190 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES

 

not move, so I presently concluded that it was a ship at anchor; and
being eager, you ‘may be sure, to be satisfied, I took my gun in my
hand, and ran towards the south-east side of the island, to the rocks,
where I had been formerly carried away with the current; and getting
up there, the weather by this time being perfectly clear, I could plainly
see, to my great sorrow, the wreck of a ship cast away in the night
upon those concealed rocks which I found when I was out in my boat;
and which rocks, as they checked the violence of the stream, and made
a kind of counter stream, or eddy, were the occasion of my recovering
then from the most desperate hopeless condition that ever I had been
in all my life.

Thus, what is one man’s safety is another man’s destruction ; for it
seems these men, whoever they were, being out of their knowledge, and
the rocks being wholly under water, had been driven upon them in the
night, the wind blowing hard at east and east-north-east. Had they
seen the island, as I must necessarily suppose they did not, they must,

I thought, have endeavoured to have saved themselves on shore by

e help of their boat: but the firing of their guns for help, especially
when they saw, as I imagined, my fire, filled me with many thoughts:
first, I imagined that, upon seeing my light, they might have put them-
selves into their boat, and have endeavoured to make the shore, but
that the sea going very high, they might have been cast away: other
times I imagined, that they might have lost their boat before, as might
be the case many ways; as particularly, by the breaking of the sea
upon their ship, which many times obliges men to stave or take in
pieces their boat, and sometimes to throw it overboard with their own
hand: other times I imagined they had some other ship or ships in
company, who, upon the signals of distress they had made, had taken
them up and ,carried them off: other whiles I fancied they were all gone
off to sea in their boat, and, being hurried away by the current that I
had been formerly in, were carried out into the great ocean, where there
was nothing but misery and perishing; and that perhaps they might,
by this time, be starving, and in a condition to eat one another.

All these were but conjectures at best; so, in the condition I was in,
Icould do no more than look upon the misery of the poor men, and pity
them; which had still this good effect on my side, that it gave me more
and more cause to give thanks to God, who had so happily and comfors-
ably provided for me in my desolate condition, and that, of two ships’
companies, who were now cast away upon this part of the world, not
one lifeshould be spared but mine. I learned here again to observe,
that it is.yery rare that the providence of God casts us into any con
dition of life so low, or any misery so great, but we may see something