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第2章 高级区新人

　　WIFE. - Why He no makee you much good better? you say He makee you.

　　From this city we had a frightful desert, which held us twenty-three days' march. We furnished ourselves with some tents here,for the better accommodating ourselves in the night; and the leaderof the caravan procured sixteen waggons of the country, forcarrying our water or provisions, and these carriages were ourdefence every night round our little camp; so that had the Tartarsappeared, unless they had been very numerous indeed, they would nothave been able to hurt us. We may well be supposed to have wantedrest again after this long journey; for in this desert we neithersaw house nor tree, and scarce a bush; though we saw abundance ofthe sable-hunters, who are all Tartars of Mogul Tartary; of whichthis country is a part; and they frequently attack small caravans,but we saw no numbers of them together.

　　They told me, like seamen, they would warrant it they would comeoff again, and they would take care, &c.; so away they went. Ientreated them to consider the ship and the voyage, that theirlives were not their own, and that they were entrusted with thevoyage, in some measure; that if they miscarried, the ship might belost for want of their help, and that they could not answer for itto God or man. But I might as well have talked to the mainmast ofthe ship: they were mad upon their journey; only they gave me goodwords, and begged I would not be angry; that they did not doubt butthey would be back again in about an hour at furthest; for theIndian town, they said, was not above half-a mile off, though theyfound it above two miles before they got to it.

　　I paused a while at his words, and looking steadily at him, "Whatdevil," said I, "sent you on this unlucky errand?" My nephewstared as if he had been frightened at first; but perceiving that Iwas not much displeased at the proposal, he recovered himself. "Ihope it may not be an unlucky proposal, sir," says he. "I daresayyou would be pleased to see your new colony there, where you oncereigned with more felicity than most of your brother monarchs inthe 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 havesaid so much, that I told him, in a few words, if he agreed withthe merchants, I would go with him; but I told him I would notpromise 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 wouldnot be possible to do so; that the merchants would never allow himto come that way with a laden ship of such valu

　　As their strength and their grandeur, so their navigation,commerce, and husbandry are very imperfect, compared to the samethings in Europe; also, in their knowledge, their learning, and intheir skill in the sciences, they are either very awkward ordefective, though they have globes or spheres, and a smattering ofthe mathematics, and think they know more than all the worldbesides. But they know little of the motions of the heavenlybodies; and so grossly and absurdly ignorant are their commonpeople, that when the sun is eclipsed, they think a great dragonhas assaulted it, and is going to run away with it; and they fall aclattering with all the drums and kettles in the country, to frightthe monster away, just as we do to hive a swarm of bees!

　　Will Atkins, with abundance of frankness and good humour, said theyhad met with affliction enough to make them all sober, and enemiesenough to make them all friends; that, for his part, he would liveand die with them, and was so far from designing anything againstthe Spaniards, that he owned they had done nothing to him but whathis own mad humour made necessary, and what he would have done, andperhaps worse, in their case; and that he would ask them pardon, ifI desired it, for the foolish and brutish things he had done tothem, and was very willing and desirous of living in terms ofentire friendship and union with them, and would do anything thatlay in his power to convince them of it; and as for going toEngland, he cared not if he did not go thither these twenty years.

　　Upon inquiry we found it was a French merchant ship of three-hundred tons, home-bound from Quebec. The master gave us a longaccount of the distress of his ship; how the fire began in thesteerage by the negligence of the steersman, which, on his cryingout for help, was, as everybody thought, entirely put out; but theysoon found that some sparks of the first fire had got into somepart of the ship so difficult to come at that they could noteffectually quench it; and afterwards getting in between thetimbers, and within the ceiling of the ship, it proceeded into thehold, and mastered all the skill and all the application they wereable to exert.

ght, when, within thecompass of three hours, I had all the several circumstances overagain, one after another, viz. sick, sleepy, eagerly hungry, painin the stomach, then ravenous again, then sick, then lunatic, thencrying, then ravenous again, and so every quarter of an hour, andmy strength wasted exceedingly; at night I lay me down, having nocomfort but in the hope that I should die before morning.

　　I immediately found out the supercargo, and told him the story,adding that I foresaw there would be a mutiny in the ship; andentreated him to go immediately on board and acquaint the captainof it. But I might have spared this intelligence, for before I hadspoken to him on shore the matter was effected on board. Theboatswain, the gunner, the carpenter, and all the inferiorofficers, as soon as I was gone off in the boat, came up, anddesired to speak with the captain; and then the boatswain, making along harangue, and repeating all he had said to me, told thecaptain that as I was now gone peaceably on shore, they were loathto use any violence with me, which, if I had not gone on shore,they would otherwise have done, to oblige me to have gone. Theytherefore thought fit to tell him that as they shipped themselvesto serve in the ship under his command, they would perform it welland faithfully; but if I would not quit the ship, or the captainoblige me to quit it, they would all leave the ship, and sail nofurthe