ir bloody doings, and take my full
aim at their heads, when they were so close together as that it would be
next to impossible that I should miss my shot, or that I could fail
wounding three or four of them at the first shot. In this place, then, I
resolved to fix my design; and, accordingly, I prepared two muskets and
my ordinary fowling-piece. The two muskets I loaded with a brace of
slugs each, and four or five smaller bullets, about the size of
pistol-bullets; and the fowling-piece I loaded with near a handful of
swan-shot, of the largest size: I also loaded my pistols with about four
bullets each; and in this posture, well provided with ammunition for a
second and third charge, I prepared myself for my expedition.

After I had thus laid the scheme of my design, and, in my imagination,
put it in practice, I continually made my tour every morning up to the
top of the hill, which was from my castle, as I called it, about three
miles, or more, to see if I could observe any boats upon the sea, coming
near the island, or standing over towards it: but I began to tire of
this hard duty, after I had, for two or three months, constantly kept
my watch, but came always back without any discovery; there having not,
in all that time, been the least appearance, not only on or near the
shore, but on the whole ocean, so far as my eyes or glasses could reach
every way.

As long as I kept my daily tour to the hill to look out, so long also I
kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all the
while in a suitable form for so outrageous an execution as the killing
twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at all
entered into a discussion of in my thoughts, any farther than my
passions were at first fired by the horror I conceived at the unnatural
custom of the people of that country; who, it seems, had been suffered
by Providence, in his wise disposition of the world, to have no other
guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and,
consequently, were left, and perhaps had been so for some ages, to act
such horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but
nature, entirely abandoned by Heaven, and actuated by some hellish
degeneracy, could have run them into. But now, when, as I have said, I
began to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long
and so far every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself
began to alter; and I began, with co