It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought (some said from Italy, others from the Levant) among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others, from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days, to spread rumors and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practiced since. But such things as those were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the government had a true account of it, and several counsels were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumor died off again; and people began to forget it, as a thing we were very little concerned in and that we hoped was not true, till the latter end of November or the beginning of December, 1664, when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Longacre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane. The family they were in endeavored to conceal it as much as possible; but, as it had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighborhood, the secretaries of state got knowledge of it. And concerning themselves to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house, and make inspection. This they did, and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague. Whereupon it was given in to the parish clerk, and he also returned them to the hall; and it was printed in the weekly bill of mortality in the usual manner, thus: -Daniel Defoe, born Daniel Foe, was an English writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and is even referred to by some as one of the founders of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various. For his famous novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), DeFoe may have based part of his narrative on the true story of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk and perhaps also inspired by the translation of Abubacer's Philosophus Autodidactus, an earlier novel also set on a desert island