Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  When Dampier’s description of the Batchelor’s Delight voyage appeared in the 1697 as A New Voyage Round the World, it created a market for buccaneer tales. Although largely descriptive, written to serve practical seamen, Dampier’s broad curiosity secured him a far wider audience. If Dampier’s description of the meeting between Will and Robin was the literary highlight of the island visit, it segued neatly into a discussion of survival for maroons, one which would have served a later inhabitant well. Only then did Dampier locate and describe the island. ‘It is about 12 leagues round, full of high hills and small, pleasant valleys; which if manured, would probably produce anything proper for the Climate. The sides of the Mountains are part Savannahs, part Wood-lands.’ Among the trees some could be used for building but, he lamented, ‘none fit for masts’. The cabbage trees were small, ‘but produce a good head, and the Cabbage very sweet.’ He contrasted the goats on the east and west ends of the island, unable to explain why those in the arid west were fatter. Equally mysterious was the fact that while the island could feed 4 or 500 families, it remained uninhabited. The fish were ‘in great Companies …, so plentiful, that two men in an hours time will take with Hook and Line, as many as will serve 100 men’. This cornucopic line, originally Schouten’s, would be repeated endlessly, along with Dampier’s description of seals and elephant seals by each new visitor to the island. Elephant seal oil was ‘very sweet and wholesome to fry meat’, but the flesh was ‘indifferent’. Finally he came to the essentials: anchorages and water.

  There are only two bays in the whole Island where Ships may anchor, these are both at the East end, and on both of them is a Rivulet of good fresh water. Either of these Bays may be fortified with little charge, to that degree that 50 men in each may be able to keep off 1000.11

  Finally he noted that for 16 days the doctors from Captain Eaton’s ship fed the scorbutic men on goat meat and herbs, with good results. Dampier’s report located the island and its anchorages, catalogued the edible resources, and provided a survival guide for future maroons. Yet the island itself had yet to enter the wider popular consciousness. To rouse interest in the book Dampier named many of his more exotic landfalls, from Tierra del Fuego to Formosa in the extended title, but not Juan Fernández. Wafer produced a ‘Secret Report’ for the Earl of Halifax in 1698, and advised occupation:

  This I look upon as a Place fit for a settlement to make it a Store House of all Provisions. Here may be Black Cattle, Sheep and Goats Easely breed, and it is a good place for a Look Out or to Set Wounded or Sick men on Shore, In order for their recovery.12

  The buccaneers did not fade away; a new cycle of wars turned them into legitimate instruments of state power with privateer commissions. Their exploits, as pirate and privateer left an enduring legacy in English literature. The best-selling texts of Exquemelin and Dampier revived the market for seafaring narratives, little troubled by novelty or profit since the days of Hakluyt and Purchas. They met an audience primed by increased domestic interest. Charles II made voyaging central to purposes of his new Royal Society, founded in 1662, reflecting the interconnected, expanding commercial and intellectual horizons of Restoration England. Royal Society secretary Robert Boyle soon published a guide for seamen reporting distant voyages in the society’s journal Philosophical Transactions. Royal patronage of voyages and trading ventures focused the commercial and landed elite on useful knowledge. It was no accident that Dampier dedicated his 1697 A New Voyage Round the World to the Earl of Halifax, President of the Royal Society, or that Society Secretary Sir Hans Sloane became the leading collector of voyage texts.13 While most educated Englishmen were content with published accounts of the South Pacific Sloane, a wealthy doctor, assiduously acquired the primary documentation of buccaneer voyages. His purchases reflected personal interest and scientific curiosity, and ensured their survival in the British Museum collection.

  Dampier set the fashion for oceanic travel books, including the first English glimpses of Australia. Piling up details, sketches and reports entranced his land-bound audience. Plunder, weirdness and bizarre food made it clear the Southern Ocean was another world. Dampier described the relish with which he consumed flamingo tongues alongside an intelligent, if graphic discussion of scurvy, along with the refitting, watering and other facilities of the coasts he visited. He hoped to make his fortune, and achieve gentlemanly status on the back of his book, but such dreams proved elusive. New Voyage sold five editions in six years, making publisher James Knapton a genre specialist, while rapid translation into Dutch, French and German spread Dampier’s name across Europe. He was, briefly, a man of significance. In 1698 he addressed the Royal Society, dined with Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, learned men who appreciated a good sea story, and took command of HMS Roebuck for a Pacific voyage that proved beyond doubt that whatever else he could boast Dampier was no leader of men.14

  After the failure of his brief naval career Dampier’s book became a promotional tool for further buccaneering. Dampier’s writings and local knowledge lured unsuspecting or plain gullible investors into a new privateer voyage that set off for the South Seas in 1703. England was now at war with France over the succession to the Spanish throne, so the government was deeply involved. The Treasury provided for Dampier’s family in his absence. He also got to kiss Queen Anne’s hand, when he took his leave of her husband, Prince George of Denmark, the Lord High Admiral. Dampier commanded the 200 ton St George, previously a merchant vessel named Nazareth, along with the Cinque Ports Galley and a coterie of old cronies. His name was well-known to the Spanish, who feared his cartographic insight and first-hand experience. The old buccaneer knew that pilot books and other navigational information was a key resource, seizing texts from prize vessels, the better to understand the Great South Sea: ‘these we found by experience to be very good guides.’15

  The privateers set the usual rendezvous at Juan Fernández. Stopping at Madeira and the Cape Verde islands, they committed the usual buccaneer outrages, getting drunk, plundering the locals and enslaving a few unwary Africans. Then Dampier put his first lieutenant ashore at St Jago (modern São Tiago), where he died. Such riotous antics destroyed discipline, and Dampier lacked the skill or the will-power to command. Men deserted. Then Captain Pickering of the Cinque Ports died. When the ship reached Juan Fernández on Christmas Eve 1703 most of the crew, disgusted with replacement Captain Thomas Stradling deserted and ran ashore. Dampier sailed past the island, apparently unable to identify a place he had visited three times before. When he finally cast anchor he persuaded Stradling’s crew to re-embark by promising to consult them, and honour the distribution of prize money under the articles of association. Meanwhile almost all the scorbutic men recovered on a diet of fresh food and clean water. The ships were careened, water casks refilled and barrels of seal oil stowed for cooking and lighting. The last involved frightful animal cruelty: the men enjoyed tormenting the elephant seals for sport, jabbing them with boarding pikes, much as bulls and bears were baited back home in England.

  Having put his ships and men into some sort of order, Dampier bungled an attack on the French ship St Joseph, spotted off the island. He also left some of the crew, with the ship’s boats and other stores ashore. When the English ships returned they found two larger French ships had arrived – the St Esprit and Baron de Breueuil – so they headed off for the mainland. The French ships had come to trade, in violation of Spanish law, generating 357 per cent profits. A second French squadron that operated between 1707 and 1709 did equally well. With Spain a battle ground between rival Habsburg and Bourbon kings little trade reached South America, leaving a market only too willing to evade the law. French trade officially ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, closing a brief golden age of interloping in the South Seas.16

  When the English ships began raiding Spanish shipping, their crews quickly realised Dampier was incompetent, cowardly and usually drunk. Worse still, he took bribes from captured ships, to prevent his men from plundering their cargo: hiding
the cash from the investors. On his return to England Dampier was assailed in print, his chosen medium, and on his chosen ground of navigation. William Funnell, second mate of the St George, had deserted in the Pacific and returned home embittered. His references to magnetic variation and pointed criticism of Dampier’s inability to navigate Cape Horn stressed technical expertise, while a dedication to Admiralty Secretary Josiah Burchett implied career ambitions.17 By questioning Dampier’s status as the lone literate navigator, Funnell seriously damaged the old buccaneer’s reputation.

  NOTES

  1 P.J. Marshall & G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment, Dent & Sons, London, 1982, pp. 37–8. Today Potosi is in Bolivia.

  2 J. Esquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, Routledge, London, n.d., pp. 395–401.

  3 D. Cordingly, Spanish Gold: Captain Woodes Rogers and the Pirates of the Caribbean, Bloomsbury, London, 2011, pp. 3–16.

  4 Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 86; G. Norris (ed.), Buccaneer Explorer: William Dampier’s Voyages, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2005, p. xx suggests George Ridpath, who worked with Woodes Rogers, both published with James Knapton. R.H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 354 notes Coleridge was taught by William Wales, astronomer on Cook’s second Pacific voyage, who may have inspired Coleridge’s remark. Esquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, pp. 393, 397; Norris, Buccaneer Explorer, p. 33.

  5 Bradley, The Lure of Peru, pp. 115–17; T. Severin, Seeking Robinson Crusoe, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002, pp. 97–177.

  6 Sharp’s journal in D. Howse & N. Thrower, A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1992, pp. 22, 257.

  7 Waggoner is English slang for a book of charts, corrupted version of the Dutch author Lucas Janszon Waghenaer; Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 88; Howse & Thrower, A Buccaneer’s Atlas, introduction, p. 33.

  8 Norris, Buccaneer Explorer, p. 54; L.E.E. Joyce (ed.), A New Voyage & Description of the Isthmus of America by Lionel Wafer, Surgeon on Buccaneering Expeditions in Darien, the West Indies, and the Pacific from 1680 to 1688; with Wafer’s Secret Report (1698) and Davis’s Expedition to the Gold Mines (1704), Hakluyt Society, London, 1934, p. 127; Cordingly, Spanish Gold, p. 13.

  9 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, p. 150–5; Bradley, The Lure of Peru, pp. 191–3.

  10 Bradley, The Lure of Peru, pp. 154–69, 171–5; Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 102–5; Joyce, A New Voyage & Description of the Isthmus of America by Lionel Wafer, p. 126.

  11 W. Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World: Describing Particularly The Isthmus of America, feveral Coafts and Iflands in the Weft Indies, the Ifles of Cape Ver, the Paffage by Tierra del Fuego, the South Sea Coafts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, the Ifle of Guma, one of the Ladrones, Mindanao, and other Philippine and Eaft India Iflands near Cambodia, China, Formofa, Luconia, Celebes &c, New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar Ifles, the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Helena, Their Soil, Rivers, Harbours, Plants, Fruits, Animals, and Inhabitants, Their Customs, Religion, Government, Trade &c. Illustrated with Particular Maps and Draughts, James Knapton, London, 2 vols, 1697 (see vol. I, pp. 83–93 for Juan Fernández).

  12 Joyce, A New Voyage & Description of the Isthmus of America by Lionel Wafer, p. 144.

  13 Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 115. Halifax and Sloane subscribed to Churchill’s 1728 Navigiantium.

  14 Cordingly, Spanish Gold, p. 15.

  15 D. Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2001, pp. 33, 45–6.

  16 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, pp. 181–94.

  17 Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, pp. 70–80; W. Funnell, A Voyage Round the World, London, 1707.

  4

  ‘The Absolute Monarch of the Island’

  The Cinque Ports Galley returned to Juan Fernández in May 1704 hoping to refit, but the French had taken the men and stores abandoned the year before. Morale was so low that Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk decided to maroon himself on the island. He despised Stradling, and reckoned the worm-eaten ship was about to sink. Although he regretted the decision as the boat rowed back to the ship, giving Stradling the satisfaction of refusing to let him rejoin, it proved to be wise. Returning to the Chilean coast, the Cinque Ports sank; half the crew drowned, the rest ended up in a Spanish prison.

  For Selkirk, abandoning the ship meant the loss of his home, his ‘family’, his purpose in life and the relaxation of the mess-deck. For some months he lived a dark, introverted life, slowly coming to terms with his situation, and his environment. Eventually he adjusted to the realities of a solitary existence on a small island, finding food and a sexual outlet among the goats. Diana Souhami suggested his habit of marking the ears of goats recorded these bestial interludes. There was no need to ‘own’ the livestock in any other way on an island that was his and his alone.1

  While Selkirk lived his curious life, surrounded by goats and cats, waiting for rescue, petrified that the Spanish would catch him and send him to the silver mines, the expedition collapsed in mutual recrimination, deceit, and despair. Dampier botched his attack on the Manilla galleon and finally reached England without the ship, in circumstances that left the investors penniless, but some of the officers in funds. The old buccaneering ways were based on mutual support, democratic decision-making and complete contempt for lawful authority. It was hardly surprising that the concerns of far-distant investors, men of money with little understanding of the oceans, were ignored. The buccaneers were men seeking pleasure and reward, they had no reason to adhere to the law codes of a polite society that held them in contempt, and was not above hanging them when expediency required.2

  Dampier’s expedition may have been a disaster, but hope springs eternal. In 1708 Bristolian merchant ship captain Woodes Rogers raised funds for a two ship South Seas expedition, inspired by the successful French voyages. Rogers had suffered significant losses at the hands of French privateers, while a recent Act of Parliament removed the Crown’s right to share in privateer profits, specifically to promote privateering enterprise. This expedition proved far more successful than its precursors, and it established Juan Fernández on the English world map. If the voyage of the Duke and Duchess relied on William Dampier’s navigational skill, he did not receive a command. Rogers proved a far better expedition leader.3 On 31 January 1709 the expedition reached Juan Fernández, for the essential stop-over to recover from scurvy and refresh the water supply. This was no easy matter, for, as Rogers noted:

  We are very uncertain of the latitude and longitude of Juan Fernandez, the Books laying ’em down so differently, that not one chart agrees with another, and being but a small island, we are in some doubts of striking it.4

  The importance of fetching the island was the main reason why Dampier had been taken on as the pilot, but the old pirate had forgotten the latitude!

  That night the privateers could see a fire burning ashore in Windy Bay, and suspected they would find a French ship nearby. The following morning Duke and Duchess crept into the Bay, despite frequent offshore squalls. When the first boat reached the shore it encountered a strange figure: ‘our Pinnace returned from the shore and brought an abundance of Craw-fish, with a Man cloath’d in Goat Skins, who looked wilder than the first Owners of them’. This was the first sight most members of the expedition had of Alexander Selkirk. Not that the taciturn Scot was the best of story-tellers: ‘at his first coming on board us, he had so much forgot his Language for want of Use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seemed to speak his words by halves’.5

  Strange, stuttering Selkirk proved a very useful acquaintance, making goat and vegetable soup for the sick, and helping harvest the fish, flesh and vegetation of the island for scorbutic sailors. Selkirk claimed the turnips had been sown by Dampier’s crew; he also enjoyed the leaves
of the indigenous cabbage tree, sandalwood seeds and a form of pepper. Selkirk understood the seasonal weather, flora and fauna, reporting the island ‘capable of maintaining a good number of people, and being made so strong that they would not be easily dislodged’.6 The synergy with Dampier’s sentiments a decade earlier suggests textual borrowing by Rogers or his editor.

  Rogers observed ‘the greens and the goodness of the air’ ensured the sick ‘recovered very fast of the scurvy’.7 A diet of turnip tops, tree cabbage, watercress and parsley limited mortality to two of the twenty-one scurvy patients. Meanwhile the ships were prepared for action, undergoing a full refit: stripped down, their masts lowered and the hulls careened. A forge was set up ashore, along with a tented encampment for men deprived of their wooden home. Rigging was mended, ironwork repaired, and the cooperage shaken down, cleaned and remade. Meanwhile the seal population paid a heavy price; many were butchered and rendered down, providing eighty gallons of oil for lamps and cooking. On 14 February the two ships set sail for the mainland.

  The magical island of Juan Fernández had cured the sick, replenished the ships and saved a solitary sinner from damnation. Voyage narratives by Rogers and Edward Cooke, the latter including a rough map of the island, linked the remarkable story of Selkirk with a unique place, and helped to make it British. Cooke’s map renamed Windy Bay ‘Duke and Duchess Bay’, pointed out the best fishing grounds, and stressed that the southeast end of the island had few trees, but many goats. A profile emphasised the mountainous nature of the place, and a singular large tree on the ridge, in all probability the same one that George Anson’s men lamented they could not reach in 1741. The presence of a single tent where Anson later pitched camp suggests his bower was rather less ‘natural’ than he had suspected.8