Robinson Crusoe Summary: Shipwreck, Survival and 28 Years Alone
What Robinson Crusoe is about
Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe on 25 April 1719. It is an adventure novel about a young Englishman who ignores his father's advice, goes to sea, and ends up spending 28 years on a remote tropical island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad. The book is often credited with marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and is sometimes called the first novel, or at least the first English novel, though those labels are disputed.
The story opens in August 1651, when Crusoe sails from Kingston upon Hull against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to study law. The family name, we are told, comes from the German Kreutznaer. His first voyage ends in a storm and a wrecked ship. That does not cure him. He sails again, is captured by Sale pirates and enslaved by a Moor. Two years later he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury and is picked up by a Portuguese captain bound for Brazil. Crusoe sells Xury to the captain and, with the captain's help, sets up a plantation in Brazil.
Years later he joins an expedition to buy slaves in Africa. A storm drives the ship off course and it runs aground on a sandbar off the Venezuelan coast, near the mouth of the Orinoco, on 30 September 1659. The crew lower a boat and are drowned by a tidal wave. Crusoe alone survives, along with the captain's dog and two cats. He calls the place the Island of Despair.
The years on the island
Most of the book is a record of work. Crusoe salvages arms, tools and supplies from the wreck before the next storm breaks it up. He builds a fenced habitat beside a cave he digs out. He cuts marks into a wooden cross to make a calendar. Over the years he hunts, grows barley and rice, dries grapes into raisins, learns pottery, sets traps and raises goats. He keeps a parrot. He reads the Bible, becomes religious, and comes to thank God for a life in which nothing is missing except human society.
Then the island turns out not to be empty after all. Crusoe discovers that cannibals land there from time to time to kill and eat prisoners. He fortifies his home and rations the ammunition he had been using for hunting. He plans to kill the visitors for what he sees as an abomination, then decides he has no right to, since they do not knowingly commit a crime. A wrecked Spanish galleon later supplies him with food, ammunition and a dog, but no rescue, because its crew have already gone.
The main characters
Crusoe himself is the narrator and very nearly the whole cast. He is restless, practical and acquisitive, a man who keeps accounts of his own soul much as he keeps accounts of his grain. Friday is the prisoner Crusoe rescues from the cannibals and names after the day he appeared. Crusoe teaches him English and converts him to Christianity, and the relationship is one of master and servant from the start, something Crusoe had dreamed of before it happened. Friday's father and a shipwrecked Spaniard are saved from a later landing. Xury, the boy who helps Crusoe escape slavery and is then sold, appears early and matters more than his short time on the page suggests. An English sea captain, loyal sailors and a group of mutineers arrive near the end.
The themes
Survival is the engine. Defoe gives the reader inventories, timetables, failures and slow improvements, including a dugout canoe built too large and too far from water ever to launch. Identity is the quieter subject. Crusoe arrives as a trader and leaves as something else, having rebuilt a version of English domestic life out of goats, barley and a cave.
The book is also an uncomfortable record of its own period. Crusoe sells a boy, runs a plantation, sets out to buy slaves, and names the man he rescues rather than asking. Modern readers tend to find the colonial attitudes as revealing as the adventure.
How it ends
An English ship appears. Its crew have mutinied and plan to maroon their captain on the island. Crusoe strikes a deal and helps the captain retake his ship. The ringleader is executed, and the other mutineers accept Crusoe's offer to stay on the island rather than be hanged in England. Crusoe leaves on 19 December 1686 and reaches England on 11 June 1687. His family had assumed he was dead, so his father's will left him nothing. He travels to Lisbon to reclaim the profits of his Brazilian estate, which have made him wealthy, and brings the money overland to England.
Why it still matters
The first edition named Crusoe as the author, and many readers took it for a true travelogue. The story is thought to draw on the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on a Pacific island renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966, and possibly on Pedro Serrano. Four editions appeared before the end of 1719. It became one of the most widely published books in history and produced so many imitations in print, film, television and radio that its name now defines a genre: the Robinsonade.
