I knew it when: I saw it—meat lay there for the taking, meat sufficient for a score of ships’ companies.
I directly seized my oar—than which there was no other stick of wood on the island—and cautiously advanced upon all that immensity of provender.
It was quickly guessed by me that these creatures of the sea were unacquainted with man.
They betrayed no signals of timidity at my approach, and I found it a boy’s task to rap them on the head with the oar.
And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and strangely mad.
Indeed quite bereft was I of all judgment as I slew and slew and continued to slay.
For the space of two hours I toiled unceasingly with the oar till I was ready to drop.
What excess of slaughter I might have been guilty of I know not, for at the end of that time, as if by a signal, all the seals that still lived threw themselves into the water and swiftly disappeared.
I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had possessed me.
I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as I could to make amends. But first, ere the great task began, I returned thanks to that Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously preserved.
Thereupon I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning the seals, cutting the meat into strips, and placing it upon the tops of rocks to dry in the sun.
Also, I found small deposits of salt in the nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather side of the island. This I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.
Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in that no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted.
The unremitting labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means of this wholesome diet in which I did not stint myself.
Another evidence of God’s mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that barren islet, was there so long a spell of clear weather and steady sunshine as in the period immediately following the slaughter of the seals.
Months were to pass ore ever the seals revisited my island.
But in the meantime I was anything but idle.
I built me a hut of stone, and, adjoining it, a storehouse for my cured meat.
The hut I roofed with many sealskins, so that it was fairly water-proof.
But I could never cease to marvel, when the rain beat on that roof, that no less than a king’s ransom in the London fur market protected a castaway sailor from the elements.
I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all knowledge of the day of the week, and be unable to distinguish one from the other, and not know which was the Lord’s day.
I remembered back carefully to the reckoning of time kept in the longboat by Captain Nicholl; and carefully, again and again, to make sure beyond any shadow of uncertainty, I went over the tale of the days and nights I had spent on the island.
Then, by seven stones outside my hut, I kept my weekly calendar.
In one place on the oar I cut a small notch for each week, and in another place on the oar I notched the months, being duly careful indeed, to reckon in the additional days to each month over and beyond the four weeks.
Thus I was enabled to pay due regard to the Sabbath.
As the only mode of worship I could adopt, I carved a short hymn, appropriate to my situation, on the oar, which I never failed to chant on the Sabbath.
God, in His all-mercy, had not forgotten me; nor did I, in those eight years, fail at all proper times to remember God.
It was astonishing the work required, under such circumstances, to supply one’s simple needs of food and shelter.
Indeed, I was rarely idle, that first year.
The hut, itself a mere lair of rocks, nevertheless took six weeks of my time.
The tardy curing and the endless scraping of the sealskins, so as to make them soft and pliable for garments, occupied my spare moments for months and months.
Then there was the matter of my water supply.
After any heavy gale, the flying spray salted my saved rainwater, so that at times I was grievously put to live through till fresh rains fell unaccompanied by high winds.
Aware that a continual dropping will wear a stone, I selected a large stone, fine and tight of texture and, by means of smaller stones, I proceeded to pound it hollow.
In five weeks of most arduous toil I managed thus to make a jar which I estimated to hold a gallon and a half.
Later, I similarly made a four-gallon jar.
It took me nine weeks.
Other small ones I also made from time to time.
One, that would have contained eight gallons, developed a flaw when I had worked seven weeks on it.
But it was not until my fourth year on the island, when I had become reconciled to the possibility that I might continue to live there for the term of my natural life, that I created my masterpiece.
It took me eight months, but it was tight, and it held upwards of thirty gallons.
These stone vessels were a great gratification to me—so much so, that at times I forgot my humility and was unduly vain of them.
Truly, they were more elegant to me than was ever the costliest piece of furniture to any queen.
Also, I made me a small rock vessel, containing no more than a quart, with which to convey water from the catching-places to my large receptacles.
When I say that this one-quart vessel weighed all of two stone, the reader will realize that the mere gathering of the rainwater was no light task.
Thus, I rendered my lonely situation as comfortable as could be expected.
I had completed me a snug and secure shelter; and, as to provision, I had always on hand a six months’ supply, preserved by salting and drying. For these things, so essential to preserve life, and which one could scarcely have expected to obtain upon a desert island, I was sensible that I could not be too thankful.
Although denied the privilege of enjoying the society of any human creature, not even of a dog or a cat, I was far more reconciled to my lot than thousands probably would have been.
Upon the desolate spot, where fate had placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many, who, for ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in solitary confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker.
However dreary my prospects, I was not without hope that that Providence, which, at the very moment when hunger threatened me with dissolution, and when I might easily have been engulfed in the maw of the sea, had cast me upon those barren rocks, would finally direct some one to my relief.