Robinson Crusoe

After describing his first four years owning a plantation in Brazil, Crusoe chronicles his first year on an uninhabited island following a shipwreck that occurs after a twelve-day storm, which began on the twelfth day of the journey—one Crusoe left for the same date Crusoe went from his mother and father’s home in Hull. The ship knocks into a remote island and gets stuck, and the sailors—unsure if they are near the coast of Africa or America—sail a smaller boat taken from the ship. The smaller boat wrecks, tossing Crusoe into thirty-foot waves. He nearly drowns. Crusoe survives with nothing on his person but a knife, tobacco pipe, and some tobacco. The ship’s dog and two cats also survive.

These pages open in Brazil, with Crusoe’s life as plantation owner, growing tobacco, and other crops, on his own. He befriends a neighbor, one plantation over, Wells, a Portuguese man from Lisbon with English parents,. After two years, the captain of the ship Crusoe arrived on suggests Crusoe write to London and order some of the money Crusoe left with the widow of his former ship’s captain sent to him. It arrives, equaling a prosperous third year. After four years, local merchants and fellow planters—who’ve heard Crusoe’s accounts of Guinea—offer Crusoe free board to Guinea for the purpose of acquiring Negro slaves to work their plantations. However, they shipwreck twenty-four days into their journey. All but Crusoe perish. Crusoe comments on his foolish decision attempting to increase his riches in Brazil, stating he could have led a prosperous life there, one according to Crusoe’s father’s advice, following the middle road. “As I had once done thus in my breaking away from my parents, so I could not be content now, but I must go and leave the happy view I had of being a rich and thriving man in my new plantation, only to pursue a rash and immoderate desire of rising faster than the nature of the thing admitted” (27).

Filled with despair, Crusoe sleeps in a tree the first night. The next morning Crusoe sees the ship stranded on a rock, realizing they could have survived. When the sea calms, Crusoe swims, about a quarter-mile, out to retrieve all manner of supplies: chests filled with provisions: bread, cheeses, dry’d goat’s flesh, corn, guns and ammunition, and tools: hammer, axe, two saws, nails, grind-stone and more. To transport his provisions, Crusoe builds a raft, using the ship’s lumber, making thirteen trips in eleven days.

Crusoe spends the next four years exploring, hunting, and living on the island, as he continues to arrange, expand, and fortify his household: a tent on a little plain along the side of a hill. At first, Crusoe “piled all the empty chests and casks up in a circle round the tent, to fortify it from any sudden attempt, either from man or beast” (39). As months pass, Crusoe realizes the island’s lack of large beasts. By the end of four years Crusoe more than adapts. He often spends three days furnishing one fence post, constructed after Crusoe cuts down and drags the tree back to his site. One of the posts he carves, “in capital letters, making it into a great cross” and “set it up on the shore where I first landed, viz. I came on shore here on the 30th of Sept. 1659” (46). On this, Crusoe carves one notch each day to mark time.

By the end of the year Crusoe’s habitat evolved into “a tent under the side of a rock, surrounded with a strong pale of posts and cables, but I might now rather call it a wall, for I rais’d a kind of wall up against of turfs, about two foot thick on the out-side […] rais’d rafters from it leaning to the rock, and thatch’d or cover’d it with boughs of trees […] to keep out the rain, which I found at some times of the year very violent” (48). The section also includes a list of Evil and Good things about Crusoe’s condition, such as he is cast upon a desolate island but is alive.

Defoe presents this entire section as Crusoe’s journal, and this form accounts for the remainder of the novel. This section covers Crusoe’s first year stranded on the island, summarizing, sometimes in great detail, Crusoe’s day to day, or weekly, happenings. Ranging from September 30th, the day of the wreck, and covering the entire year, the journal chronicles Crusoe’s efforts to salvage provisions from the wreck, construct a household, and explorations of the island. “From the 1st of October, to the 24th. All these days entire spent in many several voyages to get all I could out of the ship […] Much rain also in these days” (51).

Crusoe further details the process of constructing his habitation. By October 31st, he feels secure enough from an attack by wild beasts or men to go hunting, which he does every morning. He kills a she-goat, whose child follows and also gets killed. As autumn progresses, Crusoe domesticates his home, rebuilding a table many times until it’s perfect. “For I was but a very sorry workman, tho’ time and necessity made me a compleat [sic] natural mechanick [sic] soon after, as I believe it would do any one else” (52). In December, an earth quake topples Crusoe’s cave, which now benefits from shelves and pieces of boards, arranged like a dresser, salvaged from the wreck. By December, Crusoe constructs a fence, covering it with turf, giving it a thatched look “that if any people were to come on shore there, they would not perceive any thing like a habitation” (55).

Much at play here are Crusoe’s interior explorations, in which Crusoe explores his concept of God and Providence, especially after an earthquake that causes more of the ship to wash up on a rock, allowing Crusoe to acquire more provisions. The earthquake provokes Crusoe’s inner debates, which occupy most of the final third section. He runs out of candle wax and fails constructing his own lamp, but discovers corn growing on the island. Before the quake Crusoe “acted upon no religious foundation at all, indeed I had very few notions of religion in my head, or had entertain’d any sense of any thing that had befallen me, otherwise than as a chance, or as we lightly say, what pleases God; without so much as enquiring into the end of Providence in these things, or his order in governing events […] But after I saw barley grow there, in a climate which I know was not proper for corn, and especially that I knew not how it came there […] I began to suggest, that God had miraculously caus’d this grain to grow […] so directed purely for my sustenance on that wild miserable place” (56). This sets off a string of queries moving back and forth between faithlessness and faith, as Crusoe experiences various weather-provoked fits and fevers. “What is this earth and sea of which I have seen so much, whence is it produced, and what am I, and all the other creatures” (67), Crusoe writes. After great rains, on June 21, Crusoe prays to God for the first time since the storm at Hull. Crusoe focuses on the idea of deliverance, not from sin, but from his situation. He experiences a dream in which a burning man descends from a black cloud. Then in springtime, on the west side of the island, Crusoe finds a verdant hill with lemon and lime trees, and grapes, which Crusoe learns how to cure by hanging. Here, leading into July, Crusoe considers relocating to the fruitful field, but decides the location too vulnerable. Instead, he builds a smaller hut, sometimes spending a few nights there. Known as a bower, Crusoe calls it his country house.