Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous stories in the world — the tale of a man shipwrecked alone on a desert island who survives for twenty-eight years by his own labour and ingenuity. Published in April 1719 as the autobiography of a real mariner, “written by himself”, it was the first great success of Daniel Defoe‘s career as a novelist and is often called the first English novel. Its hero, a restless merchant’s son from York who disobeys his father’s advice to stay at home in the “middle station of life”, becomes on his island farmer, builder, potter, basket-maker, tailor, hunter and king; he keeps a journal and a calendar, reads the Bible, is converted, fears cannibals, rescues one of their prisoners and makes him his servant, Friday, and is finally rescued by an English ship.

The book has been read as an adventure story, a Puritan spiritual autobiography, a myth of economic individualism, a parable of colonialism, and a meditation on solitude. It created a genre — the “Robinsonade” — and an archetype that has never lost its hold.

At a glance

The story

Robinson Crusoe is born in York in 1632, the third son of a prosperous merchant from Bremen. His father, a careful man, urges him to stay at home and enjoy the “middle station of life” — the happiest condition, free from the miseries of both poor and rich — and warns that if he goes to sea, God will not bless him. Robinson, possessed by “a propensity of nature” to wander, runs away to sea at eighteen. His first voyage from Hull ends in a storm and shipwreck off Yarmouth; he vows to repent, but forgets as soon as the danger is over.

He makes a profitable trading voyage to Guinea on the west coast of Africa. On a second voyage his ship is captured by Moorish pirates, and he becomes a slave in Sallee (Salé) in Morocco. After two years he escapes in a fishing boat with a boy, Xury, sailing down the African coast, where they hunt lions and meet African people, until a Portuguese captain picks them up. Crusoe sells the boat — and Xury, for sixty pieces of eight — and in Brazil buys land and becomes a prosperous sugar and tobacco planter. Short of labour, he and his neighbours plan a voyage to Guinea to buy slaves illegally; Crusoe goes as supercargo.

On 30 September 1659, a hurricane wrecks the ship near an island off the coast of South America. All the crew drown except Crusoe, who is thrown ashore. Alone, soaked, terrified, he spends the first night in a tree. The next day the wreck has been driven close to shore, and over the following days he swims out to it again and again and builds rafts to bring ashore everything he can: biscuits, rice, cheese, rum, carpenter’s tools, guns, powder, shot, swords, clothes, canvas, rope, nails, pens and ink, three Bibles, two cats and a dog. He finds money — and laughs at it: “O drug! what art thou good for?… I have no manner of use for thee” — and takes it anyway.

He builds a fortified dwelling against a rock face, with a tent and a cave behind a double palisade of stakes, entered by a ladder. He sets up a wooden post as a calendar, cutting a notch each day. He draws up an account of his condition like a ledger of “good” and “evil”: “I am cast upon a horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery” — “But I am alive, and not drowned, as all my ship’s company was.” He keeps a journal until his ink runs out.

With immense labour he learns to do everything: he makes a table and chair, shelves, a lamp from goat fat, clay pots that he learns to fire, baskets, an umbrella, clothes from goatskins (making him the famous figure in a shaggy hat). He tames goats and builds enclosures for a flock. Some grains of barley and rice shaken from a sack sprout by chance; he sees it as a miracle, then realises it was natural, yet still a gift of Providence; he cultivates them and, after years of trial, learns to make bread. He spends five months felling a huge cedar and hollowing a canoe, only to find it too heavy to drag to the water. He teaches a parrot, Poll, to say “Poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you? Where have you been?”

In his first year he falls seriously ill with fever and has a terrifying dream of an angel descending in flames to punish him. In his fear he opens the Bible and reads “Call on me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.” He experiences a conversion, repenting of his rebellion against his father and God, and from then on reads the Bible daily and interprets his life in terms of Providence. He comes to see his solitude as both a punishment and a deliverance from the world’s wickedness.

He explores the island, finds its fertile interior with grapes, limes and melons, and builds a second “country seat” there, calling himself “king and lord of all this country indefeasibly”. On the anniversary of his landing he fasts. In his sixth year he tries to circumnavigate the island in a smaller canoe and is nearly swept out to sea by a current.

In his fifteenth year comes the most famous moment in the book:

It happened one day about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.

He is thrown into terror for years, hiding, fortifying his home, imagining the devil or savages. He later discovers on the shore the remains of a cannibal feast — skulls, hands, feet and bones of men — left by people from the mainland who visit the island to kill and eat their prisoners. Horrified, he plans to massacre them, then reflects that they act according to their own customs and that he has no right to judge them, and resolves to defend himself only.

In his twenty-fifth year he sees cannibals land with two prisoners. One prisoner breaks free and runs toward his part of the island, pursued by two others. Crusoe intervenes, kills one pursuer and stuns the other, whom the fugitive kills. The rescued man, a young, handsome Carib, kneels and places Crusoe’s foot on his head as a sign of submission. Crusoe names him Friday, after the day of his rescue: “I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know that was to be my name.” He teaches Friday English, clothes him, cures him of his desire to eat human flesh, and converts him to Christianity, though Friday’s question — why God does not simply kill the devil, if he is so powerful — leaves Crusoe struggling for an answer. Friday proves loyal, affectionate, intelligent and skilful, and Crusoe grows to love him: “never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me.”

Friday tells him of white men living among his people, and they plan to sail to the mainland. Then cannibals land again with three prisoners; Crusoe and Friday attack, killing many, and rescue a Spaniard and an old man who turns out to be Friday’s father. Crusoe now has “subjects”: “My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects… I was absolute lord and lawgiver.” The Spaniard and Friday’s father go to the mainland to fetch the other Spaniards stranded there.

Before they return, an English ship anchors. Its crew have mutinied and bring their captain and two others ashore to maroon them. Crusoe and Friday free the captain and, by cunning — pretending to be the island’s governor with an army — recapture the ship. Crusoe leaves the worst mutineers on the island with instructions for survival, and on 19 December 1686 sets sail, after twenty-eight years, two months and nineteen days on the island, taking his goatskin cap, umbrella, parrot and money.

He returns to England after thirty-five years’ absence, finds his parents dead, and travels to Lisbon, where he learns that his Brazilian plantation has prospered, held in trust; he is now rich. Travelling overland back to England with Friday, he crosses the Pyrenees in winter, where they fight off a horde of ravenous wolves and Friday baits a bear. Crusoe settles in England, marries, has three children, and is widowed. In 1694 he visits his island, now a colony with Spaniards, English mutineers and their native wives; he distributes land, and promises more in the sequel.

Themes

Survival and labour. The most enduring pleasure of the book is practical: watching Crusoe solve problem after problem — shelter, food, tools, clothes, bread — by trial, error and patient work. The island becomes a model of the human transformation of nature, a whole civilisation rebuilt by one man’s hands.

Providence and conversion. Defoe was a Dissenter, and the book is structured like a Puritan spiritual autobiography: original sin (disobedience to the father), wandering, punishment, illness, conversion through Scripture, and a life of reading God’s hand in events. Crusoe constantly interprets accidents as signs. Whether this religious frame is sincere or a pious overlay on an adventure story is debated; most scholars now see it as integral.

Economic individualism. Crusoe keeps accounts, lists his goods, measures his labour, calls himself lord of the manor, and on his return finds his capital has grown. Karl Marx in Capital used “Robinson on his island” to analyse labour time and value, mocking the political economists who loved “Robinsonades”; Ian Watt made Crusoe the representative of homo economicus and of the individualism that made the novel possible. Crusoe’s isolation can be read as the condition of the modern self, alone with its property and its God.

Colonialism. Crusoe is a slave-owner and slave-trader (the fatal voyage was to buy slaves), a colonist who claims an inhabited region’s island as his property, names its native “Friday”, teaches him to call him “Master”, and rules over “subjects”. James Joyce called Crusoe “the true symbol of the British conquest… the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit… the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the practical and well-balanced religiousness, the calculating taciturnity.” Postcolonial writers have answered the book: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) imagines a woman castaway and a Friday whose tongue has been cut out; Derek Walcott’s Pantomime reverses the roles; Michel Tournier’s Vendredi (1967) lets Friday teach Crusoe.

Solitude. The book is also a profound study of loneliness — the terror of isolation, the longing for a voice (even a parrot’s), the panic of the footprint, which reveals that human company can be more frightening than solitude.

Reception and afterlife

Robinson Crusoe was an immediate bestseller and was soon translated into French, German, Dutch and many other languages. Rousseau, in Émile (1762), declared it the one book his ideal pupil would read — “the most felicitous treatise on natural education”. It spawned hundreds of imitations: Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, William Golding’s darker answer Lord of the Flies (1954). In modern times it lives on in films (Luis Buñuel’s 1954 version, Cast Away with Tom Hanks in 2000), television and survival culture.

In conversation

• “The footprint in the sand” — the sudden sign that one is not alone.
• Man Friday — a loyal helper (with colonial overtones that many now avoid).
• “Poor Robin Crusoe!” — the parrot’s cry; self-pity in isolation.