I spent a lot of time making a large shelf for my cave. I found a big tree and chopped it down. This took three days. Then, I chopped off the branches. This took another two days. After that, I chopped the wood away from one side, and then from the other side. This took more than one month. Altogether it took forty-two days. In England, two men with a good saw could have made six of these shelves from that tree in half a day.
I also spent a lot of time looking after my corn and rice crops. I had to protect them from wild animals and birds, so I made a fence around them. I shot some of the birds and hung them up near the corn. After that, all the other birds stayed away. I used one of the old swords I had taken from the ship to cut down the corn when it was ready. I was very proud of my corn and rice and worked hard to increase my crops. A few years later, I would have enough corn to make bread. I had to find a way to grind the corn into flour, but the rocks on the island were not hard enough. I finally discovered that a very hard piece of wood would do. I used some cloth to separate the meal from the husks. Not having anoven, I made some square pots with lids and covered them with hot ashes. This baked the dough, and I had bread! I made my cave bigger again to hold the corn and flour so that I could make bread whenever I needed to.
I sometimes wondered how I could get to the land which was visible from the other side of the island. I went to the ship’s boat that was blown onto the beach in the shipwreck. However, I could not get it to the water. It was too heavy. I tried many different ways of doing it, but none of them were successful.