Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on an island off the coast of Venezuela with his talking parrot Poll, his pet dog, and a tame goat as his only companions.

In his twenty-fifth year, he discovers that Carib cannibals occasionally use a desolate beach on the island to kill and eat their captives.

Crusoe learned a few of his native words that have been found in a Spanish-Térraba (or Teribe) dictionary, so Friday may have belonged to that tribe, also called the Naso people.

T. Artelett proposes to call him Mercredi ("Wednesday"), "as it is always done in the islands with Robinsons,"[2] but his master Godfrey prefers to keep the original name.

[6] The July 1, 1912, edition of the news magazine "Industrial World", volume 46, issue 2, published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, uses the term "Girl Friday".