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Though he has been credited with the authorship of more than five hundred works, Daniel Defoe (1660-1631) is best known for the nine novels which he published between 1719 and 1725. A distinctive feature of these novels is what Robinson Crusoe would call the“mere wandering Inclination” of their protagonists. Only in the special instance of A Journal of the Plague Year does the main character confine himself to one location. All others wander, at least across the channel, and in six of the novels, the hero or heroine crosses oceans: Robinson Crusoe touches Africa and the Americas in his first volume and crosses Asia in his second; Captain Singleton crosses Africa and visits the East Indies; Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack establish plantations in Virginia/Maryland, and Jack trades in the Caribbean; and the narrator of A New Voyage Round the World crosses the South Pacific and organizes a trans-Andean expedition in South America.

Defoe’s habit of sending his heroes abroad is both a response to contemporary interest in literature of travel and an expression of his consistent vision of England’s advantage. Narratives of the adventures of privateers and circumnavigators like William Dampier and Woodes Rogers had stimulated an appetite for accounts of voyages, and Defoe's fictions clearly appeal to this appetite. But Defoe had long been advocating in his newspaper and pamphlets the extension of English control over distant markets. His novels enable him to dramatize his argument. His narrators—ordinary Englishmen and -women—travel to other continents and, exercising their industry and ingenuity, make their fortunes through planting and trading. Defoe transformed the names and blank spaces of the map of the world into manageable realities, into places that challenge a self-reliant individual without overwhelming him.

Defoe was careful to insure the verifiability of the distant horizons pursued by his protagonists. The itineraries could all be checked on maps: the Philips Point where Moll Flanders lands in Maryland; the Cape Coast Castle on the Gulf of Guinea from which Captain Singleton sails for England. Defoe himself never voyaged beyond Europe. He made commercial journeys to the continent, and he was the greatest tourist of his own country, as evidenced by his reports in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). But throughout his career, Defoe’s writings indicate his mastery of geographical detail. He has been identified as the author of the text of the massive Atlas Maritimus (1782), a work which demonstrates a comprehensive grasp of economic geography. In The Compleat English Gentleman (c. 1729), Defoe argues that a central acquirement of a modern gentleman is a sense of the shape of his world, a sense which may be obtained, as Defoe’s was, vicariously: “he may make the tour of the world in books, he may make himself master of the geography of the Universe in the maps, atlasses, and measurements of our mathematicians. He may travel by land with the historian, by sea with the navigators. He may go round the globe with Dampier and Rogers, and kno’ a thousand time more in doing it than all those illiterate sailors.” Defoe’s fictional voyagers always do return to England as gentlemen. Their experience of the wide world makes their fortunes, reforms their characters, and restores their souls. The last effect is not unimportant: Crusoe finds God at the mouth of the Orinoco, Colonel Jack in Mexico, and Captain Singleton at sea in the East Indies.

The best maps of the world available to Defoe were those of Herman Moll (d. 1732). Throughout the seventeenth century, the French and the Dutch were Europe’s leading cartographers. Moll, the most prominent English mapmaker of the period, was, in fact, a Dutchman who had come to England by 1678 and who, by 1700, had begun to publish under his own name a series of maps, atlases, and geographies—even a geographical monthly. Moll debated the principles of cartography and made efforts to incorporate into his maps the most recent discoveries and technical innovations. Though his work has long been recognized as an influence upon Defoe, the only certain collaboration between the two men occurred when Moll’s maps were included in Defoe’s A Tour. But the mapmaker and the novelist were ultimately engaged in a common endeavor: familiarizing the average Englishman with the new horizons of the eighteenth century.

This pictorial map of Crusoe’s island seems designed more to substantiate the truth of Defoe’s narrative than the truth of Crusoe’s geography (Map 1 ). With its depictions of principal island incidents from The Strange Surprizing Adventures and The Farther Adventures, it resembles a crude version of a medieval painting of the events of a saint’s life. Images from the two volumes are scattered across the landscape. Wreckage from Crusoe’s ship floats at the mouth of the creek in the bottom center; above, the ladder marks the entry to his famous fortress; and in the center, Crusoe’s parrot, Poll, recites his line while perched atop Crusoe’s bower with its fenced paddocks. The upper left quadrant depicts in detail the feast which led to Crusoe’s acquisition of Friday; the lower left quadrant depicts in detail the feast which led to the rescue of the Spaniard and Friday’s father. Nineteen cannibals, cautiously observed by a concealed Crusoe, sit around the fire as two are about to butcher the Spaniard. After seventeen are killed and four escape, Friday, in the lower left, discovers his father in a canoe. The final episode taken from The Strange Surprizing Adventures appears in the main scene at the lower right: Crusoe and Friday agree to assist the marooned English commander, his mate, and his passenger to regain control of his ship. The five huts at the right presumably represent the five mutineers whom Crusoe leaves behind on the island (along with seventeen Spaniards who arrive later). The large structure at the upper right is the amazing basketwork domicile erected by the reformed rebel, Will Atkins. The action to the left represents the climactic battle between hundreds of cannibals and the small, but victorious forces of the English and Spanish.

The map aims at a rough accuracy. The cannibals did confine their feasts to the western side of the island. The rocky point which nearly proved disastrous to Crusoe as he attempted to round it properly projects from the southeast. The five Englishmen did plant themselves in the northeast corner. Other details are less accurate, and certainly the overall image fails as a reasonable facsimile of a Caribbean island.

The map did not accompany either of the volumes which it illustrates. Instead, it appeared as the frontispiece of the third volume, The Serious Reflections, a collection of essays and meditations which have little to do with Crusoe but which Defoe chose to publish under Crusoe’s name. In his preface to The Serious Reflections, Defoe defends himself against the charge of writing fiction by asserting the “allegorical” truth of the Crusoe stories. Significantly, then, Defoe added the narrative map at the point when he had to admit that the narrative lacked historical truth. When, in The Farther Adventures, he was still maintaining the illusion of verisimilitude, he had attached a very different sort of map-an abstract, factual “Map of the World” with the fiction of Crusoe’s island grafted in place (Map 2 ).

Beginning with Captain William Dampier’s enormously popular A New Voyage Round the World (1697; seventh edition 1729), English travel literature enjoyed a second Renaissance. Circumnavigators and privateers—Dampier and Woodes Rogers being preeminent—published accounts of their adventures. In at least three of the most popular instances—Dampier (1697), Rogers (1712), and Edward Cooke, one of Roger’s mates (1712)—the frontispiece to their volume of voyages was a folding map, a planisphere by Herman Moll upon which a dotted line traced the route of the voyager. This then was the convention which lies immediately behind “A Map of the World on which is Delineated the Voyages of Robinson Cruso.” Crusoe’s folding planisphere has been attributed to Moll, but though it is similar to the map employed by Dampier and Cooke and is even closer to that employed by Rogers, it is not identical to either, and lacking an “H. Moll fecit,” its origin remains indefinite. It first appeared in the first edition of The Farther Adventures; it was added to the fourth and later editions of The Strange Surprizing Adventures.

Crusoe’s initial, indirect path to his island in The Strange Surprizing Adventures is accurately marked: London to Sallee, coasting Africa, the break toward the Cape Verde islands, the voyage to Brazil, and the storm-disrupted journey that ends at “R. Crusoe’s I.” at the mouth of the “R. Oronoque.” The direct return to England twenty-eight years later is also clearly indicated. The map omits Crusoe’s voyage on his nephew’s ship back to the island via Newfoundland in The Farther Adventures. It picks him up at “B. de Todos Santos” in Brazil and follows him to Madagascar and to Bengal, where Crusoe’s nephew is compelled to abandon him. His trading voyages in the East Indies are traced, and finally the map charts his way home: from Peking across Tartary to “Tobolski,” where he winters with the Russian Prince. The map then errs, perhaps because the engraver had to anticipate the author. Crusoe avoids all further cities on his way to Archangel (and so does not follow the map’s route through Moscow), and his voyage to London is interrupted by a stop in Hamburg which is not shown on the map.

“A Map of the World” illustrates several significant gaps in early eighteenth century cartography. Some details will be discussed later, but two areas of ignorance can be illustrated here. In the northwest corner of North America, the mapmaker has lightly sketched in the opening of a water entry to the continent. In both the Dampier and Rogers planispheres, this shaded feature is identified as the Strait of Anian. This nonexistent strait can be traced back to misunderstandings of Marco Polo. Its persistence is due in part to the lingering dream of a northwest passage (a dream that Defoe had not abandoned), and in part to the failure to explore the apparently unprofitable northern waters. On the Asian side, Japan is attached to “Yedso,” which is itself ambiguously related to the continent. In the more usual conformation, Yedso (or Yezo or Iesso) appears as a part of Asia. A “S. of De Vries” separates it from a long, vague coastline—“Compagnies Land”—which extends east to the Strait of Anian. Compagnies Land is marked on the Dampier and Rogers planispheres; it has been erased from Crusoe’s.

The narrator of A New Voyage contemplates a northern expedition to investigate these coasts, but he abandons the project in part because “it was not yet discovered whether the land of California was an island or a continent.” If the latter proves correct, he anticipates a long and fruitless voyage. Though California’s attachment to the continent had been conclusively confirmed in 1701 by the Jesuit explorer, Eusebio Kino, the discovery (more correctly, the rediscovery) had not yet reached the English mapmakers who, with greater certainty than Defoe’s narrator, continued to portray California as an island. Moll never renounced its insularity; A Compleat Geographer (1709) declares that previous doubts have been resolved: “at last the Spaniards sail’d quite round.”

The other region of particular concern to a number of Defoe’s protagonists is the Australian area—New Holland, New Guinea, Van Dieman’s Land, and the East Indian spice islands. The islands, largely the preserve of the Dutch, were the scene of a very profitable trade. Crusoe, Singleton, and the narrator of A New Voyage all make fortunes there. Australia, still incompletely defined, was the object of less mercenary interest. In 1699, Captain Dampier had been outfitted for a specifically geographical expedition which had limited success in further charting the coasts of the region. Defoe’s Captain Singleton and the narrator of A New Voyage are permitted to outdo Dampier. The latter coasts down a mainland somewhat to the west of the scrap of New Zealand marked on the map. He discovers a primitive culture receptive to the trade for European goods. At approximately 40S, the narrator turns eastward for his southern route across the Pacific—“by a course never sailed before”—discovering more new lands and penetrating to an icy 67S before arriving at the coast of the South America. Captain Singleton makes a more cursory trip down the eastern Australian coast, but then, by turning westward and eventually landing on a southern shore, he evidently finds Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) to be an island independent of Australia. Not until 1798 would an actual navigator, George Bass, duplicate Singleton’s feat by sailing through the strait which now bears his (and not Singleton’s) name.

“A New Map of the North Parts of America” is a large sheet map issued separately by Moll in 1720 and eventually included in The World Described. It aims to inform the English of the latest French discoveries and claims. Moll notes his sources in the box at the lower left. The French map to which he refers is the 1718 “Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississippi” of Guillaume Delisle. Moll follows closely Delisle’s depiction of Texas and the lower Mississippi. Indeed, the inset “A Map of ye Mouth of Mississippi” is identical to an inset on Delisle’s map. Delisle was the first cartographer to place “Texas” on a map, and Moll follows him: “Mission de los Teyas Sett. In 1716.”

Moll’s synthesis of a number of sources gives him greater accuracy in some areas. But in one respect his critical sense failed him. Moll depicts the “Morte or Longo R.” flowing eastward from “La Hontan’s Limit” across the northern plains to the Mississippi (it also appears on the Crusoe planisphere). Though Delisle had included the Riviere Longue on earlier maps, by 1718 he had recognized the error. The River Longo or Longue was, in fact, a fairly recent fabrication of the Baron de Lahontan, a frustrated French adventurer who, in 1703, published his Noveaux Voyages (translated as New Voyages to North America, also 1703). Lahontan enhanced his actual experiences with a circumstantial account of his encounters with the Indians along his invented waterway, a river too great to be the Minnesota and entering the Mississippi too far north to be the Missouri.

Moll, like Delisle, is confused about the course of the Ohio River. The name of the Mississippi’s major eastern tributary, “Ouabach,” reflects a common confusion between the Wabash and the Ohio. Although the five Great Lakes had appeared on French maps since 1650, Moll’s Dampier map of 1697 had simply depicted the St. Lawrence river emerging from an open-ended body of water. “A New Map” presents a relatively accurate picture of the region, including notice of the “Land Carriage of Chekakou” (Chicago).

The “Indian Fort at Sasquesahanock,” illustrated in the inset engraving, refers to the Susquehannock Old Fort located on the west bank of the river about forty miles north of the Chesapeake (opposite present-day Washington Boro). It was occupied by the Susquehannocks from at least 1608, when Captain John Smith heard of it, until 1675 when pressure from the Iroquois and direct conflict with Maryland forced its abandonment. It remained a landmark in the 1680s boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and Moll emphasizes it here as a counter to French territorial claims.

The “Margravate of Azilia” which appears on Moll’s map in the place of Georgia represents the unfulfilled ambition of Sir Robert Montgomery who, in 1717, obtained a license from the proprietors of Carolina to establish Azilia between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers. One purpose of the new colony was to serve as a buffer against the encroaching French. Montgomery promoted his margravate in two pamphlets (1717 and 1720), but lacked the funds to realize the project. Not until the 1730s would General Oglethorpe succeed in planting the colony of Georgia in the territory.

Throughout the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713), Defoe warned the readers of his newspaper, The Review, of the threat to the North American colonies posed by French expansionism. In the second decade of the century, he concentrated more upon advocating the expansion of English interests in South America (see Map 5). Colonel Jack, though it devotes most of its transatlantic action to Jack’s cultivation of his plantations in Maryland, hints at the motive behind Defoe’s turn southward. Planting gives Jack property and status, but at the end of his narrative, a new activity—trading—offers the prospect of vastly greater wealth. He becomes involved in an illicit trade with Spanish ports, carrying European goods from Boston and New York to Cuba and Mexico. Defoe was certain that Spanish America was full of advantageous markets and compliant Spanish officials. Jack’s enterprise is finally disrupted by a storm which maroons him comfortably in Vera Cruz, but which casts his ship’s crew ashore near Pensacola, just beyond “the Rio Grand, or as the French call it, the Missisipi.” The French, who have replaced the Spanish at the fort, prove more savage than the Indians, and the crew is compelled to make a “long wilderness Journey over the Mountains, till they reach’d the S.W. parts of South Carolina.” “Pensacola Fort” and the “Applache Mount[ains]” are marked on Moll’s map. Jack admits that the rugged journey “indeed deserves to have an Account to be given of it by itself,” but Defoe provides no further details.

John Oldmixon (1673-1742) was, like Defoe, a Grub Street writer with higher ambitions. A partisan Whig journalist, Oldmixon had occasion to express his distaste for Defoe’s ambiguous party allegiances. Appearing in 1708, The British Empire in America was Oldmixon’s first bid for the title of historian. Moll’s map of the Chesapeake was inserted in front of the chapter on Virginia. It reveals a detailed knowledge of the complex waterways of the bay. Perhaps because the cartography was so exact, Defoe was cautiously vague in placing his characters in the scene. Colonel Jack, for example, after being trepanned across the Atlantic, is “carried up a small River or Creek, which falls into the Potowmack River, about eight Miles from the great River.” There he is sold as an indentured servant to a planter named Smith. Later, he is transferred to “the West Plantation,” and at one point is required to spend twelve days by the “Potuxent River.” His own plantations are established in the same vicinity, so Colonel Jack’s experience of Virginia/Maryland (“for,” as Jack declares, “Maryland, is Virginia, speaking of them at a distance”) would seem to be limited to the Charles County/St. Mary’s County peninsula between the Potomac and the Patuxent.

Moll Flander’s experience is slightly broader and slightly more precise. Her Virginian husband brings her to his plantation via the York River. When she returns years later with another husband, Jemy, she lands in Westmoreland County on the south side of the Potomac River and discovers that her Virginian husband and her son have removed to a plantation in that vicinity. (She later approaches it from the back by following a creek up from the Rapahannock.) Missing the ship that they had intended to take for Carolina, Moll and Jemy eventually settle near “Philips Point” on the Maryland eastern shore.

Ultimately, however, Defoe’s interest lay not in a particular river or point. He sent his two protagonists to the Chesapeake because the social and economic structure of the region best suited his theme. As Herman Moll’s map clearly shows, Virginia and Maryland were dotted with isolated plantations and virtually devoid of cities. Every plantation served as a complete, miniature economy. Atlas Maritimus observes the multitude of “Bays, Rivers, Creeks and Coves”—waterways which distribute the population and mandate self-reliance—and notes “in short, every Plantation is a City, every House a Sea-Port, and every Planter is a Merchant.” Thus the planter is, like Robinson Crusoe, an autonomous individual. A second important feature of the region—widely promoted in the seventeenth century—was its social mobility: a transported convict might complete his or her sentence of servitude and then through virtuous industry rise without prejudice to a position of prominence in the local gentry—a feat accomplished by both Moll and Jack.

The second half of A New Voyage Round the World fulfills in fiction a scheme which Defoe had been promoting in fact for more than twenty years. It involved establishing an English trading colony on the vacant coast of Patagonia and the English takeover of the weak Spanish government of lower Chili. From this pair of bases, English merchants might easily dominate a lucrative trade with the underdeveloped societies—Spanish and Indian—of South America. Defoe claims that sometime prior to the death of the king in 1702, his plan had found a receptive audience in King William. In 1711, in private letters to Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, he repeated the project to the then Lord Treasurer. Defoe was an advocate (and to some degree, probably an originator) of Harley’s South Sea project. The South Sea Company, in return for assuming the burden of—by 1719—the entire English national debt, was granted a trading monopoly with the Spanish possessions. The project culminated in the famous South Sea Bubble of 1719, a financial disaster which left many bankrupt. Defoe, however, remained optimistic and continued to advance his particular scheme in a variety of polemical writings: The Review (Summer 1711), A True Account of the Design and Advantages of the South-Sea Trade (1711), An Essay on the South Sea Trade (1712), An Historical Account of the Voyages—–of Sir Walter Raleigh (1719), A General History of Discoveries (1727), and A Plan of English Commerce (1728).

In A New Voyage the narrator lands in Baldivia, the specific object of Defoe’s design upon the western coast. There he encounters a Spanish gentleman who welcomes him to his estate in nearby Villa Rica. The Spaniard depreciates his countrymen’s achievements in the region, admitting that a more energetic people (e.g. the English) might readily usurp the territory and better exploit its natural and human resources. The narrator takes a short tour of the Andes, then organizes an expedition which is to cross the mountains and to descend eastward along a river to rendezvous with the ships at Cape Blanco on the coast of Magellan’s Land. Four months later his ships do reunite with the explorers, who have made the first crossing of the continent below the Rio de la Plata and who have on the way collected a fortune in gold.

Moll’s map of Chili, first printed in A System of Geography (1701) and reprinted in The Compleat Geographer and Atlas Manuale, so accurately illustrates Defoe’s narrative, that Burton J. Fishman has described it as Defoe’s certain source. Though Fishman is wrong to think that this is the only map by Moll to depict the Rio Camerones, he is correct to observe that its unique feature make it a particularly good example of the relationship between maps and fiction.

Defoe does not mention the Rio Camerones in A New Voyage, but that it is indeed the river by which he intends the expedition to descend is made explicit in his letters to Harley. There he proposes to found the Atlantic colony “Near the Mouth of Rio Camerones, which River is Navigable within 200 Miles of Valdivia.” In his “New and Exact Map of the Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South Sea Company” (1711), Moll had drawn a short “R. Camerones” just above C. Blanco on the Patagonian coast. The river’s source is thus hundreds of miles southeast of Baldivia, and its navigability extremely dubious.

Not only is Rio Camerones much longer on the 1711 map, but—as Fishman notes—South America has been tilted so that its axis runs in a northeast direction (vs. the normal and correct due north orientation). As a result of this peculiar shift, the course of a river running perpendicular to the coast apparently proceeds northwestward, not due west, as it does in the 1711 map. And so the Rio Camerones seems here to have its source very near Villa Rica (which itself appears further inland than it does on the 1711 map). Moll has even drawn in a series of active volcanoes, such as those seen there by the narrator. Thus Moll’s map seems to justify the simple transcontinental itinerary proposed by Defoe. But no one after King William listened attentively to the proposal, and Defoe was spared the embarrassment of learning that Rio Camerones existed only on maps.

The interior of Africa remained a mystery to European cartographers until the explorations of the nineteenth century. Moll’s “Map of Africa” (1710) attempts to add intimations collected from contemporary sources to an essentially Ptolemaic concept of the African interior. The main features of central Africa according to Ptolemy (AD 150) were two huge lakes which served as the sources of the Nile. These lakes, located below the equator, were fed by the runoff from the snow-covered Mountains of the Moon to the south. They issued in two rivers which joined near the equator to form the Nile. (A third river from an equatorial third lake, Coloe, joined the Nile at 12° N.) Ptolemy’s two lakes have been roughly correlated with Lakes Victoria and Albert, the sources of the White Nile; Lake Coloe may be identified with Lake Tsana, the source of the Blue Nile.

With the significant exception of Guillaume Delisle, who banished the legendary lakes from his 1700 map of Africa, early eighteenth century cartographers still followed Ptolemy. John Ogilby’s major work, Africa (1670), follows its Dutch source in having the Nile emerge from two parallel lakes, Zafflan and Zaire/Zembre (and in having the Congo (Zaire) River also emerge from the latter). The continental map of Africa which Moll inserted in A System of Geography follows this traditional pattern. But the continental maps were not by Moll, and the “Advertisement” to A System specifically warns that the old “general” maps were included so that “by comparing the particular Maps with them, the New Corrections may the better appear.” “A New Map of Africa” incorporates Moll’s “New Corrections.” The “Luna Mountains” persist, but the two lakes appear as bogs. Zafflan has no major outlet; Zaire/Zembre issues northward not in the Nile, but in the “Zebee R.” which terminates (or originates) in mountains above the equator. (Moll retains the Zaire/Zembre as a source of the Zara (i.e. Congo) River.) Moll’s Nile, like Delisle’s, originates entirely in “Abissinia.”

Moll’s map also illustrates contemporary confusion about what Singleton calls “the River Niger, or Rio Grande.” The Niger actually emerges in modern Guinea and flows east and south to Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea. Moll’s “Great River Niger” originates in “Niger Lake,” not far from Zafflan and Zaire/Zembre, and flows north and then west to the Atlantic, where it is confused with the River Senegal.

The lakes of central Africa are relevant to Defoe because Captain Singleton and his party encounter three major lakes as they cross Africa from Mozambique to the Gold Coast. Singleton has with him a map-conscious gunner who twice consults his charts and declares that the river or lake before them must be the source of the Nile (a lake which Singleton had called “Coalmucoa”). Clearly his maps were not prepared by Herman Moll.

Singleton’s account of his expedition cannot be made to conform exactly to any cartographic source, but Moll’s map can illustrate the problems. Singleton’s crew depart from northern Madagascar, pass some islands (the Comoros), and land six miles below the river “Quilloa.” “Quilloa,” on Moll’s maps and others, refers to a kingdom, an island fort, and a city (the modern Kilwa Kisiwana)—none of which Singleton mentions—but not to a river. Moll’s “Gada R.” hardly extends the four hundred miles into the interior which Singleton claims for the Quilloa.

A.W. Secord sees Singleton’s three great lakes as the Zafflan, the Zaire/Zembre, and the Niger. But this identification does not fit Singleton’s account of marching west for Angola until the third lake forces his party to turn northward to the equator. They round the third lake, heading southwest for the Congo (i.e. Zara) River, but encountering an impassable desert, they finally comply with Singleton’s desire to turn back north toward the River Niger. Eventually they reach the gold-rich interior regions of western Africa and, having collected a fortune, descend down a river south to the coast. Singleton proceeds to “Cape Coast Castle” (see Moll’s inset engraving), where he obtains passage to England.

A possible explanation for Singleton’s itinerary based on Moll’s map would identify the first lake not as Zafflan, but as the smaller “Gafat” just east of Zafflan. Singleton does not mention the connecting river, and he does mention a northflowing “Golden River” (the gunner’s first Nile) between the first and second lakes. But such an identification at least makes the Zaire/Zembre a plausible candidate for the third body of water along whose eastern shore the party marches north for thirty-two days.

Defoe’s sense of Africa’s interior has been praised for its precocity. One interpretation of Singleton’s journey has led some to nominate Defoe as the first European to realize that the course of the Congo rose above the equator. This rather overstates the case. Singleton’s geography is no better than it needs to be: sufficient to maintain a sense of actuality about a continental interior known little by legend and less by maps. There is no evidence that Bruce or Speke or Burton were inspired by Singleton, but the equanimity with which Defoe’s heroes surveyed their world set a model for the later imperial designs that did clarify coasts and interiors.

1. Robinson Crusoe’s Island, from The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (London 1720)
2. “A Map of the World,” from The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London 1719)
3. Herman Moll, “A New Map of the North Parts of America” (1720), from The World Described (London 1727)
4. Herman Moll, “A New Map of Virginia and Maryland,” from John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (London 1708)
5. Herman Moll, “Chili,” from A System of Geography (London 1701)
6. Herman Moll, “Africa” (1710), from The World Described (London 1727)

By Daniel Defoe

By Herman Moll

Secondary

Adams, Percy G. Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1680. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Baker, J.N.L. “The Geography of Daniel Defoe.” Scottish Geographical Magazine 47 (1931): 257-69.

Fishman, Burton. “Defoe, Herman Moll, and the Geography of South America.” HLQ 36 (1972-73): 227-37.

Secord, A.W. Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, IX, 1924.