Castaways 12

             “At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.”
                                                                                         Herman Melville


It was the first story of the Southern Sea.
On 25 April 1719, just over a decade after Selkirk’s rescue, and a year before his death off the African coast, an English merchant, political prisoner, and spy published the first edition of his tale about a marooned sailor, surviving by the goatskin of his wits on a deserted Caribbean island. Daniel Defoe lived in an era when British booksellers, who carried the titles of controversial writers, were hung in public. But this book, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates, created an eternal myth, a legend so real that, to this day, there are some Tobago islanders, who proudly proclaim one of the world’s most famous fictional characters as an ancestor.
Robinson Crusoe was the first true English novel. Chock full of sailing ships and stormy seas and exotic desert islands, and muskets and wild boars and cannibals, it set the standard for every adventure story that followed.
Far more than exuberant action thriller, set in a faraway locale, Robinson Crusoe was the symbolic narrative of a lone man’s ability to face the ultimate tests of nature, and emerge triumphant over hardship and adversity. Some felt that it was a Christian allegory for the development of civilization. James Joyce described Defoe’s protagonist as ‘the true prototype of the British colonist.’ His enduring faith and steadfastness helped establish and promulgate the myth of colonial supremacy. Robert Louis Stevenson’s assessment of the footprint scene as ‘the most unforgettable in English literature,’ confirmed Friday’s rescue from his cannibal pursuers as the precedential paradigm of the White Man’s Burden. But those grandiose insights and claims still understated the larger significance of the legend that Defoe had created.
In 1731, a decade after Selkirk’s death, and another before Defoe’s, a German writer named Johann Gottfried Schnabel, in the preface of his work Die Insel Felsenburg, The Island Stronghold, coined a term that would become emblematic for the spawn of imitations that would define a renegade literary genre. Robinsonade.
In the classic robinsonade, the hero is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilization, usually shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded island, often located in the Pacific, tropical, uninhabited and usually uncharted. He must improvise to become self-sufficient from the limited resources at hand. At its essence, the robinsonade is a Man versus Nature conflict, a solitary statement of survivalism.
The infinite number of potential storyline combinations and permutations, are tempered by thematic elements common to them all. There is always isolation, be it on a desert island, a virgin planet, a Lost World, or any other sufficiently remote wild wilderness. The principle characters are making a new beginning. There are encounters with natives, hostile or helpful, which leads to a commentary on the essence of society, and the construction of a new one, for better or worse, depending on the skill level of the castaway. A difficult ordeal, involving conflict, is required for character development, as typifies every hero quest. Elements of technological change and economic advancement, in the context of the assumed innate antagonism of nature, are important. The solitude had to lead back to society, or the ordeal would have no meaning. The natural world in which the castaway found himself could only take one of two forms, nice or nasty.
Thomas More had depicted nature as idyllic, and the Utopian robinsonades range from ingenious recreations of society’s comforts, as in Swiss Family Robinson, to more questionably humorous forms, like Gilligan’s Island. The two other iconic real-life desert island paradise robinsonades arrived on Pitcairn with the Bounty mutineers, and with New Zealander Tom Neale’s An Island to Oneself, the autobiography of his sixteen years on Anchorage Island, in the Suwarrow atoll. Western literature, with its monotheistic estrangement from, and inherent antagonism to, the natural world, has many more dystopian representations of robinsonades as less escapism than requiring escape. Defoe portrayed Crusoe’s remote island as unforgiving and sparse, his Bible-reading, superior cultured, principle character managing to prevail in conflicts with heathens, and survive the elements, by virtue of his virtue.

                             “I am monarch of all I survey,

                             My right there is none to dispute;
                              From the centre all round to the sea,

                             I am lord of the fowl and the brute.”
                                       William Cowper, The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk

Other wild wildernesses are hostile pits of savagery, and the castaways undergo feral regression, best represented in Fielding’s Lord of the Flies, Garland’s The Beach, or a dozen other works of especially United States origin. The Americans are rather more utopian about the powers of human achievement, and definitely more dystopian about the friendliness of nature. They have a special affinity for post-apocalyptic fantasy, in no small measure because they live so removed from Mother Earth, having historically used the U.S. Cavalry and the Army corps of engineers to move her out of the way of their pursuit of progress. The illusion of a secure existence off The Road, in a gated community theme park, is preferable to the reality of sharing their lives with the creepy crawlies, and an armed and paranoid populace. They can watch the latest episode of Survivor from their condo couch comfort, and leave the bugs to the Starship Troopers.
But even the beautifully seductive literary genre of the robinsonade, and the salts it precipitates, sells the significance of Robinson Crusoe short of a bigger impact.
In his quest for survival, the robinsonade castaway not only becomes a perfect study about the man of nature, but the nature of man.