In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  This dread of a lonely death was justified. Selkirk came very close to being killed in a hunting accident. The event was clearly a traumatic experience for the Scot because he described it in detail to both Woodes Rogers and Steele. He had been chasing a wild goat through the hills and “pursued it with so much eagerness that he catched hold of it on the brink of a precipice of which he was not aware, the bushes hiding it from him, so that he fell with the goat down the said precipice, a great height, and was so stunned and bruised with the fall that he narrowly escaped with his life.” When Selkirk recovered consciousness he found himself lying on top of the dead goat. The animal’s body had cushioned his fall and saved his life. But he was so badly bruised and shaken that “he was scarce able to crawl to his hut which was about a mile distant, or to stir abroad again in ten days.”

  Yet the most astonishing fact of his entire stay is that Selkirk never made the effort to explore his island fully. The terrain is exceedingly difficult, with high ridges, steep inclines, and treacherously loose soil; and the Anvil and the other high peaks remain out of reach. Yet even a cautious explorer would take no more than a week to investigate its 40 square miles. But for four years Selkirk was content to stay where he was, overlooking Cumberland Bay and restricted to the eastern two thirds of the island. He told Woodes Rogers that it was too difficult to gain access to the long northwest spur, though this was where there were many goats. It seems a poor excuse for someone who was so fit and agile. The truth was that Selkirk elected to remain within self-imposed limits. Whether through caution, inertia, lack of curiosity, fear of an accident far from his huts, or disinterest, he made his small world even smaller than it was.

  What would remind the Scotsman of four years and four months of his life if he went back to his island now? Would anything be familiar? Of course he would recognize the contours of the steep slopes rising toward the Cordon Central, the ridge that links the massive block of the Anvil with the sharper summit of Cerro la Piramide. This is the woodland and brush country where he lived and hunted. But the trees on the lower slopes would now seem very strange—eucalyptus, pines, cedars. They were not there in his time, nor was the exuberance of gold and orange and yellow nasturtiums growing along the rocky banks of the streams, nor the clusters of morning glories beside the beach. All these are more recent immigrants. Like the goats that fared better than humans, pioneer plants root more firmly than men on the Island of Robinson Crusoe. For millennia the island was a botanical wonder, a Galápagos of unique plant species that evolved in isolation, and it still has more endemic plant species for its size than any other oceanic island in the world. But the majority of these native species have retreated and are now found only in a few last strongholds of native vegetation high up in the mountains. They have given ground to more powerful invaders—chiefly the maqui bushes, which the fishermen cut to provide wood for their langosta pots, and to the humble blackberry.

  In Selkirk’s time the lower slopes were covered with native trees—sandalwood and myrtle, including the “pimento” tree whose branches gave the bright flames of his signal fire. A byword to the hungry sailors was the “cabbage tree,” actually a native palm, Juania australis. It sprouted a budlike cluster of leaves “as good as any garden cabbage I have ever tasted,” in Funnell’s opinion. He compared its trunk to a bamboo growing “small and straight with several knots or joints about four inches from each other,. . . void of any leaves except at the top in the midst of which the Cabbage is contained.” At the head of the tree fanned out an array of branches twelve or thirteen feet long. The “cabbage” itself was cut out from the bottom of the branches and was about six inches in circumference and “as white as milk.” From the base of the cabbage dangled spectacular bunches of berries the color and size of cherries. They tasted “much like English haws” and had a stone in the middle. “We never climb up to get the fruit or cabbage,” noted Funnell, “because the tree is so high, and there is not anything to hold by, so a man would find it a hard matter to get up.” Instead, “which we always do to get the cabbage,” the sailors cut down the entire tree.

  As a result the cabbage trees were already a dwindling resource by Selkirk’s time. Today he would have to ascend almost to the watershed of the Cordon Central, 1,640 feet above the sea, before he came across his first specimen of the palm. Though no longer felled for food, the “cabbage tree” was cut down to make souvenirs from its handsomely patterned wood. Only a thousand of these trees survive.

  Most surprising of all, today Selkirk would find no goats. After four hundred years as the island’s most successful residents, goats have disappeared from the Island of Robinson Crusoe, though about four thousand remain on Isla Alejandro Selkirk. Rangers of CONAF, the Chilean Parks Service, shot them as threats to a fragile ecosystem after the island was designated in 1977 as a World Reserve Biosphere; it is now listed among the dozen most threatened bioreserves on the planet. The rangers would like to dispose similarly of all the rabbits and rats, cats and mice, thrushes and sparrows that have joined more than two hundred introduced plant species, “weeds” in botanical parlance, in eroding the original ecosystem. Selkirk would also find it difficult to find enough feral cats to tame, but the feline role in the destruction of birdlife has been assumed by another escaped pet, the coati, a raccoon-like omnivore. Marauding coatis eat the eggs of, among others, the island’s most endearing native bird, the tiny Juan Fernandez hummingbird. The male weighs less than half an ounce but sings a powerful song to attract the female, and the two hover together in an exquisite mating flight. The dark maroon plumage of the male bird, the color of drying blood, is so different from the green, white, and brilliant blue of the female that for a time it was thought they were different species. Funnell was much taken with the tiny flittering bird and judged it to be “about the bigness of a Bee. It hath a bill no bigger than an ordinary Pin.” In the evenings as the privateersmen made camp on shore, the birds, which had been scarce by day, would appear in the gloaming and “come humming about us.” Today there are less than twelve hundred of these unique hummingbirds left, a huge decline since Funnell’s time, when “if it was dark and we had a fire, before morning we should have a hundred of them fly into the fire.”

  Against all odds, it is the seal population of the island that preserves a sense of the natural world in which Selkirk lived. The prodigious numbers of seals, sea lions, and elephant seals never failed to astound early visitors. In the breeding season their bulbous bodies carpeted every beach and rock ledge “in so much that we were forced to kill them to set our feet on shore.” Many sailors complained of the taste of the dark, almost black seal meat and would not eat it, but few had any scruples about butchering the animals to satisfy their colleagues, who compared the flavor to roast mutton. The seals were so easily despatched—a “tap on the nose” would do the job—that sailors from a Dutch squadron in 1624 came to regret their own wantonness. They turned to killing the seals for fun when they completed their victualing and left so many dead seals rotting on the beach that the carcasses turned putrid, the air began to stink, and the sailors were reluctant to come ashore again.

  This slaughter was nothing compared to what was to follow. At the end of the eighteenth century a market for sealskins developed in China in the wake of the declining trade in sea otter fur. The price of a sealskin was cheap, about fifty cents. But if a sealing captain could cram enough pelts in the hold of his ship and bring them directly to a Chinese port, he could make a handsome profit. The endemic Juan Fernandez seal was particularly desirable. The animal has a magnificent thick “two hair” pelt, with an outer and inner layer of hair, and commanded a premium price. Whalers and fur traders had hunted Juan Fernandez seals only sporadically until, in 1793, an American captain by the name of Steward began sealing operations in the archipelago in deadly earnest. Effectively a poacher, he ignored the Spanish colonial authorities and swooped down on the enormous herds of seals. Men were set ashore to walk up to the massed animals and club them
on the head one by one. The killers’ arms grew tired from swinging their bludgeons. Steward’s ship, the Elisa, took the first cargo of Juan Fernandez seal skins direct to China. It was the start of a grotesque bonanza. In the next ten years the islands were effectively pillaged of their seal population. In 1798, Captain Edmund Fanning came into Canton with his ship, Betsey, stuffed with nearly a hundred thousand fur skins, nearly all from Más Afuera, the future Isla Alejandro Selkirk. As many as fourteen sealing ships would anchor off the island at one time while their crews went about the carnage. Some captains put slaughter gangs ashore and sailed off for a few weeks to another hunting ground. When they returned, they expected to find piles of flayed skins stacked on the beach, ready to be loaded aboard. The treatment of the shore crews was on a par with the brutality of the operation. In 1808 the American sealing ship Nancy visited Easter Island and forcibly kidnapped twelve men and ten women islanders. The plan was to take them to Más Afuera and put them ashore as slaves, to kill and skin seals. It would have been yet another case of forcible marooning had not the captain of the Nancy, three days after leaving Easter Island, allowed his captives out of the hold and up on deck. All the Easter Islanders promptly flung themselves overboard and tried to swim away. Efforts to drag them back into the ship failed. So the Nancy kept her course, and the islanders were left to drown at sea.

  The seal population of the islands collapsed before this onslaught. Another American captain, Amasa Delano, reckoned that three million skins were shipped out during the period 1797 to 1804. He himself took a hundred thousand skins. There were fewer and fewer sightings of Juan Fernandez seals. By the mid-twentieth century the animal was believed to be extinct.

  Fortunately, the impression was wrong. Small groups of seals survived. They must have continued to live and breed on islets and in hidden coves, and in 1965 the Juan Fernandez seal was rediscovered, to the surprise and satisfaction of zoologists. Today the population is estimated at twelve thousand individuals and is increasing steadily. The langosta fishermen of San Juan Bautista regarded the seal resurgence with sour suspicion at first. They assumed the animals were eating the precious langostas, and surreptitiously shot the seals when they had the chance. Now they have been persuaded that the seals are more likely to be eating octopus, the langostas’ predator, and they leave the seals alone.

  The main seal rookery lies below the high razorback spur that forms the western arm of Isla Robinson Crusoe. Here the terrain is utterly different from the evergreen area where Selkirk lived. The high ridge is bare and massively eroded into a moonscape of crumbly white soil. The wind from the ocean lifts across the crest, raising plumes of fine dust. In this desert landscape the only surface water is occasional seepage oozing from seams in the layers of the pale earth that gives the zone its name—Tierras Blancas. Rain seldom falls, and the runoff carves deep gashes in the badlands that grow steeper and steeper until they fall away as the cliffs encircling the rookery. First seen from high on the ridge, the seals are no bigger than small dark slugs scattered across the rock ledges far below. Then, in the swirl and foam of the waves that lap the rocks, the swimmers are visible, dozens and dozens of animals bobbing and floating in the backwash, rising and falling with the swell, a corona of sea mammals. Descending out of the sound of the wind on the ridge, you begin to hear the clamor. The sounds of the rookery come rising on the updrafts. Thinly at first, but then louder and louder as you follow the path downward, the sound is reflected and echoed by the cliffs, until it becomes an uproar. This is the constant clamor Steele described as “dreadful Howlings and Voices . . . too terrible to be made for human Ears.” It is a cacophony of moaning and braying, barking and hissing, bubbling and trumpeting. Closer, it is possible to distinguish the mewling squeaks of the seal pups, which Cooke compared so well to the bleating of lambs. Their mothers have higher-pitched cries, and overlaying everything is the astonishing roar and belch and chuffing sounds of the huge bull seals. These are hulking creatures, with massive shoulders and upper bodies bulked out by a great mane of magnificent silver or pale brown fur. In the breeding season they are to be treated with respect. They rear up in a tremendous show of defiance, weave their heads from side to side, puff out their manes like bloated cobras, open their mouths to reveal great yellow fangs, and bellow aggressively. “They roared as if they had been Lyons,” wrote Basil Ringrose, a buccaneer, in The Adventures of Captain Bartholomew Sharpe and Others in the South Sea, published in 1685. “Two of our men could not kill one of these animals with great stones.”

  Late October is the seals’ birthing season, and newborn seal pups lie larvalike, three or four at a time, in rock crevices. Only a few hours old, the babies are already capable of crawling. They labor their way over the rough stones to reach their mothers and suckle. Encountering another infant, they hiss and bicker, miniature versions of their fathers, who keep up a constant bullying watch over their harems. Straying females are chased back into the group. If a strange bull intrudes there is outrage. The defending male lumbers to the attack, moving across the rocks with surprising speed while he utters a threatening chuffing sound like a giant blacksmith’s bellows working frenziedly. At touching distance he rears up in display and roars. If his authority is still challenged, the two males press up against one another like sumo wrestlers. They push and shove and twist their heads from side to side, mouths wide open, fangs and red gullet displayed, seeking to shove the opponent back from the ring. But there is a more dangerous side. If an opening presents itself, there is be a lightning-fast lunge and a cruel bite with teeth designed to grip and kill large fish. A gobbet of flesh flies from the gouged wound, and the victim suddenly turns and flounders away, leaking blood and pursued by his trumpeting victor. The contest usually ends with the defeated male solitary and forlorn on a rocky outcrop or, very occasionally, as a battered and bloated corpse floating on the tide, the buoyant carcass gradually flayed by the rocks.

  ”I suppose they feed on grass and fish,” wrote Ringrose, “for they come ashore by the help of their two fore feet and draw their hinder part after them.” Hauling out is the zoologists’ term for the apparently cumbersome process, but its awkwardness is deceptive. I pitched a tent on the edge of the rookery, hoping to hear the sounds that disheartened Selkirk on his first few nights ashore. I picked a spot uphill and a hundred yards inland. As the sun went down, more and more seals began to haul out. They were coming ashore to rest for the night. The younger, more athletic males carefully avoided the territory of the big savage males on the more favored ledges close to the water. They waited for the surge of a swell to lift them onto an adjacent shelf, and then set off inland to find their couches. A six-foot scree of broken rock was no obstacle. They clambered up as if their flippers were gripping claws, and to my consternation the younger males appeared on the slope I had selected and began to range toward me. One by one they found suitable spots and lay down to rest. I realized that I was camped within the fringe of the rookery. I waited for darkness. Sure enough, the sneezes, roars, and burps of the colony diminished but never grew quiet throughout the night. And, lying there, I discovered something that no buccaneer had reported: the groaning, bubbling, grumbling talk of the seal is pervaded by an oily miasma of mustiness. Their breath and body odor is the smell of rotten fish.

  It is a peculiarity of the buccaneers and pirates and privateers who raided the South Sea that they chose to write books about their exploits. They might have been expected to keep quiet about their pillage, torture, theft, arson, mutinies, and the rest. Instead they came home and paraded their feats before the public. This was chiefly an English trait. There were French and Dutch buccaneers who described their escapades, but the majority of the buccaneer-authors were English. Seven English buccaneers or privateersmen published books boasting of their exploits off the coasts of South America before Defoe penned his story of Robinson Crusoe. Besides Woodes Rogers and Edward Cooke, who both described Selkirk’s rescue, there had been Funnell and Dampier and Welbe, who acco
mpanied the expedition that took Selkirk to the Pacific. Before them, Basil Ringrose’s Adventures of Captain Bartholomew Sharpe and Others in the South Sea was so popular that it was reprinted in two travel collections, and a seventh book was written by a buccaneersurgeon, Lionel Wafer, whom we shall meet later. Every one of these publications mentioned the island of Juan Fernandez before Defoe took up his pen.

  Daniel Defoe was at yet another crossroads in his life when he sat down to write The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. . . . Highly intelligent and ferociously hard-working, he was willing to turn his hand to almost any occupation. Yet his schemes rarely worked out quite as he hoped. His first enthusiasm had been commerce. He tried in turn to make money by wholesaling hosiery, then by underwriting insurance, and finally by running a brick and tile factory. When all these businesses miscarried, he turned to journalism, financial speculation, and a murky career as a spy, agent provocateur, and political propagandist for both main political parties of the day. In the course of these activities he wrote numerous political pamphlets, and also a book on moral instruction, which had sold very well. His robust literary style, vigorous wit, and a delight in exchanging strokes in the political fray meant that he spent much of his life gyrating from one crisis to the next. Twice bankrupt, he had been pursued through the courts for debt and sedition or on false charges made by his enemies. A warrant issued for his arrest on a charge of seditious libel in 1703 describes him as “a middle sized spare man, about 40 years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a mole near his mouth.” While Selkirk was preparing to set sail aboard the Cinque Ports, Defoe was exposed for three days in the public pillory. Famously, the London mob who approved of his satirical view of the failings of the government and the judicial system escorted him to the pillory, decorated it with flowers, drank his health, and bought copies of a satirical poem that Defoe had penned with typical feistiness while waiting for the sentence to be carried out. Now, eight years after Selkirk had come home with Woodes Rogers and six years after Steele the essayist had published his description of the maroon, Defoe launched yet another career: at the age of fifty-nine, with a wife and six grown-up children, he became a novelist.