ess a murderer than they were in being men-eaters, and
perhaps much mere 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 those merciless
creatures; if I did at any time venture abroad, it was not without
looking round 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 back 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 hear 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 unquiet, dreamed always frightful
dreams, and often started out of my sleep in the night; in the day great
troubles overwhelmed my mind; in the night I dreamed often of killing
the savages, and the reasons why I might justify the doing of it. But to
wave all this for awhile, 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 great storm of wind all day, with a great deal of
lightning and thunder, and a very foul night was after it: I know not
what was the particular occasion of it; but as I was reading in the
Bible, and taken up with 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 of a quite different nature from any I
had met with before; for the notions this put into my thoughts were
quite of another kind: I started up in the greatest haste imaginable;
and in a trice clapped up my ladder to the middle place of the rock, and
pulled it after me, and mounting it the second time, got to the top of
the