Crusoe climbs down to a calm morning and a ship the night tide has pushed in, about a mile off, almost to the rock that bruised him. The ship's boat lies two miles the other way, beyond an inlet, so he leaves it. He swims the last of the distance, hauls up a rope on the fore-chains, and finds the stern dry. Biscuit goes into his pockets. Rum steadies him. With no boat he can launch, he lashes spare yards and a sawn topmast into a raft and loads bread, rice, cheeses, dried goat, the rats' leavings of corn, cordial waters, the carpenter's chest, guns, pistols, swords, and two dry barrels of powder. His coat and shirt drift off the beach while he works. The raft then grounds on a shoal and the cargo starts to slide. He braces the chests until the tide levels him, shoves into a creek, and moors on a flat with broken oars. The ebb leaves the load safe. A hill a mile inland tells him the rest. From the top the sea rings him round. Only distant rocks and two smaller islands, about three leagues west, break the water. A shot at a hawk-like bird, flesh fit for nothing, sends unknown fowls screaming out of the wood. He sleeps that night in a ring of chests.
Low tide takes him back, and he keeps going. A second raft brings nails, hatchets, a grindstone, muskets, clothes, a sail, and the mate's hammock. A wild cat eats one bit of biscuit from his hand and walks off when he will spare no more. He pitches a tent inside a circle of casks, pistols by his head. Thirteen days ashore and eleven trips strip the ship of rigging, canvas, cable, a hogshead of bread, rum, sugar, and flour. The last, heaviest raft oversets in the cove. He dives through the ebb for iron and pieces of cable. On a twelfth trip he finds razors, knives, and about thirty-six pounds in coin. He calls the money a drug, says a knife is worth the heap, and wraps the coins in canvas all the same. The wind rises off the land. He swims for the tent. By morning the ship has vanished.
The low camp is damp and has no fresh water, so he looks for shade, a view of the sea, and ground nothing can rush down. A plain on the sheltered side of a hill gives him a hollow in the rock, not yet a cave. He drives a half-circle of stakes, packs cable between the rows, and enters by a ladder he pulls up behind him. A tent within a tent, the outer one under a tarpaulin, holds what rain would spoil. Then lightning makes him think of the powder. He stops building and, in about a fortnight, splits some two hundred and forty pounds into a hundred parcels and hides them in the rocks. Goats, he learns, flee if they see him from below and ignore him if he climbs above them. He kills a she-goat. The kid follows to the fence, will not eat, and he kills it too, eating both slowly so the bread will last. Afraid of losing the days, he sets a post like a cross on the first landing place, cuts the date, the 30th of September 1659, and notches each day after, longer at the week and longer again at the month. Pens, ink, compasses, and three Bibles are in the cargo. The two cats come with him. The dog swims ashore on his own and stays, a servant that cannot talk. To get the grief out of his head he writes the case as debtor and creditor: alone, but not drowned with the ten; naked, but in a heat where clothes are little use; no one to speak to, but the drifted ship has given him the means to live.
The fence of posts takes nearly a year. A turf wall thickens it, and later a thatch of boughs. Once he trusts the island has no beasts that hunt him, he digs sideways through the sandy rock and out beyond the pale, a back door and room for the heap that had left him nowhere to turn. He has never handled tools, yet without a table he can hardly write or eat in any comfort. Short boards from the raft become a chair and a table. A whole tree, hewn flat, gives a single shelf-plank. Pegs in the rock take the guns. The cave starts to look like a magazine, and the order pleases him. Only then does he begin a journal. After the landing he ran the shore crying that he was undone, and even with the stores ashore he still climbed a little mountain, thought he saw a sail, stared until he was nearly blind, and sat down and wept.
