Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

  If a French ship came to The Island he would surrender and hope for mercy, but never to the Spanish. He would make a lair, a hideaway, high in the mountain forest, in case they came.

  So he hoped for rescue and feared dying uncomforted in this overwhelming place. He looked out over the ocean thinking Dampier, Clipperton, Funnell, Morgan, Bellhash might return him to the world he knew. Their misfortune was his hope. The Cinque Ports might limp back, leaking like a sieve. He supposed there would be further mutinies on both ships. More men would turn on Dampier. He was an adventurer, a seasoned navigator, but he could not manage men. Mutineers would leave him, take prize ships, fly the bloody flag and try their luck. The two ships might now be six.

  Selkirk’s Island was the best to careen, to water, to eat fresh food. Here was good anchorage. Whoever came, he would give them greens and goat broth to cure their scurvy. His fire would dry their clothes and warm their bones. They would restore in the mountain air. He would welcome any of the men, except Stradling. He would be marooned for ever sooner than see Stradling again.

  And so he became a watchman by occupation. His obsession and abiding fear was that he would miss a ship that passed or be surprised by an enemy. He watched in the first light of the morning, at noon and at dusk. Behind the bay he climbed to his lookout, his vantage point. He scanned the encircling sea. He surveyed The Island, its tormented forms, its peaks and valleys, the islet of Santa Clara, the forests of ferns. Day after day he did not see his ship of rescue. He saw no ship at all.

  Here was a paradox of freedom: he was free from responsibility, debt, relationship, the expectations of others, yet he yearned for the constraints of the past, for the squalor and confinement of shipboard life.

  Hunger and thirst were diversions. He ate roots, berries, birds’ eggs. He shot seals and sea birds. A goat stared at him with curiosity. He killed it with a cudgel, boiled it with turnips, flavoured it with pimento. Rats scuttled in the undergrowth, waiting their share.

  1704–9 The Fragrance of Adjacent Woods

  DAYS ELIDED into weeks and months. Whatever The Island had, he could use, whatever it lacked, he must do without.

  He pined with ‘eager Longings for seeing again the Face of Man’. He was alone on a remote piece of land surrounded by ocean. Chile was 600 miles away, Largo 7000. He was an unsociable man, but disagreement and provocation were preferable to this. Had Stradling left him with a Negro slave, they might have built a boat, farmed goats. Had he left him with women prisoners, he would have peopled The Island and been served.

  This fate seemed like a curse. His father had warned that his temper would cost him his life, and opposed his going to sea with the privateers. If he returned to Largo he would make amends, work as a tanner, find a wife.

  His mother, he supposed, would pray for him. Texts from the Bible. All that happened was God’s will. God acted with surprising vengeance, but good intention. The Bible was the word of God. It was the Truth. God created all things, owned and controlled the lot. He made the world in seven days and man in his own image. He was benevolent. He had a purpose, a grand design.

  ‘It was Selkirk’s manner to use stated hours and places for exercises of devotion, which he performed aloud, in order to keep up the faculties of speech, and to utter himself with greater energy.’† Sometimes as the sun rose lighting the woodland of sandalwood trees and huge ferns (Blechnum cycadifolium), their fronds unfurling like wakening snakes, the mountain he called the Anvil rising three thousand feet behind him, cloud trapped on its peaks, he read from the Bible, the only narrative text he had. He read of Sodomie and Beastialitie in Leviticus and of Heaven and Redemption in the Gospels. He mumbled the psalms and appeals of his church: ‘Hear O Lord my Prayer, give Ear to my Supplication, hear me in Thy Justice, I stretch forth my Hands to Thee; my Soul is as Earth without Water unto Thee, Hear me speedily O Lord; my Spirit hath fainted away. Turn not away Thy Face from me.’

  Such lamentations yielded no change in his circumstances, but had a consoling force. He did not care too much about the sense of what he intoned. It was vocabulary he would not otherwise have used and feared to lose. He hoped that God was half-way human enough to get him out of this hole. Only God and Stradling knew he was marooned.

  Withdrawal from tobacco left him light-headed. It had been an addiction for fifteen years. He wondered if there was some substitute opiate on The Island, some other leaf to chew. But he did not experiment. Foxglove and hemlock he knew could kill. Dampier had warned against eating plants that birds rejected.

  Activity dispelled depression. He kept busy. And on a day when the sky was clear and the valley still, his mood lifted. He felt vigorous, reconciled. He grilled a fish with black skin in the embers of a fire, ate it with pimentos and watercress and forgot to deplore the lack of salt. Around him hummingbirds whirred and probed. Mosses, lichens, fungi and tiny fragile ferns, epiphytes, Hymenophyllum and Serpyllopsis, covered the trunks of fallen trees.

  He resolved to build a dwelling and accrue stores. He chose a glade in the mountains a mile from the bay, reached after a steep climb. Behind it rose high mountains, wooded to the peak. This glade had the shade and fragrance of adjacent woods, a fast, clear stream, lofty overhanging rocks. From it he had watched mist fill the valley and dissipate with the morning sun. White campanulae grew from the rocks, puffins nested by the ferns. A little brown and white bird, the rayadito, swooped for insects. Clumps of parsley and watercress grew by the stream.

  1704–9 Pestered by Rats

  THE RANDOM yield of the island became his tools, weapons, furniture and larder. By the shore he found nails, iron hoops, a rusty anchor, a piece of rope. With fire and stones he forged an axe, knife blades, hooks to snare fish, a punch to set wooden nails. He carved a spade from wood and hardened it in glowing embers. He hollowed bowls and casks from blocks of wood. He turned boulders and stones into larders for meat, a pestle and mortar, a hearth and a wall.

  He liked goat meat, but often the goats he shot crawled to inaccessible rocks to die. When his bullets and gunpowder were finished he felt undefended, on a par with creatures that scurry for cover at a sudden sound. Without gunfire, he caught goats by chasing them. Out of their horns he carved cutlery.

  On either side of the stream he built huts of pimento wood. He thatched their roofs in a lattice of sandalwood. The cruder hut was his larder and kitchen, the larger was his dwelling. On a wide hearth of stones, he kept a fire burning night and day, its embers banked high. His wooden bed was on a raised platform, his sea chest held such possessions as he had. He scraped, cleaned and dried the skins of the goats he killed, in the way he had learnt from his father. With a nail he made eyelets then joined the hides with thongs of skin. He lined the walls of the hut with these skins. The place smelled like a tanner’s yard, it smelled like home.

  Home shielded him from squalling winds and the threat of night. From his bed he saw the ocean lit by stars, the morning sun above the eastern mountains. The seals were quieter when they finished breeding. Other sounds amplified: the clamour of birds, the waterfalls.

  This glade defined where he felt safe, but ‘his habitation was extremely pestered with rats, which gnawed his clothes and feet when sleeping’. Their forebears had jumped from European ships. Pregnant at four weeks, they gave birth after three weeks gestation, had litters of eighteen, became pregnant again immediately, and lived for two years. They ate bulbs, shoots, carcasses, bones, wood and each other. They left spraints of urine wherever they went and their fur was infested with lice and fleas. Their appetites were voracious and their most active time, the pitch of night. The Island housed them in millions, white, grey, black and brown. As he slept they gnawed his clothes and the bone-hard skin of his feet. He would wake to hissing fights. He slung pebbles at them, but in seconds they resumed.

  Equally fecund were the feral cats. They too came from Spanish, French and English ships. He enticed them with goats’ meat wanting them to defend him against the rats. Kittens in partic
ular within days were tame. ‘They lay upon his bed and upon the floor in great numbers.’ They purred to see him, settled in shafts of sunlight, curled round his legs. To them he was a gentle provider, a home maker.

  In the face of this feline army the rats kept away. Instead he endured the cats’ territorial yowls, their mating calls and acrid smells. He talked to them, they made him feel less alone. ‘But these very protectors became a source of great uneasiness to him.’

  For the idea haunted his mind and made him at times melancholy, that, after his death, as there would be no one to bury his remains, or to supply the cats with food, his body must be devoured by the very animals which he at present nourished for his convenience.†

  To ensure his meat supply, he lamed kids by breaking their back legs with a stick. He then fed them oats gathered from the valley. They did not equate their pain and curtailment with him and were tame when he approached them with food.

  So he became The Island’s man. Monarch of all he surveyed.† He swam in the sea, washed in the streams, rubbed charcoal on his stained teeth. His beard that was never cut merged with the tawny hair of his head. His shoes wore out but he did not try to repair them. The soles of his feet became as hard as hooves. He ran barefoot over rocks. ‘He could bound from crag to crag and slip down the precipices with confidence.’†

  The seals and sea lions ceased to be a threat:

  merely from being unruffled in himself he killed them with the greatest ease imaginable, for observing that though their Jaws and Tails were so terrible, yet the Animals being mighty slow in working themselves round, he had nothing to do but place himself exactly opposite to their middle, and as close to them as possible, and he despatched them with his Hatchet at will.†

  Their fat was cooking oil, their fur his bedding, shared with pale fleas and ticks that burrowed and blistered under his skin. He gouged these out with a wooden pin.

  As time passed he ceased to imagine threat from monsters or cannibals. Nor was he troubled by the moan of the wind, the calling seals, the chirps and screechings of The Island. His hut, cats and goats created a semblance of home. He adapted to The Island’s ways.

  1704 Hard labour

  HE WAS RIGHT about worms eating the Cinque Ports. In his view ‘The Mexican Worm was larger, and eats the Bottoms of the Ships more on its Sea-Coasts, than any other place’.† After a month the ship sank near Malpelo, a small barren island off the Peruvian coast. Most of the crew drowned. Stradling and thirty-one others got to the shore on two rafts.

  This island offered none of the abundance of Juan Fernandez. They existed at the brink of life on chance catches of fish and birds and drank the blood of tortoises because there was no water. Eighteen survived, then surrendered to the guarda-costa as an alternative to starvation. They were fed, shackled and marched overland via Quito and Cisco to prison in Lima. ‘The Spaniards put them in a close Dungeon and used them very barbarously.’†

  As prisoners they were left to rot, or used in the gold and silver mines and workhouses. ‘Those that are put in Workhouses are chain’d and imploy’d in carding Wool, rasping Logwood etc.’ They were in the company of ‘Mullattoes and Indians, but no Spaniards, except for the worst of Crimes’.

  A sort of freedom could be bought if the bribe was high. ‘Turning Papist’ was another way. True Englishmen thought this the surrender of their souls and worse than death. Converts were baptised, then employed as servants to men of note, or used as money-making curiosities. One privateer who ostensibly converted, was baptised in the Cathedral of Mexico City, then displayed in markets. The ritual was to sprinkle oil on his tongue and pour oil on his head. The ‘small parcels of Cotton’ used to rub these off were then sold to Penitents for an ungodly fee, with a claim to their divine properties ‘because taken off the Head of a converted Heretic’.

  Stradling spent four years in prison in Lima. He escaped twice. The first time he made toward Panama in a stolen canoe. He hoped to cross the Isthmus then get to Jamaica with an English trading sloop. He paddled twelve hundred miles, was recaptured, thrown back into gaol and warned that if he tried it again he would be sent to the mines. He tried it again and was taken prisoner by a French ship bound for Europe. From there he made his way home to Britain, penniless and ill.

  1704 Rogue, Rascal, Son of a Bitch

  NOR DID Dampier’s fortunes improve. The worms were at it in the St George too. Funnell said its timbers were so badly eaten they were as thin as a sixpence. ‘We could thrust our thumbs quite through with ease’.

  Yet still Dampier aimed for ‘the chiefest end of the expedition’, the Manila treasure galleon. In pursuit of it, he voyaged north in ‘dirty squally weather, with much Thunder and Lightning, and very uncertain Gales’. The men survived on fish and turtles until they seized a small craft, bound for Panama, with a cargo of flour, sugar and brandy. On it were more letters to the President of Panama. They learned that two Spanish Men-of-War, armed with twenty-four-pound brass guns and five hundred soldiers and seamen, were lying in wait for them near Guayaquil.

  On 22 July they fought one of these warships. According to Welbe at ten in the morning Dampier gave orders to attack. Welbe advised him to wait ‘till we had the Advantage of the Sea-Breeze’

  and then we might be sure of getting to the Windward of her; but if we tack’d the Ship then, as he intended to do, we shld lose the Advantage of the Sea-Breeze, and be sure to go to the Leeward of her. But he wld not consent to it, but took his own Way, and immediately tack’d the Ship. And as I said, so it happen’d; for we were not able to fetch to the Windward of her. But if Capt. Dampier had taken my Advice…†

  As ever, Dampier took no one’s advice. He blamed his crew for the botch-up. He called them ‘a Parcel of Fellows who were Perpetually drunk… They were always Doing something they should not; and did not think me worthy their Council.’ They had, he said, ‘sprung my Fore-Top Mast in the Night, so it immediately came by the Board. By this I was utterly deprived of means to get a windward, or anything else.’

  Insults were exchanged. The men told him he was not fit to captain a ship and that his language was ‘very base and abusive’. He should not call them ‘Rogue, Rascal, Son of a Bitch and other such vulgar Expressions’.

  They hoisted ‘the bloody Flag’, the pirates’ flag, instead of the English ensign of a commissioned privateer and fought the ship for themselves. Funnell said they fought from noon to dusk. ‘We went to it as fast as we could load and fire.’ They made little impact and counted themselves fortunate that only two of their men had their hands and faces blasted. The Spanish ship, unharmed, sailed away in the dark.

  Dampier feared that his Master, Mr Bellhash, and his First Mate, John Clipperton, were ‘on the Watch to overset the Voyage’. The crew had split into marauding gangs. At the island of Gallera, twenty armed men went ashore to loot and scavenge. Islanders fled to the mountains ‘with their Wives and Children and all they had’. The gang ransacked their huts, stole wood from a half-built bark, and took another bark with two masts and square sails, loaded with plantains. They named it the Dragon.

  The ostensible plan was to fit this out as a consort, the better to fight the treasure ship. At St Lucas the St George was hauled ashore. It was encrusted with barnacles and leaking. The carpenters could do no more than patch leaks with nails and oakum. While they worked, its ammunition and provisions were stored on the Dragon. On 2 September twenty-one men, led by Clipperton, demanded money and silver from Dampier, boarded the Dragon, and left under cover of night.

  In a ship of holes with scarce arms and a reduced crew, the St George sailed on toward Acapulco. The men ate guanos and pelicans. They saw the ‘Vulcans of Guatimala’ spewing flames. On 9 October a small prize yielded provisions. Her captain, Christian Martin, an adventurer brought up in London, knew the South Sea. On a previous disputatious voyage he had marooned himself on the island of Gorgona, then escaped to freedom on a raft of tree trunks with two shirts for a sail and a large bag filled wit
h oysters fixed to the mast.

  Martin helped them locate the Manila galleon. It was called the Rosario and they sighted it on 6 December near the ‘Vulcan of Collima’. It was a well-built ship, armed with twenty-four-pound cannon. The St George had only four five-pounders. Martin advised that the one chance of success was to draw alongside by stealth then board with speed.

  Dampier vacillated and was as ever drunk. The Rosario, supposing the St George to be friendly, hoisted the Spanish ensign and fired a greeting shot to its leeward. Welbe and others urged Dampier to fly Spanish colours. Instead, he hoisted the English flag and gave orders to fire.

  The Rosario ‘sprung her luff and got to windward’ and prepared to batter the St George to pieces. The boatswain on the St George urged the helmsman to edge near, so that they could board quickly. Dampier swore he would shoot him through the head if he did so. The Rosario cannon hit the St George below water, hit the ‘Powder Room’ and blasted planks out of the stern. Welbe told Dampier the ship was sinking: ‘The captain cried out, Where is the canoe? Where is the canoe? And was for getting into the boat to save his life, which showed what man of courage and conduct he was.’ Dampier said the men were not in a fit state to board anything. They were all ‘Drunk and Bewitch’d though Clark, the Mate, who was Potent in Liquor, cry’d Board, board her’.

  As the St George sheared off, the carpenters again tried to plug holes in its timbers. Welbe said Dampier left no orders with anyone but went to his cabin with a supply of liquor, ordered a sentry to guard the door ‘that no Body should disturb him’, and did not wake until eight next morning.

  The Manila ship sailed toward Lima, its treasure intact. The crew of the St George wanted to go home ‘knowing we could do no good in these Parts, either for our selves or Owners; having Provision but for three Months and that very short; and our Ship being ready of herself to fall in Pieces.’†