by Daniel Defoe
thefrights and terrors I was in about the savages, I had undertaken it, andperhaps brought it to pass too; for I seldom gave any thing over withoutaccomplishing it, when I once had it in my head enough to begin it.
But my invention now ran quite another way; for night and day I couldthink of nothing, but how I might destroy some of these monsters intheir cruel bloody entertainment, and, if possible, save the victim theyshould bring hither to destroy. It would take up a larger volume thanthis whole work is intended to be, to set down all the contrivances Ihatched, or rather brooded upon in my thoughts, for the destroying thesecreatures, or at least frightening them, so as to prevent their cominghither any more; but all was abortive; nothing could be possible to takeeffect, unless I was to be there to do it myself; and what could one mando among them, when perhaps there might be twenty or thirty of themtogether, with their darts, or their bows and arrows, with which theycould shoot as true to a mark as I could with my gun?
Sometimes I contrived to dig a hole under the place where they madetheir fire, and put in five or six pounds of gunpowder, which, when theykindled their fire, would consequently take fire, and blow up all thatwas near it; but, as in the first place I should be very loath to wasteso much powder upon them, my store being now within the quantity of abarrel, so neither could I be sure of its going off at any certain time,when it might surprise them; and, at best, that it would do little morethan just blow the fire about their ears, and fright them, but notsufficient to make them forsake the place; so I laid it aside, and thenproposed, that I would place myself in ambush in some convenient place,with my three guns all double-loaded, and in the middle of their bloodyceremony let fly at them, when I should be sure to kill or wound perhapstwo or three at every shoot; and then falling in upon them with my threepistols, and my sword, I made no doubt but that, if there were twenty, Ishould kill them all: this fancy pleased my thoughts for some weeks, andI was so full of it that I often dreamed of it; and sometimes, that Iwas just going to let fly at them in my sleep.
I went so far with it in my indignation, that I employed myself severaldays to find out proper places to put myself in ambuscade, as I said, towatch for them; and I went frequently to the place itself, which was nowgrown more familiar to me; and especially while my mind was thus filledwith thoughts of revenge, and of a bloody putting twenty or thirty ofthem to the sword, as I may call it; but the horror I had at the place,and at the signals of the barbarous wretches devouring one another,abated my malice.
Well, at length I found a place in the side of the hill, where I wassatisfied I might securely wait till I saw any of the boats coming, andmight then, even before they would be ready to come on shore, conveymyself unseen into thickets of trees, in one of which there was anhollow large enough to conceal me entirely; and where I might sit, andobserve 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 impossiblethat I should miss my shoot, or that I could fail wounding three or fourof them at the first shoot.
In this place then I resolved to fix my design; and accordingly Iprepared two muskets and my ordinary fowling-piece. The two muskets Iloaded with a brace of slugs each, and four or five smaller bullets,about the size of pistol-bullets, and the fowling-piece I loaded withnear an handful of swan-shot, of the largest size; I also loaded mypistols with about four bullets each: and in this posture, well providedwith ammunition for a second and third charge, I prepared myself for myexpedition.
After I had thus laid the scheme for my design, and in my imaginationput 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 kept mywatch; but came always back without any discovery, there having not inall that time been the least appearance, not only on or near the shore,but not on the whole ocean, so far as my eyes or glasses could reachevery way.
As long as I kept up my daily tour to the hill to look out, so long alsoI kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all thewhile in a suitable frame 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 further 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; andconsequently were left, and perhaps had been for some ages, to act suchhorrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but nature,entirely abandoned of Heaven, and actuated by some hellish degeneracy,could have run them into; but now, when, as I have said, I began to beweary 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 toalter, and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to consider what itwas I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to pretend tobe judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven hadthought fit for so many ages to suffer, unpunished, to go on, and to be,as it were, the executioners of his judgments upon one another; also,how far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had toengage in the quarrel of that blood, which they shed promiscuously oneupon another. I debated this very often with myself thus: How do I knowwhat God himself judges in this particular case? It is certain thesepeople do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their ownconsciences reproving, or their light reproaching them. They do not knowit 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 crimeto kill a captive taken in war, than we do to kill an ox; nor to eathuman flesh, than we do to eat mutton.
When I had 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 albeit the usage they gaveone another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing tome: these people had done me no injury: that if they attempted me, or Isaw 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 had really no knowledge of me, and consequently no design uponme; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them: thatthis would justify the conduct of the Spaniards, in all theirbarbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of thesepeople, who, however they were idolaters and barbarians, and had severalbloody and barbarous rites in these customs, such as sacrificing humanbodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocentpeople; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of withthe utmost abhorrence and detestation, even by the Spaniards themselves,at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a merebutchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable eitherto God or man; and such, as for which the very name of a Spaniard isreckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity, or ofChristian compassion: as if the kingdom of Spain were particularlyeminent for the product of a race of men, who were without principles oftenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which isreckoned to be a mark of a generous temper 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 of my design, and toconclude I had taken a wrong measure in my resolutions to attack thesavages; that it was not my business to meddle with them, unless theyfirst attacked me, and this it was my business, if possible, to prevent;but t
hat, if I were discovered and attacked, then I knew my duty.
On the other hand, I argued with myself that this really was the way notto deliver myself, but entirely to ruin and destroy myself; for unless Iwas sure to kill every one that not only should be on shore at thattime, but that should ever come on shore afterwards, if but one of themescaped to tell their country-people what had happened, they would comeover again by thousands to revenge the death of their fellows; and Ishould only bring upon myself a certain destruction, which at present Ihad no manner of occasion for.
Upon the whole, I concluded, that neither in principles nor in policy, Iought one way or other to concern myself in this affair: that mybusiness was, by all possible means to conceal myself from them, and notto leave the least signal to them to guess by, that there were anyliving creatures upon the island, I mean of human shape.
Religion joined in with this prudential, and I was convinced now manyways that I was perfectly out of my
