Some Strife in My Thoughts

Abstract

If Defoe was not to become a minister, what was he to do with his life? For him, as for Crusoe at a similar age, it was now ‘too late … to go apprentice to a trade, or clerk to an attorney’; and in any case he can have been no readier than Crusoe to settle down to the humdrum routine of such a life.¹ Crusoe’s ‘meer wandring disposition’ led him to run away to sea; but even before his ship could reach London from Hull two storms had signified divine displeasure at his action.² But why two storms? Crusoe’s explanation, that ‘Providence … resolved to leave me entirely without excuse’, is not altogether convincing.³ Perhaps the answer lies in Defoe’s own experience; for there are strong hints that he himself met with two storms on what must have been a very early voyage — before he was a fully fledged merchant — in his case from London to Oporto. He described the latter as ‘a Barr’d Port, and dangerous enough, so that if the Sea goes high there is no venturing in, and the Ships are oblig’d to go away to Villa da Conde and sometimes to Viana, till the weather abates’.