About this Text
An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon by Robert Knox, written in 1681, is an autobiographical tale of Robert Knox’s time in Sri Lanka, which was known at the time as the Island of Ceylon. Although much of this book takes place while the author is captive, there are still significant movements. The movements are more condensed to the island. Nevertheless, there is the initial voyage across the ocean, and then the group is pushed onto the east coast of Ceylon. Then there are various movements across the island until he escapes and returns to London (Knox, 1681).
There are some general plot points which are similar to Robinson Crusoe. For example, the idea of being held priosoner on a foreign island is similar to Crusoe being stranded on a foreign island. However, as I have said before, I am less interested in the literary similarities between Crusoe and the potential sources.
The edition that was used in the mapping process of this project was from Project Gutenberg. Although this is by no means the authoritative edition of the text, we needed a clean txt file in order to perform the computations. Other digital versions exist, in fact a pdf availble on google scholar was almost used, yet we decided to go with the Gutenburg for consistency with the Crusoe (which is also a Gutenburg).
