Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

THOMAS ESTCOURT, with three other backers, drew up Articles of Agreement for the South Sea voyage of the St George. These were to be the defining rules of the enterprise – a guide to order, the accepted reference for settling disputes.

  ‘No purchase, no pay’ were the terms of engagement for officers and crew. It was an inducement to fight, if plunder was the only reward. A Council of Ships’ Officers would regularly review progress of the expedition. Records were to be made of meetings and of resolutions passed. Meticulous account books were to be kept of all cargoes seized.

  Dampier was to try, in the course of the voyage, to get plunder back to the owners – to avoid losing it in shipwreck or attack. On his return to London, spoils would be meted out in the time-honoured division between bosses and workers – two thirds for the four owners, one third for the one hundred and twenty officers and crew in shares according to rank. A fifth of the total booty would go to the Crown. During the voyage, to buy bits and pieces – liquor, sex, parrots – each man might claim one share of his total entitlement.

  Dampier refused to sail without Edward Morgan, pirate, thief and his ally on a previous buccaneering expedition. Departure was delayed until Morgan was released from prison on a sentence for fraud. He was then hired as ‘Purser and Agent’, accountable for all expenditure. Another friend, John Ballett, was to go as Surgeon and James Barnaby who had sailed with Dampier in the Roebuck was to go as Second Lieutenant. John Clipperton was Chief Mate, William Funnell Second Mate, James Hill Master, and Samuel Huxford First Lieutenant.

  It was agreed that none of the crew was to be marooned or put ashore in the course of the voyage. The St George would sail in consort with a sister ship the Fame commanded by Captain Pulling. Dampier put up two thousand pounds surety for the ‘civil and honest behaviour of officers and men’. He accepted he would be fined five thousand pounds if he failed ‘diligently and faithfully to observe perform fulfill accomplish and keep all and every one of the said Articles’.†

  He assured an income for his wife Judith while gone for what might be years. During the setting up of this voyage, in 1702, he worked as ‘an Extraordinary Land-carriage Man in ye Port of London’, transporting ships’ cargo to its destination. He appealed to Lord Godolphin at the Treasury to guarantee his wage from this. Godolphin issued a Warrant in January 1703:

  William Dampier is Ordered to Sea for some time upon publique Service and hath therefore prayed that his Sallary in ye mean time may be continued and paid to his Assigns, Which Request I think Reasonable and do therefore Authorize and Require you to cause the Sallary of the said William Dampier to be continued for him on ye Establishment and paid to his Asses during his absence occasioned by ye particular Service upon which he is now sent.†

  Thus Dampier’s respectability. On 16 April the London Gazette announced that ‘Captain William Dampier, being prepared to depart on another Voyage to the West Indies had the Honour to Kiss her Majesty’s Hand, being introduced by His Royal Highness the Lord High Admiral’.†

  The St George was victualled for eight months, had two sets of sails, five anchors, five cables, a ton of spare cordage, twenty-two cannons, one hundred small arms, thirty cutlasses, thirty barrels of gunpowder, thirty rounds of great shot and a ton of small shot. With one hundred and twenty men, it was deliberately overcrewed. For its size twenty men would have been enough. There were only twenty-five feet of living space in the bows. But extra men were needed to crew captured ships and ransack towns, and the expectation was for many to die, to be killed fighting or to desert.

  The prospect was of hardship and danger. All ports of the South Sea were closed to these men. They could freely anchor only at small islands unclaimed by Spain. If captured they would be killed, left to starve, or holed up in a Spanish prison. Prizes were elusive. The chance of contracting scurvy or the bloody flux was greater than of acquiring gold. Violence and mutiny were always close. The crew was comprised of the disaffected and desperate of any nationality or age. Thoughts of booty and quantities of free liquor were their enticement. And perhaps too the wide sea, the night sky, adventure, unknown lands and departure from a no-hope life.

  Before leaving London, Dampier and Captain Pulling quarrelled. Pulling then refused to sail in consort with Dampier and instead went off to ‘cruize among the Canary-Islands’. (His ship blew up in Bermuda in August 1703 when a man drew brandy from a barrel with a lighted candle in his hand.)

  Pilot ships guided the St George down the Thames, across the Flats and into the Downs, the anchorage at Kent near the Goodwin Sands. A fair wind took the ship into the Channel on 30 April 1703. Eighteen days later it reached Kinsale, a walled market town in Cork in southern Ireland. There was a sandy cove, the Swallow, dry at low water, the ruins of an old fort, deep water in the bay of Money Point and rocks called ‘the Sovereign’s Bollocks’ to be avoided, ‘they are very foul’.

  For five months the St George lingered in Kinsale harbour waiting for a replacement consort, the Cinque Ports Galley. The men got bored. Dampier put ashore those he thought useless, and took on new recruits. Supplies dwindled and the ship was revictualled. The staple diet was bread, meat, cheese and a gallon of beer a day per man. Beer was brewed extra strong to keep better. There were kegs, demijohns, bottles, hogsheads and casks of rum, claret, brandy and arak.* Water, unsafe to drink and used only for cooking, formed the ground tier of casks in the hold and served as ballast.

  Meat was thought the basis of a healthy diet and it travelled live – as many caged and tethered bullocks, sheep, pigs, goats, hens and geese as could be crammed in. There was a stench of excrement and animal misery. Cats were carried to kill the ships’ rats, and dogs to hunt on land. Salt beef and pork were supposed to hold good for up to five years. The meat was salted twice with Newcastle white and French bay salt and packed in casks filled with ‘bloody pickle’ made by boiling, scumming and clarifying the meat juices. Casks of butter and Suffolk cheese – hard and thin and made from skimmed milk – were supposed to last six months. There were supplies of biscuit, dried peas, currants, rice and oatmeal and plenty of tobacco for chewing, but no citrus fruits or greens.†

  Even before leaving Kinsale the relationship between Dampier and his backers soured. The owners complained about the delays and Dampier’s frequent requests for money – he wanted further refitting of the ship and an advance of £450. They were dismayed, too, at the amount of beer the crew consumed: ‘more than a hogshead every day and everything seems to be managed with the same sort of husbandry’. The owners’ agents wrote that they had ‘so ill an opinion of Captain Dampier’s conduct and management that we begin to despair of the voyage and advise you to give over for lost what you have already laid out’.†

  The Cinque Ports Galley arrived on 6 August. It was a small ship of about 130 tons, mounted with 20 guns and carrying 90 men.† Charles Pickering, its Captain and part-owner, had earlier sailed in it to Marseilles ‘to aid the Queen’s enemies’. He, too, had spent considerable time in Court on charges of treachery, evasion of Customs and fraud. Among his officers were Thomas Stradling his First Lieutenant; Thomas Jones, Mate; John Cobham, Gunner; James Broady, Surgeon; and a dour Scot, Alexander Selkirk, who was the ship’s Master.†

  1703 Selkirk or Selcraig

  OFFICIALS VARIOUSLY spelled his name Selcraig, Selchraige, Sillcrigge, Silkirk, Selkirk. He was born in 1680 in Nether Largo in Fife in Eastern Scotland, in one of a huddle of houses that faced the wide curve of Largo Bay.* A long beach linked the neighbouring towns of Ely and Anstruther. Fishing and merchant ships anchored in Largo harbour and sometimes warships seeking crews for voyages to distant seas. Behind the bay was a dense woodland called Keil’s Den. In the mouth of the Firth of Forth was the Isle of May, inhabited by seals, and colonies of breeding puffins, cormorants, kittiwakes and terns.

  Alexander was the seventh and last son of John Selcraig and his wife Euphan. They had no daughters and had been married thirteen years when he was born. His father expected him to work in the fam
ily trade: scraping, stretching and tanning hides and cobbling them into shoes. For Alexander the sea promised adventure, gold and escape from small-town life. His mother thought because he was the seventh son he was destined to bring luck to others and fortune to himself. She encouraged his ambition, which was ‘the cause of much domestic strife and bickering’.†

  The Selcraigs were Scottish Presbyterians, contemptuous of England as a colonising power. There was one monarch but there were two economies. A Settlement in 1689 took Scotland’s constitution of Church and State closer to England. Protesters ‘exprest their Inveteracy with Stones and Dirt and Curses’. The ‘hot Presbyterians’ and ‘Squadroni’ as Daniel Defoe called them, broke windows, ‘went Hallowing in the Dark and called the English Dogs.’ They beat drums, armed themselves with pistols, swords and daggers and declared that all Scotland should stand together and there would be no Union.†

  In Glasgow ringleaders were locked up in the Castle. In Dumfries, the offending Settlement was burned at the Market Cross. In Nether Largo, Alexander’s eldest brother John led ‘a great mob, armed with staves and bludgeons’ who barred the church door, jeered at the Episcopalian minister, John Auchinleck, for being anglicised and a traitor and threatened to kill him if he held the Sunday service. Auchinleck got away fast. He ‘divided what Money there was amongst the Poor and retired from his Charge’.

  Six years later, aged fifteen, Alexander was accused of ‘undecent beaiviar’ in the same church. He was summoned to appear before a disciplinary session of its Elders. The parish records read:

  1695. Alexander Selchraig to be summoned August, 25. This same day the Session mett. Alexr. Selchraig, Son to John Selchraig, Elder, in Nether Largo, was dilated for his Undecent Beaiviar in ye Church; the Church Officer is ordirred to ga and cite him to compear befoor our Session agst ye nixt dyett.

  August, 27th ye Session mett. Alexr. Selchraig, Son to John Selchraig, Elder, in Nether Largo, called but did not compear, being gone avay to ye Seas; this Business is continued till his return.†

  1695–99 New Caledonia

  A WAY AT ye seas for eight years, from the time of his indictment by the Largo Elders to when he joined the Cinque Ports as Master, Selkirk became a hardened man and mariner. Chances are he learned his skills, aged fifteen on, in a Scottish expedition to the South Sea. It was Scotland’s assertion as a colonial power. It became known as the Darien Disaster.†

  The intention was to set up a colony on the Isthmus of Darien, a bleak strip of land in north Panama between the Caribbean and South Seas. This ‘little Caledonia’ was to control an overland trade route that would channel the wealth of the world, east and west, to Scotland.

  William Paterson was the driving force behind the scheme: in 1695 he founded the Company of Scotland, trading to Africa and the Indies. He described the Isthmus of Darien as ‘this door of the seas, and the key to the universe’.† He was much influenced by Lionel Wafer, a shipmate of Dampier’s, on the Trinity in 1684. Buccaneer, surgeon and barber, Wafer kept a journal of his travels to Panama. Dampier made a transcript of this which he gave to Paterson to read. Wafer wrote of the gold mines of Canea and Santa Maria and the road to Portobello, used by muletrains loaded with the wealth of Peru. He was lyrical about Darien, its valleys watered with perennial springs, its fertile soil and pineapples as big as a man’s head.

  The indigenous Cuna Indians would welcome the colonisers, Wafer said. Copper-skinned and adorned with rings and plates of gold, they lived in simple villages in huts roofed with plantain leaves. They hated the Spaniards who had made them into slaves. Wafer, though, was accepted because he cured them with ‘Physic and Phlebotomy’. In return they told him about their land.

  Grand plans were made. Twenty per cent of taxes and profits from merchandise, gold, silver and jewels, would go to the Company of Scotland. The colony would be divided into districts run by councillors – Fort St Andrew, on a promontory guarding the bay, New Edinburgh, nestling in the mountains.

  Five ships were prepared: the Caledonia, St Andrew, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour. Recruitment advertisements posted in Scottish coffee houses promised volunteers like Selkirk adventure and riches. Each man would get fifty acres of agricultural land and a house in fifty square feet of ground. Councillors would have twice that. Relatives would be shipped out at the Company’s expense.

  Opposition came from the Lords of Trade and Plantations in London. They aimed to halt the scheme and annex Darien for the Crown. They summoned Dampier and Wafer in June 1697. They paid Wafer to delay publishing his manuscript, wanting its information for themselves. Paterson paid him for the same reason.

  The ships sailed from Leith on 14 July 1698, crewed with twelve hundred volunteers. Their intended route was up the east coast of Scotland, round the Orkney Islands to the Atlantic Ocean, down to Madeira, across to the Indies, then into the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Darien. Short rations and death were the voyage’s themes. The ships were supposed to be victualled for nine months, but the salt beef and pork went mouldy within days, there were weevils in the bread and insufficient oil and butter.

  In thick fog, near Aberdeen, the ships lost sight of each other. At Madeira the men swarmed ashore desperate for fresh food. They ate unripe fruit and became ill. They were mistaken for Algerian pirates and attacked. Officers sold their scarlet coats and plumed hats to buy meat.

  As they sailed the Atlantic to Antigua, Guadeloupe, and to ‘Crab Island’ near Puerto Rico, men died like flies: Alexander Alder, Robert Hardy, Andrew Baird, Thomas Fullarton, Peter Wilmot… They died of hunger and disease. A surgeon’s mate, Walter Johnson, took too much laudanum for his fever and ‘slept till death’. Officers were merciless. With negligible stores, they regretted it if in a day no more than four or five men died. The sick were denied oatmeal or water and left on deck, exposed to bad weather. Those who stole food ran the gauntlet of surviving men, who lashed them with knotted ropes.

  It took four months to reach Darien. The Unicorn, as it entered the bay, struck sunken rocks. It tore its sheathing and from then on leaked. ‘Tis a very wet country’ Wafer had written with understatement. ‘You shall Hear for a great way together the croaking of frogs and toads, the humming of mosquitoes or gnats and the hissing or shrieking of snakes.’†

  The men were exposed to drenching rains, the air was humid, there were violent gales and tornadoes. Here in this mangrove swamp those who had survived the seas were supposed to build New Edinburgh and Fort St Andrew. But scrimp rations and disease had left them weak. ‘Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such hard work that we were like so many skeletons.’

  The settlers lost all interest in their home from home, their squalid New Caledonia where they had come to die. After two months they managed to build rudimentary huts and dig graves for two hundred dead. They ate lizards and pelicans and food scrounged from the Cuna Indians who were hostile to them. They were desperate to leave but had nowhere to go. Ten men who stole weapons from the Unicorn and deserted, were caught and put in irons. A plot to sail on a buccaneering cruise in the St Andrew was also foiled. There was an epidemic of tropical fever, its symptoms spots, sore eyes and joints, and vomiting bile.

  Then the Spaniards, who had garrisons, forts and infantrymen at Carthagena, Santa Maria and Panama, attacked. They sent eight hundred infantrymen to destroy what there was of Fort St Andrew and to burn the huts of New Edinburgh. A northerly wind made it hard for the Scots to flee.

  It was near impossible to send letters home for help. When two relief ships the Olive Branch and Hopeful Binning reached Darien in August 1699 they found ruins and graves. Only one ship, the Caledonia, returned to Scotland of the five that had left the Firth of Forth fifteen months previously. It carried no more than three hundred men, many of whom died before it reached the river Clyde.

  1701 A Combate of Neiffells

  THOSE WHO survived such rigours were strong and lucky. Selkirk’s behaviour, ‘undecent’ at fifteen, was violent by the time he w
as twenty-one. The predicted fortune had not appeared, nor the hardship of ye seas reconciled him to family life in Nether Largo. Back home in November 1701 a ‘tumult’ in his father’s house provoked complaints by neighbours. Selkirk, his father, mother, brother Andrew, eldest brother John and John’s wife Margaret Bell, were summoned to a disciplinary session of the Church Elders. Largo parish records give detail of the tumult:† Andrew took a can of sea water into the house. Selkirk unwittingly drank from it then spat the salt water out. Andrew laughed at him. Selkirk perceived this as an insult, beat him with a cudgel, swore at him, threatened to kill him and tried to go upstairs to get their father’s pistol. To block his way, their father sat on the floor with his back to the door. Selkirk hit him. Andrew ran for help to John and Margaret who lived nearby.

  Their mother, expecting an all-out fight, left the house. John tried to get their father up off the floor and to the fireside. Selkirk ‘caste off his Coate’ and challenged John to a ‘combate of Neiffells’.* Their father intervened to separate them. Selkirk got them both into a neck lock and twisted them to the ground. Margaret tried to drag him off. John ran out of doors. She followed calling back at Selkirk, ‘You Fals Loun, will you murder your Father and my Husband both?’ Selkirk attacked her too. She was not sure how he beat her, but ‘ever since she hath a sore pain in her head’.

  He was summoned to appear before the church elders on 25 November. Instead, he went to the nearby town of Cupar. Two days later he was again ordered to attend church, stand in the pulpit and ‘be rebuked in face of the Congregation for his scandalous Carriage’. This he did. He confessed he had sinned by attacking his brothers, ‘promised amendment in the strength of the Lord and so was dismissed’.

  Such was Selkirk’s temper, and violence and retribution in Nether Largo. He wanted again to be at sea with its wider dangers and rewards. He was twenty-three, a navigator, fighter and survivor. Largo held nothing for him. It was intolerable to be laughed at and made to seem foolish by his weakling brother, and to be judged and found wanting by small-town churchgoers who knew nothing of the force of the ocean, the curse of scurvy or the heat of the sun in a Southern sky.