possible, the letters being of the smallest size. Six, and
even five, letters were often a day's work for me, so painstaking was I.

And, lest it should prove my hard fortune never to meet with the long-
wished opportunity to return to my friends and to my family at Elkton, I
engraved, or nitched, on the broad end of the oar, the legend of my ill
fate which I have already quoted near the beginning of this narrative.

This oar, which had proved so serviceable to me in my destitute
situation, and which now contained a record of my own fate and that of my
shipmates, I spared no pains to preserve. No longer did I risk it in
knocking seals on the head. Instead, I equipped myself with a stone
club, some three feet in length and of suitable diameter, which occupied
an even month in the fashioning. Also, to secure the oar from the
weather (for I used it in mild breezes as a flagstaff on top of my
pyramid from which to fly a flag I made me from one of my precious
shirts) I contrived for it a covering of well-cured sealskins.

In the month of March of the sixth year of my confinement I experienced
one of the most tremendous storms that was perhaps ever witnessed by man.
It commenced at about nine in the evening, with the approach of black
clouds and a freshening wind from the south-west, which, by eleven, had
become a hurricane, attended with incessant peals of thunder and the
sharpest lightning I had ever witnessed.

I was not without apprehension for the safety of the island. Over every
part the seas made a clean breach, except of the summit of my pyramid.
There the life was nigh beaten and suffocated out of my body by the drive
of the wind and spray. I could not but be sensible that my existence was
spared solely because of my diligence in erecting the pyramid and so
doubling the stature of the island.

Yet, in the morning, I had great reason for thankfulness. All my saved
rainwater was turned brackish, save that in my largest vessel which was
sheltered in the lee of the pyramid. By careful economy I knew I had
drink sufficient until the next rain, no matter how delayed, should fall.
My hut was quite washed out by the seas, and of my great store of seal
meat only a wretched, pulpy modicum remained. Nevertheless I was
agreeably surprised to find the rocks plentifully distributed with a sort
of fish more nearly like the mullet than any I had ever observed. Of
these I picked up no less than twelve hundred and ninete