Crusoe

“ On his first voyage, the ship was wrecked in a fearful storm, and the crew was saved by sailors from another ship.
Next, Crusoe went on a voyage to Africa. On the way there the ship was captured by pirates. The captain of the pirates made a slave of the boy. The man took Crusoe to his home and made him dig in the garden and work in the house.
One day Crusoe hid some food in a small boat and managed to escape, with a boy. They sailed for many long days and nights, keeping close to shore. They did not dare to land, because of the lions and other wild animals. ”

“ Crusoe would sigh, and say that if we only had a boat we would set sail and find the Spaniards, and bring them to the island. Once he said, “We had better make a canoe, Friday, and have it all ready, so that when your father comes we can send him in it to bring the Spaniards here.”
I was so astonished to hear him say that my father was coming that I almost spoke English to him; but I recollected in time that I was Friday, so I only said, “What you meanee?”
“Your father, my poor Friday,” he answered, “is a very old savage, and he has been captured by the enemy. ”

“ Crusoe, if it stops raining, we’ll build a good, substantial plank house that will keep out the rain, and we’ll put it where the water will run off of it instead of into it. I’m sure that’s what your grandfather did when he built his country-house, and we ought to imitate him.” I just added that little remark to please Mr. Crusoe, for his grandfather must have been the worst man to imitate that ever 35lived. Why, a hand-organ monkey would have too much sense to imitate him. ”

“ Where is the man, woman, or child who has not sympathized with the poor seaman before the mast, Alexander Selkirk, typified by the genius of Defoe as his inimitable Crusoe, whose name (although one by no means uncommon in middle life in the east of England,) has become synonymous for all who build and plant in a wilderness, “cut off from humanity’s reach?” ”

“ Crusoe, “I can’t really say they are.”
39“Then,” said I, “you see we haven’t found the kind of stakes that your grandfather used, for if we had they’d have sprouted months ago.”
“That’s so,” said Mr. Crusoe, in a gloomy sort of way.
“Then we might as well give up building a fence. We’ve got a house now that nobody can get into, and what we want to do is to cut down the trees and bushes around the house, so that the hannibals can’t hide in them and shoot at us,” I said.
“Cannibals, boy; not hannibals,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe. ”

“ I regard a knowledge of every detail of the original Robinson Crusoe as well-nigh a necessity in education. Girls may occasionally be excused, but never boys. It ought to be unnecessary, therefore, to say that some of the narrative passages of Crusoe in New York are taken, word for word, from the text of Defoe. ”

“ the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage, and I am now employed in reading the controversy in Religious courtship’—‘Very well,’ cried I, ‘that’s a good girl, I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make the gooseberry-pye.’
CHAPTER VIII. ”

“ The classic Crusoe problem would be extremely awkward if he'd run into it. There was a legend about an individual back on old Earth who'd been left isolated on an island by shipwreck for half a lifetime. ”

“ Crusoe put on it, so, after he was satisfied, I got together two barrels of flour, a barrel of sugar, a bag of coffee, two breech-loading rifles, a lot of cartridges, Mr. Crusoe’s trunk, the captain’s chest, and the medicine-chest. Then I found two long oars and a big coil of rope, not much larger than signal halyards, and put them aboard the raft and shoved off.
The water was so shallow that we poled the raft along with the two oars very easily. I meant to land on the beach, but Mr. Crusoe said we must keep away to the right, and land a little way up a creek that we would find just there. ”

“ but Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with. ”

“ You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice—Robinson Crusoe. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. ”

“ Friday is always spoken of as a black, but that is a mistake, as the inhabitants of all the islands in the part of the Pacific where Robinson Crusoe is supposed to have been wrecked are light brown people; some are very light. Many of them are civilised, and have become Christians, but in those days they were perfect savages, and some of them were cannibals. ”

“ I fastened the ship’s ensign, union down, to the top of the big tree on the hill, and built a big bonfire on the hill ready 135to light as a signal to any vessel that might sight the island in the night. But no picnickers and no vessel came, though if Mr. Crusoe had let me make signals for vessels from the time we first came ashore, I am sure we should have been taken off very soon.
I was getting so anxious about Mr. Crusoe that I wanted to try everything that I could think of that might help him. I had sometimes seen a man’s arm, when he had sprained it, rubbed with medicine, and as Mr. ”

“ According to the almanac, as he called his post with notches cut on it, we had been on the island about two years when he turned me into a man Friday, though, according to my reckoning, we had been there less than a year. But Mr. Crusoe seemed to enjoy himself better the longer we stayed, and I made up my mind that he never 71meant to get away, and that unless I wanted to live and die a corked-up savage, I must contrive some plan for getting away alone. ”

“ We may add, that Spain is the country in which the [268] memory of the crusades was preserved the longest. In the last century, the bull called Crusada was there published every year in all the provinces. This solemn publication reminded the Spaniards of the triumphs they had formerly obtained over the Mussulmans.
We have shown the state of the principal powers of Europe during the crusades; it now remains for us to speak of a power which dominated over all the others, and which was as a tie or centre to all the powers;—we mean the authority of the heads of the Church. ”

“ Another enthusiasm succeeded to that of religious enterprises; and the exploits of the heroic times of our history excited much more [230] admiration in our romances and poets, than they created desire in people of the world to imitate them. Then the Epic Muse, whose voice only celebrates distant events, sang the heroes of the holy wars; and the crusades, for the same reason that Tasso became at liberty to adorn the recital of them with all the wealth of his imagination,—the crusades, we say, were no longer anything for Europe but a poetical remembrance. ”

“ But if it be true that letters owed a part of their progress to the influence of the crusades, it must be confessed that the Crusaders did not always show themselves disposed to profit by them for themselves: nothing can exceed the ignorance of the Crusaders who then set out for the East. ”

“ What prodigy, in fact, can more astonish the philosopher, than to see Europe, which may be said to have been agitated to its very foundations, move all at once, and like a single man, march in arms towards the East?
The council of Clermont, which was held in the month of November, 1095, had fixed the departure of the Crusaders for the festival of the Assumption of the following year. During the winter nothing was thought of but preparations for the voyage to the Holy Land; every other care, every other labour was suspended in the cities and the plains. ”

“ Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the long-boat, with the shoulder of mutton sail, with which I sailed above a thousand miles on the coast of Africa; but this was in vain. ”

“ In the seventeenth century, so abounding in men of genius, the heroic bravery of the Crusaders was admired, their reverses were deplored, and, without a question as to the good or evil which these distant expeditions had brought about, the pious motives which had made the warriors of the West take arms were respected. The eighteenth century, which had adopted all the opinions of the Reformation, and exaggerated them,—the eighteenth century did not spare the crusades, and did not fail to accuse the ignorance, barbarity, and fanaticism of our ancestors as the causes of them. ”

“ Thus began the Crusades, those romantic expeditions which, combining religious fervor with military ardor, united the various nations of Europe from the shores of the Baltic to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the banks of the Danube to the Bay of Biscay, in one common cause, and poured the mingled tide of fanatics, warriors and adventurers, upon the plains of Asia. ”

“ But the history of the Crusades must be viewed rather as a chapter in the history of civilization in the West itself, than as an extension of Western dominion or religion to the East. It is a chapter very difficult to write, for while on the one hand an ingenious and speculative historian may refer to the influence of the Crusades almost everything which was thought or done between 1100 and 1300, a cautious writer who seeks to find documentary evidence for every assertion may be rather inclined to attribute to that influence little or nothing. ”

“ Like the conquests of Alexander the Great, the crusades opened up a new world.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CRUSADES When all is said, the crusades remain one of the most remarkable movements in history. They exhibited the nations of western Europe for the first time making a united effort for a common end. The crusaders were not hired soldiers, but volunteers, who, while the religious fervor lasted, gladly abandoned their homes and faced hardship and death in pursuit of a spiritual ideal. They failed to accomplish their purpose, yet humanity is the richer for the memory of their heroism and chivalry. ”

“ In consequence of the mixture and confusion of divers nations in the middle ages, the wonderful traditions of the North became confounded with those of the South, and produced a semi-barbarous mythology, which differed widely from the laughing mythology of the Greeks. But the labours, the perils, the exploits of a religious war, of a [343] distant war, like those of the crusades, must have given a more noble direction to the imagination of poets, and preserved it from that which was common and whimsical in the romantic conceptions of a gross age. ”

“ The Greek priests and monks, thus plundered by the conquerors, parted with tears from the remains of the saints that had been confided to their keeping, and which every day cured the sick, made the lame to walk, restored sight to the blind, and strength to the paralytic. These holy spoils, that the devotion of the faithful had gathered together from all the countries of the East, went to illustrate the churches of France and Italy, and were received by the Christians of the West as the most glorious trophies of the victories God had enabled the Crusaders to obtain. ”

“ The pope and the leaders of the Christian army forbade Crusaders to enter the holy city without having conquered it; and they, who did not always prove so docile, obeyed the prohibition without pain. More than a hundred thousand warriors that had left Europe for the purpose of delivering Jerusalem, returned to their homes without having entertained perhaps one thought of visiting the tomb of Christ, for which they had taken up arms. The thirty ounces of gold promised by the emperor to all who should cross the sea to fight the infidels, very much increased the number of the Crusaders ”

“ The Crusades established an intercourse between the East and the West, which if often hostile, has nevertheless kept an open channel for that interchange of thought and industry, which in the single department of comparative philology has made possible a marvelous advance into an unsuspected region of knowledge. ”

“ Knowledge, however, continued to increase and spread, and assisted greatly in polishing the manners of the nations of Europe. One proof that the crusades were not unconnected with these first steps of civilization is, that knowledge and letters first flourished among the peoples enriched by the commerce which the holy wars favoured, as in Italy; and with the peoples who had most communication with the Orientals, as the Spaniards. Two inventions were destined to complete this happy revolution, and mark the commencement and the end of the period of the crusades. ”

“ The inclination to enrich themselves by victory had, particularly, no longer any bounds when the Crusaders had once beheld Constantinople; ambition took the place in their hearts of every generous sentiment, and left nothing of that enthusiasm which had been the moving principle of other crusades. No prodigy, no miraculous apparition came to second or stimulate the valour of knights to whom it was quite sufficient to point out the wealth of Greece. In preceding crusades, the bishops and ecclesiastics promised the combatants indulgences of the Church and eternal life ”

“ They had preserved far more of it, and more of the old fineness of feeling that went with it, than had survived in Greece itself, or in any part of the Teutonized empire of Rome. The Crusaders got glimpses of its influence, at least, and a curiosity was wakened, which sent students into Moorish Spain, and opened scholarly interchanges which greatly advanced learning in Europe. Rising Power of the Church. Not the least important effect of the Crusades was the atmosphere of religion which they caused to envelope the great affairs of the time, and which they made common in politics and society. ”