the first place; and this I did out of the short pieces of boards
that I brought on my raft from the ship. But when I had wrought
out some boards as above, I made large shelves, of the breadth of
a foot and a half, one over another all along one side of my cave,
to lay all my tools, nails, and ironwork on; and, in a word, to
separate everything at large into their places, that I might come
easily at them. I knocked pieces into the wall of the rock to hang
my guns and all things that would hang up; so that, had my cave
been to be seen, it looked like a general magazine of all
necessary things; and I had everything so ready at my hand that it
was a great pleasure to me to see all my goods in such order, and
especially to find my stock of all necessaries so great.
And now it was that I began to keep a journal of every day's
employment; for, indeed, at first I was in too much hurry, and not
only hurry as to labor, but in too much discomposure of mind; and
my journal would have been full of many dull things.
You may be sure my thoughts ran many times upon the prospect of
land which I had seen from the other side of the island; and I was
not without secret wishes that I were on shore there, fancying
that, seeing the mainland, and an inhabited country, I might find
some way or other to convey myself further, and perhaps at last
find some means of escape.
But all this while I made no allowance for the dangers of such an
undertaking, and how I might fall into the hands of savages, and
perhaps such as I might have reason to think far worse than the
lions and tigers of Africa: that if I once came in their power, I
should run a hazard of more than a thousand to one of being
killed, and perhaps of being eaten; for I had heard that the
people of the Caribbean coast were cannibals or man-eaters, and I
knew by the latitude that I could not be far from that shore.
Then, supposing they were not cannibals, yet they might kill me,
as many Europeans who had fallen into their hands had been served,
even when they had been ten or twenty together--much more I, that
was but one, and could make little or no defence; all these
things, I say, which I ought to have considered well, and did come
into my thoughts afterwards, yet gave me no apprehensions at
first, and my head ran mightily upon the thought of getting over
to the shore.
Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the longboat with shoulder-of-
mutton sail, with which I sailed above a thousand miles on the
coast of Africa; but this was in vain. Then I thought I would go
and look at our ship's boat, which, as I have said, was blown up
upon the shore a great way, in the storm, when we were first cast
away. She lay almost where she did at first, but not quite; and
was turned, by the force of the waves and the winds, almost bottom
upward, against a high ridge of beachy, rough sand, but no water
about her. If I had had hands to have refitted her, and to have
launched her into the water, the boat would have done well enough,
and I might have gone back into the Brazils with her easily
enough; but I might have foreseen that I could no more turn her
and set her upright upon her bottom than I could remove the
island; however, I went to the woods, and cut levers and rollers,
and brought them to the boat, resolving to try what I could do;
suggesting to myself that if I could but turn her down, I might
repair the damage she had received, and she would be a very good
boat, and I might go to sea in her very easily.
I spared no pains, indeed, in this piece of fruitless toil, and
spent, I think, three or four weeks about it; at last, finding it
impossible to heave it up with my little strength, I fell to
digging away the sand, to undermine it, and so to make it fall
down, setting pieces of wood to thrust and guide it right in the
fall.
But when I had done this, I was unable to stir it up again, or to
get under it, much less to move it forward towards the water; so I
was forced to give it over; and yet, though I gave over the hopes
of the boat, my desire to venture over to the mainland increased,
rather than decreased, as the means for it seemed impossible.
This at length put me upon thinking whether it was not possible to
make myself a canoe, or periagua, such as the natives of those
climates make, even without tools, or, as I might say, without
hands, of the trunk of a great tree. This I not only thought
possible, but easy, and pleased myself extremely with the thoughts
of making it, and with my having much more convenience for it than
any of the negroes or Indians; but not at all considering the
particular inconvenience which I lay under more than the Indians
did, viz., want of hands to move it, when it was made, into the
water--a difficulty much harder for me to surmount than all the
consequences of want of tools could be to them; for what was it to
me if, when I had chosen a vast tree in the woods, and with much
trouble cut it down, if I had been able with my tools to hew and
dub the outside into the proper shape of a boat, and burn or cut
out the inside to make it hollow, so as to make a boat of it--if,
after all this, I must leave it just there where I found it, and
not be able to launch it into the water?
One would have thought I could not have had the least reflection
upon my mind of my circumstances while I was making this boat but
I should have immediately thought how I should get it into the
sea; but my thoughts were so intent upon my voyage over the sea in
it that I never once considered how I should get it off the land;
and it was really, in its own nature, more easy for me to guide it
over forty-five miles of sea than about forty-five fathoms of
land, where it lay, to set it afloat in the water.
I went to work upon this boat the most like a fool that ever man
did who had any of his senses awake. I pleased myself with the
design, without determining whether I was ever able to undertake
it; not but that the difficulty of launching my boat came often
into my head, but I put a stop to my inquiries into it by this
foolish answer which I gave myself--"Let me first make it; I
warrant I will find some way or other to get it along when it is
done."
This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy
prevailed, and to work I went. I felled a cedar-tree, and I
question much whether Solomon ever had such a one for the building
of the Temple of Jerusalem; it was five feet ten inches diameter
at the lower part next the stump, and four feet eleven inches
diameter at the end of twenty-two feet; after which it lessened
for a while, and then parted into branches. It was not without
infinite labor that I felled this tree; I was twenty days hacking
and hewing at it at the bottom; I was fourteen more getting the
branches and limbs and the vast spreading head cut off, which I
hacked and hewed through with axe and hatchet, and inexpressible
labor; after this, it cost me a month to shape it and dub it to a
proportion, and to something like the bottom of a boat, that it
might swim upright as it ought to do. It cost me near three months
more to clear the inside, and work it out so as to make an exact
boat of it; this I did, indeed, without fire, by mere mallet and
chisel, and by the dint of hard labor, till I had brought it to be
a very handsome periagua, and big enough to have carried six-and-
twenty men, and consequently big enough to have carried me and all
my cargo.
When I had gone through this work I was extremely delighted with
it. The boat was really much bigger than ever I saw a canoe or
periagua, that was made of one tree, in my life. Many a weary
stroke it had cost, you may be sure; and had I gotten it into the
water, I make no question but I should have begun the maddest
voyage, and the most unlikely to be performed, that ever was
undertaken.
But all my devices to get it into the water failed me; though they
cost me infinite labor, too. It lay about one hundred yards from
the water, and not more; but the first inconvenience was, it was
up hill towards the creek. Well, to take away this discouragement,
I resolved to dig into the surface of the earth, and so make a
declivity: this I began, and it cost me a prodigious deal of pains
(but who grudge pains who have their deliverance in view?); but
when this was worked through, and this difficulty managed, it was
still much the same, for I could no more stir the canoe than I
could the other boat. Then I measured the distance of ground, and
resolved to cut a dock or canal, to bring the water up to the
canoe, seeing I could not bring the canoe down to the water. Well,
I began this work; and when I began to enter upon it, and
calculate how deep it was to be dug, how broad, how the stuff was
to be thrown out, I found that, by the number of hands I had,
being none but my own, it must have been ten or twelve years
before I could have gone through with it; for the shore lay so
high, that at the upper end it must have been at least twenty feet
deep; so at length, though with great reluctancy, I gave this
attempt over also.
This grieved me heartily; and now I saw, though too late, the
folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we
judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.
In the middle of this work I finished my fourth year in this
place, and kept my anniversary with the same devotion, and with as
much comfort as ever before.
In the first place, I was removed from all the wickedness of the
world here; I had neither the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the
eye, nor the pride of life. I had nothing to covet, for I had all
that I was now capable of enjoying; I was lord of the whole manor;
or, if I pleased, I might call myself king or emperor over the
whole country which I had possession of: there were no rivals; I
had no competitor, none to dispute sovereignty or command with me;
I might have raised ship-loadings of corn, but I had no use for
it; so I let as little grow as I thought enough for my occasion. I
had tortoise or turtle enough, but now and then one was as much as
I could put to any use; I had timber enough to have built a fleet
of ships; and I had grapes enough to have made wine, or to have
cured into raisins, to have loaded that fleet when it had been
built.
But all I could make use of was all that was valuable: I had
enough to eat and supply my wants, and what was all the rest to
me? If I killed more flesh than I could eat, the dog must eat it,
or vermin; if I sowed more corn than I could eat, it must be
spoiled; the trees that I cut down were lying to rot on the
ground; I could make no more use of them but for fuel, and that I
had no occasion for but to dress my food.
In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me,
upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are
no farther good to us than they are for our use; and that,
whatever we may heap up to give others, we enjoy just as much as
we can use, and no more. The most covetous, griping miser in the
world would have been cured of the vice of covetousness if he had
been in my case; for I possessed infinitely more than I knew what
to do with.
FINDS THE PRINT OF A MAN'S FOOT ON THE SAND
By Daniel Defoe
It would have made a Stoic smile to have seen me and my little
family sit down to dinner. There was my majesty, the prince and
lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my
absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it
away, and no rebels among all my subjects. Then, to see how like a
king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants! Poll, as if
he had been my favorite, was the only person permitted to talk to
me. My dog, who was now grown old, sat always at my right hand;
and two cats, one on one side of the table and one on the other,
expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of especial
favor. With this attendance and in this plentiful manner I lived;
neither could I be said to want anything but society; and of that,
some time after this, I was likely to have too much.
I was something impatient, as I have observed, to have the use of
my boat, though very loath to run any more hazards; and therefore
sometimes I sat contriving ways to get her about the island, and
at other times I sat myself down contented enough without her. But
I had a strange uneasiness in my mind to go down to the point of
the island: this inclination increased upon me every day, and at
length I resolved to travel thither by land, following the edge of
the shore. I did so; but had any one in England met such a man as
I was, it must either have frightened him, or raised a great deal
of laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at myself, I
could not but smile at the notion of my travelling through
Yorkshire with such an equipage, and in such a dress. Be pleased
to take a sketch of my figure, as follows:
I had a great high shapeless cap, made of a goat's skin, with a
flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the sun from me as to
shoot the rain off from running into my neck, nothing being so
hurtful in these climates as the rain upon the flesh under the
clothes.
I had a short jacket of goat's skin, the skirts coming down to
about the middle of the thighs, and a pair of open-kneed breeches
of the same; the breeches were made of the skin of an old he-goat,
whose hair hung down such a length on either side that, like
pantaloons, it reached to the middle of my legs; stockings and
shoes I had none, but had made me a pair of somethings, I scarce
knew what to call them, like buskins, to flap over my legs, and
lace on either side like spatterdashes, but of a most barbarous
shape, as indeed were all the rest of my clothes.
I had on a broad belt of goat's skin dried, which I drew together
with two thongs of the same instead of buckles, and in a kind of a
frog on either side of this, instead of a sword and dagger, hung a
little saw and a hatchet, one on one side and one on the other. I
had another belt not so broad, and fastened in the same manner,
which hung over my shoulder, and at the end of it, under my left
arm, hung two pouches, both made of goat's skin, too, in one of
which hung my powder, in the other my shot. At my back I carried
my basket, and on my shoulder my gun, and over my head a great
clumsy, ugly, goat's-skin umbrella, but which, after all, was the
most necessary thing I had about me next to my gun. As for my
face, the color of it was really not so mulatto-like as one might
expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine
or ten degrees of the equinox. My beard I had once suffered to
grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but, as I had
both scissors and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short,
except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into a large
pair of Mahometan whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks
at Sallee, for the Moors did not wear such, though the Turks did;
of these mustachios, or whiskers, I will not say they were long
enough to hang my hat upon them, but they were of a length and
shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have passed
for frightful.
But all this is by the by; for as to my figure, I had so few to
observe me that it was of no manner of consequence, so I say no
more of that. In this kind of dress I went my new journey, and was
out five or six days. I travelled first along the seashore,
directly to the place where I first brought my boat to an anchor
to get upon the rocks; and, having no boat now to take care of, I
went over the land a nearer way to the same height that I was upon
before, when, looking forward to the points of the rocks which lay
out, and which I was obliged to double with my boat, as is said
above, I was surprised to see the sea all smooth and quiet--no
rippling, no motion, no current, any more there than in other
places. I was at a strange loss to understand this, and resolved
to spend some time in the observing it, to see if nothing from the
sets of the tide had occasioned it; but I was presently convinced
how it was; viz., that the tide of ebb setting from the west, and
joining with the current of waters from some great river on the
shore, must be the occasion of this current, and that, according
as the wind blew more forcibly from the west or from the north,
this current came nearer or went farther from the shore; for,
waiting thereabouts till evening, I went up to the rock again, and
then, the tide of ebb being made, I plainly saw the current again
as before, only that it ran farther off, being near half a league
from the shore, whereas in my case it set close upon the shore,
and hurried me and my canoe along with it, which at another time
it would not have done.
This observation convinced me that I had nothing to do but to
observe the ebbing and the flowing of the tide, and I might very
easily bring my boat about the island again; but when I began to
think of putting it in practice, I had such terror upon my spirits
at the remembrance of the danger I had been in, that I could not
think of it again with any patience, but, on the contrary, I took
up another resolution, which was more safe, though more laborious--
and this was, that I would build, or rather make, me another
perigaua or canoe, and so have one for one side of the island, and
one for the other.
You are to understand that now I had, as I may call it, two
plantations in the island--one my little fortification or tent,
with the wall about it, under the rock, with the cave behind me,
which by this time I had enlarged into several apartments or
caves, one within another. One of these, which was the driest and
largest, and had a door out beyond my wall or fortification--that
is to say, beyond where my wall joined to the rock--was all filled
up with the large earthen pots of which I have given an account,
and with fourteen or fifteen great baskets, which would hold five
or six bushels each, where I laid up my stores of provisions,
especially my corn, some in the ear, cut off short from the straw,
and the other rubbed out with my hand.
As for my wall, made, as before, with long stakes or piles, those
piles grew all like trees, and were by this time grown so big, and
spread so very much, that there was not the least appearance, to
any one's view, of any habitation behind them.
Near this dwelling of mine, but a little farther within the land,
and upon lower ground, lay my two pieces of corn land, which I
kept duly cultivated and sowed, and which duly yielded me their
harvest in its season; and whenever I had occasion for more corn,
I had more land adjoining as fit as that.
Besides this, I had my country-seat, and I had now a tolerable
plantation there also; for, first, I had my little bower as I
called it, which I kept in repair--that is to say, I kept the
hedge which encircled it in constantly fitted up to its usual
height, the ladder standing always in the inside. I kept the
trees, which at first were no more than stakes, but were now grown
very firm and tall, always cut, so that they might spread and
grow thick and wild, and make the more agreeable shade, which they
did effectually to my mind. In the middle of this I had my tent
always standing, being a piece of a sail spread over poles, set up
for that purpose, and which never wanted any repair or renewing;
and under this I had made me a squab or couch with the skins of
the creatures I had killed, and with other soft things, and a
blanket laid on them, such as belonged to our sea-bedding, which I
had saved; and a great watch-coat to cover me. And there, whenever
I had occasion to be absent from my chief seat, I took up my
country habitation.
Adjoining to this I had my enclosures for my cattle, that is to
say my goats, and I had taken an inconceivable deal of pains to
fence and enclose this ground. I was so anxious to see it kept
entire, lest the goats should break through, that I never left off
till, with infinite labor, I had stuck the outside of the hedge so
full of small stakes, and so near to one another, that it was
rather a pale than a hedge, and there was scarce room to put a
hand through between them; which afterwards, when those stakes
grew, as they all did in the next rainy season, made the enclosure
strong like a wall, indeed stronger than any wall.
This will testify for me that I was not idle, and that I spared no
pains to bring to pass whatever appeared necessary for my
comfortable support, for I considered the keeping up a breed of
tame creatures thus at my hand would be a living magazine of
flesh, milk, butter, and cheese for me as long as I lived in the
place, if it were to be forty years; and that keeping them in my
reach depended entirely upon my perfecting my enclosures to such a
degree that I might be sure of keeping them together; which by
this method, indeed, I so effectually secured that, when these
little stakes began to grow, I had planted them so very thick that
I was forced to pull some of them up again.
In this place also I had my grapes growing, which I principally
depended on for my winter store of raisins, and which I never
failed to preserve very carefully, as the best and most agreeable
dainty of my whole diet; and indeed they were not only agreeable,
but medicinal, wholesome, nourishing, and refreshing to the last
degree.
As this was also about half-way between my other habitation and
the place where I had laid up my boat, I generally stayed and lay
here in my way thither, for I used frequently to visit my boat;
and I kept all things about or belonging to her in very good
order. Sometimes I went out in her to divert myself, but no more
hazardous voyages would I go, scarcely ever above a stone's cast
or two from the shore, I was so apprehensive of being hurried out
of my knowledge again by the currents or winds, or any other
accident. But now I come to a new scene of my life.
It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was
exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the
shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like
one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened,
I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I
went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore
and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other
impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were
any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there
was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot--
toes, heel, and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew
not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable
fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of
myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say,
the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking
behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and
tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man. Nor is
it possible to describe how many various shapes my affrighted
imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were
found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable
whimsies came into my thoughts by the way.
When I came to my castle (for so I think I called it ever after
this), I fled into it like one pursued. Whether I went over by the
ladder, as first contrived, or went in at the hole in the rock,
which I had called a door, I cannot remember; no, nor could I
remember the next morning, for never frightened hare fled to
cover, or fox to earth, with more terror of mind than I to this
retreat.
I slept none that night; the farther I was from the occasion of my
fright, the greater my apprehensions were, which is something
contrary to the nature of such things, and especially to the usual
practice of all creatures in fear; but I was so embarrassed with
my own frightful ideas of the thing, that I formed nothing but
dismal imaginations to myself, even though I was now a great way
off. Sometimes I fancied it must be the devil, and reason joined
in with me in this supposition, for how should any other thing in
human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought
them? What marks were there of any other footstep? And how was it
possible a man should come there? But then, to think that Satan
should take human shape upon him in such a place, where there
could be no manner of occasion for it, but to leave the print of
his foot behind him, and that even for no purpose, too, for he
could not be sure I should see it--this was an amusement the other
way. I considered that the devil might have found out abundance of
other ways to have terrified me than this of the single print of a
foot; that as I lived quite on the other side of the island, he
would never have been so simple as to leave a mark in a place
where it was ten thousand to one whether I should ever see it or
not, and in the sand, too, which the first surge of the sea, upon
a high wind, would have defaced entirely. All this seemed
inconsistent with the thing itself, and with all the notions we
usually entertain of the subtlety of the devil.