There might perhaps have been several poor people, as I have
observed above, that would have been hardy enough to have ventured
for the sake of the money; but you may easily see by what I have
observed that the few people who were spared were very careful of
themselves at that time when the distress was so exceeding great.
Much about the same time I walked out into the fields towards Bow;
for I had a great mind to see how things were managed in the river
and among the ships; and as I had some concern in shipping, I had a
notion that it had been one of the best ways of securing one’s self from
the infection to have retired into a ship; and musing how to satisfy my
curiosity in that point, I turned away over the fields from Bow to
Bromley, and down to Blackwall to the stairs which are there for
landing or taking water.
Here I saw a poor man walking on the bank, or sea-wall, as they call
it, by himself. I walked a while also about, seeing the houses all shut
up. At last I fell into some talk, at a distance, with this poor man; first
I asked him how people did thereabouts. ‘Alas, sir!’ says he, ‘almost
desolate; all dead or sick. Here are very few families in this part, or in
that village’ (pointing at Poplar), ‘where half of them are not dead
already, and the rest sick.’ Then he pointing to one house, ‘There they
are all dead’, said he, ‘and the house stands open; nobody dares go into
it. A poor thief’, says he, ‘ventured in to steal something, but he paid
dear for his theft, for he was carried to the churchyard too last night.’
Then he pointed to several other houses. ‘There’, says he. ‘they are all
dead, the man and his wife, and five children. There’, says he, ‘they
are shut up; you see a watchman at the door’; and so of other houses.
‘Why,’ says I, ‘what do you here all alone? ‘ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I am a
poor, desolate man; it has pleased God I am not yet visited, though my
family is, and one of my children dead.’ ‘How do you mean, then,’ said
I, ‘that you are not visited?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘that’s my house’ (pointing
to a very little, low-boarded house), ‘and there my poor wife and two
children live,’ said he, ‘if they may be said to live, for my wife and one
of the children are visited, but I do not come at them.’ And with that
word I saw the tears run very plentifully down his face; and so they
did down mine too, I assure you.
‘But,’ said I, ‘why do you not come at them? How can you abandon
your own flesh and blood?’ ‘Oh, sir,’ says he, ‘the Lord forbid! I do not
abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and, blessed be
the Lord, I keep them from want’; and with that I observed he lifted up
his eyes to heaven, with a countenance that presently told me I had
happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious,
good man, and his ejaculation was an expression of thankfulness that,
in such a condition as he was in, he should be able to say his family
did not want. ‘Well,’ says I, ‘honest man, that is a great mercy as
things go now with the poor. But how do you live, then, and how are
you kept from the dreadful calamity that is now upon us all?’ ‘Why,
sir,’ says he, ‘I am a waterman, and there’s my boat,’ says he, ‘and the
boat serves me for a house. I work in it in the day, and I sleep in it in
the night; and what I get I lay down upon that stone,’ says he, showing
me a broad stone on the other side of the street, a good way from his
house; ‘and then,’ says he, ‘I halloo, and call to them till I make them
hear; and they come and fetch it.’