The Robinson Crusoe that gives its name to Daniel Defoe’s novel and the most illustrious castaway in literature (with permission from Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver) is not the hero you think. Especially if you haven’t read the book yet (what are you waiting for?) and your image is that of the movies or adventure comics. Yes, Robinson Crusoe survived 28 years on an island. Yes, it is also true that he saved Friday from being eaten by cannibals. But…
But there is another Robinson with many chiaroscuro, a character in the shadows, hidden by the brilliance of the survivor who managed to get ahead in a hostile and lonely environment. We prefer the hero and we do not want to remember that other petty and prudish Robinson, who reads the Bible a thousand times in search of answers and who during the 28 years of his adventure does not show even a hint of sexual desire. And besides, he was a slave owner.
“The ship was bottomless (…) but all its provisions were dry and intact.” Foraging plays a big part in this 1719 marvel, the plot of which we won’t gut in the hope that the uninitiated will discover it. The adventure does not begin with the shipwreck. Not even when the castaway recovers belongings and provisions from the ship. Nor when the years go by and he is the “king” of his island…
There, in the semi-sunken hull, our character shows the principle that guides his existence: take advantage of everything that life offers you. He filled his pocket with food and, “while he was doing other things,” he began to eat cookies. “Biscuitsâ€, depending on the translation. Actually, they must have been cakes, bread or nautical cookies. I mean, biscuits. Buns that lasted longer due to their double cooking, hence the explanation of his name (bis cuit).
Robinson, the sole survivor of a ship headed to Africa in search of slaves for the Brazilian plantations, thanks God for his salvation and repents of his sins, among which is not the fact of admitting that a being human can possess another, something that he sees with total normality. He doesn’t stop being curious that he didn’t even experience slavery in his own flesh that opened his eyes.
The real adventure begins before the shipwreck, when Robinson is enslaved by pirates on another voyage between the Canary Islands and the African coast. To flee from his captors (“Moors”, it reads in translation), he uses a fishing boat in which there is a boy and a man, whom he throws overboard into the high seas and leaves at the mercy of the waves, despite to his request for help, trusting that he would be saved “because he was an excellent swimmer”.
This devout Robinson considered getting rid of the boy, Xury, also considering that he was a “Mohammedan.” In the end, she saved him because she smiled at him, swore allegiance to him, and promised that she would go with him “to the end of the world.” He set out to get her to renounce his faith, make him embrace Christianity, and make him a “great man.” Both shared a thousand dangers on a hateful coast for the protagonist, who did not want to “die among blacks.”
A merchant traveling to Brazil rescues them and the captain offers him “sixty pieces of eight for Xury”, but Robinson was not willing, or so he says, “to sell the freedom of the boy”, who had helped him with ” so much loyalty to recover yoursâ€. He talked a lot, but in the end he gave it to him (that’s the verb he uses) in exchange for a promise: the captain would set him free “in ten years, if he converted to Christianity.”
So, alone again, our man arrives in Brazil, where he settles on a plantation and begins planting tobacco and sugar. The work was so hard and the land so vast that, alas, only then did he realize a mistake: “I had made a mistake in parting with Xury, my boy.” As soon as things start to go a bit well for him, the first thing he does is look for “a European servant” and “buy a black slave.”
He had already been at his mill for four years and he praised the virtues of human trafficking so much that three neighbors commissioned him to return to the Guinea coast, where he had been twice before, “given how easy it was to acquire a large quantity of black slaves to work in Brazilâ€. And all in exchange for “trifles, such as colored beads, toys, knives, scissors, axes, pieces of glass and the like.”
“I was born to be my own destroyerâ€, says Robinson Crusoe, who embarks on a journey without questioning the unworthy goal he is pursuing and which will end in tragedy. He will be shipwrecked and atone for his guilt by living “incredible adventures for 28 years completely alone on an uninhabited island off the coast of America, near the mouth of the great Orinoco River”, as part of the very long original title says.
From this moment the best-known part of the book begins, that of the man looking for food in a semi-runaway ship: “I also found a little rum in the main cabin, from which I drank a good drink, since I certainly needed it to face what I expected.” Timber, masts, sails, gunpowder and weapons (two pistols, two muskets and “two rusty old swords”) complete his treasure, but not the greatest…
In a chest he found tools that were worth more “than a ship loaded with gold.” The jewel in the crown, however, was another chest with “bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat meat†and “some barley and wheat, although the rats had eaten or spoiled it almost on the inside.†whole”. On the island you will find fruit and water. Over the years he will tame goats, distill spirits, bake bread, and make butter and cheese.
“I thought I would starve and what a table the Creator gave me!†The other problem, that of loneliness, was not solved until he discovered footprints on the beach. Those footprints will lead him to Friday, whom he will finally see as a similar. Who is wilder? The cannibal native or the English sailor who approved of slavery? Together they will discover that they are the same. And together they will leave the island and be saved. Two human beings.
