I have been, in all my circumstances, a memento to those who are touched with that general plague of mankind, whence, for aught I know, one half of their miseries flow; I mean, that of not being satisfied with the station wherein God and nature hath placed them; for, not to look back upon my primitive condition, and the excellent advice of my father, the opposition to which was, as I may call it, my original sin, my subsequent mistakes of the same kind have been the means of my coming into this miserable condition; for had that Providence, which so happily had seated me at the Brasils as a planter, blessed me with confined desires, and could I have been contented to have gone on gradually, I might have been by this time, I mean in the time of my being on this island, one of the most considerable planters in the Brasils; nay, I am persuaded, that by the improvements I had made in that little time I lived there, and the increase I should probably have made if I had stayed, I might have been worth a hundred thousand moidores; and what business had I to leave a settled fortune, well-stocked plantation, improving and increasing, to turn supercargo to Guinea, to fetch Negroes, when patience and time would have so increased our stock at home, that we could have bought them at our own doors, from those whose business it was to fetch them?  And though it had cost us something more, yet the difference of that price was by no means worth saving at so great a hazard.

But as this is ordinarily the fate of young heads, so reflection upon the folly of it is as ordinarily the exercise of more years, or of the dear-bought experience of time; and so it was with me now; and yet, so deep had the mistake taken root in my temper, that I could not satisfy myself in my station, but was continually poring upon the means and possibility of my escape from this place; and that I may, with the greater pleasure to the reader, bring on the remaining part of my story, it may not be improper to give some account of my first conceptions on the subject of this foolish scheme for my escape; and how, and upon what foundation, I acted.

I am now to be supposed to be retired into my castle, after my late voyage to the wreck, my frigate laid up, and secured under water as usual, and my condition restored to what it was before:  I had more wealth, indeed, than I had before, but was not at all the richer; for I had no more use for it than the Indians of Peru had before the Spaniards came thither.

It was one of the nights in the rainy season in March, the four-and-twentieth year of my first setting foot in this island of solitariness, I was lying in my bed or hammock, awake, and very well in health, had no pain, no distemper, no uneasiness of body, no, nor any uneasiness of mind more than ordinary, but could by no means close my eyes, that is, so as to sleep; no, not a wink all night long, otherwise than as follows: