Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Preface
I Go to Sea
I Am Captured by Pirates
I Escape from the Sallee Rover
I Become a Brazilian Planter
I Go on Board in an Evil Hour
I Furnish Myself with Many Things
I Build My Fortress
The Journal
I Sow My Grain
I Travel Quite Across the Island
I Am Very Seldom Idle
I Make Myself a Canoe
I Improve Myself in the Mechanic Exercises
I Find the Print of a Man’s Naked Foot
I See the Shore Spread with Bones
I Seldom Go from My Cell
I See the Wreck of a Ship
I Hear the First Sound of a Man’s Voice
I Call Him Friday
We Make Another Canoe
We March Out Against the Cannibals
We Plan a Voyage to the Colonies of America
We Quell a Mutiny
We Seize the Ship
I Find My Wealth All About Me
We Cross the Mountains
I Revisit My Island
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) lived a life full of business successes and reverses, financial gains and losses, and political victories and defeats. Sent by his father to study for the ministry, Defoe entered the business world instead. In 1685, Defoe took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion against King James II; and in 1688, he joined a volunteer regiment that acted as William III’s escort into London. By 1692, Defoe’s business affairs had foundered and creditors filed suit against him, but he talked his way out of debtors’ prison. His poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) met with resounding success. In 1702, after he attacked the Tories in a pamphlet, the enraged government imprisoned him for two years; upon his release, he became a secret agent for the government. Between 1718 and 1723 he published Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year.
Paul Theroux is the award-winning author of such novels as Picture Palace (winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction) , The Mosquito Coast, My Secret History, Saint Jack, and Kowloon Tong. He has also published numerous best-selling travel books, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Kingdom by the Sea, and The Pillars of Hercules.
Robert Mayer is Professor of British Literature and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe and the editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen. His recent work includes the essay ‘‘Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood’’ and an ongoing study of authorship and reading that focuses on Sir Walter Scott.
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Introduction
Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story of the ultimate castaway, is so established in most people’s minds that even those who have not read it know some details of the story: Shipwreck. Desert island. Goatskin jacket and funny hat. Hairy umbrella. Talking parrot. Shocking footprint. Man Friday. Cannibals. Rescue. It is all so familiar as an apparently simple, wonderful tale of survival that it is easily read as a great yarn.
Crusoe is too human and accident prone to be truly heroic—this may be another reason for his enduring appeal. But the island setting is also a compelling feature of his story, for the island as a microcosm of the world has been used imaginatively in English in works as diverse as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Crusoe is more stubborn than brave, and his first-person narrative, the more believable for being defiantly unliterary, can be appreciated as the account of a man’s twenty-eight-year ordeal of loneliness, hunger, and physical threat; a man who ingeniously succeeds against the odds. But it is all so assured and so filled with plausible episodes and peculiar wisdom, it helps to be reminded that it was the first English novel and was written by a man nearly sixty, who resembled his fictional creation in his need to scheme in order to survive. Defoe was a master of improvisation, and he had to be, for his life was a chronicle of ups and downs—which is a fair description of this novel.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was, in the words of one critic, ‘‘a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned.’’ He was imprisoned for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses included bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used for perfume) for quick cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman, and sometime secret agent, whose first novel—the first in the English language—was a huge hit, running into many editions and being quickly pirated and imitated.
One of the reasons for the success of this piece of fiction was that it was taken for fact. It is utterly, vulgarly modern in that sense. In the preface, Defoe, wearing the mask of editor, wrote, ‘‘The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.’’ Defoe (who took the view that fiction could be a low and subversive trick that encouraged mendacity) had hit upon an idea that persists to this day—that if a book is said to be true, it is somehow a more important and authentic piece. ‘‘A true story, based on actual events,’’ runs the assertion in the made-for -TV movie. ‘‘It really happened!’’ the person says, who urges you to read such a book. That was also what Defoe wanted people to say in 1719 when Robinson Crusoe was first published; and they did say it and believed it.
The story is sensational—even today a story about such a castaway would be front-page news. But with time and rereading this adventure deepens in meaning, and the lo
nger you live, the more impressive an achievement Robinson Crusoe becomes, turning from amazing tale to a subtle study in innovation, a metaphor for human survival, and ultimately one of our own mythical tales, almost Biblical in its morality: Robinson is as vivid and unambiguous a character as Job or Jonah, two people he specifically mentions.
And surely it is significant that the very first English novel is a desert island story, just one man in the middle of nowhere, with almost nothing, who survives to create a whole world. In this sense the novel is like an allegory of the history of humankind. The narrative emerges from chaos, with no society or props to speak of. A whole metaphor of creation is described in this book, which is as surprising in its action as in its intelligence. Its contradictions are the contradictions in the lives of many people; it embodies many of our discontents and dilemmas. No women figure in its drama; there is no passion, and though there is affection, there is hardly any love. But in its understated way the novel discusses just about everything else—materialism, isolation, arrogance, travel, friendship, imperialism, rebellious children, the relativity of wealth, the conundrum of power, the ironies of solitude, learning by doing; it is about faith, atonement, and the passage of time. It is also as practical as a pair of shoes. No sooner is the ordeal over than Crusoe is back, founding a colony and counting his money; and in the same way, the Crusoe idea continued, producing sequels and parodies, giving words to the language—‘‘Crusoe’’ is a byword for castaway, as ‘‘Friday’’ is a synonym for helper.
Robinson begins life as a disobedient and hubristic, if accident-prone boy. He is given any amount of advice by his sententious father, the German immigrant to England, Herr Kreutznaer, who anglicized his name to Crusoe. The name change is a nice touch in a book full of detail, which is the more plausible for its being strange and even somewhat unnecessary. But as it happens, Defoe also changed his name, Frenchifying it, for his father’s name was plain Mr. Foe. Daniel Defoe was anything but average, but he chose to write about a pretty ordinary, though arrogant, young man who (ignoring his father’s Teutonic and pedestrian sermon on the safety of staying home) leaves home and finds himself involved in extraordinary events, beginning just days after his departure, when on his first voyage, his ship sinks. He is not deterred, and not even put off by a fairly prescient man who looks him in the eye and says that wherever he goes he ‘‘will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments.’’
Soon after, battling sea monsters, Crusoe is saved by his servant Xury; instead of rewarding him for his efforts, he sells Xury into slavery, and it is only when he is a harassed planter in Brazil that he regrets selling Xury, for he realizes that he could use a slave to help him in his work. He thinks of Xury again in this way on the island. That crudely human logic is one of the most plausible aspects of the novel; and it frequently gives rise to Crusoe’s refrain that he can’t seem to do anything right. He even claims in this early stage that as a tobacco farmer in rural Brazil he is living ‘‘like a man cast away upon some desolate island, that had no body there but himself.’’
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 meditati
on 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.