About the middle of the following May, one day there came a very great storm, with much thunder and lightning and rain, and during the night the wind blew a perfect hurricane. Robinson was sitting listening to the roaring of the wind, and sometimes reading the Bible which he had found in one of the seamen’s chests, for he could not sleep.
Suddenly he was startled by a kind of dull thud that seemed to shake the very air, such a thud as you might hear if something very heavy, but soft, fell on the floor of a room upstairs. And this noise was followed in about a minute by another thud. This time he could hear plainer, and he knew that the sounds were those of big guns fired at sea, and that they must come from some ship in danger, and signalling for help, perhaps to some other vessel.
Robinson ran out, and climbing up his ladder, got to the top of the rock in time to see the flash of another gun, away towards the reef of rocks at the end of the island.
If he was not able to help the people on board the vessel, they might yet, if they were saved, help him, so he collected all the dry wood he could get, and making a great pile, set fire to it, as a signal to the ship that there was some one on the island. And he was sure that the signal was seen, for as soon as it blazed up another gun was fired; then gun after gun, for some time.
Robinson kept his fire blazing all night, and when daylight came, and the storm cleared off, he thought he could see, away to the east, something which looked like a ship. He fancied she was at anchor, for she never moved. But the distance was too great, and the weather too thick for him to be sure if it was a ship at all that he saw.
Later in the day, when the weather had cleared, on going up the hill from which, long ago, he had watched the current sweeping past the rocks, he could see plainly that there was a vessel, but, to his sorrow, that she was a wreck, fast on the reef where, the day he was carried out to sea, he had found the current divide.
Without doubt the crew must have perished. And it filled Robinson with sadness and great grief to think how near he had been perhaps to fellow countrymen, and how not even one had been spared to come ashore. His whole soul yearned for the sight of a white man, some one to whom he could speak. But all that ever he saw of the crew, except what he afterwards found on the ship itself, was the body of a boy, which drifted on shore at the end of the island nearest the wreck; and he could not tell from the few clothes that were on the body to what nation the boy had belonged. In his pockets were two gold coins, and a tobacco pipe, and the last at least was of use to Robinson.
CHAPTER VII
ROBINSON VISITS THE WRECKED SPANISH
SHIP; RESCUES A PRISONER FROM
THE CANNIBALS
When the weather had again become calm and settled, Robinson was greatly tempted to venture out in his boat to the wreck, in spite of the narrow escape he had had before at that place; but there might still, he thought, be some one alive on board, and he made up his mind to risk it. This time he put a compass in the boat, and great store of food and water, as much as she could well carry, and he pushed off, paddling along the shore till he came near to the end of the sand-bank where the current ran so strong. And there his heart failed him. If he once got into that current, how was he to get out of it again? And if he were swept out to sea, and a gale [Pg 60]of wind sprang up, what chance was there that his small boat would live through it? He was so cast down by these thoughts that he ran the boat ashore and got out.
Going on to a high rock he sat for hours watching the water, trying to make up his mind whether to venture to the wreck or not, when he noticed that the current was now running in the direction contrary to that in which it had been flowing the first time he saw it. This, it occurred to him, must be caused by the tides, and it seemed likely that if he chose his time, the current going one way would carry him close to the wreck, and that caused by the next tide would help him back again.