Editing Robinson Crusoe (section)

== Sources and real-life castaways ==
{{See also|Castaway#Real occurrences}}
[[File:Alexander Selkirk Statue.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Statue of Robinson Crusoe at [[Alexander Selkirk]]'s birthplace of [[Lower Largo]] by [[Thomas Stuart Burnett]]]]
[[File:Alexander Selkirk Title Page.jpg|right|thumb|Book on Alexander Selkirk]]
There were many stories of real-life castaways in Defoe's time. Most famously, Defoe's suspected inspiration for ''Robinson Crusoe'' is thought to be Scottish sailor [[Alexander Selkirk]], who spent four years on the uninhabited island of [[Robinson Crusoe Island|Más a Tierra]] (renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966)<ref name=Severin2002/>{{rp|pages=23–24}} in the [[Juan Fernández Islands]] off the Chilean coast. Selkirk was rescued in 1709 by [[Woodes Rogers]] during a British expedition that led to the publication of Selkirk's adventures in both ''[[A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World]]'' and ''A Cruising Voyage Around the World'' in 1712. According to [[Tim Severin]], "Daniel Defoe, a secretive man, neither confirmed nor denied that Selkirk was the model for the hero of his book. Apparently written in six months or less, ''Robinson Crusoe'' was a publishing phenomenon."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Severin |first=Tim |year=2002 |title=Marooned: The Metamorphosis of Alexander Selkirk |jstor=41213335 |journal=The American Scholar |volume=71 |issue=3 |pages=73–82}}</ref>

According to [[Andrew Lambert]], author of ''Crusoe's Island'', it is a "false premise" to suppose that Defoe's novel was inspired by the experiences of a single person such as Selkirk, because the story is "a complex compound of all the other buccaneer survival stories."<ref name=Little2016>{{cite magazine |last=Little |first=Becky |date=28 September 2016 |title=Debunking the myth of the 'real' Robinson Crusoe |magazine=National Geographic |url=https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/robinson-crusoe-alexander-selkirk-history/ |access-date=7 December 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171208122400/https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/robinson-crusoe-alexander-selkirk-history/ |archive-date=8 December 2017 |url-status=dead}}</ref> However, ''Robinson Crusoe'' is far from a copy of Rogers' account: Becky Little argues three events that distinguish the two stories:
# Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked while Selkirk decided to leave his ship, thus marooning himself;
# The island that Crusoe was shipwrecked on had already been inhabited, unlike the solitary nature of Selkirk's adventures.
# The last and most crucial difference between the two stories is that Selkirk was a privateer, looting and raiding coastal cities during the War of Spanish Succession.
"The economic and dynamic thrust of the book is completely alien to what the buccaneers are doing," Lambert says. "The buccaneers just want to capture some loot and come home and drink it all, and Crusoe isn't doing that at all. He's an economic imperialist: He's creating a world of trade and profit."<ref name=Little2016/>

Other possible sources for the narrative include [[Ibn Tufail]]'s ''[[Hayy ibn Yaqdhan]]'', and Spanish sixteenth-century sailor [[Pedro Serrano (sailor)|Pedro Serrano]]. Ibn&nbsp;Tufail's ''Hayy ibn&nbsp;Yaqdhan'' is a twelfth-century philosophical novel also set on a [[desert island]], and translated from Arabic into Latin and English a number of times in the half-century preceding Defoe's novel.<ref>{{cite book |first=Nawal Muhammad |last=Hassan |year=1980 |title=Hayy bin&nbsp;Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe: A study of an early Arabic impact on English literature |publisher=Al-Rashid House}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Cyril |last=Glasse |year=2001 |title=[[Encyclopedia of Islam|New Encyclopedia of Islam]] |page=202 |publisher=Rowman Altamira |isbn=0-7591-0190-6}}</ref><ref name=Amber>{{cite journal |first=Amber |last=Haque |year=2004 |title=Psychology from Islamic perspective: Contributions of early Muslim scholars and challenges to contemporary Muslim psychologists |journal=Journal of Religion and Health |volume=43 |issue=4 |pages=357–377, esp.369|doi=10.1007/s10943-004-4302-z |s2cid=38740431 }}</ref><ref name=Wainwright>{{cite news |first=Martin |last=Wainwright |title=Desert island scripts |series=Review |newspaper=[[The Guardian]] |date=22 March 2003 |url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,918454,00.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080724144426/http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,918454,00.html |archive-date=24 July 2008}}</ref>

[[Pedro Serrano (sailor)|Pedro Luis Serrano]] was a Spanish sailor who was marooned for seven or eight years on a small desert island after shipwrecking in the 1520s on a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua. He had no access to fresh water and lived off the blood and flesh of sea turtles and birds. He was quite a celebrity when he returned to Europe; before passing away, he recorded the hardships suffered in documents that show the endless anguish and suffering, the product of absolute abandonment to his fate, now held in the [[General Archive of the Indies]], in [[Seville]].{{citation needed|date=May 2022}} It is quite possible that Defoe heard his story in one of his visits to Spain before becoming a writer.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2016-08-02 |title=La historia que inspiró a Robinson Crusoe, española. Pedro Serrano, 1526. |url=https://abcblogs.abc.es/espejo-de-navegantes/otros-temas/la-historia-que-inspiro-a-robinson-crusoe-espanola-pedro-serrano-1526.html |access-date=2023-11-05 |website=ABC Blogs |language=es}}</ref>

Yet another source for Defoe's novel may have been the [[Robert Knox (sailor)|Robert Knox]] account of his abduction by the King of [[Sri Lanka|Ceylon]] [[Rajasinha II of Kandy]] in 1659 in ''[[An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon]]''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Knox |first=Robert |year=1911 |title=An Historical Account of the Island Ceylon based on the 1659 original text |place=Glasgow, UK |publisher=James MacLehose and Sons}}</ref><ref name=Filreis>see Alan Filreis</ref>

[[Tim Severin|Severin]] (2002)<ref name=Severin2002/> unravels a much wider range of potential sources of inspiration, and concludes by identifying castaway surgeon Henry Pitman as the most likely:

:An employee of the [[Duke of Monmouth]], Pitman played a part in the [[Monmouth Rebellion]]. His short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony, followed by his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures, was published by [[John Taylor (bookseller)|John Taylor]]<!-- J. Taylor --> of [[Paternoster Row]], London, whose son [[William Taylor (bookseller)|William Taylor]] later published Defoe's novel.

Severin argues that since Pitman appears to have lived in the lodgings above the father's publishing house and that Defoe himself was a [[Mercery|mercer]] in the area at the time, Defoe may have met Pitman in person and learned of his experiences first-hand, or possibly through submission of a draft.<ref name=Severin2002/> Severin also discusses another publicized case of a marooned man named only as [[Will (Indian)|Will]], of the [[Miskito people|Miskito]] people of Central America, who may have led to the depiction of [[Man Friday|Friday]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Dampier |first=William |author-link=William Dampier |title=A New Voyage round the World |year=1697 |location=London |publisher=James Knapton |url=https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.34672}}</ref>

Secord (1963)<ref>{{cite book |last=Secord |first=Arthur Wellesley |year=1963 |orig-year=1924 |title=Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe |pages=21–111 |place=New York, NY |publisher=Russell & Russell}}</ref> analyses the composition of ''Robinson Crusoe'' and gives a list of possible sources of the story, rejecting the common theory that the story of Selkirk is Defoe's only source.