In this place then I resolved to fix my design; and accordingly I prepared two muskets and my ordinary fowling-piece.  The two muskets I loaded with a brace of slugs each, and four or five smaller bullets, about the size of pistol-bullets, and the fowling-piece I loaded with near an handful of swan-shot, of the largest size; I also loaded my pistols with about four bullets each:  and in this posture, well provided with ammunition for a second and third charge, I prepared myself for my expedition.

After I had thus laid the scheme for my design, and in my imagination put it in practice, I continually made my tour every morning up to the top of the hill, which was from my castle, as I called it, about three miles or more, to see if I could observe any boats upon the sea, coming near the island, or standing over towards it; but I began to tire of this hard duty, after I had for two or three months constantly kept my watch; but came always back without any discovery, there having not in all that time been the least appearance, not only on or near the shore, but not on the whole ocean, so far as my eyes or glasses could reach every way.

As long as I kept up my daily tour to the hill to look out, so long also I kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all the while in a suitable frame for so outrageous an execution, as the killing twenty or thirty naked savages for an offence, which I had not at all entered into a discussion of in my thoughts, any further than my passions were at first fired by the horror I conceived at the unnatural custom of the people of that country, who, it seems, had been suffered by Providence, in his wise disposition of the world, to have no other guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and consequently were left, and perhaps had been for some ages, to act such horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but nature, entirely abandoned of Heaven, and actuated by some hellish degeneracy, could have run them into; but now, when, as I have said, I began to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long, and so far, every morning in vain; so my opinion of the action itself began to alter, and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to consider what it was I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer, unpunished, to go on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments upon one another; also, how far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon another.  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; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them.  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.