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- No, Robinson Crusoe is not a true story. It is a work of fiction. However, the book was presented as if it were a true story, was based on the popular travel narrative genre, and was so realistic that many early readers thought it was factual.
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Nov 14, 2022 · It's an adventure story told in autobiographical form, making it read like a true account of one massively unfortunate sailor. But in order for this story to sizzle with the plausibility that it does, it has to have roots in some pretty wild true stories of survival.
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Is Robinson Crusoe based on a true story?
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Why did Daniel Defoe write Robinson Crusoe?
Published in April 1719 when Defoe was 59 and Selkirk 43, Crusoe captivated readers unlike anything in its time (and is now considered by many the first true English novel). Laced with politics...
Jan 15, 2019 · Defoe’s work has spawned a plethora of television and movie adaptations, and the novel remains a classic for new generations of readers. However, few readers realize that the story of Robinson Crusoe was actually inspired by true-life events. Robinson Crusoe, 1719, 1st edition.
Explore the incredible true story behind the legendary Robinson Crusoe in our latest video! Meet Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway whose adventures i...
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- Overview
- He Wasn’t Shipwrecked
- He Was a Pirate
- He Was Alone
- A Modern Connection
Alexander Selkirk was marooned on an island for more than four years. But his story was very different from the famous novel.
For centuries, the English-speaking world has been enchanted by stories of people trapped on islands. Think Lord of the Flies, Cast Away, or even Gilligan’s Island.
Real-life buccaneer survival narratives were a major literary genre when Daniel Defoe published his hit novel Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Defoe was influenced by these narratives, and his resulting novel about a shipwrecked Englishman both mirrored and transformed the genre. In its first year, the novel went through several printings to meet public demand.
After Defoe’s death in 1731, some readers claimed the novel was inspired by Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish buccaneer who’d spent four and a half years on an island by himself. Today, many writers claim a connection between Selkirk and Crusoe.
But the idea that there’s a single, real Crusoe is a “false premise,” says Andrew Lambert, a naval history professor at King's College London and author of Crusoe’s Island. That’s because Crusoe’s story is “a complex compound of all the other buccaneer survival stories.”
“Selkirk is definitely not accepted as the major source, or even one of the top five,” says Paula Backscheider, an English scholar at Auburn University and author of Daniel Defoe: His Life. “Robinson Crusoe is a long book and it is incorrect in dozens of ways to give Selkirk as the major source.”
In Robinson Crusoe, the hero is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He lands on an island by accident—but Selkirk chose to be left on an island.
Selkirk was a crew member on the Cinque Ports when it stopped at Más a Tierra, one of the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile, in 1704. There, Selkirk had an argument with the captain because he didn’t think that the ship was safe enough to keep sailing. Instead of leaving with the crew, Selkirk marooned himself on the island.
“The ship itself was in poor condition and he believed it would sink, which indeed it did,” Lambert says. “So his basis for putting himself ashore was quite sound. The ship sank and half the crew drowned.”
Selkirk thought that another English ship would sail by within the next few weeks or months, and that he would soon be riding the seas again. Unfortunately, that ship he was waiting for didn’t arrive for four and a half years.
Before marooning himself on Más a Tierra, Selkirk looted Spanish ships and coastal cities in South America with the Cinque Ports. That’s because, unlike Crusoe, Selkirk was a pirate.
In fact, one of the critical differences between Robinson Crusoe and earlier survival narratives like Selkirk’s is that its main character isn’t a pirate.
While Selkirk’s island was uninhabited, the island that Crusoe landed on was home to a tribe of people. One of the most important characters in the book—besides Crusoe himself—is Friday, a member of the tribe. (Friday is also the origin of the antiquated phrases man Friday and girl Friday.)
Lambert thinks the character of Friday was partly inspired by a real-life Miskito Indian named Will, who was marooned and rescued on Más a Tierra two decades before Selkirk. Will’s story, he says, was recorded by buccaneer William Dampier (who was also aboard the ship that saved Selkirk and the ship that Selkirk had originally deserted).
In the 1960s, Chile changed the name of Más a Tierra, the island that Selkirk was marooned on, to Robinson Crusoe Island because of the presumed connection between Selkirk and Crusoe (it’s worth noting that the island in Robinson Crusoe has some Caribbean characteristics). They also changed the name of Más Afuera, a different island, to Alejandro Selkirk Island, even though Selkirk was never marooned there.
These name changes, Lambert suspects, had a lot to do with promoting tourism. Yet they also created a strange irony.
- Becky Little
Oct 1, 2012 · Daniel Defoe's famous novel was inspired by the true story of an 18th Century castaway, but the real Robinson Crusoe island bears little resemblance to its fictional counterpart.
Robinson Crusoe is a 1997 American adventure survival drama film directed by Rod Hardy and George T. Miller, and starring Pierce Brosnan in the title role, based on Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.
