Robinson Crusoe

This section includes jumps in time that show glimpses of Crusoe’s life eighteen years into being cast away. Halfway through this section Crusoe spots a footprint near the shore that terrifies him. This section opens as Crusoe, at last, manages to construct a boat and describes his getting caught in a powerful rip current during a boat-journey six years into his stay. Crusoe almost meets sure ruin. After incredible efforts, Crusoe navigates free of the current. He returns to his bower, again praising the wealth of the island and deciding not to venture off it again.

As this section progresses, Crusoe further details his life on the island, describing his clothes, made of goat skin, which make him resemble a medieval knight, for he carries two pistols and a broad sword across his waist.

His routine remains similar for eighteen years. As Crusoe thinks about new needs—like wanting beer, and not having a large enough oven, he expands his cave into various apartments so that it occupies the inside of the hill and exits through a door on the side of the hill opposite his tent, and continues fortifying his wall, ultimately building another semi-circle wall outside his second wall, which includes holes for muskets. This because Crusoe sees a footprint, one day in his eleventh year, near the shore that breeds intense fear that his island might be inhabited, or visited by cannibals sailing from a nearby main island. At first Crusoe, “fancy’d it must be the Devil” (113). “O what ridiculous resolutions men take, when possess’d with fear!” Crusoe writes. “It deprives them of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief. The first thing I propos’d to my self, was, to thrown down my enclosures, and turn all my tame cattle into wild woods, that the enemy might not find them” (116). But his interior interrogations soon give way to reason. For months, Crusoe becomes bent on destroying the savages this one footprint must belong to. Every day Crusoe camouflages himself on top a hill, observing the shore where he spotted the print for any approaching ships. Crusoe’s fear leads him to create an enclosure for the goats, in a barely-seen wooded meadow near the western fruitful fields, he has tamed, which provide food. He plans to grow surplus barley and rice. Towards the end of this section, these fears prove half-true, as hiking towards the far southwest point of the island, Crusoe spots a beach littered with human skulls and bones.

As with other sections, Crusoe continues making biblical allusions, this time mentioning the story of Saul, who became St. Paul. Likewise, Crusoe continues to explore the role providence plays in his life. Crusoe comes to believe God’s providence created conditions where he shipwrecked on his side of the island, which visitors, likely savages, would not reach, since they would first think the island appears uninhabited and worthless. “I then reflected that God, who was not only righteous but omnipotent, as he had thought fit thus to punish afflict me, so he was able to deliver me; that if he did not think fit do it, ’twas my unquestion’d duty to resign my self absolutely and entirely to his will” (114). Thoughts like this remind Crusoe that in eighteen years, he never sees another human creature, which leads Crusoe’s mind back into safe quarters.

These pages chronicle up to the twenty-sixth year Crusoe spends living on the uninhabited island. The major event occurs during Crusoe’s twenty-third year, in the month of May, when for the first time Crusoe sees humans: “no less than nine naked savages, sitting round a small fire, they had made, not to warm them […] but as I suppos’d, to dress some of their barbarous diet, of human flesh, which they had brought with them, whether alive or dead I could not know” (133). Towards the end of this section, Crusoe hears gunfire that he judges comes from men in distress. Crusoe then lights bushel on fire on the side of the hill, as means of communication, which inspires more gunfire. But when the storm subsides the following day, Crusoe finds the men’s ship wrecked, and he resolves to approach it and scour for provisions.

The incident spotting the savages occurs at an interesting time in the narrative, as Crusoe spends the first part of this section in moral exploration, deciding that he would be a more barbarous sinner if he hunts and kills the savages than if he leaves them alone. For it is God’s Providence that allowed them to continue in their traditions for ages. “What authority or call I had, to pretend to be judge as executioner upon these men as criminals” he writes, “whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunish’d, to go on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments” (125). These inner explorations lead to Crusoe condemning Spain for its countrymen’s heinous behavior enslaving millions of natives in Brazil and abroad.

Even before Crusoe observes the savages, he changes his daily routine to reduce smoke from his fires. He spends more time in the wooded meadow, in which Crusoe encloses the goats, and one day, moving bushel and firewood, discovers a cave that inside is quite large. Crusoe begins using this cave as a place of security, believing no savage would venture inside. One day, he sees two eyes, and hears moaning, stirring his greatest fears, but finds it is a dying goat. In the cave, or grotto, Crusoe finds “the walls reflected a hundred thousand lights” but “whether diamonds, or any precious stones or gold” (130) he is unsure. Into this cave, Crusoe brings his magazine of ammunition and other provisions.

Before Crusoe observes the savages around their fire, his journal turns again to inner explorations, and God’s providence. He discusses his parrot, which often calls out Poor Robin Crusoe, and describes other animals he keeps: “several tame sea-fowls, whose names I know not, who I caught upon the shore, and cut their wings” (132). Crusoe journals how he could stay inside his enclave and never leave, for fear of savages: “How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun […] is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be rais’d again from the affliction we are fallen into” (132). These thoughts fill the pages leading up to the moment Crusoe observes the savages. Seeing them, Crusoe runs to a hill where he can better observe. There, he watches the savages canoe out to a larger group, with many more canoes, and watches them sail off towards a main island. In the years that follow, Crusoe learns they come every eighteen months or so, which alleviates some of his fears, allowing Crusoe to again sink into routine.