The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

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The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Title page from the first edition
Author Daniel Defoe
Country England
Language English
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher W Taylor
Publication date 1719
Media type Print
ISBN NA
Preceded by Robinson Crusoe
Followed by Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe

The title-page of the less known Part II of Robinson Crusoe's further adventures shows this text: THE FARTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE; Being the Second and Last Part OF HIS LIFE, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe. Written by Himself. To which is added a Map of the World, in which is Delineated the Voyages of ROBINSON CRUSOE. LONDON: Printed for W. Taylor at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row. MDCCXIX.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

The book starts with the statement about Crusoe's marriage in England. He bought a little farm in Bedford and had three children: two sons and one daughter. Our hero suffered a distemper and a desire to see "his island." He could talk of nothing else, and one can imagine that no one took his stories seriously, except his wife. She told him, in tears, "I will go with you, but I won't leave you." But in the middle of this felicity, Providence unhinged him at once, with the loss of his wife.

[edit] Crusoe's return to his island

At the beginning of 1693, he made his nephew the commander of a ship. About the beginning of January 1694, Crusoe and Friday went on board in the Downs on the 8th, then touched and left Ireland on the 5th of February. On the 20th of February they rescued the survivors of a burning ship that sank afterwards. It was a 300 ton French merchant ship, homeward-bound from Quebec. They delivered them to Newfoundland, and on March 19, 1694 they were at the northern latitude of 27 degrees and 5 minutes on the Atlantic Ocean, then landed in Brazil. They got to his old habitation, the desert island off the coast of Venezuela, on 10 April 1695. [1]

Almost nine years had passed since he had left the island previously, in December 1686. He had left five Englishmen there, three rude villains and two good fellows. The Spaniards numbered about seventeen, having in the interval come from the mainland with the father of Friday. The two poor Englishmen had pitched their tents on the north shore of the island, but they had continuously been harassed by the villains who once threw a firebrand at their huts. The two honest Englishmen trod the fire out with their feet. They had firearms with them, and boldly ordered the rogues to lay down their arms. The three rogues left furiously, but they stayed up till midnight, in order to take the poor men when they are asleep. The other two men had also a design upon them, and gone abroad.

However, the three villains were weary, so they fell asleep at Crusoe's bower. When they came to the huts of the two honest Englishmen, Will Atkins called out to his comrade, Ha, Jack, here's the nest, but damn them, the birds are flown. [2]

The Farther Adventures gives an account of the activities of the small population, and the regular visits of the cannibals during Crusoe's absence. [3] Finally the savages invaded the island with a fleet of 28 canoes, Crusoe was told. They landed on the easternmost side of the island, two leagues from Crusoe's first cave, and a war broke out.

Crusoe does not tell when he left the island for the second time. After he let his old bird Poll be free in the forest, Crusoe set sail to the mainland. A strong current carried him to the east-northeast, and they got into a bay on the third day. Here an army of about a thousand canoes came towards them from the east by paddling. He ordered Friday to call out in his language. The poor fellow obeyed him, and was killed by three arrows at that moment. It must have been the army of the cannibal Changuenes, enemies of Friday's Térraba tribe.

[edit] Crusoe's adventures in Madagascar

After having buried Friday in the ocean, the same evening they set sail for Brazil. They stayed for a long period there, then went directly over to the Cape of Good Hope. They landed on Madagascar where their nine men were pursued by three hundred natives, because one of his mariners had carried off a young native girl among the trees. The natives hanged this person, so the crew massacred 32 persons and burned the houses of the native town. Crusoe opposed all these, therefore he was marooned, and settled at the Bay of Bengal for a long time.

[edit] Crusoe's travels in Southeast Asia and China

Finally, he bought a ship that later turned out to be stolen. Therefore they went to the river of Cambodia and Cochin-China or the bay of Tonquin, until they came to the latitude of 22 degrees and 30 minutes, and anchored at the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Then they arrived to the coast of China. They visited Nanking near the river of Kilam, and sailed southwards to a port called Quinchang. An old Portuguese pilot suggested them to go to Ningpo by the mouth of a river. This Ningpo was a canal that passed through the heart of that vast empire of China, crossed all the rivers and some hills by the help of sluices and gates, and went up to Peking, being near 270 leagues long. So they did, then it was the beginning of February, in the Old Style calendar, when they set out from Peking.

Then they travelled through the following places: Changu, Naum (or Naun, a fortified city), Argun(a) on the Chinese-Russian border (April 13, 1703).

[edit] Crusoe's travels in Siberia

Argun was the first town on the Russian border, then they went through Nertzinskoi, Plotbus, touched a lake called Schaks Ozer, Jerawena, the river Udda, Yeniseysk, and Tobolsk (from September 1703 to beginning of June 1704). They arrived into Europe around the source of the river Wirtska, south of the river Petrou, to a village called Kermazinskoy near Soloy Kamskoy (Solikamsk). They passed a little river called Kirtza, near Ozomoys (or Gzomoys), came to Veuslima on the river Wirtzogda, running into the Dwina, then they stayed in Lawrenskoy (July 3-7, 1704). Finally Crusoe arrived at the White Sea port town Archangel or Archangelsk on August 18, sailed into Hamburg (September 18), and Hague. He arrived at London on 10 January 1705, having been gone from England ten years and nine months.

[edit] References and notes

  1. ^ There is a year gap here which would have allowed them to reach that uninhabited island that could instead be located in the Pacific Ocean, namely the Cocos Island or Isla del Coco in Spanish, an offshore island of Costa Rica. The book Desert Island (Robinson Crusoe Enterprises, North Vancouver, 1996) proposed the highly detailed theory that Daniel Defoe used the Isla del Coco as an accurate model for his descriptions of the island inhabited by the marooned Robinson Crusoe. However Defoe placed Crusoe's island not in the Pacific, but rather off the coast of Venezuela in the Atlantic Ocean. Robinson Crusoe was a territorial British colonist: he considered as his own island, and he seems reluctant to confess its exact location to anyone, not even to Defoe, who placed the island near the mouth of the River Orinoco.
  2. ^ At this point of the book, one must mention that this volume later informs us that Crusoe had received information between 1695 and 1719 about the death of Atkins. The bilingual book of J. Christopher Weston Knight, La Isla del Coco - Cocos Island (1992) contains a black and white photograph showing an old iscription found on Cocos Island. The text is carved in a piece of wood cut out of a palm tree. It goes, "THE Bird Is Gone." The famous saying of Atkins, "The birds are gone" may have been carved by his English colleagues on the day of his burial, but this time referring only to himself, in singular, not without some irony. The inscription now is in the National Museum in San José, Costa Rica. There is no need to add that no other islands have any English text in connection with the history of Robinson Crusoe, only Cocos Island. A radiocarbon test would give us an approximate date for the age of the wood that may have belonged to the grave of Will Atkins.
  3. ^ These may have been historically true.

[edit] External links