OCEANIC FAITH

"I beg to add , too, that I could not anticipate how much my faith would be strengthened, by trusting in God amid the exposures of a voyage. Faith grew stronger by its exercise . For nine consecutive nights I had laid my head upon my pillow at sea. In the midst of the vast deep, where our great vessel and all it contained might, like the 'President,' go to the bottom in an hour, leaving none to tell the story of our fate, and no traces even of the whereabouts of our destruction--to trust God in these circumstances--to hear the rolling heaving ocean, at deep dark midnight , and still to trust him --to listen to the hurried commands, and the rattling of ropes and sails , and the hundred and one accompaniments of a storm, and still to trust him--give faith a strength peculiar only to its trial and dangers. I could not help writing to Mrs. Ward, that, having long before learned to trust our Heavenly Father as God of the land, I had learned to rely upon him as God of the ocean. I know not how far this accords with the experience of other passengers, and have no means of knowing whether the same feeling will continue with myself; but I do know that it, at present, is far from being one of the least striking or the least pleasing incidents of my first voyage." P. 168, "Great Britain," AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FUGITIVE SLAVE by Samuel Ringgold Ward (1855, 1970)