The novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe perhaps contains the most widely familiar of our four myths. But since the idea of a man stuck all alone on a desert island for a long time may be all that can be assumed to remain in the reader's memory of the story, I shall rehearse its bare bones here.

THE STORY

Robinson Crusoe's father is a successful German merchant called Kreutznaer, who settled in Hull and later in York. The hero of the novel is Kreutznaer's third son; his surname is oddly corrupted to Crusoe, and he is called Robinson after his mother's maiden name.

Even as a youth, Crusoe feels he has to go to sea. “There seemed,” he writes, “something fatal in that propension of nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befal me.” Crusoe's father argues, with eloquence and deep conviction, that his son's “meer wandering inclination” will certainly lead to disaster. The “upper station of low life” is assuredly “the best state in the world” (p.28), and if Robinson “goes abroad he will be the miserablest wretch that was ever born” (p.30). This deadlock between father and son is broken when Crusoe, aged about nineteen, commits what he later describes as his “original sin” (p.198) and ships with a friend at Hull. It is September 1, 1651.

Soon a storm arises, and Crusoe begins to reflect that he is being “justly … overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my father's house, and abandoning my duty” (p.31).