Cargoes for Crusoes

Excerpt: “How that I, Robinson Crusoe, came to be wrecked with others of the ship’s company on a Desert Island, all being lost save my unworthy self, hath in a precise manner been narrated by one D. Defoe in the book he saw fit to entitle with my name; but his ending is indifferent. For novels like Defoe’s must have the Happy Ending, so styled. Yet is the truth often happier far than fiction. Being no hand to invent a tale, I am content to set down in this place events as I humbly took part in them. Let me declare, then, that here on my Desert Island I for long suffered great loneliness and consequent distress of soul. This went on many days. Howbeit, while sunk very low in my spiritual state and with expectation nearly gone, a huge ship passing near labored painfully with a storm by the mercy of God being compelled to throw overboard—or, as they say at sea, to jettison—the greater part of her cargo. And being thus lightened she stood away from the Island and went on her course safely. The same storm cast upon the shore the rich treasure wherewith she had been laden, so many wooden boxes or cases, packed tightly and well-lined, which for the most part were washed up undamaged and, within, scarcely dampened except it may be for an inch or two. Coming down to the shore the morning after I stood transfixed with astonishment at the sight of something lying on the sand. It was a book."