er at all that if I killed one
party--suppose ten or a dozen--I was still the next day, or week, or
month, to kill another, and so another, even _ad infinitum_, till I
should be, at length, no less a murderer than they were in being
man-eaters--and perhaps much more so. I spent my days now in great
perplexity and anxiety of mind, expecting that I should one day or other
fall, into the hands of these merciless creatures; and if I did at any
time venture abroad, it was not without looking around me with the
greatest care and caution imaginable. And now I found, to my great
comfort, how happy it was that I had provided a tame flock or herd of
goats, for I durst not upon any account fire my gun, especially near that
side of the island where they usually came, lest I should alarm the
savages; and if they had fled from me now, I was sure to have them come
again with perhaps two or three hundred canoes with them in a few days,
and then I knew what to expect. However, I wore out a year and three
months more before I ever saw any more of the savages, and then I found
them again, as I shall soon observe. It is true they might have been
there once or twice; but either they made no stay, or at least I did not
see them; but in the month of May, as near as I could calculate, and in
my four-and-twentieth year, I had a very strange encounter with them; of
which in its place.

The perturbation of my mind during this fifteen or sixteen months'
interval was very great; I slept unquietly, dreamed always frightful
dreams, and often started out of my sleep in the night. In the day great
troubles overwhelmed my mind; and in the night I dreamed often of killing
the savages and of the reasons why I might justify doing it.

But to waive all this for a while. It was in the middle of May, on the
sixteenth day, I think, as well as my poor wooden calendar would reckon,
for I marked all upon the post still; I say, it was on the sixteenth of
May that it blew a very great storm of wind all day, with a great deal of
lightning and thunder, and; a very foul night it was after it. I knew
not what was the particular occasion of it, but as I was reading in the
Bible, and taken up with very serious thoughts about my present
condition, I was surprised with the noise of a gun, as I thought, fired
at sea. This was, to be sure, a surprise quite of a different nature
from any I had met with before; for the notions this put into my thoughts
were quite of a