The first thing that appears to the reader is the absence of Daniel Defoe's name, supporting the fiction that it was written by Robinson Crusoe.
The book starts with the statement about Crusoe's marriage in England. He bought a little farm in Bedford and had three children: two sons and one daughter. Our hero suffered a distemper and a desire to see "his island." He could talk of nothing else, and one can imagine that no one took his stories seriously, except his wife. She told him, in tears, "I will go with you, but I won't leave you." But in the middle of this felicity, Providence unhinged him at once, with the loss of his wife.
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2 Crusoe's adventures in Madagascar 3 Crusoe's travels in Southeast Asia and China 4 Crusoe's travels in Siberia |
At the beginning of 1693, he made his nephew the commander of a ship. About the beginning of January 1694, Crusoe and Friday went on board in the Downs on the 8th, then touched and left Ireland on the 5th of February. On the 20th of February they rescued the survivors of a burning ship that sank afterwards. It was a 300 ton French merchant ship, homeward-bound from Quebec. They delivered them to Newfoundland, and on March 19, 1694 they were at the northern latitude of 27 degrees and 5 minutes on the Atlantic Ocean, then landed in Brazil. They got to his old habitation, the desert island, on the 10th of April, 1695. There is a year gap here which allowed them to reach that uninhabited island that can be located in the Pacific Ocean, namely the Cocos Island or Isla del Coco in Spanish, an offshore island of Costa Rica. Robinson Crusoe was a territorial British colonist: he considered as his own island, and he seems reluctant to confess its exact location to anyone, not even to Defoe. Or, they may have had an agreement to place the island near the mouth of the River Orinoco.
Almost nine years have passed since he had left the island previously, in December 1686. He had left five Englishmen there, three rude villains and two good fellows. The Spaniards numbered about seventeen, coming from the mainland with the father of Friday. The two poor Englishmen had pitched their tents on the north shore of the island, but they had continuously been harassed by the villains who once threw a firebrand at their huts. The two honest Englishmen trod the fire out with their feet. They had firearms with them, and boldly ordered the rogues to lay down their arms. The three rogues left furiously, but they stayed up till midnight, in order to take the poor men when they are asleep. The other two men had also a design upon them, and gone abroad.
However, the three villains were weary, so they fell asleep at Crusoe's bower. When they came to the huts of the two honest Englishmen, Will Atkins called out to his comrade, Ha, Jack, here's the nest, but damn them, the birds are flown. At this point of the book, one must mention that this volume later informs us that Crusoe had received information between 1695 and 1719 about the death of Atkins. The bilingual book of J. Christopher Weston Knight, La Isla del Coco - Cocos Island (1992) contains a black and white photograph showing an old iscription found on Cocos Island. The text is carved in a piece of wood cut out of a palm tree. It goes, "THE Bird Is Gone." The famous saying of Atkins, "The birds are gone" may have been carved by his English colleagues on the day of his burial, but this time referring only to himself, in singular, not without some irony. The inscription now is in the National Museum in San José, Costa Rica. There is no need to add that no other islands have any English text in connection with the history of Robinson Crusoe, only Cocos Island. A radiocarbon test would give us an approximate date for the age of the wood that may have belonged to the grave of Will Atkins.
The Further Adventures gives an account of the activities of the small population, and the regular visits of the cannibals. These may have been historically true. Finally the savages invaded the island with a fleet of 28 canoes, Crusoe was told. They landed on the easternmost side of the island, two leagues from Crusoe's first cave, and a war broke out.
Crusoe does not tell when he left the island for the second time. After he let his old bird Poll be free in the forest, Crusoe set sail to the mainland. A strong current carried him to the east-northeast, and they got into a bay on the third day. Here an army of about a thousand canoes came towards them from the east by paddling. He ordered Friday to call out in his language. The poor fellow obeyed him, and was killed by three arrows at that moment. It must have been the army of the cannibal Changuenes, enemies of Friday's Térraba tribe.
After having buried Friday in the ocean, the same evening they set sail for Brazil. They stayed for a long period there, then went went directly over to the Cape of Good Hope. They landed on Madagascar where their nine men were pursued by three hundred natives, because one of his mariners had carried off a young native girl among the trees. The natives hanged this person, so the crew massacred 32 persons and burned the houses of the native town. Crusoe opposed all these, therefore he was marooned, and settled at the Bay of Bengal for a long time.
Finally, he bought a ship that later turned out to be stolen. Therefore they went to the river of Cambodia and Cochin-China or the bay of Tonquin, until they came to the latitude of 22 degrees and 30 minutes, and anchored at the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Then they arrived to the coast of China. They visited Nanking near the river of Kilam, and sailed southwards to a port called Quinchang. An old Portuguese pilot suggested them to go to Ningpo by the mouth of a river. This Ningpo was a canal that passed through the heart of that vast empire of China, crossed all the rivers and some hills by the help of sluices and gates, and went up to Peking, being near 270 leagues long. So they did, then it was the beginning of February, in the Old Style calendar, when they set out from Peking.
Then they travelled through the following places: Changu, Naum (or Naun, a fortified city), Argun(a) on the Chinese-Russian border (April 13, 1703).
Argun was the first town on the Russian border, then they went through Nertzinskoi, Plotbus, touched a lake called Schaks Ozer, Jerawena, the river Udda, Jeniseysk, and Tobolsk (from September 1703 to beginning of June 1704). They arrived to Europe around the source of the river Wirtska, south of the river Petrou, to a village called Kermazinskoy near Soloy Kamskoy (Solikamsk). They passed a little river called Kirtza, near Ozomoys (or Gzomoys), came to Veuslima on the river Wirtzogda, running into the Dwina, then they stayed in Lawrenskoy (July 3-7, 1704). Finally Crusoe arrived to Archangel or Archangelsk in August 18, Hamburg (September 18), and Hague. He arrived in London on the 10th of January 1705, having been gone from England ten years and nine months.Crusoe's return to his island
Crusoe's adventures in Madagascar
Crusoe's travels in Southeast Asia and China
Crusoe's travels in Siberia