The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - 51

Never did a ship come to this part that had less business than I had; and yet it was with great difficulty that we were admitted to hold the least correspondence on shore. Not my partner himself, who was alive, and made a great figure among them, not my two merchant trustees, nor the fame of my wonderful preservation in the island, could obtain me that favour; but my partner remembering that I had given five hundred moidores to the prior of the monastery of the Augustines, and three hundred and seventy-two to the poor, went to the monastery, and obliged the prior that then was, to go to the governor, and beg leave for me presently, with the captain, and one more, besides eight seamen, to come on shore, and no more; and this upon condition absolutely capitulated for, that we should not offer to land any goods out of the ship, or to carry any person away without licence.

They were so strict with us, as to landing any goods, that it was with extreme difficulty that I got on shore three bales of English goods, such as fine broad-cloths, stuffs, and some linen, which I had brought for a present to my partner.

He was a very generous, broad-hearted man, though (like me) he came from little at first; and though he knew not that I had the least design of giving him any thing, he sent me on board a present of fresh provisions, wine, and sweetmeats, worth above thirty moidores, including some tobacco, and three or four fine medals in gold. But I was even with him in my present, which, as I have said, consisted of fine broad-cloth, English stuffs, lace, and fine Hollands. Also, I delivered him about the value of 100l. sterling, in the same goods, for other uses: and I obliged him to set up the sloop which I had brought with me from England, as I have said, for the use of my colony, in order to send the refreshments I intended to my plantation.

Accordingly he got hands, and finished the sloop in a very few days, for she was already framed; and I gave the master of her such instruction as he could not miss the place; nor did he miss it, as I had an account from my partner afterwards. I got him soon loaded with the small cargo I had sent them; and one of our seamen, that had been on shore with me there, offered to go with the sloop, and settle there, upon my letter to the governor Spaniard, to allot him a sufficient quantity of land for a plantation; and giving him some clothes, and tools for his planting work, which he said he understood, having been an old planter in Maryland, and a buccaneer into the bargain.

I encouraged the fellow by granting all he desired; and, as an addition, I gave him the savage which we had taken prisoner of war, to be his slave, and ordered the governor Spaniard to give him his share of everything he wanted, with the rest.

When we came to fit this man out, my old partner told me, there was a certain very honest fellow, a Brasil planter of his acquaintance, who had fallen into he displeasure of the church: "I know not what the matter is with him," says he, "but, on my conscience, I think he is a heretic in his heart; and he has been obliged to conceal himself for fear of the Inquisition;" that he would be very glad of such an opportunity to make his escape, with his wife and two daughters; and if I would let them go to the island, and allot them a plantation, he would give them a small stock to begin with; for the officers of the Inquisition had seized all his effects and estate, and he had nothing left but a little household stuff, and two slaves; "And," adds he, "though I hate his principles, yet I would not have him fall into their hands, for he will assuredly be burnt alive if he does."

I granted this presently, and joined my Englishman with them; and we concealed the man, and his wife and daughters, on board our ship, till the sloop put out to go to sea; and then (having put all their goods on board the sloop some time before) we put them on board the sloop, after she was got out of the bay.

Our seaman was mightily pleased with this new partner; and their stock, indeed, was much alike, rich in tools, and in preparations, for a farm; but nothing to begin with, but as above. However, they carried over with them (which was worth all the rest) some materials for planting sugar-canes, with some plants of canes; which he (I mean the Portugal man) understood very well.

Among the rest of the supplies sent my tenants in the island, I sent them, by this sloop, three milch-cows and five calves, about twenty-two hogs, among them, three sows big with pig, two mares, and a stone-horse.

For my Spaniards, according to my promise, I engaged three Portugal women to go; and recommended it to them to marry them, and use them kindly. I could have procured more women, but I remembered that the poor persecuted man had two daughters, and there were but five of the Spaniards that wanted; the rest had wives of their own, though in another country.

All this cargo arrived safe, and, as you may easily suppose, very welcome to my old inhabitants, who were now (with this addition) between sixty and seventy people, besides little children; of which there were a great many: I found letters at London from them all, by way of Lisbon, when I came back to England, being sent back to the Brasils by this sloop; of which I shall take some notice in its place.

I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it; and whoever reads the rest of my memorandums, would do well to turn his thoughts entirely from it, and expect to read only of the follies of an old man, not warned by his own harms, much less by those of other men, to beware of the like; not cooled by almost forty years misery and disappointments; not satisfied with prosperity beyond expectation; not made cautious by affliction and distress beyond irritation.

I had no more business to go to the East Indies, than a man at full liberty, and having committed no crime, has to go to the turnkey at Newgate, and desire him to lock him up among the prisoners there, and starve him. Had I taken a small vessel from England, and gone directly to the island; had I loaded her, as I did the other vessel, with all the necessaries for the plantation, and for my people; took a patent from the government here, to have secured my property, in subjection only to that of England, which, to be sure, I might have obtained; had I carried over cannon and ammunition, servants, and people to plant, and, taking possession of the place, fortified and strengthened it in the name of England, and increased it with people, as I might easily have done; had I then settled myself there, and sent the ship back, loaded with good rice, as I might also have done in six months time, and ordered my friends to have fitted her out again for our supply; had I done this, and staid there myself, I had, at least, acted like a man of common sense; but I was possessed with a wandering spirit, scorned all advantages, pleased myself with being the patron of these people I had placed there, and doing for them in a kind of haughty majestic way, like an old patriarchal monarch; providing for them, as if I had been father of the whole family, as well as of the plantation: but I never so much as pretended to plant in the name of any government or nation, or to acknowledge any prince, or to call my people subjects to any one nation more than another; nay, I never so much as gave the place a name; but left it as I found it, belonging to no man; and the people under no discipline or government but my own; who, though I had an influence over them as father and benefactor, had no authority or power to act or command one way or other, farther than voluntary consent moved them to comply: yet even this, had I staid there, would have done well enough; but as I rambled from them, and came thither no more, the last letters I had from any of them, were by my partner's means, who afterwards sent another sloop to the place; and who sent me word, though I had not the letter till five years after it was written, that they went on but poorly, were malecontent with their long stay there; that Will Atkins was dead; that five of the Spaniards were come away; and that though they had not been much molested by the savages, yet they had had some skirmishes with them; that they begged of him to write to me to think of the promise I had made to fetch them away, that they might see their own country again before they died.

But I was gone a wild-goose chase indeed, and they who will have any more of me, must be content to follow me through a new variety of follies, hardships, and wild adventures; wherein the justice of Providence may be duly observed, and we may see how easily Heaven can gorge us with our own desires, make the strongest of our wishes to be our affliction and punish us most severely with those very things which we think it would be our utmost happiness to be allowed in.

Let no wise man flatter himself with the strength of his own judgment, as if he was able to choose any particular station of life for himself. Man is a short-sighted creature, sees but a very little way before him; and as his passions are none of his best friends, so his particular affections are generally his worst counsellors.

I say this with respect to the impetuous desire I had from a youth to wander into the world, and how evident it now was that this principle was preserved in me for my punishment. How it came on, the manner, the circumstance, and the conclusion of it, it is easy to give you historically, and with its utmost variety of particulars. But the secret ends of Divine Providence, in thus permitting us to be hurried down the stream of our own desires, are only to be understood of those who can listen to the voice of Providence, and draw religious consequences from God's justice and their own mistakes.

Be it had I business or no business, away I went. It is no time now to enlarge any farther upon the reason or absurdity of my own conduct; but to come to the history--I was embarked for the voyage, and the voyage I went.

I shall only add here, that my honest and truly pious clergyman left me here; a ship being ready to go to Lisbon, he asked me leave to go thither; being still as he observed, bound never to finish any voyage he began. How happy had it been for me if I had gone with him!

But it was too late now; all things Heaven appoints are best. Had I gone with him, I had never had so many things to be thankful for, and you had never heard of the Second Part of the Travels and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; so I must leave here the fruitless exclaiming at myself, and go on with my voyage.

From the Brasils we made directly away over the Atlantic sea to the Cape de Bonne Esperance, or, as we call it, the Cape of Good Hope; and had a tolerable good voyage, our course generally south-east; now and then a storm, and some contrary winds. But my disasters at sea were at an end; my future rubs and cross events were to befal me on shore; that it might appear the land was as well prepared to be our scourge as the sea, when Heaven, who directs the circumstances of things, pleases to appoint it to be so.

Our ship was on a trading voyage, and had a supercargo on board, who was to direct all her motions after she arrived at the Cape; only being limited to a certain number of days for stay, by charter-party, at the several ports she was to go to. This was none of my business, neither did I meddle with it at all; my nephew the captain, and the supercargo, adjusting all those things between them as they thought fit.

We made no stay at the Cape longer than was needful to take in fresh water, but made the best of our way for the coast of Coromandel; we were indeed informed that a French man of war of fifty guns and two large merchant-ships were gone for the Indies; and as I knew we were at war with France, I had some apprehensions of them; but they went their own way, and we heard no more of them.

I shall not pester my account, or the reader, with descriptions of places, journals of our voyages, variations of the compass, latitudes, meridian distances, trade-winds, situation of ports, and the like; such as almost all the histories of long navigation are full of, and which make the reading tiresome enough, and are perfectly unprofitable to all that read, except only to those who are to go to those places themselves.

It is enough to name the ports and places which we touched at, and what occurred to us upon our passing from one to another. We touched first at the island of Madagascar, where, though the people are fierce and treacherous, and, in particular, very well armed with lances and bows, which they use with inconceivable dexterity, yet we fared very well with them awhile; they treated us very civilly; and for some trifles which we gave them, such as knives, scissors, &c. they brought us eleven good fat bullocks, middling in size, but very good in flesh, which we took in, partly for fresh provisions for our present spending, and the rest to salt for the ship's use.

We were obliged to stay here for some time after we had furnished ourselves with provisions; and I that was always too curious to look into every nook of the world wherever I came, was for going on shore as often as I could. It was on the east side of the island that we went on shore one evening, and the people, who by the way are very numerous, came thronging about us, and stood gazing at us at a distance; as we had traded freely with them, and had been kindly used, we thought ourselves in no danger; but when we saw the people we cut three boughs out of a tree, and stuck them up at a distance from us, which, it seems, is a mark in the country not only of truce and friendship, but when it is accepted, the other side set up three poles or boughs also, which is a signal that they accept the truce too; but then this is a known condition of the truce, that you are not to pass beyond their three poles towards them, nor they come past your three poles or boughs towards you; so that you are perfectly secure within the three poles, and all the space between your poles and theirs is allowed like a market for free converse, traffic, and commerce. When you go thither you must not carry your weapons with you; and if they come into that space they stick up their javelins and lances all at the first poles, and come on unarmed; but if any violence is offered them, and the truce thereby broken, away they run to the poles and lay hold of their weapons, and then the truce is at an end.

It happened one evening when we went on shore, that a greater number of their people came down than usual, but all was very friendly and civil. They brought with them several kinds of provisions, for which we satisfied them with such toys as we had; their women also brought us milk and roots, and several things very acceptable to us, and all was quiet; and we made us a little tent or hut, of some boughs of trees, and lay on shore all that night.

I know not what was the occasion, but I was not so well satisfied to lie on shore as the rest; and the boat lying at an anchor about a stone's cast from the land, with two men in her to take care of her, I made one of them come on shore, and getting some boughs of trees to cover us also in the boat, I spread the sail on the bottom of the boat, and lay on board, under the cover of the branches of the trees, all night.

About two o'clock in the morning we heard one of our men make a terrible noise on the shore, calling out for God's sake to bring the boat in, and come and help them, for they were all like to be murdered; at the same time I heard the firing of five muskets, which was the number of the guns they had, and that three times over; for, it seems, the natives here were not so easily frighted with guns as the savages were in America, where I had to do with them.

All this while I knew not what was the matter; but rousing immediately from sleep with the noise, I caused the boat to be thrust in, and resolved, with three fusils we had on board, to land and assist our men.

We got the boat soon to the shore; but our men were in too much haste; for being come to the shore, they plunged into the water to get to the boat with all the expedition they could, being pursued by between three and four hundred men. Our men were but nine in all, and only five of them had fusils with them; the rest, indeed, had pistols and swords, but they were of small use to them.

We took up seven of our men, and with difficulty enough too, three of them being very ill wounded; and that which was still worse was, that while we stood in the boat to take our men in, we were in as much danger as they were in on shore; for they poured their arrows in upon us so thick, that we were fain to barricade the side of the boat up with the benches and two or three loose boards, which to our great satisfaction we had by mere accident, or providence rather, in the boat.

And yet had it been daylight, they are, it seems, such exact marksmen, that if they could have seen but the least part of any of us, they would have been sure of us. We had, by the light of the moon, a little sight of them as they stood pelting us from the shore with darts and arrows, and having got ready our fire-arms, we gave them a volley, and we could hear by the cries of some of them, that we had wounded several; however, they stood thus in battle array on the shore till break of day, which we suppose was that they might see the better to take their aim at us.

In this condition we lay, and could not tell how to weigh our anchor, or set up our sail, because we must needs stand up in the boat, and they were as sure to hit us as we were to hit a bird in a tree with small shot. We made signals of distress to the ship, which though she rode a league off, yet my nephew, the captain, hearing our firing, and by glasses perceiving the posture we lay in, and that we fired towards the shore, pretty well understood us; and weighing anchor with all speed, he stood as near the shore as he durst with the ship, and then sent another boat with ten hands in her to assist us; but we called to them not to come too near, telling them what condition we were in; however, they stood in nearer to us; and one of the men taking the end of a tow-line in his hand, and keeping our boat between him and the enemy, so that they could not perfectly see him, swam on board us, and made the line fast to the boat, upon which we slipt our little cable, and leaving our anchor behind, they towed us out of the reach of the arrows, we all the while lying close behind the barricade we had made.

As soon as we were got from between the ship and the shore, that she could lay her side to the shore, we ran along just by them, and we poured in a broadside among them, loaded with pieces of iron and lead, small bullets, and such stuff, besides the great shot, which made a terrible havoc among them.