by Daniel Defoe
of digging a hole under the place where they madetheir fire, and putting in five or six pounds of gunpowder, which, whenthey kindled their fire, would consequently take fire, and blow up allthat was near it: but as, in the first place, I should be unwilling towaste so much powder upon them, my store being now within the quantityof one barrel, so neither could I be sure of its going off at anycertain time, when it might surprise them; and, at best, that it woulddo little more than just blow the fire about their ears, and frightthem, but not sufficient to make them forsake the place: so I laid itaside; and then proposed that I would place myself in ambush in someconvenient place, with my three guns all double-loaded, and, in themiddle of their bloody ceremony, let fly at them, when I should be sureto kill or wound perhaps two or three at every shot; and then falling inupon them with my three pistols, and my sword, I made no doubt but thatif there were twenty I should kill them all. This fancy pleased mythoughts for some weeks; and I was so full of it, that I often dreamedof it, and sometimes that I was just going to let fly at them in mysleep. I went so far with it in my imagination, that I employed myselfseveral days to find out proper places to put myself in ambuscade, as Isaid, to watch for them; and I went frequently to the place itself,which was now grown more familiar to me: but while my mind was thusfilled with thoughts of revenge, and a bloody putting twenty or thirtyof 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 thehill, where I was satisfied I might securely wait till I saw any oftheir boats coming: and might then, even before they would be ready tocome on shore, convey myself, unseen, into some thickets of trees, inone of which there was a hollow large enough to conceal me entirely andthere I might sit and observe all their bloody doings, and take my fullaim at their heads, when they were so close together as that it would benext to impossible that I should miss my shot, or that I could failwounding three or four of them at the first shot. In this place, then, Iresolved to fix my design; and, accordingly, I prepared two muskets andmy ordinary fowling-piece. The two muskets I loaded with a brace ofslugs each, and four or five smaller bullets, about the size ofpistol-bullets; and the fowling-piece I loaded with near a handful ofswan-shot, of the largest size: I also loaded my pistols with about fourbullets each; and in this posture, well provided with ammunition for asecond 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 up to thetop of the hill, which was from my castle, as I called it, about threemiles, or more, to see if I could observe any boats upon the sea, comingnear the island, or standing over towards it: but I began to tire ofthis hard duty, after I had, for two or three months, constantly keptmy watch, but came always back without any discovery; there having not,in all that time, been the least appearance, not only on or near theshore, but on the whole ocean, so far as my eyes or glasses could reachevery way.
As long as I kept my daily tour to the hill to look out, so long also Ikept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all thewhile in a suitable form for so outrageous an execution as the killingtwenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at allentered into a discussion of in my thoughts, any farther than mypassions were at first fired by the horror I conceived at the unnaturalcustom of the people of that country; who, it seems, had been sufferedby Providence, in his wise disposition of the world, to have no otherguide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and,consequently, were left, and perhaps had been so for some ages, to actsuch horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing butnature, entirely abandoned by Heaven, and actuated by some hellishdegeneracy, could have run them into. But now, when, as I have said, Ibegan to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so longand so far every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itselfbegan to alter; and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, toconsider what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had topretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whomHeaven had thought fit, for so many ages, to suffer, unpunished, to goon, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments one uponanother. How far these people were offenders against me, and what rightI had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shedpromiscuously upon one another, I debated this very often with myself,thus: How do I know what God himself judges in this particular case? Itis certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not againsttheir own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; theydo not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance ofdivine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think itno more a crime to kill a captive taken in war, than we do to kill anox; nor to eat human flesh, than we do to eat mutton.
When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I wascertainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers inthe sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more thanthose Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisonerstaken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put wholetroops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threwdown their arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me,that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish andinhuman, yet it was really nothing to me; these people had done me noinjury: that if they attempted me, or I saw it necessary, for myimmediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said forit; but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had noknowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore itcould not be just for me to fall upon them: that this would justify theconduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America,where they destroyed millions of these people: who, however they wereidolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites intheir customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, wereyet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rootingthem out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence anddetestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by allother Christian nations in Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody andunnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and forwhich the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful andterrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as ifthe kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a raceof men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowelsof pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generoustemper in the mind.
These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a fullstop; and I began, by little and little, to be off my design, and toconclude I had taken wrong measures in my resolution to attack thesavages; and that it was not my business to meddle with them, unlessthey first attacked me; and this it was my business, if possible, toprevent; but that if I were discovered and attacked by them, I knew myduty. On the other hand, I argued with myself, that this really was theway not to deliver myself, but entirely to ruin and destroy myself; forunless I was sure to kill every one that not only should be on shore atthat time, but that should ever come on shore afterwards, if but one ofthem escaped to tell their country-people what had happened, they wouldcome over again by thousands to revenge the death of their fellows, andI should only bring upon myself a certain destruction, which, atpresent, I had no manner of occasion for. Upon the whole, I concluded,that neither in principle nor in policy, I ought, one way or other, toconcern myself in this affair: that my business was, by all possiblemeans, to conceal myself from them, and not to leave the least signal tothem to guess by that there were any living creatures upon the island, Imean of human shape. Religion joined in with this prudential resolution;and I was convinced now, many ways, that I was perfectly out of my dutywhen I was laying all my bloody schemes for the destruction of innocentcreatures, I mean innocent as to me. As to the crimes they were guiltyof towards one another
, I had nothing to do with them; they werenational, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is thegovernor of nations, and knows how, by national punishments, to make ajust retribution for national offences, and to bring public judgmentsupon those who offend in a public manner, by such ways as best pleasehim. This appeared so clear to me now, that nothing was a greatersatisfaction to me than that I had not been suffered to do a thing whichI now saw so much reason to believe would have been no less a sin thanthat of wilful murder, if I had committed it; and I gave most humblethanks on my knees to God, that had thus delivered me fromblood-guiltiness; beseeching him to grant me the protection of hisprovidence, that I might not fall into the hands of the barbarians, orthat I might not lay my hands upon them, unless I had a more clear callfrom Heaven to do it, in defence of my own life.
In this disposition I continued for near a year after this; and so farwas I from desiring an occasion
