*Knots are nautical miles per hour.
*Woodes Rogers bought this wig for £7.
*Hatley and his companions were captured by the Spaniards, tortured, starved, and put in the same Lima prison as Stradling. They were not freed until peace came in 1713.
*Begona was a pilgrim shrine in northern Spain.
*Captain Opey, sailing with an English East India ship, bought it then sold it to Chinese traders for breaking up.
*Batchelor died in November 1711 so never shared in the profits of the galleon named after him.
5
LONDON SCRIBBLERS
LONDON SCRIBBLERS
1712 The Most Barren Subject that Nature Can Afford
WOODES ROGERS and Edward Cooke had both kept journals of their quest for the Manila treasure ship. Back in London they hurried to outsmart each other in book form. There was a readership for first-hand accounts of plundering voyages, to exotic far-off places across dangerous seas. It was fashionable ‘to go round the globe with Dampier’ as Daniel Defoe put it.
Neither Rogers nor Cooke had Dampier’s skill for travel writing, his range, or flare for anecdote. Beyond shipboard life, their observations were more of the ‘winds south, southeast, anchored at Guam’ sort. But Dampier had no book to offer of this voyage. His days of fame were gone. He was given no praise for the Acapulco haul. Comment on him by fellow mariners was scathing. While he was away, William Funnell had published his own scornful account of the previous failed voyage.† Dampier became caught in renewed blame and litigation and his waning energy was used in trying to vindicate his reputation and clear his name.†
Edward Cooke feared that more notice would be taken of Woodes Rogers’ book than his own. Rogers had been Commander in Chief of the whole expedition and had eminent literary friends. At Bartram’s Coffee House in Church Street, opposite Hungerford Market in the Strand, he met with Richard Steele, pamphleteer, playwright, essayist and author of the daily paper the Spectator and with the equally prolific Daniel Defoe who wrote and published the Review.
Cooke had for a short time been captain of the worm-eaten prize the Marquess, sold at Batavia, for scrap. He had no influential friends. To get ahead of Rogers, he brought out his book in two parts. The first volume was on sale by March 1712, four months after the ships were home. He called it A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World Perform ’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711 by the Ships Duke and Dutchess of Bristol.
To imply high patronage he dedicated it to Sir Robert Harley. On the title page he was advised by his publisher to advertise ‘an Account of Mr Alexander Selkirk, his Manner of living and taming some wild Beasts during the four Years and four Months he liv’d upon the uninhabited Island of Juan Fernandes’.
But the ‘Account’ Cooke gave his readers was confined to one meagre paragraph. Selkirk, he told them, had been Master of the Cinque Ports Galley. He had had some unspecified disagreement with his captain and ‘the ship being leaky he had gone ashore’. He had survived on goat meat, cabbages that grow on trees, on turnips and parsnips. He tamed wild goats and cats. When rescued, he was wearing a goatskin jacket, breeches and cap, all ‘sewed with thongs of the same’. And that was the sum of it. What more was there to say? Cooke turned his attention to storms, gunboats, plunder, and disputes among the crew.
Readers felt cheated. This story of abandonment whetted curiosity. They wanted more of it. Who was Selkirk? What had he felt? How, in detail, had he survived?
Cooke was encouraged by his publisher to fill the gap with his second volume. In an irascible preface to it he promised ‘a fuller Account of the Man found on the Island’. He complained he had been rushed into print for the first part of his book with insufficient time to research details.
That short Hint rais’d the Curiosity of some Persons to expect a more particular Relation of the Man’s manner of living in that tedious Solitude. We are naturally fond of Novelty and this Propension inclines us to look for something very extraordinary in any Accident that happens out of the common Course. To hear of a Man’s living so long alone in a desert Island, seems to some very surprizing and they presently conclude he may afford a very agreeable Relation of his Life when in Reality it is the most barren Subject that Nature can afford.
Cooke met with Selkirk and questioned him, but saw no scope to his story. It was, in his view, dull and inconsequential to be interminably alone, without company or comfort, on a bit of land he described as an ‘entire Heap of Rocks’, so steep as to look ‘almost perpendicular’. He was not, he wrote, going to pander to romanticism or invent. The discerning reader would, he felt sure, want truth not fiction. Not many people wanted to read about ‘ancient Authorities’, in the Egyptian desert, who eked out solitary lives of austerity and devotion.
What then can it be that flatters our Curiosity? Is Selkirk a natural Philosopher, who, by such an undisturb’d Retirement could make any surprizing Discoveries? Nothing less, we have a downright Sailor, whose only Study was how to support himself, during his Confinement and all his Conversation with Goats.
So Cooke gave again the bones of Selkirk’s adventure. The frigates of the Duke and Dutchess had sailed into the Great Bay of The Island. Their crew saw a man waving a white flag. They called to him to show them a good place to land. He gave directions, then ‘ran along the Shore in Sight of the Boat so swiftly that the native Goats could not have outstripp’d him’. When invited to the ship, ‘he first enquir’d whether a certain Officer he knew was Aboard’. If so, he would remain in solitude, rather than sail with him.
He had an axe and other tools, a pot to boil meat. He had made a spit and a bedstead and ‘tam’d a Parcel of Goats’. He ‘knew all the by Ways and Paths on the Mountains, could trip from one Crag to another, and let himself down the dreadful Precipices’. He had kept an exact account of the day of the month and the week. He had taken Captain Frye into the mountains to ‘a pleasant spot full of Grass and furnish’d with Trees’ where he had built his lodging place and a kitchen.
His greatest disaster was when he fell down a precipice and lay for dead. Somehow he crawled to his hut and survived. He survived, too, when Spaniards landed on The Island, by hiding from them. They pursued him but he was to them ‘a Prize being so inconsiderable, it is likely they thought it not worth while to be at any great Trouble to find it’.
Cooke supposed the Spaniards were as uninterested as he was in Selkirk. There was no cause for wonder in this story, no pause for thought. A man marooned was another happening. It merited no more than a paragraph or two. It was hard to spin it out. It was an incident of personal misfortune, irrelevant to the true purpose of the voyage, an ‘Accident out of the Common Cause’, no more significant than Icarus falling from the sky.
1712 A Plain and Temperate Way of Living
WOODES ROGERS needed his book to be a commercial success.† His unease and desperation were not mitigated by his return to England. Half his face had been shot away, he walked with a limp, he was accused of embezzlement and his share of the treasure was contested. At home in Bristol he had debts which he could not pay. His father-in-law, Admiral Whetstone, was dead, his wife had cooled towards him and he had three children to maintain. To escape his creditors, he declared himself bankrupt.
He was a man of no particular education, his journal entries were circumstantial, and he wanted literary polish to his seaman’s prose. It would not, he knew, woo readers to tell them, as did Cooke, that Selkirk’s story was ‘the most barren Subject that Nature can afford’.
He sought Richard Steele’s help. Steele was a fat man, fond of drink and prone to gout. He walked with a cane and on bad days with crutches.* He could not have chased goats on an uninhabited island, or survived scrimp rations in a leaky ship. But he saw in Selkirk’s story evidence of Christian piety, the vanity of riches and the indomitability of Man.
He was curious to meet this abandoned man. Rogers introduced them and they had Coffee House conversations at the end of 1711. Steele qu
estioned Selkirk in line with his own interest: what had been his quarrel with Stradling, what possessions did he have when marooned, what creatures threatened him, what did he eat, how did he endure the isolation, what sort of dwelling had he built, what did he read, how often did he pray, how did he cope with his return to society, how had the experience of The Island changed him.
Rogers called his book A Cruising Voyage Round the World. To vie with Cooke his title page advertised ‘the Taking of the Acapulco Ship and An Account of Alexander Selkirk living alone four Years and four Months in an Island’. His version was more than a tale of derring-do, fortune hunting and of a marooned man who survived to make the journey home. Selkirk was transmuted into a Christian, a Patriot, the Governor of The Island.
Rogers gave again the facts of abandonment, the possessions Selkirk had, the huts he built, the clothes he sewed. But in the minds of those who could not know The Island, its seisms, eruptions and squalling winds, its ravines and jagged peaks, its yellow orchids, spiny bromeliae and hummingbirds, Selkirk had been alone four years and months on an indeterminate bit of land – sand, with scant palms and an encircling sea. It was not The Island that was of interest, it was Man, who in the image of God, got the better of wherever he was. ‘Nothing but the Divine Providence’ Rogers was prompted to write, ‘could have supported any Man.’
Selkirk, in his isolation, moved from piracy to piety, from rape and plunder to a state of grace. Abandoned on The Island he did not fuck goats or rail at the sky. ‘He employ’d himself in reading, singing Psalms and praying’.
Solitude and Retirement from the World is not such an unsufferable State of Life as most Men imagine, especially when People are fairly call’d or thrown into it unavoidably, as this Man was.
Selkirk was sustained not by The Island but by God. In his closeness to God he ‘found means to supply his Wants in a very natural manner’. Scavenging for food and chopping trees for shelter was inconvenient, but the results were on a par with ‘all our Arts and Society’. And there was a moral for readers, comfortable in their libraries and lounges:
how much a plain and temperate way of living conduces to the Health of the Body and the Vigour of the Mind, both of which we are apt to destroy by Excess and Plenty, especially of strong Liquor, and the Variety as well as the Nature of our Meat and Drink: for this Man when he came to our ordinary Method of Diet and Life, tho he was sober enough, lost much of his Strength and Agility. But I must quit these Reflections, which are more proper for a Philosopher and Divine than a Mariner.
Selkirk read this account of who he was and concurred. Perhaps it was like that. God determined the day. Time had passed. The experience was distanced. Memories were lost and fragmented. It was all over in a temporal way, the extravagant isolation, the ordeal of life without a human voice. On The Island waves broke loud against the ridge of the shore.
1713 When I Was Not Worth a Farthing
ONE YEAR later Richard Steele, profited on his own account from Selkirk’s adventure. Like Rogers, Steele was in debt and acquainted with creditors.† He faced repeated lawsuits for money. He owed to his tailor, goldsmith and upholsterer and for arrears in rent, and to friends. Even Joseph Addison, a literary collaborator since their schooldays, went to court to recover money from him.* Steele needed to make his pen pay.
In October 1713 he started a journal, the Englishman.* His intention with it was ‘to rouze in this divided Nation that lost Thing called Publick Spirit’. He published it until February 1714. He said that it exposed him ‘to much Hatred and Invective’. His ‘Brother Scribbler’ Jonathan Swift was rude about it and him:
Mr Steele publishes every day a penny paper, to be read in coffee-houses and get him a little money… He hath no invention, nor is master of a tolerable style… Being the most imprudent man alive, he never follows the advice of his friends, but is wholly at the mercy of fools or knaves, or hurried away by his own caprice; by which he hath committed more absurdities in economy, friendship, love, duty, good manners, politics, religion and writing, than ever fell to one man’s share.†
In the Englishman Steele wrote about Patriotism, Passive Obedience and the Protestant Succession. Occasionally he diverted to lighter things. Issue 21 was on the pleasures of a country drive in a chaise, 34 was about a visit to Oxford, and 26 was devoted to Selkirk on The Island.
With a journalist’s flam, at the start of this article Steele promised to relate ‘an Adventure so uncommon, that it’s doubtful whether the like has happen’d to any of human Race’. To give a sense of verity he told of the conversations he had held with Selkirk in 1711. From Selkirk’s demeanour Steele claimed to discern that ‘he had been much separated from Company’. Selkirk, he wrote, had ‘a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in Thought’.*
Solitude on Juan Fernandez had been sheer romance. The Island Steele would never glimpse was ‘the most delicious Bower, fann’d with continual Breezes and gentle Aspirations of Wind’. Selkirk’s ‘Repose after the Chase’ in the hut he had made, was ‘equal to the most sensual Pleasures’ of town life.
He never had a Moment heavy upon his Hands; his Nights were untroubled, and his Days joyous, from the Practice of Temperance and Exercise.
Abandonment enriched him. From it, he learned the value of simplicity. He listened to barking seals with pleasure and danced with goats and kittens. Return to the World, Steele said, with all its joys, could not compensate Selkirk for his loss. And there was a moral to this adventure for readers of the Englishman to observe:
This plain Man’s Story is a memorable Example, that he is happiest who confines his Wants to natural Necessities; and he that goes further in his Desires, increases his Wants in Proportion to his Acquisitions; or to use his own Expression, I am now worth 800 Pounds, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a Farthing.
The virtue of poverty was a Christian ideal often not espoused by its advocates. Steele did not confine his Wants to natural Necessities. He had a family house at Hampton Wick and a chariot with four horses. He employed Richard the footman, a gardener, a boy called Will, a woman called Watts, and a boy who spoke Welsh. He liked his coffee hot, his armchairs deep and his wines of the vintage sort.
Some months after their conversations together in 1711, Selkirk met Steele by chance in the street. He greeted him expecting an exchange of conversation. Steele could not recollect having seen him before. He had to be reminded who Selkirk was. He had remembered the story, but not the man.
1712 Gold Ingots and 2 Casks of Decay’d Tea Bisquetts
SELKIRK HAD a battle to get his share of the plunder – the eight hundred pounds derided by Steele. On its arrival in London, the cargo from the treasure galleon was swarmed over by owners and officers, officials and lawyers. There were accusations of embezzlement, cheating and lies.
He had hoped to go to Largo to visit his family. But he would not leave London until the auctions were over and the courts had ruled on who should get what. If he left town, or signed on for another voyage, he feared he would get nothing.
Storing and sorting the cargo began on 11 December 1712 under the supervision of Robert Patterson. His bill came to £311 10s for 623 days work at 10 shillings a day. It was one of a plethora of expenses, all extravagantly deducted. There were charges for making boxes and barrels, bagging raw and thrown silk, for sorting lace, boxing pepper, renting warehouses and sale rooms, for printing and advertising, for packers’ fees, for coffees and teas at Wills Coffee House and wine at the Dolphin Tavern.
The waterman who guided the ships up the Thames put in a bill for £34 16s. Mr Montague wanted £107 10s for sorting silk. £300 went in ‘tavern expenses and treats’. Henry Coleman charged £54 8s for clothes for Negro slaves so that they might look respectable at the point of sale. Samuel Smith fitted them with shoes for £3 15s.
There were eight auctions of plunder ‘by the candle’ in 1712 and 1713 at the Mar
ine Coffee House in Cornhill and at Edmund Crisp’s Coffee House. Bids were received for as long as a small piece of candle burned. The last bid before the candle went out secured each lot.
Gold ingots, pieces of eight and pearls fetched four thousand pounds. But much of the valuable stuff had disappeared. Members of the crew reiterated that Woodes Rogers had hidden away treasure at Batavia so that he might secretly collect it later.
Merchants from all over the country gathered for these auctions. They bid for china, bales of silk, silk stockings, linens, towels, calicos, spices, cast iron, bees wax, ribbons and taffetas, a chest of priests’ vestments, six dozen handbells, twenty-four pictures painted on copper in oils, a ‘great bewgle’, cocoa, yarn, flowered muslin, chintzes, quilts, shirts, smocks, drawers, petticoats and forty-five counterpanes stitched with silk.*
The total raised for the plunder was £147,975 12s 4d, a sum far below the expectation of the men. The Lord Chancellor ruled that two thirds of this should go to the owners, and one third to the crew, according to the original terms of agreement. But before any payments were made the Chancery Courts had to judge and rule on the depositions, submissions, grievances and pleas that came from all involved.
Bribes were paid. The East India Company, persistent in their accusation that their trading rights had been infringed, was bought off for £6000 plus £161 5s to an unnamed official.† Payment was also made to The Company of Silk Throwers, who controlled the import of silk from Persia, China and the East Indies. One hundred and forty-nine pounds went in bribes to Custom House Officers.
Predictably the crew fared worst. Three years went by before they got anything. They claimed they should receive £1000 a share, not the £42 6s eventually authorised by the Master in Chancery. In signed petitions they accused the owners and ships’ officers of ‘vile and clandestine practices’ such as destroying the Bills of Lading, of selling off prize vessels and of sending home silver plate in East India Company ships.
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