things were doing, you may be sure my thoughts ran
many times upon the prospect of land which I had seen from the other
side of the island; and I was not without some secret wishes that I was
on shore there; fancying, that seeing the main land, and an inhabited
country, I might find some way or other to convey myself farther, and
perhaps at last find some means of escape.

But all this while I made no allowance for the dangers of such a
condition, and that I might fall into the hands of savages, and perhaps
such as I might have reason to think far worse than the lions and tigers
of Africa; that if I once came in their power, I should run a hazard of
more than a thousand to one of being killed, and perhaps of being eaten;
for I had heard that the people of the Caribbean coast were cannibals,
or man-eaters; and I knew, by the latitude, that I could not be far off
from that shore. Then supposing they were not cannibals, yet that they
might kill me, as they had many Europeans who had fallen into their
hands, even when they have been ten or twenty together; much more I, who
was but one, and could makee little or no defence; all these things, I
say, which I ought to have considered well of, and did cast up in my
thoughts afterwards, took up none of my apprehensions at first; yet my
head ran mightily upon the thought of getting over to the shore.

Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the long-boat with the
shoulder-of-mutton sail, with which I sailed above a thousand miles on
the coast of Africa; but this was in vain: then I thought I would go and
look at our ship's boat, which, as I have said, was blown up upon the
shore a great way, in the storm, when we were first cast away. She lay
nearly where she did at first, but not quite; having turned, by the
force of the waves and the winds, almost bottom upward, against a high
ridge of beachy rough sand; but no water about her, as before. If I had
had hands to have refitted her, and to have launched her into the water,
the boat would have done very well, and I might have gone back into the
Brazils with her easily enough; but I might have foreseen, that I could
no more turn her and set her upright upon her bottom, than I could
remove the island; however, I went to the woods, and cut levers and
rollers, and brought them to the boat, resolving to try what I could do;
suggesting to myself, that if I could but turn her down, and repair the
damage she had received, she would be a very good