A REFLECTION ON THE PAST. 186

{ 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, I 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 contrivance, 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 Pro-
vidence to me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all
its hardships and misfortunes. And this part also I cannot but re-
commend 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 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 T had deserved, and had therefore reason to expect from
the hand of Providence. I had lived a dreadful life, perfectly des-
titute of the knowledge and fear of God. I had been well in-
structed 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 sea-
faring life, which of all the lives is the most destitute of the fear
of God, though his terrors are always before them; I say, falling
early into the seafaring life, and into seafaring company, all that
little sense of religion which I had entertained was laughed out of
me by my messmates, by a hardened despising of dangers and the
views of death, which grew habitual to me, by my long absence
from all manner of opportunities to converse with anything but
what was like myself, or to hear anything that was good, or tended
towards it.

So void was I of everything that was good, or of the least sense
of what I was, or was to be, that in the greatest deliverances T en-