Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel by Pearl Jason H.;

Author:Pearl, Jason H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

The imperative to keep a common stock becomes a recurring theme. Later, when they find rivers of gold, Singleton proposes that “to preserve the good Harmony and Friendship … what we found should be brought together to our common Stock, and be equally divided at last,” to which everyone “jointly swore, and gave their Hands to one another, that they would not conceal the least Grain of Gold from the rest” (5:89). The riches they acquire function as social glue, ensuring cooperation and quelling public discord for the sake of even distribution. To protect these gains, and especially their fair allotment, the group enacts a rule against gambling. They pool their profits because they pool their labor, each man performing or learning to perform one of several technical roles: blacksmith, rope maker, sail maker, and indeed “twenty Trades we knew little or nothing of” (5:49). Once again, Defoe insists, “Necessity was the spur to invention,” a familiar refrain from Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps most importantly, the group as a whole reserves the right to choose its leaders, and they hold these leaders accountable. In the first half of the novel, Singleton and the others are not yet full-blown pirates, despite their desire to be. In the second half, the group steals its wealth, rather than finding it, but the same rules obtain. On actual pirate ships, such rules instilled real order amid the seeming disorder of alternating captains and mutating crews. It only looked like disorder on the outside. The articles of the ship entailed discipline, too, but punishments were generally less severe than those aboard merchant and naval vessels (Rediker, Villains of All Nations 60–82). It has been argued that Defoe mutes the violence of piracy (Schonhorn, “Defoe’s Captain Singleton”), and that seems true. The point, however, is not the novel’s failed realism but its investment in the fiction it constructs. Indeed, utopias must be at odds with the realities they, by definition, upend and modify. If Defoe regarded actual pirate communities as anarchic gangs of murderers and robbers, he presents in Captain Singleton the possibility for something better.

What Singleton wants, or what he eventually learns he wants, is the stability that was denied him from childhood, the sort of stability that requires firm ground to stand on, a land-based geography that is necessarily beyond the horizon. His movement is ever onward, defined by “trips into the unknown,” not a “circuit” (P. Rogers, Text of Great Britain 148). The question of where to go arises again and again, largely because Singleton has no preference, no notion of where he and his shipmates can or should enjoy their riches in peace—or even if that is what they want to do. The inland of Africa, a “vast uninhabited Wilderness” (5:80), is the setting of Simon Berington’s Gaudentio di Lucca (1737), a later novel in which the narrator finds “a Nation in one of remotest Parts of the World, who, tho’ they were Heathens, had more Knowledge of the Law of Nature and common Morality, than the most civiliz’d Christians” (8).

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