Robinson asked Friday if his tribe ever came to this island, and Friday said that they did, and that he himself had often come over; and he told Robinson that on one visit he and his friends had eaten more than twenty men. His tribe, he said, was very strong, and fought well. Thus they took more prisoners, and used the island oftener than the other tribes, and it seemed that the far side of the island, where Robinson had seen so many remains of feasts, was the part that Friday’s tribe held as their own. Sometimes other tribes used another island for their feasts.
It troubled Robinson’s mind greatly to hear what Friday had to say about this custom, but by little and little, as the weeks went past, he got him to see how horrible a thing it was to eat human flesh. From this beginning, Friday gradually came to be in his habits more like a white man, and teaching him was a great joy to Robinson, who found the years after Friday’s arrival the happiest of all that he had lived on the island. Not only had he now help in his work, but he had some one to talk to, for want of which, during the weary years when he was alone, he had almost forgotten his own tongue.
When they began easily to understand each other, Robinson asked Friday how far it was from the island to his country, and if the canoes were not often lost whilst crossing. Friday said there was no danger, and that no canoes were ever wrecked; that always in the morning the wind and the current set one way, and the other in the afternoon. This Robinson thought must have something to do with the tides, but afterwards he learned that the change of wind was only the difference between the sea breeze and the land breeze, which blow time about, morning and evening, in those parts. The change in the current was due to the in-draft and out-draft of a great river, off whose mouth the island lay.
Friday told Robinson much about his country, and about his people, who he said were Caribs. And a great way ‘beyond the moon,’ by which he meant to the west, he said that white men lived who had beards such as Robinson wore. These white men, he said, had killed very many natives, from which Robinson fancied that they must be Spaniards, who about that time were very cruel to the people whose countries they had taken.
Robinson asked if Friday could tell him how he might get over to where the white men lived, and Friday said it would be very easy, if they had a big canoe. And again Robinson began to make plans and to hope to escape from the island. He showed Friday the boat in which he and the crew had tried to land from the wreck, the remains of which still lay high up on the shore, out of reach of the waves of any but a very high tide, or of a storm worse than common. Friday looked long at it without speaking, till Robinson asked what he was thinking of.
Then he said that he had once before seen such a boat, but for some time he could not make Robinson understand where, or when, he had seen it. Robinson thought he meant that a ship had been driven ashore on the coast, and that the boat, perhaps, had come from her. But presently Friday spoke of the men who had been in the boat, and whom he and his people had pulled out of the sea. He counted on his fingers to make Robinson understand that there had been seventeen of them.
‘Where are they now?’ Robinson asked; and Friday said they still lived with his tribe.
This put new ideas into Robinson’s head, for he thought that probably these men might have belonged to the ship whose guns he had heard, and to which he had afterwards gone out in his boat as she lay on the reef.
Friday said that his people had given the men food, and had not hurt them.
‘Why did they not kill and eat them?’ asked Robinson; and again Friday assured him that they ate men only whom they took in war.