creatures of the sea were
unacquainted with man. They betrayed no signals of timidity at my
approach, and I found it a boy's task to rap them on the head with the
oar.

And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and
strangely mad. Indeed quite bereft was I of all judgment as I slew and
slew and continued to slay. For the space of two hours I toiled
unceasingly with the oar till I was ready to drop. What excess of
slaughter I might have been guilty of I know not, for at the end of that
time, as if by a signal, all the seals that still lived threw themselves
into the water and swiftly disappeared.

I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was
shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had
possessed me. I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly
refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as I
could to make amends. But first, ere the great task began, I returned
thanks to that Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously
preserved. Thereupon I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning the
seals, cutting the meat into strips, and placing it upon the tops of
rocks to dry in the sun. Also, I found small deposits of salt in the
nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather side of the island. This
I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.

Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in
that no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted. The
unremitting labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means
of this wholesome diet in which I did not stint myself. Another evidence
of God's mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that barren islet,
was there so long a spell of clear weather and steady sunshine as in the
period immediately following the slaughter of the seals.

Months were to pass ore ever the seals revisited my island. But in the
meantime I was anything but idle. I built me a hut of stone, and,
adjoining it, a storehouse for my cured meat. The hut I roofed with many
sealskins, so that it was fairly water-proof. But I could never cease to
marvel, when the rain beat on that roof, that no less than a king's
ransom in the London fur market protected a castaway sailor from the
elements.

I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning
of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all
knowledge of the