senseless, insignificant passion in the world, for that it regarded
only things past, which were generally impossible to be recalled or
to be remedied, but had no views of things to come, and had no
share in anything that looked like deliverance, but rather added to
the affliction than proposed a remedy; and upon this he repeated a
Spanish proverb, which, though I cannot repeat in the same words
that he spoke it in, yet I remember I made it into an English
proverb of my own, thus:-
“In trouble to be troubled,
Is to have your trouble doubled.”
He then ran on in remarks upon all the little improvements I had
made in my solitude: my unwearied application, as he called it;
and how I had made a condition, which in its circumstances was at
first much worse than theirs, a thousand times more happy than
theirs was, even now when they were all together. He told me it
was remarkable that Englishmen had a greater presence of mind in
their distress than any people that ever he met with; that their
unhappy nation and the Portuguese were the worst men in the world
to struggle with misfortunes; for that their first step in dangers,
after the common efforts were over, was to despair, lie down under
it, and die, without rousing their thoughts up to proper remedies
for escape.
I told him their case and mine differed exceedingly; that they were
cast upon the shore without necessaries, without supply of food, or
present sustenance till they could provide for it; that, it was
true, I had this further disadvantage and discomfort, that I was
alone; but then the supplies I had providentially thrown into my
hands, by the unexpected driving of the ship on the shore, was such
a help as would have encouraged any creature in the world to have
applied himself as I had done. “Seignior,” says the Spaniard, “had
we poor Spaniards been in your case, we should never have got half
those things out of the ship, as you did: nay,” says he, “we
should never have found means to have got a raft to carry them, or
to have got the raft on shore without boat or sail: and how much
less should we have done if any of us had been alone!” Well, I
desired him to abate his compliments, and go on with the history of
their coming on shore, where they landed. He told me they
unhappily landed at a place where there were people without
provisions; whereas, had they had the common sense to put off to
sea again, and gone to another island a little further, they had
found provisions, though without people: there being an island
that way, as they had been told, where there were provisions,
though no people – that is to say, that the Spaniards of Trinidad
had frequently been there, and had filled the island with goats and
hogs at several times, where they had bred in such multitudes, and
where turtle and sea-fowls were in such plenty, that they could
have been in no want of flesh, though they had found no bread;
whereas, here they were only sustained with a few roots and herbs,
which they understood not, and which had no substance in them, and
which the inhabitants gave them sparingly enough; and they could
treat them no better, unless they would turn cannibals and eat
men’s flesh.
They gave me an account how many ways they strove to civilise the
savages they were with, and to teach them rational customs in the
ordinary way of living, but in vain; and how they retorted upon
them as unjust that they who came there for assistance and support
should attempt to set up for instructors to those that gave them
food; intimating, it seems, that none should set up for the
instructors of others but those who could live without them. They
gave me dismal accounts of the extremities they were driven to; how
sometimes they were many days without any food at all, the island
they were upon being inhabited by a sort of savages that lived more
indolent, and for that reason were less supplied with the