We've been reading novels for so long we forget there had to be a first one, and a leading candidate for this role is Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe": and as a rip-roaring success, it can also claim to the the world's first best-seller.
Adventurer and historian Tim Severin adds to an illustrious series of books in which he goes in the footsteps of "real" or "fictional" people (the lines between these categories may blur ...)

Like many kids, I would have been happy to fill in the word "Adventurer" under the heading "What do you want to be when you grow up?" You can certainly apply this label to Tim Severin, who can also lay secure claim to descriptors such as historian, geographer, sailor, travel writer, and story teller.

His adventures have included going in the wake, or footsteps, of characters such as St. Brendan the Navigator, Sindbad the Sailor, Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, the Crusaders, Genghis Khan, the explorers of the Spice Islands, Chinese junks across the Pacific, and Moby Dick. Very often the escapade involved reconstructing the craft or method of travel used, covering the ground, and coming out with an excellent read of a book. For example, on the Brendan Voyage, he reconstructued the leather "currach" that the saint would have used, and then followed his voyage from Ireland, to Scotland, to Iceland, and on through the ice floes to Newfoundland.

In "Seeking Crusoe", Severin first visits the island Juan Fernandez, where the "inspiration" for Crusoe, Daniel Selkirk, was marooned. Though he winkled out some salty tales of marooning from this location (it was a prime hang-out for the mainly British "privateers" - basically pirates under license - who harried these Spanish Waters off the Pacific coast of South America), he concluded that the real locale had to be elsewhere, on the Spanish Main (Caribbean side), where conditions were closer to the real world of Crusoe's island.

Travelling round the narco-haunted backwaters of the Mosquito Coast, he hangs with the virtually amphibious Miskiti Indians (prototypes for Man Friday), and unearths many other story elements and source documents from which Defoe derived his themes.

The motif of marooning, and being marooned, even self-marooning, is explored throughout the book. Playing the urge for solitutude, self-definition, self sufficiency against our instinctive urge for comradeship and society, there is much of Crusoe in both author and book - and in all of us.

(Personal footnote: as a wanna-be young adventurer, all those clueless years ago, I almost made it onto the crew of the Brendan - as a photographer. They took a guy from the Beeb instead, and he had to be replaced in Scotland after suffering from sea-sickness. After reading the book, I was quick to forgive Tim for not taking me on!).