Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by TimSeverin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $4.19

  Who was the real Robinson Crusoe? In search of the world's most famous castaway, Tim Severin travels where men were shipwrecked or abandoned in the days of the pirates and buccaneers...and lived to tell their tales of survival. A Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, has long been considered as the real life inspiration for Crusoe. So Severin begins his quest on the islands of Juan Fernandez 400 miles off the coast of Chile where Selkirk was marooned for four years. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe , also knew the extraordinary survival tale of an English buccaneer surgeon, Lionel Wafer, wounded in a pirate raid and abandoned in the jungle of Panama. So Severin goes to meet the Indian tribe, the Kuna, who rescued him. Carrying on his journey he finally takes a 100 year old sailing boat to Salt Tortuga, a small uninhabited island off the coast of Venezuela. There he establishes the truth about a runaway 'white slave', Henry Pitman, marooned by pirates thirty years before Defoe created Crusoe...

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.25

  This work is an exploration in to the legend behind Daniel Defoe's classic novel, citing possible places where this famous character could have been marooned. It examines the claim that Crusoe was based on a real life castaway, Alexander Selkirk. Describing the tropical locales and the practicalities of island life, the text brings the fictional and the factual together, along the way exploding some enduring myths.