,
ungoverned villains, and were fit for any manner of mischief.

While I was saying this, the man came whom he had sent back, and with him
eleven more. In the dress they were in it was impossible to guess what
nation they were of; but he made all clear, both to them and to me.
First, he turned to me, and pointing to them, said, "These, sir, are some
of the gentlemen who owe their lives to you;" and then turning to them,
and pointing to me, he let them know who I was; upon which they all came
up, one by one, not as if they had been sailors, and ordinary fellows,
and the like, but really as if they had been ambassadors or noblemen, and
I a monarch or great conqueror: their behaviour was, to the last degree,
obliging and courteous, and yet mixed with a manly, majestic gravity,
which very well became them; and, in short, they had so much more manners
than I, that I scarce knew how to receive their civilities, much less how
to return them in kind.

The history of their coming to, and conduct in, the island after my going
away is so very remarkable, and has so many incidents which the former
part of my relation will help to understand, and which will in most of
the particulars, refer to the account I have already given, that I cannot
but commit them, with great delight, to the reading of those that come
after me.

In order to do this as intelligibly as I can, I must go back to the
circumstances in which I left the island, and the persons on it, of whom
I am to speak. And first, it is necessary to repeat that I had sent away
Friday's father and the Spaniard (the two whose lives I had rescued from
the savages) in a large canoe to the main, as I then thought it, to fetch
over the Spaniard's companions that he left behind him, in order to save
them from the like calamity that he had been in, and in order to succour
them for the present; and that, if possible, we might together find some
way for our deliverance afterwards. When I sent them away I had no
visible appearance of, or the least room to hope for, my own deliverance,
any more than I had twenty years before--much less had I any
foreknowledge of what afterwards happened, I mean, of an English ship
coming on shore there to fetch me off; and it could not be but a very
great surprise to them, when they came back, not only to find that I was
gone, but to find three strangers left on the spot, possessed of all that
I had left behind me, which would otherwise have been their