The real Robinson Crusoe

BIOGRAPHY: Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, By Katherine Frank, The Bodley Head, 338pp. £20

BIOGRAPHY: Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth,By Katherine Frank, The Bodley Head, 338pp. £20

NOT THE least of the questions that occur to the reader of this enjoyable book is whether the use of cannabis had a bearing on the equanimity with which Robinson Crusoe approached life on a desert island.

The great myth of Crusoe, the Englishman stranded in the tropics for 28 years, is not, of course, a myth at all, though myth-like it lives on, from Buñuel's film to Desert Island Discsto Lost. The book which bears his name, generally considered to be the first English novel, appeared in 1719.

Daniel Defoe was almost 60 when he wrote the book, and apart from various other weaknesses set out at length by Katherine Frank in her engaging reappraisal of his book and its origins, he was, she says, a congenital plagiarist.

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The accepted view until now was that Crusoe was based on Alexander Selkirk, a Scot whose story of being marooned on an island off the coast of Chile was well known from the writing of Richard Steele. But there were scores of such stories, according to Frank. The seas of the world were crowded and dangerous, and the inevitable castaways wrote about their ordeals, or were written about – not least Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese nobleman savagely mutilated by his superior for having surrendered the fort at Goa in 1503. He jumped ship on St Helena and lived a hidden life alone for nearly 30 years.

But the mariner who Frank believes was the true model for Robinson Crusoe was Robert Knox, a man who made his first sea voyage, with his father, at the age of 14, in 1655. On their second voyage in the Anne– a ship of that great global power the East India Company – under the command of Knox senior, it was damaged in a storm and they took shelter off the coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1660. Invited ashore by the wily King of Kandy, the captain sent his son, but was later lured ashore himself.

The two Knoxes were captured, with 18 of the crew. The captain sent word to the remaining crew that if he was not released the ship was to sail away. Robert delivered the message and returned to shore, having sworn to his father that he would not abandon him. After a stalemate of several weeks, the ship departed without them. It was nearly 20 years before young Knox left the island.

Frank’s book has two heroes, each in his own way a prodigious character who suffered great hardship.

Robert Knox travelled the world, and during his captivity he showed a resilience, inventiveness and strength of character that are hard to imagine. He wrote his only book, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, on the seven-month voyage home after his escape. In England – now famous for what was at once a self-help book and a natural history of an exotic country – he collaborated with the noted scientist Robert Hooke (Frank says they shared a "curiosity about virtually everything, acute powers of perception and a passion for close and detailed observation"), and had an audience with King Charles II.

Daniel Defoe never travelled anywhere, but he had an extraordinary capacity for hard work, not to say hack work. He was a powerhouse of writing, who is thought to have written more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals.

He came into his most intensive period of fiction industry at the age of 60, when he published Robinson Crusoe. The sequel appeared a few months later, and within the year came the third instalment, preceded by another novel, Captain Singleton – which borrowed themes, incidents and eight pages verbatim from Knox's book. ( Moll Flandersand A Journal of the Plague Yearwere to follow.)

Defoe’s other history – of failed business ventures, imprisonment, humiliation in the stocks – and his sad end, hiding from creditors and estranged from his son, are treated here in sympathetic detail.

Knox’s disappointments were largely to do with his failure to publish a second edition of his book, and an autobiography, on both of which he laboured for most of his life. It would be 300 years before they appeared, in two giant volumes, from a Sri Lankan publisher. (The shorter original is, happily, available free on the Project Gutenberg website.)

The setbacks of his sailing life he could put up with. There is a philosophical note to his second marooning, when his mutinous crew left him behind in St Helena – he was by this time an East India Company captain himself. He was “stript . . . [all] at once of all my worldly riches & Injoyments . . . all my Worldly Substance & Worldly Dignities vanished, together in a moment & left me with onelly the Cloaths on my backe”.

This twin biography gives us a vivid account of two men and their pitiless times, and of their extraordinary adventures, at home and abroad. Frank’s extensive research lies lightly on the nice pace and flavour of her story, and she lets us decide for ourselves on the balance between savage and civilised in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

And as for the cannabis: Knox was one of the first English writers to describe what he called Gange. In case of fever or stomach complaints in Ceylon he ate it “morning and evening”, and noted the side-effects: “it intoxicates the brain and makes one giddy . . . deprives a man of memory [so] that in disscourse he cannot remember what hee hath sayed”.


John S Doyle is a freelance journalist