Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  NOTES

  1 S. Clissold, Bernardo O’Higgins and the Independence of Chile, London, 1968, p. 48; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 92–9.

  2 Frost, ‘Shaking Off the Spanish Yoke’, pp. 34–6.

  3 The Times (9 January 1808); Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, vol. II, p. 660.

  4 M. Ellery, ‘William Campbell and the Harrington: Privateering in Chilean Waters in 1804’, The Mariner’s Mirror 97(4) (2011), pp. 315–40, esp. p. 319.

  5 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, pp. 285–6, 318–19; J. Lynch, The Spanish–American Revolutions, 1808–1826, W.W. Norton, New York, 1973 (see pp. 127–56 for the Chilean Revolution).

  6 A.D. Lambert, The Challenge: Britain versus America in the Naval War of 1812, Faber & Faber, London, 2012, pp. 270–304 for Pacific operations in the War of 1812. B.M. Gough, The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America 1810–1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1971, pp. 15–17.

  7 Log of HMS Phoebe, 11–19 September 1813, 5 February 1814: ADM 51/2675. Coastal views of Juan Fernández and Más Afuera from Byron’s voyage, Phoebe, Tagus and Beagle: ADM 344/2255.

  8 Admiral Dixon to Admiralty, 24 December 1814: ADM 1/22. Also in G.S. Graham & R.A. Humphreys (eds), The Navy in South America, 1807–1823, Navy Records Society, London, 1962, p. 149.

  9 J. Shillibeer, A Narrative of the Briton’s Voyage to Pitcairn’s Island, Taunton, 1817, pp. 152–8.

  10 View of the Island of Juan Fernández from the anchorage: HMS Tagus, Captain Pipon, rec’d 23 November 1816, ADM 344/2255. One of these may be the battered MS ADM 352/350/2 showing San Felix. I am indebted to Captain Michael Barritt RN for his advice on this subject.

  11 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 133–4; Clissold, Bernardo O’Higgins and the Independence of Chile, p. 178.

  12 M. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. T. Hayward, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, 2003, p. 180.

  13 E.B. Billingsley, In Defence of Neutral Rights: United States Navy and the Wars of Independence in Chile and Peru, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1968, pp. 142–3 records that the USS Constellation took Chilean Troops to restore order in 1821.

  14 Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, pp. 180–5.

  15 A.L. Mitchell & S. House, David Douglas: Explorer and Botanist, Aurum Press, London, 1999, pp. 43–5; D. Douglas, Journal Kept by David Douglas during His Travels in North America 1823–1827, Wesley & Sons, London, 1914 (reprinted by Cambridge University Press), see pp. 53–4, 93–9 for Juan Fernández.

  16 Douglas, Journal, p. 54.

  17 Douglas, Journal, p. 54. They were London fire bricks.

  18 Douglas, Journal, pp. 94–9; Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, vol. II, p. 797; Mitchell & House, David Douglas, p. 45.

  19 P.J. Cain & A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914, Longman, London, 1993, pp. 306–11; Keeble, Commercial Relations between British Overseas Territories and South America, pp. 6–9; R.A. Humphreys, British Merchants and South American Independence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967.

  20 John White to Lord Aberdeen (foreign secretary), 14 January 1830, in C.K. Webster (ed.), Britain and the Independence of Latin America 1812–1830: Select Documents from the Foreign Office Archives, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1938, vol. I, pp. 369–70 (taken from FO 16/12a).

  21 Consular Correspondence is dominated by humdrum economic issues, presidential speeches and long-running financial disputes, some dating back to the War of Independence. See FO 16/4-70 for the 1840s. Nugent to George Canning 24 June 1824 & 5 July 1825, in Webster, Britain and the Independence of Latin America, vol. I, pp. 353–4, 359–60.

  22 John White to Lord Aberdeen 4 & 14 January 1830, 30 June 1830, and John Bidwell (FO) to White, 21 June 1830, in Webster, Britain and the Independence of Latin America, vol. I, pp. 368–71.

  17

  Imaginary Voyages

  Herman Melville was by no means the first to imagine Pacific voyages. For centuries Europeans had been fascinated by the notion of the Antipodes, the weight of an unknown land in the south counterbalancing the land masses of the northern hemisphere, keeping the earth in balance as it rotated. Their literary existence long preceded their discovery, prompting all manner of imaginary writing, which turned speculative geography into the stuff of fiction. Here the link between real and imaginary voyages was ancient, and potent. The mythic antipodes were finally displaced from the map by Captain Cook’s second voyage, which proved a negative. He replaced a mega-continent with an alternative geography of island constellations and unknown peoples, which swiftly became subjects of fascination and wonder for European audiences predisposed to see the exotic in this unknown region. Many authors responded to the new discoveries by imagining the next stage of exploration.

  Such imaginary voyages have a long history, exploring the frontiers of knowledge, places where different worlds could be imagined. In the twentieth century they were set in outer space, before that the South Pacific had served the same function. These Pacific fictions constitute a distinct literary genre, dominated by colonialist writings from Britain and France. Much attention has been paid to the imperial/colonialist portrayal of indigenous peoples. On uninhabited islands like Juan Fernández men can write their identities without difficulty. There were no indigenous peoples to contest the discoverer’s meaning, challenge the naming of places, or resist occupation. There was no need to fight, and no risk that the discoverer could be accused of annihilating local peoples. That said, the twenty-first century has become far more conscious of the devastation wrought by humans on their complex, fragile ecosystems.

  The best known of these imaginary voyages, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, provided a complex mix of agendas and ideologies to contemporary readers. The success of Defoe’s book was such that for at least two hundred years the literate world, far from certain what was true and what was not, preferred to engage with the text at a literal level. The quest for ‘Crusoe’s island’ and the ‘real’ Crusoe, which has continued to this day, is both a testament to Defoe’s creative power and a widespread failure of imagination. Defoe wrote in a tradition dating back to Sir John Mandeville and Thomas More, exploiting popular subjects of the day, the survivor/castaway and buccaneer narratives. It was rare that such works were constructed without an agenda.

  In one key area the imaginary world was anything but simple. The impact of scurvy on the mind was significant, and unpredictable:

  Scurvy was known to result in heightened sensual awareness and made contrasts seem more extreme (such as the difference between pain and pleasure). The disease would leave its victims in unpredictably altered states, often delirious and highly sensitive to visual stimulation, a state of ‘scurvied rapture’ that also amplified attraction or repulsion.1

  When scurvy sufferers reached land their condition transformed a fruitful, fertile island into a paradise of mythic proportions. If real travellers, afflicted by a common traveller’s disease, were prone to seeing paradise in the prosaic then the field was open to pure imagination, suitably informed by scurvied accounts. More’s Utopia, disease wracked visions and bookmaking craft offered endless opportunities to reimagine.

  The potential for uncertainty was increased by early travel collections, from Hakluyt onward, which included mythic, fabulous and forged texts either from ignorance or an intention to mislead. More set his fable in the part imagined world of Amerigo Vespucci’s second voyage; Defoe exploited a library of different narratives, while Rousseau further muddied the waters by linking Anson and Defoe. In this regard it is essential to stress that uninhabited Juan Fernández was not utopia; it was an earthly paradise where men found goat, cabbage tree and crayfish.

  The success of Defoe’s book created the ‘robinsonade’ –
stories that followed his model, one that has never lost the power to fascinate, a fact attested by the constant reuse of survivor, castaway and maroon metaphors in contemporary popular culture. The model requires a Juan Fernández-like island, without indigenous peoples. Defoe rarely strayed from reality, because he had a powerful, polemical project in mind, and would not wish to risk it by dabbling in the fantastic. Swift, with more satirical intent, found the fantastic a powerful ally.

  For many reasons, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century voyages and travels were closer to fiction than other factual texts, and the space that separated them from fictional alternative could be strikingly small. By the nineteenth century these genres had hardened to the point that such melding of fact and fiction was increasingly contested. Melville’s response was unusual, simply bursting the limits, but he did so at a time when audiences were increasingly uneasy about work that blurred the line between fact and fiction. By the 1830s the old-fashioned imaginary voyage had become obsolete, replaced by new, fresh and starkly realistic travel tales. Who could hope to invent anything to compare with John Franklin’s arctic cannibal survivor story, or tales of Timbuktu, which opened hitherto mythic spaces to forensic scrutiny. This new literature was organised around scientific voyaging, published in London, and largely propelled by Admiralty Secretary John Barrow.2

  Such voyages were driven by the quest for useful knowledge, of navigation, terrestrial magnetism, and economic opportunities. In this Barrow followed Sir Joseph Banks, having worked closely with the aging colossus in his last decade at the Royal Society. The emotive power of the genre was reflected in the commercial success of the best narratives, from John Franklin to Charles Darwin. By the 1840s British audiences demanded their travel tales be true, they did not want any more robinsonades. They wanted a reliable report of proceedings, one that avoided any suspicion of authorial invention. While Leopold von Ranke invested history with an aura of objectivity that transformed it from opinion and argument to ‘science’, travel texts produced by experienced navigators implied the same detachment, a quality more likely to be found in the straightforward accounts of seamen than the reworked versions of professional scribes. The contrast between Hawkesworth’s version of Cook’s first voyage and the unvarnished words of the great man from the second provide a compelling case. Yet it cannot be denied that imaginary voyages still shaped the expectations of travellers. Crusoe dominated the mental world of eighteenth and nineteenth century voyagers as they approached Juan Fernández; they went ashore looking for his cave, imposing Defoe’s story on the very different reality that they encountered. Those with access to a wider range of texts could add references to Anson, and perhaps Dampier. The wonderment of the Reverend Walter was but little removed from Crusoe, shaped as it had been by a succession of buccaneer narratives themselves clouded by scorbutic rapture. The worlds of fact and fiction were endlessly intertwined.

  By the 1820s references to Juan Fernández had become confused, the divergent strains of history and fiction melded and refracted in the minds of passing travellers. In September, HMS Blonde ran past the island on her return from Hawaii. Artist and guest Robert Dampier, a distant relative of the old buccaneer, invested the view with a highly developed romantic sensibility:

  On Saturday afternoon, still carrying with us our favouring breezes, we made the island of Juan Fernández. The bold, rocky outline of its mountains, which appear very high, has a fine effect from the sea; the vallies & low land seemed uncommonly rich & verdant, calling to mind the beautiful tale of Robinson Crusoe, one gazed on this island with peculiar interest. Goats, which I believe thrive there in great abundance, are now the sole proprietors. Formerly convicts from the Chilean states were banished to this desolate spot.3

  They had already failed to reach island in February, frustrated by the wind. Dampier joined the ship at Rio de Janeiro, at the invitation of Captain Lord Byron, cousin of the lately deceased poet, and grandson of Wager survivor ‘Foul Weather Jack’ Byron. The Dampier distinction drew between the island’s rich natural habitat and desolate location was significant. He read it as a fictive location, an isolated setting for romance and wonder. By contrast Lieutenant George Peard, sailing to the Bering Straits on HMS Blossom passed a month later, and observed:

  We sailed from Valparaiso on Saturday the 29th with a breeze from the Southward & Westward and kept close to the wind on the Larboard tack in order to fetch the island of Juan Fernández, celebrated for having been for so many years the solitary abode of Alexander Selkirk. But finding this object unattainable, on the 31st we bore WbS [West by South] for Easter Island.4

  Peard viewed the island as a problem of navigation, ship-handling and weather: it is highly significant that the solitary inhabitant he recalled had been a real mariner. HMS Blossom never sighted the island.

  The Royal Navy also visited Juan Fernández with scientific purpose. Dispatched in 1826 the survey ship HMS Adventure, Captain Philip Parker King and her smaller consort, the soon to be famous HMS Beagle, to complete a thorough survey of the Cape Horn region between the River Plate and the strategic island of Chiloe, which had occupied the dreams of English projectors since Charles II’s day. Now the object was safe navigation for the growing commercial links with Chile and Peru. Both ships came armed with a battery of chronometers and a library packed with published accounts, charts and manuscript sailing directions. Although the geographical limits of the survey fell far short of Juan Fernández, the wider purpose of improved navigation sustained the age-old link between the island and the passage via Cape Horn or the Straits of Magellan, making it essential to fix the island on the chart and check its condition as a refuge for scorbutic crews.

  After completing the west coast survey and visiting Valparaiso to refit and have his chronometers cleaned and rated by the local agent of Liverpool manufacturer Roskell, King included Juan Fernández on the return leg south to Talcahuano and Concepción. Adventure arrived in Cumberland Bay on 16 February 1830, five days after leaving the Chilean coast. As the ship approached the island he was struck by the ‘remarkable and picturesque view’. Initially only El Yunque registered, ‘an abrupt wall of dark-coloured bare rock, eight or nine hundred feet in height, through whose wild ravines, broken by the mountain torrents, views are caught of verdant glade, surrounded by luxuriant woodland’. Adventure anchored in Tryal’s berth, close to Bahía Pangal.5

  The island had been occupied, rented by Dom Joachim Larrain who left a governor and about forty people to work the seal and cod fisheries for passing trade, and dry fish for the mainland. The seal colony had been greatly reduced by over-fishing. There was no sign of agriculture, a failing which the governor attributed to insect pests; King blamed Chileno indolence. The huts were a good distance away from the old fort at San Juan Bautista, to avoid the harsh winds. The fort was still in tolerable order, having been repaired as recently as 1809, but unarmed; he noted traces of another two batteries. The men quickly set to fishing, both ‘cod and crayfish remained plentiful’. So were the goats that fed the buccaneers and saved Lord Anson, but they were hard to catch, remaining high up on the mountains. The lowland areas still belonged to wild dogs descended from packs landed by long forgotten Spanish Viceroys. For the first time a Royal Navy expedition paid close attention to the geology, fauna and botany of the island, linking their findings to samples obtained on Más Afuera. This was a voyage in Anson’s wake.

  There are few persons who have not read, with much interest, Mr Walter’s account of the Centurion’s voyage, and who are not well acquainted with his description of this island, which we found exceedingly correct. The views of the land, although old-fashioned in execution, are most correctly delineated, and the plan of the bay is quite sufficient for every common purpose of navigation; but as we had an opportunity of fixing its latitude and longitude more correctly, it became desirable to make a more detailed plan than Commodore Anson’s.6

  King also took visual references from Walter’s account, noting the link between A
nson’s ‘valley’ and the clearances made by earlier Spanish settlers. Some of the junior officers had an opportunity to get beyond the beach, crossing the mountain spine at the pass known as ‘Puertozuela’ (which had yet to acquire the modern label ‘Selkirk’s Mirador’) and hunt goats on the barren lands beyond. Adventure sailed from Cumberland Bay on 22 February.7 King redrew the charts as part of his global project to record meridional distances to improve accurate navigation. HMS Beagle also passed the island, her officers producing some excellent coastal perspectives.8

  In August 1834 Charles Darwin, in Santiago pursuing his geological researches while the Beagle was surveying, met ‘a strange genius, a Major Sutcliffe’. A former British officer who had served in the Chilean war of independence, Sutcliffe claimed to have sent a book of old voyages through the Straits of Magellan to Fitzroy. Darwin was sceptical: ‘I do not know what to make of him. He is full of marvellous stories; and to the surprise of every one every now & then some of them are proved to be true.’9 Four months later this mysterious fantasist would be the governor of Juan Fernández, the ideal location for a dramatic collision between English dreams and South American realities – ending in melodrama and exile.

  Sutcliffe had been sent to administer the island and the reestablished prison settlement. Anxious to bring something of the English improving approach to his new domain Sutcliffe addressed the ramshackle buildings, limited infrastructure and lack of agriculture. Having built a jetty and assessed the commercial opportunities Sutcliffe sent a letter to London Times advertising his new domain as a source of wood, water and food. Passing British ships need not bother to anchor, his new jetty made loading easy. Finally he stressed the link to Crusoe and his peculiar position as a British governor, and, quoting Cowper’s lines, reckoned himself ‘Monarch of all I Survey’.10