Having had it on my mind to relate the end of this dear little child, I
have omitted something from its exact place, which I will supply here. It
will come quite as well here as anywhere else.

Foreseeing that if the boat lived through the stormy weather, the time
must come, and soon come, when we should have absolutely no morsel to
eat, I had one momentous point often in my thoughts. Although I had,
years before that, fully satisfied myself that the instances in which
human beings in the last distress have fed upon each other, are
exceedingly few, and have very seldom indeed (if ever) occurred when the
people in distress, however dreadful their extremity, have been
accustomed to moderate forbearance and restraint; I say, though I had
long before quite satisfied my mind on this topic, I felt doubtful
whether there might not have been in former cases some harm and danger
from keeping it out of sight and pretending not to think of it. I felt
doubtful whether some minds, growing weak with fasting and exposure and
having such a terrific idea to dwell upon in secret, might not magnify it
until it got to have an awful attraction about it. This was not a new
thought of mine, for it had grown out of my reading. However, it came
over me stronger than it had ever done before--as it had reason for
doing--in the boat, and on the fourth day I decided that I would bring
out into the light that unformed fear which must have been more or less
darkly in every brain among us. Therefore, as a means of beguiling the
time and inspiring hope, I gave them the best summary in my power of
Bligh's voyage of more than three thousand miles, in an open boat, after
the Mutiny of the Bounty, and of the wonderful preservation of that
boat's crew. They listened throughout with great interest, and I
concluded by telling them, that, in my opinion, the happiest circumstance
in the whole narrative was, that Bligh, who was no delicate man either,