[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Cassell, Petter, and Galpin house artists —> Next]
Crusoe on the Look-out on the Hill
Thomas R. Macquoid
Engravers: Butterworth and Heath
1863-64
Wood-engraving
14.2 cm high by 14.2 cm wide, framed.
Cassell's Robinson Crusoe, page 113.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
After I had thus laid the scheme of my design, and in my imagination put it in practice, I continually made my tour every morning to the top of the hill, which was from my castle, as I called it, about three miles or more, to see if I could observe any boats upon the sea, coming near the island, or standing over towards it; but I began to tire of this hard duty, after I had for two or three months constantly kept my watch, but came always back without any discovery; there having not, in all that time, been the least appearance, not only on or near the shore, but on the whole ocean, so far as my eye 'or glass could reach every way.
As long as I kept my daily tour to the hill, to look out, so long also I kept up the vigour of my design, and my spirits seemed to be all the while in a suitable frame for so outrageous an execution as the killing twenty or thirty naked savages, for an offence which I had not at all entered into any discussion of in my thoughts, any farther than my passions were at first fired by the horror I conceived at the unnatural custom of the people of that country, who, it seems, had been suffered by Providence, in His wise disposition of the world, to have no other guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and consequently were left, and perhaps had been so for some ages, to act such horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but nature, entirely abandoned by Heaven, and actuated by some hellish degeneracy, could have run them into. But now, when, as I have said, I began to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long and so far every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself began to alter; and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to consider what I was going to engage in; what authority or call I had to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunished to go on, and to be as it were the executioners of His judgments one upon another; how far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed promiscuously upon one another. I debated this very often with myself thus: “How do I know what God Himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton.” [Chapter XII, "A Cave Retreat," pp. 114-15]
The picture situates Crusoe's apprehensions in the context of a still unoccupied island, although the castaway has found evidence that cannibals periodically visit the island to practice their grisly rites. It remains breathtakingly beautiful and exotic, but Crusoe is now continually looking beyond the jungle with his telescope and looking towards the sea. Having yearned for human contact for a dozen years, he now has to maintain a constant vigilance lest he be taken by surprise. In the ornate border four curious parrots observe Crusoe's activities, perhaps implying that he now has far less to fear from nature than from his own kind.
Left: Stothard's 1790 realisation of this highly charged moment, Robinson Crusoe discovers the print of a man's foot (Chapter XI, "Finds the print of a man's foot on the sand." (copper-engraving). Right: A colourful realisation of the scene from a early 19th c. children's book Robinson Crusoe's terror at the print of the human foot (hand-tinted copper-plate). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: An elegant oval vignette of Crusoe in "island dress" on the shore, I was much surprized at the print of a man's foot on the shore (1820). Right: Cruikshank's caricatural realisation of the same scene, Friday's Footprint — Crusoe discovers a human footprint on the beach (1831). [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.
Last modified 14 March 2018