CAPTAIN ROBERT KNOX
Between the years 1690 and 1714, at odd times between voyages, two sea captains used to meet each other in London, dine together, shift their tides, and then go off again trading to the coast or hunting the never-caught galleon, as their marvellous fates led them. Both had endured more than man is usually given to endure, both had tasted to the full of life's unexpectedness; but perhaps the strangest of all the strange things that happened to them was this—that once or twice, before they met each other, their wanderings brought them close together and then swept them apart, as though life had determined that their two souls should never know each other in action, only meet when the action was done, to complete each other's sagas from complemental memories; Dampier to hear from Knox what happened to the Cygnet's crew, Knox to hear from Dampier how that crew came into being.
We have no record of any of the conversations between them; but it is plain that sometimes (when they got away from yarns and marine shop) they quarrelled about the respective merits of the Cocornut tree and the Plantain. Dampier, as a West Indian sailor, extolled the plantain, with (apparently) "all the art of Rhetoricke and Logicke." Knox, as an East Indian sailor, got extremely hot and prickly whenever a plantain tree was mentioned. "It is," he says, "no more propper to call them trees than it is to Call a Cabbage a tree ... whare as the Cocornut tree Contineweth flourishing aboute 100 yeares." Knox had neither Rhetoricke nor Logicke, only a passion "to doe the Cocornut tree justice" and a kind of native wildness in his spelling.
They were remarkable-looking men, as remarkable men invariably are. Dampier, probably the taller of the two, was of a black, forbidding beauty, with a clear skin, showing scarlet under tan. Knox, a stumpier figure, had the battered, triumphant look of one who, after a long struggle for salvation, has found his calling and election sure. His weather-beaten, manful old face is happy with the power of being fervent in season and out of season. If we may hazard an opinion, Dampier, who was not reared in the school of piety nor much touched by religious feeling, may have found his companion's pious ejaculations trying.
Knox was a captive among the natives in Ceylon for the best twenty years of his life, and his book is an account of his captivity, with some description of Ceylon as it was. "Whether hereafter they are ever or never read by anyone it is equially the same to me," he says. With a gush of the improving talk which he lets fly on these occasions, he tells us why it is the same. The burden of his song is very much—"Man is dust. Man, thou art a Worm. Man, a century hence you will be equially the same, whether in six feet or the moles of Adrianus." Probably he was not a gloomy man when he first went to sea. But to be ruined and kept in exile among an inferior race throws a man in upon himself; and Knox for many years led the life of the religious contemplative without the contemplative's solaces and safe-guards. It would not be fair to say that he came home mad; but it is plain that he came home with the crankiness of one who has lived an abnormal life during many years. His crankiness showed itself in well-marked monkish ways, in a hatred of women (which was, perhaps, partly fear), and in an inability to mix on equal terms with his fellow-men. It is said that men who have been in prison for a long term never really rejoin their fellows. The spiritual experience to which the outer world has no key, and that self-created world which has served the soul for world for so long a time, forbid a perfect reunion. Knox came home from Ceylon with a world in his head, built up out of constant Bible-reading. Whenever he found that the men of the real world failed to understand him (and his constant quarrels and wrangles show that they failed pretty often) he turned to this imaginary world for justification and for solace. He sometimes moralizes very prettily on death, the futility of life, the vanity of human ambition, and the queerness of Fate's dealings. Bishops South and Atterbury did the like by us at even greater length. On the whole, Knox is better reading than the bishops, for at root he is a simple, hardy being who has had to fight to live, and for a companion in this world we prefer one who has had to depend first and last on what is manly in himself. For this reason Knox's moralizings are never quite tedious. One feels the man behind the writing. There is someone robust and sturdy at the back of it all. Life proved Knox to the bone before he earned his leave to write. A man so proved is genuine whether he be enlightened or not.
Knox was not enlightened. Like other unenlightened men, he finds it difficult to express himself. His book gives a reader the impression of an entirely sincere man entirely confused. It is as though a jumble of piety, avarice, suspicion, delicate noble feeling, utter callousness, and rule of thumb were hung upon a character essentially upright and simple. Now and then he is even heroic. One of his simple acts of piety strikes us as indescribably heroic. His father and he, with other members of the crew, went ashore on Ceylon and were captured by the Sinhalese. He was allowed to go back to the ship with a message. Before he set out with this message he promised his father that he would return. He could have escaped in the ship quite easily. Those on board the ship begged him to escape while he had the chance. He was a young man, why should he go back to captivity; why not get away in the ship now Providence had helped him to her? Knox delivered his message and went back to his father, and was a captive for the next twenty years.
Many of the sea captains of that age were men of fine mental attainments and great political sagacity. Their books are wise with the rough and noble wisdom of men who have faced big issues of life and death for months together. Knox's mind was too confused for wisdom. His piety, though great, provided him with no way of life. Newton, Cowper's friend, was changed by sudden religious illumination from a slaver to a preacher. Knox, on the other hand, having been brought, as he would put it, out of the Land of Egypt, became not a preacher but a slaver. He got a little ship full of powder and trade guns, and went away to Madagascar to buy slaves. On this voyage the man's character seems to have gone to pieces. It often happens that when the devil gets well he forgets to pay his doctor's bill. Knox as a slaver is not a pretty figure.
His trade lay with a certain King Ribassa, who "was one of the younger Sonns of the famous old King Lightfoot, who with his owne hand would shoot those of his wives that offended him, and after bid some cut open her body to take out the Bullett." This man, as was to be expected from his breeding, "soone dranke up the Bottle of Brandy I sent him, and dispatched away my Messenger to mee againe with 6 Slaves (3 men and 3 Women) for a present to me ... which I looked one as a presage of a successfull trade like to insew." Indeed, in a little while comes the entry: "We shooke hands and rubbed noses ... and began to drinke Brandy which was the King's Chiefe delight." During the drinking the King much admired Knox's big dog, "as the Dog did the King to see him so full of Colours as his beads made him—for the King arose to stroake the Dog, which put the Doge into a fome with rage that I was faint to catch him about the Necke else he would have tasted what the fine King was made one."
It is said that Courts give a tone to society. The following entry shows the fine flavour of Court life under Ribassa and his brother. "The King and I walked hand in hand ... with one hand he led me and in the other hand he held a bottle of Brandy, saying unto me as we walked 'See how all obey my word,' and when the work was done Prince Chemaniena came and licked his father's knees in testimony of his obedience, and helped us to drinke our bottle of Brandy." The brandy was shed unavailingly. Ribassa was a knave, and his brother's charity was interrupted by pirates (whether Misson's or Avery's men does not appear). Knox had done a little piracy in his time, as "this in all appearance seemed a ready way to raise my decayed fortune"; but being a pirate and being robbed by one do not leave the same flavour on the palate. He wisely set sail for far away Bencoulen, where "aboute 20 men all looking like Ghoasts" lived in Dampier's old fort on rotten rice and punch.
Knox lived to be about eighty years old. After twenty years' captivity, a long battering at sea, yellow fever, scurvy, malaria, Hurry Canes, and other tumults, such an age does him credit. There can be no doubt that Defoe (who knew him) got many hints for "Robinson Crusoe" from him. It is sad that the comparatively colourless Selkirk should have robbed him of much credit properly his.
Latterly Mr. James Ryan has edited and printed his collected writings, together with an Autobiography never before published, from which some of these facts are quoted.