Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  Much of the delay in addressing scurvy was occasioned by eighteenth-century notions that the sea was an unhealthy place; that sea air was bad, and land air good. At sea men expected to get sick, and duly did. Only in the early twentieth century did scientists finally understand the cause of scurvy was vitamin deficiency, which enabled them to provide both preventives and cures little different from those suggested by empirical tests a century before. It was in 1934 that the cause was finally isolated, along with the impact of thiamine deficiency on mental health. Finally the insanity, nostalgia and overwrought sensory inputs of scorbutic mariners, the very strangeness of seafaring, made sense.

  Nor was scurvy the only vitamin deficiency disorder to afflict seafarers. Across the ages mariners had been affected by a strange phenomenon, seemingly healthy men suddenly became convinced that the ocean was a green field. Under this delusion, calenture, afflicted men left the ship, often with fatal results. While Erasmus Darwin linked their sensibility to nostalgia, naval physician Thomas Trotter blamed the reading of novels and romances. Yet Trotter recognised the link between scurvy and homesickness, which he categorised as ‘scorbutic nostalgia’. Afflicted men suddenly felt a profound yearning for home and food, green fields and fresh water. Several visitors to Juan Fernández displayed these symptoms. Men were overwhelmed by the sight and smell of land, tiny fresh water run offs were magnified into mighty waterfalls, some insisted on being buried, or placed face down in freshly dug earth. On Anson’s voyage it was claimed that men recovered after such earthy inhalations. That these two maritime diseases entered the English cultural mainstream reveals just how deep the sea had penetrated into the life of the nation, and how seriously scurvy had confined the development of British commerce, strategy and self-image.

  Richard Walter’s account of the approach to Juan Fernández is critical to any study of calenture and scurvy. He found it hard to convey the emotional state of the crew as they caught sight of land, lacking the literary power to describe feelings which he must have shared. Sights, sounds and smells made men feel better. Walter opened the enclosed mental world of the scorbutic. Sufferers have no space for the sensibilities of others, entirely wrapped up in their own feelings and visions. Endlessly rehearsing trifling grievances they become obsessive, as mad as David Cheap. They imagine things, and find it impossible to escape the descending spiral of their own delusions. A lethal disease that leaves the mind unfettered, scurvy turned the commonplace into wondrous visions.

  While commonly associated with seafarers, scurvy was not restricted to the sea. It was common enough among the rural poor in eighteenth-century Britain, where seasonal food supplies and grinding poverty reduced winter vitamin intake. At sea the disease was more dangerous because remedies were harder to find, and seafarers inured to hardship, danger and risk, were reluctant to acknowledge their suffering. Sailor culture placed a premium on manly resolve, standing up to adversity and trivialising death as the only defence against despair and collapse. The madness of seamen was notorious; they provided a disproportionate number of inmates for mental asylums in eighteenth-century London. It did not help that sailors, as a group, were heavy drinkers, and more likely than landlubbers to have contracted tropical and venereal diseases.

  The body needs a daily intake of ten milligrams of vitamin C to avoid scurvy, and sixty milligrams to remain healthy. While eighteenth-century men saw listlessness as a cause of scurvy, we know that the opposite is true. The mental symptoms are easily explained; scorbutics have almost no vitamin C in their brains, once the brain has scavenged any remaining vitamin C from the rest of the body vitamin deficiency causes oxidisation tissue damage in the brain, disrupting neuro-transmitters. This causes depression, reduces spontaneous activity, and heightens interest in taste, flavour and smell. Vitamin deficiency means brain function is both changing and deteriorating, including the loss of fine motor skills and strength. On 23 March 1741 the Centurion lost ‘one of our ablest seamen’, who fell overboard from the rigging.3 This tragedy, commemorated in William Cowper’s poem ‘The Cast-away’, was undoubtedly scorbutic.

  Anson’s voyage turned scurvy, the iconic disease of the British Empire, into an adjective used to describe other unpleasant manifestations. It became a commonplace of expeditions to the Frozen North, the dusty Australian outback, and the wild Patagonian shore Anson had coasted. Everywhere the British pushed at the limits of knowledge they found scurvy, it stopped explorers in their tracks, set a span on human endurance and played a dark role in many more disasters, from John Franklin in the Arctic to Robert Falcon Scott at the other end of the earth. Occupying an equally significant place in the imaginary world of the explorer it made an Edenic paradise of green islands, transfixing the imagination of countries and continents with a blizzard of adjectives.

  Spanish voyagers, fresh from the ports of Peru and Chile, found little to spur the imagination on Juan Fernández. It was a useful navigational marker, and a strategic problem. They were mystified by English descriptions, and curiously flawed English navigation. Even when they recognised the words they did not see how they applied to this island. Lost in wonder, scorbutic British mariners mistook their location, and misplaced their paradise.

  Modern science has an explanation: the loss of vital amino acids allows the nervous system to suffer sensory overload, for good or ill. In this state men can as easily die of despair as recover their health from the smell of freshly dug earth. Half a century after Anson, scientist Humphrey Davy experienced many of the same effects when breathing nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Suddenly he became the centre of the universe, with profoundly heightened sensitivity, by turns irritable, blinded by dazzling visions, startled by enhanced hearing, and isolated from reality in a parallel world of his own imagination. Gas, like scurvy, LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, reduces the natural restraining mechanisms that modulate human sensory perception.

  The heightened imaginative capacity of scorbutic men created the fabulous island of Juan Fernández, the one that greeted weary mariners after many months battling mountainous seas and epidemic disease. These were expeditions into the darker recesses of the human psyche, to places that could only be accessed by novel stimulants, or potentially lethal deficiencies. Here, in the self-absorbed mental world of sick men, emerged fictive seas, magical islands and redemption, investing Crusoe’s prosaic island with a sense of wonder and bemusement. It is no coincidence the imagined worlds of great sea writers, of Melville, Conrad and Golding always found space for madness and obsession, improbable delusions and the strange power of the land.

  A century after Anson’s voyage, British warships were still calling at Juan Fernández, but improved diet and ready access to Chilean ports left them ill-equipped to fathom the meaning of old accounts. As they coasted the jagged cliffs, dropped anchor in Cumberland Bay and rambled up and down the vertical landscape many wondered why the men of 1741 made simple navigational errors, became oppressed by nostalgia, and obsessed with trifles. Bemused by the inexplicability, fictive and factual versions of the past began to conflate, Crusoe and Selkirk became one, while Anson was credited with secreting a treasure hoard. While Anson buried nothing on the island, other than the tragic victims of a catastrophic voyage, this magical island was capable of anything. The graves are lost, but the delusions live on.

  Today the island can be reached in less than a day from almost anywhere on the planet. The journey is a humdrum affair of planes; big ones to Santiago, then a twin-engine Beechcraft to Juan Fernández. Only the open boat ride from la Heradura along the rocky coast to Cumberland Bay and the jetty of San Juan Bautista hints at the very different voyages that brought dying men to an island of wonders, a fitting abode for Prospero. It was a role that Anson, a man of few words, declined to play. By contrast, David Cheap imagined he saw Caliban, and killed him with a pistol.

  NOTES

  1 Cheap later alleged indiscipline, but he had no authority to inflict summary capital punishment.

  2 Much of what fol
lows is based on the outstanding seminar ‘The Natural History of Scurvy’ held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich on 26–7 March 2012. I am indebted to the convenor, Professor Jonathan Lamb, and all those who took part. Proceedings of the seminar are in the International Journal of Maritime History for June 2013. See also J. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2001, pp. 116–31.

  3 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 81.

  14

  Distant Despair

  In the late eighteenth century, the narratives of Selkirk, Crusoe and Anson exerted a powerful grip on British culture, nowhere more than in William Cowper’s poem ‘Verses, Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk, During his Solitary Abode in the Island of Juan Fernández’. There are two manuscripts of the poem in Cowper’s hand; one of them attributes the lines to Robinson Crusoe rather than Selkirk. This conflation of characters would become an increasingly commonplace approach to the core story. Cowper empathised with the Scottish seafarer, catching the despair and anxiety that characterised his early days on the island, and his longing for society. This ‘despair’ was the result of isolation, which in turn became desolation. Far from delighting in the spectacle of unspoiled nature he was shocked by ‘this horrible place’. A voice from the Age of Reason, rather than the Romantic era, Cowper shared Selkirk’s solace in revealed religion and was not unfamiliar with more humdrum forms of isolation. Depressive mental illness made human company ‘too emotionally demanding’, and Cowper lived as a virtual recluse. Convinced God had turned against him he lived on a small private income, gifts and patronage, his poetry was a diversion from despair. His conversion to Evangelical Christianity by former seafarer and slaver John Newton may explain the frequent use of nautical terms, but he read key travel texts, especially those concerning his heroes Cook and Anson.1 He became a first-rate armchair traveller:

  My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fireside.2

  Cowper’s isolation from public life demonstrates just how deep the island stories had penetrated into British culture, his literary wanderings enabled him to conjure up the isolation of Juan Fernández and the terrors of the Cape Horn. Although inspired by a love of travel narratives, inner themes of ‘Selkirk’, imprisonment and despair, reference Cowper’s own condition. Both men long for society, but Cowper’s contrast between Selkirk’s physical isolation with his own ‘spiritual self-exile’3 provided the piece with elemental force. It was a fitting requiem for a very English author who took a South Sea island into the poetical repertoire.

  In ‘The Task’ (1785) Cowper recorded the pleasure of a traveller’s tales:

  He travels, and I too. I tread his deck,

  Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes

  Discover countries, with a kindred heart

  Suffer his woes, and share in his escapes;

  While fancy, like the finger of a clock,

  Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.

  He also developed his South Sea references; including a strikingly Selkirkian line about climbing ‘ev’ry morn’ to the mountain top to look for ships from England. His discussion of Omai, the Tahitian youth who captivated London was paired with apocalyptic visions of drowning sailors, an earthquake and a tidal wave that signalled the end of the world. He was equally acute on the diseases of the ocean, examining calenture through a potent contrast between the fatal grassy dreams of sick seafarers and pleasant reality of his own rural wanderings.4

  ‘The Cast-away’ picked up the story of the scurvied seaman who fell from the rigging as the Centurion staggered round Cape Horn, combining shock, horror and religious sensibility. His influence on Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, another epic of despair, set against the towering backdrop of the vast ocean waves of Cape Horn is obvious. Cowper closed his imaginative life with telling lines:

  When snatched from all effectual aid,

  We perish’d, each alone:

  But I beneath a rougher sea,

  And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

  He died on 25 April 1800 in the Norfolk market town of East Dereham.5

  Verses, Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk, during his Solitary Abode in the Island of Juan Fernández

  I am monarch of all I survey,

  My right there is none to dispute,

  From the centre all round to the sea,

  I am lord of the fowl and the brute.

  Oh solitude! where are the charms

  That sages have seen in thy face?

  Better dwell in the midst of alarms,

  Than reign in this horrible place.

  I am out of humanity’s reach,

  I must finish my journey alone,

  Never hear the sweet music of speech,

  I start at the sound of my own.

  The beasts that roam over the plain,

  My form with indifference see,

  They are so unacquainted with man,

  Their tameness is shocking to me.

  Society, friendship, and love,

  Divinely bestow’d upon man,

  Oh had I the wings of a dove,

  My sorrows I then might assuage

  In the ways of religion and truth,

  Might learn from the wisdom of age,

  And be cheer’d by the sallies of youth.

  Religion! what treasure untold

  Resides in that heav’nly word!

  More precious than silver and gold,

  Or all that this earth can afford.

  But the sound of the church-going bell

  These vallies and rocks never heard,

  Ne’er sigh’d at the sound of a knell,

  Or smil’d when a sabbath appear’d.

  Ye winds that have made me your sport,

  Convey to this desolate shore

  Some cordial endearing report

  Of a land I shall visit no more.

  My friends do they now and then send

  A wish or a thought after me?

  O tell me I yet have a friend,

  Though a friend I am never to see.

  How fleet is a glance of the mind!

  Compar’d with the speed of its flight,

  The tempest itself lags behind,

  And the swift-winged arrows of light.

  When I think of my own native land,

  In a moment I seem to be there;

  But alas! recollection at hand

  Soon hurries me back to despair.

  But the sea fowl is gone to her nest,

  The beast is laid down in his lair,

  Ev’n here is a season of rest,

  And I to my cabbin repair.

  There is mercy in ev’ry place,

  And mercy, encouraging thought!

  Gives even affliction a grace,

  And reconciles man to his lot.

  NOTES

  1 W. Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, ed. J. Sambrook, Longman, London, 1994, pp. 12, 18, 272–5. Of Anson he writes: ‘No braver chief could Albion boast’ (p. 317).

  2 Cowper letter of 6 October 1783, in Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, p. 12; ‘The Task’, pp. 144–5.

  3 Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, p. 14

  4 Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, pp. 78, 71–2.

  5 Cowper, The Task and Other Poems, pp. 78, 319, 45–6.

  15

  Whaling and the South Pacific

  By the 1780s it seemed Juan Fernández had slipped out of the British world view. Not only had Cook’s first voyage opened a new continent, but the dispatch of the First Fleet to Botany Bay provided an alternative, British depot for ships making the interminable voyage into the Pacific, for trade, exploration or war. After Cook most Pacific voyagers entered the Pacific via the
Cape of Good Hope. When William Bligh attempted to round Cape Horn in the Bounty he was blown back. Cook had switched the axis of British Pacific voyaging, settling New South Wales, opening New Zealand, and completing a new Indian Ocean nexus of trade and power, one that occasionally used Cape Horn as a route home, but had little need for a way station off Valparaiso. When Spain declared war in 1779 the British, hard pressed at sea by the American rebels, the French and Spanish, had nothing left for the South Pacific.1 After the American war British projects to attack Spanish South America were based at Sydney, rather than Juan Fernández, where the petty bastion commanding Cumberland Bay indicated the need for some serious fighting. Most accounts imply Juan Fernández, deprived of its central place as a strategic nexus and navigational way station in the British world view, was left to the avarice of lethal extractive industries, the intermittent attentions of a new South American political system and the musings of romantic Robinsonians. Yet the reality was very different: British ships continued to call at Juan Fernández, seeking refreshment, intelligence and profit.

  After the American Revolution Britain, France and Spain shifted their focus to the imperfectly understood spaces of the Pacific. Cook’s heroic voyaging outlined the ocean, and emphasised its material riches. Inspired by avarice, and informed by science, a new breed of men planned voyages to the other side of the world, in search of otter pelts, seal skins and whale oil. They would be aided and abetted by imperial visionaries, economic theorists and national governments seeking an edge in the ultimate competition. In the process new books would be written, and new discoveries made. Britain also faced new competition from the former American colonies. While American merchants surged into the Pacific to exploit the latest British discoveries, the bitter experience of losing the continental empire in America revitalised British oceanic insight. In 1780, with the outcome of the war hanging in the balance India expert Sir John Dalrymple observed: ‘England might very well put up with the loss of America, for she would then exchange an empire of dominion which is very difficult to be kept for an empire of trade which keeps itself.’2 Having failed as a Continental power, Britain should return to its true vocation, linking dominion of the seas with the expansion of trade. Dalrymple advised entering the Pacific via the Cape of Good Hope, the ‘easy’ route, using the Galápagos and Tahiti as bases to raid Spanish America.