Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (Volume 2, PT. 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DOCUMENT 204. GENEEAL STATEMENT OF SWEDENBORG'S TRAVELS FROM 1710 TO 1734 1710. I travelled to Gottenburg, and thence by ship to London. On the way to London I was four times in danger of my life: 1. From a sand-bank on the English coast in a dense fog, when all considered themselves lost, the keel of the vessel being within a quarter of a fathom of the bank. 2. From the crew of a privateer, who came on board, declaring themselves to be French, while we thought they were Danes. 3. From an English guard-ship on the following evening, which on the strength of a report mistook us in the darkness for the privateer; wherefore it fired a whole broadside into us, but without doing us any serious damage. 4. In London I was soon after exposed to a still greater danger, for some Swedes, who had approached our ship in a yacht, persuaded me to sail with them to town, when all on board had been commanded to remain there for six weeks; the news having already spread, that the plague had broken out in Sweden. As I did not observe the quarantine, an inquiry was made; yet I was saved from the halter, with the declaration, however, that no one who ventured to do this in future would escape his doom. This account serves as an introduction to Swedenborg's Journal of Travel for the years 1736 to 1740. It is written in the Swedish language, and is contained in the Swedenborg MSS., which are preserved in the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Codex 88, pages 498 and 503. It was translated into Latin by Dr. Eahl in 1844, and published the same year by Dr. Im. Tafel, as an introduction to Swedenborg's Itinerarium, Section I i. A photo-lithographic copy of the Swedish original is contained in VoL IIL of the Swedenborg MSS., pages 60 and 51, from which this trajislation is made. In..