The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe

by Rick Wilson

  Chapter 2

  A Tale of Two Tales

  It happened one day about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition ... How it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.

  Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

  It is one of the most famous scenes ever evoked by a novel: the moment when the marooned Robinson Crusoe finds the footprint in his island’s sand that will eventually lead him to Man Friday and some unexpected but welcome companionship.

  One footprint: ‘I could see no other impression but that one.’ The cover of this book illustrates two such prints – of left and right feet – to make it clear that, despite unquestionably being the inspiration for Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk was quite a different animal. He would surely have seen footprints in the mud of his island, but they would have been his own. For the essential difference was that he and his remarkable story were real. Also, he was a working-class rough diamond from a Scottish fishing village background whose impetuous character contrasted starkly with that of Defoe’s Crusoe, a middle-class, genteel plantation owner. And there are dozens of other stark differences between the two stories. To mention but a few ...

  Crusoe is the sole survivor of a dramatic shipwreck, while Selkirk’s abandonment was to some degree self-imposed – after he argued with his Captain Thomas Stradling, refused to sail further with him if their ship was not properly prepared, and had his bluff called.

  Crusoe is rescued and taken home to England in 1686 after surviving 28 years, two months, and 19 days on the island, while Selkirk was marooned on his island for four years and four months before being rescued in 1709.

  Crusoe spends his early castaway days shuttling on a makeshift raft between the beach and the shipwreck and manages to salvage endless piles of useful stuff – from muskets and powder through crowbars and hammocks, nails and clothes; whereas, after his abandonment, Selkirk was set on the beach with only limited personal possessions grudgingly allowed by the captain.

  Crusoe enjoys the company not only of Man Friday but of a dog and a parrot, while Selkirk’s consoling companions were his domesticated goats and a veritable army of cats which he taught tricks.

  Crusoe’s return home eventually sees him marrying and settling down with a family (before his wife’s death), while Selkirk’s childless love life was an extraordinary mess – he promised himself to one woman from his home village, married an English woman, and made wills to them both, so that his estate was bitterly fought over after his demise.

  Crusoe’s fictional island was located by Defoe not in the Pacific Ocean (as was Selkirk’s factual island of Mas-a-Tierra in the Juan Fernandez archipelago), but in the Atlantic – ‘22 degrees of longitude difference west from Cape St Augustino’ so that Crusoe found he was ‘gotten upon the coast of Guiana, or the north part of Brazil, beyond the River Amazonas, toward that of the River Oronoque, commonly called the Great River.’

  Tourism chiefs on the island of Tobago seem to think that means them, so they have generated a lively tourism industry around the myth of Crusoe’s presence there, which also includes ‘his cave.’ Here is some of Tobago’s present-day tourism publicity:

  Tobago – Robinson Crusoe’s island

  Tobago, also called Crusoe’s Island, is said to be the island on which Daniel Defoe modelled his famous book. The cave where the fictional character dwelled is near Crown Point.

  Crusoe would have been very much at home here. The island is one of beauty and contrasts and in many areas is still unspoilt and even undiscovered by visitors. The traditional Tobago of golden sandy beaches and friendly local fishermen still remains. While the isand’s south-west corner has some lovely hotels of very high standard there is still a huge variety of smaller character hotels and quiet villas for visitors to enjoy.

  Tobago has two distinct coastlines. The rugged Atlantic coast with its dramatic views and spectacular coast road is also home to some sheltered coves and beautiful beaches. This windward side of the island leads up to the wildlife paradise of Tyrrel’s Bay with the enchanting outcrops of Goat Island and Little Tobago just a short boat ride away.

  By contrast the leeward Caribbean coastline is peppered with gentle golden sandy beaches, beautiful yet peaceful and undiscovered. The waters around Tobago are fed from the great Orinoco River whose warm currents sustain a marine life of incredible diversity.

  Tobago has all the good things of the Caribbean so perhaps Robinson Crusoe did live here after all?

  And here is how the genuine castaway’s Chilean island of Mas a Tierra is promoted after having been officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island by the Chilean government in 1966; though it is still more generally referred to simply as Juan Fernandez.

  Juan Fernandez: Robinson Crusoe Island

  Robinson Crusoe Island was created by several volcanic explosions which gave life to the group of Juan Fernández Islands. The island was lived on for four years by the shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk, who motivated the writer Daniel Defoe to write the literature classic Robinson Crusoe.

  Nature endows the island with a unique variety of flora and vegetables specific to this location. Also, there are animals like the fur seal and red hummingbird which are unique to this area.

  The awe of such natural beauty gives one an appreciation and motivated the world authorities to pronounce the island as a national park and a world biosphere reserve. Existing under these 2 titles helps to secure conservation of its biodiversity.

  Robinson Crusoe Island is unique to the other Juan Fernández Islands due to its permanent population concentrated in the city of San Juan Bautista. The local economy is based on lobster fishing.

  From November to April the island is full of life. During this time, one can appreciate the birth of the fur seal babies who cordially observe the arrival of tourists and greet them with funny somersaults.

  The story of Selkirk’s stay on the island has transformed it into a mysterious, exciting place. But its beauty has made it an unforgettable paradise.

  Actually, there are three islands in the Juan Fernandez archipelago. Robinson Crusoe is the main one, with its small population, fishing industry and almost invisible airfield for daring visitors; the others are both uninhabited – the tiny Santa Clara and also-renamed Alexander Selkirk Island, which was never even visited by the Scottish mariner.

  In any case, the two castaway islands, the real and the imagined one, are a huge distance apart and such radical differences in the two tales go on and on. Yet there is no dissenting voice, academic or otherwise, ever to be heard when the claim is made that the Scottish sailor’s experience inspired the classic story by Daniel Defoe, though he set it back 50 years and east into another ocean altogether.

  However, if it is quite generally accepted that Defoe based his famous book on the exploits of Alexander Selkirk, some people might find it a little puzzling to discover just how little the two tales have in common. In some minds the stories are actually just one, so intertwined are they in the general consciousness: as with the renaming of Selkirk’s island to Crusoe; as with the Crusoe Hotel in Lower Largo where, despite the name, one would assume the focus would be on the local connection alone. But while a dedicated display room celebrates Selkirk and a novelty signpost outside also points to Juan Fernandez (7,500 miles away) well-fed diners in the restaurant can view an illustrated wall mounting that summarises the fictitious tale of Defoe’s hero.

  So when you mention Selkirk’s name, many people say, ‘Oh, yes, Robinson Crusoe’ as if they were one and the same person. And yet the stories’ similarities seem fewer than their differences. Apart from his wearing of the goats’ skins as clothes when his own everyday clothes give out, one of Crusoe’s most striking similarities with Selkirk is the keeping of these animals, whose ancestors in the true story were initially imported to the island by a passing Spani
sh ship. This is from the Defoe’s novel:

  My dog surprised a young kid, and seized upon it, and I, running in to take hold of it, caught it, and saved it alive from the dog. I had a great mind to bring it home if I could; for I had often been musing, whether it might not be possible to get a kid of two and so raise a breed of tame goats, which might supply me when my powder and shot should be all spent. I made a collar to this little creature, and with a string which I made of some rope-yarn which I always carried about me, I led him along, though with some difficulty till I came to my bower, and there I enclosed him and left him ...

  Despite the natural riches of his island that gave Selkirk some happiness and most of his physical wants, he was occasionally stricken by severe bouts of melancholy and homesickness. And such moments would also envelope Crusoe ...

  The anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm and make me wring my hands and weep like a child.

  Selkirk may have had his troubles with the Church in his wild Fifeshire youth (see chapter 3), but in his isolated state he found himself turning to religion – as did Crusoe when feeling down:

  I daily read the Word of God and applied all the comforts of it to my present state. One morning, being very sad, I opened the Bible upon these words, ‘I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee’; immediately it occurred that these words were to me; why else should they be directed in such a manner, just at the moment when I was mourning over my condition, as one forsaken of God and man?

  What the two figures also had in common was a recurring and disturbing ambivalence about the happiness or misery found on their imposed island home:

  I began to conclude in my mind that it was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken, solitary condition than it was probable I should ever have been in any other particular state in the world; and with this thought I was going to give thanks to God for bringing me to this place. I know not what it was, but something shocked my mind at that thought, and I durst not speak the words. ‘How canst thou be such a hypocrite,’ said I, even audibly, ‘to pretend to be thankful for a condition which however thou may’st endeavour to be contented with, thou wouldst rather pray heartily to be deliver’d from?’

  The Selkirk spark for the classic book is accepted everywhere as a fact, the only doubt being whether he and the author ever met and, if so, where. The only person who appears to have been shy about acknowledging Selkirk’s input is Defoe himself, and more of that later. But it is first worth pointing out just what a massive literary achievement Robinson Crusoe was, coming at a time when the multitasking author – pamphleteer, tax inspector, journalist, economist, merchant, novelist and English government spy on Scotland before the Union – really needed a financial fillip.

  For me, it was summed up by a visit to Waterstone’s bookshop in central Bristol no fewer than 290 years after the book was first published. ‘Would you have a copy of Robinson Crusoe?’ I enquired innocently. The female assistant with bright red hair looked at me askance. ‘Well, of course we do,’ she said, leading me to a display shelf where there were as many as three editions by three different publishers. ‘We also have several abridged editions for children – who often seem to appreciate them more than contemporary stories.’

  Well. You can’t deny that’s quite something after nearly three centuries. It seems piratical adventures will never lose their appeal to the child in us all.

  No doubt Defoe, the father of seven children, sensed that when he embarked into fiction in his late fifties, desperately broke and struggling to find rewarding work as a journalist. A prolific and versatile writer, in his time he produced more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on a wide range of topics including politics, crime, religion, marriage, geography and psychology. None of these journalistic or literary efforts delivered him much financial security. Indeed, he often got into serious trouble – such as bankruptcy and imprisonment – because of his political intensity, his tendency to libel people, and his inability to stay out of debt.

  It must have been an immeasurable relief to him when the publication of Robinson Crusoe created a sensation in London and far beyond. Published in 1719, the novel was a huge and immediate success. Everything about it seemed to be record-breaking, including its full title which was The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner; Who lived Eight and Twenty Years All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River Oronoque ... An Account of How He Was at Last Strangely Delivered by Pyrates.

  It was soon referred to simply as Robinson Crusoe, of course, and before the end of the year the first edition had run through four print runs. As is so often the case with blockbusters, many publishers had turned it down. But William Taylor, the publisher who accepted it, soon found demand so great he had to employ several printers simultaneously to produce the required number of copies. Often said to be the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe had, within a few years, reached a readership as wide as any book ever written in that language. By the end of the 19th century it had been published in at least 700 editions and translations. And it has remained enduringly popular throughout the world ever since. It is still the most widely read book after the bible, has been translated into virtually every known tongue, and sold tens of millions of copies.

  Despite that huge achievement and all his undoubted talents, Defoe made little money out of it as he sold the copyright and still managed to die poor, probably hiding from his creditors. But in the creation of Crusoe he definitely hit a rich vein of abiding human curiosity. The idea of being separated from civilised society and having to fend for yourself all alone on a deserted island obviously has universal appeal. We all wonder how we would fare in such circumstances: would we go berserk, jump off a cliff from which we see no rescue ships, or buckle down and apply some practical self-discipline to the challenge and wait it out?

  It seems Selkirk experienced a fair mix of these reactions, which no doubt gave Defoe some interesting and authentic detail to work on. But did he get it second-hand or from the man himself? Defoe denied ever meeting Selkirk, but there has long been a huge question mark over that assertion. In any case there were two others close to Selkirk who certainly influenced the creation of Crusoe – Captain Woodes Rogers and Sir Richard Steele. Their well-circulated and avidly-read accounts of the castaway’s adventures could not have been missed by such a diligent man as Defoe, keenly aware of current news events. He was in any case a friend of Steele, also a penny newspaperman and prodigious writer, who had met Selkirk, and they must have discussed the whole castaway saga together. Defoe was obviously taken by the ‘novel’ potential of the tale and (it is respectfully suggested) set about getting his own first-hand, horse’s-mouth interview with Selkirk who, after his return to England with a hugely bountiful Spanish treasure ship (see chapter 5), spent some time in Bristol awaiting another super-ambitious voyage with Captain Woodes Rogers.

  The captain brought Selkirk from London into his Bristol home in leafy, elegant Queen Square partly to reserve and prepare him for this new voyage – with a new South Sea Company heralding peace and freedom of the seas between England and Spain – and partly to show him off as something of a promotional novelty to augment the undoubted impact of his (the captain’s) book, A Cruising Voyage round the World. ‘ A bizarre story is told,’ recalls the Western Daily Press feature writer and editor Gerry Brooke, ‘that while he was a guest of Woodes Rogers, Selkirk amused the local gentry by parading round the elegant square on a Sunday after church, decked out in his island goatskins.’

  Today you can still see the area of Selkirk’s short residency (in the captain’s servant quarters) – at
Queen Square, which is ageing gracefully in all its tree-lined glory, though the house itself has gone. A plaque at Nos 33-35 marks the place where it was ...

  WOODES ROGERS

  1679-1732

  Great seaman, circumnavigator, colonial governor

  Lived in a house on this site

  While Selkirk was becoming a local hero, Defoe – wearing another of his many hats – was a frequent visitor to Bristol as a government excise commissioner for the glass duty, responsible for collecting the tax on bottle manufacture. But his writer’s hat was never far from his head. Had he heard from someone that Selkirk had ‘papers’ – presumably some kind of invaluable log of his adventure? Contrary to his own denial, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that he did interview Selkirk – several times in a few different places – and that he took ‘papers’ from him. If he did not then return them, that would have been potentially scandalous and perhaps explain his denial of a meeting. Another theory is advanced by Bristol historian and pub owner Mark Steeds: ‘I believe Defoe denied having contact with Selkirk because he wanted to distance himself from him so that Robinson Crusoe would be perceived as all his own unassisted work.’

  In any case, it is quite widely accepted in Bristol that Defoe and Selkirk met in the picturesque Tudor-style Llandoger Trow pub, a place which propels you magically back to the 18th century while gracing King Street at right angles to the Welsh Back quayside that saw much River Avon traffic from Wales. It is only a few hundred yards from the erstwhile home of Woodes Rogers.

  On its wood-rich ground floor, next to a sumptuously carved period wooden mantelpiece, the pub boasts a pillar that stakes the claim:

  The Llandoger Trow dates back to 1664 and is steeped in history and legend, the most famous of which are the literary connections to Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson. It is said that Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk, the marooned sailor on which he based the book Robinson Crusoe, here. A trow is a flat-bottomed sailing barge, and the Llandoger part of the name comes from a small Welsh village called Llandogo on the River Wye in Monmouthshire.