What authority or call had I to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit, for so many ages, to suffer to go on unpunished? I debated this very often with myself thus: How do I know what God himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime. They do not know it to be an offence and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox, nor to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton. Indeed, they were much as the beast in this manner.
When I considered this a little, it followed that I was certainly in the wrong in it. These people were not murderers in the sense I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than the beast was a murderer for what it had done. It had a fine animal mind, but still animal, with no understanding of sin or crime or justice. That it kill'd the mate was indeed an awful thing, but it was not an evil thing. As I have oft said before, the beast is not evil. Indeed, if it were, should I have not put myself, and it, to death to punish it? No! I had been satisfied to leave it here, where it enjoyed freedom with no danger to others.
These considerations put me to a pause. I began, by little and little, to be off my design, and to conclude I had taken wrong measures in my resolution to attack the savages. It was not my business to meddle with them unless they first attacked me, and this it was my business, if possible, to prevent. If I were discovered and attacked by them I knew my duty.
On the other hand, I argued with myself, this was the way to ruin and destroy myself. Unless I was sure to kill every one that not only should be on shore at that time, but that should ever come on shore afterwards, if but one of them escaped to tell their country-people what had happened, they would come over again by thousands to revenge the death of their fellow.
Upon the whole, I concluded, that neither in principle nor in policy I ought to concern myself in this affair. My business was, by all possible means, to conceal myself from them and not to leave the least signal to them to guess by that there were any living creatures upon the island of human shape.
My new cave, dark symbols,
my resolution
In this disposition I continued for near a year after this. So far was I from desiring an occasion for falling upon these wretches in all that time, I never once went up the hill to see whether there were any of them in sight, or to know whether any of them had been on shore there or not, that I might not be tempted to renew any of my contrivances against them. I kept myself more retired than ever and seldom went from my cell. Certain it is these savage people who sometimes haunted this island never came with any thoughts of finding any thing here aside from their great totem, and consequently never wandered off from the coast. I doubt not but they might have been several times on shore after my apprehensions of them had made me cautious, as well as before. Indeed, I looked back with some horror upon the thoughts of what my condition would have been if I had chopped upon them and been discovered before that, when, naked and unarmed, except with one gun, and that loaded often only with small shot, I walked every where, peering about the island to see what I could get. What a surprise should I have been in if, when I discovered the print of a man's foot, I had instead seen fifteen or twenty cannibals and found them pursuing me!
I believe the reader of this will not think it strange if I confess these anxieties, these constant dangers I lived in, and the concern that was now upon me, put an end to all invention and to all the contrivances I had laid for my future accommodations and conveniences. I had the care of my safety more now upon my hands than that of my food. I cared not to drive a nail or chop a stick of wood for fear the noise I might make should be heard. Much less would I fire a gun. Above all, I was uneasy at making any fire, lest the smoke, which is visible at a great distance in the day, should betray me. For this reason I removed that part of my business which required fire into my new apartment in the woods. After some time I found, to my unspeakable consolation, a meer natural cave in the earth which went in a vast way and where, I dare say, no savage, had he been at the mouth of it, would be so hardy as to venture in. Nor would any man else, but one who, like me, wanted nothing so much as a safe retreat.