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Terrorized, Newton awaited his fate. But another stranger—or perhaps the first—came and recovered the ring for him. But the stranger would not give it back, saying he must now keep it in trust, for the young man was still too foolish to have it.

For a few weeks after the dream, Newton was shaken enough to separate himself from the rough and tumble of the other sailors and resume something of his earlier religious observance. But by landfall, in December 1743, he had once again put such disciplines aside.

In the following months Newton missed a second voyage—on which he would have been an officer—again by overstaying a visit to Mary. Then on March 1, 1744, John was traveling to see Mary when his life took an unexpected turn. With the unmistakable gait of a sailor but no papers as a legitimate merchantman, Newton fell prey to a naval press-gang.

Within days, despite his father's intervention, he found himself a lowly crewman aboard a man-o'-war of the Royal Navy, the Harwich. From the first, he was driven, half-starved, and "broken" from dawn till night. In short, he was treated as were all young men in the eighteenth-century navy, for such severe discipline seemed the only way young sailors could be prepared for the extreme hardships and dangers of life in England's floating military.

Bad as were the physical privations aboard this ship, the voyage's effect on Newton's spirit was worse. The captain's clerk, a man named Mitchell, was a free-thinker only too happy to share his convictions with a young friend. Life, said Mitchell, was for the taking. God was a phantom invented by killjoy religious types. We must eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die and pass into extinction.

Newton had long desired to escape the constraints of his mother's religion. Now, under Mitchell's influence, he took the precious ring of his dream from his finger and threw it overboard.

Enjoying the heady release of his new creed, Newton struck up a friendship with a younger man, midshipman Job Lewis, who still clung to enough religion to keep him steady against the low morals of the crew at large. Newton was a clever and persuasive speaker and a forceful personality, and he had soon driven from young Lewis the last of his compunctions.

At Christmas, 1744, the Harwich moored north of the straits of Dover, preparing for its next voyage. With horror, Newton learned this would take them not, as before, to the Mediterranean for a year, but instead to the East Indies, for five long years. In that time, John was convinced, his Mary would belong to another.

Distraught, driven by passion, and unchecked any longer by scruples born of faith, Newton resolved to find some way off of this ship. When the opportunity came, on a trip to the market for provisions, he slipped away, determined to quit the navy forever.

Unfortunately, a party of marines he encountered the day after his escape had other ideas. He was arrested and dragged back to his ship in chains, where the captain had him stripped and flogged with a cat-o'-nine-tails.

Newton now faced the universal scorn of the crew, five years of misery, and the near-certain loss of Mary. Only the secret hand of God, he later claimed, kept him from killing either the captain or himself.

By a remarkable coincidence, however, Newton was soon able to secure a transfer to another vessel—the Greyhound—bound for the Guinea coast and the slave trade. The captain of this vessel was a friend of his father's, and before long Newton found himself well-established in the trade, working under the ship's part-owner, a Mr. Clow, at a slave "factory" on the Plantain Islands near Sierra Leone.

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