m; and, in short, they had
so much more manners than I, that I scarce knew how to receive their
civilities, much less how to return them in kind.

The history of their coming to, and conduct in the island after my going
away, is so remarkable, and has so many incidents, which the former part
of my relation will help to understand, and which will, in most of the
particulars, refer to that account I have already given, that I cannot
but commit them with great delight to the reading of those that
come after me.

I shall no longer trouble the story with a relation in the first person,
which will put me to the expense of ten thousand Said I's, and Said
he's, and He told me's, and I told him's, and the like; but I shall
collect the facts historically as near as I can gather them out of my
memory from what they related to me, and from what I met with in my
conversing with them, and with the place.

In order to do this succinctly, and as intelligibly as I can, I must go
back to the circumstance in which I left the island, and which the
persons were in of whom I am to speak. At first it is necessary to
repeat, that I had sent away Friday's father and the Spaniard, the two
whose lives I had rescued from the savages; I say, I had sent them away
in a large canoe to the main, as I then thought it, to fetch over the
Spaniard's companions whom he had left behind him, in order to save them
from the like calamity that he had been in, and in order to succour them
for the present, and that, if possible, we might together find some way
for our deliverance afterward.

When I sent them away, I had no visible appearance of, or the least room
to hope for, my own deliverance, any more than I had twenty years
before; much less had I any foreknowledge of what after happened, I mean
of an English ship coming on shore there to fetch them off; and it could
not but be a very great surprise to them when they came back, not only
to find that I was gone, but to find three strangers left on the spot,
possessed of all that I had left behind me, which would otherwise have
been their own.

The first thing, however, which I inquired into, that I might begin
where I left off, was of their own part; and I desired he would give me
a particular account of his voyage back to his countrymen with the boat,
when I sent him to fetch them over. He told me there was little variety
in that part; for nothing remarkable happened to them on the way, they
having very