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Crusoe and Friday out Shooting
"MM": Matt Somerville Morgan
Engravers: Butterworth and Heath
1863-64
Wood-engraving
18 cm high by 14 cm wide, framed.
Cassell's Robinson Crusoe, page 149.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham. Text by Allingham and George P. Landow.
It was after this some considerable time, that being upon the top of the hill at the east side of the island, from whence, as I have said, I had, in a clear day, discovered the main or continent of America, Friday, the weather being very serene, looks very earnestly towards the mainland, and, in a kind of surprise, falls a jumping and dancing, and calls out to me, for I was at some distance from him. I asked him what was the matter. “Oh, joy!” says he; “Oh, glad! there see my country, there my nation!” I observed an extraordinary sense of pleasure appeared in his face, and his eyes sparkled, and his countenance discovered a strange eagerness, as if he had a mind to be in his own country again. [Chapter XV, "Friday's Education," p. 146]
The illustrator, Matt Somerville Morgan, further contrasts the middle-aged, goat-skin clad European, standing, and the young, kneeling aboriginal in conventional European clothing, for Crusoe carries sabre, pistol, and musket — and Friday is quite unarmed.
Although the reader may wonder at Friday's rapid progress in learning English, the concepts of "country" and "nation"would not have been foreign to a Noble Savage for whom the extended family is life's compass. The aboriginal peoples with whom Europeans came in contact in the Americas and Africa were organised along tribal lines but certainly possessed an idea of extended territory. Nicholas Tarling has pointed out that local tribes and even empires, such as the Burmese, conceived of territories as areas of power emanating out from ruling centers — as opposed to European notions of areas within borders derived from maps and printing. The peoples whom the British colonised would have had notions of large areas inhabited by different, often hostile, groups, as Defoe emphasizes by the hostility that exists between the book's South American aboriginal neighbours, Friday's tribe and the cannibal Others who prey upon Friday's people, and in turn sometimes fall prey to them.
Above: Paget's realisation of Crusoe's conducting a catechism class for his servant, "I entered into a long discourse" (1891). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Left: The original Stothard copper-plate engraving in which Crusoe welcomes both former captives, the Spaniard and Friday's father (1790), Robinson Crusoe builds a tent for Friday's father and the Spaniard. Right: Colourful realisation of the same scene, with a decidedly subservient and Negroid Friday contrasting the Caucasian Crusoe: Friday's first interview with Robinson Crusoe. (1818). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner. As Related by himself. With upwards of One Hundred Illustrations. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1863-64.
Tarling, Nicholas. Nations and States of Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Last modified 20 March 2018