The Prodigal Son at Sea

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Although generally regarded as an adventure story, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a fictional memoir of faith, may be read as a retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Crusoe’s father is a merchant who gives his son a comfortable living and urges him to join him in his business. The son, however, goes off to sea, despite warnings regarding the dangers of such a life. The novel recounts Crusoe’s experiences of suffering and difficulty before coming to faith followed by his subsequent growth in Christian confidence and testimony afterward.

Rashness

When young Crusoe announces his desire to seek his fortune at sea, his father urges him to weigh the risks and comforts of that life against the life of a merchant like himself. Instead of giving more thought to his ways, the determined young prodigal ingratiates himself with a merchant captain who takes him on as a companion investor, not a sailor. With his help, Crusoe makes a handsome profit and decides to try again. On the next voyage, however, he is captured by pirates and sold into slavery. The experience recalls to him his father’s prophetic words that he would “have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his [father’s] counsel when there might be none” to help him. Nonetheless, when Crusoe finally escapes, his father’s words fade. He sets off again to seek his fortune, oblivious once more to his father’s loving advice.

This third adventure ends in the shipwreck that maroons him on a deserted island. Although he dares to venture out to what remains of the wrecked ship to salvage what he can from it, he remains lonely and hopeless. He builds and stocks a sturdy shelter but struggles, nearly in despair, until he decides to measure the evils of his circumstances against the goods.

Gratitude

In composing the two comparative lists, he becomes aware of a simple truth. The list of goods includes his being alive, his bounty of salvage from the wrecked ship, his ability to feed himself, the absence of threats from beasts and other men, and hope that the One who preserved him can deliver him.

Despite the deteriorating clothes, defenselessness, and isolation, he chooses and sets his mind to live and to hope. Reflecting on his many struggles, he concludes, “there was scarce any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for it.”

Wrestling with God

Later, when recovering from a serious illness, Crusoe takes out one of three Bibles recovered from the shipwreck. Though he’s too ill to concentrate, his eyes fall on Psalm 50:15: “Call on Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” Moved, he kneels and prays for the first time in years, asking God to fulfill his promise and deliver him from the island. He continues to meditate on this verse over his twenty-eight years marooned in the Atlantic.

Like many Christians, only times of extreme trial move him to look to God for help, as when, after experiencing a life-threatening earthquake, he utters the most essential prayer, “Lord have mercy upon me!”

When he discovers barley growing about a month after uttering this prayer, he experiences a revelation. Admitting, “I had hitherto acted upon no religious foundation at all,” he recalls that he had heretofore attributed the events of his life to chance. But the sight of grain growing in a place where it is not native suggests to him something miraculous, and he begins to think God has intervened on his behalf, reflecting, “I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen a providence as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the work of Providence to me.” He acknowledges that more than chance was involved in a few odd grains falling into fertile, protected ground just before the rains came.

Confession

As he meditates on his experiences, he confesses his father’s “good instruction,” as well as his own “eight years of seafaring wickedness”—which included slave-trading. He describes that chapter in his life as one when he neither looked to God nor reflected on his own foolish choices. He confesses “a certain stupidity of soul, without desire of good, or conscience of evil.” When rescued from slavery, as when spared from death by shipwreck, he failed to give thanks. Instead, in his first many months on the island, he felt no remorse for ignoring his father but instead pitied himself as an unfortunate man, “born to be always miserable.”

The prodigal son who committed, in his own words, a “breach of my duty to God and my father” and who underwent suffering ultimately comes to repent of his defiance and longs to make amends. Stricken with illness and despair, he finds in God’s word an understanding he had never before fully grasped. 

Service

By the time Crusoe encounters a man captured in war and rescues him from cannibals who have brought him to the island for sacrifice, his religious sensibilities have become more solid. In fact, he determines to teach the man the Christian religion. Unable to speak his language, Crusoe decides to call the man Friday, the day he rescued him. Though today’s critics will say that Crusoe the slave-trader makes Friday his personal slave because he expects a man of color to serve him, the fact is that a bond of friendship grows between the two men, and they learn from each other. The same critics might call Crusoe a colonialist who has taken over other people’s land, but in truth Crusoe delivers Friday from cannibalism, which was practiced not only by his captors but also by Friday’s own people.

An Overcomer

Surely, it is no spoiler to note that Crusoe and Friday both eventually escape the island and sail to Europe. The adventure has been made into at least eighteen films. However, it is for the story of Crusoe’s transformation from prodigal to penitent that readers should pick up this novel and read it today. In a world in which inhabitants of the most privileged and abundant civilization in human history fixate on the suffering of others and join mobs steeped in resentments (both in the streets and on social media), it could be instructive to follow the rebellion, suffering, and subsequent maturation of a man who chooses to survive and persevere rather than give up in self-pity or erupt in rage. Crusoe is a man who conquers both his situation and himself. Unlike the never-ending jeremiads of the internet woebegone, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe moves from tribulation to triumph.