I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had possessed me.  I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as I could to make amends.  But first, ere the great task began, I returned thanks to that Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously preserved.  Thereupon I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning the seals, cutting the meat into strips, and placing it upon the tops of rocks to dry in the sun.  Also, I found small deposits of salt in the nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather side of the island.  This I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.

Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in that no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted.  The unremitting labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means of this wholesome diet in which I did not stint myself.  Another evidence of God’s mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that barren islet, was there so long a spell of clear weather and steady sunshine as in the period immediately following the slaughter of the seals.

Months were to pass ore ever the seals revisited my island.  But in the meantime I was anything but idle.  I built me a hut of stone, and, adjoining it, a storehouse for my cured meat.  The hut I roofed with many sealskins, so that it was fairly water-proof.  But I could never cease to marvel, when the rain beat on that roof, that no less than a king’s ransom in the London fur market protected a castaway sailor from the elements.

I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all knowledge of the day of the week, and be unable to distinguish one from the other, and not know which was the Lord’s day.

I remembered back carefully to the reckoning of time kept in the longboat by Captain Nicholl; and carefully, again and again, to make sure beyond any shadow of uncertainty, I went over the tale of the days and nights I had spent on the island.  Then, by seven stones outside my hut, I kept my weekly calendar.  In one place on the oar I cut a small notch for each week, and in another place on the oar I notched the months, being duly careful indeed, to reckon in the additional days to each month over and beyond the four weeks.

Thus I was enabled to pay due regard to the Sabbath.  As the only mode of worship I could adopt, I carved a short hymn, appropriate to my situation, on the oar, which I never failed to chant on the Sabbath.  God, in His all-mercy, had not forgotten me; nor did I, in those eight years, fail at all proper times to remember God.

It was astonishing the work required, under such circumstances, to supply one’s simple needs of food and shelter.  Indeed, I was rarely idle, that first year.  The hut, itself a mere lair of rocks, nevertheless took six weeks of my time.  The tardy curing and the endless scraping of the sealskins, so as to make them soft and pliable for garments, occupied my spare moments for months and months.