Visualizing Crusoe

Mapping Robinson Crusoe

Even for those who have not read Robinson Crusoe, most people are aware of its central premise—that of man shipwrecked solo on a deserted island. Central to the castaway narrative is the desert island onto which the survivor washes up. The island that serves as the inspiration for, or which is fictionally created, has been something that is at the center of these narratives. 

Some sources suggest that Daniel Defoe's inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was based on the story of real-life Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who was stranded for four years on the island of "Más a Tierra," since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. The island is one of three volcanic islands that comprise the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. The other two islands are called "Alejandro Selkirk Island" (formerly Más Afuera) and Santa Clara Island. 





 

British Commodore George Anson circumnavigated the globe from 1740-1744. Some of the engravings in his A voyage round the world, in the years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV depict what is now known as Robinson Crusoe Island, including his tent pitched on the island. 





Daniel Defoe also published in 1719 a sequel to Robinson Crusoe titled "The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner : who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque : having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself : with an account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by pyrates / written by himself." This text's frontispiece includes a map of the world onto which Crusoe's voyages are overlaid

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