'Sometimes Irrecoverable Silence'

I had forgotten the wolf attack in Robinson Crusoe (1719). This comes late in the novel and I get the sense Defoe can’t face the end of his story and wishes to throw in one last adventure. Crusoe has been rescued from his island by an English ship’s captain, whose mutinous crew he helps defeat, and is returned to England. For reasons hardly worth recounting, he travels to Lisbon to reclaim his lost wealth. He wishes to return to England by land, thus avoiding pirates, so while traveling over the Pyrenees in the middle of winter, Crusoe and his companions fight off a pack of starving wolves. 

“When we had fired a second volley of our fusees, we thought they stopped a little, and I hoped they would have gone off, but it was but a moment, for others came forward again; so we fired two volleys of our pistols; and I believe in these four firings we had killed seventeen or eighteen of them, and lamed twice as many, yet they came on again.”

 

It’s a good story, preceded by Friday killing a rampaging bear. Naturally, I recalled “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Defoe knew his audience. Readers in London were unlikely to have ever seen a wolf but they lived on in folklore. By the fifteenth century in England, the species was probably extinct, hunted to death.

  

Seventy years before Defoe, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (also known as Vulgar Errors) Sir Thomas Browne devotes a chapter to the wolf. He is writing the book to debunk superstitions, which today overlap with “conspiracy theories,” myths, rumors, urban legends and assorted crackpot notions. Browne’s musings are often dubious but almost always entertaining. One such piece of folk wisdom reported by Browne is “a man becomes hoarse or dumb, if a Wolf have the advantage first to eye him.” (Defoe doesn’t mention this phenomenon.) Browne offers a naturalistic explanation:

 

“The ground or occasional original hereof, was probably the amazement and sudden silence the unexpected appearance of Wolves do often put upon Travellers; not by a supposed vapour, or venomous emanation, but a vehement fear which naturally produceth obmutescence; and sometimes irrecoverable silence. Thus Birds are silent in presence of an Hawk, and Pliny saith that Dogs are mute in the shadow of an Hyæna.”

 

Wonderful word, obmutescence: “a keeping silent, a becoming willfully mute or obstinately speechless.”