by Rick Wilson
The interesting question that arises here is: if the famous castaway had not died at sea but in his home town, would the ever-disapproving church have given him such a place in this graveyard?
Maybe not, but I suspect he still had a place in his family’s heart. For the Selkirk name that he adapted from the old Selcraig – presumably to be more easily pronounced down south and in faraway places – was already famous by the time Andrew died. Clearly the beaten sibling had then decided to adopt it, perhaps even with a small degree of fraternal pride.
Chapter 4
Survival on the Island
Doubts concerning the Seaworthiness of Cinque Ports grew apace after my joining her as Sailing Master in the year 1703, venturing out to the Spanish Americas with William Dampier’s Privateering Expedition. I felt it prudent at first to pass no remark but bore Unease from the Outset.
Aye, and with my Captain Pickering dead and the incompetent Lieutenant Stradling in his place, I was accurs’d with a Dreadful Dream which warned me of the Ultimate Wreck of the Ship and the Miserable Failure of the Expedition.
Additional to the Incompetence of the Vessel and her Men. I saw small chance of Success for a Venture so quickly riven with Rivalry and Bitterness that even the captains could not settle a common Course of Action. Having therefore parted from Dampier and our companion ship St George, a bickering council came, none the less, to Conclusion of sorts; the Cinque Ports should make sail Direct for Juan Fernandez Island there to do our Revictualling; whereupon she might venture Farther North, parallel to the Coast of South America, where the place of Rich Golden Pickings was to be found, among Spanish Trading ships and Settlements.
Yet the leaking Vessel needed more than careening and stocking alone. ’Twas nothing short of folly, in my opinion, to venture further without Radical Repair.
Was I not to say it?
Now he regretted speaking his mind, for he had simply changed it. Wet to the skin and shivering from running into the sea after his resolution failed on his ship’s departure, Selkirk suddenly realised what he had done with his threat to the so-called captain Thomas Stradling – ‘repair the ship properly or go without me’ – who just wanted to push on regardless; and who had then called his bluff. The mutinous castaway now saw that he had invited his own abandonment and severance from society It was an alarming realisation.
He fell to his knees, raked his hands desperately through the grey shingle of Cumberland Bay and roared out an animalistic Scottish curse that echoed up into Mas a Tierra’s high volcanic hills. The lolling seals about him waddled away in fright, as the ship unfurled its sails and slowly disappeared into the distance, ignoring his pleas to come back. No doubt Stradling was laughing now. But he wouldn’t be laughing long, by God. Or so Selkirk believed.
He dragged himself up by his sea chest with a deep sigh, wrenched his focus from the fading white sails and looked around and above the great bay in which he stood. It, too, was suddenly alarming; an environment somehow chillingly different from the spot with which he had become increasingly familiar, over the past month, among his recuperating shipmates.
It was not his first visit to Juan Fernandez. The two-ship expedition had stopped off there in early February 1704, seven months before, when there was almost a mutiny, with 42 men quitting the Cinque Ports in dispute with Captain Stradlng and resolving to stay ashore. Was Selkirk among them? Probably. And he was doubtless sizing up the island’s residential potential when the sudden appearance of a French ship mobilised everyone to defend their own vessels and perhaps then give chase. In the rush, five men were left behind. Three were later taken prisoner by other visiting French ships, while two concealed themselves for six months, eventually rejoining the Cinque Ports on this visit. As Howell noted: ‘Their account of the manner in which they had spent their time fixed the resolution that Selkirk had formed before, to leave the ship and remain upon the island.’
This time – apart from his dealings with the so-called captain – the place had not seemed unfriendly and there had been no fear even as he leapt ashore from the longboat for the last time and ‘with a faint sensation of freedom and joy, shook hands with his comrades and bade them adieu in a hearty manner’ – though there was some disappointment that those who had shared his concerns about the ship and its captain had chosen not to join him.
Now that he stood totally alone on Mas a Tierra, he saw it as awe-inspiring and frightening – jagged peaks, laced with waterfalls, rising abruptly behind him; dark valleys and high wooded enclaves which were home, no doubt, to many monstrous creatures with equally monstrous appetites. He was scared. This was not how it was meant to be. The plan had been for the two-ship convoy of the St George and the Cinque Ports to seize and plunder Spanish ships and settlements to the serious enrichment of the English sailors. But the disillusionment of Alexander Selkirk had begun even before his ship reached the Juan Fernandez archipelago in early September 1704. Along with most of the rest of the crew, he had quickly developed a serious lack of confidence in the leaking vessel and the 21-year-old whippersnapper Stradling, the lieutenant who had taken the captaincy after Captain Charles Pickering’s sudden death. But well before that happened, Selkirk had awoken from a remarkable dream in which he was warned of the total failure of the expedition.
When it came to the crunch, he spoke up. Whatever else he was, the Scot was bluntly honest and knew he had to make his opinion known to the captain. As ship’s master, he insisted on a major overhaul of the badly leaking hull, honeycombed as it was with worm holes. Expedition leader William Dampier might have circumnavigated the world three times but he had made a big mistake before the outset of this voyage, by asserting that the ships’ hull timbers needed no sheathing against the sea worms they might encounter. In the event, the worms had practically devoured the Cinque Ports’ oak frames and the pumps had been manned day and night. Selkirk insisted that the ship – and certainly he – could sail no further unless the beasts were killed off by heating and scraping, and certain timbers replaced.
Stradling was having none of it. The captain’s adamant refusal to agree then resulted in Selkirk being set on the beach of Cumberland Bay on the last day of September 1704, accompanied only by (see chapter 6) the clothes he stood up in, his sea chest, bedding, a musket, a pound of powder, a bag of bullets, several pounds of tobacco, a knife and hatchet, a cooking pot, some cheese and quince marmalade, a flint and steel, a small batch of books including navigational studies and a Bible given to him by his mother in Lower Largo; and his precious navigational instruments.
Thus, 130 years after the Spanish captain Juan Fernandez discovered it, the island of Más a Tierra (meaning closer to land) received what was to be its most famous visitor, a 28-year-old Scottish tanner’s son, who would one day be responsible for the renaming of it as Robinson Crusoe Island. That day it would be something of a visitor magnet and paradise; but for this solitary visitor, staring up and into its forbidding interior on this black day, the island was alive with nightmarish visions and fears.
What ghastly secrets did its dark woods and valleys hold? He would not venture soon or willingly into such deathtraps. Yet he would have to eat. He saw fur seals playing on rocks and, seal flesh being his least favourite food, he hoped they did not represent his future diet. He groaned and looked back out to sea. It had all just been a bit of theatre, hadn’t it, and soon Stradling – realising that he couldn’t operate the Cinque Ports without its sailing master – would be soon turning back to pick him up. Wouldn’t he?
But by sunset, the ship had not returned and he would have to sleep on the beach – under a makeshift tent made from discarded sails – with one eye shut, while the other scanned the moonlit horizon. As he clung fast to his loaded musket, the wailing and bellowing of ‘monsters of the deep’, combined with the crashing waves and high-pitched whine of the winds rushing down through the valleys, had all the makings of a scream-plagued nightmare. He slept not a wink and shook with fear all night. He was almost sur
prised to be alive and unmolested by animals – or even cannibals – in the morning; but he would do this again and again. Inland, it would be far worse at night, among the moving dark shadows and alarming noises of trees breaking and falling under the force of the winds. He did not intend to leave the beach until he saw the sail of the returning Cinque Ports, or some other rescuer. He would run from England’s Spanish enemies, but anyone else could happily have the pleasure of his company.
Why was he so confident of being picked up? This island was well known to English privateers as a safe and reliable refuge. Many stopped off to restock with its small lobster-like crayfish, goat meat, water, fish and a berry-like fruit from the so-called cabbage palm. He supposed these would serve this castaway well enough until his day of salvation, though he would miss his bread and salt. The crayfish were particularly easy to catch and their flesh was delicious, at least to begin with, but if he ate too many fish he found they ‘occasion’d a Looseness’ in his bowel. Not that it mattered much as there was no-one else to witness his discomfort. He was the reluctant monarch of all he surveyed, but what monarch could live by wild fruit and crayfish alone, he thought, as he began to long for some real red meat. Knowing there were goats in the hills – descendants of those left by earlier visiting Spanish sailors – Selkirk was driven by hunger into the hinterland with his musket, to seek out and shoot one in daylight. It was easier than he thought and he brought the beast back to the beach in triumph, hung around his shoulders.
To cook it, to warm himself and to hope he might be seen by a rescuer, he lit a fire with the firelock of his gun. It was fuelled with the fragrant wood of pimento trees, giving a long, steady flame which he then found comforting to tend through the noises of the night. The flesh of the goat served him well, giving him food for days on end, including a robust soup which he enhanced with local vegetables radishes, watercress and turnips. It lacked only salt and bread, he thought, but it was still nourishing and tasty and he used the leaves of the cabbage-palm plant as bread.
There were such compensations, but no-one to share them with. Without sight of a friendly sail, far less a friendly face, the isolation quickly became unbearable. And those night-time horrors! What would he do about them? Had he exchanged one deathtrap for another? How long could he survive like this? Over the weeks and months as the horizon remained stubbornly empty, save for a few white spots of sails that always passed the island by, he grew weak and dejected and much less hopeful that he could escape the clutches of the wild animals that he had convinced himself roamed the interior.
His early optimism about rescue now looked badly misplaced, and he let depression take a strong grip on him. He turned to his Bible for comfort and consolation, beginning a daily routine of morning and evening prayer services at which he spoke out loud, if only to keep his voice in practice. ‘I was a better Christian while in this solitude than I ever was before, or that, I am afraid, I should ever be again,’ he said later.
When he was particularly low he even began to contemplate suicide. One night, as dusk was falling, he measured out the options that his musket and limited supply of powder and bullets gave him. There were only three: 1. Use it on himself now to avoid the slow, lingering death or animal attack he feared. 2. Keep shooting whatever he could for food in the hope of a rescue ship turning up sooner rather than later and, if not saved before the bullets ran out, use the last one on himself. 3. After powder exhaustion, struggle on weaponless, making do and hoping for the best. At the moment, the first option was looking the most appealing. But he quickly realised that was probably what Stradling had in mind for him – in the tradition among offended captains of putting troublemakers on sandbanks with a one-shot pistol. They could then shoot themselves or wait for the sharks to take them.
It wasn’t quite the same, but if this was what Stradling had been hoping for, Selkirk wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of killing himself. With his spirit so weakened, it was a big challenge to maintain the will to live, but he had to do it. The misery of his marooning at this time was probably well imagined by the poet William Cowper in the poem published in 1782 as ‘Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk During His Solitary abode in the Island of Juan Fernandez’:
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,
How soon would I taste you again!
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 heavenly 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’re sigh’d at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled 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 cabin repair.
There is mercy in ev’ry place;
And mercy, encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace,
And reconciles man to his lot.
But life had to go on. Hunger being the mother of courage, as necessity is of invention, his forays from the beach and into the hinterland became more frequent and, meeting nothing there more dangerous than agitated goats, he started to believe there might be nothing to fear in the woods. He had already realised that the bellowing from the seaward side was nothing more than the nocturnal calls of the fearsome-looking but cumbersome two-ton sea lions and he gradually realised that this was a benign and truly verdant island on which to be cast away.
Though it was 18 months before he could absent himself for a whole day from the beach, he gradually became ‘reconciled to his lot.’ It was not long after that, however, that he took the goat by the horns, as it were, and hauled his stuff two miles up into the mountains, found a secluded clearing with a fine view over the bay to the horizon, and proceeded to build two huts – one to live in, one to use as a kitchen. Goatskins covered their pimento-tree framework and although not especially robust, they were soon cosy enough to call home. Here he was able to keep himself in food while still keeping watch for the telltale signs of sails entering the great bay. He
also found a lookout point higher up the hill which he would visit every day for an even better view. The distance between the campsite and the lookout point was only about half a kilometre, but probably twice that distance if he followed the zig-zags of the present-day path. The going is difficult, uphill all the way, and it would have taken him at least half an hour to reach it.
But he did so unmolested and the exercise gave him such strength that his fitness reached unimaginable levels. It was clear to him now that he was not threatened by any wild animals. Above him in the skies there were hawks, puffin-like pardels, albatrosses, owls and humming birds the size of bees. The most annoying ground animals he had to deal with were rats and feral cats (from previous visiting ships) that were attracted to his warmth and his food, nibbled about his body and tore at his clothes while he slept. Being most irritated by the aggressive rats, he started to encourage the cats by offering them titbits, and soon he had an army of them stationed around his camp – with some of them even cuddled up in his bed. The cats took care of the rats.
In the absence of human company, the cats soon became much-loved affectionate friends as he played with them, taught them tricks, and talked and sang to them in an effort to keep his voice alive. He even taught them to dance and ‘often afterwards declared, that he never danced with a lighter heart or greater spirit any where to the best of music, than he did to the sound of his own voice with his dumb companions.’
He was friendly, too, with the goats, though that was a more complex relationship as he needed them for food and he tried not to get too fond of them before they had to be killed. But he did not always shoot them. He would sometimes catch the kid goats by hand, an exercise that helped maintain his fitness. He would chase them barefoot up and down the hills, along the craggy tracks and through the forest with great fleetness of foot until he could grab them by the hind leg and bring them ‘home’ to a pen where he would cripple them and keep them until required. It was a way of keeping food fresh that owed something to his shipboard way of life. He varied his diet, however reluctantly, with seal meat and shellfish, and at every meal the cabbage-palm was a substitute for bread.