Robinson Crusoe (, ) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and has been described as the first novel, or at least the first English novel – although these labels are disputed.
Written with a combination of epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and that the book was a non-fiction travelogue. Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world.
Before the end of 1719, the book had already run through four editions, and it has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television, and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, the Robinsonade.
Plot summary
Robinson Crusoe (the family name coming from the German name "Kreutznaer") sets sail from Kingston upon Hull, England, on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in law. After a tumultuous journey where his ship is wrecked in a storm, his desire for the sea remains so strong that he sets out to sea again. This journey, too, ends in disaster, as the ship is taken over by Salé pirates (the Salé Rovers) and Crusoe is enslaved by a Moor. Two years later, he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury; a captain of a Portuguese ship off the west coast of Africa rescues him. The ship is en route to Brazil. Crusoe sells Xury to the captain. With the captain's help, Crusoe procures a plantation in Brazil.
Years later, Crusoe joins an expedition to purchase slaves from Africa but the ship gets blown off course in a storm about forty miles out to sea and runs aground on the sandbar of an island off the Venezuelan coast (which he calls the Island of Despair) near the mouth of the Orinoco River on 30 September 1659. The crew lowers the jolly boat, but it gets swamped by a tidal wave, drowning the crew, but leaving Crusoe the sole human survivor. He observes the latitude as 9 degrees and 22 minutes north. He sees penguins and seals on this island. Aside from Crusoe, the captain's dog and two cats survive the shipwreck. Overcoming his despair, he fetches arms, tools and other supplies from the ship before the next storm breaks it apart. He builds a fenced-in habitat near a cave which he excavates. By making marks in a wooden cross, he creates a calendar post to keep track of his time on the island. Over the years, by using tools salvaged from the ship, and some which he makes himself, he hunts animals, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make raisins, learns to make pottery and traps and raises goats. He also adopts a small parrot. He reads the Bible and becomes religious, thanking God for his fate in which nothing is missing but human society. He also builds two boats: a large dugout canoe that he intends to use to sail to the mainland, but ends up being too large and too far from water to launch, and a smaller boat that he uses to explore the coast of the island.
More years pass and Crusoe discovers cannibals, who occasionally visit the island to kill and eat prisoners. Alarmed at this, he conserves the ammunition he'd used for hunting (running low at that point) for defence and fortifies his home in case the cannibals discover his presence on the island. He plans to kill them for committing an abomination, but later realizes he has no right to do so, as the cannibals do not knowingly commit a crime. One day, Crusoe finds that a Spanish galleon has run aground on the island during a storm, but his hopes for rescue are dashed when he discovers that the crew abandoned the ship. Nevertheless, the abandoned galleon's untouched supplies of food and ammunition, along with the ship's dog, add to Crusoe's reserves. Every night, he dreams of obtaining one or two servants by freeing some prisoners; during the cannibals' next visit to the island, when a prisoner escapes, Crusoe helps him, naming his new companion "Friday" after the day of the week he appeared. Crusoe teaches Friday the English language and converts him to Christianity.
Crusoe soon learns from Friday that the crew from the shipwrecked galleon he'd found had escaped to the mainland and are now living with Friday's tribe. Seeing renewed hope for rescue and with Friday's help, Crusoe builds another, but smaller, dugout canoe for a renewed plan to sail to the mainland. After more cannibals arrive to partake in a feast, Crusoe and Friday kill most of them and save two prisoners. One is Friday's father and the other is a Spaniard, who informs Crusoe about the other Spaniards shipwrecked on the mainland. A plan is devised wherein the Spaniard would return to the mainland with Friday's father and bring back the others, build a ship, and sail to a Spanish port.
Before the Spaniards return, an English ship appears; the sailors have staged a mutiny against their captain and intend to leave him and those still loyal to him on the island. Crusoe and the ship's captain strike a deal in which Crusoe helps the captain and the loyal sailors retake the ship. With their ringleader executed by the captain, the mutineers take up Crusoe's offer to remain on the island rather than being returned to England as prisoners to be hanged. Before embarking for England, Crusoe shows the mutineers how he survived on the island and states that the Spaniards will be coming.
Crusoe leaves the island on 19 December 1686 and arrives in England on 11 June 1687. He learns that his family believed him dead; as a result, he was left nothing in his father's will. Crusoe departs for Lisbon to reclaim the profits of his estate in Brazil, which has granted him much wealth. In conclusion, he transports his wealth overland to England from Portugal to avoid travelling by sea. Friday accompanies him and, en route, they endure one last adventure together as they fight off famished wolves while crossing the Pyrenees.Ribas, Joseph . Robinson Crusoé dans les Pyrénées. Éditions Loubatières. ISBN 2-86266-235-6.
Characters Robinson Crusoe: The narrator of the novel, who gets shipwrecked. Friday: A native Caribbean whom Crusoe saves from cannibalism, and subsequently names "Friday". He becomes a servant and friend to Crusoe. Xury: Servant to Crusoe after they escape slavery from the Captain of the Rover together. He is later given to the Portuguese Sea Captain as an indentured servant. The Widow: Friend to Crusoe who looks over his assets while he is away. Portuguese Sea Captain: Rescues Crusoe after he escapes from slavery. Later helps him with his money and plantation. The Spaniard: A man rescued by Crusoe and Friday from the cannibals who later helps them escape the island. Friday's father: rescued by Crusoe and Friday at the same time as the Spaniard. Robinson Crusoe's father: A merchant named Kreutznaer. Captain of the Rover: Moorish pirate of Sallee who captures and enslaves Crusoe. Traitorous crew members: members of a mutinied ship who appear towards the end of the novel The Savages: Cannibals that come to Crusoe's Island and who represent a threat to Crusoe's religious and moral convictions as well as his own safety.
Sources and real-life castaways
There were many stories of real-life castaways in Defoe's time. Most famously, Defoe's suspected inspiration for Robinson Crusoe is thought to be Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra (renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966) in the Juan Fernández Islands off the Chilean coast. Selkirk was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers during a British expedition that led to the publication of Selkirk's adventures in both A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World and A Cruising Voyage Around the World in 1712. According to Tim Severin, "Daniel Defoe, a secretive man, neither confirmed nor denied that Selkirk was the model for the hero of his book. Apparently written in six months or less, Robinson Crusoe was a publishing phenomenon."
According to Andrew Lambert, author of Crusoe's Island, it is a "false premise" to suppose that Defoe's novel was inspired by the experiences of a single person such as Selkirk, because the story is "a complex compound of all the other buccaneer survival stories." However, Robinson Crusoe is far from a copy of Rogers' account: Becky Little argues three events that distinguish the two stories: Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked while Selkirk decided to leave his ship, thus marooning himself; The island that Crusoe was shipwrecked on had already been inhabited, unlike the solitary nature of Selkirk's adventures. The last and most crucial difference between the two stories is that Selkirk was a privateer, looting and raiding coastal cities during the War of Spanish Succession. "The economic and dynamic thrust of the book is completely alien to what the buccaneers are doing," Lambert says. "The buccaneers just want to capture some loot and come home and drink it all, and Crusoe isn't doing that at all. He's an economic imperialist: He's creating a world of trade and profit."
Other possible sources for the narrative include Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and Spanish sixteenth-century sailor Pedro Serrano. Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is a twelfth-century philosophical novel also set on a desert island, and translated from Arabic into Latin and English a number of times in the half-century preceding Defoe's novel.
Pedro Luis Serrano was a Spanish sailor who was marooned for seven or eight years on a small desert island after shipwrecking in the 1520s on a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua. He had no access to fresh water and lived off the blood and flesh of sea turtles and birds. He was quite a celebrity when he returned to Europe; before dying, he recorded the hardships suffered in documents that show the endless anguish and suffering, the product of absolute abandonment to his fate, now held in the General Archive of the Indies, in Seville. It is quite possible that Defoe heard his story in one of his visits to Spain before becoming a writer.
Yet another source for Defoe's novel may have been the Robert Knox account of his abduction by the King of Ceylon Rajasinha II of Kandy in 1659 in An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon.see Frank (2012)
Severin (2002) unravels a much wider range of potential sources of inspiration, and concludes by identifying castaway surgeon Henry Pitman as the most likely:
An employee of the Duke of Monmouth, Pitman played a part in the Monmouth Rebellion. His short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony, followed by his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures, was published by John Taylor of Paternoster Row, London, whose son William Taylor later published Defoe's novel.