; no
venomous or poisonous creatures which I might feed on to my hurt; no
savages to murder and devour me. In a word, as my life was a life of
sorrow one way, so it was a life of mercy another; and I wanted nothing
to make it a life of comfort, but to make myself sensible of God's
goodness to me, and care over me in this condition; and after I did make
a just improvement of these things, I went away, and was no more sad.

I had now been here so long, that many things which I brought on shore
for my help were either quite gone, or very much wasted, and near spent.

My ink, as I observed, had been gone for some time, all but a very
little, which I eked out with water, a little and a little, till it was
so pale, it scarce left any appearance of black upon the paper. As long
as it lasted, I made use of it to minute down the days of the month on
which any remarkable thing happened to me: and, first, by casting up
times past, I remember that there was a strange concurrence of days in
the various providences which befel me, and which, if I had been
superstitiously inclined to observe days as fatal or fortunate, I might
have had reason to have looked upon with a great deal of curiosity.

First, I had observed, that the same day that I broke away from my
father and my friends, and ran away to Hull, in order to go to sea, the
same day afterwards I was taken by the Sallee man of war, and made a
slave: the same day of the year that I escaped out of the wreck of the
ship in Yarmouth Roads, that same day-year afterwards I made my escape
from Sallee in the boat: and the same day of the year I was born on,
viz. the 30th of September, that same day I had my life so miraculously
saved twenty-six years after, when I was cast on shore in this island:
so that my wicked life and my solitary life began both on one day.

The next thing to my ink being wasted, was that of my bread, I mean the
biscuit which I brought out of the ship; this I had husbanded to the
last degree, allowing myself but one cake of bread a day for above a
year; and yet I was quite without bread for near a year before I got any
corn of my own; and great reason I had to be thankful that I had any at
all, the getting it being, as has been already observed, next to
miraculous.

My clothes, too, began to decay mightily: as to linen, I had none for a
great while, except some chequered shirts which I found in the chests of
the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved, b