DEFOE, DISSENTERS AND A DESERT ISLAND by Cliff Reed
1. Introduction. According to tradition the wooden pillars that hold up the roof of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House were once ships’ masts. True or not, it is certainly possible, and even if they never actually sailed the seven seas they could still have come from the shipyards that once existed on the banks of the River Orwell. And one reason we know about those shipyards is because the 18th century traveller and writer, Daniel Defoe, says of Ipswich that “many ships…have been built there.” Defoe, who visited Ipswich in the early 1720s, also had this to say about the Meeting House: it “is as large and as fine a building of that kind as most on this side of England, and the inside the best finished I have seen, London not excepted.” Whether or not Defoe thought the pillars were ships’ masts we are not told!
Ships were to feature prominently in Defoe’s best-known book, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, in which the hero travels the world, but the description of Ipswich appears in a rather different book. This is his ‘Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain’ (published 1724-26), which gives us a fascinating picture of this country in the early years of the second decade of the 18th century. And one interesting feature of the book is Defoe’s numerous mentions of Dissenters’ Meeting Houses, such as the one in Ipswich. Defoe was himself a Dissenter and had contemplated entering the ministry, but although he decided against it, he still wrote provocatively in the Dissenting interest.
2. Defoe ‘On Tour’. The 1720s were a significant time for the Dissenters, meaning people who dissented from the Church of England. The Toleration Act of 1689 had allowed them the freedom to build their own places of worship and so the following decades saw many such places being built. They were usually known as meeting-houses, although Defoe tells us that in the North they were also called ‘chapels’. The principal Dissenting denominations at that time were the Presbyterians, many of whom later became Unitarians, as in Ipswich, and the Independents, later known as Congregationalists. The Independents also had a “new-built” Meeting House in Ipswich when Defoe visited, but although he said it was “handsome”, he also commented that it was “not so gay or so large” as the Presbyterian one! Other Dissenters at that time included the Quakers, who did have a meeting-house in Ipswich when Defoe visited, and the Baptists, who didn’t.
Defoe’s account of his national tour has some interesting details about the Dissenters and their meeting-houses. In Torbay, for example, he tells us that the “town, as most of the towns in Devonshire are, is full of Dissenters and a very large meeting-house they have here.” And he continues, “how they act here with respect to the great dispute about the doctrine of the Trinity, which has caused such a breach among those people at Excester [sic] and other parts of the county, I cannot give any account of.” This is a reference to the Unitarian beliefs then emerging mainly, but not exclusively, among the Presbyterians.
At Bridgwater the meeting-house was “remarkable”, Defoe tells us, for having “an advanced seat for the mayor and aldermen, when any of the magistrates should be of their Communion, as sometimes has happened.” This was “remarkable” because at that time all civic dignitaries were usually Anglican. Bridgwater, Defoe records, also had an academy “for the Dissenters to breed up their preaching youth.” So too did Taunton, the “tutor” of which, a man named Warren, told Defoe that “threescore and twelve” of his former students were “ministers then preaching”, and that one of them had “styled him the Father of the Faithful”!
At Bideford, Defoe saw such “a multitude of people come out of” the “very large, well-built and well-finish’d meeting-house” that “I thought all the town had gone thither.” The “five or six” meeting-houses in Newcastle-upon-Tyne were also reported, by Defoe, to be “throng’d with multitudes of people.” In Wrexham, one of the “two large meeting-houses” had preaching in Welsh “one part of the day and in English the other.” The sheer number of meeting-houses, as reported by Defoe, is noteworthy. Bristol had seven – “two Presbyterian, one Independent, two Quakers, one Baptist; also one or two other meetings not to be named.” The large parish of Halifax was said to have “in it…about sixteen meeting-houses which they call also chapels,…having bells to call the people,” not including “several” Quaker meetings. Of Leeds, Defoe wrote that, “Here are two large meeting-houses of Dissenters…besides Dissenters’ chapels in the adjacent depending villages.”
It may be indicative of Defoe’s own liberal outlook that he describes approvingly a scene he witnessed in Dorchester where, “I saw the Church of England clergymen and the Dissenting minister…drinking tea together, and conversing with civility and good neighbourhood like catholick Christians, and men of a catholick and extensive charity” – “catholick” in this context meaning ‘ecumenical’ or ‘universal’. Ecumenism, it may seem strange to hear, was also one of Defoe’s themes in his famous novel, ‘The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ (published in 1719) – a book with more religious and related ideas in it than you might expect!
3. Crusoe’s Spiritual Odyssey. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is a novel, a work of fiction, although it reads as the autobiography of its central character and supposed narrator. Although Daniel Defoe did travel in Europe as well as Great Britain, he never went to most of the places that Robinson Crusoe does in the novel. However, Defoe does seem to have some knowledge of places that Crusoe goes to, suggesting that he had talked at length with travellers, sailors, traders and sea-captains, or read their accounts. And Crusoe’s travels take him to many more places than the ‘desert island’ for which he is famous and which occupies most of the novel’s first volume. Apart from being a good story, though, what makes ‘Robinson Crusoe’ that bit more interesting is the fact that it is a sort of imagined spiritual odyssey as well as a physical one, in which something of Defoe’s own principles and beliefs are revealed.
The fictional character Robinson Crusoe starts out as a rather rebellious young man, something of a scapegrace in fact. Although nominally a Christian and raised as such, religion means little to him when he goes off to sea in defiance of his father. And things go well at first as he sails to Guinea – then a fairly general term for West Africa – and returns home with “five pounds nine ounces of gold dust”, which was worth the then princely sum of £300. His next voyage didn’t go so well, and at this point the subject of slavery comes up – but it is Crusoe who becomes a slave, the prisoner of what are called “Turkish rovers”, or Barbary pirates. He escapes, goes on to Guinea and from there sails to Brazil where he becomes a sugar planter. And this is where slavery comes up again. He had already encountered the African end of the slave trade, later telling other sugar planters of “the manner of trading with the Negroes there, and how easy it was to purchase upon the coast for trifles…not only gold dust,…elephants’ teeth, etc. but Negroes for the service of the Brasils in great numbers.” That is to say: African slaves. The planters in Brazil, who were Portuguese, were very interested, “especially that part”, Crusoe says, “related to the buying Negroes; which was a trade, at that time, not far entered into so that Negroes were bought and those not excessively dear.” Crusoe the young merchant and sugar-planter had no moral qualms about slavery but it was slave-trading that led him into the greatest adventure of his life – and a great change in this brash young man.
He sets out on another voyage to Guinea, this time to buy slaves for himself and his fellow-planters in Brazil. But his ship is wrecked in a storm and he is washed up alone on the ‘desert island’ where he was to spend the next thirty-five years, most of them by himself. His fictional experience was very loosely based on a true story, that of the Scottish buccaneer Alexander Selkirk, who had lived alone on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific for four years, although there the similarity pretty much ended. For a start, Crusoe’s island wasn’t in the Pacific, or anywhere near it. In fact, considering that Crusoe’s island is fictional it is – surprisingly - possible to locate where it would have been quite exactly from Defoe’s detailed description, including its longitude and latitude! It was off the north coast of South America, close to the mouths of the mighty River Orinoco and somewhere between what is now Guyana and the real-life island of Trinidad, an area where I once had an adventure of my own!
I can’t tell the whole of Crusoe’s story here, of course, but some of his experiences are worth touching on. And firstly there was the religious journey he made from being very much a nominal Christian to a sincere and deeply committed one, a journey facilitated by his reading of the Bible, his self- reflection – for which he had plenty of time in the years of solitude - his experience of nature and his later encounters with the people who, after many years, came to the island and joined him there. And Crusoe’s faith turned out to be what we might, for the time, call liberal, inclusive and ecumenical!
In his initial reflections, he asked himself some questions: “What is this earth and sea, of which I have seen so much? Whence is it produced? And what am I, and all the other creatures, wild and tame, human and brutal?’ And he concludes that “…it is God that has made all.” But he then asks why he has been singled out for shipwreck and misfortune: “Why has God done this to me? What have I done to be thus used?” But the answer soon comes from within himself: “My conscience…checked me…as if I had blasphemed, and it spoke to me like a voice, ‘Wretch! Dost thou ask what thou hast done? Look back upon a dreadful misspent life, and ask thyself what hast thou not done?’”
The repentant Crusoe has some challenging experiences and comes to some surprising conclusions. He discovers that his island is visited by parties of Caribs, an Amerindian or Native American people notorious for their warlike nature and their ritual cannibalism – something which, apparently, Defoe didn’t make up! From hiding, he is horrified to witness them slaughtering and consuming their captive enemies, and wonders if he should intervene. And having guns and ammunition salvaged from the shipwreck, he would be able to do so with devastating effect. But he doesn’t and soliloquizes as to why: “How do I know what God himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences…; they do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit.” His surprising conclusion is that these “cannibals” are innocent, unlike “those Christians” who “put to death the prisoners taken in battle,”, or the Christian Spanish who “in all their barbarities practiced in America” had “destroyed millions” of the indigenous people.
And having demolished claims to moral superiority on the part of supposed Christians, he turns his attention to the division and enmity caused by religion: “As to all the disputes, wrangling, strife, and contention which have happened…about religion, whether niceties in doctrines, or schemes of church government, they were all perfectly useless to us, and…they have been so to the rest of the world.” When, after many years, Crusoe gains a companion, servant and convert in the person of a man, a Carib himself, who he shelters from the cannibals and names Friday, he finds his beliefs questioned. After Crusoe tells Friday about God’s “omnipotence and aversion to sin” and how “the devil was God’s enemy…and used all his malice to defeat the good designs of Providence,” Friday asks him, “Well…you say God is so strong, so great…But if God is so strong…why God no kill the devil, so make him no more wicked?” Crusoe is stumped and admits, “I was strangely surprised at this question.”
Eventually, as the years pass, Crusoe is joined on his island by others, and next two to arrive after Friday are Friday’s father and a Spaniard, and this leads to another interesting development. He relates, “It was remarkable too, I had but three subjects, and they were of different religions: my man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.”
And this remained true as the population of the island grew. There were more Spaniards, there were Caribs, there were English – including some initially troublesome sailors, there was a French Roman Catholic priest and there was a Portuguese refugee from the Inquisition and his family. He may have brought his two slaves too, in which case Africans were added to the mix. And this diverse community ended up getting along pretty well under Crusoe’s enlightened rule. Among the new recruits were several women. They included some Caribs who came to be ‘wives’ for the English sailors. And when the sailors and their Carib partners wanted to get properly married as Christians, Crusoe and the enlightened French priest made it possible. When Crusoe and the priest addressed the island’s diverse population on such matters they set out a pleasingly liberal rule: “We made them promise that they would never make any distinction of Papist or Protestant in their exhorting the savages to turn Christian, but teach them the general knowledge of the true God, and of their saviour Jesus Christ; and they likewise promised that they would never have any differences or disputes one with another about religion.”
The “savages” mentioned here were a group of Caribs who had taken up residence on the island and Crusoe wanted to integrate them peacefully into the community, rather than killing them or enslaving them as would usually have happened. So he set out this solution to the islanders regarding the Caribs: “I proposed that either [they should] plant for themselves, or be taken into their several families as servants, to be maintained for their labour, but without being absolute slaves; for I would not permit them to make them slaves by force, by any means…” Not, perhaps the most politically-correct solution by 21st century standards, but pretty good for the 18th!
And so Defoe leaves us on his fictional island, as Crusoe left his ‘subjects’, with a diverse, humane, tolerant and harmonious community of men, women and children, “of which”, we are told, “there were a great many.” Not a bad vision for the 18th century and maybe not a bad one for the 21st!
Addendum: Daniel Defoe on Bury St. Edmunds
In his ‘Tour’, Defoe makes no mention of the - now Unitarian - Dissenting Meeting House in Bury St. Edmunds, which had been erected in 1711. In fact he seems rather more interested in the “abundance of the finest ladies, or as fine as any in Britain”, even if some of those who, as he puts it, “appear at the assemblee, are there for matches and intrigues” and “take scandalous liberty” there!