CHAPTER V.
We had never explored the island, for we had been too busy with other things; but after our house was finished, Mr. Crusoe said that we must set out on an exploring expedition.
It was warm weather, but that didn’t prevent Mr. Crusoe from loading himself and me with about a thousand pounds of luggage. He carried in a belt around his waist a sword, a saw, a hatchet, and two revolvers. Then he lashed on his shoulders a basket holding two blankets and a lot of provisions, and he carried a shot-gun on one shoulder and a rifle on the other. He made me carry another load just like his own, and he grumbled because he did not have an umbrella to keep the sun off.
We started early in the morning to climb the big hill, at the foot of which we built our first house. If the luggage weighed a thousand pounds when we started, it weighed at least ten thousand before we got to the top of the hill. Mr. Crusoe’s sword and his saw kept getting between his legs and tripping him up every little while, and when he came down you’d have thought by the noise that a tin-peddler’s wagon had capsized. He fell on the edge of the saw once, but it was probably a good thing, for it helped him to get up quicker than I ever saw a man get up before. I expected to see some of his guns and pistols go off every time he fell, but they didn’t do it.
We were as hot and tired when we got to the top of the hill as if we had walked twenty miles, and Mr. Crusoe piled up his cargo on the ground and lay down to rest. We could see the whole island from the place where we were. It was about two miles across and three miles long, and the coral reef ran all around it, except just where there was the opening that we could see from the beach. Far away to the southward I could see land, but it was so far off that you could hardly tell it from a faint cloud.
I had brought the ship’s ensign in my basket unknown to Mr. Crusoe, and I now got it out, for I meant to set it, union down, on one of the big trees on the top of the hill.
Mr. Crusoe, tired as he was, jumped up and snatched it away from me.
“I know what you meant to do with that,” he said; “you were going to signal the cannibals that we are here.”
“I never thought about the cannibals,” said I, “and I don’t believe in them very much anyway. I was going to set the ensign as a signal of distress, so that some vessel can see it, and come and take us off.”