To the modern readerthere are some unpleasant surprises in reading Defoe´s narrative. What does the Western (and in particular the English) reader make of Crusoe´s view of Xury, the black slave, and of the indian, Man Friday. Crusoe´s scruples at selling Xury, his companion slave and fellow-fugitive to the Portuguese captain are absolved when the captain offers to set Xury free after ten years, if he turns Christian. This confident, paternalistic attitude would have been Crusoe´s natural one (and was probably Defoe´s). Of course Defoe does not make Crusoe view these men so mawkishly as later adopters of his condemnation of the cannibals. Crusoe goes on to say:

' What authority or call {had I}, to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven have thought for so many ages to suffer unpunished…'

Crusoe is of his own day, and thought intellectually puzzled, acts towarrds the indians in the all-conquering way of the succsessful, mercantile civilitation which Defoe so admired, and which we from time to time realize is still our inheritance. Defoe´s imagination, thought free for his day, is yet limited by his time in this respect, and Robinson Crusoe stands at once optimistically alive and sad, as a monument to an earlier age of Western culture.

SOURCE: ©Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.
                © Penguin classics.
                © Edited with an introduction by Angus Ross.