Robinson Crusoe

Shipwrecked alone on a tropical island near the mouth of the Orinoco, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years wresting a life from the wilderness, until a footprint in the sand, and the man Friday, change everything. Defoe frames the survival tale with a real geography: the departure from England against his father's wishes, the Brazil plantation he abandons for one last voyage, and the Caribbean island, drawn from the seas off Trinidad and the Orinoco delta, on which he is cast away.

Crusoe

Hull and York

To sea

Against his father's plea to be content with the safe middle station of life, the restless young Crusoe runs off to sea from Hull, and is shipwrecked, enslaved and freed before ever reaching his island. Defoe frames the whole book as the story of a disobedient wanderer, the comfortable English home rejected for a life of danger that his island exile will make him repent.

The opening chapters

explicit Crusoe leaves his family at York and sails from Hull, real English towns, against his father's advice; sited there, far outside the island setting.

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