Surviving Crusoe

Once upon a time, a young man in 18th-century York upped and ran away to sea against his parents&rsquo wishes. He survived storms and pirates and disease, until one day his ship sank off the coast of a seemingly uninhabited island. With a pipe and a knife in his pocket, and the remains of some provisions on board his sundered vessel, he spent the next 28 years becoming the world&rsquos most famous castaway.

When Daniel Defoe wrote The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner in 1719, he created a literary figure and trope that dominates all others like it to this day. His wasn&rsquot the first castaway there were 16th century French epic voyages, Shakespeare&rsquos Tempest, Homer&rsquos Odyssey, and a small cache of shipwreck stories such as Henry Neville&rsquos story Isle of Pines (1668), and Alexander Selkirk&rsquos extraordinary life on which Crusoe&rsquos was based.

But Defoe created the archetype. He couldn&rsquot have predicted the success of his work&mdashthere were 41editions in Britain within 40 years, and over 200 by the 19th century&mdashand he certainly couldn&rsquot have foreseen the huge spate of so-called &lsquoRobinsonades&rsquo that would follow.

There was Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable (Godolphin, 1868), and Robinson Crusoe in Verse (Bott, 1882). There was Canadian Crusoes (Traill, 1852) and Welsh Family Crusoes (Anon., 1857). It&rsquos a hugely seductively idea, after all. Who wouldn&rsquot want to play with the possibilities of doing it all over again in a new world

As James Joyce observed, Crusoe is &ldquoThe true symbol of the British [colonial] conquest...who, cast away on a desert island,... becomes an architect, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe the manly independence the unconscious cruelty the persistence the slow yet efficient intelligence the sexual apathy the practical, well-balanced religiousness the calculating taciturnity.&rdquo

Travel as the quintessential colonial act&mdashappropriating the free, domesticating the wild to establish the known in an unknown place&mdashis a meaty subject for picking apart, and writers through the ages have indulged the itch to do so. Defoe&rsquos colossus has been the point of departure for countless imitations, derivations, parodies, and subversions. Robinsonades, for the most part, merely tweak things around to their liking. There are worshipful ripoffs like R M Ballantyne&rsquos The Coral Island (1858), spitting satires like Jonathan Swift&rsquos Gulliver&rsquos Travels (1726), and bitter psycho-theological subversions like Golding&rsquos Lord of the Flies (1954) and Pincher Martin. And so on and so forth, all the way down into the 21st century with JM Coetzee&rsquos postcolonial, gender-reversed reading of the colonial castaway trope in Foe (1987), and this year&rsquos Man-Booker prize-winning novel, Yann Martel&rsquos Life of Pi,which sets an Indian teenager adrift in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger for company.

The fascination with the challenges of man alone against wilderness extends to real life enactments, most famously in the cult television show Survivor (16 strangers set loose in a remote location to compete for prizes. You aren&rsquot supposed to ask what kind of castaways have company and a television crew hanging on their every movement, nor whether the prospect of a million dollars and a guaranteed flight home after a few weeks makes for a particularly challenging situation).

There have been slightly more authentic individual attempts in 1981, British wirter Gerald Kingsland advertised for a woman who would live with him as his wife for one year on the island of Tuin, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, as fieldwork for a novel on the subject. Lucy Irvine answered his ad, and laid out the gory details in a much-read book called Castaway which was also turned into a movie. (The luxury of including in their luggage 200 tea bags, pasta, vinegar, dried fruit and cutlery, was more than neutralised by the enormous dangers and pitfalls of negotiating The Man-Woman Thing.)

In the end the central question thrown up by being stranded on a desert island is not &lsquoWhat&rsquos the one book you would take with you&rsquo, but &lsquoIs there any way to travel other than to constantly project a world you know upon a world you don&rsquot&rsquo