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Crusoe and the Priest
Thomas Macquoid
Engraver: Wentworth
1863-64
Wood-engraving
16.5 cm high (including caption) by 14 cm wide, framed.
Cassell's Robinson Crusoe, page 284.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
He looked earnestly at me, seeing my confusion. “Sir,” says he, “I shall be very sorry if what I have said gives you any offence.” — “No, no,” said I, “I am offended with nobody but myself; but I am perfectly confounded, not only to think that I should never take any notice of this before, but with reflecting what notice I am able to take of it now. You know, sir,” said I, “what circumstances I am in; I am bound to the East Indies in a ship freighted by merchants, and to whom it would be an insufferable piece of injustice to detain their ship here, the men lying all this while at victuals and wages on the owners’ account. It is true, I agreed to be allowed twelve days here, and if I stay more, I must pay three pounds sterling per diem demurrage; nor can I stay upon demurrage above eight days more, and I have been here thirteen already; so that I am perfectly unable to engage in this work unless I would suffer myself to be left behind here again; in which case, if this single ship should miscarry in any part of her voyage, I should be just in the same condition that I was left in here at first, and from which I have been so wonderfully delivered.” He owned the case was very hard upon me as to my voyage; but laid it home upon my conscience whether the blessing of saving thirty-seven souls was not worth venturing all I had in the world for. I was not so sensible of that as he was. I replied to him thus: “Why, sir, it is a valuable thing, indeed, to be an instrument in God’s hand to convert thirty-seven heathens to the knowledge of Christ: but as you are an ecclesiastic, and are given over to the work, so it seems so naturally to fall in the way of your profession; how is it, then, that you do not rather offer yourself to undertake it than to press me to do it?”
Upon this he faced about just before me, as he walked along, and putting me to a full stop, made me a very low bow. “I most heartily thank God and you, sir,” said he, “for giving me so evident a call to so blessed a work; and if you think yourself discharged from it, and desire me to undertake it, I will most readily do it, and think it a happy reward for all the hazards and difficulties of such a broken, disappointed voyage as I have met with, that I am dropped at last into so glorious a work.” [Chapter VI, "The French Clergyman's Counsel," pp. 282-83]
The other figure in the illustration, an undeniable presence, is the jungle setting of the conversation. The illustration combined with the evangelical text may have reminded readers of the 1860s of how Natural Law (as exemplified by Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest") had come into collision with Christian doctrine. The French priest seems to be advocating a middle ground in terms of European colonists mating with indigenous women, since he has adopted the position that it is better for a young man and woman of different backgrounds to marry, even if the union transgresses the boundaries of race or class. This was an issue that Dickens would dramatise that same year that the Cassell's volume appeared in the relationship of lower-class Lizzie Hexam and the attorney Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend (1864). As Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre points out, the Caribbean colonies of France and England tended facilitate miscegenation in in the kinds of European-Creole liaisons that polite society back in Europe did not readily accept — Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester being a case in point. Sexual desire, as the 1848 novel dramatises, was a significant cultural factor in the European colonisation of the West Indies, Africa, India, and Asia.
Left: Thomas Stothard's study of Crusoe's distributing supplies to the colonists of both nationalities, Robinson Crusoe distributing tools of husbandry among the inhabitants. Centre: George Cruikshank's equivalent scene, Crusoe distributing agricultural implements. Right: Wal Paget's realisation of Crusoe and the French priest discussing the religious education of the colonists and their wives in "We walked on" (1891). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Cruikshank's small-scale realisation of Crusoe's interest in spreading the words and spirit of the Gospel, Crusoe presents a Bible to Will Atkins and his native wife (1831). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above: Wal Paget's vignette of Will Atkins discussing religious matters with his native wife as Crusoe and the French priest arrive at the plantation: "Atkins and His Tawny Wife" (1891). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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 1 April 2018