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 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 because he carries two pistols and a broad sword across his waist. 

His routine remains similar for 18 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. He also continues fortifying his wall, ultimately building another semi-circle wall outside his second wall, which includes holes for muskets. This is because Crusoe sees a footprint one day in his 11th year. It is near the shore and breeds intense fear that his island might be inhabited or visited by “cannibals” sailing from a nearby 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). 

For months, Crusoe becomes bent on destroying the people this one footprint must belong to. Every day Crusoe camouflages himself on top of 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 plans to grow surplus barley and rice. Toward the end of this section, Crusoe spots a beach littered with human skulls and bones.

Crusoe spends the first part of this section in moral exploration, deciding that it would be sinful to hunt and kill the people who may live on the island. It is God’s providence that has 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). Crusoe condemns Spain for its enslaving millions of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and abroad.

Crusoe changes his daily routine to reduce smoke from his fires. He spends more time in the wooded meadow 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 one else 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.

Crusoe 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 other people: “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). 

During Crusoe’s 23rd year, in the month of May, Crusoe sees humans on the island for the first time: “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). Seeing them, Crusoe runs to a hill where he can better observe. There, he watches the people canoe out to a larger group, with many more canoes, and sail off toward a main island. In the years that follow, Crusoe learns they come every 18 months or so, which alleviates some of his fears, allowing Crusoe to again sink into routine. Toward the end of this section, Crusoe hears gunfire that he judges comes from men in distress. Crusoe then lights bushels on fire on the side of the hill as a means of communication, which inspires more gunfire. However, when the storm subsides the following day, Crusoe finds the men’s ship wrecked, and he resolves to approach it and scour for provisions.