CHAPTER VII.
It was not very long after we had moved into our goat-skin clothes that Mr. Crusoe got up early one morning, and came and stood over me with an axe in his hand as I was lying asleep on my bed. I woke up suddenly, and saw him looking very solemn, and I thought at first that he must have been taken sick, so I asked him what was the matter, and if I could do anything for him.
“Nothing is the matter with me,” he replied; “but I am sorry you woke up, for I was just going to kill you.”
“That’s very kind in you, I’m sure,” said I; “but don’t you think, Mr. Crusoe, that you could manage to get along without killing me till after breakfast? I ought to get up and start the fire, you know.”
Now Mr. Crusoe couldn’t bear to start a fire, and whenever he tried it he always got his throat and eyes full of smoke, and couldn’t get anything to burn except kindlings. So he was glad to get rid of making a fire and getting breakfast that morning, and he told me that on second thoughts I might live till the coffee was ready.
It took me a good while to make a fire that morning, and I pretended that I couldn’t split kindlings without the axe, and when I once got the axe into my hands I took very good care not to let Mr. Crusoe get hold of it again. I made up my mind, however, that Mr. Crusoe must give up his notion about killing me, for it was really getting pretty dangerous, now that he had got the idea of knocking me on the head with the axe whenever he could catch me asleep. So, while the coffee was boiling, I said to him, “Mr. Crusoe, the reason why you are going to kill me is that your grandfather wasn’t cast ashore with an intelligent sailor-man, isn’t it?”
“That’s just it, my dear boy,” said he.
“But,” said I, “there was his man Friday, that I’ve heard you talk about. Now why shouldn’t I be your man Friday? It won’t do for you to try to get on without one, you know very well; and I don’t see where your Friday is to come from unless I help you out.”
“That’s an excellent idea, Mike,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe. “And what’s more, if you are Friday I needn’t kill you; and I do assure you I don’t want to kill you if it can be avoided.”
“All right,” said I, “I’m your man Friday, and I hopeyou won’t give yourself the least trouble after this about killing me.”
Mr. Crusoe was as pleased with the notion of turning me into Friday as if he had been made a captain in the navy, but he said I couldn’t be made into Friday by just saying so, and that he would have to think how to do it in the correct way.
After breakfast Mr. Crusoe told me that I must burn a piece of cork and black myself all over, and that I might move out of my goat-skin clothes, and wear nothing but a towel tied round my waist. This suited me perfectly, and in a few minutes I was as black as a native African king. Then Mr. Crusoe told me I must walk about a mile down the beach, and then turn and run back to the house, and he would meet me, and consider that I was Friday.
I can’t tell you how nice it was to get rid of my goat-skin clothes. I felt as light as a feather; and after I had walked a mile away, and turned to run back, I felt as if I could run for a week without stopping.
I was running my best when Mr. Crusoe stepped out from the woods and aimed his gun almost at me. I thought first that he was going to shoot me, so the instant he fired I dropped flat on the beach, and then jumped up again andran towards him, so as to get hold of his gun before he could load.
But he hadn’t fired at me after all. As I came towards him he put his gun down on the ground and smiled from ear to ear, and beckoned me to come to him in the most friendly sort of way. Then I remembered what he had told me about the way in which his grandfather had introduced himself to Friday by shooting a cannibal who was hungry, and was chasing Friday so as to catch him and put him on the coals.
When I came where Mr. Crusoe was he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Good fellow! poor fellow! your enemies are killed and you are safe now.” He couldn’t have been kinder if I had been a dog; and when he took me by the hand and led me back to the house, and made me lie down and drink another cup of coffee, I was pretty well satisfied to be Friday.
MIKE TAKES THE PART OF “MAN FRIDAY.”
MIKE TAKES THE PART OF “MAN FRIDAY.”
MIKE TAKES THE PART OF “MAN FRIDAY.”
He began calling me Friday at once, and never called me anything else except once or twice when he got very angry at something and called me “You Mike!” When I began to talk back to him he stopped me, and said, “Friday, you talk too plain. You mustn’t say, ‘That coffee’s awful good!’ but you must say, ‘Him coffee berry muchee good!’ Rememberthat you’re a poor, ignorant savage, just beginning to learn English, and don’t let me have to correct you again.”
I was disappointed to find that I had to climb into my goat-skin clothes again; and when I had finished the coffee, and Mr. Crusoe showed me the clothes, and said, “Now, Friday, you must put on these clothes,” I said, “I do wish, Mr. Crusoe, you’d let me go as I am now.” He looked very angry, and said, “What did you say, Friday? Your broken English isn’t very easy to understand.” I knew what he meant then, and said, “Me no likee clothes. Me no wearee clothes in my country.” This pleased him better, but all the same I had to put the clothes on.
I found it pretty easy to talk as Mr. Crusoe wanted me to, and after a while it seemed perfectly natural to be a man Friday. It was a nuisance to have to black myself all over every time after I had been in swimming, and once I tried to get Mr. Crusoe to let me black nothing but my face and hands, but he wouldn’t agree to it. I really began to feel as if I was a real black savage; and as Mr. Crusoe never said anything more about killing me, I could go to sleep without fear of having my brains knocked out with the axe.
The worst thing about it was that Mr. Crusoe would insist on instructing me, as he called it. He would make mesit down by him and listen while he told me that there was more of the world than the island where we were, and there were great nations of white people who built ships and railroads and all sorts of things; just as if I didn’t know all about it a great deal better than he did, who had never been on board a ship but once. However, I had to listen respectfully, and I used to remember that, after all, it was easier to sit still and let a man talk than it was to work hard either afloat or ashore. But one day he tried to tell me what a ship was like. He called it a “big canoe,” and I never heard any man talk such nonsense as he did when he described how a ship is rigged. I really couldn’t stand it, so I said, “You no talkee sense. Gimme rest; you makee me tired,” and I got up and left him. After that he didn’t talk to me any more about ships.
Another thing that bothered me was that Mr. Crusoe would make me tell him all sorts of yarns about my country. He didn’t mean America, nor yet Ireland, but some heathen country not far from our island, where he maintained that I used to live. Of course my stories didn’t suit him until I found out just what he wanted me to tell. I had to tell him that the tribe of savages that I belonged to used to fight with another tribe. That was partly true of the Flanagansin old Ireland, for I have often heard my father say how they used to fight with the Maguires; but I thought things had come to a pretty pass when I had to call a respectable, decent family like the Flanagans a tribe of savages.
Then, too, Mr. Crusoe was bound to make me tell him that there were a whole ship’s company of Spaniards in my country. I had to make believe that they had been shipwrecked there, and whenever we talked about them Mr. Crusoe would sigh, and say that if we only had a boat we would set sail and find the Spaniards, and bring them to the island. Once he said, “We had better make a canoe, Friday, and have it all ready, so that when your father comes we can send him in it to bring the Spaniards here.”
I was so astonished to hear him say that my father was coming that I almost spoke English to him; but I recollected in time that I was Friday, so I only said, “What you meanee?”
“Your father, my poor Friday,” he answered, “is a very old savage, and he has been captured by the enemy. They will bring him here to eat him before very long, and then we’ll rescue him.”
“My father was a respectable Irishman, Mr. Crusoe,” said I, “and I won’t allow any man—I don’t care who he is—tocall him an old savage.” I was so angry that I got up and left Mr. Crusoe after saying this, and I didn’t see him again till supper-time. However, he never said anything to me about it, and perhaps he didn’t notice that I had answered him in English.
By this time you must have found out that Mr. Crusoe was a very curious man. What was perhaps the strangest thing of all about him was that he wouldn’t make the least attempt to get away from the island. Not only did he forbid me to hoist a signal where any ship could see it, or to make a bonfire at night, but he would never listen when I proposed building a boat or making a raft, and so trying to get over to the main-land; that is, if it was the main-land that we could see from the top of the hill. He would always say, whenever I spoke about getting away, that an English ship would come for us after a while, and that we hadn’t been on the island half long enough yet. According to the almanac, as he called his post with notches cut on it, we had been on the island about two years when he turned me into a man Friday, though, according to my reckoning, we had been there less than a year. But Mr. Crusoe seemed to enjoy himself better the longer we stayed, and I made up my mind that he nevermeant to get away, and that unless I wanted to live and die a corked-up savage, I must contrive some plan for getting away alone.
I took the saw one afternoon when Mr. Crusoe was asleep, and went up to the top of the hill, and climbed the big tree that stood at the very top, and had only a few limbs. I began at the very top of the tree, and sawed all the limbs off except two that were opposite to each other, and stood out straight from the tree. Then I trimmed these two limbs until the whole tree looked exactly like an enormous cross. It stood to reason that no ship could see this cross without understanding that some one was on the island, and meant the cross to be a signal of distress; and no Christian ship would think of passing by the island without sending a boat to find out what was the matter.
I was afraid that Mr. Crusoe would be in a rage when he should find out what I had done, and I didn’t suppose it would be possible to keep him from finding it out. Still, I took the trouble to drag all the sawed-off branches into the woods, where Mr. Crusoe would not be likely to find them, and brushed up the leaves and the sawdust.
That night we had a very heavy thunder-storm, and the lightning struck three or four times very near us. Mr.Crusoe was a good deal frightened, and told me while the shower was going on that his grandfather didn’t like thunder, and that he was like his grandfather in most things. It appears that old Mr. Crusoe was in a terrible state of mind when it thundered and lightened, for fear that his gunpowder would take fire and blow him up; and it’s a great pity that it didn’t. My Mr. Crusoe thought that he ought to worry about the powder because his grandfather did; but I finally convinced him that when the lightning had the choice of twenty thousand big trees to strike, it would not demean itself to strike a little low but just for the sake of looking for some powder to blow up.
The next morning we happened to walk out where we could see my big tree, and I saw that the top of it was splintered, and that it was burned black. You see, the lightning had struck it, and it would have been burnt up if the rain had not put the fire out.
Mr. Crusoe was perfectly delighted when he saw the big cross. He never dreamed that I had anything to do with it, and he said that it was a sign to tell him that he was doing right, and that the English ship would come and take him off, and that everything would turn out well, only that we must hurry up and find my father and the Spaniards onthe main-land, and be ready to kill the cannibals and to capture Will Atkins. I really began to think that perhaps Mr. Crusoe was a little crazy, and resolved that I would keep a close watch on him, and stand by to lash him to a tree, in case it should become necessary.
CHAPTER VIII.
Although Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t let me build a boat in which we could sail for some Christian country, he made up his mind that we must have a boat all ready to send over to the main-land in search of his precious Spaniards.
I couldn’t see any use in this. Even if there were any Spaniards where we could get at them, they wouldn’t have been any use to us. Spaniards are all very well in their own country, I suppose, but they are the most useless kind of sailors. Indeed, you can’t make sailors of them if you try your very best. I tried to tell Mr. Crusoe that if we filled the island up with a lot of Spaniards they would eat up all the provisions, and then grumble for more, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
We had plenty of wood for the timbers and planking of a large boat, and we two together could have built it in a short time, but that wouldn’t suit Mr. Crusoe. He said we must cut down a big tree and hollow it out, so as to make a canoe. There wasn’t the least use in arguing with him, forhe told me that a poor, ignorant, converted cannibal like myself couldn’t possibly know anything about boats—which was pretty hard to bear, especially from a landsman.
There were plenty of big trees near the water, but Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t look at them. He selected a tree that stood nearly a quarter of a mile from the shore, and said that it was just the tree we wanted. I knew he would have a good time launching a heavy canoe that would have to be dragged over the ground for such a long distance, but I let him have his way, which is always the best thing to do when you can’t help yourself.
It was a big job cutting that tree down, for it was at least three feet thick, but we cut it down at last, or rather I did, for Mr. Crusoe soon got tired of swinging his axe, and said that he would content himself with superintending me. He brought a blanket and a pillow, and put them on the ground near the tree, and superintended very comfortably, only the tree came down a little sooner than we expected, and he had just time to run before it fell directly across the blanket.
Chopping the tree down was the easiest part of the work. It took a week longer to trim off the branches. Then we had to cut away the sides of the tree, and shape it something like a whale-boat, only without the sheer. This took thebest part of another week; and all this time the only thing Mr. Crusoe did was to lie on a blanket and superintend.
The hardest work of all was to hollow out the canoe. Mr. Crusoe said that in my country we always hollowed out a log by kindling a fire on the top of it, and of course I had to try it. Anybody except a man belonging to the Crusoe family would have known that this plan wouldn’t work; and even Mr. Crusoe became convinced after a while that a big tree couldn’t be hollowed out in any such way.
It took five weeks of good steady work to get that tree hollowed out with the adze, but when it was done we really had quite a decent-looking boat. Mr. Crusoe wanted to rig her before we launched her, but he gave up the idea when I asked him if his grandfather rigged his canoe before he launched it; and he was obliged to admit that even that forsaken old idiot had sense enough to not do such a ridiculous thing. I had always considered old Mr. Crusoe as about half-witted, but I had been made by this time to suffer so much on account of him that I couldn’t bear even to hear his name.
MR. CRUSOE SUPERINTENDS THE BUILDING OF THE CANOE.
MR. CRUSOE SUPERINTENDS THE BUILDING OF THE CANOE.
MR. CRUSOE SUPERINTENDS THE BUILDING OF THE CANOE.
I needn’t tell you that when the canoe was ready for launching we couldn’t stir her. Mr. Crusoe came and puthis shoulder against her, and gave a shove that would hardly have started a barrel, and then said, “It’s of no use trying; we shall have to dig a canal to the beach.”
Now I didn’t very much believe that we could ever launch the canoe, though of course I never expected that Mr. Crusoe could stir her all alone, but I didn’t want to give it up without trying. But Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t let me try. He said that we could bring the water up to the boat by means of a canal, and that there was no other possible way of launching her. So I had to begin to dig a canal, though I knew all the time it was mere foolishness, for it would have taken both of us at least four years to dig one broad enough and deep enough to float the canoe. However, I dug for two days, while Mr. Crusoe superintended, and then he said that it was of no use, and I might knock off, and that his grandfather once made a canoe that he was never able to launch.
This showed that Mr. Crusoe had never expected to launch the canoe, and that he had made me do all the work of making it just because his grandfather had been the same kind of a lunatic, and had made a big canoe a quarter of a mile from the shore. I was always good-tempered, except, of course, when something went wrong, but this timeI was angry, and I walked off and didn’t speak to Mr. Crusoe again until the next day.
He never said anything more about the canoe, and seemed to have forgotten all about it, but I determined to launch it just to spite him and his grandfather. With the help of a long lever I pried the canoe up, and put half a dozen rollers under her. Then I smoothed the ground as well as I could between her and the beach. About half the way was level ground, and the rest of the way was downhill to the beach. This was one of the things that made it impossible to dig a canal, for the upper end of the canal, near where the canoe lay, would have been about forty feet deep, provided we could have dug it.
We had an enormous big “fish-tackle” that I had brought ashore from the wreck, and that was used when we fished the anchor. I carried this up to the canoe, and rigged it so that I could use a lever to haul on it with. The lever was my own invention, and it worked almost as well as a capstan. Of course it was very slow work, but I was able to move the canoe a little at a time, and after two weeks of working at odd times when Mr. Crusoe was asleep or busy, so that he did not miss me, I got the canoe up to the top of the high ground and was ready to let her run down to thebeach. At first I thought I would get Mr. Crusoe to help me launch her, but as there was no surf, and the beach was fairly steep, I decided to do the work alone. Before I started her downhill I cut a lot more of rollers, and laid them all the way from the canoe to the water, and I ballasted the canoe with about a ton of heavy stones. Then I made the tackle fast to her stern and to a tree, and got in and let her go.
She bumped down the hill as fast as I would let her go, and shot into the water without taking a drop into her. I anchored her with a stone, cast off the tackle, and swam ashore. I felt pretty proud of what I had done; not so much because it was a bit of good sailor work, but because I had done what old Mr. Crusoe didn’t have sense enough to do. She was really a fine boat. She was thirty-six feet long and nearly three feet wide. Of course this would have been narrow for a Christian boat, but I meant to put an outrigger on her, such as the natives use in the Sandwich Islands, and this, I knew, would make her as stiff as a church. With a half deck fore and aft, a good mast and sail, and a steering-oar, she would be fit to cross the Pacific Ocean with a dozen people in her.
After dinner, when, as a rule, a man is more reasonable than at other times, I took Mr. Crusoe to the beach andshowed him the boat. Do you think he was pleased? Not much. He said I had no right to launch the boat; that his grandfather’s memory was insulted by it, and that it was our duty to leave the canoe to rot on shore, and to make a smaller one that we could launch easily. Luckily, he couldn’t help himself, for he couldn’t get the canoe back into the woods where she was made, and so he had to make the best of it.
Mr. Crusoe was not a very modest man. In fact, he thought he knew everything, and he tried to tell me how the canoe ought to be rigged. I couldn’t keep him from talking, but I went ahead all the same and rigged the boat as she ought to have been rigged: with a leg-of-mutton sail forward and a jigger aft, just big enough to jam her on a wind. Mr. Crusoe wanted very much to have her fitted with a rudder, because his grandfather fitted a canoe with a rudder, though I knew just as well as if I had seen his canoe that no rudder ever made her steer. Of course I used a steering-oar instead of a rudder, and when I had fitted her with an outrigger, and decked her over for five feet from the stem and the stern, I hoisted the sails and took her out for a trial trip.
She sailed beautiful, and the jigger brought her around every time as handy as if she had been a cat-boat. She wasperfectly dry, and the outrigger kept her almost on an even keel. Mr. Crusoe watched her from the shore, and when I brought her in and anchored her, I could see that he was proud of her, although he was that obstinate that he wouldn’t say so. In the course of the day, however, he hit on an idea that reconciled him to the canoe. He made believe that she was the second canoe we had built, and that the first one was still lying up in the woods. He said to me, “Friday, you have done well to build a new canoe entirely by yourself. She is smaller than the first one that we built and couldn’t launch, but she is quite big enough.” I understood in a minute what he meant, and agreed with him that the first canoe was far too big. It was a pity to see a full-grown man act so babyish about a thing, but it was a warning to me never to bother my head about following the example of my grandfather.
I had made up my mind, now that we had a boat, to provision her for six weeks or so, and to try to find some civilized country or to fall in with a ship. The island was comfortable enough, for we had plenty to eat and nothing to do, unless we wanted to do it, and for the first month or two I thought I would like to live there forever. But I was surprised to find, after a while, that I was getting tiredof it, and wanted to get back on board a deep-water ship, and meet somebody besides Mr. Crusoe. I had no fault to find with him, except that he once had a grandfather, and I was ready to do anything in reason to please him, but I didn’t want to spend all my life with him and nobody else.
I knew Mr. Crusoe would never consent to leave the island in the canoe, but I meant to get him to come out with me for a little sail, and then lash him, and keep him lashed until we should be well out of sight of the island.
I had hard work to get enough provisions and water stowed on board the canoe without attracting Mr. Crusoe’s attention, but I was very careful about it, and I not only provisioned her for six weeks, but I hove overboard the stone ballast and ballasted her with canned provisions. I put two rifles and a shot-gun aboard of her, with plenty of ammunition, and I furnished her with blankets and everything that anybody could want at sea. She was more like a gentleman’s pleasure yacht than anything else, and I got to be so fond of her that I resolved I would never go to sea in any other craft, but would use her for trading among the Pacific Islands, and be my own master instead of having a lot of captains and mates over me all my days.
But when I was all ready Mr. Crusoe spoilt my plan.Perhaps he suspected what I meant to do. At any rate, he wouldn’t trust himself on board the canoe, and told me that he did not want me to go sailing in her for fear I might be blown off the island, and not be able to get back again.
I was so disgusted that I said to myself that I had had enough of Mr. Crusoe, and that if he wouldn’t come with me I would leave him. I didn’t mean to abandon him for good and all, but I expected to fall in with a ship, and then the captain would steer for the island and take Mr. Crusoe off. He could live for a while very comfortably by himself, for that was what his grandfather did before he engaged Friday to live with him. The more I thought of escaping alone, the more I liked the idea. I had given Mr. Crusoe every chance to come with me, and I was even ready to carry him off against his will, but when a man is as obstinate as he was, what can you do? After all, I could get on alone in the boat a good deal better than I could with him, for he would have been sure to try to make me sail the boat just as his grandfather used to, and he would have been no end of trouble, as a landsman always is when you have got him in a small boat, unless he happens to be sea-sick. So, after thinking it all over, I resolved to start that same night, and get rid of the island and Mr. Crusoe at the same time.