Robinson Crusoe's Canoes

Among his many experiments in manufacturing in the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures, Robinson Crusoe tries his hand at building canoes. The last of these, built with Friday's help, is a hybrid of Carib and European design, a traditional dugout fitted out with sail and rudder. I read this vessel as a transcultural object, reflecting the technological adaptations common in the contact zone. At the same time, I investigate the history of European representations of the canoe in the eighteenth century, showing that it was at the center of debates about native craftsmanship and labor. Crusoe's adventures as a shipwright allow Defoe to explore and complicate the boundaries between civilized and "savage" in his novel, and to imagine the possibilities of a new colonial dispensation of labor marked by collaboration between indigenous and European workers.