Defoe’s “South-Sea” and “North-Sea” Schemes: A Footnote to A New Voyage Round the World
P.N. Furbank, Open University, and W.R. Owens, University of Bedfordshire
Volume 13, no. 4, July 2001
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In May 1711, shortly after Robert Harley had put forward in Parliament a plan for a South Sea Company, he asked Daniel Defoe to let him have his thoughts about it. It would form part of the charter of the Company that, under the Grand Alliance treaty of 1701, England had the right to take possession of some part of the Spanish dominions; and Defoe responded by proposing the seizure of an area in Patagonia (largely unpopulated and not under Spanish rule) as a step towards establishing a colony on the other side of the Andes, at Valdivia, in Chile. The land around Valdivia was, he said, very fertile; the climate was ideally suited to the English; and the region abounded in gold.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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