It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked around me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground, to look further; I went up the shore, and down the shore, but it was all one: I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot—toes, heel, and every part of a foot…
Next time you’re at the beach, try leaving one footprint in the sand and no others. I’m not nit-picking. I spent years trying to achieve it. If you used a boat or a surf board, you could ride in on the wave right up the beach, plant your foot and let the next wave carry you away, provided the tide turned at that very moment or else your implantation would be obliterated. I was never able to do it. Maybe you could use a hot-air balloon (or helicopter) and fly over, make one touch down, and fly on, but I was never in a position to try that. If you were really clever, you could wade at peak tide, judge the last longest wave, do a big hop and hop back again. But I was never able to judge that wave right.
My superbly illustrated version of the book (by Lydia Roselyr) tacitly offers a simpler explanation—showing that the illustrator was as worried by the problem as I was. She solved it by drawing the beach as being of the pebbled variety with only one small patch of sand, just large enough to accommodate a single foot-print. I needed to think up a new sea-side game after that.
Robinson Crusoe never existed, neither as a person, nor as a book. He never existed as a person, because it was one Alexander Selkirk who actually lived stranded on an island, and upon whom Daniel Defoe based his novel. Actually, Selkirk didn’t exist either, since his name was really Seleraig—you can easily imagine that was not the sort of moniker to carry below decks in the British merchant marine, which was official jargon for pirate in those days. He sailed on the second of Dampier’s two government sanctioned pirate raiders but he quarrelled with his captain and was voluntarily put ashore on Juan Fernandes Island, where he remained for four years and four months until another ship picked him up. You’ll be disappointed to know the island was very much inhabited. Selkirk returned to England after an absence of eight years.
In much the same fashion, Robinson Crusoe the book doesn’t really exist either. It’s actual title is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner, who lived eight and twenty years all alone on an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great Oroonoque; having been cast ashore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself. With an account how he was at last delivered by Pirates. Written by Himself. And even then, most versions include only the first half of the novel in which he is stranded on the island up to the point of his rescue and leave out his further adventures which tell of how he was a great success as a slave trader.
In any case, I’ve always felt guilty about this book because I never enjoyed it as much as I was made to believe I should have. In fact I found it long and boring even in its abridged form. Mostly, it is a long sermon on morality and not as strong on detail as, say, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, was. Defoe fudged most of the means by which his materials for survival were found, as he did the techniques used to put them to their purpose. It has left me all my life faintly worried that there was some aspect of literature that I never properly grasped, for it was the first of many other books that I was assured I must enjoy by people who claimed to know what I must and must not enjoy, but I found it tedious. So, for the first time, I ask the question? Is it them or me?
