Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  Reaching the Galápagos Islands, which had been specifically mentioned in his orders, Colnett named islands for Lord Chatham and Admiral Lord Hood, the First Lord and First Naval Lord of the Admiralty. He also stopped at Isla de la Plata, where Drake divided his plunder, and buccaneers refreshed on good water, goats and turtles. There was a good anchorage, close to water: ‘In a war with Spain this island would form an excellent station, as well as a place to look out and accommodate the sick, as it lies four leagues from the nearest main land, which is Cape Lorenzo.’ Not only could ships lie on the seaward side of the island without being seen from the mainland, but with a chain of longboats they could link up with the Galápagos, commanding the route north and south, as ships were not known to pass further out. British control of the sea lanes would cut off the Spanish from the northwest, and secure the whale fishery.23

  The whaling side of the venture proving less successful, Colnett headed back to San Félix to salt down seal skins. A stop at the Galápagos cured his men of boils, and they stocked up on fresh turtle. Naming a bay for Sir Joseph Banks reflected the strategic/economic genesis of the expedition; and the critical role of the great man in all contemporary Pacific projects. Colnett’s report brought the Galápagos and the Saints into the British world view, as poor substitutes for the one true island destination. His voyage stressed the vital role of importance of ‘convenient places for refitting and refreshment’ in the Pacific on the eve of the nineteenth century.24

  Colnett’s cautious approach to Spanish settlements was not without justification. Well aware of growing British interest in ‘their’ ocean, but lacking naval power, the Spanish were only dangerous to those ashore. When Britain and Spain went to war in 1796 the whalers took privateer licences, to make war on men as well as cetaceans.25 As the Falkland Islands Crisis of 1770 had demonstrated, Spanish attempts to close the loopholes in their imperial carapace were futile in the face of British naval power. On that occasion the British did not press their advantage, but thirty years later the situation had changed.

  In an attempt at economy, the Spanish authorities put the Juan Fernández garrison on double duty in 1760, turning the island into a prison camp. While Cumberland Bay remained a guard post against British ships the governor focused on preventing rebellion and escape. Fort Santa Barbara had been rebuilt in stone, the San Francisco Xavier battery covered the beach, while outlying forts in Bahía Pangal and Puerto Inglese also watched for British interlopers. For thirty years the islands slumbered, even Alejandro Malaspina’s voyage of discovery did not land. Passing both islands in March 1790 Malaspina was content with Anson’s description, and the charts of Carteret, covering Más Afuera, and Ulloa dealing with Bahía Cumberland. Ulloa’s description led him to fear losing an anchor. Instead he provided accurate locations for the islands.26 This information was kept secret, but such threadbare precautions did little to reduce imperial overstretch, dragging the old Empire down to ruin. To secure a vast, thinly populated continental empire which lay exposed to British incursions at almost all points Spain required a powerful navy. Without it Spain could only look to local defences.

  Little wonder that Jenkinson, in retirement in 1802, took pride in the success of the fishery he had done so much to foster. It was, in his opinion, worth far more than a continental empire. Receipts exceeded half a million pounds. British South Pacific whaling endured into the 1830s, when coal gas reduced domestic demand. American whalers persisted because their home market was far slower to adopt gas. As the trade declined, Samuel Enderby’s grandson made a grander claim: the trade opened by the whalers ‘eventually brought about the independence of such states as Peru and Chili’.27

  NOTES

  1 Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, pp. 638–9.

  2 Dalrymple, 1 March 1780; Frost, ‘Shaking Off the Spanish Yoke’, pp. 30–1.

  3 Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, p. 1.

  4 J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim, Constable, London, 1969, p. 346. Palliser to Jenkinson, 23 November 1785, BT 6/93, quoted in Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, pp. 302–3.

  5 E.A. Stackpole, Whales and Destiny: The Rivalry between America, France, and Britain for Control of the Southern Whale Fishery, 1785–1825, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1972, p. 76.

  6 Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, pp. 350–1; Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, pp. 301–7.

  7 Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, p. 317; M.E. Thurman, The Naval Department of San Blas: New Spain’s Bastion for Alta California and Nootka 1767 to 1798, Clark, Glendale, CA, 1967, pp. 309–18.

  8 Sir J. Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain, London, 1789, appendix I, part II.

  9 The Times (12 November 1790), p. 2, col. C; Anglo-Spanish Convention, 1790: Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, pp. 318, 645.

  10 Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, pp. 322, 326.

  11 Enderby to Banks, 26 August 1788, in N. Chambers (ed.), The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768–1820, Pickering & Chatto, London, 2008, vol. II, p. 329. Enderby to Banks, 16 February 1793, for scientific specimens in W.R. Dawson (ed.), The Banks Letters, British Museum, London, 1958, p. 309.

  12 Mulgrave to Banks, 19 October 1790, in Dawson, The Banks Letters, p. 669.

  13 J. Moss, Naval Chronicle 18 (1807), pp. 32–6.

  14 M. Harris, ‘Commander John Ralph Moss, RN (1759–1799)’, Naval Review 100 (February 2012), pp. 60–5.

  15 W. Kaye Lamb (ed.), The Voyage of George Vancouver, 1791–1795, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1984, vol. I, pp. 20–4; Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. III, p. 184.

  16 B.M. Gough, Distant Dominion: Britain and the North-West Coast of North America, 1579–1809, British Columbia University Press, Vancouver, 1980, p. 133; Kaye Lamb, Vancouver, vol. I, pp. 196–7, & vol. IV, pp. 1468–74; Archibald Menzies to Banks, 26 March 1795, in N. Chambers (ed.), The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, vol. IV, Pickering & Chatto, London, 2011, p. 272–4.

  17 J. Beaglehole, The Exploration of the Pacific, London, 1960, pp. 185–6; Churchill & Churchill, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca; J. Harris, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Biblotheca, 2 vols, London, 1705; new edition by Campbell, ‘carefully revised with large additions’, London, 1744.

  18 Stackpole, Whales and Destiny, pp. 155–7 focuses too closely on whaling to see the deeper import.

  19 J. Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic and Round Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean for the Purpose of Extending the Spermacetti Whale Fisheries and Other Objects of Commerce by Ascertaining the Ports, Bays, Harbours, and Anchoring Births in Certain Islands and Coasts in Those Seas at which the Ships of the British Merchants Might be Refitted, London, 1798, pp. 24–7. The Gale Outline Edition has Banks’s signature.

  20 Spanish Chart of Northern Chile, Peru and San Felix: ADM 352/350/2.

  21 Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic, pp. 20, 28–9, 32.

  22 Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic, pp. 35–7. This idea may have come from Banks, who made similar observations on St Helena and Ascension Island; Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 325–6.

  23 Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic, pp. 46–63 (quote at p. 63), 69–75.

  24 Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic, pp. 137, 145, 158–9.

  25 Thurman, The Naval Department of San Blas, p. 359; T.W. Keeble, Commercial Relations between British Overseas Territories and South America, 1806–1914, London, Athlone Press, 1970, pp. 1–3, 7–9, 28.

  26 A. David, F. Fernández-Armesto, C. Novi & G. Williams (eds), The Malaspina Expedition, 1789–1794, vol. I, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 165–7.

  27 Jenkinson to Sir Joseph Banks, 24 February 1802, cited in Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793,
vol. II, p. 327.

  16

  The End of an Era

  In 1793 Spain and Britain became allies against the French Revolution, opening Peruvian and Chilean ports to British trade.1 The growth of Australian and Indian commerce into the South Pacific, linking South America with China, increased opportunities for smuggling. Spain changed sides in 1796, reviving interest in South American strategic and commercial opportunities. The government turned to Colnett for advice on South Pacific strategy and welcomed South American revolutionaries, their schemes made doubly attractive by the imperative need to expand the frontiers of commerce, both to sustain the costs of war and to replace the increasingly constricted European markets. Most projects proved abortive, the few that were attempted, notably at Buenos Aires, were spectacular failures. In 1805–6 the Grenville administration adopted Captain Home Popham’s plans to seize Valparaiso, only to redirect the resources to reinforce Popham’s disastrous attempt to occupy Buenos Aires.2 Despite all the ambition and energy put into planning for war in the South Pacific Britain rarely had the luxury of focusing on the region in an age of total war, and lacked the resources to operate there on a sustained basis, while Juan Fernández, even if it had been available, was no longer an adequate base. Then, with startling suddenness, the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon changed everything.

  Prostrated by war, Spain was unable to defend the American empire against local independence movements, leaving the British to open the trade of Chile and Peru by less dramatic measures. Smuggling, loans and technical support to the revolutionary movements broke the last remnants of Spanish commercial exclusion. Commercial actors created an ‘informal’ empire, both to avoid expense and remove the temptation to create costly government posts.3 Naval power would sustain commercial access. Yet as Spain faded into Pacific history, Britain faced a new competitor.

  American merchant ships trading to the Columbia River settlement began calling at Juan Fernández in the 1790s, initially for food and water, then to harvest sandalwood from the island and elsewhere to carry to China, along with Pacific sea otter pelts. American whaleships also used the islands to refresh. In a last twitch of the old imperial system, the Viceroy of Peru, Ambrosio O’Higgins, disciplined the governor of Juan Fernández for allowing an American ship to repair in Cumberland Bay. Meanwhile British and American sealers, whalers, smugglers and privateers used Más Afuera as a base and watering station.4 In the process they annihilated the seal population. New York sealing ship Eliza reached Más Afuera in 1792, taking 38,000 skins to Canton. In 1798 seven more arrived. The Spanish removed the sealers from the island in 1801 and again in 1804–5, but the Americans just kept coming back, in ever greater numbers. A short-lived bonanza saw large, if transient populations ashore, with huts and gardens, even celebrating the Fourth of July. One sealer estimated around three million pelts were taken to China in seven years. The pelagic populations were annihilated, and by 1815 there was little to see on Más Afuera but ruined huts and a tragic jumble of bleached bones. Once the seals had been wiped out the sealers stopped coming, but the island continued to suffer. The indigenous flora had been devastated by two invasive species: fecund and ever-hungry goats, whose only virtue was a prodigious appetite that held back the all-embracing, strangling maquis shrub.

  An island of life and beauty had been turned into a wasteland by human greed and carelessness; it is unlikely the damage can be undone. Between 1797 and 1809 some 226 American ships called in Chilean ports, of which only 12 were condemned as smugglers. Illicit trade and new ideas broke the monopolist policy of metropolitan Spain. South American independence was essential for economic development.5 Chilean patriots took control in 1813. Later that year the Royal Navy returned to Juan Fernández.

  In 1812 the United States declared war on Britain, invading Canada and attacking British shipping. Captain David Porter’s American frigate USS Essex ventured into the South Pacific, where he captured a dozen British whaleships off the Galápagos, using information from Colnett’s book. A British squadron sent to seize the American fur trade post at Astoria on the Pacific Coast near the Canadian border used the island as a rendezvous. The frigate HMS Phoebe, Captain James Hillyar, and the ship sloops HMS Racoon and HMS Cherub arrived on 11 September 1813, without the transport ship. When they departed on the 18th the Racoon sailed north for Astoria, but Phoebe and Cherub headed east to hunt the Essex.6 The British warships arrived in far better condition than Anson’s shattered squadron, but they made good use of island to refit damaged rigging, refill their water casks, gather firewood and fresh food. Edging into Cumberland Bay Phoebe had fired a signal gun, summoning a pilot to help the ships work up into the anchorage. Cattle, vegetables and fish improved the health of the crew while the boats were ashore for several days obtaining wood and water. The officers also compiled a fresh set of coastal perspectives.7 After searching the Galápagos and calling at Callao Phoebe and Cherub set course for Valparaiso, via Más Afuera. The importance of the islands as navigational markers was obvious. Phoebe captured the Essex at Valparaiso, while most of the British whalers were recaptured. In November HMS Racoon stopped off at the island on passage between British Columbia and Rio. The restored Spanish administration of Chile had begun sending political prisoners to the island, living a squalid life in a newly dug cave overlooking Cumberland Bay.8

  Royal Marine Lieutenant John Shillibeer provided the next account of the island, serving on the frigate HMS Briton. Sent to deal with the Essex, Briton became the first British warship to visit Pitcairn Island, last refuge of the Bounty mutineers, and the Marquesas islands. These exotic locations gave Shillibeer ample opportunity to indulge his literary and artist talents. His romantic affinities were obvious, this was a book compiled in the wake of Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth. Briton arrived on 22 January 1815. Like any well-read traveller, Shillibeer sought the island of Anson and ‘the ingenious pen of Daniel De Foe’, but he was looking with modern eyes. In contrast to his scorbutic precursors Shillibeer’s descriptions were qualified, and slightly lukewarm: ‘notwithstanding we did not find it that earthly paradise described by Lord Anson, it is exceedingly beautiful and capable of every improvement’. He sympathised with the Chilean Patriots, appalled by the situation of men of quality and standing ‘reduced to the lowest ebb of misery, and the very point of starvation’. Shillibeer reported Cumberland Bay to be ‘neither commodious, nor safe’; the island was ‘excessively mountainous and romantically picturesque, possessing several crystalline streams of water, and a soil of great fertility’. Sitting on a rocky headland between San Juan and Bahía Pangal, he contemplated ‘the most romantic, strange, and incomprehensible scenery which can be found in the formation of the universe’, while executing a workmanlike sketch of the bay and the headland. He encountered wild descendants of Anson’s plants, Juan Fernández’s goats, the loose soil that made any such venture hazardous, and the thieving habits of the Spanish troops. Some ill-disciplined soldiers assaulted the nightwatchmen and stole tools left ashore overnight, prompting Shillibeer to reflect on the long history of Spanish larceny. Having completed her wood and water Briton was back at Valparaiso by 19 February, and set course for Plymouth.9

  At the same time the officers of another British frigate, HMS Tagus, produced an excellent coloured view of Cumberland Bay, indicating the watering and wooding locations. Wood came from Bahía Pangal, the lower slopes around the village had been clear felled, including Lord Anson’s Valley. Both Phoebe and Tagus produced charts of the island, featuring Cumberland Bay. All three British frigates collected Spanish chart material, exploiting the chaos to secure hitherto ‘secret’ manuscripts and printed cartography to inform a new British chart.10

  Chile emerged as an independent country in 1818, ruled by the landed elite. De facto head of state Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegitimate son of a Irish born Spanish governor of Peru, paid an American merchant ship to liberate the patriot prisoners from Juan Fernández, then abandoned the island. In 1820 Antonio Jose de I
risarri, Chilean representative in Europe proposed ceding Juan Fernández or Valdivia to Britain in return for guaranteeing Chile against Spanish reconquest. O’Higgins rejected any sacrifice of territory. He had been less scrupulous in 1817, proposing to discharge Chile’s debts to mercenary naval genius Lord Cochrane by transferring the very same islands!11 The British government expressed no interest, consistently opposing the additional expense of uneconomic territories, Cochrane preferred cash. After leaving Chilean service he visited the island, to refill his ship’s water butts.

  Maria Graham, a passenger on the flagship, portrayed Cochrane and his officers as overgrown schoolboys, rambling about the romantic island of Robinson Crusoe. Her own participation was limited more by decorum and dress than any lack of interest. Maria knew Selkirk, Crusoe and Cowper. Having fixed their position off Más Afuera on 22 January 1823, Cochrane’s ships spent most of the 24th working into Cumberland Bay, anchoring just before sunset, giving Maria ample opportunity to take in the scenery: ‘the most picturesque I ever saw, being composed of high perpendicular rocks wooded nearly to the top, with beautiful valleys; and the ruins of the little town in the largest of these heighten the effect’.12 This was a place of wild beauty, where the intermittent impact of roving mankind had taken the edge off the appalling loneliness that Selkirk had endured.