Marooned

by Robert Andrew Parker

  Then, out of the blue, a chance came to return to his island. A meeting with Woodes Rogers offered the possibility.

  The former privateer captain now dressed in the latest fashion—scarlet coat with brass buttons, velvet breeches, black silk stockings, a wig with curls that hung to his shoulders. He had become a successful businessman, sending merchant ships loaded with cargo to the Bahama Islands, east of Florida. (In 1717 King George I was to appoint Rogers "Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over our Bahama Islands in America.")

  Now that peace had been restored between England and Spain, Rogers told his former mate and comrade, a new, highly profitable venture was in the works. The South Sea Company was the idea of Sir Robert Harley, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the royal treasury. The plan was to set up trading posts along the coastal towns of South America. Rogers would be the expedition leader.

  The project was big, exciting! A fleet of twenty warships—including one with eighty guns—forty cargo ships, five hospital ships, four thousand soldiers. Juan Fernández would become a supply depot. Selkirk knew the island best. Would he help set up the colony? The South Seas Company had already spent £120,000, and the Secretary of State, Henry St. John, had pledged even more government money. Investors were pouring in additional funds. Even Queen Anne was interested.

  Weeks later, Rogers again met with Selkirk. His news was disappointing. Funds from the government were not coming—no, he didn't know why, no one did. It was a huge scandal. Thousands of investors had lost money. The South Seas Company was bankrupt. There would be no ships, no soldiers, no supply depot on Juan Fernández. Queen Anne and all those high government officials refused to say what had happened.

  For Selkirk, any hope he might have had of returning to his island home was now gone.

  ***

  Rogers also introduced Selkirk to Richard Steele, a journalist who had helped Rogers write his book. After hearing about Selkirk and reading Rogers's book, Steele wanted to tell the castaway's story on Juan Fernández for his magazine, The Englishman.

  "I had the pleasure frequently to converse with the man soon after his arrival in England in the year 1711. It was a matter of great curiosity to hear him, as he is a man of good sense, give an account of ... that long solitude."

  Steele was a member of Parliament, heavyset and limping with gout. He and Selkirk met in coffeehouses. Soon Steele saw that the former castaway seemed uneasy with his new life in London.

  "[He] frequently bewailed his return to the world," Steele wrote, "which could not ... with all its enjoyments, restore him to the tranquility of his solitude" on his island.

  "I am now worth 800 pounds," the despondent mariner told him, "but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing."

  On that far-off island, Steele wrote, Selkirk's "life grew so exquisitely pleasant that he never had a moment heavy upon his hands. His nights were untroubled and his days joyous from the practice of temperance and exercise.... His life was one continual feast."

  Selkirk's story took up the entire December 1–3, 1713, issue of The Englishman.

  Watching the glum mariner sip coffee, Steele realized what troubled the former castaway: He yearned for his island home.

  Wearing a handsome blue waistcoat with white cuffs and lapels

  and a cocked hat, the new lieutenant boarded his ship.

  SEVEN

  Largo and Beyond

  In the spring of 1714 Selkirk left London for Largo. He hadn't seen his mother and father in ten, almost eleven years. Were they still alive?

  The trip in a rattling coach was about 400 miles over rutted roads, so he most likely took passage on a coastal trader. At Edinburgh he would have changed to a ferry to cross the fifteen-mile-wide mouth of the Firth of Forth.

  Herring boats bobbing in the quiet water of Largo Bay, same as when he was a boy, was probably his first sight of home. The seaside village on that Sunday morning had not changed. The same stone houses with thatched roofs; stairways to second floors on outside walls; iron weathervanes, mostly fish, pointing nowhere. Behind the houses, sheep grazed on sloping hills.

  For his homecoming, Selkirk wore a new coat with gold trim. He was barbered and groomed. He walked up the path to the family cottage. The longed-for moment was finally here. He opened the door, stepped into the kitchen, ready to hug his old mother, give his dad a manly embrace.

  But the kitchen was empty. A low fire probably flickered in the hearth and fresh bread and cake waited on the table. But the house was still. Then he remembered: The day was Sunday.

  Up the path he strode past the churchyard, where stood headstones of departed grandparents, aunts, and cousins. He stepped into the Presbyterian church, still stone cool. The congregation was singing a hymn. He knew the words. He had sung the same in this church as a boy and on a far-off island as a man.

  What happened next became part of the family legend. It was retold years later by his cousin John Howell.

  "As soon as he sat down, all eyes were upon him, for such a personage perhaps had seldom been seen within the church at Largo. He was elegantly dressed in gold-laced clothes. Besides, he was a stranger, which in a country church is a matter of attention at all times.

  "After remaining some time engaged in devotion, his eyes were ever turning to where his parents and brothers sat, while theirs as often met his gaze. Still, they did not know him.

  "At length, his mother recognized him and, uttering a cry of joy, could contain herself no longer. Even in the house of God she rushed to his arms, unconscious of the impropriety of her conduct and the interruption of the service.

  "Alexander and the family's friends immediately retired to his father's house to give free scope to their joy and congratulations."

  The gathering must have been typical of the day: aunts, uncles, cousins crowding the door; neighbors who remembered Alexander as a wee lad peering through windows; fishermen he had gone sailing with stopping by; boys he had played with, now men, sitting with wives, sipping tea, eating buttered bread. His old teacher, bent with age, who remembered him as a bright but at times unruly pupil, telling all who would listen that Alexander had shown little interest in his books except for mathematics and geometry. The rooms loud with the babble of talk and sudden whoops of laughter.

  There were brother John and his wife, Margaret, and brother David. There was also Andrew, his feeble-minded brother, now a grown man.

  Euphan, his mother, lingered nearby. For the celebration she most likely served haggis, a special pudding for holidays, made from the heart, liver, and other organs of a sheep.

  ***

  But for Alexander the joy of homecoming lasted only a few days. The questions, the stares, the hearty slaps on the back soon began to get on his nerves. He became uncomfortable with hovering cousins, aunts, old school chums, well-meaning neighbors.

  He tried to be polite, to listen. In all likelihood his family and friends talked about matters of little interest to him—the herring catch, the church's need for a new roof, squabbles with the next village over grass for the sheep. This was their world, the world of Largo.

  To escape the press of company, he spent days along Largo Bay talking with fishermen. He bought a boat and went sailing. On the open water he was alone. At Kingscraig Point, under the cliff at low tide, he caught lobsters and brought them home for the evening meal.

  Worried about his moody son, his father probed gently. Was he ready to settle down, join him in the shop—leather tanning and shoemaking—perhaps take a village girl to wife?

  It was his father's old wish, his heartfelt plea. But Alexander didn't fit in Largo. He was a stranger here. The village was too small—about 1,200 lived in the cluster of houses. The people, his parents included, were too narrow, too set in their ways, for a traveled man who had seen a larger world.

  ***

  He moved out of his parents' house and took an upstairs room in the home of his brother John and his wife, Margaret. Perhaps a change of living arra
ngements would help.

  For breakfast, Margaret usually served porridge, a tattie—potato—and a mug of tea with milk and sugar. Alexander likely stood while eating his porridge, following a belief of the time: standing aided digestion.

  After breakfast, probably carrying a wrapping of bread and dried fish for a noon meal, he took long walks in the wooded hills and to Keil's Den, where the ruins of Pitcruvie Castle stood. Returning at dark, he took the outside steps to his second-floor room and avoided neighbors and cousins waiting on the first floor.

  Margaret kept two cats. She watched while Alexander held the forelegs of one, hummed a tune, and tried to teach it to dance. This-way, that-way, take-a-step, take-a-step. When the animal tripped over its hind feet, Alexander became annoyed. Margaret told her husband about his brother's strange behavior.

  Then Alexander did something that astonished everyone.

  With a spade he began enlarging a cave on the side of a hill in Keil's Den. He installed boards to support the roof. In front he scraped a flat place and cobbled together a bench. Villagers passing on the lane below saw him sitting on the bench, chin on hands, staring across the bay.

  His worried parents trudged up the slope. The found their son weeping. "Oh, my beloved island!" he blubbered helplessly. "I wish I had never left thee. I never was before the man I was on thee. And I fear never can be again."

  A grown man crying! John and Euphan didn't know what to make of it. Such sadness in his eyes. They may have tried to console him, assuring him he had aunts and uncles and cousins who loved him, brothers and friends, too.

  Likely his father urged him again to come work in the shop, anytime, even tomorrow! A place would be made for him.

  Euphan may have tried reaching out to her son but saw he was beyond comforting.

  ***

  Soon came the day when Alexander left. He gave a boy a penny to follow with his sea chest on a cart. John and Euphan watched as he walked down the hill. Father and mother may have felt a sense of farewell, something telling them they would never see their son again.

  At the bay he boarded the ferry to Edinburgh. There he would find a ship to London.

  In late 1716 or early 1717 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. He was assigned to H.M.S. Enterprise, a supply ship.

  ***

  By November 1720 Selkirk had been promoted to master's mate, second in command. The rank just below captain, master's mate, or lieutenant, was the highest rank someone not of the upper class could attain.

  Wearing a handsome blue waistcoat with white cuffs and lapels and a cocked hat, the new lieutenant boarded his ship, H.M.S. Weymouth, at Plymouth. Together with H.M.S. Swallow, the warship headed for West Africa to hunt pirates and slave traders. The sun off the coast was intense, nights humid without a breeze.

  In June 1721 Selkirk sent a boat up the Gambia River to find fresh water and cut wood for the cook stove. The crew was captured by natives. Boats filled with musket-carrying seamen from the Weymouth went to find the missing men in the mosquito-infested jungle. The rescued crew members returned to the ship bringing with them a deadly sickness, most likely malaria or yellow fever.

  Disease swept through the Weymouth. Each day fewer crew answered morning roll call. Men began dying.

  Sometime in November or December, Selkirk became ill. The ship's doctor placed him in a hammock slung from beams in the captain's cabin, which had been turned into a hospital ward.

  Medicine at the time knew little about treating tropical diseases. The doctor did what he could to ease the men's suffering—cooling their flushed faces with water-soaked cloths, offering a thin soup to settle nausea, massaging aching limbs, placing blankets on feverish bodies shivering with cold, wiping away vomited blood, pouring cups of water between trembling lips that still left thirst unsatisfied.

  On December 13, 1721, the Weymouth's captain entered a new name in the ship's log:

  Alexr. Selkirk, DD ... P.M.

  "DD" stood for "today's date" written at the top of the page. "RM." meant death occurred some hour between noon and midnight.

  As was the practice, Selkirk's body was enclosed in a sack made from an old sail. The sack was weighted with two cannonballs, one at the head and one at the feet. Then it was placed on a plank and lifted onto the ship's rail.

  The captain read the old words of the burial service from The Book of Common Prayer. "Deliver your servant, Alexander ... from all evil, and set him free from every bond...."

  The plank was tilted, and Selkirk's body slid into the gray waves somewhere off the coast of Africa.

  ***

  H.M.S. Weymouth returned to England in 1722. Lieutenant Selkirk's sea chest was sent to Largo. There it joined the few belongings he had left behind at his brother's house—a gold-laced coat, a brown stoneware flip jar, a clam shell he had once used to dip cool water from a turtle shell in a hut on an island some ten thousand miles away, and a musket.

  The stock of the musket was carved with a picture and a rhyme. During an idle afternoon the marooned mariner had engraved his name, a seal on a rock, and these words:

  With 3 drams powder

  3 ounce hail

  Ram me well & prime me

  To kill I will not fail.

  "Hail" referred to a hail of bullets. On a high hill on Juan Fernández today stands a bronze tablet. The spot is called Selkirk's Lookout. There the lonely castaway stacked dry grass and firewood and watched with his brass spyglass for a rescue ship. The tablet was placed by the officers of a British warship, H.M.S. Topaze, in 1863 and reads:

  In memory of Alexander Selkirk, mariner, a native of Largo, in the county of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude for four years and four months. He was landed from the Cinque Ports galley, 96 tons, A.D. 1704, was taken off in the Duke, privateer, 12th Feb., 1709. He died Lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth A.D. 1728, aged 47 years.

  The last date was incorrect. The Weymouth's logbook in the Public Records Office in London gives 1721 as the year of his passing. He was 41.

  Still, the tablet, erected nearly a century and a half after Selkirk's death, recognized the Scottish mariner's magnificent adventure—a salute to a fellow seaman who had survived four years alone on a remote island in the broad ocean sea.

  "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."

  EIGHT

  The Real Robinson Crusoe

  There was a man in London who had read Woodes Rogers's Cruising Voyage Around the World and Richard Steele's account of Selkirk's years on Juan Fernández in The Englishman.

  Daniel Defoe was a failed businessman. At the time Rogers's and Steele's accounts of Selkirk's adventures came out in 1712 and 1713, he was in his early fifties. Short of money, he was trying to pay off debts, support a wife and children, and maintain a big house by writing books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles.

  Defoe had a sharp tongue. His political stories annoyed men in high positions in the church and government. He was a gadfly, constantly nagging them with criticism. One of his pamphlets, published around 1700, charged some members of Parliament with disrespect for the rights of Englishmen. The powerful men he named did not appreciate his views. A £50 reward was offered for his capture.

  The London Gazette described the fugitive—the only description we have of Defoe. "He is middle aged, a spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-colored hair, but wears a wig. A hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, a large mole near his mouth."

  An informer turned him in for the reward. The government charged him with sedition—urging people to resist new laws. Defoe spent the next six months in Newgate Prison and was fined £135.

  As much as he wrote through the years, by his sixtieth year Defoe was tired and broke, partly because he made unwise investments in business ventures that didn't turn profits.

  Creditors badgered him for money he had borrowed. What he needed was a big score, a moneymaker. He remembered Rogers's book and Steele's account of Selkirk's
marooning. Here was the story he was looking for, a man surviving alone on an uninhabited island.

  But there was a flaw in the idea. In the early eighteenth century almost all books published were nonfiction. Histories, biographies, and travel books were popular subjects. Novels rarely appeared.

  Defoe, though, did not want to let the idea go. He spoke with his printer, W. T. Taylor in Pater Noster Row. They agreed that a book about a marooned seaman on a tropical island might sell, but only if it read like nonfiction, if it seemed factual, not a story.

  How to do this? A clever idea presented itself. The hero should write the book himself, make the story appear as though it had really happened.

  In April 1719 the new book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. Defoe's name did not appear as author. The title page read: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself.

  "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."

  These opening lines begin what is probably the most famous adventure story ever told, the tale of the shipwrecked mariner who survived twenty-eight years on an island off Brazil. The book is still available today in bookstores and libraries almost three hundred years after it was first published.

  Readers believed Crusoe's story was true. In the Preface, Defoe noted that the book was "a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it."

  W. T. Taylor printed 1,500 copies of Robinson Crusoe. So popular was the new book that it was reprinted a month later, again in June, and twice more by the end of the year. In October the story was serialized in The Original London Post for sixty-five weeks, an astonishing run.

  Defoe never named Selkirk as the model for his hero. But in a new edition of his novel he wrote:

  There is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are [my] subject, and to whom all or most part of the story alludes: this may be depended upon for the truth, and to this I set my name.