Robinson Crusoe Goes to Sea

Hours after running away to sea, Robinson Crusoe was sorry he ever left home.

set in 1651

The Interregnum 1649-1660

Introduction

Against the advice of his affectionate father and the pleadings of his distraught mother, Robinson Crusoe, then eighteen, refused to study for the law and announced he would go to sea. This remained little more than a shapeless gesture of teenage rebellion for a year. Then one day a friend went to Hull for a trip up the coast to London in his father’s ship, and invited Robinson to come along for the ride.

by Daniel Defoe 1660-1731

ON THE 1st of September, 1651, I went on board a ship bound for London. Never any young adventurer’s misfortunes, I believe, began younger, or continued longer than mine. The ship had no sooner got out of the Humber, than the wind began to blow, and the waves to rise, in a most frightful manner; and as I had never been at sea before, I was most inexpressibly sick in body, and terrified in mind: I began now seriously to reflect upon what I had done, and how justly I was overtaken by the judgment of Heaven, for wickedly leaving my father’s house. All the good counsels of my parents, my father’s tears, and my mother’s entreaties, came now fresh into my mind; and my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to which it has been since, reproached me with the contempt of advice, and the abandonment of my duty.

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Précis

Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe’s tale about a castaway, tells us that after he defied his parents and boarded a ship for London in the docks at Hull, he almost immediately regretted it. The ship had hardly entered the North Sea, before rough weather struck and Robinson was immobilised by fear and seasickness.

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