Daniel Defoe was a failed businessman. At the time accounts of Selkirk's adventures came out in 1712 and 1713, he was in his early fifties. Short of money, he was trying to pay off debts, support a wife and children, and maintain a big house by writing books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. Defoe had a sharp tongue and his political stories annoyed powerful men in the church and government. One of his pamphlets charged some members of Parliament with disrespect for the rights of Englishmen. They did not appreciate his views. A £50 reward was offered for his capture.
He was betrayed by an informer and was charged with sedition. Defoe was fined £135 and spent the next six months in prison. Even though he wrote a lot, by his sixtieth year Defoe was broke, partly because he made unwise investments in business ventures that didn't turn profits. He desperately needed a money-spinner. He remembered the accounts of Selkirk's marooning that he had read. The story of a man surviving alone on an uninhabited island was one that he could use.
In the early eighteenth century almost all books published were nonfiction. Histories, biographies, and travel books were popular subjects. Novels rarely appeared. Defoe spoke with his printer who agreed that a book about a marooned seaman on a tropical island might sell, but only if it read like nonfiction. In order to achieve this, Defoe decided to write in such a way that it would seem that the hero was writing the book himself, make the story appear as though it had really happened.
In April 1719 the new book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. Defoe's name did not appear as author. The title page read: "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself. It became the most famous adventure story ever told, the tale of the shipwrecked mariner who survived twenty-eight years on an island off Brazil. The book is still available today in bookstores and libraries almost three hundred years after it was first published.
Readers believed Crusoe's story was true. In the Preface, Defoe noted that the book was "a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it." The book was so popular that it was reprinted a month after its first print run of 1500 copies and thrice more by the end of the year. The story was serialized in The Original London Post for sixty-five weeks, an astonishing run. Defoe never named Selkirk as the model for his hero.
But in a new edition of his novel he wrote: "There is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are [my] subject, and to whom all or most part of the story alludes: this may be depended upon for the truth, and to this I set my name. Defoe's notes for his story, still preserved in the Guildhall Library in London, read in part: "Goats plenty. Fish: abundance, split and salt.... The fat of young seals good as olive oil."
There is also mention of a visit with a Captain Thomas Bowry of the East India Company, a shipping firm who showed Defoe maps of Juan Fernández. Ten years after it was published, Defoe's story appeared in French, and by 1760 in German, Dutch, and Russian. Translations appear today in nearly all the world's languages. After the success of the first Crusoe story, Defoe wrote two more: "Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and "Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe" the next year.
In his lifetime, Defoe turned out an awesome amount of writing but only Crusoe and Moll Flanders (1722) remains in print today. Although he wrote a lot, Defoe never seemed to earn enough money to support his wife and seven children. In April 1731, he was hiding from people he owed money to in a shabby house in London where he died, some twelve years after his famous novel first appeared in which he created one of the most enduring characters in all fiction.
Did Selkirk ever read the story? Possibly. In April 1719, when the novel appeared, he was on leave from H.M.S. Enterprise and in London. On daily walks about the city he sometimes visited bookstores. At the end of his famous story, Defoe arranged for Crusoe to return to the island on which he had lived for twenty-eight years. But we know that was only fiction. Alexander Selkirk, the real-life Robinson Crusoe, never visited his island home again.
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