Never any young adventurer's misfortunes, I believe, began sooner, or continued longer than mine. The ship was no sooner out of the Humber than the wind began to blow and the sea to rise in a most frightful manner; and, as I had never been at sea before, I was most inexpressibly sick in body and terrified in mind. I began now seriously to reflect upon what I had done, and how justly I was overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my father's house, and abandoning my duty. All the good counsels of my parents, my father's tears and my mother's entreaties, came now fresh into my mind; and my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to which it has since, reproached me with the contempt of advice, and the breach of my duty to God and my father.

All this while the storm increased, and the sea went very high, though nothing like what I have seen many times since; no, nor what I saw a few days after; but it was enough to affect me then, who was but a young sailor, and had never known anything of the matter. I expected every wave would have swallowed us up, and that every time the ship fell down, as I thought it did, in the trough or hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; in this agony of mind, I made many vows and resolutions that if it would please God to spare my life in this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a ship again while I lived; that I would take his advice, and never run myself into such miseries as these any more. Now I saw plainly the goodness of his observations about the middle station of life, how easy, how comfortably he had lived all his days, and never had been exposed to tempests at sea or troubles on shore; and I resolved that I would, like a true repenting prodigal, go home to my father. (Chapter 1)

Basic set up:

Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the novel, gets caught in a big storm while aboard a ship. Here he's recounting his feelings of terror and repentance.

What is it with these Augustans and shipwrecks? First Gulliver, now Robinson. The difference? Defoe apparently based Robinson Crusoe on the true story of a shipwreck.

The reading public really had a hunger for adventure stories like this. This was a time when more and more of the world was being explored, the British Empire was beginning to be established, and people started getting hugely curious about different places and people. Defoe's novel fed right into that hunger.

Defoe's novel is also characterized by a journalistic tone of voice. We're supposed to believe that Crusoe's narration is "true," and many early readers of the novel totally did think that a real guy named Robinson Crusoe was the author of the book, telling about real-life events that had actually happened to him.

While Crusoe was a character made up by Daniel Defoe, his story was inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk, a man who was shipwrecked on a Pacific Island for four years. Defoe's novel is a great example of the way that fact and fiction got mixed up during the Augustan era, and of the way literary work and journalism blended into one another.