"The corpse of a drowned boy." — illustration for Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1891)

The corpse of a drowned boy (p. 135) depicts Crusoe in full "island dress" examining the corpse of a cabin boy from the recently wrecked Spanish ship. Middle of page 137, vignetted: 7.5 cm high by 12.5 cm wide, signed "Wal Paget" in the lower left-hand quadrant. Running head: "Salvage from the Wreck" (p. 133).

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Passage Illustrated: Another Memento Mori

There are some secret springs in the affections which, when they are set a-going by some object in view, or, though not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul, by its impetuosity, to such violent, eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable. Such were these earnest wishings that but one man had been saved. I believe I repeated the words, “Oh that it had been but one!” a thousand times; and my desires were so moved by it, that when I spoke the words my hands would clinch together, and my fingers would press the palms of my hands, so that if I had had any soft thing in my hand I should have crushed it involuntarily; and the teeth in my head would strike together, and set against one another so strong, that for some time I could not part them again. Let the naturalists explain these things, and the reason and manner of them. All I can do is to describe the fact, which was even surprising to me when I found it, though I knew not from whence it proceeded; it was doubtless the effect of ardent wishes, and of strong ideas formed in my mind, realising the comfort which the conversation of one of my fellow-Christians would have been to me. But it was not to be; either their fate or mine, or both, forbade it; for, till the last year of my being on this island, I never knew whether any were saved out of that ship or no; and had only the affliction, some days after, to see the corpse of a drowned boy come on shore at the end of the island which was next the shipwreck. He had no clothes on but a seaman’s waistcoat, a pair of open-kneed linen drawers, and a blue linen shirt; but nothing to direct me so much as to guess what nation he was of. He had nothing in his pockets but two pieces of eight and a tobacco pipe — the last was to me of ten times more value than the first. [Chapter XIII, "The Wreck of a Spanish Ship," page 135]

Commentary: Crusoe taken unawares despite his vigilance

Crusoe's sense of mortality — heightened by his discovery of the dying goat and then of the remnants of the cannibals' grisly feast, is apparent in his surveying the body of a drowned cabin-boy from the nearby Spanish wreck, a subject which Thomas Wehnert had considered in Crusoe finds a drowned boy.

Related Material

Parallel Illustrations from the 1863-64 Edition

Left: Thomas Macquoid's engraving contrasts the apprehensive Crusoe and the still beautiful, unmarried landscape: Crusoe on the Lookout on the Hill (1863). Right: Matt Somerville Morgan's Crusoe in his Fort. [Click on images to enlarge them.]

References

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.

Last modified 2 May 2018