The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
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 fulfil 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 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 eye or glass 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 frame for so outrageous an execution as the killing
twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at all
entered into any 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; or 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; 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, 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 idolators
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 of 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 I ought, neither in principle nor in policy, 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 sign for
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 He 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 that 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
everything 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 for
discovery, or 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 except upon my constant employment,
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 out of danger; for
certain, it is that these savage people, who sometimes haunted this
island, never came with any thoughts of finding anything 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 everywhere, 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 sank 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 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 me from 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.