Having thus settled my affairs, sold my cargo, and turned all my effects into good bills of exchange, my next difficulty was, which way to go to England. I had been accustomed enough to the sea, and yet I had a strange aversion to go to England by sea at that time; and though I could give no reason for it, yet the difficulty increased upon me so much, that though I had once shipped my baggage in order to go, yet I altered my mind, and that not once, but two or three times.
It is true, I had been very unfortunate by sea, and this might be one of the reasons. But let no man slight the strong impulses of his own thoughts in cases of such moment. Two of the ships which I had singled out to go in, I mean more particularly singled out than any other, that is to say, so as in one of them to put my things on board, and in the other to have agreed with the captain; I say, two of these ships miscarried, viz. one was taken by the Algerines, and the other was cast away on the Start, near Torbay, and all the people drowned except three; so that in either of those vessels I had been made miserable, and in which most, it was hard to say.
Having been thus harassed in my thoughts, my old pilot, to whom I communicated every thing, pressed me earnestly not to go to sea; but either to go by land to the Groyne, and cross over the Bay of Biscay to Rochelle, from whence it was but an easy and safe journey by land to Paris, and so to Calais and Dover; or to go up to Madrid, and so all the way by land through France.
In a word, I was so prepossessed against my going by sea at all, except from Calais to Dover, that I resolved to travel all the way by land; which, as I was not in haste, and did not value the charge, was by much the pleasanter way; and to make it more so, my old captain brought an English gentleman, the son of a merchant in Lisbon, who was willing to travel with me; after which, we picked up two who were English, and merchants also, and two young Portuguese gentlemen, the last going to Paris only; so that we were in all six of us, and five servants, the two merchants and the two Portuguese contenting themselves with one servant between two, to save the charge; and as for me, I got an English sailor to travel with me as a servant, besides my man Friday, who was too much a stranger to be capable of supplying the place of a servant upon the road.
In this manner I set out from Lisbon; and our company being all very well mounted and armed, we made a little troop whereof they did me the honour to call me captain, as well because I was the oldest man, as because I had two servants, and indeed was the original of the whole journey.
As I have troubled you with none of my sea journals, so shall I trouble you with none of my land journals. But some adventures that happened to us in this tedious and difficult journey, I must not omit.
When we came to Madrid, we, being all of us strangers to Spain, were willing to stay some time to see the court of Spain, and to see what was worth observing; but it being the latter part of the summer, we hastened away, and set out from Madrid about the middle of October. But when we came to the edge of Navarre, we were alarmed at several towns on the way, with an account that so much snow was fallen on the French side of the mountains, that several travellers were obliged to come back to Pampeluna, after having attempted, at an extreme hazard, to pass on.
When we came to Pampeluna itself, we found it so indeed; and to me that had been always used to a hot climate, and indeed to countries where we could scarce bear any clothes on, the cold was insufferable; nor, indeed, was it more painful than it was surprising: to come but ten days before out of the Old Castile, where the weather was not only warm, but very hot, and immediately to feel a wind from the Pyrenees mountains, so very keen, so severely cold, as to be intolerable, and to endanger benumbing and perishing of our fingers and toes, was very strange.
Poor Friday was really frighted when he saw the mountains all covered with snow, and felt cold weather, which he had never seen or felt before in his life.
To mend the matter, after we came to Pampeluna, it continued snowing with so much violence, and so long, that the people said, winter was come before its time; and the roads, which were difficult before, were now quite impassable: in a word, the snow lay in some places too thick for us to travel; and being not hard frozen, as is the case in northern countries, there was no going without being in danger of being buried alive every step. We staid no less than twenty days at Pampeluna; when (seeing the winter coming on, and no likelihood of its being better, for it was the severest winter all over Europe that had been known in many years) proposed that we should all go away to Fontarabia, and there take shipping for Boardeaux, which was a very little voyage.