Claire Harman
ISLAND RECORDS
Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth
By Katherine Frank
(Bodley Head 368pp £20)
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In the summer of 1660, an East Indiaman called the Anne, under Captain Robert Knox, was damaged in a storm in the Indian Ocean and forced to berth for repairs at Trincomalee in Ceylon. It wasn't the best choice of port. The Dutch had abandoned their fort there and the territory was in the control of the king of Kandy, who promptly sent an armed force to take the 'outlandish' Britishers prisoner.
Among the sixteen men detained were the captain and his nineteen-year-old son, also called Robert, who was destined to stay 'captivated' in a series of Ceylonese villages for the next twenty years, during which time his father died and Knox Jr in effect went native, growing a beard, adopting the local sarong as dress and knitting caps for a living. He escaped on a trading visit to the coast and on the seven-month journey back to England began writing An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, published in 1681.
Knox's book, unearthed and carefully reconsidered by Katherine Frank in the light of its influence on one particularly influential reader, was part misery memoir and part travelogue, full of hitherto unknown information about the geography and culture of Ceylon. Frank has done a marvellous job of recreating the history behind the book: the knotty dealings of the East India Company, the internal and external politics of Ceylon in the seventeenth century, the life of its ports, courts and villages. The reasons for Knox's indefinite detention are not clear, but nothing was required of him and his fellow captives except not to escape; they might well have spent the rest of their lives on that distant island, 'settled into a new kind of contentment'.
Indeed, Knox came to look back on his years of captivity as a form of lost idyll, for the London he returned to in 1680 had been changed beyond recognition by the Great Fire and the Restoration. Nothing was familiar and no one expected him still to be alive: Knox's sister 'started back' from his face at the door. Unlike the happy endings of novels, real life turned out messy and uncomforting.
Knox jumped at the opportunity to return to sea in command of a merchant ship that had been converted for use as a slaver. He wasn't, however, really fit for such a job. His long removal from society had turned him into something of an ascetic, insensitive to the needs and welfare of others. While at Madagascar he got into a dispute with the king over the delivery of a consignment of slaves that threatened to turn into another Ceylon-style hostage-taking. His crew voted with their feet, mutinying at St Helena and leaving Knox stranded on the island - not alone, but disgraced and disgruntled.
This all happened forty years before Daniel Defoe, serial speculator, pamphleteer, business addict and former bankrupt, wrote his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, an instant bestseller featuring a man shipwrecked on an island for twenty-eight years. Less well-known is Defoe's second fictional foray, Captain Singleton, which draws directly on incidents in Knox's book, even plagiarising parts of it. There's no doubt that Defoe read Knox, and the two men, as Katherine Frank points out, ended up living within two miles of each other in north London in the 1710s. They might well have met - Knox had connections with the Royal Society and Defoe was nothing if not alert to an opportunity.
But how much deeper does the connection go? Frank, the distinguished biographer of Lucie Duff Gordon and Mary Kingsley among others, is more instinctive and poetic than many of the scholars who have checked and crosschecked clues to Defoe's sources and working methods in his massive oeuvre of novels, poems, self-help manuals, political essays and journalism. Elegantly written, her argument proceeds as much by extended metaphor as by hard evidence. Defoe's incarceration in Newgate in 1703 for debt was a kind of shipwreck, she says, his release was like Knox's escape from Ceylon, and his survivor's instinct was the same as Knox's and Crusoe's: 'when shipwrecked by land, take up a pen rather than an oar or sail. Make experience into a saleable commodity. If life fails you, rewrite it.' The incredibly powerful and timeless appeal of the Crusoe story, she argues, has its basis in the psychological truths Defoe learned the hard way, and recognised in Knox's narrative - that 'by dint of hard work and positive thinking' you can survive disaster and transform your life.
But by claiming that Knox 'was Crusoe' Frank enters choppy, and crowded, waters. Her bibliography mentions dozens of works that claim to identify the Ur-source for Defoe's classic tale, including Diana Souhami's marvellous Selkirk's Island, Tim Severin's Seeking Robinson Crusoe and the definitive overview of all such studies (before 1924), A W Secord's Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. Frank's promotion of Knox as a pivotal influence doesn't hold up too well against the multiplicity of other, similar sources. The turn of the eighteenth century seems to have been glutted with castaway narratives - if even half of them were true, there could barely have been an empty atoll anywhere to be found. And when the author keeps reminding us of the flaws in her central thesis, the reader is bound to feel confused. '[Defoe] didn't reproduce Knox's adventures sequentially in the novel', Frank tells us, reasonably enough. 'Instead, he appropriated a number of key events, actions and locales and then rearranged and refashioned them into an entirely new narrative which nevertheless was largely derived from episodes in Knox's life.' Elsewhere, she tells us that 'despite all his borrowings in Captain Singleton, Defoe created a hero who couldn't have been less like the serious, dedicated Robert Knox'. The rationale of her book gets harder and harder to perceive.
Knox retired at last to Stoke Newington and led a life of frugality and self-containment. He had few friends, and became increasingly pious and severe. Did he read Robinson Crusoe when it was published in 1719, the year before his death? And if so, did he recognise any of his own experience in Ceylon reflected in Crusoe's long island sojourn? Perhaps the person most like Crusoe was Defoe himself, utilising the raw materials around him to their fullest possible extent. Defoe knew nothing about globe-trotting and distant lands, and probably put Crusoe alone on his island, Katherine Frank suggests, because it was easier to imagine. Books like Knox's were grist to an extraordinarily active mill; Defoe was professionally predatory on all such material, barely stopping to think about the transitions effected in his imagination. I'd bet that if he'd been asked what he thought of the late Captain Knox's book, he might have had difficulty remembering that he'd ever read it.
Defoe was one of the most prolific authors ever, ardent and impatient, often (but not always) slapdash, never looking back. Perhaps it was despite, and not because of, his obvious indebtedness to so many sources that he could create one of the most convincing, compelling and original fictions in our whole literature.
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Claire Harman's most recent book is Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Canongate).