its popularity
undiminished for nearly two centuries. The story is based upon the
experiences of Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, who had been marooned in the
island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, and who had lived there
in solitude for five years. On his return to England in 1709, Selkirk's
experiences became known, and Steele published an account of them in _The
Englishman_, without, however, attracting any wide attention. That Defoe
used Selkirk's story is practically certain; but with his usual duplicity
he claimed to have written _Crusoe_ in 1708, a year before Selkirk's
return. However that may be, the story itself is real enough to have come
straight from a sailor's logbook. Defoe, as shown in his _Journal of the
Plague Year_ and his _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, had the art of describing
things he had never seen with the accuracy of an eyewitness.

The charm of the story is its intense reality, in the succession of
thoughts, feelings, incidents, which every reader recognizes to be
absolutely true to life. At first glance it would seem that one man on a
desert island could not possibly furnish the material for a long story; but
as we read we realize with amazement that every slightest thought and
action--the saving of the cargo of the shipwrecked vessel, the preparation
for defense against imaginary foes, the intense agitation over the
discovery of a footprint in the sand--is a record of what the reader
himself would do and feel if he were alone in such a place. Defoe's long
and varied experience now stood him in good stead; in fact, he "was the
only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert
island without finding himself at a loss what to do;"[215] and he puts
himself so perfectly in his hero's place that he repeats his blunders as
well as his triumphs. Thus, what reader ever followed Defoe's hero through
weary, feverish months of building a huge boat, which was too big to be
launched by one man, without recalling some boy who spent many stormy days
in shed or cellar building a boat or dog house, and who, when the thing was
painted and finished, found it a foot wider than the door, and had to knock
it to pieces? This absolute naturalness characterizes the whole story. It
is a study of the human will also,--of patience, fortitude, and the
indomitable Saxon spirit overcoming all obstacles; and it was this element
which made Rousseau recommend _Robinson Crusoe_ as a better treatise on