A few pages later, in one of Defoe’s calculated ironies, Crusoe is shipwrecked on a slaving expedition, and begins to understand the reality behind his desert-island hyperbole, as he becomes a real castaway on an island of real desolation. There is no question that Defoe intended a morality tale, but as a prolific writer (four hundred works bear his name), he was well-enough acquainted with the public taste to know that for his story to be believed it needed persuasive detail. Crusoe is not high-minded. He is a rebellious son who is attracted to the risky and the morally doubtful. He is inexperienced, not a Londoner but a young provincial, a Yorkshireman. That he is from a reasonably well-off family makes him seem out of touch and a bit innocent; he keeps reminding us how average he is in being incompetent (‘‘I had never handled a tool in my life’’), and accident prone (‘‘I that was born to be my own destroyer’’), and he is not at all religious until he finds a Bible among the tools and seeds and paraphernalia he rescues from the smashed ship.
He survives by growing and maturing; but he does more than survive—he ends by ruling the island, by becoming if not wise, then sensible; by acquiring power and using it with understanding. He progresses from being an almost-victim to an almost-dictator. One of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is that in order to prevail over the natural obstacles of his island, Crusoe has to learn the rudiments of civilization. For this to happen he must become acquainted with the paradox that his desert island is both a prison and a kingdom—he uses those very words. Early on, he describes himself as a prisoner and describes his anguish. Later he speaks of ‘‘the sixth year of my reign, or my captivity, which you please.’’ After some time passes and his confidence grows, his hut is a ‘‘castle,’’ and with the appearance (and conversion from cannibalism) of Friday, he thinks of himself as a ruler. At last, with his rescue of the Spaniards and Friday’s father he says, ‘‘My island was now peopled and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, How like a king I looked.’’ And he thinks of himself as an absolute ruler and even a despot, but a benevolent one.
Whenever the subject of
Robinson Crusoe
comes up, the name Alexander Selkirk is mentioned. Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scotsman from the village of Largo in Fifeshire, was a contemporary of Defoe. He was a seaman and notorious for his pugnacity—well-known for his having thrown his father down a flight of stairs. During a voyage on a privateer in the Pacific, he quarreled with his captain and demanded to be put ashore on the remote (and deserted) island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile. There he remained for five years, 1704-09. He became a popular hero on his rescue and return to Britain. Details of his life as a castaway were published: his living off the land, his thatched-roof huts, his goatskin wardrobe. He said that he hankered for the tranquillity of his simple life on the island. The celebrated essayist Richard Steele interviewed Selkirk and used him as a living illustration of the maxim ‘‘that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities.’’
There is no evidence that Defoe ever met Selkirk, but as a journalist he obviously knew the story and Selkirk was undoubtedly the inspiration for
Robinson Crusoe.
But though Selkirk was apostrophized as a simple-lifer, he was in effect no more than a survivor in extraordinary circumstances. The differences between Crusoe and Selkirk are more significant than the similarities. Selkirk’s story is a fairly simple tale of survival on a barren island, while Crusoe’s is at once a story of atonement and colonization; it is about becoming civilized—at least in eighteenth -century terms, when forcible conversion and slave trading were regarded as elements of civilization.
Selkirk was a pirate who remained a pirate. Crusoe, also an unruly son, is supremely disobedient; his experience on the island (at the mouth of the Orinoco) is both his punishment and his reward, as his island prison is transformed into his kingdom. Crusoe epitomizes perspective. The issue of survival is secondary to the whole debate circling around the matter of point of view, which is summed up in his stating that on the island, ‘‘I entertained different notions of things.’’ Ambition and arrogance and greed got him into this fix; rationalism gets him out of it. When he sees the futility of riches on the island, the meaninglessness of money, the vanity of hoarding, and reaches the conclusion ‘‘That the good things of this world are no farther good to us, that they are for our Use,’’ he is on the way to salvation.
The odd thing is that Selkirk is usually represented as a kind of marvel and of course he isn’t. He is just the singular fellow who returned to tell his tale of solitary survival. Crusoe insists that the reader see him as an unexceptional but a vivid warning, a living example of the ills of man, beset by hubris and discontent. ‘‘I have been in all my circumstances a memento to those who are touched with the general plague of mankind. . . .’’
Crusoe is only solitary for part of his ordeal. The dramatic, and poignant, appearance of the footprint and the serious meditation that follows is one of the episodes that lifts this novel to another level of meaning. It also shows Defoe as someone who could speak in the plainest and most convincing way about tools and seeds and grape growing, while at the same time being capable of the most profound rumination about the invasion of solitude and society and the definitions of space and time. Crusoe had lamented his solitude earlier, but no sooner has he conquered it and prevailed over his isolation than he has to reckon on the complexities of human company. The footprint is the beginning of this test of his understanding and the end of his Eden. What follows is like an allegory of the Ascent of Man, for he has to cope with cannibalism, aggression, warfare, and the competitive instinct. By overcoming these obstacles, Crusoe grows stronger. And yet, though he is a hero in a literary sense, he is not heroic in his deeds. His most persuasive quality is his humanity; he is the congenital bumbler who is challenged by circumstances to become competent. And one might add that though the Bible strengthens him, he does not become visibly religious until Friday appears, and then he is sanctimonious.
If
Robinson Crusoe
were a story about holding out against the odds, then everything would hinge on Crusoe’s rescue. But this is not the case. By mastering himself, Crusoe masters the island and makes a world of it. He progresses in an almost evolutionary sense from a lowly creature precariously clinging to life at the edge of the island, to being the dominant species on it; he moves from castaway to colonizer. At the end, Crusoe is both, as he says, a king and a ‘‘Generalissimo.’’ Defoe’s point is that Crusoe does not need to be rescued, and it is emphasized by the fact that no sooner has he been scooped up and told his story, than he returns to the island and prospers. It is a success story—of fall and rise; it is also a narrative of purification, with the most downright details as well as something approaching the spiritual. Not surprisingly, this novel has been in print and popular for almost three hundred years.
—Paul Theroux
Preface
IF EVER the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making public, and were acceptable when published, the editor of this account thinks this will be so.
The wonders of this man’s life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of a greater variety
The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them (viz.) to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let them happen how they will.
The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it. And however thinks, because all such things are disputed, that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion, as to the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without further compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication.
I Go to Sea
I WAS BORN in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise and, leaving off his trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name ‘‘Crusoe,’’ and so my companions always called me.
I had two elder brothers, one of which was lieutenant-colonel to an English regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Colonel Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards; what became of my second brother I never knew, any more than my father or mother did know what was become of me.
Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts. My father, who was very ancient, had given me a competent share of learning, as far as house education and a country free school generally goes, and designed me for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands, of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends that there seemed to be something fatal in that propension of nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.
My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons more than a mere wandering inclination I had for leaving my father’s house and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz., that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.
He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues, and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, not sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest; not enraged with the passion of envy, or secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but in easy circumstances sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter, feeling that they are happy, and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly.
After this, he pressed me earnestly, and in the most affectionate manner, not to play the young man, nor to precipitate myself into miseries which nature and the station of life I was born in seemed to have provided against; that I was under no necessity of seeking my bread; that he would do well for me, and endeavour to enter me fairly into the station of life which he had been just recommending to me; and that if I was not very easy and happy in the world, it must be my mere fate or fault that must hinder it, and that he should have nothing to answer for, having thus discharged his duty in warning me against measures which he knew would be to my hurt. In a word, that as he would do very kind things for me if I would stay and settle at home, as he directed, so he would not have so much hand in my misfortunes as to give me any encouragement to go away. And to close all, he told me, I had my elder brother for an example, to whom he had used the same earnest persuasions to keep him from going into the Low Country wars, but could not prevail, his young desires prompting him to run into the army, where he was killed; and though he said he would not cease to pray for me, yet he would venture to say to me that if I did take this foolish step, God would not bless me, and I would have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel, when there might be none to assist in my recovery.