正文预览

第5章 败露了（五更完）

　　EARLY in the morning, when marching from a little town calledChangu, we had a river to pass, which we were obliged to ferry;and, had the Tartars had any intelligence, then had been the timeto have attacked us, when the caravan being over, the rear-guardwas behind; but they did not appear there. About three hoursafter, when we were entered upon a desert of about fifteen orsixteen miles over, we knew by a cloud of dust they raised, thatthe enemy was at hand, and presently they came on upon the spur.

　　Here they built themselves two handsome huts, and contrived them ina manner like my first habitation, being close under the side of ahill, having some trees already growing on three sides of it, sothat by planting others it would be very easily covered from thesight, unless narrowly searched for. They desired some dried goat-skins for beds and covering, which were given them; and upon givingtheir words that they would not disturb the rest, or injure any oftheir plantations, they gave them hatchets, and what other toolsthey could spare; some peas, barley, and rice, for sowing; and, ina word, anything they wanted, except arms and ammunition.

　　At last the Tartars came on, and an innumerable company they were;how many we could not tell, but ten thousand, we thought, at theleast. A party of them came on first, and viewed our posture,traversing the ground in the front of our line; and, as we foundthem within gunshot, our leader ordered the two wings to advanceswiftly, and give them a salvo on each wing with their shot, whichwas done. They then went off, I suppose to give an account of thereception they were like to meet with; indeed, that salute cloyedtheir stomachs, for they immediately halted, stood a while toconsider of it, and wheeling off to the left, they gave over theirdesign for that time, which was very agreeable to ourcircumstances.

d upon inquiry thenext day; and there were five or six men all together, who stood tolook at the ship, not knowing what to think of us.

　　I must confess I was now very uneasy, and thought myself, includingthe late escape from the longboats, to have been in the mostdangerous condition that ever I was in through my past life; forwhatever ill circumstances I had been in, I was never pursued for athief before; nor had I ever done anything that merited the name ofdishonest or fraudulent, much less thievish. I had chiefly been myown enemy, or, as I may rightly say, I had been nobody's enemy butmy own; but now I was woefully embarrassed: for though I wasperfectly innocent, I was in no condition to make that innocenceappear; and if I had been taken, it had been under a supposed guiltof the worst kind. This made me very anxious to make an escape,though which way to do it I knew not, or what port or place wecould go to. My partner endeavoured to encourage me by describingthe several ports of that coast, and told me he would put in on thecoast of Cochin China, or the bay of Tonquin, intending afterwardsto go to Macao, where a great many European fam

　　After half-an-hour's consultation they were called in, and a longdebate ensued, their two countrymen charging them with the ruin ofall their labour, and a design to murder them; all which they ownedbefore, and therefore could not deny now. Upon the whole, theSpaniards acted the moderators between them; and as they hadobliged the two Englishmen not to hurt the three while they werenaked and unarmed, so they now obliged the three to go and rebuildtheir fellows' two huts, one to be of the same and the other oflarger dimensions than they were before; to fence their groundagain, plant trees in the room of those pulled up, dig up the landagain for planting corn, and, in a word, to restore everything tothe same state as they found it, that is, as near as they could.

　　The first thing, however, which I inquired into, that I might beginwhere I left off, was of their own part; and I desired the Spaniardwould give me a particular account of his voyage back to hiscountrymen with the boat, when I sent him to fetch them over. Hetold me there was little variety in that part, for nothingremarkable happened to them on the way, having had very calmweather and a smooth sea. As for his countrymen, it could not bedoubted, he said, but that they were overjoyed to see him (it seemshe was the principal man among them, the captain of the vessel theyhad been shipwrecked in having been dead some time): they were, hesaid, the more surprised to see him, because they knew that he wasfallen into the hands of the savages, who, they were satisfied,would devour him as they did all the rest of their prisoners; thatwhen he told them the story of his deliverance, and in what mannerhe was furnished for carrying them away, it was like a dream tothem, and their astonishment, he said, was somewhat lik

khorses inEngland seemed to me to look much better; though it was hard tojudge rightly, for they were so covered with equipage, mantles,trappings, &c., that we could scarce see anything but their feetand their heads as they went along.

　　I took this interval to say to the clergyman, first, that I wasglad to see the particulars we had both been witnesses to; that,though I was hard enough of belief in such cases, yet that I beganto think it was all very sincere here, both in the man and hiswife, however ignorant they might both be, and I hoped such abeginning would yet have a more happy end. "But, my friend," addedI, "will you give me leave to start one difficulty here? I cannottell how to object the least thing against that affectionateconcern which you show for the turning of the poor people fromtheir paganism to the Christian religion; but how does this comfortyou, while these people are, in your account, out of the pale ofthe Catholic Church, without which you believe there is nosalvation? so that you esteem these but heretics, as effectuallylost as the pagans themselves."