THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE
CHAPTER I--REVISITS ISLAND
That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz.
"That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh," was
never more verified than in the story of my Life. Any one would
think that after thirty-five years' affliction, and a variety of
unhappy circumstances, which few men, if any, ever went through
before, and after near seven years of peace and enjoyment in the
fulness of all things; grown old, and when, if ever, it might be
allowed me to have had experience of every state of middle life,
and to know which was most adapted to make a man completely happy;
I say, after all this, any one would have thought that the native
propensity to rambling which I gave an account of in my first
setting out in the world to have been so predominant in my
thoughts, should be worn out, and I might, at sixty one years of
age, have been a little inclined to stay at home, and have done
venturing life and fortune any more.
Nay, farther, the common motive of foreign adventures was taken
away in me, for I had no fortune to make; I had nothing to seek:
if I had gained ten thousand pounds I had been no richer; for I had
already sufficient for me, and for those I had to leave it to; and
what I had was visibly increasing; for, having no great family, I
could not spend the income of what I had unless I would set up for
an expensive way of living, such as a great family, servants,
equipage, gaiety, and the like, which were things I had no notion
of, or inclination to; so that I had nothing, indeed, to do but to
sit still, and fully enjoy what I had got, and see it increase
daily upon my hands. Yet all these things had no effect upon me,
or at least not enough to resist the strong inclination I had to go
abroad again, which hung about me like a chronic distemper. In
particular, the desire of seeing my new plantation in the island,
and the colony I left there, ran in my head continually. I dreamed
of it all night, and my imagination ran upon it all day: it was
uppermost in all my thoughts, and my fancy worked so steadily and
strongly upon it that I talked of it in my sleep; in short, nothing
could remove it out of my mind: it even broke so violently into
all my discourses that it made my conversation tiresome, for I
could talk of nothing else; all my discourse ran into it, even to
impertinence; and I saw it myself.
I have often heard persons of good judgment say that all the stir
that people make in the world about ghosts and apparitions is owing
to the strength of imagination, and the powerful operation of fancy
in their minds; that there is no such thing as a spirit appearing,
or a ghost walking; that people's poring affectionately upon the
past conversation of their deceased friends so realises it to them
that they are capable of fancying, upon some extraordinary
circumstances, that they see them, talk to them, and are answered
by them, when, in truth, there is nothing but shadow and vapour in
the thing, and they really know nothing of the matter.
For my part, I know not to this hour whether there are any such
things as real apparitions, spectres, or walking of people after
they are dead; or whether there is anything in the stories they
tell us of that kind more than the product of vapours, sick minds,
and wandering fancies: but this I know, that my imagination worked
up to such a height, and brought me into such excess of vapours, or
what else I may call it, that I actually supposed myself often upon
the spot, at my old castle, behind the trees; saw my old Spaniard,
Friday's father, and the reprobate sailors I left upon the island;
nay, I fancied I talked with them, and looked at them steadily,
though I was broad awake, as at persons just before me; and this I
did till I often frightened myself with the images my fancy
represented to me. One time, in my sleep, I had the villainy of
the three pirate sailors so lively related to me by the first
Spaniard, and Friday's father, that it was surprising: they told
me how they barbarously attempted to murder all the Spaniards, and
that they set fire to the provisions they had laid up, on purpose
to distress and starve them; things that I had never heard of, and
that, indeed, were never all of them true in fact: but it was so
warm in my imagination, and so realised to me, that, to the hour I
saw them, I could not be persuaded but that it was or would be
true; also how I resented it, when the Spaniard complained to me;
and how I brought them to justice, tried them, and ordered them all
three to be hanged. What there was really in this shall be seen in
its place; for however I came to form such things in my dream, and
what secret converse of spirits injected it, yet there was, I say,
much of it true. I own that this dream had nothing in it literally
and specifically true; but the general part was so true--the base;
villainous behaviour of these three hardened rogues was such, and
had been so much worse than all I can describe, that the dream had
too much similitude of the fact; and as I would afterwards have
punished them severely, so, if I had hanged them all, I had been
much in the right, and even should have been justified both by the
laws of God and man.
But to return to my story. In this kind of temper I lived some
years; I had no enjoyment of my life, no pleasant hours, no
agreeable diversion but what had something or other of this in it;
so that my wife, who saw my mind wholly bent upon it, told me very
seriously one night that she believed there was some secret,
powerful impulse of Providence upon me, which had determined me to
go thither again; and that she found nothing hindered me going but
my being engaged to a wife and children. She told me that it was
true she could not think of parting with me: but as she was
assured that if she was dead it would be the first thing I would
do, so, as it seemed to her that the thing was determined above,
she would not be the only obstruction; for, if I thought fit and
resolved to go--[Here she found me very intent upon her words, and
that I looked very earnestly at her, so that it a little disordered
her, and she stopped. I asked her why she did not go on, and say
out what she was going to say? But I perceived that her heart was
too full, and some tears stood in her eyes.] "Speak out, my dear,"
said I; "are you willing I should go?"--"No," says she, very
affectionately, "I am far from willing; but if you are resolved to
go," says she, "rather than I would be the only hindrance, I will
go with you: for though I think it a most preposterous thing for
one o
f your years, and in your condition, yet, if it must be," said
she, again weeping, "I would not leave you; for if it be of Heaven
you must do it, there is no resisting it; and if Heaven make it
your duty to go, He will also make it mine to go with you, or
otherwise dispose of me, that I may not obstruct it."
This affectionate behaviour of my wife's brought me a little out of
the vapours, and I began to consider what I was doing; I corrected
my wandering fancy, and began to argue with myself sedately what
business I had after threescore years, and after such a life of
tedious sufferings and disasters, and closed in so happy and easy a
manner; I, say, what business had I to rush into new hazards, and
put myself upon adventures fit only for youth and poverty to run
into?
With those thoughts I considered my new engagement; that I had a
wife, one child born, and my wife then great with child of another;
that I had all the world could give me, and had no need to seek
hazard for gain; that I was declining in years, and ought to think
rather of leaving what I had gained than of seeking to increase it;
that as to what my wife had said of its being an impulse from
Heaven, and that it should be my duty to go, I had no notion of
that; so, after many of these cogitations, I struggled with the
power of my imagination, reasoned myself out of it, as I believe
people may always do in like cases if they will: in a word, I
conquered it, composed myself with such arguments as occurred to my
thoughts, and which my present condition furnished me plentifully
with; and particularly, as the most effectual method, I resolved to
divert myself with other things, and to engage in some business
that might effectually tie me up from any more excursions of this
kind; for I found that thing return upon me chiefly when I was
idle, and had nothing to do, nor anything of moment immediately
before me. To this purpose, I bought a little farm in the county
of Bedford, and resolved to remove myself thither. I had a little
convenient house upon it, and the land about it, I found, was
capable of great improvement; and it was many ways suited to my
inclination, which delighted in cultivating, managing, planting,
and improving of land; and particularly, being an inland country, I
was removed from conversing among sailors and things relating to
the remote parts of the world. I went down to my farm, settled my
family, bought ploughs, harrows, a cart, waggon-horses, cows, and
sheep, and, setting seriously to work, became in one half-year a
mere country gentleman. My thoughts were entirely taken up in
managing my servants, cultivating the ground, enclosing, planting,
&c.; and I lived, as I thought, the most agreeable life that nature
was capable of directing, or that a man always bred to misfortunes
was capable of retreating to.
I farmed upon my own land; I had no rent to pay, was limited by no
articles; I could pull up or cut down as I pleased; what I planted
was for myself, and what I improved was for my family; and having
thus left off the thoughts of wandering, I had not the least
discomfort in any part of life as to this world. Now I thought,
indeed, that I enjoyed the middle state of life which my father so
earnestly recommended to me, and lived a kind of heavenly life,
something like what is described by the poet, upon the subject of a
country life:-
"Free from vices, free from care,
Age has no pain, and youth no snare."
But in the middle of all this felicity, one blow from unseen
Providence unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me
inevitable and incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a
deep relapse of the wandering disposition, which, as I may say,
being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me; and,
like the returns of a violent distemper, came on with an
irresistible force upon me. This blow was the loss of my wife. It
is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, give a
character of her particular virtues, and make my court to the sex
by the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the
stay of all my affairs; the centre of all my enterprises; the
engine that, by her prudence, reduced me to that happy compass I
was in, from the most extravagant and ruinous project that filled
my head, and did more to guide my rambling genius than a mother's
tears, a father's instructions, a friend's counsel, or all my own
reasoning powers could do. I was happy in listening to her, and in
being moved by her entreaties; and to the last degree desolate and
dislocated in the world by the loss of her.
When she was gone, the world looked awkwardly round me. I was as
much a stranger in it, in my thoughts, as I was in the Brazils,
when I first went on shore there; and as much alone, except for the
assistance of servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what
to think nor what to do. I saw the world busy around me: one part
labouring for bread, another part squandering in vile excesses or
empty pleasures, but equally miserable because the end they
proposed still fled from them; for the men of pleasure every day
surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and
repentance; and the men of labour spent their strength in daily
struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured
with: so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to
work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end
of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily
bread.
This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom, the island;
where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it;
and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where
the money lay in the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the
favour to be looked upon in twenty years. All these things, had I
improved them as I ought to have done, and as reason and religion
had dictated to me, would have taught me to search farther than
human enjoyments for a full felicity; and that there was something
which certainly was the reason and end of life superior to all
these things, and which was either to be possessed, or at least
hoped for, on this side of the grave.
But my sage counsellor was gone; I was like a ship without a pilot,
that could only run afore the wind. My thoughts ran all away again
into the old affair; my head was quite turned with the whimsies of
foreign adventures; and all the pleasant, innocent amusements of my
farm, my garden, my cattle, and my family, which before entirely
possessed me, were nothing to me, had no relish, and were like
music to one that has no ear, or food to one that has no taste. In
a word, I resolved to leave off housekeeping, let my farm, and
return to London; and in a few months after I did so.
When I came to London, I was still as uneasy as I was before; I had
no relish for the place, no employment in
it, nothing to do but to
saunter about like an idle person, of whom it may be said he is
perfectly useless in God's creation, and it is not one farthing's
matter to the rest of his kind whether he be dead or alive. This
also was the thing which, of all circumstances of life, was the
most my aversion, who had been all my days used to an active life;
and I would often say to myself, "A state of idleness is the very
dregs of life;" and, indeed, I thought I was much more suitably
employed when I was twenty-six days making a deal board.
It was now the beginning of the year 1693, when my nephew, whom, as
I have observed before, I had brought up to the sea, and had made
him commander of a ship, was come home from a short voyage to
Bilbao, being the first he had made. He came to me, and told me
that some merchants of his acquaintance had been proposing to him
to go a voyage for them to the East Indies, and to China, as
private traders. "And now, uncle," says he, "if you will go to sea
with me, I will engage to land you upon your old habitation in the
island; for we are to touch at the Brazils."
Nothing can be a greater demonstration of a future state, and of
the existence of an invisible world, than the concurrence of second
causes with the idea of things which we form in our minds,
perfectly reserved, and not communicated to any in the world.
My nephew knew nothing how far my distemper of wandering was
returned upon me, and I knew nothing of what he had in his thought
to say, when that very morning, before he came to me, I had, in a
great deal of confusion of thought, and revolving every part of my
circumstances in my mind, come to this resolution, that I would go
to Lisbon, and consult with my old sea-captain; and if it was
rational and practicable, I would go and see the island again, and
what was become of my people there. I had pleased myself with the
thoughts of peopling the place, and carrying inhabitants from
hence, getting a patent for the possession and I know not what;
when, in the middle of all this, in comes my nephew, as I have
said, with his project of carrying me thither in his way to the
East Indies.
I paused a while at his words, and looking steadily at him, "What
devil," said I, "sent you on this unlucky errand?" My nephew
stared as if he had been frightened at first; but perceiving that I
was not much displeased at the proposal, he recovered himself. "I
hope it may not be an unlucky proposal, sir," says he. "I daresay
you would be pleased to see your new colony there, where you once
reigned with more felicity than most of your brother monarchs in
the world." In a word, the scheme hit so exactly with my temper,
that is to say, the prepossession I was under, and of which I have
said so much, that I told him, in a few words, if he agreed with
the merchants, I would go with him; but I told him I would not
promise to go any further than my own island. "Why, sir," says he,
"you don't want to be left there again, I hope?" "But," said I,
"can you not take me up again on your return?" He told me it would
not be possible to do so; that the merchants would never allow him
to come that way with a laden ship of such value, it being a
month's sail out of his way, and might be three or four. "Besides,
sir, if I should miscarry," said he, "and not return at all, then
you would be just reduced to the condition you were in before."
This was very rational; but we both found out a remedy for it,
which was to carry a framed sloop on board the ship, which, being
taken in pieces, might, by the help of some carpenters, whom we
agreed to carry with us, be set up again in the island, and
finished fit to go to sea in a few days. I was not long resolving,
for indeed the importunities of my nephew joined so effectually
with my inclination that nothing could oppose me; on the other
hand, my wife being dead, none concerned themselves so much for me
as to persuade me one way or the other, except my ancient good