Robinson Crusoe: 300th Anniversary Edition

By Daniel Defoe, Eko and Jamaica Kincaid

Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.
Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.

But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781632061201

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), son of a London butcher, James Foe, took the pen name Defoe in 1703, the year he was pilloried and jailed for publishing a notorious attack on the religious hypocrisy and intolerance of the English political class. His imprisonment ruined his lucrative trade as a merchant but made him a popular figure with the public. Freed by the intervention of rising statesman Robert Harley, Defoe became a renowned journalist, but also a government spy. Robinson Crusoe, his first work of fiction, was published in his sixtieth year, but was soon followed by other lasting novels, including The Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana.

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Praise for

Robinson Crusoe

"[Robinson Crusoe] is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective … . The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men."

—Virginia Woolf

Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West, transcending the book which—in its multitude of editions, translations, imitations, and adaptations (‘Robinsonades’)—celebrates his adventures. Having pretended once to belong to history, he finds himself in the sphere of myth.

—J. M. Coetzee

Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

—Carlos Fuentes

"I thought it that Robinson Crusoe should be the only instance of a universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry … . I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of Friday."

—Charles Dickens

"Was there every anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?"

—Samuel Johnson

Contents

Introduction by Jamaica Kincaid

Artist’s Statement

Chronology

Robinson Crusoe

Start in Life

Slavery and Escape

Wrecked on a Desert Island

First Weeks on the Island

Builds a House—The Journal

Ill and Conscience-Stricken

Agricultural Experience

Surveys His Position

A Boat

Tames Goats

Finds Print of Man’s Foot on the Sand

A Cave Retreat

Wreck of a Spanish Ship

A Dream Realised

Friday’s Education

Rescue of Prisoners from Cannibals

Visit of Mutineers

The Ship Recovered

Return to England

Fight Between Friday and a Bear

A Guide for Restless Readers

Suggestions for Further Reading

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Introduction

The true symbol of British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knife-grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.

—James Joyce

Dear Mr. Crusoe,

Please stay home. There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which more often than not the goods you are trading are people like me, Friday. There’s no need at all to leave your nice bed and your nice wife and your nice children (everything with you is always nice, except you yourself are not) and hop on a ship that is going to be wrecked in a storm at night (storms like the dark) and everyone (not the cat, not the dog) gets lost at sea except lucky and not nice at all you, and you are near an island that you see in the first light of day and then your life, your real life, begins. That life in Europe was nice, just nice; this life you first see at the crack of dawn is the beginning of your new birth, your new beginning, the way in which you will come to know yourself—not the conniving, delusional thief that you really are, but who you believe you really are, a virtuous man who can survive all alone in the world of a little godforsaken island. All well and good, but why did you not just live out your life in this place, why did you feel the need to introduce me, Friday (and I will come to that name), into this phony account of your virtues and your survival instincts? Keep telling yourself geography is history and that it makes history, not that geography is the nightmare that history recounts.

Perhaps it is a mistake to ask someone like me, a Friday if there ever was one, a Friday in all but name, to write an introduction to this much loved and admired classic, this book that seems to offer each generation who reads it, sometimes when a child and sometimes as an adult who becomes a child when reading it, the thrill of the adventure of a man being lost at sea, then finding safety on an island that seems to be occupied by nobody, and then making a world that is very nourishing to him physically and spiritually.

I was a ravenous reader as a child. I read the King James version of the Bible so many times that I even came to have opinions early on about certain parts of it (I thought of the Apostle Paul as a tyrant and the New Testament as too much about individuals and not enough about the people); I read everything I could find in the children’s section of the Antigua Public Library, situated on a whole floor just above the Treasury Department. If there was something diabolical or cynical in that arrangement, I never found it, but if it does turn out to be so, I will not be at all surprised. Among the many things that would haunt me were these three books: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Yes, yes, my early education consisted largely of ignoring that native Europeans were an immoral, repulsive people who were ignorant of most of the other people inhabiting this wonderful earth. Also, they were very good writers, that was true enough.

What made a native of Europe, less than two hundred years after Christopher Columbus wandered into the mid-Atlantic Ocean (where he found a paradise and proceeded to undo it), imagine himself alone on an island far away from his home? Had his world, the world of Europe, become so burdensome to him, and the presence of all those new people and the things to be done to them in their New World become so overwhelmingly burdensome that all alone became a heaven and a haven, a metaphor for becoming a new person, a perfect person? What makes such a person imagine himself (for it would be a him) the only survivor of a catastrophe at sea, and finding himself alone on an unknown island (unknown to him) construct a self that is self-assured, complete, and reasonable (within such boundaries), assured of his place in the order of things, in command of the order of things? For there are no real moments of doubt in this narrative that all will be well, or that he will emerge from this catastrophe enhanced in all the ways his enhancement requires.

Alone is always accompanied by loneliness, at least if you are an English person of a certain time. There doesn’t seem to be a single one of them who does not need a companion. Somebody has to polish his shoes or make her tea or at least listen to tales of things the listener will never know. An English person of a certain time must have a Friday. Christopher Columbus ambled into the Caribbean archipelago on a Thursday in October 1492. He met people who seemed to look remarkably like Friday. Columbus immediately began to make a detailed list of their physical appearance and their ways (they were so amiable, even their dogs didn’t bark) and immediately judged them beneath him: Columbus gave a man a sword; the man, having never seen a sword before, held it by the blade.

So just how did Daniel Defoe conceive of a parable for the 1492 adventure? What if Christopher Columbus and his gang of hardened criminals and hard-hearted adventurers had arrived in the Antilles and found themselves stranded with no way of going back from whence they came? Would Columbus then have been a refugee dependent on the kindness of these strangers? Crusoe though is that rare kind of refugee: the refugee who is not suffering from hardship of the usual kind attached to a refugee—economic hardship, political persecution; he is having an existential crisis, a crisis seemingly known only to the privileged person from Europe and which comes along with The Enlightenment. You know who doesn’t have such a crisis? A person living quite comfortably in a climate that is called paradisaical, where she has no need for much clothing and not far away in the background is a jungle, not a forest.

Ennui, a domesticated, localized version of an existential crisis, is not for the Fridays of this world. We are vulnerable to the insane needs and greed of that Other, that native of Europe; we have our flaws, but so far we Fridays, when we are spoken of, are not regarded as part of the vast array of human experience, we are regarded as wanting, as lacking, as illegitimate forms of the human family, as forms of Being meant to tend sugar cane and reap cotton, mastering the role of performing in perpetuity the Other, the Other that is always lacking in full form and dignity that is the human condition.

The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European—which is to say white—identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced. Quite the opposite: it is evidence of the ignorance, the absence of moral knowledge and feeling, the realization once again that the people who lay claim to the Enlightenment needed enlightenment and that the rest of us were perfectly okay and that because of them we are in search of something that some of us already knew: when confronted with a sword, accept it by the blade, for the handle only leads to more blades, and more blades and better blades that await in the long run—and life is the long run—are of no use at all.

So dear Mr. Crusoe,

Please don’t come. Stay home and work things out; your soul, a property you value very much, will be better off for it.

Sincerely,

Jamaica Kincaid

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Artist’s Statement

Robinson Crusoe, Creation as an Island

Art is a journey with a point of no return, its borders are immeasurable and in the process of creation I have lost myself to find what I want to portray, what my drawing seeks. The story of Robinson Crusoe is a metaphor for existence. As an artist, he gets lost to find his essence, a shipwreck isolates him from the world, and in that rebirth he reaches the depths of himself. In the creation of an artwork I have shipwrecked many times, I have destroyed thousands of drawings that disappear in the oceans of black ink like the fragments of a ship, and from those setbacks, a work of art arises. In each new drawing I lock myself in an island, the blank paper is an unknown and desert terrain, I inhabit it as a destination, and I know that once conquered I have to undertake a different route, get lost, let my ship sink and reinvent my own drawing. For art, distances are nonexistent. It is an endless journey, with no notion of time, my work is my biography, I have no past other than the drawing I have finished, and I will not have a future outside of my notebook and my black ink. Art is for the castaways of reality, for those of us who can only live within invention and failure.

—Eko

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Chronology

1620s–1630s European privateers, traders, and settlers begin to establish permanent colonies and trading posts on the Caribbean islands neglected by Spain.

1660 Daniel Defoe, né Daniel Foe, is born (exact date unknown) to Presbyterian parents Alice and James Foe, likely in Fore Street in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, London. His father is a tallow chandler and a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers. Britain and France sign a peace treaty, returning control of several colonized islands to the Caribs.

1671 Daniel Defoe attends the Rev. James Fisher’s boarding school in Pixham Lane in Dorking.

1674 Defoe attends a dissenting academy at Newington Green in London.

1684 Now an established merchant in London, Defoe marries Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a London merchant, receiving a significant dowry of £3,700.

1685 Defoe joins the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion, an attempt to overthrow James II, the Duke of York. Defoe gains a pardon and escapes the Bloody Assizes, the infamous trials of Judge George Jeffreys. Henry Pitman, an employee of the Duke of Monmouth and an active participant in the Monmouth Rebellion, publishes a short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony, followed by his shipwrecking and adventures on a deserted island. The book is published by J. Taylor of Paternoster Row, whose son William Taylor later publishes Defoe’s novel.

1688 Queen Mary and her husband William III are jointly crowned. Defoe becomes one of William’s close allies and a secret agent. Some of the new policies lead to conflict with France and damage trade relationships for British merchants, including Defoe.

1692 Defoe is arrested for debts and declares bankruptcy. Following his release, he travels in continental Europe and Scotland.

1695 Back in England, Defoe begins to use the aristocratic-sounding De in his last name and serves as a commissioner of the glass duty, responsible for collecting taxes on bottles.

1697 Defoe publishes his first notable work, An Essay Upon Projects, a series of proposals for social and economic improvement.

1701 The True-Born Englishman, Defoe’s most successful poem, defends the king against his enemies and satirizes the English claim to racial purity.

1702 The death of William III and the succession of Queen Anne creates political upheaval. Defoe’s pamphlet entitled The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church argues for the extermination of the Dissenters and those who practice occasional conformity.

1703 A natural target to Queen Anne’s offensive against Nonconformists, Defoe is arrested and placed in a pillory on July 31 and is charged with seditious libel. He is released in exchange for his cooperation as an intelligence agent for the Tories. In November, Defoe witnesses the Great Storm in London.

1704 Defoe publishes The Storm, which documents the events of 1703 and includes a collection of witness accounts of the tempest. He also begins his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France, which supports the Harley Ministry and chronicles the events of the War of the Spanish Succession. It becomes the main mouthpiece of the English government promoting the Act of Union 1707, which unites the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain.

1705 Defoe’s pamphlet entitled A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury the 8th of September, 1705 is published anonymously. It deals with interaction between the spiritual and the physical realms.

1709 Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish privateer and Royal Navy officer, survives his ordeal as a castaway and receives a great deal of public attention in England. He spent four years on an uninhabited island called Más a Tierra in the South Pacific Ocean. Defoe authors a book entitled The History of the Union of Great Britain, which attempts to explain the facts leading up to the 1707 Act of Union.

1712 Edward Cooke, fellow crew member of Alexander Selkirk, mentions the castaway’s ordeal in a book chronicling their privateering expedition, A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World.

1715 Defoe publishes The Family Instructor, a conduct manual on religious duty, as well as his apologia Appeal to Honour and Justice, a defence of his part in Harley’s Tory ministry.

1717 Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager at the Court of England is published. In this work, Defoe impersonates Nicolas Mesnager, the French plenipotentiary who negotiated the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, a series of individual peace treaties signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession.

1718 Defoe publishes A Continuation of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, a satire of European politics and religion.

1719 Robinson Crusoe is published on April 25. Within a year, this first volume runs through four editions and is translated into French, German, and Dutch. Later in the year Defoe writes a lesser-known sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Imitating Defoe, Ambrose Evans publishes The Adventures and Surprising Deliverances of James Dubourdieu and His Wife, which tells the story of a shipwrecked couple on a desert island named Paradise.

1720 The third and last book of the Robinson Crusoe series, Serious Reflections During the Life & Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World is published.

1721 Penelope Aubin writes The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family, a novel that tells the story of a family shipwrecked on an uninhabited island named Delos. Soon she becomes one of the most productive imitators of Defoe’s works.

1722 Defoe’s Colonel Jack is published. The story follows an orphaned boy from a life of poverty to colonial prosperity.

1726 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a prose satire on human nature and the travelers’ tales literary subgenre, is published. Defoe publishes The Complete English Tradesman and makes use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, in which he provides a survey of British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

1731 Daniel Defoe dies on April 24, likely while hiding from his creditors. He is interred in Bunhill Fields, Islington, London. German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel coins the word robinsonade in the Preface of his work Die Insel Felsenburg (The Island Stronghold), describing a subgenre of survivalist fiction similar to Robinson Crusoe.

1763 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education, Emile, or On Education, is published in English. The protagonist is only allowed to read Robinson Crusoe before the age of twelve and attempts to imitate Crusoe’s experience.

1788 Britain passes the Slave Trade Act (Dolben’s Act), limiting the number of slaves transported on British ships.

1794 France decrees the abolition of slavery both in France and in colonized territories.

1801 Toussaint Louverture leads the Haitian Revolution, drawing up the Constitution of 1801 which gives him authoritarian control of Hispaniola.

1802 Napoléon Bonaparte reinstates slavery in many French territories.

1812 Swiss author Johann David Wyss writes The Swiss Family Robinson, a novel about a family shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia.

1833–34 Britain fully abolishes slavery and the slave trade, introducing the practice of indentured apprenticeships.

1848 Slavery is abolished in Danish islands. France re-abolishes slavery in colonies.

1870 A monument is erected in Bunhill Fields, honoring Defoe’s memory.

1883 In his novel Treasure Island, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson parodies Crusoe with the character of Ben Gunn.

1930 Beatrix Potter’s children’s’ book The Tale of Little Pig Robinson is published. The author directs the reader to Robinson Crusoe for a detailed description of the island (the land of the Bong tree) to which her eponymous hero moves.

1954 Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel directs Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. An American film adaptation named Miss Robin Crusoe features a female castaway and female Friday.

1966 Walt Disney adapts the novel into the comedic film Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., featuring a female Friday named Wednesday. Más a Tierra, the second largest of the Juan Fernández Islands in Chile and home to the marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk in the early eighteenth century, is renamed Robinson Crusoe Island.

1967 French novelist Michel Tournier publishes Friday, or, The Other Island (French Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique), retelling the story of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe story. Tournier’s Crusoe rejects civilization when he has an opportunity to escape the island.

1971 Crusoe in England, a long poem by American writer Elizabeth Bishop, is published in the New York Times. The poem imagines Crusoe later in life as he reflects on his past adventure.

1986 South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe retells the story of Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman named Susan Barton.

1997 A new American adaptation named Robinson Crusoe stars actor Pierce Brosnan.

2000 American film Cast Away features Tom Hanks as a FedEx employee stranded on an island for several years, using the major themes of the Robinson Crusoe narrative.

2019 Robinson Crusoe, a major contender for the first English novel and translated into over a hundred languages, celebrates its three hundredth anniversary globally.

Robinson Crusoe‌

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Start in Life

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 afterwards 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 whom 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 knew what became 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 go, 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 propensity 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 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 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 consequence 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 standard of 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 the one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distemper upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtue 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 a life of slavery for daily bread, nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the passion of envy, or the 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 just been 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 should have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel when there might be none to assist in my recovery.

I observed in this last part of his discourse, which was truly prophetic, though I suppose my father did not know it to be so himself—I say, I observed the tears run down his face very plentifully, especially when he spoke of my brother who was killed: and that when he spoke of my having leisure to repent, and none to assist me, he was so moved that he broke off the discourse, and told me his heart was so full he could say no more to me.

I was sincerely affected with this discourse, and, indeed, who could be otherwise? and I resolved not to think of going abroad any more, but to settle at home according to my father’s desire. But alas! a few days wore it all off; and, in short, to prevent any of my father’s further importunities, in a few weeks after I resolved to run quite away from him. However, I did not act quite so hastily as the first heat of my resolution prompted; but I took my mother at a time when I thought her a little more pleasant than ordinary, and told her that my thoughts were so entirely bent upon seeing the world that I should never settle to anything with resolution enough to go through with it, and my father had better give me his consent than force me to go without it; that I was now eighteen years old, which was too late to go apprentice to a trade or clerk to an attorney; that I was sure if I did I should never serve out my time, but I should certainly run away from my master before my time was out, and go to sea; and if she would speak to my father to let me go one voyage abroad, if I came home again, and did not like it, I would go no more; and I would promise, by a double diligence, to recover the time that I had lost.

This put my mother into a great passion; she told me she knew it would be to no purpose to speak to my father upon any such subject; that he knew too well what was my interest to give his consent to anything so much for my hurt; and that she wondered how I could think of any such thing after the discourse I had had with my father, and such kind and tender expressions as she knew my father had used to me; and that, in short, if I would ruin myself, there was no help for me; but I might depend I should never have their consent to it; that for her part she would not have so much hand in my destruction; and I should never have it to say that my mother was willing when my father was not.

Though my mother refused to move it to my father, yet I heard afterwards that she reported all the discourse to him, and that my father, after showing a great concern at it, said to her, with a sigh, That boy might be happy if he would stay at home; but if he goes abroad, he will be the most miserable wretch that ever was born: I can give no consent to it.

It was not till almost a year after this that I broke loose, though, in the meantime, I continued obstinately deaf to all proposals of settling to business, and frequently expostulated with my father and mother about their being so positively determined against what they knew my inclinations prompted me to. But being one day at Hull, where I went casually, and without any purpose of making an elopement at that time; but, I say, being there, and one of my companions being about to sail to London in his father’s ship, and prompting me to go with them with the common allurement of seafaring men, that it should cost me nothing for my passage, I consulted neither father nor mother any more, nor so much as sent them word of it; but leaving them to hear of it as they might, without asking God’s blessing or my father’s, without any consideration of circumstances or consequences, and in an ill hour, God knows, on the 1st of September 1651, I went on board a ship bound for London. Never any young adventurer’s misfortunes, I believe, began sooner, or continued longer than mine. The ship was no sooner out of the Humber than the wind began to blow and the sea to rise in a most frightful manner; and, as I had never been at sea before, I was most inexpressibly sick in body and terrified in mind. I began now seriously to reflect upon what I had done, and how justly I was overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my father’s house, and abandoning my duty. All the good counsels of my parents, my father’s tears and my mother’s entreaties, came now fresh into my mind; and my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to which it has since, reproached me with the contempt of advice, and the breach of my duty to God and my father.

All this while the storm increased, and the sea went very high, though nothing like what I have seen many times since; no, nor what I saw a few days after; but it was enough to affect me then, who was but a young sailor, and had never known anything of the matter. I expected every wave would have swallowed us up, and that every time the ship fell down, as I thought it did, in the trough or hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; in this agony of mind, I made many vows and resolutions that if it would please God to spare my life in this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a ship again while I lived; that I would take his advice, and never run myself into such miseries as these any more. Now I saw plainly the goodness of his observations about the middle station of life, how easy, how comfortably he had lived all his days, and never had been exposed to tempests at sea or troubles on shore; and I resolved that I would, like a true repenting prodigal, go home to my father.

These wise and sober thoughts continued all the while the storm lasted, and indeed some time after; but the next day the wind was abated, and the sea calmer, and I began to be a little inured to it; however, I was very grave for all that day, being also a little sea-sick still; but towards night the weather cleared up, the wind was quite over, and a charming fine evening followed; the sun went down perfectly clear, and rose so the next morning; and having little or no wind, and a smooth sea, the sun shining upon it, the sight was, as I thought, the most delightful that ever I saw.

I had slept well in the night, and was now no more sea-sick, but very cheerful, looking with wonder upon the sea that was so rough and terrible the day before, and could be so calm and so pleasant in so little a time after. And now, lest my good resolutions should continue, my companion, who had enticed me away, comes to me; Well, Bob, says he, clapping me upon the shoulder, how do you do after it? I warrant you were frighted, wer’n’t you, last night, when it blew but a capful of wind? A capful d’you call it? said I; ’twas a terrible storm. A storm, you fool you, replies he; do you call that a storm? why, it was nothing at all; give us but a good ship and sea-room, and we think nothing of such a squall of wind as that; but you’re but a fresh-water sailor, Bob. Come, let us make a bowl of punch, and we’ll forget all that; d’ye see what charming weather ’tis now? To make short this sad part of my story, we went the way of all sailors; the punch was made and I was made half drunk with it: and in that one night’s wickedness I drowned all my repentance, all my reflections upon my past conduct, all my resolutions for the future. In a word, as the sea was returned to its smoothness of surface and settled calmness by the abatement of that storm, so the hurry of my thoughts being over, my fears and apprehensions of being swallowed up by the sea being forgotten, and the current of my former desires returned, I entirely forgot the vows and promises that I made in my distress. I found, indeed, some intervals of reflection; and the serious thoughts did, as it were, endeavour to return again sometimes; but I shook them off, and roused myself from them as it were from a distemper, and applying myself to drinking and company, soon mastered the return of those fits—for so I called them; and I had in five or six days got as complete a victory over conscience as any young fellow that resolved not to be troubled with it could desire. But I was to have another trial for it still; and Providence, as in such cases generally

Reviews for Robinson Crusoe

[comfypants · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A man with wanderlust encounters a series of escalating misfortunes.1/4 (Bad).I gave up after 40 pages. I haven't even gotten to the really racist stuff yet (I suspect), but already the attitude towards slavery is too much. The style is readable but uniformly void of personality, and it's pretty clear how the story is going to unfold, so I'm confident that I'm not missing anything.(Aug. 2022)

[scaryguy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Timeless classic!