NS ae Mere See eng ee este Be tng, Ooms

OF ROBINSOR CRUSOE. 143°

 

it should be; nay, with what it would certainly have been, if the good
providence of God had not wonderfully ordered the ship to be cast up
near to the shore, where I not only could come at her, but could bring
what I got out of her to the shore for my relief and comfort; without
which I had wanted tools to work, weapons for defence, or gunpowder .
and shot for getting my food.

I spent whole hours, I may say whole days, in representing to myself,
in the most lively colours, how I must have acted, if I had got nothing
out of the ship; how I could not have so much as got any food, except
fish and turtles; and that, as it was long before I found any of them, 1
must have perished first—that I should have lived, if I had not perished,
like a mere savage—that if I had killed a goat or a fowl by any con-
trivance, I had no way to flay or open them, or part the flesh from the
skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth,
and pull it with my claws, like a beast.

These reflections made me very sensible of the goodness of Provi-
dence to me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all its
hardships and misfortunes; and this part also I cannot but recommend
to the reflection of those who are apt, in their misery, to say, ‘Is any
affliction like mine?’ Let them consider how much worse the cases
of some people are, and what their case might have been, if Providence
had thought fit.

T had another reflection, which assisted me also to comfort my mind
with hopes; and this was, comparing my present condition with what
I had deserved, and had therefore reason to expect, from the hand of
Providence. I had lived a dreadful life, perfectly destitute of the
knowledge and fear of God: I had been well instructed by father and
mother: neither had they been wanting to me in their early endeavours
to infuse a religious awe of God into my mind, a sense of my duty, and-
of what the nature and end of my being required of me. But, alas!
falling early into the seafaring life, which, of all lives, is the most
dekiitute of the fear of God, though his terrors are always before them,
—I say, falling early into the seafaring life, and into seafaring com-
pany, all that little sense of religion which I had entertained was
laughed out of me by my messmates—by a hardened despising of dan-
gers, and the views of death, which grew habitual to me—by my long
absence from all manner of opportunities to converse with any thing
but what was like myself, or to hear any thing of what was good, or
tended towards it.

So void was I of every thing that was good, or of the least sense ‘of
what I was, or was to be, that in the greatest deliverance I enjoyed,
auch as my escape from Sallee, my being taken up by the Portugu Q: