Over the top

Over the years I have had the opportunity to research some of the remarkable Western – mostly British – characters that have resided in and impacted on Sri Lanka in some manner, and then broadcast their knowledge of the enigmatic island to the outside world. I am regularly amazed at the way Occidental biographers often ignore or marginalize such characters when they happen to interact with their biographical subjects. Sri Lanka is, it seems, far removed from the Home Counties and West Country milieu of successful biographers.

The major disregarded character is Robert Knox. Sixteen-eighty-one saw the publication of the first book about Ceylon in the English language – in some ways it’s still the best. Titled An Historical Relation of Ceylon, it was written by Knox with the help of Dr Robert Hooke, then Secretary to the Royal Society, and had a commendation by Sir Christopher Wren.

Knox had been confined to the mountainous and autonomous Kandyan Kingdom in Dutch-held Ceylon from 1660 to 1680. The book was widely read and discussed in London’s coffee houses (where Knox spent much time with Hooke). It’s simply the finest jewel in Sri Lanka’s two centuries of English literature. Moreover, Knox has long thought to have been the primary source for the character of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

It is hypothesised by Donald Ferguson in Captain Robert Knox (1896-97), and James Ryan, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1911), that Knox and Defoe at least met each other. John Masefield in A Mainsail Haul (1913) and Arthur Secord in “Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe”, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, (1924), go further and assert they were acquaintances.

What is certain is that Defoe possessed a copy of Knox’s book. Its ownership may have proved useful, for Secord comments: “So similar in tone are the two works that many passages could be transferred bodily from one to the other without noticeable effect upon them.”

That Defoe seems indebted in part to Knox for the resourceful character of Crusoe is commented on by Secord, EFC Ludowyk in “Robert Knox and Robinson Crusoe”, University of Ceylon Review (1952), and SD Saparamadu, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1958). Saparamadu notes: “If you peer into the features of Crusoe you will see something of the man who was not the lonely inhabitant of a desert island, but who has lived in an alien land among strangers, supported by the strength of his resolution to resist acceptance of his fate.”

Yet authors of the slew of Defoe biographies mostly disregard Knox, and in an instance when he is mentioned, astonishingly maligned: Paula R Backscheider in Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989) dismisses Knox as an “inferior writer”. Even a specific book on the subject, Tim Severin’s Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002), ignores Knox. Severin believes the source was a surgeon, Henry Pitman, who wrote a short book, A Relation of the Great Suffering and the Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, (1689) about his escape from a Caribbean penal colony and being shipwrecked and marooned on an uninhabited island off Venezuela.

Another possible source is examined by Diana Souhami – who like Severin overlooks Knox – in Selkirk’s Island (2001). Alexander Selkirk was the Sailing Master of the Cinque Ports, sent to plunder Spanish ships along the coast of South America in 1703. Selkirk had a difference of opinion with his captain and was put ashore on an uninhabited island off Chile, where, due to his lack of initiative, he barely survived before being rescued by Captain Woodes Rogers. Selkirk’s account was published by Rogers’ in his Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712).

The circumstances are similar enough to Crusoe’s and Defoe may have been influenced by them but moulded his hero’s character on Knox, the more adept survivor. Assuming this was the case Masefield laments: “It is sad that the comparatively colourless Selkirk should have robbed him (Knox) of much credit properly his.”

An example of related research is Linda Colley’s Captives (2002) that covers a assortment of prisoners in various parts of the British Empire from 1600 to 1850. It’s amazing that Colley, like Souhami, fails to mention Knox though she covers Defoe and Crusoe in her opening chapter.

An astonished American-born but England-based biographer remarked to me: “Is Knox really so forgotten?” Mysteriously, he is. Yet Ernest A Baker concludes in The History of the English Novel (1929): “Knox might well have been the author of the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe.”

The success of Robinson Crusoe encouraged Defoe to write The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720). In this instance Knox’s contribution is unquestionable, which reinforces the theory that Knox is likely to have been a source for Defoe. Captain Singleton includes an incident in which the eponymous hero’s pirate ship goes aground off the south-eastern coast of Ceylon. Military forces arrive to entrap the pirates but don’t succeed, partly because a similar situation faced by an earlier English sailor, as remembered by the ship’s surgeon, provides a forewarning.

The surgeon recalls the Englishman’s name “was Knox, Commander of an East India ship, who was driven on Shore, just as we were, upon the Island of Ceylon: That he was beguiled by the Barbarians, and inticed to come on Shore, just as we were invited to do at that time . . .”

The answer as to whether Defoe did borrow Knox’s character for Crusoe will become clearer in 2011, for the astonished biographer mentioned earlier, Katherine Frank – A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (1986), A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (1990), Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (1994), and the contentious Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (2002) – has been stirred into writing the first complete biography of Knox.

Richard Boyle is the author of Knox’s Words: A study of the words of Sri Lankan origin or association first used in English literature by Robert Knox and recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (2004). Robert Knox also makes an appearance in Richard Boyle’s  ‘Dagger-clawed little people’ on the search of an early hominid on the island of Ceylon in Himal’s March issue.