t; and getting up there, the
weather by this time being perfectly clear, I could plainly see, to my
great sorrow, the wreck of a ship, cast away in the night upon those
concealed rocks which I found when I was out in my boat; and which
rocks, as they checked the violence of the stream, and made a kind of
counter-stream, or eddy, were the occasion of my recovering from the
most desperate, hopeless condition that ever I had been in, all my life.
Thus, what is one man's safety is another man's destruction; for it
seems these men, whoever they were, being out of their knowledge, and
the rocks being wholly under water, had been driven upon them in the
night, the wind blowing hard at E.N.E. Had they seen the island, as I
must necessarily suppose they did not, they must, as I thought, have
endeavoured to have saved themselves on shore by the help of their boat;
but their firing off guns for help, especially when they saw, as I
imagined, my fire, filled me with many thoughts: first, I imagined that
upon seeing my light, they might have put themselves into their boat,
and endeavoured to make the shore; but that the sea going very high,
they might have been cast away: other times I imagined that they might
have lost their boat before, as might be the case many ways; as,
particularly, by the breaking of the sea upon their ship, which many
times obliges men to stave, or take in pieces, their boat, and sometimes
to throw it overboard with their own hands: other times I imagined they
had some other ship or ships in company, who, upon the signals of
distress they had made, had taken them up and carried them off: other
times I fancied they were all gone off to sea in their boat, and being
hurried away by the current that I had been formerly in, were carried
out into the great ocean, where there was nothing but misery and
perishing; and that, perhaps, they might by this time think of starving,
and of being in a condition to eat one another.

As all these were but conjectures at best, so, in the condition I was
in, I could do no more than look on upon the misery of the poor men, and
pity them; which had still this good effect on my side, that it gave me
more and more cause to give thanks to God, who had so happily and
comfortably provided for me in my desolate condition; and that of two
ships' companies who were now cast away upon this part of the world, not
one life should be spared but mine. I learned here again to observe,
that it is