"I bought me a slave" — illustration for Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1891)

I bought me a slave

Wal Paget (1863-1935)

lithograph

11 cm high by 7.5 cm wide, vignetted.

1891

Robinson Crusoe, embedded on page 25.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated: Crusoe the Slave-owner

When this cargo arrived, I thought my fortune made, for I was surprised with the joy of it; and my stood steward, the captain, had laid out the five pounds, which my friend had sent him for a present for himself, to purchase and bring me over a servant, under bond for six years’ service, and would not accept of any consideration, except a little tobacco, which I would have him accept, being of my own produce.

Neither was this all; for my goods being all English manufacture, such as cloths, stuffs, baize, and things particularly valuable and desirable in the country, I found means to sell them to a very great advantage; so that I might say I had more than four times the value of my first cargo, and was now infinitely beyond my poor neighbour — I mean in the advancement of my plantation; for the first thing I did, I bought me a negro slave, and an European servant also — I mean another besides that which the captain brought me from Lisbon. [Chapter II, "Slavery and Escape," page 26]

Commentary

The other significant nineteenth-century narrative-pictorial series for The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe do not attempt to address the fact that Crusoe's "cargo" includes slaves, and that the vessel that founders on the unnamed Caribbean island is, in fact, a slave ship. Although Crusoe has anxieties about the cannibals who periodically visit his island to conduct their grisly feasts, he fails to see that he himself commodified human beings, not as objects for the table, but as beasts of burden and convenience. Crusoe in this illustration conceives of himself as a man of substance, for he now owns another human being, just as he was owned by the Moor at Sallee.

The story, of course, precedes William Wilberforce's and the Reverend Thomas Clarkson's anti-slavery crusade, taking us to at time when owning and trading in slaves was socially acceptable — and lucrative. Moreover, the man of affairs in the Brazils owns plantations, for which he requires slaves to render the operation economically viable. Crusoe's complacent attitude towards slavery is all the more ironic because he was raised in an evangelical household.

Neil Heims (1983) relates Crusoe's abhorrence of the cannibalism by the indigenous population of the mainland opposite the island with his previous involvement in the slave trade, an equally abhorrent practice that treats human beings as cattle:

The confounding irony which reveals a serious identity between Crusoe and the cannibals, however, and accounts for the split the fable effects between them, and for his strong antagonism to them, is that Crusoe set out on the adventure that cast him upon the island for twenty-eight years in order to be a trafficker in Negro slaves. The savagery of this act of consuming and devouring, in order to be denied for the sake of the European conscience, was displaced onto the blacks themselves by inventing a fable that focuses on the more blatant savagery of a simpler cannibalism attributed to them. In Robinson Crusoe, the intended victims become the victimizers, and the original victimizers, the Europeans, can feel righteous and justified in their course of "enterprize." Through its fable, Robinson Crusoe shows the justifying fantasy of the Europeans for their brutal consumption of human lives.[Heims, p. 193]

Related Material

Parallel Scene from Cassell (1863-64)

Above: Cassell's highly realistic wood-engraving of Crusoe discussing business with his fellow planters in Brasil, Crusoe and the Planters (1863-64). [Click on image to enlarge it.]

Reference

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner. As Related by Himself. With upwards of One Hundred and Twenty Original Illustrations by Walter Paget. London, Paris, and Melbourne: Cassell, 1891.

Heims, Neil. "Robinson Crusoe and the Fear of Being Eaten." Colby Library Quarterly,Volume 19, Issue 4 (December 1983). Pp.190-193. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://search.yahoo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2528&context=cq

Last modified 23 April 2018