Name: Moll’s Maps in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Author: Daniel Defoe

The first edition of 1719 was issued with an engraved frontispiece portrait of Crusoe by John Clark and John Pine. Four months later, The Farther Adventures (1719) contained a world map by Herman Moll charting Crusoe’s supposed voyages. This closely resembles the map Moll had produced for Woodes Rogers’s Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712), one of the main published sources for Selkirk’s adventure. By adopting Moll’s design, Defoe implied a direct continuity between his fiction and authoritative voyage literature, even supplying plausible latitudes and longitudes for Crusoe’s landfalls and storms.

A more elaborate map of Crusoe’s island appeared only in Serious Reflections (1720). This large fold-out engraving, signed ‘Clark & Pine sc. 1719,’ is a pictorial plan of the island, showing Crusoe’s bower, Friday’s rescue of his father, encounters with cannibals, the burning of huts, and the meeting with the English captain whose ship provides escape. Because the plate is dated 1719 but was first issued in 1720, scholars have suggested that it may originally have been intended for The Farther Adventures as a companion – or substitute – for Moll’s world map.
By combining contemporary cartographic forms with imaginative narrative, Defoe gave his fiction the trappings of scientific credibility. In the aftermath of the Longitude Act (1714), charts, coordinates, and mapped routes carried powerful cultural authority. Crusoe’s maps thus anchored the story’s plausibility while linking it to wider eighteenth-century debates about exploration, empiricism, and the expanding limits of the known world.

Ex Carta

Herman Moll’s charts in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe lend empirical realism to the castaway’s adventures, blending imaginative narrative with Enlightenment cartography.

Daniel Defoe’s (c.1660–1731) celebrated tale of shipwreck and survival is often styled the first English novel. Few works have embedded themselves more deeply in the global imagination: the figure of Crusoe and his companion Friday has been translated, adapted, and retold for over three centuries. The book’s immediate success was such that Defoe published two sequels within a year – 

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Defoe’s narrative drew loosely on the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned for four years on Juan Fernández Island (1704–1709). Yet Robinson Crusoe was much more than reportage: it fused spiritual meditation, travelogue, romance, and satire into a new literary form. Crusoe has been described as ‘a character of compelling reality who appears in one archetypal incident after another,’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and as an enduring prototype for later survival narratives. These include 

, as well as science fiction in which the desert island is transposed to distant planets, including 

returned Crusoe and Friday to the island, while the third part, 

, attempted to defend the work’s truthfulness and moral purpose. From the outset, Defoe encouraged readers to treat Crusoe’s story as ‘history', deliberately blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Set of three first editions of the complete adventures; The first edition of 1719 was issued with an engraved frontispiece portrait of Crusoe by John Clark and John Pine. Four months later, 

 (1719) contained a world map by Herman Moll charting Crusoe’s supposed voyages. This closely resembles the map Moll had produced for Woodes Rogers’s 

 (1712), one of the main published sources for Selkirk’s adventure. By adopting Moll’s design, Defoe implied a direct continuity between his fiction and authoritative voyage literature, even supplying plausible latitudes and longitudes for Crusoe’s landfalls and storms.

A more elaborate map of Crusoe’s island appeared only in Serious Reflections (1720). This large fold-out engraving, signed ‘Clark & Pine sc. 1719,’ is a pictorial plan of the island, showing Crusoe’s bower, Friday’s rescue of his father, encounters with cannibals, the burning of huts, and the meeting with the English captain whose ship provides escape. Because the plate is dated 1719 but was first issued in 1720, scholars have suggested that it may originally have been intended for 

 as a companion – or substitute – for Moll’s world map.

By combining contemporary cartographic forms with imaginative narrative, Defoe gave his fiction the trappings of scientific credibility. In the aftermath of the Longitude Act (1714), charts, coordinates, and mapped routes carried powerful cultural authority. Crusoe’s maps thus anchored the story’s plausibility while linking it to wider eighteenth-century debates about exploration, empiricism, and the expanding limits of the known world.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Moll’s Maps in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River Oronoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where in all the Men Perished but himself.  With an Account how he was at last as Strangely Deliver'd by Pyrates