Sometimes I thought if digging a hole under the place where they made
their fire, and putting in five or six pounds of gunpowder, which, when
they kindled their fire, would consequently take fire, and blow up all
that was near it: but as, in the first place, I should be unwilling to
waste so much powder upon them, my store being now within the quantity of
one barrel, 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
more than just blow the fire about their ears and fright them, but not
sufficient to make them forsake the place: so I laid it aside; and then
proposed that I would place myself in ambush in some convenient place,
with my three guns all double-loaded, and in the middle of their bloody
ceremony let fly at them, when I should be sure to kill or wound perhaps
two or three at every shot; and then falling in upon them with my three
pistols and my sword, I made no doubt but that, if there were twenty, I
should kill them all. This fancy pleased my thoughts for some weeks, and
I was so full of it that I often dreamed of it, and, sometimes, that I
was just going to let fly at them in my sleep. I went so far with it in
my imagination that I employed myself several days to find out proper
places to put myself in ambuscade, as I said, 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 thus filled with thoughts of revenge and a
bloody putting twenty or thirty of 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 the hill where I was satisfied I might
securely wait till I saw any of their boats coming; and might then, even
before they would be ready to come on shore, convey myself unseen into
some thickets of trees, in one of which there was a hollow large enough
to conceal me entirely; and there I might sit and observe 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 impossible that I should miss
my shot, or that I could fail wounding three or four of them at the first
shot. In this place, then, I resolved to fulfil my design; and
accordingly I prepared two muskets and my ordinary fowling-piece. The
two muskets I loaded with a brace of slugs