The End of Style: Defoe to DeWitt

On September 1, 1659, the English son of a Bremen merchant sails north out of Brazil on a slaving expedition. He follows the coast thirty days and, in inclement weather, his ship is run aground. On a sandbar off an island near the mouth of the Orinoco, the men lower a boat from the deck and are swallowed in a wave, “mountain-like,” of which the one survivor is the merchant’s prodigal son. Lately he was the proprietor of a sugar plantation, and before that, in Morocco, he himself was a slave. He lands with a knife, a pipe, and a small ration of tobacco. “Two shoes that are not fellows” later wash up on the beach, and he does not wait for more to arrive. His byword is “providence,” and he labors with Calvinistic zeal to prove it accompanies him. The next day, the wreck has been pushed nearer the island by the tides. He returns to it to supply himself. Among other provisions, he recovers the several books he will have to entertain him through the next twenty-seven years: three English Bibles and an assortment of books in Portuguese, among them, he notes in his diary, some Catholic prayerbooks.