172 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES

 

murdered and devoured before the morning; and I must testify from
my experience, that a temper of peace, thankfulness, love, and affec-
tion, is much more the proper frame for prayer, than that of terror
and discomposure; and that under the dread of mischief impending,
a man is no more fit for a comforting performance of the duty of pray-
ing to God, than he is for repentance on a sick-bed; for these discom-
posures affect the mind as the others do the body; and the discom-
posure of the mind must necessarily be as great a disability as that of
the body, and much greater; praying to God being properly an act of
the mind, not of the body.

But to go on: After I had thus secured one part of my little living
stock, I went about the whole island searching for another private:
place to make such another deposit; when wandering more to the west
point of the island than I had ever dcne yet, and looking out to sea,
I thought I saw a boat upon the sea at a great distance. I had found
a perspective glass or two in one of the seamen’s chests which I saved
out of our ship; but I had it not about me, and this was so remote,
that I could not tell what to make of it, though I looked at it till my
eyes were not able to look any longer: whether it was a boat or not, I
did not know: but as I descended from the hill, I could see no more
of it, so I gave it over; only I resolved to go no more without a per-
spective glass in my pocket.

When I was come down the hill to the end of the island, where in-
deed I had never been before, I was presently convinced that the see-
ing the print of a man’s foot was not such a strange thing in the island
as I imagined; and, but that it was a special providence that I was
cast upon the side of the island where the savages never came, I should
easily have known, that nothing was more frequent than for the canoes
from the main, when they happened to be a little too far out at sea, to
shoot over to that side of the island for harbour; likewise, as they
often met, and fought in their canoes, the victors, having taken any
prisoners would bring them over to this shore, where, according to
their dreadful customs, being all cannibals, they would kill and eat
them: of which hereafter.

When I was come down the hill to the shore, as I said above, being
the south-west point of the island, I was perfectly confounded and
amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind,
at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of
human bodies; and, particularly, I observed a. place where there had
been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cock-pit, where
it is supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their inhuman feast-
ings updp the bodies of their fellow creatures.

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