Daniel Defoe villainized piracy in the first and second volumes of the Crusoe trilogy (1719–20). His pirates there are agents of dangerous unrest, threats to civil order both at sea and on land. They are immoral and irrational, almost incorrigibly wicked and stubbornly unmindful of even their own best interests. True, Will Atkins reforms, but this is really a purgation of character, a convenient elimination of qualities deemed inadmissible in Crusoe’s fledgling colony.
Defoe takes a different view in The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of Captain Singleton (1720), aligning us with a more deviant—but more disenfranchised—character who treats his fellow seamen less as accessories to vice and more as partners in collectivized banditry. Here, too, piracy is sinful and criminal, but it is arguably more necessary, and the demands of repentance are relatively lenient, arguably negligible. Indeed, to move from Robinson Crusoe to Captain Singleton is to witness some of the diversity of the period’s utopianism, which could find various—even antithetical—expression in the corpus of a single author.
Historically, this was “The Golden Age of Piracy,” a retrospectively romantic phrase for what was nevertheless a concurrently romanticized heyday of supposedly limitless freedom and booty. Numerous legends have been handed down and refashioned, most famously those of Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Edward Teach (also known as Blackbeard), and Bartholomew Roberts, or Black Bart, but perhaps no pirate embodied—or inspired—a more compelling utopian fantasy than Captain John Avery, born Henry Every and sometimes called Captain Bridgeman or Long Ben—the proliferation of names and nicknames turns out to be significant as both publicity and disguise. Among contemporaries, Avery gained notoriety for taking a treasure-laden ship from the Grand Mughal, a heist of staggering riches, and absconding to Saint Mary’s, an island off the coast of Madagascar. He and his fellow pirates established a temporarily successful colony there, about which we have few facts and much speculation.1 Finally, Avery fled again, disappearing into Ireland, and maybe England, quickly giving rise to a series of popular narratives, including Defoe’s earlier King of Pirates (1719).2 I begin with Avery because he was perhaps a model for the protagonist of Captain Singleton (Secord 139–47), yet also because he is advertised on the title page and dropped into the novel’s plot. More broadly, the stories surrounding Avery illustrate the readiness of writers, and the willingness of readers, to fill out thin rumors of piracy with grand utopian speculations.
Many of today’s commentators have emphasized the political valences of piracy. Extending Eric Hobsbawm’s work on social bandits, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and others have shown how pirates founded parallel societies notable for their relatively egalitarian rules and power structures and their equal distribution of rations and spoils (Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels and Bandits; Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations; Linebaugh and Rediker 143–73; Bromley; Burg). As Alexander Exquemelin documented, in his popular Buccaneers of America (1678), “Everything taken—money, jewels, precious stones and goods—must be shared among them all, without any man enjoying a penny more than his fair share” (72). This may sound simple, but pirates created durable systems for electing captains, inducting newcomers, and storing and apportioning earnings. Christopher Hill went so far as to hypothesize that Caribbean pirates, at least some of them, carried forward the radical—or utopian—ideals of the English Revolution (“Radical Pirates?”; “Pirates”). Ordinary sailors, it has also been argued, helped galvanize the American Revolution (Lemisch). The General History of the Pyrates (1724), a clearinghouse of facts and fictions about Golden Age piracy, describes a series of pirate communities that stand in stark contrast to the tyrannical hierarchies of merchant and naval vessels. The first rule aboard Roberts’s ship was, “Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at Pleasure” (C. Johnson 211). Captain Misson, founder of the mythic colony Libertalia, assured his crew that “he would use the Power they gave for the publick Good only, and … that he was their Friend and Companion, and should never exert his Power, or think himself other than their Comrade, but when the Necessity of Affairs should oblige him” (392). Pirate communities have been praised, moreover, for their empowerment of African slaves (Kinkor) and women (Appleby; Rediker, Villains of All Nations 103–26) and their acceptance of nonnormative genders and sexualities (Turley). They developed their own traditions, even their own pidgin languages, and this culture is said to have unified them in opposition to the spread of European empires and commercial networks. What is important, for my purposes, is the underlying assumption that these communities were radically separate, different, and oppositional. Certainly they were treated that way by nation-states viewing them as “enemies of all humankind,” les ennemis du genre-humain, hostis humanai generis (Heller-Roazen 116–18).
By their very nature as rovers, pirates were seldom attached to solid ground. Earlier, we saw how Margaret Cavendish imagined a utopia only vaguely connected with the earth itself; in this chapter I also look at utopias already spinning away from fixed coordinates. There were, of course, Madagascar and other haunts and havens, but there was also the ship, which Michel Foucault called a “heterotopia par excellence,” and which Paul Gilroy has described as “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 22; Gilroy 4). The sea, for Gilroy and others, is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari considered a “smooth space,” a deterritorialized field amenable to improvised and nonhierarchical social organization (Deleuze and Guattari 387; Kuhn 23–49). Thus we can observe in pirate societies models of utopia that are uprooted from the beginning, models that are born of movement. At the same time, in many narratives of piracy, especially Captain Singleton, we can also observe efforts to reroot and localize these societies, desires to retire to some distant island or return home to England undetected.
The success rate was low, and the eagerness to idealize Avery and others entailed a knowing blindness to common punitive outcomes. Defoe published Captain Singleton at the twilight of piracy’s Golden Age, when an expanded British navy and a strengthened colonial legal system were making the seas safer for commercial vessels. Avery’s escape set in motion the events that led to the exemplary capture and execution of Captain Kidd, whom Defoe also includes in Captain Singleton. Following the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1714 scores of decommissioned sailors turned to piracy, but they sailed into the teeth of a more mature empire that had more to lose by their pillaging. By 1730, most pirates had been caught, imprisoned, or executed—or else they reintegrated into lawful society (Ritchie 236). At times, fiction was receptive to these facts. In The King of Pirates (1719), Defoe cuts Avery’s achievements down to size, as does the account in the General History, and even the highly fictional Misson story ends with the captain’s death in an attempted escape, his Madagascar settlement left in tatters.3 Indeed, the print market was flooded with trial accounts, the contemporaneous popularity of which is amply illustrated in the second, third, and fourth volumes of Joel H. Baer’s anthology British Piracy in the Golden Age, 1660–1730 (2007). The scaffold could serve as a platform for resistance, and we should not underestimate pirates’ ability to act on such a stage, but political and religious authorities always tried to muzzle their performances.4 It has been argued that pirates never escaped existing webs of power, that they never carved out fully separate enclaves for utopian communities. Thus early modern privateers, buccaneers, and pirates, with or without letters of marque or reprisal, which sanctioned their actions at the state level, carried with them varying degrees of authority drawn from land-based social structures. They operated at the vanguard of, but never quite beyond, European empires (Thompson 21–68; Lane; Fuchs 118–38; Jowitt, Culture of Piracy), commercial networks (Starkey, British Privateering and “Pirates and Markets”; Nadal; Leeson), legal jurisdictions (Benton 104–61; Frohock, Buccaneers and Privateers), and reconnaissance projects (Barnes and Mitchell; Neill 31–51).
Of course, pirate ships and colonies faced internal pressures as well. Voyage accounts are filled with stories of mutiny, the constant threat of which blurred the line between revolutionary idealism and bloody anarchy. Many today have heard of William Bligh and the mutiny on the Bounty, analyzed brilliantly by Greg Dening, but readers at the time were accustomed to such stories, and Defoe folds many into Captain Singleton, the plot of which is propelled largely by additions and divisions of crews and alterations of leadership. As Jonathan Lamb argues, “The agreement following each mutiny was one in a series of deals struck to order the relationship between chance and desire…. But these agreements lasted no longer than the mood of interesting suspense they aroused, and were revoked as soon as boredom, fear, or (in many cases) success made them redundant” (Preserving the Self 168). One sailor’s power sharing was perhaps the next man’s chaos. Madagascar was itself thought of as unruly. Readers could have read about the island in full-length books by Walter Hamond, Richard Boothby, François Cauche, and, later, Robert Drury, and if the first two exaggerate the island’s attractive features, hawking for investors and colonists, the second two push in the opposite direction with their sobriety and melancholy, respectively.5 European contact had been established in the early sixteenth century by the Portuguese. The French held trading posts along the east coast. The English, however, had been dismally unsuccessful (Pearson; Bialuschewski; Larson; MacDonald). This, ironically, is a place Singleton calls home, though he admits to having no true home and values Madagascar mainly for its distance from Europe.
In this chapter, I examine how Defoe represents piracy in Captain Singleton, looking particularly at the way the novel imagines, undermines, and recoups its utopian potential. By the end of the narrative, as the pirates disband and scatter, their unified and isolated community breaks into a multitude of diverging individuals. The geographic refuges they seek prove likewise fragmented, naturalized within the larger world as so many traversable, accessible spaces. Singleton, for one, shrouds himself in disguise, burying his piratical past in a recess of interiority, communicable only as a matter of grave secrecy. Still, he creates a conspicuously strong bond with his Quaker friend, William Walters, and marries William’s sister, guarding with them the truth of their ill-gotten gains. This secret holds them together back in England and undergirds their collective well-being, re-creating the pirate’s articles in miniature. Defoe’s rejection of piracy on the high seas and at Madagascar sacrifices much, perhaps too much, to skepticism, since pirate communities held real subversive potential. At the same time, the novel’s transformation of this sort of community produces an alternative that relies less on the variables and unknowns of distant geographies. It puts less pressure on violence, be it against European merchants and navies or natives of Madagascar. In bringing the pirate community home, Defoe gives it a practicable immediacy, at least for those weaned on its ideals or fattened by its plunder. He also offers a different model of the family, which then stood at the opposite pole of the British Empire but helped underwrite it ideologically.
Singleton’s leading role in two mutinies seems justified by his circumstances, beginning with orphanhood, very early in life, and then exploitation aboard a merchant vessel. Unlike Crusoe, Singleton has no father—or mother—to warn him against going to sea. Victim of bad luck, carelessness, and scheming mistreatment, the young picaro gets handed from one guardian to the next, ending up for some time with a gypsy, who gets hanged, and then the master of a ship, who calls him “his own Boy” but never accepts the role of “Father” (The Novels 5:20). Singleton continues to change hands, from Barbary corsairs to a new Portuguese master, who treats him no better, withholding his wages and maintaining that Singleton “was not his Servant but his Slave” (5:24). This master, a ship’s pilot, would “beat and torture [him] in a barbarous manner for every trifle; so that in a Word [his] life began to be very miserable” (5:25). Indeed, the adventures at sea only magnify Singleton’s vulnerability, giving his initial itinerancy a wider scope and increasing his exposure to the world’s abuses. His caregivers and captors, on land and at sea, are even less steady than the crew aboard a pirate ship, and actually the relationships and communities he forms with shipmates offer significantly stronger support, materially and psychically. Defoe’s orphans always land on their feet, surpassing their disadvantaged origins, but the novelist of unabashed individualism took a genuinely sympathetic position on the problem of orphanhood and recognized the need for an institutional, society-wide solution (Zunshine 40–63; Nixon, The Orphan 41–47). Singleton, too, amasses riches, but not before joining with similarly mistreated underlings, a group of deserters that quickly balloons to twenty-seven. They have strength in numbers, but also moral legitimization, since they abandon ship to protest the withholding of their wages. This was a common problem, at least for ordinary seamen (Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 116–52). The second mutiny is perhaps harder to defend, or perhaps the burden is on us: Singleton tells the guiltier part of his tale because he thinks readers will find it “an agreeable Piece of Story” (5:134).
Thus Defoe’s hero goes from singularity to collectivity. He becomes, as a character, almost inseparable from the sailors around him, in both a narrative and a political sense: the pronoun “I” rarely emerges from the plural “we,” and negotiation and deference joins his interest with that of those around him. Typically, narrators of pirate accounts bury the personal pronoun. These narrators tend to distinguish themselves only on moral or legal grounds, to indicate dissent or noncompliance in cases of questionable battles and seizures, for instance.6 Captain Singleton reads more like a confession, and for Singleton himself, sticking with the group is both a social ideal and a tactical necessity. Continually, he refrains from voicing his opinions and refuses to object when the group makes a decision against his better judgment, as they do when they vote to trek across Africa: “They were all positive, and I might as well have held my Tongue; so I submitted, and told them, I would keep our first Law, to be governed by the Majority” (5:56). We are always aware of the sacrifices for such solidarity, aware of the fragility of consensus, or its illusion, and how much self-abnegation is involved. When chosen as the new leader, Singleton rejects this authority and says the gunner, his mentor, should be the leader, but he too demurs, and they agree to lead together. The deliberations of the group are very deliberate: everyone considers one possibility, weighs it against another, and pursues a course in near unanimity, or at least without obstructive disagreement. For the most part, these discussions are conspicuously rational and pragmatic, keeping self-interest at bay and producing better decisions for everyone than any individual could arrive at alone.
This group of once-fluctuating numbers is now consolidated, unified by rules to which everyone agrees, rules that guarantee solidarity, communal property, democracy, and order:
The first thing we did was give every one his Hand, that we would not separate from one another upon any Occasion whatsoever, but that we would live and die together; that we would kill no Food, but that we would distribute in publick; and that we would be in all things guided by the Majority, and not insist upon our own Resolutions in anything if the Majority were against it; that we would appoint a Captain among us to be our Governor or Leader during Pleasure; that while he was in Office, we would obey him without Reserve, on Pain of Death; and that every one should take Turn, but the Captain was not to act in any particular thing without the Advice of the rest, and by the Majority. (5:33–34)
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). Singleton grants that modern maps had yet to chart this space; he admits it is, in some cases, incommensurate with existing modes of description. Continually, he tells us what is not there, what he does not encounter, presenting a landscape of boundless emptiness. At one point, for instance, he remarks, “We had now travelled a 1000 Miles without meeting any People, in the Heart of the whole Continent of Africa, where to be sure never Man set his Foot since the Sons of Noah”—evacuating the space of not just people but history itself (97). Africa, though, is not a refuge to hide out in but an abyss to be swallowed up by. Toward the end, Singleton has traveled all over the world, and no place entices him more than Madagascar. Early on, he confides, “If our business indeed was only to eat and drink, we could not find a better Place in the World…. I liked the Country wonderfully, and even then had strange Notions of coming again to live there; and I used to say to them very often, that if I had but a Ship of 20 Guns, and a Sloop, and both well Manned, I would not desire a better Place in the World to make my self as rich as a King” (45). This, of course, is also what Defoe’s Avery proposes, laying out a plan for “building a little City here, establishing our selves on Shore, with a good Fortification, and Works proper to defend our selves” (5:153). Since they “had Wealth enough,” he reasons, “and could encrease it to what Degree [they] pleased, [they] should content [themselves] to retire here, and bid Defiance to the World” (5:153–54). According to legend, that is precisely what the actual Avery had done, too. Later, Singleton rebuffs William’s proposal to return to England, professing more attachment to Madagascar, which has been “a fortunate Island to [him] more than once” (209). It was perhaps a fortunate island to Avery, as well. Revising the conjectures of King of Pirates, Defoe—or at least Singleton—speculates that Avery and fifty of his men successfully “settled themselves in an Inland Place, as a Colony,” and “that they are there still, and that they are considerably encreased” (Defoe, King of Pirates 154). In his final act as captain, Singleton establishes Madagascar as a point of rendezvous, so presumably this is where the rest of his own men go when he deserts them.
Nevertheless, from the beginning, there are incipiently divergent interests, seeds of dissension that sprout up as the novel begins to individuate its main character and those around him. After the first mutiny, Singleton conceals a private stash of money, instinctively refusing to enter fully into the group’s shared purpose. He harbors opposing views on major decisions, holding his tongue in the company of others—but expressing disagreement freely enough with readers. He admits a “secret Ambition” to become a “compleat Sailor,” independent and self-sufficient and capable of making his own way in the world (5:60). After the trek across Africa, when the travelers find the gold, he suspects “it was ten to one if the Gold, which was the Makebait of the World, did not first or last set us together by the Ears to break our good Articles and our Understanding one among another, and perhaps cause us to part Companies, or worse” (5:88–89). Later in the novel, such a shakeup occurs. With a surfeit or riches, the group grows “mightily divided in their Notions,” and Captain Wilmot argues sharply with Singleton, ultimately departing and taking all the treasure with him, leaving those who remain to hash out “several simple Disputes” (5:154, 156). When the pirates hold together, it is often only because of a calculating and persuasive speech, such as that made by Singleton after the departure of Wilmot. The splintering of unity, the plot suggests, is the natural consequence of the development of individuals and their relationships to larger groups. This can explain Singleton’s rise in power and his eventual departure, followed by his fuller evolution as a novelistic character (Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives 63–93; T. Blackburn). Other characters, too, emerge from the collective “we,” most notably William, who is arguably overcharacterized, loaded with sometimes contrary adjectives yet somehow elusive underneath it all. William never joins the pirates willingly and remains separate even when they include him, raise him up the ranks, and follow his advice. The very first thing he does is obtain a signed certificate attesting that he was taken against his will, that he is not a pirate and cannot be prosecuted as such. Whether this signifies individual conscience or only feigned conscience spurred by self-interest, the certificate subtly undermines the articles binding pirate to pirate. Later, at William’s prompting, Singleton eventually parts company with the rest of the crew. Gradually, he makes the transition to commerce, a surprisingly easy development that obscures the line between lawless pirates and the lawful merchants on whom they preyed.7 Singleton takes possession of his identity, ironically, by switching, blurring, and thereby laundering it, becoming Persian, Armenian, Greek, becoming as inscrutable on the outside as William had been. Private wealth gets separated from the common stock, and unsurprisingly what they take is more than their fair share. It is commensurate with the detachment and personal exceptionalism produced by the ethics of individualism.
Among themselves, though, the pirates are relatively companionable; their peace was built on aggression toward not just Europe but also innocent peoples already victimized by European empires. In the expedition across Africa, Singleton and the Portuguese seamen contrive a flimsy offense and enslave a host of Africans to carry their baggage, forcing them all the way across the continent and then simply abandoning them on the other side. When Singleton and his mates find a slave ship, its crew killed by brutalized slaves, their first impulse is to murder the slaves; William intervenes, preaching reason and compassion, but these principles are consistent with the same profit motive that justified slavery, and William sells the Africans to planters in Brazil. Pirate crews were heterogeneous on many levels, but Singleton’s crew regards itself as homogenously European and Christian, as having attained a higher level of civility, even though this superiority is undermined by their definitive disconnection from home.8 Later, taking water on an island in the Indian Ocean, they do senseless battle with a retreating party of natives, pursuing them to a hollowed-out tree and continuing the assault until all these foes lay dead—again, on William’s counsel. More skirmishing follows on the shore of Ceylon. If violence is underreported, it remains dispiriting. All these encounters are driven by a strange combination of unquestioned self-interest and Crusoe-like paranoia, a need to wipe out racial and cultural others. The encounters with these others tend to be mediated by either duplicitous trade or a hail of musket shot.
If violence goes unquestioned, Singleton admits his wrongdoings against commercial nations and seems resigned to the appropriate punishment. He enters the second mutiny “being well prepared for all manner of Roguery … without the least Checks of Conscience … much less any Apprehension of what might be the Consequence of it” (5:122). Conceding he has omitted incriminating details, he still blames himself for “one of the most reprobate Schemes that ever Man was capable.” He has crossed paths with “some of the most famous Pyrates of the Age, some of whom have ended their Journals at the Gallows”—with confessions of guilt and pleas for God’s, if not society’s, mercy. It is a fate Singleton, too, has every reason to expect, even after his apparently safe return to England. Actually, many of the novel’s pirates—Harris and Wilmot, for instance—die earlier in the customary attack-and-defense violence in which all pirates engaged. Finally, Singleton disavows piracy and repents. He views his riches as “a Hoard of other Mens Goods, which [he] had robbed the innocent Owners of, and which [he] ought, in a Word, to be hanged for here, and damned for hereafter” (5:217). In a dream, the devil elicits a full confession: “I am a Thief, a Rogue, by my Calling; I am a Pirate, and a Murtherer, and ought to be hanged” (5:218). With dubious haste, William reasons Singleton out of these throes and reconciles both keeping their wealth and somehow repenting the acquisition of it.
Before returning to England, the goal is to find a distant refuge, but throughout the novel Defoe disenchants such spaces and strips them of their utopian potential. The pirates as a group seek a location on land that will insulate them against the laws they have broken and, presumably, allow them to make more concrete the articles aboard the ship, yet all the novel’s geographies are equally arduous, equally resistant to idealization. Exemplary, in this case, is the interior of Africa, at the time a mostly uncharted area otherwise conducive to the utopian imagination. Maximillian Novak notes that the representation of Africa has been criticized “sometimes for its lack of realism, sometimes for its lack of imagination”; the criticism is the same, if we assume realism is the effect of imaginative verisimilitude (Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions 584). Defoe could have done with this space more or less what he wanted, but he constructs it with blanched fictions made up of not desire but deductions from putative facts, unadventurous extrapolations that merely vary what was already known, or thought to be known, about Africa’s trading regions along the western coast. His geography is inaccurate but not unrealistic. Moreover, as one commentator has put it, “Defoe’s imagination about the nature of inland Africa was in no danger of contradiction by the knowledge of his readers” (Scrimgeour 23). It would be another 150 years before the region was charted by Europeans. Still, whatever its fictional facts, the setting rarely exceeds the necessities of the plot, and when it does, those particulars that stand out are discrete objects of value—elephant tusks, gold nuggets—that can be carried away and brought to market.9 Singleton acquires an instrumental knowledge of geography from the gunner, which allows him to use existing maps and think beyond their blank spots, indeterminacies, and errors, to find his way from one side of Africa to the next, indeed from one corner of the world to the next. It is a dynamic exercise, moving back and forth between experiential and abstract forms of knowledge, and it assumes relative—not superlative—differences among the globe’s diverse regions. Thus Singleton finds various inland nations contrasting by degree rather than kind, and he makes sense of the African landscape with English measurements and analogies. His navigational abilities amount to anticipatory disenchantment. Singleton rejects Avery’s stated proposal for a seaside encampment, arguing that Madagascar “would be no Security to us, if we pretended to carry on our cruising Trade: For that then all the Nations of Europe, and indeed of that Part of the World, would be engaged to root us out” (5:154). He prefers instead something more like the inland colony he thinks Avery actually established. Real seclusion was not to be had on the shores of an island, or anywhere at all where enemies could approach by water—but it was not to be had in the middle of Africa, either.
After the pirates leave Ceylon, we get an awkwardly interpolated condensation of Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), a captivity narrative that effectively reverses the expectations of utopian geographies. Here, instead, we have an isolated space that repels rather than attracts, a space that imprisons rather than shelters, that engenders fear and anxiety rather than hope and contentment. In Crusoe, we saw how the two could overlap, but there can be no mistaking the negativity Defoe attaches to Ceylon. It entails a geography detached from the rest of the world but with a distinctly anti-utopian expectation, threatening contamination of identity, not its reformation. Such mixing was sometimes celebrated as a means of knowledge production (Voigt), but Defoe’s novel draws its national and cultural lines nervously and starkly, always differentiating the English from the Portuguese and especially the Europeans from the Africans. The Ceylonese are placed even further down the scale.
By the end, the novel’s major crisis is the hero’s rootlessness, his lack of affiliation with a nation or family. Despite his navigational knowhow, his ability to go to Madagascar or anywhere else in the world, Singleton comes to suffer a version of Georg Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness,” a homelessness that is geographically literalized.10 Over the course of the novel, Singleton continually agrees to go along with others, saying he has no preference for one place or another. At the beginning, when asked his opinion, he explains, “Truly I was on no side, it was not one Farthing Matter to me … whether we went or stayed, I had no home, and all the World was alike to me; so I left it entirely to them to determine” (5:45). Much later, after he has traveled widely, all the choices remain equivalent, or roughly equivalent, limited in their power to pull or push. On board a moving vessel, Singleton proclaims to William, “I am at Home, here is my Habitation, I never had any other in my Life time; I was a kind of Charity School-Boy, so that I can have no Desire of going any where for being rich or poor, for I have no where to go” (5:209). Later, he writes, “As to the Wealth I had, which was immensely great, it was all like Dirt under my Feet” (5:216). Actually, his wealth is the reason he cannot have dirt under his feet.
If utopia is no longer a geographic hideout, it becomes instead a feature of interiority, an ideal lodged in the mind, not located on the map. As Robinson Crusoe does, Captain Singleton reconfigures utopia as a subjective state, not a credulous fantasy but a resolute ideal, capable of being brought back to England and secretly inserted into life. In the case of Captain Singleton, as we have seen, a dawning sense of separate intentions accompanies its principal character’s emergence as an individual, but the interior space that opens up near the ending comprehends more than simply self-interest. Almost out of nowhere, Singleton admits, “I grew very thoughtful about my Circumstances, not as to the Danger … but I really began to have other Thoughts of my self, and of the World, than ever I had done” (5:215). These thoughts include pangs of conscience and feelings of guilt that seem to repudiate his piratical past. In addition, however, they also include persistent memories that carry the past forward and re-create the pirates’ enclave. Singleton’s disguise is matched by tactics that insulate him from the society that initially maltreated him, the society he can never fully reenter. Just as the pirates created a world of their own, so Singleton creates a world of his own, diminished obviously from the size of Madagascar but reviving some of the possibilities he once thought it could accommodate. Thus he arrogates to himself the pleasures of “utopian consciousness,” which John Richetti argues is the readerly purpose of the novel as a genre and this novel specifically (Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives 65). Such pleasures are diluted in later novels and flattened out by Defoe himself in his New Voyage (1724), which puts its two-dimensional hero in a South Seas still invested with wonder, albeit a wonder that is primarily economic (Markley, Far East 210–40). In this sense, Singleton seems to step out of Defoe’s own trajectory of novelistic character (Markley, Far East 227–32).
Much more than Crusoe, Singleton shares this consciousness with others, chiefly William, a friend unlike any in Defoe’s earlier novels. Indeed, it is William who activates Singleton’s conscience and the utopian interiority it engenders. William is a “Privy-Counsellour and Companion upon all Occasions,” a fount of useful knowledge and advice (5:143). He becomes, in Singleton’s effusive characterization, “a merciful Protector above me … a most faithful Steward, Counselor, Partner, or whatever I might call him, who was my Guide, my Pilot, my Governor, my every thing” (5:220). Although Singleton enjoys a position of authority, William continually calls the shots, leveling the command chain that superficially orders them. At one point, Singleton tells us, “I over-ruled William,” but later the roles are reversed when Singleton tells him, “I give you my Word, that as I have commanded you … so you shall command me from this Hour; and every thing you direct me, I’ll do” (5:206, 211). Their Socratic exchanges obscure the lines between captain and subordinate, advisor and advisee, a line that is always obvious enough in Crusoe’s interactions with Friday and in Roxana’s relationship with Amy. By contrast, Singleton and William enjoy an affective kinship that borders on mawkish, bringing them together in sleeping quarters and open fields, freeing them to share dreams and tears of sadness and joy. Their relationship has generated considerable commentary, much of it centering on the ways these feelings surpass or subvert the norms of heterosexual male friendship.11 Especially persuasive is Jody Greene’s reading, which challenges the association of Defoe and solitary individualism and shows how the bond between Singleton and William demonstrates a willingness to imagine “an alternative mode of personal relation for which no vocabulary yet exists, either for critics of the novel or for the characters in the novel themselves,” a mode that “remains fundamentally imprecise and notably slippery” (416). I agree with Greene that we can find gestures here beyond the enclosed individual, but I want to focus on the way Singleton himself defines the relationship. If the pirates’ articles are defunct, then so is the certificate attesting to William’s separateness. The two characters maintain “an inviolable Friendship and Fidelity to one another,” and “neither had or sought any separate Interest”; Singleton insists that “there is not a Penny of … mine but what is yours too, and I won’t have any thing but an equal Share with you” (5:221, 222). Their relationship, I argue, replicates their former community in miniature, codified in a rewriting of the pirates’ articles as articles of brotherhood. These are, as Singleton enumerates them to William, firstly that “you shall not disclose your self to any of your Relations in England, but your Sister, no not no one”; “Secondly, we will not shave off our Mostachoes or Beards … nor leave off our long Vests, that we may pass for Grecians and Foreigners”; “Thirdly, That we shall never speak English in publick before any body, your Sister excepted”; “Fourthly, That we will always live together, and pass for Brothers” (5:224–25). The friendship is perhaps many things, but it is certainly a promise based on the model of the pirate community. This utopia is smuggled back with all the stolen riches, which are now fittingly shared without reserve.
The new rules include a third character, William’s sister, a widowed mother, with whom William and Singleton form an alternative version of domestic intimacy. William’s sister is more memorable than the widow in Crusoe, but she, too, serves as a safeguard for overseas earnings, providing for Singleton the sort of anchor he did not have earlier, a friend with a fixed address who can secrete his wealth and help him establish a local foothold. The homesick pirates send her money, cautiously divided into smaller but increasing sums, and then join her, expecting to have purchased a modicum of sheltered stability. Still, she is the first to make a gift, an act of generosity that proves her merit and elevates these exchanges above selfishness. She is not just a bank but also a beneficiary—and now a wife when Singleton marries her and makes her the object of his intentions to right his former wrongs. The three characters separate themselves together, moving outside London and severing ties with the rest of William’s family but re-creating their own. Defoe tells us little of their life or their interrelations, but it seems safe to say the money and affections of this family are unconventionally distributed, a contrast to the domestic norms of novels starting roughly in the century’s middle decades.
There are suggestions, moreover, that the utopian circle could expand further or at least that its generosity might extend beyond the main characters. Singleton considers giving his stolen wealth to “charitable Uses, as a Debt due to Mankind,” reasoning “it was due to the Community, and I ought to distribute it for the General Good” (5:224). The scope of these ambitions would seem to shrink upon the return to England, but he calls his new wife only “the Object of my first Bounty,” implying that there may be more to come. Earlier, he claims to have used his money “to preserve a ruined Family, whom [he] had plunder’d,” presumably an additional family (5:220).
At the same time, of course, there are limits to Singleton’s magnanimity, to his self-exposure, to the bounds of his new home. One cannot imagine unchecked altruism. The reconstitution of utopia depends on drawn-in boundaries and strict mandates of collective secrecy and loyalty; extension outward would always threaten dilution. Singleton has returned home to England, but he can never again enjoy English citizenship. He cannot even look like an Englishman or speak English in public. The new bounds of utopia remain unstable, though there is now a consolidated core, what Singleton calls “a Refuge for my self, a kind of a Centre, to which I should tend in my future Actions” (5:224). He embraces this tether and rejects his rambles, arguing, “A Man that has a Subsistence, and no Residence, no Place that has a Magnetick Influence upon his Affections, is in one of the most odd uneasy Conditions in the World.” A subsistence is needed, but so is a worldly education, which helps create Singleton’s new sense of home. This home, after all, has as much in common with Indian Ocean piracy as it does with country retirement.
Srinivas Aravamudan argues that Defoe’s novel eradicates piracy’s threat to concepts of international law “even as there remain fantasized alternatives not subject to moral or political economy, in the South Seas and South America” (Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans 77). As I have shown, these alternatives become practiced, at least fictionally, and Singleton’s narrated life illustrates how faraway possibilities might be brought back from abroad and reassembled as a new sense of home. Still, if the end of Avery’s life remains shrouded in mystery, so does Singleton’s. The last lines of the novel push us away, “lest some should be willing to inquire too nicely” (5:225). The rest of the story cannot be articulated, and only partly because of its dangerousness to the narrator. The cessation of narrative signals peace. This part of the story is blank in proportion to the utopian potential it generates, in proportion to Defoe’s willingness to transpose and transfigure blank spaces on the map. Crusoe, too, was reticent about his domestic life. When Singleton finishes his story, he gives us a new but unfinished beginning, the first chapter of his further adventures in England.