Twenty-Eight Years, One Footprint and a Man Named Friday: The Real Castaways and Hard Questions Behind Robinson Crusoe

Partly, but not in the way the first readers believed. Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, published on 25 April 1719, and the castaway at its centre never existed. The story is widely thought to draw on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years alone on a Pacific island off Chile, and the Spanish sailor Pedro Serrano, who survived years on a tiny Caribbean island, is another possible model. The confusion started with the book itself: the first edition named Crusoe as its author, so many readers took it for a genuine travel account. So the honest answer is that real survival stories gave Defoe material, and he turned them into fiction. Below you will find who Defoe was, what happens in the book, the main characters, the difficult questions it raises about religion, money and empire, and the words it left in everyday English.

Who was Daniel Defoe?

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist, merchant and, at times, a spy, who died on 24 April 1731. Besides Robinson Crusoe he wrote Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), and he is seen as one of the earliest champions of the English novel. He was born Daniel Foe, probably around 1660 in London, though the exact date is uncertain; he later added the grander-sounding "De" to his name himself.

His life was nearly as eventful as his hero's. As a merchant he traded in hosiery, wool and wine and was rarely out of debt. He wrote a great many political pamphlets, was often in trouble with the authorities and spent time in prison; one of his pamphlets led to three days in the pillory followed by Newgate Prison, and he gained his release by agreeing to work as an intelligence agent for the politician Robert Harley. By the time he wrote Robinson Crusoe he was around sixty, an experienced journalist who knew how to make invented events sound like reported fact.

Real castaways behind the story

The best-known candidate is Alexander Selkirk, who lived for four years on the island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández Islands and was rescued in 1709. In 1966 Chile renamed the island Robinson Crusoe Island. Defoe, a secretive man, never confirmed or denied that Selkirk was his model, and historians point out important differences: Selkirk chose to leave his ship, he was a privateer who raided coastal towns, and his island had no other inhabitants, while Crusoe is shipwrecked and eventually finds that his island is visited by others.

Scholars have suggested other sources too. Pedro Serrano survived for seven or eight years on a Caribbean island in the 1520s by eating turtles and birds. The twelfth-century Arabic philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, also set on a desert island, had been translated into Latin and English in the decades before Defoe wrote. And the researcher Tim Severin argues for the castaway surgeon Henry Pitman, whose short book was published by the father of Defoe's own publisher. In other words, the novel is less one true story than a blend of many.

The story in brief

Against his parents' wishes, young Robinson Crusoe sails from Hull in 1651. His first ship is wrecked, and on his next voyage he is captured by pirates from Salé and enslaved. After two years he escapes in a boat with a boy named Xury, is rescued by a Portuguese captain, sells Xury to that captain, and sets up a plantation in Brazil.

Years later he joins an expedition to buy enslaved people in Africa. The ship is caught in a storm and runs aground near an island off the coast of Venezuela, and on 30 September 1659 Crusoe becomes the only human survivor. He brings tools, guns and supplies from the wreck before it breaks apart, builds a fenced home by a cave and keeps a calendar by cutting marks into a wooden post. Over the years he hunts, grows barley and rice, makes pottery, tames goats and a parrot, and builds boats. He also reads the Bible and becomes deeply religious.

Then comes the turn that every reader remembers. Crusoe discovers that cannibals sometimes visit the island to kill and eat prisoners. When one prisoner escapes, Crusoe helps him and names him Friday, after the day of the week he arrived, then teaches him English and converts him to Christianity. Later the two rescue Friday's father and a Spaniard, and finally an English ship arrives whose crew has mutinied. Crusoe helps the captain take back the ship and leaves the island on 19 December 1686, after twenty-eight years. Back in Europe he recovers the profits of his Brazilian plantation, and on the way overland to England he and Friday fight off hungry wolves in the Pyrenees.

The main characters

Robinson Crusoe himself narrates the whole book. He is restless, practical and anxious, a man who counts and records everything, and his story moves from youthful disobedience to repentance. Friday is a Caribbean native whom Crusoe saves from death; he becomes Crusoe's servant and also his friend. Xury is the boy who escapes slavery with Crusoe and is later handed over to the Portuguese captain as a servant. The Portuguese captain helps Crusoe twice, first rescuing him and later managing his money. The Spaniard and Friday's father, both rescued from the cannibals, help plan the escape, and the mutinous sailors at the end are given the choice of staying on the island instead of being hanged in England.

What the novel is about: faith, work and empire

Providence and repentance. Defoe was a Puritan moralist who also wrote guides on how to live as a good Christian, and Christian ideas of providence, penitence and redemption run through the book. Crusoe comes to regret the follies of his youth, and Defoe even places important events on Crusoe's birthday. When Crusoe first finds the cannibals, he wants to kill them, but he then decides that he has no right to punish people who do not knowingly commit a crime by their own customs, even though he still forbids Friday from the practice.

Work and economics. Crusoe is a favourite example in economics textbooks. Alone on the island he has to divide his time between work and rest and choose what to produce without trade, money or prices; Friday's arrival is then used to show how trade begins. The historian Andrew Lambert contrasts him with the buccaneers who inspired the castaway stories: they wanted to grab loot and spend it, while Crusoe is busy building a world of trade and profit.

Colonialism, read fairly. Modern readers notice uncomfortable things that earlier readers often passed over. Crusoe sells the boy who escaped with him, was sailing to buy slaves when he was shipwrecked, calls himself the "king" of the island, and at the end refers to it as a "colony". His relationship with Friday is an idealised master and servant bond, and Friday is expected to give up his own culture and adopt Crusoe's. It is fair to read the book as an expression of European colonial desire. It is also fair to note what complicates that reading: Defoe used Friday to criticise Spanish colonisation of the Americas, and some critics argue that Friday's imitation of Crusoe unsettles Crusoe's authority, so the novel shows how fragile colonial attitudes were rather than simply celebrating them. Later writers answered back directly, notably J. M. Coetzee in Foe (1986) and Michel Tournier in Friday, or, The Other Island (1967).

Why it still matters

Robinson Crusoe went through four editions before the end of 1719, and by the end of the nineteenth century no book in Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations, with more than 700 alternative versions. It is often credited with starting realistic fiction, and it is sometimes called the first English novel, although that label is disputed. Its imitators formed a whole genre, the Robinsonade, which includes The Swiss Family Robinson (1812). Rousseau made it the only book his ideal pupil Emile was allowed to read before the age of twelve, and Robert Louis Stevenson called the scene in which Crusoe finds a single footprint in the sand one of the four greatest in English literature.

It also lives on in ordinary English. Because Crusoe usually calls Friday "my man Friday", English speakers still say a man Friday or a girl Friday for a loyal, all-purpose assistant, and the name Crusoe has become shorthand for anyone living alone and cut off. During the Second World War, people who hid in the ruins of Warsaw through the winter of 1944 to 1945 were later called the Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw.

Learn with Robinson Crusoe: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
a castaway	a person left alone after a shipwreck	The castaway lived on fish and rainwater.
a man / girl Friday	a loyal assistant who does many jobs	She was the office's girl Friday.
to be marooned	to be left somewhere with no way out	We were marooned at the airport overnight.
to make do	to manage with what you have	We made do with one pan and a spoon.
a Robinsonade	a story about surviving on an island	The film is a modern Robinsonade.

Try this: Imagine you are stranded for one week. Write three English sentences using "to make do" and "to be marooned".