Robinson Crusoe Day

What the day is

Robinson Crusoe Day is observed on February 1, the date in 1709 that Alexander Selkirk was taken off the island where he had been living alone for more than four years.

Origin and background

Selkirk was a Scottish sailing master who fell out with his captain over the seaworthiness of their ship and demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernández group, several hundred miles off Chile. He expected another vessel soon. None came for fifty-two months. His judgment was vindicated in the bleakest possible way: the ship he refused to sail in later sank.

He survived on goats left by earlier visitors, shellfish, turnips and wild cabbage, and reportedly tamed cats to keep rats off him while he slept. Accounts of his rescue describe a man who had nearly lost the use of speech.

Defoe's novel, published a decade later, takes the situation and changes nearly everything: the location moves to the Caribbean, the duration stretches to twenty-eight years, and the whole religious and economic architecture of the book is invented. Defoe never credited Selkirk, and scholars differ on how directly he drew on the case, since castaway accounts were popular at the time.

The novel's own reputation has shifted considerably. It was long read as a straightforward adventure about self-reliance, and is now also read as a document of colonial attitudes, particularly in its treatment of Friday, whom Crusoe names, converts and makes a servant. Both readings sit in the same text.

Chile renamed the island Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966, and named a neighboring one after Selkirk.

How to take part

• Read about Selkirk, whose real four years are stranger than the fiction.
• Read the novel with its colonial dimension in view rather than around it.
• Look up the Juan Fernández islands, which are a remarkable place in their own right.
• Consider what you would actually do first, which is rarely what people assume.
• Notice that his original complaint about the ship was correct.