Going ashore early the next day, Cochrane left the sailors to sweat over the water supply while the officers climbed the mountain, trying to reach the obvious notch in the mountain range, later named ‘Selkirk’s Mirador’. Maria remained near the beach, inspecting the ruined town. At the foot of the flagstaff in the mouldering fort lay a bronze cannon cast in 1614. Old iron guns were in use as mooring posts: they are still there. Water, piped to boats alongside the small jetty, was excellent. Maria also reflected on the 1821 insurrection, when the prisoners tried to escape on the American whaler Persia.13 She believed the Chilean authorities had blocked any attempt to make the island self-sufficient and abandoned the prison settlement, maintaining sovereignty by a proclamation banning settlement or the taking of cattle and wood. The senior British naval officer on the station advised merchant ships not to call: it is unlikely the advice was heeded.
Although the officers returned frustrated from the climb Cochrane brought an interesting rock sample to discuss. There were always amateur geologists ready to speculate on the volcanic origins of the island. The party selected a suitable spot by a stream for a picnic, using fig leaf tablecloths for a meal of ship’s provisions and under-ripe fruit. After dinner Maria and Cochrane wandered into ‘Lord Anson’s Park’, complete with European shrubs and herbs, which prompted a quote from Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’. Indeed, ‘Lord Anson has not exaggerated the beauty of the place, or the delights of the climate.’
On 26 January Maria again accompanied the officers ashore, but while they set off for the high ground, to see the other side, she wandered the shore, looking for a good spot for sketching. She chose the beach close by the modern cemetery, almost directly opposite Shillibeer’s seat. Bored by her own company, after a few hours Maria began reciting Cowper’s gloomy and lowering ‘Verses, Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’, repeating the line ‘Than reign in this horrible place’. Fortunately Cochrane returned, reporting the officers had reached the notch, and the others had pressed on down the other side. That evening a Chilean man appeared, one of four on the island butchering cattle, curing meat and hides, and boiling down the remains for the tallow. The next day proved rather blustery, so the gentlemen fell to fishing for cod and crayfish, and sailed on 28 January. Their thoughts turned to ownership, discussing the value of the island ’to any nation that takes possession of it as a harbour’. That she meant Britain was clear, ‘our whalers resort thither continually’. Characteristically her last word on the subject was ‘beautiful’.14 The assumptions and insights of British visitors implied occupation and possession were more than possible; this little island had almost everything, above all a superb strategic position.
The following year David Douglas, a young Scottish botanist working for the Royal Society, visited the island while on passage to British Columbia. Reflecting the inevitable combination of state and economic interests that propelled scientists into the unknown, Douglas sailed on the Hudson’s Bay Company ship William & Ann. Close links to leading men of science including botanist William Hooker, together with a successful North American expedition, made him an obvious choice to record new flora, and the first trained botanist to visit Juan Fernández.
Like most sailing ships heading north from Cape Horn, the William & Ann used Más Afuera as a navigational beacon, the island was spotted on 14 December 1824. At a distance it appeared ‘like a conical black rock’ before the ship closed to within two or three miles. Although short of water Captain Hanwell decided the surge on the beach was too severe to attempt a landing. Close in the island seemed to be moderately covered with herbage, supporting a healthy population of goats. Approaching Más a Tierra the following day Douglas hastily penned his impressions: ‘the whole island is very mountainous, volcanic, and beautifully covered with woods to the summit of the hills, tops of which are rarely seen, being enveloped in the clouds’.15
A day later, with the ship securely anchored in Cumberland Bay, Douglas managed to get into the first boat: ‘As we approached the shore we were surprised to see a small vessel at anchor, and on the beach a hut with smoke rising from it.’ An English voice then ‘directed us in to a sheltered creek’. Walking up the beach, Douglas, ship’s doctor John Scouler and the boat crew met Whitechapel sailor William Clark. Working out of Coquimbo, he was the boat keeper for a party of Spanish (Chilean) hunters, on the other side of the island, slaughtering and skinning wild cattle and seals. Although Clark lived in a small hut with few comforts Douglas was impressed by the cultural attainments of this latter-day Selkirk:
a man of some information; his library amounted to seventeen volumes – Bible and Book of Common Prayer, which he had to keep [in] a secret place when his Spanish friends were there; and odd volume of Tales of My Landlord and Old Mortality, some of the voyages and Cowper’s poems. He has the one by heart addressed to Alexander Selkirk; but what is still more worthy to be noticed, a fine bound copy of Crusoe’s adventures, who himself was the latest and most complete edition.16
After their strange encounter Douglas and Scouler left the sailors to fill the water butts and wandered into the ruined village. ‘Here a few years ago the Spaniards formed a colony; but it is now abandoned, all the houses are destroyed, and the fort, on which were some very large guns. Twenty-six cannons lay on the shore just below.’ Amid the general air of decay he was struck by the remains of a church consecrated in 1811, and ‘a circular oven of brick, seven feet within, marked on it 1741; probably built by Anson during his residence, it is now occupied by a small species of blue pigeon as their cote’. Abandoned, overrun gardens rich with peaches, quinces, apples, berries and vines were harvested. The only edible vegetable on offer was the radish, which grew to a large size.17 The sight of a garden, however ruinous, prompted Douglas to sow some of the seeds he had brought, and give some to Clark. In exchange for a tot of rum and few old clothes his Robinsonian friend handed over a young goat. After a second day botanising Douglas had hardly regained the deck when a storm blew up and the ship stood out of the bay.
Like most educated British visitors in the romantic era Douglas knew Anson, Cowper and Crusoe, he was equally certain of his fellow Scot Selkirk. That an itinerant sailor, working on the other side of the world, had Cowper’s lines by heart, and a copy of Crusoe, demonstrates just how deeply this curious place had penetrated into the fluid core of Britishness. As Douglas, Scouler and Clark discussed the various texts that imposed Britishness on Juan Fernández the mythic and the romantic collided. Ruined houses, a fort, a church and even an old oven heightened Douglas’s sense of wonder, while the feral gardens of long departed Spanish soldiers, and an unfortunate descendant of Juan Fernández’s goats, provided material comforts for scorbutic scientists. Douglas and Scouler even settled on a location for Crusoe’s cave. When he came to compile his impressions, Douglas melded the sickly obsessions of Richard Walter with the precise terminology demanded by his patrons, using the Latin taxonomy acquired in William Hooker’s botanical lectures at Glasgow University:
No pen can correctly depict the rural enchanting appearance of this island, and the numerous rills descending through the valleys shaded by rich luxuriant verdure emanating in the dark recesses of rocky dells, while the feathery fronds of Lomaria, Aspidium and Polypodium several species of which are new and truly princely – form a denseness to the forests.18
His list of 78 species collected, most of them unknown variants, took up more space than the discussion of the visit. It was no mean feat, earning the applause of Carl Skottsberg, the master of island botany. Captain Hanwell set course for the Galápagos, where he hoped to complete watering. William Clark’s goat was served up a week later, on Christmas Day.
After the final defeat of the Spanish Empire in the South Pacific, British attitudes towards Juan Fernández subtly shifted. What had once been a prize beyond price became a quiet backwater. Even so, the pages of the Times suggest the British maintained a serious interest in Juan Fernández and the other Chilean isl
ands. They turned up regularly, in connection with Defoesque romance, maritime disaster, the occasional convict outrage and naval visits. While Juan Fernández had long been a staple of popular culture, comments on the San Félix–San Ambrosio island group reinforced the strategic logic of British commercial interest.
That interest was expanding rapidly, now the closed markets of Imperial Spain had given way to the open ports of newly independent nations anxious for trade. Even the mines of Potosi needed British capital, technology and miners. Trade links with Chile were especially good. Released from Spanish and Peruvian domination Chile was drawn into Britain’s informal empire by seapower, money and commercial expertise. Chile’s astute leadership recognised that opening their markets to Britain would pay diplomatic dividends. They were happy to see the British at Valparaiso; many thought the port was British, while Santiago, a hundred miles inland, had only a tenth as many Britons.
The Chilean market was dominated by British and American merchants, and linked to global trade patterns, often involving a circumnavigation of the globe. Ships from Britain and the American east coast brought manufactures and luxuries to Chile. There they loaded gold, silver and copper for China, where bullion was turned into tea, silks and spices for shipment home via the Cape of Good Hope. Valparaiso became the biggest port on the west coast of South America, thickly populated with British commercial houses and residents, and glutted with British imports.19 The value of trade with Chile, Peru, Mexico and the intervening states, together with the endemic instability of the region, made a British squadron essential.20 The South American Station, formally established in 1826 to monitor the Wars of Independence, evolved into the Pacific Station in 1837. By the 1840s the squadron, based at Valparaiso where a British depot ship was moored, followed a well-practised routine. Harnessing oceanic winds and currents warships called at South Pacific and Northwest Coast locations as occasion demanded. French land grabs in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, American claims on the Oregon territory and local wars stressed the vast size of the ocean, and the paucity of resources. British merchants quickly learned the annual routine, they could summon the Navy relatively quickly, and local authorities knew as much. Britain might not possess any formal empire in the area, but the Royal Navy easily upheld the national interest.
The British diplomatic establishment in Chile, led by the Consul, was equally closely linked to commercial interests. Vice Consuls at the main ports acted as agents for British steamship companies and for Marine Insurers Lloyds of London. Chilean copper, guano and nitrates became major exports to the United Kingdom, making the collection of commercial intelligence a core activity for British representatives. The Consuls also ensured the British naval hospital was open to destitute Britons, and British seafarers without ships were sent home. Britain appointed a commercial Consul to Valparaiso in 1823, pre-dating official recognition of the state; he would be exercised by recurring anxieties of a Spanish invasion, or a French attempt to secure a naval base.21 While the Foreign Office pressed the Consul to calm down, and stop seeing danger in every twist and turn of local politics, the underlying threat was clear. Fortunately for British interests Chile became stable, and the revolution of 1830 temporarily halted Paris’s Pacific ambitions.22 The complex interweaving of local instability, burgeoning commercial interests and concerns that France might secure a strategic base in the South Pacific made the late 1820s a period of heightened tension. The government’s self-denying declaration precluded a British move for Juan Fernández, or the strategic southern island of Chiloe, even when they were offered up on a plate. Instead the Royal Navy maintained a watching brief on both places, checking the garrison and the charts. It was equally interested in the unoccupied island groups Colnett had charted in the 1790s, tacking them on to the economically driven Adventure/Beagle survey of the Cape Horn region, and other charting missions for the next half century. While the British never occupied Juan Fernández, or any other Chilean island, the possibility was rarely off the table for long, as first France and then the United States challenged British commercial interests and naval hegemony.
Britain had the power to seize and hold any Pacific island; that it chose to occupy none is deeply significant. With access to the markets and port facilities of Valparaiso and Callao British merchants and capitalists replaced older dreams of colonial conquest with the economic dominion of free trade. The naval stores hulk Nereus at Valparaiso and the floating coal depot at Callao had little fight left in them, but their presence symbolised the latent power of the dominant fleet, normally superior to any rival squadron, drawing strength from the two power standard that underpinned the British global position. These old hulks carried a flag and a signal gun, enough to summon a force that could bankrupt a South American state in a matter of weeks. Although humble, deeply unromantic depot ships replaced the island paradise at the heart of British South Pacific strategy in the nineteenth century, British squadrons continued to call at Juan Fernández, checking the charts and updating their remark books, just in case they had to come back in earnest.
Unlike the South Atlantic, where Britain seized the vacant Falkland Islands in 1833, there was no need to act in the Pacific, because relations with Chile were always far better than those with Argentina. The Falklands were about as far as the Empire cared to reach; the logistical demands of a base on Juan Fernández were simply unacceptable in peace time, and there was little reason to suspect Chile would close their harbours to the British in war. Instead Juan Fernández became naval picnic ground, a cultural highlight on the annual station tour, allowing the younger officers to stretch their legs, and think themselves well read. Steam-powered printing presses enabled every ship to carry a library, many that came to the South Pacific were equipped with Crusoe, Anson and more arcane literature. Where scorbutic privateers and the living dead of Anson’s squadron once staggered ashore to find food and water, imagining themselves in paradise, nineteenth-century voyagers generally arrived in good health, seeking sensation and spectacle. Frustrated by their inability to comprehend what had inspired men to compile prosy rhapsodies only a century before, modern visitors, troubled by the humdrum realities of a perfectly pleasant little island, were quick to invent sensation, wrapping it up in the startlingly vertical landscape of mountain, forest, rocks and ocean.
If Juan Fernández was not an Edenic paradise then it must be a place of human wonder, a Robinsonian dreamscape of imagined romances, caves, castaways, cannibals and redemption. Although the island offered little by way of remains, and only a handful of recognisable features for those fortunate enough to have Anson’s Voyage with the plates, this made it suitably opaque – meaning could be imposed on every layer of the past. The ruins of Spanish and Chilean occupation, subtly evolved into Selkirk’s residence, along with a ‘cave’ that did not appear in any account of his sojourn, while a Spanish shed halfway up to the ‘Lookout’, another building his rescuers managed to miss, became Selkirk’s house. This suspension of disbelief was aided by enterprising locals happy to tell inquisitive, credulous visitors whatever they wanted to hear, in exchange for cash, supplies or booze. Finally the marks of Defoe’s colonial project were written onto Selkirk’s Juan Fernández, for an anglophone audience predisposed to assume an air of superiority, and entitled to impose themselves on foreign soil. That this was an island, a quintessentially English island, made the process that much easier. Both British and American visitors read the island as an imperial possession, and assumed they had proprietory rights, founded on literary association and a half-remembered history. The British had ended their interest in an island base, but with America bent on a ‘Manifest Destiny’ that included other people’s land there was always a danger that something untoward might occur. The occasional visit by the Royal Navy was enough to impose a degree of reality on American dreams, invading Mexico was one thing, seizing Juan Fernández quite another.
Yet beneath the surface glitter of occasional visits and literary wandering amid the trees the ol
d British project to set up a base remained active, indeed most Royal Navy visits to Chilean islands were precise, purposeful and portentous. The Hydrographer of the Navy systematically collected charts and sailing directions – just in case – sending his best men to check the San Ambrosio, San Félix islands and Ecuadorean Galápagos Islands as possible bases. The word ‘establishment’ seemed to hover in the margins of every discussion, waiting for a suitable opportunity. Instead new technology changed the strategic geography of the Imperial problem. To service the communications of a global empire the British state took a keen interest in steam ships, subsidising mail steamship companies to provide the regular and reliable conveyance of official mail. The Pacific Steam Navigation Company, starting in the early 1840s, not only improved links with London, but also provided the coal stocks and machine shops needed to maintain naval steamers in the Pacific.
Nineteenth-century British interest reflected the reality that the islands remained a vital link in the commercial sailing ship route to Mexico, California and British Columbia. The rapid growth of South Pacific trades, dominated by British and American shipping made the location ever more significant. It was the first port of call for sickly crews and damaged ships after rounding Cape Horn. Then in 1849 a gold rush in California prompted an explosion of American shipping. Although the British had access to the ports of Chile and Peru, neither was especially stable, so it was wise to have a fallback position to protect trade. The creation of a permanent naval station reflected a growing American economic challenge, with whalers, traders and a standing naval force. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century the dominant navies in these seas were Anglophone and often at odds. While the Americans won the whaling competition Britain made far more money in other trades, bought oil for their lamps from Nantucket, and read tall Yankee tales about great whales.
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