The

Life and Adventures
of
Robinson Crusoe

By

Daniel Defoe

_With Illustrations by H. M. Brock_

London
Seeley, Service & Co. Limited
38 Great Russell Street

Contents

CHAPTER I—START IN LIFE
CHAPTER II—SLAVERY AND ESCAPE
CHAPTER III—WRECKED ON A DESERT ISLAND
CHAPTER IV—FIRST WEEKS ON THE ISLAND
CHAPTER V—BUILDS A HOUSE—THE JOURNAL
CHAPTER VI—ILL AND CONSCIENCE-STRICKEN
CHAPTER VII—AGRICULTURAL EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER VIII—SURVEYS HIS POSITION
CHAPTER IX—A BOAT
CHAPTER X—TAMES GOATS
CHAPTER XI—FINDS PRINT OF MAN'S FOOT ON THE SAND
CHAPTER XII—A CAVE RETREAT
CHAPTER XIII—WRECK OF A SPANISH SHIP
CHAPTER XIV—A DREAM REALISED
CHAPTER XV—FRIDAY'S EDUCATION
CHAPTER XVI—RESCUE OF PRISONERS FROM CANNIBALS
CHAPTER XVII—VISIT OF MUTINEERS
CHAPTER XVIII—THE SHIP RECOVERED
CHAPTER XIX—RETURN TO ENGLAND
CHAPTER XX—FIGHT BETWEEN FRIDAY AND A BEAR

CHAPTER I. START IN LIFE

I was born in 1632 in the city of York, into a respectable family—though my father wasn't originally English. He was a foreigner from Bremen, Germany, who first settled in Hull. There he built a solid fortune through trade, and once he retired from business, he moved to York, where he had married my mother. Her family, the Robinsons, was well regarded in that area, and it's from them that I got my original name: Robinson Kreutznaer. But through the usual English habit of twisting foreign words, our name became "Crusoe"—so much so that we started spelling and calling ourselves that too. My friends always knew me by that name.

I had two older brothers. One became a lieutenant-colonel in an English infantry regiment stationed in Flanders—the same regiment once led by the famous Colonel Lockhart—and he was killed fighting the Spanish near Dunkirk. I never learned what happened to my other brother, just as my parents never learned what became of me.

As the third son, with no trade or profession lined up for me, my mind filled early on with restless dreams of adventure. My father, already quite old, had given me a decent education—as much as home schooling and a local free school could provide—and he intended for me to study law. But nothing would satisfy me except going to sea. This urge pulled me so strongly against my father's wishes—and against all the pleading of my mother and other relatives—that it seemed almost like fate was steering me toward the miserable life that awaited me.

My father, a serious and thoughtful man, gave me solemn, excellent advice against the path he could see I intended to take. One morning he called me into his room, where he was laid up with gout, and argued the matter with me quite forcefully. He asked what reason I had—beyond simple restlessness—for wanting to leave home and my native country, where I had good prospects: a chance to build my fortune through hard work and effort, and a life of comfort ahead of me. He explained that it was usually men in desperate circumstances, or men born to great wealth and status, who went abroad seeking adventure—hoping to rise through bold action or make a name for themselves in extraordinary ventures. Neither extreme applied to me. My situation, he said, was the middle path: what he called the "upper level of ordinary life." Through long experience, he'd found this to be the best possible position in the world—the one best suited to real happiness. It avoided the hardships and grinding labor faced by the working class, yet it also escaped the pride, excess, ambition, and envy that plagued the wealthy and powerful.

He told me I could judge the value of this middle station by one simple fact: it was the state of life that everyone else envied. Even kings, he said, had often lamented the burdens that came with being born to greatness, wishing instead they'd been placed in the middle ground between poverty and wealth. Even the wise man in Scripture testified to this truth when he prayed for neither poverty nor riches, treating that balance as the true measure of happiness.

He urged me to notice that life's hardships fall mostly on people at the top and bottom of society, while the middle class faces the fewest disasters and the least instability. They weren't as vulnerable to the physical and mental afflictions that come either from excess and reckless living at the top, or from grinding poverty and poor nutrition at the bottom—both of which bring on sickness as a natural consequence of how people live. The middle station, he insisted, was ideally suited for virtue and genuine enjoyment. Peace and plenty were its natural companions. Moderation, calm, good health, friendship, and every worthwhile pleasure belonged to this way of life. People who lived this way moved through the world quietly and smoothly, and left it comfortably too—free from backbreaking physical labor or grueling mental strain, never forced into servitude just to earn their daily bread, never tangled up in complicated troubles that steal peace from the soul and rest from the body. They weren't consumed by envy or driven by secret, burning ambition. Instead, they glided gently through life in comfortable circumstances, tasting all its sweetness without the bitterness—genuinely happy, and growing more aware of that happiness with each passing day.

After this, he pleaded with me earnestly and with real affection not to act rashly, not to throw myself into hardships that nature and my station in life seemed designed to protect me from. I had no real need to earn my own living, he said; he intended to provide for me and help me settle comfortably into the very life he'd just described. If I failed to find contentment in the world, it would be through my own bad luck or poor choices—not through any failure on his part, since he had done his duty by warning me clearly against a path he knew would harm me. In short, he would gladly do everything in his power for me if I stayed and settled down as he wished, but he refused to have any hand in encouraging a decision that could ruin me. To drive the point home, he reminded me of my older brother, who had ignored these same warnings when he insisted on joining the wars in the Low Countries, and who had been killed as a result. Though my father promised he would never stop praying for me, he warned that if I insisted on this foolish course, God would withhold His blessing—and someday, when trouble came, I would have plenty of time to regret ignoring his advice, with no one left to help me recover.

I noticed, during this last part of his speech—which turned out to be strangely prophetic, though I doubt my father realized it at the time—that tears streamed down his face, especially when he mentioned my brother's death. And when he spoke of my having "time to repent with no one to help," he grew so overwhelmed with emotion that he stopped talking altogether, telling me his heart was too full to continue.

I was genuinely moved by everything he said—how could I not be?—and I resolved to give up all thoughts of leaving, and to settle down at home just as my father wished. But within a few days, that resolve had completely faded. In fact, to avoid any further pressure from my father, I decided within a few weeks to simply run away from home. Still, I didn't act quite as impulsively as my first burst of determination might suggest. Instead, I caught my mother at a moment when she seemed to be in an unusually good mood, and told her that my heart was so completely set on seeing the world that I would never be able to commit myself seriously to anything else. I suggested that my father would do better to give his consent than to force me to leave without it. I was already eighteen—too old, I argued, to become someone's apprentice or a clerk to a lawyer. I was certain that even if I tried, I would never finish out my contract; I'd run off before it ended anyway, straight to sea. So I asked her to persuade my father to let me take just one voyage. If I came back and didn't like the life, I promised I would never go again—and that I would work twice as hard afterward to make up for lost time.

This request threw my mother into quite a temper. She told me it would be pointless to raise the subject with my father, since he understood far too well what was truly in my best interest to ever agree to something so damaging. She said she was amazed I would even consider such a thing after everything my father had told me, and after the kind, heartfelt words he had used. In short, if I insisted on ruining myself, there was nothing anyone could do to stop me—but I could be certain I would never receive her blessing for it. She refused to have any part in my downfall, and she would not let me claim afterward that she had agreed to something my father opposed.

Although my mother refused to raise the matter with my father, I later learned that she told him everything anyway. And after showing real distress over it, he reportedly said to her with a sigh, "That boy could be happy if he stayed home. But if he goes abroad, he will become the most miserable wretch ever born. I cannot give my consent to this."

Almost a year passed before I finally broke free—though throughout that time, I remained stubbornly resistant to any suggestion of settling into a trade, and I frequently argued with my parents about their firm refusal to support what they knew I badly wanted. Then one day, I happened to be in Hull—purely by chance, with no plan of running away at that particular moment. But while there, I ran into a friend who was about to sail to London on his father's ship. He invited me to join him, using the usual bait that sailors offer: that the voyage wouldn't cost me a thing. Without consulting my father or mother, without even sending them word, I left them to learn of my departure however they might—without asking for God's blessing, or my father's, and without any real thought for the consequences. In an evil hour, God knows, on the first of September, 1651, I boarded a ship bound for London.

I doubt any young adventurer's troubles ever began sooner or lasted longer than mine did. The ship had barely cleared the Humber River when the wind picked up and the sea grew rough in the most frightening way. Since I had never been to sea before, I felt violently seasick and thoroughly terrified. I began, quite seriously, to reflect on what I had done—how justly I was being punished by Heaven's judgment for wickedly abandoning my father's house and neglecting my duty. All the good advice my parents had given me, my father's tears, my mother's pleading—it all came flooding back into my mind. My conscience, not yet hardened to the degree it would later become, scolded me for ignoring their counsel and failing in my duty to both God and my father.

All this while, the storm grew worse, and the waves rose to a terrifying height—though nothing compared to storms I would witness many times afterward, including just a few days later. Still, it was more than enough to shake a young, inexperienced sailor who had never known anything like it. I fully expected each wave to swallow us whole, and every time the ship dropped—as it seemed to do—into the trough between two swells, we