THE SCENE OF AN ORGIE. 219

out to sea, I thought I saw a boat upon the sea at a great distance.
T had found a prospective-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 hold to look any longer.
Whether it was a boat or not I do not know; but as I descended
from the hill I could see no more of it; so I gave it over—only I re-
solved to go no more out without a prospective-glass in my pocket.

When I was come down the hill to the end of the island —
where, indeed, I had neve: been before—I was presently convinced
that the seeing 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 the 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 cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches had sat
down to their inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-
creatures.

I was so astonished with the sight of these things that I enter-
tained no notion of any danger to myself from it for a long while.
All my apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch
of inhuman, hellish brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of
human nature; which though I had heard of often, yet I never
had so near a view of before. In short, I turned away my face
from the horrid spectacle: my stomach grew sick, and I was just
on the point of fainting, when nature discharged the disorder from