Robinson's Sables
Robinson Crusoe was the starting point for some of Said's crucial arguments. Re-reading Daniel Defoe's groundbreaking representations of the western man in an eastern land, Said explored Crusoe's attitude toward money, travel, and solitude. Like many critics before him, Said ignored the second volume of Defoe's trilogy, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). These adventures brought Robinson much farther than his proverbial island. Covering thousands of miles, mostly by earth, he traveled to Madagascar, China, Tartary, and Siberia, to return to England by way of Archangel. This geographical experience was very different from what he found on no man's island, and he engaged in social adventures that were totally different from his experience with Friday. In Eurasia, he negotiated with savvy eastern traders, had conflicts with his shipmates, lost Friday, decimated a native village, established a settled colony in Madagascar, failed as a colonial administrator, made a new friend, and became rich. Entering Siberia, he felt relief, but also disappointment:
As we came nearer to Europe we should find the country better peopled, and the people more civiliz'd; but I found myself mistaken in both, for we had yet the nation of the Tongueses to pass through . . . ; as they were conquered by the Muscovites, and entirely reduc'd, they were not so dangerous, but for rudeness of manners . . . no people in the world ever went beyond them. (Defoe 1925: 310)
Taking into account Robinson's previous adventures, this was no small criticism. The horrible Tunguses particularly impressed Robinson with their furs. "They are all clothed in skins of beasts, and their houses are built of the same." As we shall see shortly, Robinson's business vision did not fail him this time. In contrast, his geography was very shaky.
Much concerned, like other travelers of his time (Wolff 1994), with the boundary between Europe and Asia, he reported that this boundary stretched along the Enisey river, but some pages later transferred it thousands of miles farther west, to the Kama river. In Siberia, Robinson was also interested in comparative issues:
The Czar of Muscovy has taken to have cities . . . where his soldiers keep garrisons something like the stationary soldiers plac'd by the Romans in the remotest countries of their empire, some of which I had read particularly were plac'd in Britain. . . . Wherever we came, the garrisons and governor were Russians, and professed Christians, yet the inhabitants of the country were mere pagans sacrificing to idols, and . . . the most barbarous, except only that they did not eat human flesh, as our savages in America did. (Defoe 1925: 295)
In a un-Robinsonian way, he reported his findings to "the Muscovite governors" of Siberia, who said that it was none of their business, because if the Czar expected to convert his subjects, "it should be done by sending clergymen among them, not soldiers" (Defoe 1925: 311). They added, with more sincerity than Robinson expected, "that it was not so much the concern of their monarch to make the people
Christians as to make them subjects." He also learned that Siberia was the Russian place of exile, which did not surprise this Brit. When he befriended an exiled Russian prince there, he devised a subversive plan to smuggle him to England. This Russian Friday, however, declined the offer in sublime, Puritan words:
Here I am free from the temptation of returning to my former miserable greatness; there I am not sure that all the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury . . . may revive and take root. . . . Dear sir, let me remain in this blessed confinement, banish'd from the crimes of life, rather than purchase a show of freedom, at the expense of the liberty of my reason. (Defoe 1925: 323)
Dostoevsky's characters might have said the same thing in the same part of Siberia, but their final plea would not have been to preserve "reason." Touched by both the offer and its denial, Robinson and the prince exchanged gifts. The prince gave Robinson "a very fine present of sables, too much indeed for me to accept from a man in his circumstances, and I would have avoided them, but he would not be refus'd." Robinson gave the prince "a small present of tea, and two pieces of China damask, and four little wedges of Japan gold, which . . . were far short of the value of his sables." The prince accepted the tea and one piece of gold, "but would not take any more." The next day, the prince asked Robinson to take his only son to England. The deal was excellent: with his new Friday, Robinson obtained "six or seven horses, loaded with very rich furs, and which in the whole, amounted to a very great value" (Defoe 1925: 325). And so it happened.
Rich in realistic details, this part of The Farther Adventures sends a complex moral message. The indiscriminate picture of Siberian idolatry fits the perception of Robinson as an orientalizing Puritan traveler. His condemnation of the Tsar's indifference to his Christian mission reveals Defoe's understanding of the imperial burden. The whole picture justified Robinson's plot of cheating the Russian Tsar by smuggling his exiled subject to England. But it was not only Robinson's desperate longing for human contact, another feature of his pilgrimage, which motivated his unlimited affection toward the prince. Because of the generosity of the prince and the value of the furs, their exchange was unfair, a fact that Robinson felt deeply but did not try to correct. Two times in a row, Robinson financially benefited from this friendship. The exchange of gifts in which the western side gains fabulously and unilaterally was a regular ambition of colonial projects. But in The Farther Adventures, Robinson gained not because of his intellectual superiority over the native, but because of his moral inferiority. Evidently, Defoe designed the whole exchange in such a way that the exiled Russian prince appeared not only richer but also wiser and kinder than the traveling British merchant. Able to make a distinction between freedom and liberty in perfect English, this prince was also very enlightened, an admirable quality in comparison to Robinson's limited skills. Thrown among barbaric people, the noble prince of a higher nature represented the embodiment of a particularly Russian kind of colonialism, in which the high and the low points of human existence are pushed to the extreme, beyond the westerners' expectations. This friend was a far cry from the first volume's Friday; maybe because of this, it was the prince's son, not the prince, who took Friday's place in Robinson's retinue.
Judging Robinson solely on the basis of the first volume of his travels, Said performed an erasure that has been typical of modern readings of Crusoe, who have presented Crusoe as the model and prototype of Puritan orientalism. As Melissa Free (2006) argues in her illuminating essay, this erasure was uncommon among the early readers of Defoe but became increasingly popular in the twentieth century. In her extraordinary statistics from more than 1,000 editions of Crusoe in English, Free demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, these editions usually consisted of just the first two or all three of the volumes, with only 4 percent containing the first volume alone. In the nineteenth century, the separate publications of the first volume increased only slightly. But after World War I, more than 75 percent of the editions of Crusoe consisted of the first volume only. The story, which resulted in more commerce than any colonial cargo, was simplified by abridgement. The fur-clad Russian prince was sacrificed in preference to the naked Friday. Robinson in Siberia was not orientalist enough, or rather not in the proper way, to deserve reading.