was more, as I had saved three pistols out of the ship, I always carried them out with me, or at least two of
them, sticking them in my goat.skin belt. I also furbished up one of the great cutlasses that I had out of the
ship, and made me a belt to hang it on also; so that I was now a most formidable fellow to look at when I
went abroad, if you add to the former description of myself the particular of two pistols, and a broadsword
hanging at my side in a belt, but without a scabbard.
Things going on thus, as I have said, for some time, I seemed, excepting these cautions, to be reduced to my
former calm, sedate way of living. All these things tended to show me more and more how far my condition
was from being miserable, compared to some others; nay, to many other particulars of life which it might
have pleased God to have made my lot. It put me upon reflecting how little repining there would be among
mankind at any condition of life if people would rather compare their condition with those that were worse, in
order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings
and complainings.
CHAPTER XII . A CAVE RETREAT
Robinson Crusoe
As in my present condition there were not really many things which I wanted, so indeed I thought that the
frights I had been in about these savage wretches, and the concern I had been in for my own preservation, had
taken off the edge of my invention, for my own conveniences; and I had dropped a good design, which I had
once bent my thoughts upon, and that was to try if I could not make some of my barley into malt, and then try
to brew myself some beer. This was really a whimsical thought, and I reproved myself often for the
simplicity of it: for I presently saw there would be the want of several things necessary to the making my beer
that it would be impossible for me to supply; as, first, casks to preserve it in, which was a thing that, as I have
observed already, I could never compass: no, though I spent not only many days, but weeks, nay months, in
attempting it, but to no purpose. In the next place, I had no hops to make it keep, no yeast to made it work, no
copper or kettle to make it boil; and yet with all these things wanting, I verily believe, had not the frights and
terrors I was in about the savages intervened, I had undertaken it, and perhaps brought it to pass too; for I
seldom gave anything over without accomplishing it, when once I had it in my head to began it. But my
invention now ran quite another way; for night and day I could think of nothing but how I might destroy
some of the monsters in their cruel, bloody entertainment, and if possible save the victim they should bring
hither to destroy. It would take up a larger volume than this whole work is intended to be to set down all the
contrivances I hatched, or rather brooded upon, in my thoughts, for the destroying these creatures, or at least
frightening them so as to prevent their coming hither any more: but all this was abortive; nothing could be
possible to take effect, unless I was to be there to do it myself: and what could one man do among them,
when perhaps there might be twenty or thirty of them together with their darts, or their bows and arrows, with
which they could shoot as true to a mark as I could with my gun?
Sometimes I thought if digging a hole under the place where they made their fire, and putting in five or six
pounds of gunpowder, which, when they kindled their fire, would consequently take fire, and blow up all that
was near it: but as, in the first place, I should be unwilling to waste so much powder upon them, my store
being now within the quantity of one barrel, so neither could I be sure of its going off at any certain time,
when it might surprise them; and, at best, that it would do little more than just blow the fire about their ears
and fright them, but not sufficient to make them forsake the place: so I laid it aside; and then proposed that I
would place myself in ambush in some convenient place, with my three guns all double.loaded, and in the
middle of their bloody ceremony let fly at them, when I should be sure to kill or wound perhaps two or three
at every shot; and then falling in upon them with my three pistols and my sword, I made no doubt but that, if
there were twenty, I should kill them all. This fancy pleased my thoughts for some weeks, and I was so full of
it that I often dreamed of it, and, sometimes, that I was just going to let fly at them in my sleep. I went so far
with it in my imagination that I employed myself several days to find out proper places to put myself in
ambuscade, as I said, to watch for them, and I went frequently to the place itself, which was now grown more
familiar to me; but while my mind was thus filled with thoughts of revenge and a bloody putting twenty or
thirty of them to the sword, as I may call it, the horror I had at the place, and at the signals of the barbarous
wretches devouring one another, abetted my malice. Well, at length I found a place in the side of the hill
where I was satisfied I might securely wait till I saw any of their boats coming; and might then, even before
they would be ready to come on shore, convey myself unseen into some thickets of trees, in one of which
there was a hollow large enough to conceal me entirely; and there I might sit and observe all their 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 fulfil 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 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;
CHAPTER XII . A CAVE RETREAT
Robinson Crusoe
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 eye or glass 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 frame for so outrageous an execution as the killing twenty or
thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at all entered into any 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 cooler and
calmer thoughts, to consider what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to pretend to be judge
and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer
unpunished to go on, and to be as it were the executioners of His judgments one upon another; how far these
people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed
promiscuously upon one another. I debated this very often with myself thus: "How do I know what God
Himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against
their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offence, and
then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more
a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat
mutton."
When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong; that these people
were not murderers, in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than those
Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon
many occasions, put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their
arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me that although the usage they gave one another was
thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me: these people had done me no injury: that if they
attempted, or I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said
for it: but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and consequently no
design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them; that this would justify the
conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these
people; who, however they were idolators and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their
customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people;
and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even
the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a
bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of a
Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if
the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles
of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous
temper in the mind.
These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a full stop; and I began by little and little to be
off my design, and to conclude I had taken wrong measures in my resolution to attack the savages; and that it
was not my business to meddle with them, unless they first attacked me; and this it was my business, if
possible, to prevent: but that, if I were discovered and attacked by them, I knew my duty. On the other hand, I
argued with myself that this really was the way not to deliver myself, but entirely to ruin and destroy myself;
for unless I was sure to kill every one that not only should be on shore at that time, but that should ever come
CHAPTER XII . A CAVE RETREAT
Robinson Crusoe
on shore afterwards, if but one of them escaped to tell their country.people what had happened, they would
come over again by thousands to revenge the death of their fellows, and I should only bring upon myself a
certain destruction, which, at present, I had no manner of occasion for. Upon the whole, I concluded that I
ought, neither in principle nor in policy, one way or other, to concern myself in this affair: that my business
was, by all possible means to conceal myself from them, and not to leave the least sign for them to guess by
that there were any living creatures upon the island . I mean of human shape. Religion joined in with this
prudential resolution; and I was convinced now, many ways, that I was perfectly out of my duty when I was
laying all my bloody schemes for the destruction of innocent creatures . I mean innocent as to me. As to the
crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were national, and I
ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is the Governor of nations, and knows how, by national
punishments, to make a just retribution for national offences, and to bring public judgments upon those who
offend in a public manner, by such ways as best please Him. This appeared so clear to me now, that nothing
was a greater satisfaction to me than that I had not been suffered to do a thing which I now saw so much
reason to believe would have been no less a sin than that of wilful murder if I had committed it; and I gave
most humble thanks on my knees to God, that He had thus delivered me from blood.guiltiness; beseeching
Him to grant me the protection of His providence, that I might not fall into the hands of the barbarians, or that
I might not lay my hands upon them, unless I had a more clear call from Heaven to do it, in defence of my
own life.
In this disposition I continued for near a year after this; and so far was I from desiring an occasion for falling
upon these wretches, that in all that time I never once went up the hill to see whether there were any of them
in sight, or to know whether any of them had been on shore there or not, that I might not be tempted to renew
any of my contrivances against them, or be provoked by any advantage that might present itself to fall upon
them; only this I did: I went and removed my boat, which I had on the other side of the island, and carried it
down to the east end of the whole island, where I ran it into a little cove, which I found under some high
rocks, and where I knew, by reason of the currents, the savages durst not, at least would not, come with their
boats upon any account whatever. With my boat I carried away everything that I had left there belonging to
her, though not necessary for the bare going thither . viz. a mast and sail which I had made for her, and a
