I noted in A SHORT HISTORY OF FANTASY-ADVENTURE how the days of the epic romance were followed by a dearth of adventure in fantasy literature, and that even those novels that had adventure-elements, such as Defoe's CAPTAIN SINGLETON, tended to lack fantastic elements.
Defoe's best-known novel, ROBINSON CRUSOE, is another novel following in the cultural wake of the epic romances with their “knights of
old.” Perhaps appropriately, given the way Defoe's century had turned against the ideals of the aristocracy, Defoe comes up with a protagonist who could not be further from the ideal of the knight.
Crusoe has some dim ideas
of glory when he defies the wishes of her merchant-father and goes to sea. Yet
for the rest of the novels, he expresses nothing but pious regrets for his act
of defiance, even though in the long run he becomes a rich man as the result of
his travels. His first tour of duty at sea doesn’t exactly cover him with
glory, and his captain frankly tells Crusoe that he was never meant to sail the
seas. Nevertheless, he tries again. But everyone aboard his ship is taken
prisoner by Ottoman pirates, and Crusoe becomes a slave. Though he’s treated
reasonably well at a lord’s home in Morocco-- indeed, there are no
badly-treated slaves depicted in the novels—Crusoe does show some guts by
figuring out a way to escape his captors. A young boy named Xury—apparently
also a slave, though Defoe does not say so outright—elects to go with Crusoe.
Xury is only with the protagonist long enough to show the increase of Crusoe’s
fortunes in two ways. The first is that, once Crusoe gets hold of a modern
rifle, he uses it to flagrantly kill a lion minding its own business on the
coast of Africa—one of many cavalier slayings by the Englishman. The second is
that when Crusoe and Xury encounter a Portuguese captain, Crusoe actually sells
Xury as a slave to the captain—and Xury is totally fine with it, accepting the
provision that he’ll be freed in two years if he serves the captain well.
Since the captain’s port of call is Brazil, Crusoe uses his
newfound wealth to buy a plantation there. Defoe doesn’t want this part of
Crusoe’s life to become important, so despite being on the plantation for
years, Crusoe does not marry or make any friends, and is in a sense almost as
isolated as he will be following the third nautical voyage. This one, of
course, goes down with all hands except for stranding Robinson Crusoe on a
deserted Caribbean island.
This is of course the part of the novel that everyone knows
by heart. Crusoe scavenges what he can from the wrecked ship, bewails his
isolation for a time, and then slowly makes the island over into his own
personal resort. The ship gives him ample firearms and ammunition, as well as a
dog and some cats for minor companionship (none of whom he ever names). He soon
finds that with patience, he can make by hand anything he really needs. He has
any number of “Job moments,” where he wonders what he did to bring his
creator’s wrath down upon him. But because he’s pious, eventually he decides to
agree with Job, that the creator can do anything he likes with his creation.
Crusoe spends eighteen years on the island before he comes
across the famous “footprint in the sand.” He’s freaked out by the lone
footprint, surmising—correctly—that it was left by a Caribbean Indian, whose
tribe is likely to practice the despicable rite of cannibalism. Some time
later, some of the Indians begin landing their canoes on the island, explicitly
to devour their captives, and Crusoe finds the gory remains. He entertains
fantasies about using his guns to devastate their ranks, though prudence—the
realization that some might get away and alert their fellow tribesmen—puts the
brake on this resolve. (Again, he frames his prudence in religious terms: it’s
not for him to punish the godless tribesmen if God doesn’t. etc.) But he does
build up his ego by imagining his puissance—“I was a formidable fellow to look
at when I went abroad”—though it’s significant that his ego depends principally
on his many weapons.
Shortly before encountering the other best-known character
in the novel, Crusoe presciently dreams of befriending one of the natives for a
companion. He makes the dream come true days later, rescuing a native from his
cannibal captors and killing them before they know what’s happening. He dubs
the native Friday after the day on which he was rescued, and proceeds to
instruct the willing native in the superiority of a Christian,
non-cannibalistic outlook. Friday proves an easy convert, despite wondering why
God doesn’t just kill the troublemaking Satan. After a short period of
convivial life with Friday, Defoe gives Crusoe an almost anti-climactic out.
Mutineers come to the island to get rid of the ship’s loyal sailors, but Crusoe
prevents the murder of the crewmen. However, he also takes pity on the
mutineers and leaves them on the island with assorted supplies, in lieu of
their being hanged for mutiny. Then Cruose and Friday journey back to
civilization. The rest of the novel is then devoted to sorting out Crusoe’s
finances—his holdings have made him a rich man, even in his long absence—except
for one last sortie with Friday.
While Crusoe is blissfully careless about wiping out any
life-form that gets in his way, Defoe does play fair in showing Friday’s people
to be just as anti-PETA. In the novel’s last chapter, Crusoe, Friday, and some
companions have gone out into the wild, where they encounter various animals,
including a bear. The bear seems willing to leave the humans alone, but Friday
goes out of his way to antagonize the creature, and then shoot it through the
head. Friday then justifies his actions by stating that his people killed bears
in similar fashion back on their island, which would suggest that Defoe
considered it a mark of manhood to slaughter animals, whether one worshipped
the True God or not.
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE picks up with
Crusoe when he’s a comfortable sixty years old, married and settled in England.
Yet he can’t let go of adventure, and leaves his wife behind to go to sea on a
ship captained by his (never-named) nephew. Crusoe returns to his old island,
and many chapters are devoted to conflicts between the lowlife English
mutineers and industrious Spanish colonizers. There are also some more attempts
at conversion, as one of the mutineers tries to explain Christianity to his
Carib Indian wife. There’s a big fight when several canoes invade the island to
attack the new arrivals, and the cannibals are outgunned and defeated. Crusoe
then leaves the island for good.
However, the fate of the cannibals is a light one, compared
to what happens to the natives of Madagascar when Crusoe’s ship makes landfall
there. One of the sailors kidnaps a local woman, and while the word “rape” is
never voiced, it’s fairly evident that this is what happens. The culprit is
captured by the tribesmen, and Crusoe joins a party of sailors to investigate
what happened to him. (FWIW, an innocent member of the crew is slain when the
natives take the offender.) When the sailors find the rapist dead and
mutilated, they lose all control and slaughter at least a hundred of the
natives, though supposedly leaving most of the women and children unharmed.
Crusoe himself does not take part in the killings, though he doesn’t endanger
himself to stop them either. Back on the ship, he often voices his condemnation
of the slaughter, to the extent that the sailors demand that the captain leave
Crusoe behind in the port of Bengal. This is the closest Crusoe comes to being
isolated again, though this time he has money and is able to link up with a
trade-caravan on its way to China. The caravan suffers a few attacks by Tartar
bandits, who are again vanquished by European weaponry. However, the remainder
of the novel emphasizes Crusoe’s righteous scorn for the pagan Chines. There's an
extremely chauvinistic chapter in which Crusoe leads a group in destroying a
village idol that for some reason irritates the hell out of the pious
Englishman. He again returns to England, richer than before, but resolved never
to travel forth again, except for the ultimate voyage to meet his Maker.
I’ve often disagreed with the Mickey Marxists who want to
see imperialism in every story that stars a straight white male, or fails to
portray people of color as they want to see themselves. But I must admit that
the CRUSOE novels exhibit a chauvinism so extreme that authors like Haggard,
Doyle and Kipling look like models of liberalism by comparison. Defoe allows
Crusoe a few moments of cultural relativism—he admits that the Spanish committed
many atrocities against the natives of the New World—but at base, the author
wants to give his audience a picture of the world as one where nothing, not
even a mass slaughter, seriously challenges any preconceptions.
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