"Children's Books - Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

close. He prepared to attack us again, and we to defend ourselves; but
laying us on board the next time upon our other quarter, he entered
sixty men upon our decks, who immediately fell to cutting and
hacking the decks and rigging. We plied them with small-shot,
half-pikes, powder-chests, and such like, and cleared our deck of them
twice. However, to cut short this melancholy part of our story, our
ship being disabled, and three of our men killed and eight wounded, we
were obliged to yield, and were carried all prisoners into Sallee, a
port belonging to the Moors.
The usage I had there was not so dreadful as at first I had
apprehended, nor was I carried up the country to the emperor's
court, as the rest of our men were, but was kept by the captain of the
rover as his proper prize, and made his slave, being young and nimble,
and fit for his business. At this surprising change of my
circumstances from a merchant to a miserable slave, I was perfectly
overwhelmed; and now I looked back upon my father's prophetic
discourse to me, that I should be miserable, and have none to
relieve me, which I thought was now so effectually brought to pass,
that it could not be worse; that now the hand of Heaven had
overtaken me, and I was undone without redemption. But alas! this
was but a taste of the misery I was to go through, as will appear in
the sequel of this story.
As my new patron, or master, had taken me home to his house, so I
was in hopes that he would take me with him when he went to sea again,
believing that it would some time or other be his fate to be taken
by a Spanish or Portugal man-of-war; and that then I should be set
at liberty. But this hope of mine was soon taken away; for when he
went to sea, he left me on shore to look after his little garden,
and do the common drudgery of slaves about his house; and when he came
home again from his cruise, he ordered me to lie in the cabin to
look after the ship.
Here I meditated nothing but my escape, and what method I might take
to effect it, but found no way that had the least probability in it.
Nothing presented to make the supposition of it rational; for I had
nobody to communicate it to that would embark with me, no
fellow-slave, no Englishman, Irishman, or Scotsman there but myself;
so that for two years, though I often pleased myself with the
imagination, yet I never had the least encouraging prospect of putting
it in practice.
After about two years an odd circumstance presented itself, which
put the old thought of making some attempt for my liberty again in
my head. My patron lying at home longer than usual without fitting out
his ship, which, as I heard, was for want of money, he used
constantly, once or twice a week, sometimes oftener, if the weather
was fair, to take the ship's pinnace, and go out into the road
a-fishing; and as he always took me and a young Maresco with him to
row the boat, we made him very merry, and I proved very dexterous in
catching fish; insomuch, that sometimes he would send me with a
Moor, one of his kinsmen, and the youth the Maresco, as they called
him, to catch a dish of fish for him.