The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

       Introduction

       “The Common Bowels of Pity to the Miserable”

      In Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe tells us that in his eighteenth year as a castaway he stumbled across the remnants of a cannibalistic feast. Repulsed by “this horrid Spectacle,” he “gave God Thanks that had cast my first Lot in a Part of the World, where I was distinguish’d from such dreadful Creatures as these.” He then spent several weeks plotting “how I might destroy some of these Monsters in their cruel bloody Entertainment.” After a while, though, he gave up these fantasies, as he considered the injustice of “so outragious an Execution as the killing twenty or thirty naked Savages.” Several factors prompted this change of heart. Crusoe admitted that the Caribes had not hurt him by slaughtering each other. He considered that any attack might result in his own death. He began to pity the Caribes, “who it seems had been suffer’d by Providence in his wise Disposition of the World, to have no other Guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated Passions.” He wondered, how could God want him to kill Indians for their sinful acts when he had never told them those acts were sins?¹

      The real change, though, occurred when he realized that killing cannibals “would justify the Conduct of the Spaniards in all their Barbarities practis’d in America.” After all, the Indians of Mexico “had several bloody and barbarous Rites in their Customs,” but they were “yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent People.” To kill these Caribes would make Crusoe just like the Spanish, who, he categorically proclaimed, were “without Principles of Tenderness, or the common Bowels of Pity to the Miserable.”² Crusoe gave up on murdering the Caribes because he pitied them, but more because he could not bear to think of himself as a man without pity. His response was ponderous and self-conscious, precisely because it emerged from his need to think of himself as one who, unlike the Spanish, spontaneously felt pity. A few years later he did find an opportunity to be both compassionate and violent. After dreaming of and planning for such an occasion, he killed two Caribes in order to rescue and enslave one of their captives, another Caribe he named Friday. Although Crusoe was pleased to hear reports from Friday of some white men nearby who had killed many people, “by all which I understood, he meant the Spaniards, whose Cruelties in America had been spread over the whole Countries,” his hopes for rescue from the island did not distract from his need to understand himself as a more compassionate colonist.³

      The primary expression of Crusoe’s benevolence, the action that provided him with a sense of his difference from the Spanish, was his effort to convert Friday to Protestant Christianity. Crusoe assures his readers, “I was not wanting to lay a Foundation of Religious Knowledge in his Mind,” and he relates some of their conversations about religion. Stymied by difficult questions from his student, he “seriously pray’d to God that he would enable me to instruct savingly this poor Savage, assisting by his Spirit the Heart of the poor ignorant Creature.” Finally, after three years he concluded that “the Savage was now a good Christian, a much better than I.” Friday’s