Crusoe's Farther Adventures: Discovery, Trade, and the Law of Nations (original) (raw)

1997, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY-LUBBOCK-

At the end of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures, Crusoe suggests that he may follow his story of the discovery, defense, and settlement of his island with an account of the struggles which his successors later endured as they endeavored to preserve peace in the new colony. The Caribbeans, he summarizes, returned to invade the settlers and ruin their plantations; the English villains he had left on the island were subjected to the Spaniards though used honestly and fairly by them; the island itself was further planted and improved; and Crusoe himself returned to give the colonists supplies and to divvy up property and administrative responsibility among them. Of all this, together with "some new adventures of my own for ten years more," he tentatively promises to give an account. What he does not advertise in any detail are other episodes in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which he travels on from the island around the Cape of Good Hope, past Madagascar, up toward the East Indies and the Pacific, overland through China and Tartar to Europe, and finally back to England. On this later voyage he continues to reflect, as he did in the first part of Robinson Crusoe, on the imprudence of an adventurer's life. The difference here is that he interprets his misfortunes not so much as the just consequences of an original act of disobedience against his father, but as the result of his behaving like a reckless wanderer, journeying to places where he has "no business," 1 rather than like a responsible British merchant, who might secure, plant, and settle new territories "in the name of England" (216). A merchant, Defoe will elsewhere suggest, can, in the interests of trade, legitimately establish himself on foreign "uninhabited" soil. An adventurer who claims sovereignty over the territories he discovers, on the other hand, respects neither the interests of his own nation, nor the authority of those natural laws which regulate relations between different nations. As aimless explorer, as absolute ruler of the island, and as self-appointed prosecutor and judge of both his cannibal and his mutineer subjects, Crusoe is something more and less than a law-abiding citizen of his country and