Robinson Crusoe Trivia
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58 free Robinson Crusoe trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Robinson Crusoe trivia quiz covers Daniel Defoe's 1719 castaway novel from the first voyage out of Hull to the wolves in the Pyrenees. The easy questions handle the basics: who wrote it, how long Crusoe spends on the island, why his companion is called Friday, and the phrase 'Man Friday' the book gave the language. From there it moves through the plot in detail: the Salé pirates, Xury, the Brazilian plantation, the Island of Despair, the too-large canoe, the cannibals and the mutineers. The harder half is for literature buffs: Alexander Selkirk and the rival candidates Pedro Serrano and Henry Pitman, the classmate who may have lent his name, the two sequels, Rousseau's Emile, Stevenson's Ben Gunn, Coetzee's Foe, Ballard's 'inverted Crusoeism', Offenbach's opera and the films from Méliès and Buñuel to Cast Away. If you have played our classic novels or 18th-century literature quizzes, this is the deep dive on one book. Every answer was checked against the novel's encyclopaedia entry before publishing.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Besides his clothes, what does Crusoe famously make out of goatskins?
An umbrella
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.
Q 02What did many early readers believe Robinson Crusoe to be?
True story
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.
Q 03According to its full title, how many years does Crusoe live on his island?
28
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.
Q 04Which Scottish castaway is most often cited as the inspiration for Crusoe?
Alexander Selkirk
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.
Q 05The Pacific island renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966 belongs to which South American country?
Chile
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.
Q 06Whose family name became Crusoe's first name, Robinson?
His mother's
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'.
Q 07From which English port does Crusoe first set sail, in 1651?
Kingston upon Hull
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.
Q 08Crusoe is captured at sea and enslaved by pirates from which North African port?
Salé
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.
Q 09Who escapes slavery with Crusoe, only to be sold by him to a Portuguese captain?
Xury
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.
Q 10In which country does Crusoe run a plantation before his fateful voyage?
Brazil
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.
Q 11Crusoe's island lies near the mouth of which South American river?
The Orinoco
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.
Q 12What name does Crusoe give his new home when he first lands?
The Island of Despair
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'.
Q 13Which animals survive the shipwreck along with Crusoe?
A dog and two cats
Q 21The day Crusoe is wrecked on his island is also which anniversary?
His birthday
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.
Q 22What final adventure do Crusoe and Friday face on the way home from Lisbon?
Fighting off wolves in the Pyrenees
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.
Q 23Years into his solitude, whose voice startles Crusoe awake by calling his name?
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.
Q 14How does Crusoe keep track of time on the island?
Notches in a wooden cross
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.
Q 15Which crops does Crusoe grow on the island?
Barley and rice
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.
Q 16What goes wrong with Crusoe's first big canoe?
He cannot get it to the water
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.
Q 17Why does Crusoe name his companion Friday?
For the day of the week he appeared
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.
Q 18Why does Crusoe decide he has no right to kill the cannibals?
They do not knowingly commit a crime
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.
Q 19Which two prisoners do Crusoe and his companion rescue from the cannibals' feast?
Friday's father and a Spaniard
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.
Q 20How does Crusoe finally leave his island?
On an English ship retaken from mutineers
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.
His parrot's
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.
Q 24What term was coined for the genre of desert-island stories that Robinson Crusoe inspired?
Robinsonade
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'.
Q 25What does Crusoe do with the coins he finds on the wreck after calling them worthless?
Takes them ashore anyway
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.
Q 26On the journey home, which animal does Friday lure out along a branch to make his companions laugh?
A bear
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.
Q 27How does Crusoe get his supplies from the stranded ship to the shore?
On a home-made raft
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.
Q 28Which condition of life does Crusoe's father call the best in the world?
The middle station
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.
Q 29What was the title of Defoe's 1719 sequel to Robinson Crusoe?
The Farther Adventures of 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.
Q 30The name 'Crusoe' may derive from Timothy Cruso, who was what to Defoe?
A classmate
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.