Having made arrangements with the friends of Mr. Buchanan, and received accounts of the state of our affairs from Messrs. Crooks, Bullion and Co. of Kingston, which were far less promising than I had hoped for, I took my passage in a Clyde ship from Montego Bay. Had I yielded to my own prejudices, I should have gone to London at once, as it was there I intended to become West India merchant, but the anxiety to communicate the true state of Corbet and Possy's assets to their creditors, induced me to go first to Glasgow.

This passage was of a different description from the pleasant airing I had enjoyed outwards from Falmouth. The weather was gloomy and boisterous; I was torn to pieces by indisposition for several days, and was only roused from my intolerable subjection to the sickness, by one of the seamen crying, “a bloody sail on the larboard bow,” which I literally believed might be some wreck upon the water, but which, when I went on deck, I saw was only a vessel that had the black look of a privateer; ‘bloody’ was but a metaphorical epithet of the sailor's own coinage, who belonged to Cork, and was, of course, rich in the figures of Paddy poetry. That innocent alarm, for so it proved, had, however, the good effect of putting an end to my illness, and I have since been of opinion that sea-sickness is more subject to the resolutions of the will than any other malady.