The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - 57

These things tormented me, and my partner too, night and day; nor did we consider that the captains of ships have no authority to act thus; and if we had surrendered prisoners to them, they could not answer the destroying us, or torturing us, but would be accountable for it when they came into their own country. This, I say, gave me no satisfaction; for, if they will act thus with us, what advantage would it be to us that they would be called to an account for it? or, if we were first to be murdered, what satisfaction would it be to us to have them punished when they came home?

I cannot refrain taking notice here what reflections I now had upon the past variety of my particular circumstances; how hard I thought it was, that I, who had spent forty years in a life of continued difficulties, and was at last come, as it were, at the port or haven which all men drive at, viz. to have rest and plenty, should be a volunteer in new sorrows, by my own unhappy choice; and that I, who had escaped so many dangers in my youth, should now come to be hanged, in my old age, and in so remote a place, for a crime I was not in the least inclined to, much less guilty of; and in a place and circumstance, where innocence was not like to be any protection at all to me.

After these thoughts, something of religion would come in; and I would be considering that this seemed to me to be a disposition of immediate Providence; and I ought to look upon it, and submit to it as such: that although I was innocent as to men, I was far from being innocent as to my Maker; and I ought to look in, and examine what other crimes in my life were most obvious to me, and for which Providence might justly inflict this punishment as a retribution; and that I ought to submit to this, just as I would to a shipwreck, if it had pleased God to have brought such a disaster upon me.

In its turn, natural courage would sometimes take its place; and then I would be talking myself up to vigorous resolution, that I would not be taken to be barbarously used by a parcel of merciless wretches in cold blood; that it was much better to have fallen into the hands of the savages, who were men-eaters, and who, I was sure, would feast upon me, when they had taken me, than by those who would perhaps glut their rage upon me by inhuman tortures and barbarities: that, in the case of the savages, I always resolved to die fighting to the last gasp; and why should I not do so now, seeing it was much more dreadful, to me at least, to think of falling into these men's hands, than ever it was to think of being eaten by men? for the savages, give them their due, would not eat a man till he was dead; and killed him first, as we do a bullock; but that these men had many arts beyond the cruelty of death. Whenever these thoughts prevailed I was sure to put myself into a kind of fever, with the agitations of a supposed fight; my blood would boil, and my eyes sparkle, as if I was engaged; and I always resolved that I would take no quarter at their hands; but even at last, if I could resist no longer, I would blow up the ship, and all that was in her, and leave them but little booty to boast of.

But by how much the greater weight the anxieties and perplexities of those things were to our thoughts while we were at sea, by so much the greater was our satisfaction when we saw ourselves on shore; and my partner told me he dreamed that he had a very heavy load upon his back, which he was to carry up a hill, and found that he was not able to stand long under it; but the Portuguese pilot came, and took it off his back, and the hill disappeared, the ground before him shewing all smooth and plain: and truly it was so; we were all like men who had a load taken off their backs.

For my part, I had a weight taken off from my heart, that I was not able any longer to bear; and, as I said above, we resolved to go no more to sea in that ship. When we came on shore, the old pilot, who was now our friend, got us a lodging, and a warehouse for our goods, which, by the way, was much the same: it was a little house, or hut, with a large house joining to it, all built with canes, and palisadoed round with large canes, to keep out pilfering thieves, of which it seems there were not a few in the country. However, the magistrates allowed us all a little guard, and we had a soldier with a kind of halbert, or half-pike, who stood sentinel at our door, to whom we allowed a pint of rice, and a little piece of money, about the value of three-pence, per day: so that our goods were kept very safe.

The fair or mart usually kept in this place had been over some time; however, we found that there were three or four junks in the river, and two Japanners, I mean ships from Japan, with goods which they had bought in China, and were not gone away, having Japanese merchants on shore.

The first thing our old Portuguese pilot did for us was to bring us acquainted with three missionary Romish priests, who were in the town, and who had been there some time, converting the people to Christianity; but we thought they made but poor work of it, and made them but sorry Christians when they had done. However, that was not our business. One of these was a Frenchman, whom they called Father Simon; he was a jolly well-conditioned man, very free in his conversation, not seeming so serious and grave as the other two did, one of whom was a Portuguese, and the other a Genoese: but Father Simon was courteous, easy in his manner, and very agreeable company; the other two were more reserved, seemed rigid and austere, and applied seriously to the work they came about, viz. to talk with, and insinuate themselves among the inhabitants wherever they had opportunity. We often ate and drank with those men; and though I must confess, the conversion, as they call it, of the Chinese to Christianity, is so far from the true conversion required to bring heathen people to the faith of Christ, that it seems to amount to little more than letting them know the name of Christ, say some prayers to the Virgin Mary and her Son, in a tongue which they understand not, and to cross themselves, and the like; yet it must be confessed that these religious, whom we call missionaries, have a firm belief that these people should be saved, and that they are the instrument of it; and, on this account, they undergo not only the fatigue of the voyage, and hazards of living in such places, but oftentimes death itself, with the most violent tortures, for the sake of this work: and it would be a great want of charity in us, whatever opinion we have of the work itself, and the manner of their doing it, if we should not have a good opinion of their zeal, who undertake it with so many hazards, and who have no prospect of the least temporal advantage to themselves.

But to return to my story: This French priest, Father Simon, was appointed, it seems, by order of the chief of the mission, to go up to Pekin, the royal seat of the Chinese emperor; and waited only for another priest, who was ordered to come to him from Macao, to go along with him; and we scarce ever met together but he was inviting me to go that journey with him, telling me, how he would shew me all the glorious things of that mighty empire; and among the rest the greatest city in the world; "A city," said he, "that your London and our Paris put together cannot be equal to." This was the city of Pekin, which, I confess, is very great, and infinitely full of people; but as I looked on those things with different eyes from other men, so I shall give my opinion of them in few words when I come in the course of my travels to speak more particularly of them.

But first I come to my friar or missionary: dining with him one day, and being very merry together, I showed some little inclination to go with him; and he pressed me and my partner very hard, and with a great many persuasions, to consent. "Why, Father Simon," says my partner, "why should you desire our company so much? You know we are heretics, and you do not love us, nor can keep us company with any pleasure."--"O!" says he, "you may, perhaps, be good Catholics in time; my business here is to convert heathens, and who knows but I may convert you too?"--"Very well, Father," said I, "so you will preach to us all the way."--"I won't be troublesome to you," said he; "our religion does not divest us of good manners; besides," said he, "we are all here like countrymen; and so we are, compared to the place we are in; and if you are Hugonots, and I a Catholic, we may be all Christians at last; at least," said he, "we are all gentlemen, and we may converse so, without being uneasy to one another." I liked that part of his discourse very well, and it began to put me in mind of my priest that I had left in the Brasils; but this Father Simon did not come up to his character by a great deal; for though Father Simon had no appearance of a criminal levity in him neither, yet he had not that fund of Christian zeal, strict piety, and sincere affection to religion, that my other good ecclesiastic had, of whom I have said so much.

But to leave him a little, though he never left us, nor soliciting us to go with him, but we had something else before us at that time; for we had all this while our ship and our merchandise to dispose of; and we began to be very doubtful what we should do, for we were now in a place of very little business; and once I was about to venture to sail for the river of Kilam, and the city of Nanquin: but Providence seemed now more visibly, as I thought, than ever, to concern itself in our affairs; and I was encouraged from this very time to think I should, one way or other, get out of this entangled circumstance, and be brought home to my own country again, though I had not the least view of the manner; and when I began sometimes to think of it, could not imagine by what method it was to be done. Providence, I say, began here to clear up our way a little; and the first thing that offered was, that our old Portuguese pilot brought a Japan merchant to us, who began to inquire what goods we had; and, in the first place, he bought all our opium, and gave us a very good price for it, paying us in gold by weight, some in small pieces of their own coin, and some in small wedges, of about ten or eleven ounces each. While we were dealing with him for our opium, it came into my head that he might, perhaps, deal with us for the ship too; and I ordered the interpreter to propose it to him. He shrunk up his shoulders at it, when it was first proposed to him; but in a few days after he came to me, with one of the missionary priests for his interpreter, and told me he had a proposal to make to me, and that was this: he had bought a great quantity of goods of us when he had no thoughts (or proposals made to him) of buying the ship, and that, therefore, he had not money enough to pay for the ship; but if I would let the same men who were in the ship navigate her, he would hire the ship to go to Japan, and would send them from thence to the Philippine islands with another loading, which he would pay the freight of before they went from Japan; and that, at their return, he would buy the ship. I began to listen to this proposal; and so eager did my head still run upon rambling, that I could not but begin to entertain a notion myself of going with him, and so to sail from the Philippine islands away to the South Seas; and accordingly I asked the Japanese merchant if he would not hire us to the Philippine islands, and discharge us there. He said, no, he could not do that, for then he could not have the return of his cargo; but he would discharge us in Japan, he said, at the ship's return. Well, still I was for taking him at that proposal, and going myself; but my partner, wiser than myself, persuaded me from it, representing the dangers, as well of the seas, as of the Japanese, who are a false, cruel, treacherous people; and then of the Spaniards at the Philippines, more false, more cruel, more treacherous than they.

But, to bring this long turn of our affairs to a conclusion, the first thing we had to do was to consult with the captain of the ship, and with the men, and know if they were willing to go to Japan; and, while I was doing this, the young man whom, as I said, my nephew had left with me as my companion for my travels, came to me and told me that he thought that voyage promised very fair, and that there was a great prospect of advantage, and he would be very glad if I undertook it; but that if I would not, and would give him leave, he would go as a merchant, or how I pleased to order him; and if ever he came to England, and I was there, and alive, he would render me a faithful account of his success, and it should be as much mine as I pleased.

I was really loath to part with him; but considering the prospect of advantage, which was really considerable, and that he was a young fellow as likely to do well in it as any I knew, I inclined to let him go; but first I told him, I would consult my partner, and give him an answer the next day. My partner and I discoursed about it, and my partner made a most generous offer: he told me, "You know it has been an unlucky ship, and we both resolve not to go to sea in it again; if your steward (so he called my man) will venture the voyage, I'll leave my share of the vessel to him, and let him make the best of it; and if we live to meet in England, and he meets with success abroad, he shall account for one half of the profits of the ship's freight to us, the other shall be his own."

If my partner, who was no way concerned with my young man, made him such an offer, I could do no less than offer him the same; and all the ship's company being willing to go with him, we made over half the ship to him in property, and took a writing from him, obliging him to account for the other; and away he went to Japan. The Japan merchant proved a very punctual honest man to him, protected him at Japan, and got him a licence to come on shore, which the Europeans in general have not lately obtained, paid him his freight very punctually, sent him to the Philippines, loaded him with Japan and China wares, and a supercargo of their own, who trafficking with the Spaniards, brought back European goods again, and a great quantity of cloves and other spice; and there he was not only paid his freight very well, and at a very good price, but being not willing to sell the ship then, the merchant furnished him with goods on his own account; that for some money and some spices of his own, which he brought with him, he went back to the Manillas, to the Spaniards, where he sold his cargo very well. Here, having gotten a good acquaintance at Manilla, he got his ship made a free ship; and the governor of Manilla hired him to go to Acapulco in America, on the coast of Mexico; and gave him a licence to land there, and travel to Mexico; and to pass in any Spanish ship to Europe, with all his men.

He made the voyage to Acapulco very happily, and there he sold his ship; and having there also obtained allowance to travel by land to Porto Bello, he found means, some how or other, to go to Jamaica with all his treasure; and about eight years after came to England, exceeding rich; of which I shall take notice in its place; in the mean time, I return to our particular affairs.

Being now to part with the ship and ship's company, it came before us, of course, to consider what recompense we should give to the two men that gave us such timely notice of the design against us in the river of Cambodia. The truth was, they had done us a considerable service, and deserved well at our hands; though, by the way, they were a couple of rogues too: for, as they believed the story of our being pirates, and that we had really run away with the ship, they came down to us, not only to betray the design that was formed against us, but to go to sea with us as pirates; and one of them confessed afterwards, that nothing else but the hopes of going a-roguing brought him to do it. However, the service they did us was not the less; and therefore, as I had promised to be grateful to them, I first ordered the money to be paid to them, which they said was due to them on board their respective ships; that is to say, the Englishman nineteen months pay, and to the Dutchman seven; and, over and above that, I gave each of them a small sum of money in gold, which contented them very well: then I made the Englishman gunner of the ship, the gunner being now made second mate and purser; the Dutchman I made boatswain: so they were both very well pleased, and proved very serviceable, being both able seamen, and very stout fellows.

We were now on shore in China. If I thought myself banished, and remote from my own country at Bengal, where I had many ways to get home for my money, what could I think of myself now, when I was gotten about a thousand leagues farther off from home, and perfectly destitute of all manner of prospect of return!

All we had for it was this, that in about four months time there was to be another fair at that place where we were, and then we might be able to purchase all sorts of the manufactures of the country, and withal might possibly find some Chinese junks or vessels from Nanquin, that would be to be sold, and would carry us and our goods whither we pleased. This I liked very well, and resolved to wait; besides, as our particular persons were not obnoxious, so if any English or Dutch ships came thither, perhaps we might have an opportunity to load our goods, and get passage to some other place in India nearer home.

Upon these hopes we resolved to continue here; but, to divert ourselves, we took two or three journies into the country; first, we went ten days journey to see the city of Nanquin, a city well worth seeing indeed: they say it has a million of people in it; which, however, I do not believe: it is regularly built, the streets all exactly straight, and cross one another in direct lines, which gives the figure of it great advantage.

But when I came to compare the miserable people of these countries with ours; their fabrics, their manner of living, their government, their religion, their wealth, and their glory, (as some call it) I must confess, I do not so much as think it worth naming, or worth my while to write of, or any that shall come after me to read.

It is very observable, that we wonder at the grandeur, the riches, the pomp, the ceremonies, the government, the manufactures, the commerce, and the conduct of these people; not that they are to be wondered at, or, indeed, in the least to be regarded; but because, having first a notion of the barbarity of those countries, the rudeness and the ignorance that prevail there, we do not expect to find any such things so far off.