by Daniel Defoe
business there, or designed any, only thatwe had a mind to take on board a quantity of rice, if we could come atit; which at last, we effected by a Portuguese vessel, which we met withat sea, bound to Goa, from the Gulf of Persia. We chased her, andbrought her too, indeed, as if we resolved to attack and take the ship;but, finding a quantity of rice on board, which was what we wanted, witha parcel of coffee, we took all the rice, but paid the supercargo, whowas a Persian or Armenian merchant, very honestly for the whole parcel,his full price, and to his satisfaction; as for the coffee, we had nooccasion for it. We put in at several ports on the Indian coast forfresh water and fresh provisions, but came near none of the factories,because we had no mind to discover ourselves; for though we were to sailthrough the very centre of the India trade, yet it was perfectly withoutany business among them. We met indeed on this coast with some pearlfishers, who had been in the mouth of the Arabian Gulf, and had a largequantity of pearl on board. I would have traded with them for goods, butthey understood nothing but money, and I refused to part with it; uponwhich the fellows gave our supercargo some scornful language, whichthough he did not well understand what they said, yet he pretended totake it as a great affront, and threatened to make prize of their barks,and slaves of the men; upon which they grew very humble; and one ofthem, a Malabar Indian, who spoke a little English, spoke for them, thatthey would willingly trade with us for such goods as we had; whereupon Iproduced three bales of English cloth, which I showed them, and saidthey would be of good merchandise at Gombaroon in the Gulf, for that thePersians made their long vests of such cloths.
In short, for this cloth, and some money, we bought a box of choicepearls, which the chief of them had picked out from the rest for thePortuguese merchants at Goa; and which, when I came to London, wasvalued at two thousand two hundred pounds sterling.
We were near two months on our voyage from Madagascar to the coast ofIndia, and from thence to Ceylon, where we put in on the south-west partof the island, to see what provisions we could get, and to take in alarge supply of water.
The people here we found willing to supply us with provisions; butwithal so sharp, imposing upon us their own rates for everything, andwithal, so false, that we were often provoked to treat them very rudely.However, I gave strict orders that they should not be hurt upon anyoccasion, at least till we had filled all our water-casks and taken inwhat fresh provisions we could get, and especially rice, which we valuedvery much. But they provoked us at last beyond all patience; for theywere such thieves when they were on board, and such treacherous rogueswhen we were on shore, that there was no bearing with them; and twoaccidents fell out upon this occasion which fully broke the peacebetween us; one was on board, and the other on shore, and both happenedthe same day.
The case on board was this. There came on board us a small boat, inwhich were eleven men and three boys, to sell us roots, yams, mangoes,and such other articles as was frequent for them to do every day; butthis boat having more goods of that kind than usual, they were longerthan ordinary in making their market. While they were thus chaffering onboard, one of them having wandered about the ship, and pretending toadmire everything he saw, and being gotten between decks, was takenstealing a pair of shoes which belonged to one of the seamen. The fellowbeing stopped for his theft, appeared angry, raised a hideous screamingnoise to alarm his fellows; and, at the same time, having stolen a longpair of scissors, pulled them out, and stabbed the man who had laid holdof him into the shoulder, and was going to repeat his blow, when thepoor fellow who had been wounded, having struck up his heels and fallenupon him, had killed him if I had not called to take him off, and bringthe thief up to me.
Upon this order, they laid hold of the barbarian, and brought him upwith the shoes and the scissors that he had stolen, and as the fact wasplain, and needed no witnesses, I caused all the rest of them to bebrought up also; and, as well as we could, made them understand what hehad done.
They made pitiful signs of fear, lest they should all be punished forhis crime, and particularly when they saw the man whom he had woundedbrought in; then they expected nothing but death, and they made a sadlamentation and howling, as if they were all to die immediately.
It was not without a great deal of difficulty that I found ways tosatisfy them, that nobody was to be punished but the man that hadcommitted the fact; and then I caused him to be brought to the gears,with a halter about his neck, and be soundly whipped; and indeed, ourpeople did scourge him severely from head to foot; and, I believe, if Ihad not run myself to put an end to it, they would have whipped him todeath.
When this punishment was over, they put him into their boat, and letthem all go on shore. But no sooner were they on shore, but they raiseda terrible outcry in all the villages and towns near them, and they werenot a few, the country being very populous; and great numbers came downto the shore, staring at us, and making confused ugly noises, andabundance of arrows they shot at the ship, but we rode too far from theshore for them to do us any hurt.
While this was doing, another fray happened on shore, where two of ourmen, bargaining with an islander and his wife for some fowls, they tooktheir money and gave them part of the fowls, and pretended the womanshould go and fetch the rest. While the woman was gone, three or fourfellows came to the man who was left; when talking a while together, andseeing our men were but two, they began to take hold of the fowls whichhad been sold, and would take them away again; when one of our menstepped up to the fellow who had taken them, and went to lay hold ofhim, but he was too nimble for him, and ran away, and carried off thefowls and the money too. The seamen were so enraged to be so served,that they took up their pieces, for they had both fire-arms with them,and fired immediately after him, and aimed their shot so well, thatthough the fellow flew like the wind, he shot him through the head, andhe dropped down dead upon the spot.
The rest of them, though terribly frightened, yet, seeing our men werebut two, and the noise bringing twenty or thirty more immediately tothem, attacked our men with their lances, and bows and arrows; and in amoment there was a pitched battle of two men only against twenty orthirty, and their number increasing too.
In short, our men spent their shot freely among them as long as itlasted, and killed six or seven, besides wounding ten or eleven more,and this cooled their courage, and they seemed to give over the battle;and our men, whose ammunition was almost spent, began to think ofretreating to their boat, which was near a mile off, for they were veryunhappily gotten from their boat so far up the country.
They made their retreat pretty well for about half the way, when, on asudden, they saw they were not pursued only, but surrounded, and thatsome of their enemies were before them. This made them double theirpace, and, seeing no remedy, they resolved to break through those thatwere before them, who were about eleven or twelve. Accordingly, as soonas they came within pistol shot of them, one of our men having, for wantof shot, put almost a handful of gravel and small stones into his piece,fired among them, and the gravel and stones scattering, wounded almostall of them; for they being naked from the waist upwards, the leastgrain of sand scratched and hurt them, and made them bleed if it onlyentered the skin.
Being thus completely scared, and indeed more afraid than hurt, they allran away, except two, who were really wounded with the shot or stones,and lay upon the ground. Our men let them lie, and made the best oftheir way to their boat; where, at last, they got safe, but with a greatnumber of the people at their heels. Our men did not stay to fire fromthe boat, but put off with all the speed they could, for fear ofpoisoned arrows, and the country people poured so many of their arrowsinto the boat after them, and aimed them also so truly, that two of ourmen were hurt with them; but, whether they were poisoned or not, oursurgeons cured them both.
We had enough of Ceylon; and having no business to make such a kind ofwar as this must have been, in which we might have lost but could getnothing, we weighed, and stood away to the East. What became of thefellow that was lashed we knew not; but, as he had but litt
le fleshleft on his back, which was not mangled and torn with our whipping him,and we supposed they were but indifferent surgeons, our people said thefellow could not live; and the reason they gave for it was, because theydid not pickle him after it. Truly, they said, that they would not be sokind to him as to pickle him: for though pickling, that is to say,throwing salt and vinegar on the back after the whipping, is cruelenough as to the pain it is to the patient, yet it is certainly the wayto prevent mortification, and causes it to heal again with more ease.
We stood over from Ceylon east-south-east cross the great Bay of Bengal,leaving all the coast of Coromandel, and standing directly for Achen, onthe north point of the great island of Sumatra, and in the latitude of6 deg. 81' north.
Here we spread our French colours, and, coming to an anchor, sufferednone of our men to go on shore but Captain Merlotte and his Frenchmen;and, having nothing to do there, or anywhere else in the Indian seas,but to take in provisions and fresh water, we
