Works of fiction can provide insight into the perspectives of different generations and different cultures. One way to get an insight into the way in which Europeans of the 16th and 17th Centuries thought about colonization is to examine the book Robinson Crusoe, published by Daniel Defoe in 1719–a book which some people consider the first novel in the English language.
Many people know the story of Robinson Crusoe, even if they haven’t read it. Crusoe is an Englishman who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off the coast of South America. He is stranded on this island for more than 20 years, and, for most of that time, he is entirely on his own. But about half way through the book he finds a single human footprint in the sand and discovers that the island is visited from time to time by a tribe of cannibals who bring their prisoners there to be consumed. Eventually, Crusoe rescues one of these prisoners and makes him his servant. The name of that servant is also well-known and is still sometimes used as a synonym for an “assistant”: Friday. Crusoe gives him this name because Friday was day on which he had saved his life.
Many generations of Europeans and North Americans have read Defoe’s account of Crusoe’s naming of Friday without questioning it. And yet presumably the man had a name before Crusoe started calling him “Friday.” Certainly none of Defoe’s readers in the 18th century would have questioned Crusoe’s right to “name” Friday, any more than they would have questioned the right of Crusoe to treat Friday as he describes:
I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I sav’d his life. I called him so for the memory of the time. I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know that was to be my name; I likewise taught him to say, YES, and NO, and to know the meaning of them.
Crusoe, of course, is the “outsider” in this encounter–he is the “foreigner”–and yet he never doubts his right to make Friday his servant; he never doubts his right to give Friday a name, or to teach Friday to speak English, even though it would probably make more sense for Crusoe to learn Friday’s language which was, after all, the language of the local population.
Then Crusoe “civilizes” Friday, for example, by teaching him to wear clothes:
It is true he went awkwardly in these things at first; wearing the drawers was very awkward to him, and the sleeves of the wastcoat gall’d his shoulders and the inside of his arms; but a little easing them where he complain’d they hurt him, and using himself to them, at length he took to them very well.
And he educates Friday:
I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful.
And, finally, he converts Friday to Christianity.
Now neither Defoe, nor his readers doubted that Crusoe not only had the right but even had the responsibility to treat Friday this way. Friday was, after all, a savage. He needed to be civilized; he needed to be taught European values; he needed to be trained to be useful, handy, and helpful: meaning useful, handy, and helpful to Crusoe.
Quite unconsciously and unintentionally, Defoe gives us a fairly accurate portrait of a colonized native: deprived of his own land–made a servant in the land that was once his own–taught a foreign language, given a new name, forced to adopt new cultural values, and converted to a new religion. All, of course, for his own good.
None of this is exaggerated. In fact, colonization was often far more brutal than this fictional account, as we can see by examining what actually occurred on the islands off the coast of South America where Crusoe was stranded–the islands of the Caribbean.
And that brings us back to Christopher Columbus.
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