"The ship blew up" — illustration for Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1891)

"The ship blew up." (See p. 227), signed by Wal Paget, bottom left. Paget has positioned Crusoe's vessel in the foreground to create a sense of the distance between the two ships through aerial perspective, but offers no realisation of the disaster in human terms. One-half of page 229, roughly framed: 8.6 cm high by 12.5 cm wide. Running head: "A Fire at Sea" (page 229).

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: Another Disaster at Sea

We set out on the 5th of February from Ireland, and had a very fair gale of wind for some days. As I remember, it might be about the 20th of February in the evening late, when the mate, having the watch, came into the round-house and told us he saw a flash of fire, and heard a gun fired; and while he was telling us of it, a boy came in and told us the boatswain heard another. This made us all run out upon the quarter-deck, where for a while we heard nothing; but in a few minutes we saw a very great light, and found that there was some very terrible fire at a distance; immediately we had recourse to our reckonings, in which we all agreed that there could be no land that way in which the fire showed itself, no, not for five hundred leagues, for it appeared at WNW. Upon this, we concluded it must be some ship on fire at sea; and as, by our hearing the noise of guns just before, we concluded that it could not be far off, we stood directly towards it, and were presently satisfied we should discover it, because the further we sailed, the greater the light appeared; though, the weather being hazy, we could not perceive anything but the light for a while. In about half-an-hour's sailing, the wind being fair for us, though not much of it, and the weather clearing up a little, we could plainly discern that it was a great ship on fire in the middle of the sea.

I was most sensibly touched with this disaster, though not at all acquainted with the persons engaged in it; I presently recollected my former circumstances, and what condition I was in when taken up by the Portuguese captain; and how much more deplorable the circumstances of the poor creatures belonging to that ship must be, if they had no other ship in company with them. Upon this I immediately ordered that five guns should be fired, one soon after another, that, if possible, we might give notice to them that there was help for them at hand and that they might endeavour to save themselves in their boat; for though we could see the flames of the ship, yet they, it being night, could see nothing of us.

We lay by some time upon this, only driving as the burning ship drove, waiting for daylight; when, on a sudden, to our great terror, though we had reason to expect it, the ship blew up in the air; and in a few minutes all the fire was out, that is to say, the rest of the ship sunk. This was a terrible, and indeed an afflicting sight, for the sake of the poor men, who, I concluded, must be either all destroyed in the ship, or be in the utmost distress in their boat, in the middle of the ocean; which, at present, as it was dark, I could not see. However, to direct them as well as I could, I caused lights to be hung out in all parts of the ship where we could, and which we had lanterns for, and kept firing guns all the night long, letting them know by this that there was a ship not far off. [Chapter I, "Revisits the Island," pp. 226-27]

Commentary

Having returned to England, Crusoe immediately sets out for Lisbon to visit the Portuguese sea-captain who picked him up three decades earlier off the African coast. Defoe's putting his protagonist onto the Continent and into a series of adventures at this late point in the narrative of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe may strike modern novel-readers as somewhat anticlimactic. However, Defoe was essentially making up the conventions of the new prose narrative form on the fly, and was perhaps already thinking in terms of a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published almost immediately after the first novel, and subsequently published with it during the Victorian era as "Part Two." The present illustration sets the keynote for the constant danger to which he exposes himself in his overseas experiences in the sequel, as the adventurer in his sixties encounters natural disasters and endures attacks by hostile peoples such as Tartars and the Indo-Chinese.

Thus far in Paget's narrative-pictorial sequence, the Cassell's artist has provided just one large-scale and half-a-dozen vignette illustrations of shipwrecks, maritime disasters, and subsequent salvage operations — all in terms of consequences for the human actors rather than in seascapes foregrounding wrecked ships:

However, none of these is particularly violent, in contrast to the numerous images of shipwrecks in the 1863-64 Cassell edition. If one regards shipping, shipwrecks, the sea, and sailors as a construct behind the illustrations, about thirty per cent of the 1863-64 Cassell's illustrations are associated with such a motif, but even with the dozen illustrations in the second part, Paget devotes considerably less space to such shipping mishaps. Although shipwrecks in the age of Daniel Defoe, prior to the accurate mapping of shoals and the widespread construction of lighthouses, were all too common, as the British in the nineteenth century engaged in such preventitive measures, the number of catastrophic incidents declined. However, as The Illustrated London News for the 1850s and 1860s shows, hurricane force winds could still force even fairly large merchant vessels on the rocks, as in The Wreck of the "Royal Charter" on the Coast of Anglesea, near Moelfre Five Miles from Point Lynas Lighthouse (5 November 1859). The Cassell's house-artists appear to have had illustrations actual shipwrecks upon which to base their compositions, particularly from stories in The Illustrated London News, such as Wreck of an Indiaman." — From a Picture by Mr. Daniell (16 February 1859). Paget may simply be responding in his program to the reduced number of shipwrecks in the 1880s, and demonstrating a different understanding of the effects of such disasters on passengers and crew.

What distinguishes this particular maritime disaster is that it occurs far from land, and is not the consequence of a storm. The sea and sky reflect the suffering of those on board (whom Paget, unlike earlier illustrators, does not depict) in what J. M. W. Turner would have termed "A Sky of Discord." Moreover, Paget through his caption and through placing this illustration immediately after Crusoe's quarrel with his wife may be setting up a false expectation in readers' minds, namely that Crusoe's ship may be the sinking vessel on the horizon. The text reminds post-eighteeth-century readers that the North Atlantic served as the waterway between France and her North American colonies, particularly Quebec, which was not absorbed into the British Empire until 1759. As Crusoe had come to the rescue of Friday, the Spaniard, and the victims of the mutiny in Part One, he extends his sympathy to the oppressed and suffering, even if they are not English Protestants, in this instance coming to the assistance of French Catholics.

Related Material

Relevant illustrations from the other 19th c. editions, 1831 and 1891

Above: George Cruikshank's small-scale realisation of the disaster aboard the Quebec vessel, Crusoe sees a ship on fire at sea (1831). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Above: The 1864 edition's woodblock engraving of the fire raging aboard the French mnerchantman, "The ship blew up."

Above: Cruikshank's small-scale realisation of the suffering of the French passengers and crew, The French survivors of the fire aboard the Quebec Merchantman (1831).

Reference

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 27 March 2018