"Death of the Rebel Captain" for Daniel Defoe's "Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" (1863-64)

Death of the Rebel Captain (page 181) — the volume's forty-eighth composite wood-block engraving for Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Related by himself (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1863-64). Chapter XVIII, "The Ship Recovered." This violent illustration and the next, The Captain Hung at the Yard-Arm undercut Crusoe's assertion that he assisted in the recovery of the ship with very little bloodshed — "the rest yielded, and the ship was taken effectually, without any more lives lost" (183). Although such earlier illustrators as Thomas Stothard, George Cruikshank, and Hablot Knight Browne have avoided the violent quelling of the mutiny, both Cassell's editions &nmdash; the 1863-64 and the 1891 — have underscored the mutiny and its aftermath by providing five illustrations of the events in each case. In particular, Paget sensationalizes the scene below decks in which the captain puts a bullet through the head of the ringleader, whereas the earlier Cassell's treatment shows the head mutineer already dead as the loyal sailors break into the round-house. Full-page, framed: 14 cm high (including caption) x 21.8 cm wide. The framing border exists in two dimensions, with the finer rope serving as a pictorial frame, and the supports serving as a functional part of the scene below decks.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

The Passage Illustrated

The captain now had no difficulty before him, but to furnish his two boats, stop the breach of one, and man them. He made his passenger captain of one, with four of the men; and himself, his mate, and five more, went in the other; and they contrived their business very well, for they came up to the ship about midnight. As soon as they came within call of the ship, he made Robinson hail them, and tell them they had brought off the men and the boat, but that it was a long time before they had found them, and the like, holding them in a chat till they came to the ship’s side; when the captain and the mate entering first with their arms, immediately knocked down the second mate and carpenter with the butt-end of their muskets, being very faithfully seconded by their men; they secured all the rest that were upon the main and quarter decks, and began to fasten the hatches, to keep them down that were below; when the other boat and their men, entering at the forechains, secured the forecastle of the ship, and the scuttle which went down into the cook-room, making three men they found there prisoners. When this was done, and all safe upon deck, the captain ordered the mate, with three men, to break into the round-house, where the new rebel captain lay, who, having taken the alarm, had got up, and with two men and a boy had got firearms in their hands; and when the mate, with a crow, split open the door, the new captain and his men fired boldly among them, and wounded the mate with a musket ball, which broke his arm, and wounded two more of the men, but killed nobody. The mate, calling for help, rushed, however, into the round-house, wounded as he was, and, with his pistol, shot the new captain through the head, the bullet entering at his mouth, and came out again behind one of his ears, so that he never spoke a word more: upon which the rest yielded, and the ship was taken effectually, without any more lives lost. [Chapter XVIII, "The Ship Recovered," pp. 182-83]

Commentary

The realistic treatment of the conclusion of the mutiny in the 1863-64 Cassell's volume implies that the forces loyal to the captain have employed explosives to blow down the stout door of the round-house and in the process have eliminated the threat which the leaders of the mutiny pose. In fact, as the text makes plain, a much more violent action precedes the moment realised. The mate, leading the loyalist forces, does not even appear to have been wounded in the fray.

Things turn out rather badly for these mutineers, in contrast to the relative success of Fletcher Christian and his confederates aboard the H. M. S. Bounty, with which Victorian readers would have been familiar through three books which John Barrow published about the Bounty Mutiny in 1833, 1836, and 1838. Many Victorians such as Charles Dickens (whose own version of the Bounty mutiny occurs in the Captain Boldheart section of A Holiday Romance, 1868) would have also read Bligh's own account, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship The Bounty, and the subsequent voyage of part of the crew in the ship's boat from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch Settlement in the East Indies, illustrated with charts (London: George Nicol, 1790). At the time of Cassell's publication of this book, public sentiment in Great Britain, owing to the 1857 Bengal Mutiny (Sepoy Rebellion), would not have favoured the side of the mutineers, whom the Cassell house artists depict as both bullies and craven cowards. The subsequent scene, The Captain Hung at the Yard-arm, transforms the corpulent sailor sprawled on his back here into a diminutive scarecrow who serves as a warning to potential mutineers.

Related Material

Relevant illustrations from the other Cassell editions, 1891

Above: Wal Paget's dramatic lithograph of the capitulation of the mutineers in the foreground to Crusoe's allies in the background, "They begged for mercy" (1891). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Left: Paget's intensely dramatic sequence of lithographs that culminates with Crusoe's showing mercy as the "Governor" of the island and thereby founding a colony: left, "He made Robinson hail them."; centre, Shot the New Captain through the Head (Chapter XVIII, "Recovery of the Ship," full-page lithograph); right, "I showed them the new captain hanging at the yard-arm of the ship". In the last of these Crusoe has abandoned "island" garb for conventional seventeenth-century fashion. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Bibliography

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Related by himself. With upwards of One Hundred Illustrations. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1863-64.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Exciting Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, as Related by Himself. With 120 original illustrations by Walter Paget. London, Paris,and Melbourne: Cassell, 1891.

Last modified 21 March 2018