58 Fun Facts About Robinson Crusoe

Besides his clothes, what does Crusoe famously make out of goatskins?

An umbrella: he spoils two or three before he gets one that will fold, then calls the clumsy, ugly thing the most necessary item he owns after his gun.

What did many early readers believe Robinson Crusoe to be?

A true story: the title page named no author but the hero, saying it was 'Written by Himself', and many early readers took Crusoe for a real man.

According to its full title, how many years does Crusoe live on his island?

28: the title page promises 'Eight and Twenty Years, all alone', and Crusoe gives the same count as he leaves, though his own dates, September 1659 to December 1686, add up to just over 27.

Which Scottish castaway is most often cited as the inspiration for Crusoe?

Alexander Selkirk spent four years and four months alone on a Pacific island. Two ships did put in, but both were Spanish, so the British privateer had to hide from his only visitors.

The Pacific island renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966 belongs to which South American country?

Chile renamed it in a bid for tourists and, at the same stroke, named a neighbouring island after the Scottish sailor who once lived here alone, though he never visited the one now named after him.

Whose family name became Crusoe's first name, Robinson?

His mother's family name was Robinson. His surname began as his German father's Kreutznaer, which he says the English wore down by 'the usual corruption of words'.

From which English port does Crusoe first set sail, in 1651?

Kingston upon Hull is where he boards a friend's ship for London on impulse, without a word to his parents. A storm wrecks it before it arrives, and still he will not go home.

Crusoe is captured at sea and enslaved by pirates from which North African port?

Salé was home to the corsairs known as the Sallee Rovers. Crusoe spends two years there as a slave before sailing off in his master's boat during a fishing trip.

Who escapes slavery with Crusoe, only to be sold by him to a Portuguese captain?

Xury is sold for sixty pieces of eight, though Crusoe is 'loth' to trade away the boy's liberty. The captain promises to free him in ten years if he turns Christian.

In which country does Crusoe run a plantation before his fateful voyage?

Brazil makes him a prosperous planter within four years, but he cannot sit still. Fellow planters talk him into a secret slave-buying voyage to Guinea, and it ends in the wreck.

Crusoe's island lies near the mouth of which South American river?

The Orinoco is on the original title page as the 'Great River of Oroonoque'. That puts Crusoe's island in the Caribbean, not in the Pacific, where the sailor usually named as his model lived alone.

What name does Crusoe give his new home when he first lands?

The Island of Despair is the name in his first journal entry, written when he can see 'nothing but death' ahead. Within a year he is surveying a green valley as 'king and lord of all this country'.

Which animals survive the shipwreck along with Crusoe?

A dog and two cats: he carries the cats ashore himself, while the dog jumps overboard and swims to him, to be his 'trusty servant' for many years.

How does Crusoe keep track of time on the island?

Notches in a wooden cross, with a longer cut for every seventh day. Even so, when he adds them up after a year he finds he has 'lost a day or two' somewhere.

Which crops does Crusoe grow on the island?

Barley and rice first come up by accident, where he shook out an old bag of chicken feed. He takes the green shoots for a miracle until he remembers the bag.

What goes wrong with Crusoe's first big canoe?

He cannot get it to the water: after months hollowing out a huge cedar a hundred yards inland, he works out that digging a canal to it would take him ten or twelve years.

Why does Crusoe name his companion Friday?

For the day of the week he appeared. Crusoe's next lesson is the word 'Master', which he lets the man know is to be Crusoe's own name.

Why does Crusoe decide he has no right to kill the cannibals?

They do not knowingly commit a crime, he reasons: to them eating a captive is like eating mutton, and they have done him no harm. Attacking them would make him no better than the Spanish conquerors.

Which two prisoners do Crusoe and his companion rescue from the cannibals' feast?

Friday's father and a Spaniard. Friday only learns who the bound man in the canoe is once the fight is over, then kisses him, weeps, sings and dances around him.

How does Crusoe finally leave his island?

On an English ship retaken from mutineers: its captain, about to be marooned himself, first takes the ragged Crusoe for an angel. The worst of the rebels later choose to stay behind rather than hang in England.

The day Crusoe is wrecked on his island is also which anniversary?

His birthday, 30 September: Crusoe counts it among the strange coincidences of dates in his story, remarking that his 'wicked life' and his 'solitary life' began on the same day.

What final adventure do Crusoe and Friday face on the way home from Lisbon?

Fighting off wolves in the Pyrenees is the price of going home overland, which Crusoe chooses out of a 'strange aversion' to the sea that he cannot explain. Deep snow has left the packs ravenous.

Years into his solitude, whose voice startles Crusoe awake by calling his name?

His parrot's: Poll has picked up the self-pitying talk Crusoe taught him, and greets him with 'Poor Robin Crusoe!', asking where he has been.

What term was coined for the genre of desert-island stories that Robinson Crusoe inspired?

Robinsonade is the name for tales like The Swiss Family Robinson, which began as bedtime stories a Swiss pastor told his sons. Its German title simply means 'The Swiss Robinson'.

What does Crusoe do with the coins he finds on the wreck after calling them worthless?

Takes them ashore anyway: 'O drug! what art thou good for?' he asks the money, telling it to sink with the ship. Then, on second thoughts, he wraps it in canvas, and it sails home with him in the end.

On the journey home, which animal does Friday lure out along a branch to make his companions laugh?

A bear: Friday pelts it with a stone, lets it follow him out along a branch, then shakes the bough to make it 'dance' before shooting it at point-blank range.

How does Crusoe get his supplies from the stranded ship to the shore?

On a home-made raft, lashed together from the ship's spare masts and yards. He makes eleven trips in under two weeks, before a storm breaks up what is left of the wreck.

Which condition of life does Crusoe's father call the best in the world?

The middle station, his father argues, is spared both the hardships of the poor and the pride and envy of the great. He is in tears as he warns his son against leaving it.

What was the title of Defoe's 1719 sequel to Robinson Crusoe?

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe followed quickly, in the same year. Widowed and restless at sixty-one, Crusoe goes back to see his island, then trades his way home through China and across Siberia.

The name 'Crusoe' may derive from Timothy Cruso, who was what to Defoe?

A classmate at Charles Morton's academy in Newington Green, Timothy Cruso became a noted London preacher and writer of moral guides. He died young, long before Defoe made his surname famous.

Which Crusoe scene did Robert Louis Stevenson call one of literature's 'culminating moments'?

The footprint in the sand: after some fifteen years alone, one bare print sends Crusoe bolting for his fort in terror. He hides for three days, wondering whether the Devil left it or he did himself.

Which 1726 satire, like Robinson Crusoe before it, is narrated by a seaman stranded on strange shores?

Gulliver's Travels is said to have begun as a task from the Scriblerus Club, a circle of satirist friends: Jonathan Swift was to send up the travellers' tales then in fashion. His 'author' is a ship's surgeon.

Which Treasure Island character, marooned alone for three years and dressed in goatskins, recalls Crusoe?

Ben Gunn has lived on goats, berries and oysters, and what he craves above all is cheese, 'toasted, mostly'. Given a thousand pounds of the treasure, he gets through it in nineteen days.

Which philosopher wrote that Robinson Crusoe should be the first, and for a long time the only, book his ideal pupil reads?

Rousseau, in Emile, announces 'I hate books' and at once makes a single exception: Crusoe's story will show the boy how to depend on himself and to value things by their usefulness.

In which Victorian detective novel does the old steward Gabriel Betteredge consult Robinson Crusoe like an oracle?

The Moonstone's house-steward turns to Defoe's book whenever he wants advice or his spirits are low, and boasts that he has 'worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes' in the process.

J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel Foe retells the Crusoe story from whose perspective?

A woman named Susan Barton is washed up on the island, then back in England presses a writer to turn her tale into a book. He is the 'Foe' of the title: the plain surname Defoe was born with.

Which writer coined the term 'inverted Crusoeism' for protagonists who choose to maroon themselves?

J. G. Ballard put the idea to work in Concrete Island, where an architect crashes onto waste ground walled in by motorways and, after struggling to get off it, comes to think of the place as home.

After a crushed uprising in 1944, the so-called Robinson Crusoes hid for months in the ruins of which city?

Warsaw was emptied of its people and systematically demolished. The few who hid on in its cellars for up to three and a half months included Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose story became the film The Pianist.

Which composer wrote an 1867 opéra comique called Robinson Crusoé?

Jacques Offenbach's version owes more to British pantomime than to Defoe: Crusoe's sweetheart and two servants sail out to find him, and the cook at the cannibals' feast turns out to be an old neighbour from home.

Which film pioneer directed and starred in a Robinson Crusoe as early as 1902?

Georges Méliès played Crusoe himself. For more than a century only a black-and-white scrap of the film was known, until a near-complete hand-coloured print turned up in a Paris archive donation in 2011.

Which surrealist director made a 1954 Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O'Herlihy?

Luis Buñuel shot it in Mexico in English and Spanish at once. His co-writer was the Hollywood screenwriter Hugo Butler, who had been blacklisted and so took his credit under an invented name.

Which star plays a stranded Navy pilot in Disney's 1966 comedy version of the Crusoe story?

Dick Van Dyke shares his island with an astronaut chimp and a girl he names Wednesday. The story is credited to 'Retlaw Yensid', which is Walt Disney's name spelled backwards.

Which actor played Crusoe opposite Richard Roundtree in Man Friday (1975)?

Peter O'Toole's Crusoe is no hero. Taken from a play by Adrian Mitchell, the film turns the story round: the supposedly civilised Englishman grows hostile and violent, while Friday proves the wiser, kinder man.

In Cast Away, often likened to Robinson Crusoe, what does Tom Hanks's stranded hero have instead of a Friday?

A volleyball, which he names Wilson after the brand printed on it, drawing its face in his own blood. Filming stopped for a year so that Tom Hanks could shed the weight and let his hair grow.

Which reality TV hit was first made in Sweden in 1997 under the title Expedition Robinson?

Survivor was turned down by British broadcasters for years, so its creator took it to Swedish television instead. There the island contest was named after Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson.

Which Irish novelist called Robinson Crusoe 'the true prototype of the British colonist'?

James Joyce found 'the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit' in Crusoe, from 'manly independence' to 'unconscious cruelty'. His words stayed unpublished until 1964, more than twenty years after his death.

Which James Bond actor has also played Robinson Crusoe on film?

Pierce Brosnan's Crusoe is a lovestruck Scot who goes to sea after killing a friend in a duel over a woman, a backstory that Defoe never wrote.

Months after the wreck, what natural disaster sends Crusoe scrambling out of his cave home?

An earthquake: three violent shocks, eight minutes apart, bring earth crumbling from the roof of his cave and the hill above it. A hurricane follows within the hour.

Where does Crusoe sleep on his first night ashore?

Up in a tree: with nothing on him but a knife, a pipe and a little tobacco, he fears wild beasts will come out after dark. He cuts a short club for defence and sleeps soundly all the same.

What becomes of Friday in Defoe's 1719 sequel?

He is killed by arrows at sea, shot from a fleet of canoes as he calls out to the men in them. Crusoe answers with a broadside from the ship's guns and buries his old companion in the ocean.

The distant land Crusoe can see from his island on a clear day turns out to be which island?

Trinidad, as Crusoe works out only years later. Friday tells him that white men like himself live on the mainland beyond it, and the news sets him planning an escape by canoe.

In the book's final chapters, what title do the strangers who land on the island give Crusoe?

The governor is a bluff: Crusoe keeps out of sight so that nobody learns the island's ruler is one ragged man, and even appears before his prisoners as the governor's assistant.

Which poet wrote 'Crusoe in England', in which the aged castaway looks back on his island?

Elizabeth Bishop's Crusoe is home, old and bored. The knife he once lived by is now a relic that the local museum wants.

Which future star of TV's Batman plays a doomed astronaut in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)?

Adam West is killed in the landing, which leaves his crewmate to find air, water and food on Mars with only a monkey for company. West put on the Batman cowl two years later.

Which magazine's desert-island cartoons did Bob Mankoff, long its cartoon editor, trace back to Robinson Crusoe?

The New Yorker has run the gag since about the 1930s, Mankoff said. Its early islands were big, with a ship sinking in the distance, and only later shrank to the bare speck with a single palm.

In which English city is Crusoe born, according to the opening sentence of the book?

York is where he is born, and the title page calls him 'of York, Mariner'. As a third son 'not bred to any trade', he says, his head filled early with 'rambling thoughts' of the sea.

Defoe was placed in the pillory in July 1703 chiefly on account of which pamphlet?

The Shortest Way with the Dissenters was a hoax: Defoe, a Dissenter himself, posed as a churchman demanding that his own kind be wiped out. The crowd at his pillory is said to have thrown flowers.

Besides writing, which job did Defoe do for much of his later life?

Secret agent: a minister had Defoe freed from prison in 1703 in return for intelligence work, and he went on spying for one government after another for years.