Marooned

by Robert Andrew Parker

  He had hoped for thick steaks. After roasting the flesh of the sea lion, however, he found it too oily to eat—the meat was buried under a seventeen-inch layer of fat. But the "hair of [its] whiskers was stiff enough to make exceedingly fine toothpickers."

  Young seals, though, proved more to his taste, "as good as English lamb." Their boiled fat provided cooking oil. When cooled, it served as butter spread on a cabbage leaf.

  ***

  By the end of his second year on Juan Fernández, Selkirk was living comfortably. Still, there was an annoying problem he hadn't solved: the island's rats.

  Hidden during the day, they came out at night. Firelight and the scent of food lured them. He could hear their scurryings in the underbrush around the hut. Sometimes he could see their red eyes watching him. After he fell asleep, they crept into the hut, sniffed and nibbled his fingers and toes, and chewed his clothes.

  There were also cats on the island; like the rats, they came from ships wrecked in the past. He tried to capture a few, but they eluded him, dashing into the underbrush as he approached.

  Then, in an unexpected way, his problem with rats was solved.

  While walking through the forest one day, he came upon a litter of newborn kittens between the roots of a large tree. Gathering them into his arms, he returned to his hut and placed them in the pen with the young goats.

  Day after day he fed the kittens goat milk and scraps of goat meat. As they grew, they slept in the hut at night. The fearsome rats still eyed him from the darkness beyond the hut, but they stayed away.

  In time a dozen cats roamed the hut. He enjoyed their company, talked to them, even selected his favorites. But secretly he was afraid of them. If he died in the hut, he believed, the cats would eat his body. The thought troubled him.

  ***

  One day while on a high slope, Selkirk was startled to see the sails of two ships in the bay.

  His heart leaped. Rescue! Dashing through the woods, leaping rocks and bushes, he ran down the slope calling and waving his goatskin cap.

  On the beach men stepped from a boat, muskets in hand. They wore shiny metal helmets with narrow brims. Spanish soldiers!

  For a long moment soldiers and marooned mariner stared at each other. Then Selkirk turned and fled. A musket ball breezed past his ear.

  He ran into the forest, the Spanish soldiers chasing close behind. A gully lay in his path. Frantic with fear, he slid down and climbed the far side.

  Running, stumbling, tripping through underbrush, he came to a tall cabbage palm. He scrambled up and hid among the broad leaves just as the soldiers appeared. There were six of them.

  The soldiers took off their helmets and wiped their sweaty brows. Which way to go? Each pointed in a different direction. Then, no decision forthcoming, they decided to give up the chase. They undid their breeches and peed against the tree. From among the leaves Selkirk watched, terrified.

  Then the soldiers picked up their muskets and moved off. A few sharp reports and a painful bleating told Selkirk they had shot a goat. Then a few more shots. Meat for their ships.

  The next day, hidden behind boulders on his high lookout, he watched the scene in the bay through his spyglass. Spanish seamen floated water casks out to the anchored warships. Soon anchors raised, sails unfurled, and the ships moved out of the bay.

  Years later, seated in a warm coffeehouse in London, Selkirk was able to joke about his near capture and fortunate escape. "Their prize being so inconsiderable," he said of the Spanish soldiers, "it is unlikely they thought it worth while to be at great trouble to find it."

  ***

  Dusk falls quickly in the tropics. But Selkirk no longer feared the night, nor did it still hold the phantoms of his imagination.

  By the light of his pimento-wood fire, he held the forepaws of his favorite cat, dancing and singing sea songs and Scottish folk tunes. The other cats silently watched.

  In a warm glow of contentment, he may have thought of his former shipmates aboard the Cinque Ports. What would they say about their sailing master dancing in the firelight with a cat! But he knew his answer. "I never danced with a lighter heart or greater spirit any where to the best of music than I did to the sound of my own voice with my dumb animals."

  His life on Juan Fernández had become a daily joy, his days aboard ship and his home in Largo increasingly remote. The hut was warm, food plentiful. He was never bored. Knowledge of the island had replaced fear and ignorance. He had a sense of complete freedom, of fulfillment, of safe harbor. There was the solitude to endure, of course, and the lack of a mate or two to enjoy a pint of flip and a chat. But in this he had no choice.

  He came to a decision. If fate decreed, he would be content to spend the rest of his days on his island kingdom, master of his own life and destiny.

  ***

  On the night of January 31, 1709, another day ended, he lay down on his fur-seal bedding. His favorite cats came to curl at his feet. Others lay on a mat of sweet-smelling grass. Perhaps there was a moon that night and the bay was visible, flat as a black mirror, reflecting the moon's path.

  The pimento-wood fire burned down to comforting embers. A swath of stars became visible through the trees. Far out on the darkling sea two ships sailed a course for Juan Fernández.

  He was a strange sight—clothed in goatskins, beard hanging to his waist.

  FOUR

  The Duke and Duchess Arrive

  From his high lookout Selkirk watched the two ships enter the bay. He saw their flags through his spyglass: English!

  He ran down the slope and through the woods. At the beach he thrust his hiking staff into his goatskin cap and waved frantically. A boat was lowered. As it neared shore, he heard English voices, saw English faces. Eight men waded ashore and pointed muskets at him.

  He was a strange sight—clothed in goatskins, beard hanging to his waist, unable to speak, managing only to grunt and mutter words that sounded like "marooned ... marooned."

  To the seamen he must have looked like a half-wit, a castaway too long alone, no doubt the survivor of a shipwreck. An officer pointed to the boat. Selkirk stepped in. The boat returned to the larger of the two ships.

  Seamen crowded the rail and stared. The strange man climbed a rope ladder hung from the ship's side. The deck rose and fell on the long swells. He staggered, gripped the rail.

  "At his first coming on board us," Captain Woodes Rogers commented, "he had so much forgot his language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seem'd to speak his words by halves."

  Noting Selkirk's cap, breeches, and jacket of goatskin, Rogers said, "He looked wilder than the first owners of them."

  He offered the castaway a cup of rum but was refused. After drinking only water and goat's milk on his island, Selkirk was sure rum would be too strong for his stomach.

  Rogers ordered a plate of food. Selkirk's nose wrinkled in disgust. He would not touch the beef or the biscuits holed by weevils.

  One of the officers, William Dampier, recognized Selkirk—"the best man on the Cinque Ports," he stated.

  But Rogers had little time for the castaway. He was needed elsewhere. Nearly half the 225 men on the two ships were ill. It was the seamen's disease: scurvy. Weeks of feeding on salt beef and biscuits, and a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables, brought on pale skin, sunken eyes, infected gums, and loose teeth. Bleeding under the skin left red-and-black blotches. The men coughed constantly; their breath stank like sewage. (It was not yet known that the disease is caused by a lack of vitamin C, which is found in citrus fruits, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage, and green peppers—food not generally available to seamen on long ocean voyages.)

  The sick men were lifted from the lower deck on canvas slings—some still in their hammocks—and lowered over the side into boats. At the rail others patiently waited their turn.

  Selkirk, in a frenzy of gratitude for being rescued, made known to Rogers that he would go ashore and help care for the sick men.

  He
dashed up a slope and caught three goats. On the beach tents made from old sails were being set up for the suffering crewmen. There Selkirk built a fire and showed the crew how to roast the meat.

  Leading a party of six seamen, he cut sweet-smelling grass for the sick men to lie on and gathered turnips, cabbages, sorrel, and watercress. With the fresh greens he used a large ship's kettle to make a gentle broth.

  Within three days, Rogers saw his men gaining strength and struggling to their feet.

  A seaman who had been a barber in England cut off Selkirk's beard and trimmed his shaggy hair and scraggly eyebrows. Selkirk selected clothes from the Duke's stores—shirt, woolen stockings, breeches, shoes with buckles. But, having gone barefoot for so long, he found the shoes uncomfortable. "It was some time before he could wear shoes after we found him," Rogers noted. "For not being used to any for so long, his feet swelled when he came first to wear 'em again."

  As the health of the crew improved, Rogers was able to join Selkirk for meals on shore. Within days, Selkirk's ability to speak returned, and the two talked about the hazards of navigation. Juan Fernández, Rogers said, was " [a] small island, we [were] in some doubts of striking it. Not one chart agrees with another."

  Intently he listened to the marooned mariner's tales of survival on the island. Selkirk impressed him as an interesting and likable man, pleasant to talk with. Selkirk confided that he "was a better [man] while in this solitude than ever ... before."

  Curious officers and men visited Selkirk's huts in the grove of trees. They found goatskins hung on the walls, matted grass on the floor, a turtle shell filled with fresh water and covered by a cabbage-palm leaf. No litter, like most seamen's lodgings, no untidiness. Altogether pleasant, cool, and shaded.

  ***

  Rogers commanded the Duke and the Duchess, two privateers. He was thirty years of age, tall, well built, and self-assured. Unlike most captains, he respected his crew and addressed them courteously. Each day he insisted they attend Church of England services on the quarterdeck.

  The crews of the two ships considered him a fine seaman and a fair and proper master. He also maintained strict discipline over his sometimes unruly men. One seaman who uttered mutinous remarks was bent over the capstan and whipped. Salt was then rubbed into the open wounds.

  The two raiders had left Bristol, England, on August 2, 1708. In January 1709, after surviving high winds and towering waves around Cape Horn, they arrived at Juan Fernández battered and leaking. The Duke was Rogers's ship—80 feet long, 25 feet at the beam, with 30 five-inch guns and a crew of 117. The Duchess was slightly smaller: 26 guns, a crew of 108.

  Twenty men could have sailed either ship, but extra hands were needed to take over captured ships and to replace those who died in battle or from disease.

  Rogers intended to attack Spanish ships along the coast of South America. His plan was much like Stradling's nearly four and a half years earlier: to sail north so that, by November, his ships would be positioned off Mexico to intercept the grandest prize of all, the Manila galleon, the Spanish empire's treasure ship bound on its annual journey to Acapulco.

  Before that battle could take place, though, the Duke and Duchess had to be repaired. While the sick men recovered in tents on the beach, Rogers ordered the heavy guns hoisted out of the hold, taken ashore, and pointed toward the bay entrance. There they would discourage patrolling Spanish warships from entering the bay.

  The lightened ships were then towed into shallow water. Lines and pulleys strung between masts and trees on shore tipped the ships on their sides.

  The bottoms were crusted with barnacles, which work parties burned off with torches. Carpenters replaced hull planks rotten with holes bored by teredo worms, then smeared on an oily mix of tar, tallow, and sulfur. The slick coating would keep the destructive worms and barnacles from attaching to the hull for a time and add speed in a sea chase after slower merchant ships.

  While men labored on the hull, others mended torn sails and scrubbed slime from water casks. Carpenters' mates cut trees for new yardarms to replace those cracked and split in the stormy passage around Cape Horn.

  Another work party on shore caught seals and skinned and boiled them to extract eighty tons of oil "for the use of our lamps and to save our candles," Rogers said. The crew enjoyed baby seal. They agreed with Selkirk that the tender meat tasted like "English lamb" back home.

  Selkirk helped supply the ships with fresh food. He led a work party to gather turnips, radishes, cabbages, and plums, and he pointed out the best places for fishing. Rogers noted that the men caught "several sorts, all very good: as silverfish, rockfish, pollock, oldwives, and crawfish in such abundance that in a few hours we could take as many as would serve some hundreds of men."

  Each day the castaway captured two or three goats so their meat could be salted and stored in casks.

  Watching Selkirk catch goats, Rogers suggested a contest. Who could capture a goat first? The crew's "nimblest runners"; the Duke's mascot, an English bulldog called Lord Harry; or Selkirk?

  He watched amazed as the marooned mariner ran into the trees and dashed up slopes. "He distanc'd and tir'd both the dog and the men, catch'd the goats and brought 'em to us on his back."

  Selkirk's victory, Rogers believed, was due to his "plain and temperate way of living on the island"—fresh air, daily exercise, a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, and no tobacco or "strong liquor."

  As the repaired hulls were towed into deep water, pans of burning pitch were placed belowdecks. The fumes seeped into every corner, ridding the damp hulls of fleas, beetles, cockroaches, and rats—for a few weeks at least.

  Repairs and restocking food, water, and woodbins took eleven days. Heavy cannons were hoisted over the rail from the ship's boats and placed behind closed gun ports.

  As a final detail, Rogers may have ordered the deck painted red, a customary practice in those days of sailing ships armed with cannons. The paint would have been carried all the way from Bristol. In battle, blood spilled on the deck would not be so visible.

  ***

  Learning that Selkirk had been sailing master of the Cinque Ports and a veteran seaman "of great skill and conduct who, having had his books with him, had improv'd himself much in navigation during his solitude," Rogers appointed him second mate of the Duke.

  "Febr. 12," Rogers wrote in his journal. "This morning we ... got the last wood and water aboard, brought off our men, and got everything ready to depart."

  Raising anchor and setting sail two days later, the Duke and Duchess eased out of Great Bay.

  As he went about his new duties that afternoon, the former castaway looked back on his island home. Four years and four months he had survived alone. He could point out the beach and cave where he had spent his nights, the lookout spot above the trees—so many days watching for a sail—the grove of trees concealing his two huts.

  By evening the far-off mountains had slid below the horizon. With the Duchess following astern, the two raiders headed north on the "Spanish lake"—the sea off the western shore of South America that Spain claimed for its own.

  The Spanish gunners "did not ply their great guns half as fast as we did."

  FIVE

  Pacific Adventures and the Manila Galleon

  Rogers kept the Duke and Duchess about twenty miles out, just beyond the horizon from the South American mainland. On March 16, 1709, the two privateers came upon their first prize.

  The ship was a small trading vessel. The threat of the Duke's open gun ports was enough to lower its sails.

  The master, Antonio Heliagos, was brought on board the Duke. He was heading for a village along the coast to take on a cargo of flour, he told Rogers. Amazingly, Heliagos, half Indian and half Spanish, had unexpected news about Stradling and the crew of the Cinque Ports.

  Four years earlier, Heliagos was cruising along the coast, farther north from where they were now. On the rocky shore he saw the wreck of a ship.

  People from a near
by village told him the ship's name: the Cinque Ports. Strong winds had pushed it toward shore. The ship ran onto an underwater shelf, broke apart, and sank. Almost all the crew drowned, but the captain and six seamen made shore in a boat.

  Soldiers were waiting. Arms tied behind their backs, the shipwrecked seamen were marched to the local jail. Then they were taken overland to Lima, Peru. After spending four years in prison, they were again moved—Heliagos didn't know where. He thought possibly Spain.

  Selkirk was stunned. What if he had not gone ashore on Juan Fernández? He might have drowned or still be wasting away in a Spanish prison. By choosing the island, he had escaped a dreadful fate.

  ***

  In the next two weeks three small traders gave up their cargos—soap, leather, cocoa, coconuts, timber, and tobacco. One of these traders Rogers renamed the Increase. He placed sick men from the Duke and Duchess aboard and made Selkirk master.

  On April 2 the squadron's first large prize came into view. The 450-ton Ascensión was nearly half again the size of the Duke. A tactic Rogers may have used was to approach the merchantman upwind. The Ascensión, sails fluttering when wind was blocked from its sails, then slowed in the water. The Duke and Duchess closed in.

  Now began a scare tactic intended to bully and terrify the Spanish crew. The blare of battle trumpets aboard the privateers and the hammering of drums foretold the coming attack. Gun ports opened and the ugly snouts of cannons poked through. Bare-chested seamen raised cutlasses and boarding axes. Others swung three-pronged grappling hooks, ready to hurl them at the merchantman's rail and haul the ships together.

  The display of might was enough for the Ascensión's captain. He ordered the ship's flag lowered: Surrender.

  "Tho' one of the largest merchant ships in these seas," Rogers recorded in his journal, "she deem'd herself so safe in the King of Spain's private ocean that no gun had ever been put aboard her to fire. Indeed, for arms I saw not so much as a pistol in her."