The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
This was a great undertaking for one pair of hands; yet, as I saw there
was an absolute necessity for doing it, my first work was to find out a
proper piece of ground, where there was likely to be herbage for them
to eat, water for them to drink, and cover to keep them from the sun.
Those who understand such enclosures will think I had very little
contrivance when I pitched upon a place very proper for all these
(being a plain, open piece of meadow land, or savannah, as our people
call it in the western colonies), which had two or three little drills
of fresh water in it, and at one end was very woody—I say, they will
smile at my forecast, when I shall tell them I began by enclosing this
piece of ground in such a manner that, my hedge or pale must have been
at least two miles about. Nor was the madness of it so great as to the
compass, for if it was ten miles about, I was like to have time enough
to do it in; but I did not consider that my goats would be as wild in
so much compass as if they had had the whole island, and I should have
so much room to chase them in that I should never catch them.
My hedge was begun and carried on, I believe, about fifty yards when
this thought occurred to me; so I presently stopped short, and, for the
beginning, I resolved to enclose a piece of about one hundred and fifty
yards in length, and one hundred yards in breadth, which, as it would
maintain as many as I should have in any reasonable time, so, as my
stock increased, I could add more ground to my enclosure.
This was acting with some prudence, and I went to work with courage. I
was about three months hedging in the first piece; and, till I had done
it, I tethered the three kids in the best part of it, and used them to
feed as near me as possible, to make them familiar; and very often I
would go and carry them some ears of barley, or a handful of rice, and
feed them out of my hand; so that after my enclosure was finished and I
let them loose, they would follow me up and down, bleating after me for
a handful of corn.
This answered my end, and in about a year and a half I had a flock of
about twelve goats, kids and all; and in two years more I had
three-and-forty, besides several that I took and killed for my food.
After that, I enclosed five several pieces of ground to feed them in,
with little pens to drive them to take them as I wanted, and gates out
of one piece of ground into another.
But this was not all; for now I not only had goat’s flesh to feed on
when I pleased, but milk too—a thing which, indeed, in the beginning, I
did not so much as think of, and which, when it came into my thoughts,
was really an agreeable surprise, for now I set up my dairy, and had
sometimes a gallon or two of milk in a day. And as Nature, who gives
supplies of food to every creature, dictates even naturally how to make
use of it, so I, that had never milked a cow, much less a goat, or seen
butter or cheese made only when I was a boy, after a great many essays
and miscarriages, made both butter and cheese at last, also salt
(though I found it partly made to my hand by the heat of the sun upon
some of the rocks of the sea), and never wanted it afterwards. How
mercifully can our Creator treat His creatures, even in those
conditions in which they seemed to be overwhelmed in destruction! How
can He sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise
Him for dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in
the wilderness, where I saw nothing at first but to perish for hunger!
CHAPTER XI. FINDS PRINT OF MAN’S FOOT ON THE SAND
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
favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was
now grown old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind
upon, 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 favour.
But these were not the two cats which I brought on shore at first, for
they were both of them dead, and had been interred near my habitation
by my own hand; but one of them having multiplied by I know not what
kind of creature, these were two which I had preserved tame; whereas
the rest ran wild in the woods, and became indeed troublesome to me at
last, for they would often come into my house, and plunder me too, till
at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many; at
length they left me. 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
where, as I have said in my last ramble, I went up the hill to see how
the shore lay, and how the current set, that I might see what I had to
do: 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 colour 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
moustachios, 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-bye; 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 sea-shore, 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 periagua 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