“Now, here is what we will have to do. We must select a site for our camp,--or town, you may well say,--and we must build upon it without delay. That is to be our first step. Details will come later. There are over six hundred of us here. We represent a fair-sized village. We have mechanics, carpenters, farmers, surveyors, masons,--and merchants, to say nothing of cooks, housekeepers, and so on. The ship contains all sorts of tools to work with, canvas for temporary quarters, beds and bedding, cooking utensils,--in fact, we have everything that Robinson Crusoe didn't have, and besides all that, we've got each other. We are not alone on a desert island. We are, my friends, as well off as the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock, and we are better off than the hardy colonists who laid the foundation for the country that flies that flag up there. Centuries ago bold adventurers set out to discover unknown lands. They were few in number and poorly equipped. But they ventured into the wilderness and built villages that grew to be cities. They went through a thousand hardships that we will never know, and they survived.
“Captain Trigger and the others selected me to make this talk to you because I have had some practical experience in establishing and developing a camp, such as we will have to build. Experience has taught me one thing above all others: work, hard work of a constructive nature, is our only salvation. Unless we occupy ourselves from one day's end to another in good, hard, honest toil, we will all go mad. That's the long and the short of it. If we sat still on this boat for thirty days, doing nothing, we'd lose our minds. There isn't a man in this crowd, I am sure, who wouldn't work his head off to spare the women an hour of hardship. But the greatest hardship you women could possibly know would be idleness. There will be work for every one to do, and we can thank God for it, my friends. We will have to work for nothing. We will have to help each other. There is but one class on this island at present, and that is the working class.
“We've all got people at home waiting for us. By this time the whole world knows that the Doraine is three weeks overdue at Rio Janeiro, and that no word has been had from her. The ocean is being searched. Our friends, our relatives are doing everything in their power to get trace of this lost ship. You may depend on that. In a little while,--a few weeks, at best,--the ship will be given up for lost. We will be counted as dead, all of us. That's a hard, cruel thing for me to say, and I hate to say it,--but we've just got to realize the position we're in. It's best that we should look at it from the worst possible angle. I do not speak jestingly when I say that we may as well consider ourselves dead and forgotten. I am as full of hope and confidence as anybody and I am an optimist if there ever was one, but I don't work on the theory that God takes any better care of an optimist than He does of a pessimist.