The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, Volume 1

by Daniel Defoe

desirablein the country, I found means to sell them to a very great advantage; sothat I might say, I had more than four times the value of my firstcargo, and was now infinitely beyond my poor neighbour, I mean in theadvancement of my plantation: for the first thing I did, I bought me aNegro slave, and ail European servant also; I mean another besides thatwhich the captain brought me from Lisbon.

  But as abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of ouradversity, so was it with me. I went on the next year with great successin my plantation; I raised fifty great rolls of tobacco on my ownground, more than I had disposed of for necessaries among my neighbours;and these fifty rolls, being each of above a hundred weight, were wellcured, and laid by against the return of the fleet from Lisbon: and now,increasing in business and in wealth, my head began to be full ofprojects and undertakings beyond my reach; such as are, indeed, oftenthe ruin of the best heads in business. Had I continued in the stationI was now in, I had room for all the happy things to have yet befallenme, for which my father so earnestly recommended a quiet, retired life,and which he had so sensibly described the middle station of life to befull of: but other things attended me, and I was still to be the wilfulagent of all my own miseries; and, particularly, to increase my fault,and double the reflections upon myself, which in my future sorrows Ishould have leisure to make, all these miscarriages were procured by myapparent obstinate adhering to my foolish inclination, of wanderingabout, and pursuing that inclination, in contradiction to the clearestviews of doing myself good in a fair and plain pursuit of thoseprospects, and those measures of life, which nature and Providenceconcurred to present me with, and to make my duty.

  As I had once done thus in breaking away from my parents, so I could notbe content now, but I must go and leave the happy view I had of being arich and thriving man in my new plantation, only to pursue a rash andimmoderate desire of rising faster than the nature of the thingadmitted; and thus I cast myself down again into the deepest gulph ofhuman misery that ever man fell into, or perhaps could be consistentwith life, and a state of health in the world.

  To come, then, by just degrees, to the particulars of this part of mystory:--You may suppose, that having now lived almost four years in theBrazils, and beginning to thrive and prosper very well upon myplantation, I had not only learned the language, but had contracted anacquaintance and friendship among my fellow-planters, as well as amongthe merchants at St. Salvador, which was our port; and that, in mydiscourses among them, I had frequently given them an account of my twovoyages to the coast of Guinea, the manner of trading with the Negroesthere, and how easy it was to purchase on the coast for trifles--suchas beads, toys, knives, scissars, hatchets, bits of glass, and thelike--not only gold dust, Guinea grains, elephants' teeth, &c. butNegroes, for the service of the Brazils, in great numbers.

  They listened always very attentively to my discourses on these heads,but especially to that part which related to the buying Negroes; whichwas a trade, at that time, not only not far entered into, but, as far asit was, had been carried on by the assientos, or permission of the kingsof Spain and Portugal, and engrossed from the public; so that fewNegroes were bought, and those excessive dear.

  It happened, being in company with some merchants and planters of myacquaintance, and talking of those things very earnestly, three of themcame to me the next morning, and told me they had been musing very muchupon what I had discoursed with them of the last night, and they came tomake a secret proposal to me: and, after enjoining me to secrecy, theytold me that they had a mind to fit out a ship to go to Guinea; thatthey had all plantations as well as I, and were straitened for nothingso much as servants; that as it was a trade that could not be carriedon, because they could not publicly sell the Negroes when they camehome, so they desired to make but one voyage, to bring the Negroes onshore privately, and divide them among their own plantations: and, in aword, the question was, whether I would go their supercargo in the ship,to manage the trading part upon the coast of Guinea; and they offered methat I should have an equal share of the Negroes, without providing anypart of the stock.

  This was a fair proposal, it must be confessed, had it been made to anyone that had not a settlement and plantation of his own to look after,which was in a fair way of coming to be very considerable, and with agood stock upon it. But for me, that was thus entered and established,and had nothing to do but go on as I had begun, for three or four yearsmore, and to have sent for the other hundred pounds from England; andwho, in that time, and with that little addition, could scarce havefailed of being worth three or four thousand pounds sterling, and thatincreasing too; for me to think of such a voyage, was the mostpreposterous thing that ever man, in such circumstances, could beguilty of.

  But I, that was born to be my own destroyer, could no more resist theoffer, than I could restrain my first rambling designs, when my father'sgood counsel was lost upon me. In a word, I told them I would go withall my heart, if they would undertake to look after my plantation in myabsence, and would dispose of it to such as I should direct, if Imiscarried. This they all engaged to do, and entered into writings orcovenants to do so; and I made a formal will, disposing of my plantationand effects, in case of my death; making the captain of the ship thathad saved my life, as before, my universal heir; but obliging him todispose of my effects as I had directed in my will; one half of theproduce being to himself, and the other to be shipped to England.

  In short, I took all possible caution to preserve my effects, and tokeep up my plantation: had I used half as much prudence to have lookedinto my own interest, and have made a judgment of what I ought to havedone and not to have done I had certainly never gone away from soprosperous an undertaking, leaving all the probable views of a thrivingcircumstance, and gone a voyage to sea, attended with all its commonhazards, to say nothing of the reasons I had to expect particularmisfortunes to myself.

  But I was hurried on, and obeyed blindly the dictates of my fancy,rather than my reason: and accordingly, the ship being fitted out, andthe cargo furnished, and all things done as by agreement, by my partnersin the voyage, I went on board in an evil hour again, the 1st ofSeptember, 1659, being the same day eight years that I went from myfather and mother at Hull, in order to act the rebel to their authority,and the fool to my own interest.

  Our ship was about one hundred and twenty tons burden, carried six guns,and fourteen men, besides the master, his boy, and myself; we had onboard no large cargo of goods, except of such toys as were fit for ourtrade with the Negroes, such as beads, bits of glass, shells, and oddtrifles, especially little looking-glasses, knives, scissars, hatchets,and the like.

  The same day I went on board we set sail, standing away to the northwardupon our own coast, with design to stretch over for the African coast.When they came about ten or twelve degrees of northern latitude, which,it seems, was the manner of their course in those days, we had very goodweather, only excessive hot all the way upon our own coast, till we cameto the height of Cape St. Augustino; from whence, keeping farther off atsea, we lost sight of land, and steered as if we were bound for the isleFernando de Noronha, holding our course N.E. by N. and leaving thoseisles on the east. In this course we passed the line in about twelvedays' time, and were by our last observation, in 7 degrees 22 minutesnorthern latitude, when a violent tornado, or hurricane, took us quiteout of our knowledge: it began from the south-east, came about to thenorth-west, and then settled in the north-east; from whence it blew insuch a terrible manner, that for twelve days together we could donothing but drive, and, scudding away before it, let it carry us whitherever fate and the fury of the winds directed; and, during these twelvedays, I need not say that I expected every day to be swallowed up; nor,indeed, did any in the ship expect to save their lives.

  In this distress, we had, besides the terror of the storm, one of ourmen died of the calenture, and one man and a boy washed overboard. Aboutthe twelfth day, the weather abating a little, the master made anobservation as well as he could, and found that he was in about 1
1degrees north latitude, but that he was 22 degrees of longitudedifference, west from Cape St. Augustino; so that he found he was gotupon the coast of Guiana, or the north part of Brazil, beyond the riverAmazons, toward that of the river Oroonoque, commonly called the GreatRiver; and began to consult with me what course he should take, for theship was leaky and very much disabled, add he was going directly back tothe coast of Brazil.

  I was positively against that; and looking over the charts of thesea-coast of America with him, we concluded there was no inhabitedcountry for us to have recourse to, till we came within the circle ofthe Caribbee islands, and therefore resolved to stand away forBarbadoes; which by keeping off to sea, to avoid the in-draft of the bayor gulf of Mexico, we might easily perform, as we hoped, in aboutfifteen days' sail; whereas we could not possibly make our voyage to thecoast of Africa without some assistance, both to our ship and ourselves.

  With this design, we changed our course, and