Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe With His Vision of the Angelick World

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

and uninhabited, or at least by such as cannot be called Christians and do not concern themselves about it, as, particularly, the Swedish and Norwegian Lapland, the more eastern and southern Muscovy, beyond the Volga, even to Karakathie, and to the borders of Asia, on the side of India — I say, taking in this part, not above one-half of Europe is really inhabited by Christians.

The Czar of Muscovy, of the religion of whose subjects I have said enough, is lord of a vast extended country; and those who have measured it critically say his dominions are larger than all the rest of Europe, that is to say, that he possesses a full half as much as Europe; and in those dominions he is master of abundance of nations that are pagan or Mahomedan, as, in particular, Circassia, being conquered by him, the Circassian Tartars, who are all Mahometans, or the most of them, are his subjects.

However, since a Christian monarch governs them, we must, upon the plan I laid down, call this a Christian country; and that alone obliges me to give two-thirds of Europe to the Christians.

But this will bring another account upon my hands to balance it, viz., that excepting this two-thirds, there will not come one Christian to be accounted for in any of the other three parts of the world, except Georgia and Armenia. As for Africa, there is nothing to be mentioned on that side, all the Christians that are on the continent of Africa consisting only of a

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few merchants residing at the coast towns in the Mediterranean, as at Alexandria, Grand Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, &c.; the factories of the English and Dutch on the coast of Guinea, the Gold Coast, the coast of Angola, and at the Cape of Good Hope; all which put together, as I have calculated them, and as they are calculated by a better judgment than mine, will not amount to 5000 people, excepting Christian slaves in Sallee, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, &c., which are not so many more.

America is thronged with Christians, God wot, such as they are; for I must confess the European inhabitants of some of the colonies there, as well French and English as Spanish and Dutch, very ill merit that name.

Some part of America is entirely under the dominion and government of the European nations; and having indeed destroyed the natives, and made desolate the country, they may be said to be Christian countries in the sense as above.

But what numbers do these amount to compared to the inhabitants of so great a part of the world as that of America, which at least is three times as big as Europe, and in which are still vast extended countries, infinite numbers of people, of nations unknown and even unheard of, which neither the English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese have ever seen? Witness the populous cities and innumerable nations which Sir Walter Raleigh met with in his voyage up the great river Oronooque, in one of which they talk of two millions of people; witness the nations, infinitely populous, spread on both sides

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the river Amazon, and all the country between these two prodigious rivers, being a country above 400 miles in breadth and 1600 miles in length, besides its extent south, even to the Rio Paraguay, and S.E. to the Brazils, a rich, fruitful, and populous country; and in which, by the accounts given, there must be more people inhabiting at this time than in all the Christian part of Europe put together, being the chief if not the only part of America into which the Spaniards never came, and whither the frighted people fled from them, being so fortified with rivers and impassable bays and rapid currents, and so inaccessible by the number of inhabitants, the heat of the climate, and the mountains, waterfalls, and such other obstructions, that the Spaniards durst never attempt to penetrate the way.

What are the numbers of Christians in America, put them all together, to the inhabitants of these parts of America, besides the northern parts of America, not inquired into?

But we are not calculating of people yet, but the extent of land that the Christians possess; the British colonies in the north are by far the most populous, even more than the Spaniards themselves, though the latter extend themselves over more land.

The British colonies in the north of America are supposed to contain three hundred thousand souls, including Nova Scotia, New England, New York, New Jersey, East and West Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina; and these lie extended upon the coast from the latitude of 32 degrees to 47, or

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thereabouts, being about 750 miles in length; but then much of this is very thinly peopled, and the breadth they lie west into the country is little or nothing, 50 or 60 miles is in many places the most. And except some plantations in Virginia, in Rappahanock, and James River in Virginia, occasioned by the great inlet of the bay there, and of the rivers that fall into it, we can see nothing a hundred miles within that land but waste and woods, whose inhabitants seem to be fled farther up into the country, from the face of their enemies the Christians.

So that all this planting, though considerable, amounts to no more, compared to the country itself, than a long narrow slip of land upon the sea-coast, there being very few English inhabitants planted anywhere above twenty miles from the sea, or from some navigable river, and even that sea-coast itself very thinly inhabited, and particularly from New England to New York, from New England north to Annapolis, from Virginia to Carolina; so that all this great colony or collection of colonies — nay, though we include the French at Canada — are but a point, a handful, compared to the vast extent of land lying west and north-west from them, even to the South Sea, an extent of continent full of innumerable nations of people unknown, undiscovered, never searched into, or indeed heard of but from one another, much greater in its extent than all Europe.

If we take the north part of America, exclusive of all the country which the Spaniards possess, and which they call the empire of Mexico, and exclusive too of what the English and

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French possess on the coast and in the two rivers of Canada and Mississippi as above, which indeed are but trifles, the rest of that country, which, as far as it has been travelled into, is found exceeding populous, is a great deal larger than all Europe, though we have not reckoned the most northern, frozen, and almost uninhabitable part of it, where no end can be found, and where it is there can be no doubt but there is a contiguous continent with the northern part of Asia, or so near joining it as to be only parted by a narrow gulf or strait of sea, easily passed over both by man and beast, or else it would be hard to give an account how man or beast came into that part of the world — I say this vast continent, full of people, and no doubt inhabited by many millions of souls, is all wrapt up in idolatry and paganism, given up to ignorance and blindness, worshipping the sun, the moon, the fire, the hills their fathers, and, in a word, the devil.

As to the thing we call religion, or the knowledge of the true God, much less the doctrine of the Messiah and the name of Christ, they not only have not, but never had the least intimation of it on earth, or revelation of it from heaven, till the Spaniards came among them; nay, and now Christians are come among them, it is hard to say whether the paganism is much abated except by the infinite ravages the Spaniards made where they came, who rooted out idolatry by destroying the idolaters, not by converting them; having cruelly cut off, as their own writers affirm, above seventy millions of people, and left the country naked of its inhabitants for many hundred miles together.

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But what need we come to calculations for the present time with respect to America? Let us but be at the trouble to look back a little more than a hundred years, which is as nothing at all in the argument; how had the whole continent of America, extended almost from pole to pole, with all the islands round it, and peopled with such innumerable multitudes of people, been as it were entirely abandoned to the devil’s government, even from the beginning of time, or at least from the second peopling the world by Noah to the sixteenth century, when Ferdinando Cortez, general for the famous Charles the Fifth, first landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

We have heard much of the cruelty of the Spaniards in destroying such multitudes of the inhabitants there, and of cutting off whole nations by fire and sword; but as I am for giving up all the actions of men to the government of

Providence, it seems to me that Heaven had determined such an act of vengeance should be executed, and of which the Spaniards were instruments, to destroy those people, who were come up (by the influence of the devil, no doubt) to such a dreadful height, in that abhorred custom of human sacrifices, that the innocent blood cried for it, and it seemed to be time to put a stop to that crime, lest the very race of people should at last be extinct by their own butcheries.

The magnitude of this may be guessed at by the temple consecrated to the great idol of Vistlipustli, in the city of Mexico, where, at the command of Montezuma, the pagan mon-

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arch, twenty thousand men were sacrificed in a year, and the wall hung a foot thick with clotted blood, dashed in ceremony against the side of that place on those occasions.

This abomination God in His providence put an end to by destroying those nations from the face of the earth, bringing a race of bearded strangers upon them, cutting in pieces man, woman, and child, destroying their idols, and even the idolatry itself by the Spaniards, who, however wicked in themselves, yet were in this to be esteemed instruments in the hand of Heaven to execute the Divine justice on nations whose crimes were come up to a full height, and that called for vengeance.

I make no doubt (to carry on this digression a little farther) that when God cast out the heathen, so the Scripture calls it, from before the Israelites, and the iniquity of the people of the land was full, Joshua, Moses, and the Israelites were taxed with as much cruelty and inhumanity in destroying the cities, killing man, woman, and child, nay, even destroying the very cattle, and trees, and fruits of the earth, as ever the Spaniards were charged with in the conquest of Mexico.

This is apparent by the terror that was spread upon the minds of the people round about them, whereof thousands fled to other parts of the world. History tells us that the first builders of the city of Carthage, long before the Roman times, or before the fable of Queen Dido, were some Phoenicians, that is to say, Canaanites, who, flying for their lives, got ships and went away to sea, planting themselves on the coast of Af-

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rica as the first place of safety they arrived at; and to prove this a pillar of stone was found not far from Tripoli, on which was cut, in Phoenician characters, these words: “We are of those who fled from the face of Joshua the robber.”

The cruelties of the Israelites, in destroying the nations of the land of Canaan, was commanded from heaven, and therein Joshua was justified in what was done. The cruelties of the Spaniards, however abhorred by us, was doubtless an appointment of God for the destruction of the most wicked and abominable people upon earth.

But this is all a digression; I come to my calculation. It is true that the Spaniards, whom I allow to be Christians, have possessed the empires of Mexico and Peru; but after all the havoc they made, and the millions of souls they dismissed out of life there, yet the natives are infinitely the majority of the inhabitants; and though many of them are Christianised, they are little more than subjected; and take all the Spaniards, Christians, and all the Portuguese in the Brazils, all the English and French in the north, and, in a word, all the Christians in America, and put them together, they will not balance one part of the pagans or Mahomedans in Europe; for example, take the Crim Tartars of Europe, who inhabit the banks of the Euxine Sea, they are more in number than all the Christians in America; so that setting one nation against the other, and you may reckon that there is not one Christian, or as if there were not one Christian, in those three parts of the world, Asia, Africa, and America, except the Greeks of Asia.

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This is a just but a very sad account of the small extent of Christian knowledge in the world; and were it considered as it ought, would put the most powerful princes of Europe upon thinking of some methods, at least, to open a way for the spreading Christian knowledge. I am not much of the opinion, indeed, that religion should be planted by the sword; but as the Christian princes of Europe, how ever few in number, are yet so superior to all the rest of the world in martial experience and the art of war, nothing is more certain than that, if they could unite their interest, they are able to beat paganism out of the world. Nothing is more certain than this, that would the Christian princes unite their powers and act in concert, they might destroy the Turkish Empire and the Persian kingdom, and beat the very name of Mahomet out of the world.

It is no boast to say that, were there no intestine broils among us, the Christian soldiery is so evidently superior to the Turkish at this time, that had they all joined after the late battle at Belgrade to have sent 80,000 veteran soldiers to have joined Prince Eugene, and supplied him with money and provisions by the ports of the Adriatic Gulf and the Archipelago, that prince would in two or three campaigns have driven the Mahomedans out of Europe, taken Constantinople, and have overturned the Turkish Empire.

After such a conquest, whither might not the Christian religion have spread? The King of Spain with the same ease would reduce the Moors of Barbary, and dispossess those sons of hell, the Algerines, Tripolines, Tunizens, and all the Mahomedan

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pirates of that coast, and plant again the ancient churches of Africa, the sees of Tertullian, St. Cyprian, &c.

Nay, even the Czar of Muscovy, an enterprising and glorious prince, well assisted and supported by his neighbours, the northern powers, who together are masters of the best soldiery in the world, would not find it impossible to march an army of 36,000 foot and 16,000 horse, in spite of waste and inhospitable deserts, even to attack the Chinese Empire, who, notwithstanding their infinite numbers, pretended policy, and great skill in war, would sink in the operation; and such an army of disciplined European soldiers would beat all the forces of that vast empire with the same or greater ease as Alexander with 30,000 Macedonians destroyed the army of Darius, which consisted of 680,000 men.

And let no man ridicule this project on account of the march, which I know they will call 3000 miles, and more. While there is no obstruction but the length of the way, it is not so difficult as some may imagine; ‘tis far from impossible to furnish sufficient provisions for the march, which is indeed the only difficulty that carries any terror in it.

Such a prince as the Czar of Muscovy cannot want the assistance of innumerable hands for the amassing, or carriage for conveying, to proper magazines sufficient stores of provisions for the maintaining a select chosen body of men to march over the deserts, for in the grand march no useless mouths should be found to feed.

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