QUARANTINE BLOG # 432

June 5, 2021

Today we conclude the story of Alexander Selkirk and examine my title for this cruise talk.

The Real Robinson Crusoe

There was a man in London who had read Woodes Rogers’s Cruising Voyage Around the World and Richard Steele’s account of Selkirk’s years on Juan Fernandez in The Englishman.

At age 60, Daniel Defoe was tired and broke. What he needed was a big score, a moneymaker. The story of Alexander Selkirk’s marooning was one he could retell.

But there was a flaw in the idea. In the early eighteenth century almost all books published were nonfiction. Novels rarely appeared.

His printer, W. T. Taylor, agreed that a book about a marooned seaman on a tropical island might sell, but only if it read like nonfiction, not like a novel.

In April 1719 the new book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. Defoe’s name did not appear as author. The title page read: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself.

“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. ...”  These opening lines begin the most famous adventure story ever told, the tale of the shipwrecked mariner who survived 28 years on an island off Brazil. It is still in print almost 300 years later.

In the Preface, Defoe noted that the book was “a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.” The initial print run of Robinson Crusoe  was 1,500 copies. It was reprinted four times by the end of the year. In October, the story was serialized in The Original London Post  for 65 weeks, an astonishing run.

Defoe never named Selkirk as the model for his hero. 

At the end of his famous story, Defoe arranged for Crusoe to return to the island on which he had lived for 28 years. But Alexander Selkirk, the real-life Robinson Crusoe, never found his island home again.

Robinson Crusoe Island

Juan Fernandez has changed much since Selkirk’s day.

In 1966 the government of Chile changed the name from Juan Fernandez to Robinson Crusoe Island to attract more tourists. But the visit requires a three-hour flight from Santiago, Chile.

Five hundred people live there today. TV arrived in 1986 and telephones in 1993. A monthly supply boat from Valparaiso, Chile – 360 miles due east – brings fresh vegetables, building supplies, and gas for fishing boats and for the few cars on the island.

About 120 students are enrolled in Robinson Crusoe’s only school, kindergarten through eighth grade. Ninth-grade students attend school in Valparaiso. A Chilean naval ship transports the boys and girls in March and returns them to the island at Christmas.

Most of the island today is a Chilean national park. Sixty percent of its plants – among them 20 species of ferns and 131 kinds of moss – are found nowhere else in the world. Rare birds include the brick-red fire crown hummingbird, a species that Alexander Selkirk enjoyed watching.

Wooden signs along paths direct visitors to Selkirk’s cave and to Selkirk’s Lookout, the high ridge where the marooned mariner watched for ships, and to the tablet left by H.M.S. Topaz  in 1863. Seals, goats, and cats still inhabit the island.

👉  Today’s close is from New Morning Mercies, by Paul David Tripp.

God’s grace not only provides you with what you need, but also transforms you into what he in wisdom created you to be.

What is it that you need most? No, it’s not that new car that you’ve had your eyes on. It’s not that promotion you’ve worked so hard for or that vacation you’ve dreamed of. No, it’s not the perseverance to lose the weight you know you need to lose or the discipline to climb your way out of debt. It’s not a closer circle of friends or a solid church to attend. It’s not freedom from physical sickness or restoration to your estranged family. It’s not freedom from addiction, fear, depression, or worry. All of these things are very important in their own way, but they don’t represent your biggest need. There is one thing that every human being desperately needs, whether he knows it or not. This need gets to the heart of who you are and the heart of what God designed you to be and to do.

Your biggest need (and mine) is a fully restored relationship with God. We were created to live in worshipful community with him. Our lives were meant to be shaped by love for him. We were hardwired to live for his glory. God in grace made a way, through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, for that essential relationship to be fully restored. Through him, we are once again given access to the Father. Through him, we are restored to God’s family.

But God does even more than this. As great as is the miracle that sinners, by grace, can be restored to God, he knows that there is something else that must be addressed. Sin not only left us separate from God, it left us damaged too. The damage of sin extends to every aspect of our personhood. So God not only meets our deepest need; he commits himself to the long-term process of personal heart and life transformation. He is not satisfied that we have been restored to him; he now works so that we will become like him.

So God has welcomed you into his arms, but he’s not satisfied. He will not leave his work of redemption until every heart of every one of his children has been fully transformed by his powerful grace. Now that we are with him by grace, he works by the very same grace so that we will be like him.

“By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.

“In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.

“The more you grow like this, the more productive and useful you will be in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But those who fail to develop in this way are shortsighted or blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their old sins.

“So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove that you really are among those God has called and chosen. Do these things, and you will never fall away. Then God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:3-11 NLT). 

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