CRUSOE’S CONJECTURES. 241

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 from the most
desperate hopeless condition that ever I had been in 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, as I thought, have endeavoured
to have saved themselves on shore by the help of their boat. But
their firing of 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 hands. 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 think of starving, and of being in a condition to eat one
another.

As all these were but conjectures at best, so in the condition I
was in I could do no more than look on 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 comfortably provided for me in my desolate