The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe

by Rick Wilson

  Howell recalled that the coconut shell cup was ‘at one time richly and tastefully mounted with silver, until it was unfortunately stolen by a travelling pedlar before being returned (from Perth) deprived of its silver.’ The silver rim – engraved with the words ‘The Cup of Alexander Selkirk whilst in Juan Fernandez 1704–07’ – was restored to the cup by no less a person than Sir Walter Scott.

  Howell wrote of Selkirk’s ‘flip-can’ thus:

  But by far the most interesting relic is his flip-can in possession of his great-grand-nephew, John Selcraig. It holds about a Scottish pint and is made of brown stoneware glazed: it resembles a common porter-jug as used at the present day. On it is the following inscription and posey, as, in former times, every thing belonging to a sailor that would admit of it had its rhyme:

  Alexander Selkirk, this is my one.

  _____________________________________

  When you take me on board of ship,

  Pray fill me full with punch or flip.

  That the flip-can accompanied him in all his wanderings and stay on the island I have no hesitation to affirm. He had no opportunity to get it made after he left England upon his last cruise; and that it was manufactured at his own request the inscription evidently shows. That he would get it made upon his return is not probable, as he came to Largo so soon after, where he could have no use for it; besides, ever since he went away from thence, it has been generally locked up, and at one time by a niece during fifty years together. It was never seen by any of his other friends all that time, and the jug appears to have been very much used before it was left at Largo; so much so that it is broken at the mouth in two places, and the handle is also gone. It being cracked, there is a patch of pitch upon it to strengthen and prevent it from extending. This must have been put on while at sea by Alexander himself.

  Where is that precious relic now? Dr Caldwell thinks it passed on to the distinguished 19th-century collector Adam Sim of Biggar, Lanarkshire, but, as with so many items, the trail runs dry in later times and today we are left with the chest, the coconut cup, and two other relics said to have belonged to Selkirk: a powder horn and a knife, which are kept in storage in the little Victorian castle that is St Andrews Museum, not far from the famous golf course.

  These don’t get out much either, except for special exhibitions like the Famous Fifers theme that was celebrated a few years ago. The museum’s curator, Lesley-Anne Lettice, expresses regret that the items can’t be on permanent display (‘We have 20,000 objects and display room for only a fraction of them,’ she says) or in a smaller museum dedicated to the ancient mariner (‘The problems of temperature control, security and staffing all come down to money’).

  The clasp knife is missing its steel blade, but the heavy ivory handle is still intact and worth examination with its decorative carved cross-hatching and the initials AS burned into it with small dots. The powder horn is made of wood and brass with decorative circles and figures similarly burned into the wood. But how do we know anyway that such items were truly Selkirk’s? ‘Well, we don’t,’ Ms Lettice tells me. ‘We just have to take some things on trust. The problem is, the more things are moved around the murkier their provenance becomes.’

  These two relics represent a case in point. In 1998 they were transferred to St Andrews from Kirkcaldy Museum, to which they had been donated in 1970 by ‘an Edinburgh woman.’ But why did she believe them to be the real deal? ‘Along with them we found a label by an unknown author,’ says the curator, ‘which basically just said flatly that they had belonged to Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe, and were bought from one of his descendants named Thomson in East Fifeshire in 1849.’ Well … so what? I hear myself say. But what else is there that we can be sure about?

  In the modern university library in St Andrews – languishing in a strong-room – are the Kirk Session minutes from Largo and Newburn Parish Church (1691–1707) which record various transgressions and family troubles involving the young Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig as he was then known, referred to in chapter 3. Anything else? Well, maybe the musket, but I will come to that later. While all of these (except the musket) can be seen on request, the fact that none is on permanent display in Edinburgh, St Andrews or Lower Largo is a matter of real regret for those who believe in the tourism potential for Fife and Scotland of the Selkirk-Crusoe story.

  One such person is Stewart Dykes, proprietor of Lower Largo’s old Crusoe hotel, who told me: ‘The Selkirk-Crusoe story is a much better one than the legend of the Loch Ness monster, for instance, simply because it’s true. If the big museum doesn’t want to show the relics, why can’t we just have a dedicated museum here, to promote the village and the county and even the country? I’d be happy to play my part in that by providing premises.’

  Of course, being relatively new to the area, Stewart wasn’t around when a small Selkirk museum in Largo was last tried in 1986, and so did not witness the minimal interest that it generated – despite being lent several of the aforementioned historic Selkirk relics (another of their rare outings from the National Museum and St Andrews University) and despite a grand opening in the presence of several local dignitaries plus the Chilean ambassador to Britain. This little family museum, accommodated in the ground floor of the ‘statue’ house, was inspired and organised by Allan Jardine junior’s mother, Ivy, a couple of years after her farmer husband and his father, also Allan, died. Apart from the aforementioned artefacts, it displayed the illustrated full-colour storyboard which formed the basis of an interview feature on the BBC’s Blue Peter children’s television programme. But one of the items of which she was most proud, she told me, was a page from the log of HMS Weymouth, which recorded the death – along with many fellow crew members stricken with yellow fever – of Lieutenant Alexander Selkirk off the Gambian coast on December 13, 1721. He was 45 years old, a ripe age for a sailor in the days when surviving even one voyage was almost a miracle.

  Yet in the oddly contrary way that these things happen (or don’t) in hard-to-impress Scotland, Mrs Jardine’s dynamism and total commitment to the Selkirk cause did not harness the popular interest that such an initiative would doubtless have received in America. As it was expressed by another Selkirk descendant, Bruce Selcraig: ‘Were this the United States, you wouldn’t be able to see the sea for all the billboards touting Crusoe Land Thrill Rides and Man Friday Burgers.’ As it was, the little museum was closed within the year … but not before something else happened.

  THE FINDING OF ‘THE GUN’.

  It is at this point that I have to declare a degree of personal interest – I was actively involved in the acquisition of one (albeit unauthenticated) Selkirk relic that played a part in the little museum’s short but poignant life. As editor of The Scotsman magazine at the time, I was jolted into action when I read an article in the paper in December 1985, about the museum’s forthcoming opening which contained this sentence: ‘It is the gun which the family would most dearly like to get hold of, not least because of its chequered history.’

  It hit me like a musket ball between the eyes, and I immediately determined to flush out the ancient Fife mariner’s trusty, rusty flintlock; but I admit that there was something nagging me about it – could it have been my recollection of a frontispiece engraving of Robinson Crusoe holding two muskets in a facsimile first edition of Defoe’s book? Despite this misgiving, I decided to start my search.

  In truth, the challenge to find the gun was something of an obligation I had spontaneously offered to make prior to seeing the article. Some ten years before, during the village’s 300th-birthday celebrations for Selkirk, Mrs Jardine expressed to me the family’s fervent wish to see ‘the gun’ brought home. ‘Done,’ said I, slipping quickly into my metaphorical Superman cape only to fall promptly flat on my face. My excuse was that I was working abroad at the time.

  But now, having returned home, there were no more excuses and my promise would not let me rest, suggesting a degree of altruism that the sensational disc
overy of ‘Crusoe’s lost musket’ would surely signify for a jaundiced hack like me. If I had known then what this exercise would cost the newspaper after three months on the telephone, I would have apologised beforehand. I do apologise now, in the hope that at least a good story was judged to have come from it.

  But how was I to start? First, I threw aside that Superman persona, as I was older and wiser; then cautiously approached what seemed the clearest lead provided by Mrs Jardine – a letter she received in 1983 from one Ernest Lanning, of South Godstone, Surrey, which read:

  In the mid-1920s, when at my preparatory school, Colet Court, in London, a classmate (whose name escapes me at the moment) mentioned that his father had Selkirk’s gun in his possession. Eventually the boy (or his father) brought the gun to the school and it was shown, with great awe and reverence, to our class. I have never had any doubts that this was the genuine gun which had belonged to Selkirk.

  This surely meant that if Mr Lanning, then 72, could remember his fellow-pupil’s name, that person could conceivably still be traced and persuaded to spill a bean or two about the gun’s subsequent progress? Not so easy. Mr Lanning wanted to remember but couldn’t. Would the names of all his fellow pupils help? ‘Perhaps.’ School archivist Penny Denton obligingly produced all the form lists in which Mr Lanning’s name appeared and I sent them on. Did they ring any bells? ‘No, so sorry’ he replied.

  What about his teacher? Could she possibly be still alive? Yes! The archivist came to the rescue again, but Miss Hollom – then in her nineties, very deaf and living in Hampshire – could only vaguely understand what I was enquiring about.

  I tried a different tack. Having heard that Mr Arthur Credland, curator of the Kingston-Upon-Hull Museum, made investigations about the gun before mounting a Selkirk exhibition a few years before, I contacted him and persuaded him to send me his research file. When I received it, I saw at once (as he had seen) that we were talking about more than one gun. The thickening of the plot was signalled by a press clipping from May 22, 1924, which referred to the sale at Sothebys ‘yesterday’ of ‘the Robinson Crusoe gun’ and was accompanied by photographs. These clearly showed that this was not the weapon sold in Edinburgh (a very long-barreled brute with a wedge chopped off its butt) but one with a rather more handsome butt, engraved with the words A. SELKIRK and SEAL CRAIG, the latter being the original spelling of Sekirk’s name, and supported by carvings of a seal and a crag as a kind of visual pun. As Mr Lanning had mentioned ‘his’ gun bearing such carvings, I decided to stay on this one’s trail until it either delivered the goods or went cold.

  This was to become the search for ‘GUN No 1’. Surely I could trace it through Sothebys’ records? The buyer’s name, CJ Sawyer, might lead me to his 1924 address at the very least. From client services to cashier’s department, I was sent round in circles to be finally told that the records were long gone, buried and ‘unfindable in some North London warehouse.’

  So, back to the Credland file: where did he get that clipping from? The answer was Eric Smith of the Clapham Antiquarian Society who told me he had done some research on the gun in 1936, talking to Sothebys etc. Did he have the buyer’s address? He did! He revealed that Mr Sawyer was an antiquarian book dealer in London’s Grafton Street and as I scanned the Sawyers I had photocopied from the relevant London directory I saw that the shop was still there!

  Mr Sawyer, of course, was no longer alive but his son Charles was alive, well and had retired in Sevenoaks, Kent. Did he remember his father having the gun?

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said, raking his memory almost audibly, ‘yes ... I think I do remember it very vaguely. Dad did have such a gun but it’s very hard to recall the details. I was only a child at prep school then.’

  ‘Which prep school would that be?’ I asked.

  ‘Colet Court.’

  I was onto it! Was it possible that his father could have shown the gun to the whole school?

  ‘Yes, now that you mention it, I do recall him taking the gun there and giving a little lecture about it.’

  One mystery solved at last. Sawyer junior was two years younger than Lanning, in a different form at Colet Court. But what of the gun? Mr Sawyer asked the shop’s staff to check for a resale record but the stock book stretched back to only 1926, before which the old flintlock could well have moved on.

  The only clue came again from Mr Smith of Clapham, who had been through a similar exercise in 1936 and received the following note from Mr Sawyer senior, the gun-buyer: ‘We are in receipt of your favour of the 10th inst., and in reply beg to state that the Robinson Crusoe musket was sold to America and we do not know its present whereabouts.’

  Where to now? Neither HM Customs’ Library nor the Department of Trade’s export division could help further: no records. The warm trail of ‘Gun No 1’ seemed to have gone suddenly cold. Time to turn my attention to ‘Gun No 2’.

  This was the long-barreled beast with a family background and had been in the charge of Robert Lumsdaine of Lathallan, before his death prompted its sale at Dowell’s auction house in Edinburgh in 1905. Here is a reminder of that from the weekly London iterary review, The Athenaeum:

  In an Edinburgh auction room this week was sold a ‘relic’ whose authenticity in these degenerate days, with the scoffer so much abroad, is likely to be greatly questioned. The article is none other than Robinson Crusoe’s musket, ‘a fine old specimen with a long barrel, old flint lock, and beautifully balanced.’

  This flintlock is referred to in Sir Robert Sibbald’s A History Ancient and Modern of the Sheriffdoms of Fife (1803), as being in the possession of a family in the neighbourhood of Largo. The auctioneer states apropos of this article:

  James Gilles, aged 80, in 1895, informed General Briggs that his mother was a grandniece of Alexander Selkirk. She gave the gun to the late Major John Lumsdaine of Lathallan about the beginning of the century. It is among the property of the late Stamford Robert Lumsdaine of Lathallan, now being sold.

  Family legend has it that, on hearing of the pending sale, Allan Jardine senior’s grandfather jumped on the Edinburgh train to thwart the proceedings; but the train was delayed and, by the time he arrived at the saleroom, the gun had been sold to Mrs Hulda Whyte of Philadelphia – who could not be persuaded to resell it.

  Its alleged progress thereafter had been mapped by Mr Douglas Wright, the Dunblane-based director of the Keep Scotland Tidy campaign of the 1980s who, I discovered, had also undertaken to trace it for the Selkirk celebrations 10 years before. His enquiries suggested that Mrs Whyte sold the gun to Mr Louis Schmidt, manager of Ostendorff’s restaurant in Philadelphia, where it was hung on the bar wall until the US Sesquicentennial celebrations in 1926.

  Apparently, unable to trace Selkirk’s descendants, Schmidt then gave it to the city’s mayor to present it as a goodwill gesture to the British Ambassador, Sir Esme Howard, in order to hand it over to ‘the Daniel Defoe Museum’ in Britain – which did not exist. Perhaps Sir Esme held on to it before finding a suitable alternative establishment? It appears not. None of his surviving offspring could recall seeing it in the family home – Greystoke Castle in Cumberland – and no museums around that area appeared to have it.

  So perhaps there was some reference to its handover or ultimate fate in Sir Esme’s personal correspondence on public record in Carlisle Castle? I ventured forth and spent most of a day there prying into the private life of a stranger who I had come to know and admire. Such admiration could not, however, compensate for the disappointment of finding no clue to the gun’s fate. Glumly retracing my footsteps to the station, I began to think that what I needed was a clairvoyant. A moment later that is exactly what I saw on an advertising poster peering out at me from a shop window.

  On an impulse I decided to call her.

  ‘If I gave you some clue could you tell me where this blessed thing is?

  ‘Still on the island, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ I replied. ‘Should I make an appointme
nt to discuss this matter properly with you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother, dear. I have a strong feeling you’ll find it.’ That shop-window poster featured a cutting about her and all her works from the local Evening News and Star and, truth to tell, I felt I had marginally more faith in the press. Could a fellow hack perhaps help? ‘Sure,’ said busy local reporter Peter Hill, ‘I’ll do a little piece in the paper and see what happens.’

  The press had also helped Mr Wright with his research, much of his information having come from Jeanne Lane of The Philadelphia Bulletin; but, after receiving a copy of her letter, I now saw that the gun’s American history was sketched in less-than-definite terms and maybe she could yet pin down some of the facts more tightly? The Bulletin had long since folded and she was hard to trace but I finally found her working as a ‘counsellor’ in another city. She could recall little about the gun enquiries but gladly undertook to pick up the trail again. In the meantime, however, both lines of enquiry seemed to have come to a halt. Or had they?

  In response to the Evening News and Star item came a call from amateur gun enthusiast Barry Woodhall of Penrith. ‘I’m almost certain,’ he said, ‘that I read a story about this in one of my gun magazines.’ He couldn’t recall which one but he agreed to go through all his old issues of Guns Review and Shooting Times.

  Two days later he was still looking. I had called both magazines, they had denied running the story, and now he was suggesting that the piece might have been in a friend’s Sporting Gun. Without waiting, I contacted the editor, who said yes, they ran such an item many moons ago, but the writer, David Baker, had not revealed the identity of the gun’s owner. Excitement mounting, I called Baker. Had he actually seen the gun? Yes, and from what he could remember, its butt was indeed engraved with Selkirk’s name, a picture of a seal, and the date 1705 – when Selkirk had been on the island of Juan Fernandez for a year. Could his have been the ‘amateur hand’ that had restocked the gun with ‘what looks like a strange tropical hardwood’?