no notions of any danger to myself from it for a long while: all my
apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch of inhuman,
hellish brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of human nature,
which, though I had heard of it often, yet I never had so near a view of
before: in short, I turned away my face from the horrid spectacle; my
stomach grew sick, and I was just at the point of fainting, when nature
discharged the disorder from my stomach; and having vomited with
uncommon violence, I was a little relieved, but could not bear to stay
in the place a moment; so I got me up the hill again with all the speed
I could, and walked on towards my own habitation.
When I came a little out of that part of the island, I stood still
awhile, as amazed, and then recovering myself, I looked up with the
utmost affection of my soul, and, with a flood of tears in my eyes, gave
God thanks, that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I
was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these; and that,
though I had esteemed my present condition very miserable, had yet given
me so many comforts in it, that I had still more to give thanks for than
to complain of: and this, above all, that I had, even in this miserable
condition, been comforted with the knowledge of Himself, and the hope of
His blessing; which was a felicity more than sufficiently equivalent to
all the misery which I had suffered, or could suffer.
In this frame of thankfulness, I went home to my castle, and began to be
much easier now, as to the safety of my circumstances, than ever I was
before: for I observed that these wretches never came to this island in
search of what they could get; perhaps not seeking, not wanting, or not
expecting, any thing here; and having often, no doubt, been up in the
covered, woody part of it, without finding any thing to their purpose. I
knew I had been here now almost eighteen years, and never saw the least
footsteps of human creature there before; and I might be eighteen years
more as entirely concealed as I was now, if I did not discover myself to
them, which I had no manner of occasion to do; it being my only business
to keep myself entirely concealed where I was, unless I found a better
sort of creatures than cannibals to make myself known to. Yet I
entertained such an abhorrence of the savage wretches that I have been
speaking of, and of the wretched inhuman custom of their devouring and
eating one another up, that I continued pensive and sad, and kept close
within my own circle, for almost two years after this; when I say my
own circle, I mean by it my three plantations, viz. my castle, my
country-seat, which I called my bower, and my enclosure in the woods:
nor did I look after this for any other use than as an enclosure for my
goats; for the aversion which nature gave me to these hellish wretches
was such, that I was as fearful of seeing them as of seeing the Devil
himself. I did not so much as go to look after my boat all this time,
but began rather to think of making me another; for I could not think of
ever making any more attempts to bring the other boat round the island
to me, lest I should meet with some of these creatures at sea; in which
if I had happened to have fallen into their hands, I knew what would
have been my lot.
Time, however, and the satisfaction I had that I was in no danger of
being discovered by these people, began to wear off my uneasiness about
them; and I began to live just in the same composed manner as before;
only with this difference, that I used more caution, and kept my eyes
more about me, than I did before, lest I should happen to be seen by any
of them; and particularly, I was more cautious of firing my gun, lest
any of them being on the island should happen to hear it. It was
therefore a very good providence to me that I had furnished myself with
a tame breed of goats, and that I had no need to hunt any more about the
woods, or shoot at them; and if I did catch any of them after this, it
was by traps and snares, as I had done before: so that for two years
after this, I believe I never fired my gun once off, though I never went
out without it; and, which was more, as I had saved three pistols out
of the ship, I always carried them out with me, or at least two of them,
sticking them in my goat-skin belt. I also furbished up one of the great
cutlasses that I had out of the ship, and made me a belt to hang it on
also; so that I was now a most formidable fellow to look at when I went
abroad, if you add to the former description of myself, the particular
of two pistols, and a great broad-sword hanging at my side in a belt,
but without a scabbard.
Things going on thus, as I have said, for some time, I seemed, excepting
these cautions, to be reduced to my former calm sedate way of living.
All these things tended to show me, more and more, how far my condition
was from being miserable, compared to some others; nay, to many other
particulars of life, which it might have pleased God to have made my
lot. It put me upon reflecting how little repining there would be among
mankind at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their
condition with those that were worse, in order to be thankful, than be
always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their
murmurings and complainings.
As in my present condition there were not really many things which I
wanted, so, indeed, I thought that the frights I had been in about these
savage wretches, and the concern I had been in for my own preservation,
had taken off the edge of my invention for my own conveniences; and I
had dropped a good design, which I had once bent my thoughts too much
upon, and that was, to try if I could not make some of my barley into
malt, and then try to brew myself some beer. This was really a whimsical
thought, and I reproved myself often for the simplicity of it; for I
presently saw there would be the want of several things necessary to the
making my beer, that it would be impossible for me to supply: as, first,
casks to preserve it in, which was a thing that, as I have observed
already, I could never compass; no, though I spent not only many days,
but weeks, nay, months, in attempting it, but to no purpose. In the next
place, I had no hops to make it keep, no yeast to make it work, no
copper or kettle to make it boil; and yet, with all these things
wanting, I verily believe, had not the frights and terrors I was in
about the savages intervened, I had undertaken it, and perhaps brought
it to pass too; for I seldom gave any thing over without accomplishing
it, when once I had it in my head to begin it. But my invention now ran
quite another way; for, night and day, I could think of nothing but how
I might destroy some of these monsters in their cruel, bloody
entertainment, and, if possible, save the victim they should bring
hither to destroy. It would take up a larger volume than this whole work
is intended to be, to set down all the contrivances I hatched, or rather
brooded upon, in my thoughts, for the destroying these creatures, or at
least frightening them so as to prevent their coming hither any more:
but all this was abortive; nothing could be possible to take effect,
unless I was to be there to do it myself: and what could one man do
among them, when perhaps there might be twenty or thirty of them
together, with their darts, or their bows and arrows, with which they
could shoot as true to a mark as I could with my gun?
Sometimes I thought of digging a hole under the place where they made
their fire, and putting in five or six pounds of gunpowder, which, when
they kindled their fire, would consequently take fire, and blow up all
that was near it: but as, in the first place, I should be unwilling to
waste so much powder upon them, my store being now within the quantity
of one barrel, so neither could I be sure of its going off at any
certain time, when it might surprise them; and, at best, that it would
do little more than just blow the fire about their ears, and fright
them, but not sufficient to make them forsake the place: so I laid it
aside; and then proposed that I would place myself in ambush in some
convenient place, with my three guns all double-loaded, and, in the
middle of their bloody ceremony, let fly at them, when I should be sure
to kill or wound perhaps two or three at every shot; and then falling in
upon them with my three pistols, and my sword, I made no doubt but that
if there were twenty I should kill them all. This fancy pleased my
thoughts for some weeks; and I was so full of it, that I often dreamed
of it, and sometimes that I was just going to let fly at them in my
sleep. I went so far with it in my imagination, that I employed myself
several days to find out proper places to put myself in ambuscade, as I
said, to watch for them; and I went frequently to the place itself,
which was now grown more familiar to me: but while my mind was thus
filled with thoughts of revenge, and a bloody putting twenty or thirty
of them to the sword, as I may call it, the horror I had at the place,
and at the signals of the barbarous wretches devouring one another,
abetted my malice. Well, at length, I found a place in the side of the
hill, where I was satisfied I might securely wait till I saw any of
their boats coming: and might then, even before they would be ready to
come on shore, convey myself, unseen, into some thickets of trees, in
one of which there was a hollow large enough to conceal me entirely and
there I might sit and observe all their bloody doings, and take my full
aim at their heads, when they were so close together as that it would be
next to impossible that I should miss my shot, or that I could fail
wounding three or four of them at the first shot. In this place, then, I
resolved to fix my design; and, accordingly, I prepared two muskets and
my ordinary fowling-piece. The two muskets I loaded with a brace of
slugs each, and four or five smaller bullets, about the size of
pistol-bullets; and the fowling-piece I loaded with near a handful of
swan-shot, of the largest size: I also loaded my pistols with about four
bullets each; and in this posture, well provided with ammunition for a
second and third charge, I prepared myself for my expedition.
After I had thus laid the scheme of my design, and, in my imagination,
put it in practice, I continually made my tour every morning up to the
top of the hill, which was from my castle, as I called it, about three
miles, or more, to see if I could observe any boats upon the sea, coming
near the island, or standing over towards it: but I began to tire of
this hard duty, after I had, for two or three months, constantly kept
my watch, but came always back without any discovery; there having not,
in all that time, been the least appearance, not only on or near the
shore, but on the whole ocean, so far as my eyes or glasses could reach
every way.
As long as I kept my daily tour to the hill to look out, so long also I
kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all the
while in a suitable form for so outrageous an execution as the killing
twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at all
entered into a discussion of in my thoughts, any farther than my
passions were at first fired by the horror I conceived at the unnatural
custom of the people of that country; who, it seems, had been suffered
by Providence, in his wise disposition of the world, to have no other
guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and,
consequently, were left, and perhaps had been so for some ages, to act
such horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but
nature, entirely abandoned by Heaven, and actuated by some hellish
degeneracy, could have run them into. But now, when, as I have said, I
began to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long
and so far every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself
began to alter; and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to
consider what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to
pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom
Heaven had thought fit, for so many ages, to suffer, unpunished, to go
on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments one upon
another. How far these people were offenders against me, and what right
I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed
promiscuously upon one another, I debated this very often with myself,
thus: How do I know what God himself judges in this particular case? It
is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against
their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they
do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of
divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it
no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war, than we do to kill an
ox; nor to eat human flesh, than we do to eat mutton.
When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was
certainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers in
the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than
those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners
taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole
troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw
down their arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me,
that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and
inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me; these people had done me no
injury: that if they attempted me, or I saw it necessary, for my
immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said for
it; but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no
knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore it
could not be just for me to fall upon them: that this would justify the
conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America,
where they destroyed millions of these people: who, however they were
idolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in
their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were
yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting
them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and
detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all
other Christian nations in Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and
unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for
which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and
terrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as if
the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race
of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels
of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous
temper in the mind.
These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a full
stop; and I began, by little and little, to be off my design, and to
conclude I had taken wrong measures in my resolution to attack the
savages; and that it was not my business to meddle with them, unless
they first attacked me; and this it was my business, if possible, to
prevent; but that if I were discovered and attacked by them, I knew my
duty. On the other hand, I argued with myself, that this really was the
way not to deliver myself, but entirely to ruin and destroy myself; for
unless I was sure to kill every one that not only should be on shore at
that time, but that should ever come on shore afterwards, if but one of
them escaped to tell their country-people what had happened, they would
come over again by thousands to revenge the death of their fellows, and
I should only bring upon myself a certain destruction, which, at
present, I had no manner of occasion for. Upon the whole, I concluded,
that neither in principle nor in policy, I ought, one way or other, to
concern myself in this affair: that my business was, by all possible
means, to conceal myself from them, and not to leave the least signal to
them to guess by that there were any living creatures upon the island, I
mean of human shape. Religion joined in with this prudential resolution;
and I was convinced now, many ways, that I was perfectly out of my duty
when I was laying all my bloody schemes for the destruction of innocent
creatures, I mean innocent as to me. As to the crimes they were guilty
of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were
national, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is the
governor of nations, and knows how, by national punishments, to make a
just retribution for national offences, and to bring public judgments
upon those who offend in a public manner, by such ways as best please
him. This appeared so clear to me now, that nothing was a greater
satisfaction to me than that I had not been suffered to do a thing which
I now saw so much reason to believe would have been no less a sin than
that of wilful murder, if I had committed it; and I gave most humble
thanks on my knees to God, that had thus delivered me from
blood-guiltiness; beseeching him to grant me the protection of his
providence, that I might not fall into the hands of the barbarians, or
that I might not lay my hands upon them, unless I had a more clear call
from Heaven to do it, in defence of my own life.
In this disposition I continued for near a year after this; and so far
was I from desiring an occasion for falling upon these wretches, that in
all that time I never once went up the hill to see whether there were
any of them in sight, or to know whether any of them had been on shore
there or not, that I might not be tempted to renew any of my
contrivances against them, or be provoked, by any advantage which might
present itself, to fall upon them: only this I did, I went and removed
my boat, which I had on the other side of the island, and carried it
down to the east end of the whole island, where I ran it into a little
cove, which I found under some high rocks, and where I knew, by reason
of the currents, the savages durst not, at least would not come, with
their boats, upon any account whatever. With my boat I carried away
every thing that I had left there belonging to her, though not necessary
for the bare going thither, viz. a mast and sail which I had made for
her, and a thing like an anchor, but which, indeed, could not be called
either anchor or grapnel; however, it was the best I could make of its
kind: all these I removed, that there might not be the least shadow of
any discovery, or any appearance of any boat, or of any human
habitation, upon the island. Besides this, I kept myself, as I said,
more retired than ever, and seldom went from my cell, other than upon my
constant employment, viz. to milk my she-goats, and manage my little
flock in the wood, which, as it was quite on the other part of the
island, was quite out of danger; for certain it is, that these savage
people, who sometimes haunted this island, never came with any thoughts
of finding any thing here, and consequently never wandered off from the
coast; and I doubt not but they might have been several times on shore
after my apprehensions of them had made me cautious, as well as before.
Indeed, I looked back with some horror upon the thoughts of what my
condition would have been if I had chopped upon them and been discovered
before that, when, naked and unarmed, except with one gun, and that
loaded often only with small shot, I walked every where, peeping and
peering about the island to see what I could get; what a surprise should
I have been in, if, when I discovered the print of a man's foot, I had,
instead of that, seen fifteen or twenty savages, and found them pursuing
me, and by the swiftness of their running, no possibility of my escaping
them! The thoughts of this sometimes sunk my very soul within me, and
distressed my mind so much, that I could not soon recover it, to think
what I should have done, and how I should not only have been unable to
resist them, but even should not have had presence of mind enough to do
what I might have done; much less what now, after so much consideration
and preparation, I might be able to do. Indeed, after serious thinking
of these things, I would be very melancholy, and sometimes it would last
a great while; but I resolved it all, at last, into thankfulness to that
Providence which had delivered me from so many unseen dangers, and had
kept from me those mischiefs which I could have no way been the agent in
delivering myself from, because I had not the least notion of any such
thing depending, or the least supposition of its being possible. This
renewed a contemplation which often had come to my thoughts in former
time, when first I began to see the merciful dispositions of Heaven, in
the dangers we run through in this life; how wonderfully we are
delivered when we know nothing of it; how, when we are in a quandary,
(as we call it) a doubt or hesitation, whether to go this way, or that
way, a secret hint shall direct us this way, when we intended to go that
way: nay, when sense, our own inclination, and perhaps business, has
called to go the other way, yet a strange impression upon the mind, from
we know not what springs, and by we know not what power, shall over-rule
us to go this way; and it shall afterwards appear, that had we gone that
way which we should have gone, and even to our imagination ought to have
gone, we should have been ruined and lost. Upon these, and many like
reflections, I afterwards made it a certain rule with me, that whenever
I found those secret hints or pressings of mind, to doing or not doing
any thing that presented, or going this way or that way, I never failed
to obey the secret dictate; though I knew no other reason for it than
that such a pressure, or such a hint, hung upon my mind. I could give
many examples of the success of this conduct in the course of my life,
but more especially in the latter part of my inhabiting this unhappy
island; besides many occasions which it is very likely I might have
taken notice of, if I had seen with the same eyes then that I see with
now. But it is never too late to be wise; and I cannot but advise all
considering men, whose lives are attended with such extraordinary
incidents as mine, or even though not so extraordinary, not to slight
such secret intimations of Providence, let them come from what invisible
intelligence they will. That I shall not discuss, and perhaps cannot
account for; but certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits,
and a secret communication between those embodied and those unembodied,
and such a proof as can never be withstood; of which I shall have
occasion to give some very remarkable instances in the remainder of my
solitary residence in this dismal place.
I believe the reader of this will not think it strange if I confess that
these anxieties, these constant dangers I lived in, and the concern that
was now upon me, put an end to all invention, and to all the
contrivances that I had laid for my future accommodations and
conveniences. I had the care of my safety more now upon my hands than
that of my food. I cared not to drive a nail, or chop a stick of wood
now, for fear the noise I might make should be heard: much less would I
fire a gun, for the same reason: and, above all, I was intolerably
uneasy at making any fire, lest the smoke, which is visible at a great
distance in the day, should betray me. For this reason I removed that
part of my business which required fire, such as burning of pots and
pipes, &c. into my new apartment in the woods; where, after I had been
some time, I found, to my unspeakable consolation, a mere natural cave
in the earth, which went in a vast way, and where, I dare say, no
savage, had he been at the mouth of it, would be so hardy as to venture
in; nor, indeed, would any man else, but one who, like me, wanted
nothing so much as a safe retreat.