be able to make my sense of God's
goodness to me, and care over me in this condition, be my daily
consolation; and after I did make a just improvement on these things, I
went away, and was no more sad. I had now been here so long that many
things which I had brought on shore for my help were either quite gone,
or very much wasted and near spent.

My ink, as I observed, had been gone some time, all but a very little,
which I eked out with water, a little and a little, till it was so pale,
it scarce left any appearance of black upon the paper. As long as it
lasted I made use of it to minute down the days of the month on which any
remarkable thing happened to me; and first, by casting up times past, I
remembered that there was a strange concurrence of days in the various
providences which befell me, and which, if I had been superstitiously
inclined to observe days as fatal or fortunate, I might have had reason
to have looked upon with a great deal of curiosity.

First, I had observed that the same day that I broke away from my father
and friends and ran away to Hull, in order to go to sea, the same day
afterwards I was taken by the Sallee man-of-war, and made a slave; the
same day of the year that I escaped out of the wreck of that ship in
Yarmouth Roads, that same day-year afterwards I made my escape from
Sallee in a boat; the same day of the year I was born on--viz. the 30th
of September, that same day I had my life so miraculously saved
twenty-six years after, when I was cast on shore in this island; so that
my wicked life and my solitary life began both on a day.

The next thing to my ink being wasted was that of my bread--I mean the
biscuit which I brought out of the ship; this I had husbanded to the last
degree, allowing myself but one cake of bread a-day for above a year; and
yet I was quite without bread for near a year before I got any corn of my
own, and great reason I had to be thankful that I had any at all, the
getting it being, as has been already observed, next to miraculous.

My clothes, too, began to decay; as to linen, I had had none a good
while, except some chequered shirts which I found in the chests of the
other seamen, and which I carefully preserved; because many times I could
bear no other clothes on but a shirt; and it was a very great help to me
that I had, among all the men's clothes of the ship, almost three dozen
of shirts. There were also, indeed, several thick watch-coats of the
seamen