Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

  It was, the crewmen said, by the ‘Courage and Hazzard of their lives’ that the treasure galleon had been taken. Seventy of them had died on the voyage. Those that survived, and their families, were ‘perishing from Want of Bread and daily thrown into Gaols’, while all their complaints were pushed aside.

  Selkirk did well to get his two and a half share. He got eight hundred pounds, four gold rings, a silver tobacco box, a gold-headed cane, a pair of gold candlesticks and a silver-hiked sword. From this had been deducted what he owed for sewing silk, serge, a jacket and tobacco. He fared better than Christopher Dewars who was among those who had died. His mother collected the £3 8s 6d deemed due, and left her thumb print by way of receipt. Men forced by time to move on or away, received not a penny for their courage, or the hazard of their lives. They had, said their lawyer, been ‘blinded and kept in the Dark, nay Defrauded in a clandestine and unfair manner’.

  1712 All Things in Hugger Mugger

  AMONG THOSE wanting a cut of the Acapulco booty were the heirs of Thomas Estcourt. It rankled with them that Dampier stood to gain from this haul. They still smarted over the loss of their money in the fiasco of his 1703 voyage and held him responsible for the sinking of both their ships and the waste of all their investment.

  He had gone to sea again in 1708 without the conclusion of their legal case against him and they intended to relieve him of such funds as he had, or that might be owing to him. He was sixty-one and ill and was unlikely to disappear on another voyage.

  Estcourt’s younger sister and heir, Elizabeth Cresswell and her husband, prepared their case against him. Their charge was that he mismanaged the 1703 voyage, concealed plunder taken, and used embezzled money from the first voyage to finance the second. They paid Selkirk to give witness against him.

  Selkirk was compliant in telling people whatever they wanted to hear, if it was to his advantage. He gave evidence to the Cresswells’ agent on 18 July 1712, in the form of a signed Deposition.† He was lodging with a Thomas Ronquillo, at a house near St Catherine’s in the County of Middlesex. He had found a woman whom he described as a ‘loveing friend’, Katherine Mason. She had a husband, John, who was a merchant tailor.

  Selkirk gave his age as thirty-two, and described himself as a Mariner. He was, he said, ‘in a short time going on a long voyage to some remote Isles beyond the Seas’. He did not explain the island of his destination. Perhaps it was The Island of his abandonment, The Island that he knew.

  His evidence damned Dampier. The Cinque Ports and the St George were, he said, good ships, worth together about £6000. They sank because they had not been sheathed:

  and it must needs be a great fault in the Deft Dampier not to advise that they be sheathed … having been Severall Voyages to the South Seas before the voyage above mentioned he must needs know that the worms there eat Ships for the worms there doe eat Shipps extreamly bad & as bad as in any other pt of the World & the not sheathing the Ships St George & Cinque Ports Galley was the loss of both ships for they Perished by being worm Eaten.

  Selkirk’s picture of the 1703 voyage was of mismanagement, deception, incompetence, cowardice and greed. He said, or was prompted to say, that all Articles of Agreement between officers and crew had been broken. No entries of plunder were ever recorded or accounts kept. ‘Dampier, Morgan & Stradling took upon themselves without consulting others to manage & Do what they pleased.’ They stole money and silver plate, ‘managed all things in hugger mugger among themselves’, and paid out no dividends to the crew.

  Selkirk described how Dampier callously marooned his First Lieutenant James Barnaby. He said the French ship, sighted at the end of February 1704, from The Island, was worth £12,000, and if the men had been allowed to fight it, they would have taken it. It was Dampier who denied them the opportunity, saying ‘he knew how to make advantage of the Voyage otherwise’.

  In March and April 1704, Selkirk said, they had taken five or six Spanish ships as prizes. He put their total value at £50,000. In one were ‘Divers Chests of Silver to the value of £20,000’. Dampier’s refusal to let the men rummage this ship for plunder, caused the break-up of the voyage.

  Other witnesses, Ralph Clift and William Sheltram, corroborated Selkirk’s allegations.† Clift admitted that he himself was illiterate. None the less he confirmed that no records were kept of the voyage, nor council meetings held. Dampier, he said, went against the advice of the owners in not having the ships sheathed, ‘telling them there were no worms where they were going’. He ‘behaved himself the whole voyage very ill & very rudely & very vilely both to his officers & Men’. He and Morgan ‘took Ingots or Wedges both of silver & also of Gold’. These were worth at least £10,000, and they sold them at Batavia. It was Dampier’s ‘fault and mismanagement’ and his threatening to shoot the Steersman through the head, that lost the ‘Acapulca Ship’ and lost the Owners ‘two Millions of money’.

  Sheltram concurred. It was Dampier’s fault that the ‘Acopulca ship’ got away.* He ‘refused to be ruled’ or to follow advice. The St George was ‘like a Ceive She was eaten by worms soe much’. Men had to ‘Pump Day & Night to gett the water out of her’. Dampier ‘did behave himself very indecently, abusing both the Officers and Men & giving them very base and abusive Language’. He and Morgan ‘took a very considerable Quantity of Pearle and two Bales of wrought silk’ and hid it all away at Batavia and Amsterdam. All he, Sheltram, ever received were ten Pieces of Eight.

  The Cresswells’ case against Dampier was not heard before a judge. The mariners’ allegations could not be proved. Words might have been put into their mouths. Dampier was sick and clearly not rich. In a will dated 1714, he described himself as ‘diseased and weak in body, but of sound and perfect mind’. He died the following year aged sixty-one leaving debts of around two thousand pounds.

  1712 The South Sea Bubble

  THERE WAS always another journey to make, other prizes to be won. It seemed that Selkirk’s long voyage to remote Isles, beyond the Seas, was to be with the new South Sea Company. Peace between England and Spain was imminent in 1712 and English exclusion from the South Sea would end. A huge expeditionary force was planned to set up trading posts along the coast of South America. It would sail in June. ‘There has not been in our Memory an Undertaking of such Consequence’ Defoe wrote in an Essay on the South-Sea Trade.†

  We shall, under the Protection, in the Name, and by the Power of Her Majesty, Seize, Take and Possess such Port or Place, or Places, Land, Territory, Country or Dominion, call it what you please, as we see fit in America, and Keep it for our own. Keeping it implies Planting, Settling, Inhabiting, Spreading, and all that is usual in such Cases: And when this is done, what are we to do with it? Why, we are to Trade to it, and from it; Whither? Where ever we can with Spaniards, or any Body that will Trade with us.

  The Company’s objectives were, he said, ‘capable of being the Greatest, most Valuable, most Profitable, and most Encreasing Branch of Trade in our whole British Commerce’. Its profits would pay off the national debt – which stood at nine million pounds, lead to trading agreements with Spain and bring wealth to all involved.†

  The expeditionary fleet of 1712, would have 20 warships and bomb vessels, 40 transport ships, hospital ships and 4000 soldiers. Woodes Rogers was to command it. He met at South Sea House with the deputy governor of the South Sea Company, Sir James Bateman.

  Selkirk would go too. His Island would be colonised. He knew its virtues. It was safe for ships. It would bring great riches to Great Britain. It had given to him, it would give to others too. He would advise on its harbours and tides, its topography and climate, where to build and when to plant.

  The Company spent £120,000 on fitting ships, but more investment was needed. In March, the Secretary of State, Henry St John, pledged government money for this voyage ‘to carry on the Trade to those Parts’.† Queen Anne intimated that she would ‘be pleased to assist this Company with a Sufficient Force’.

  Selkirk hun
g around the port of Bristol drinking flip in the bars. Month after month went by. No money for the grand scheme came. The Treaty of Utrecht was signed. It marked peace with Spain and gave trading rights to the South Sea Company. But letters from the Company to the Most Honourable Robert, Earl of Oxford, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain and to Queen Anne went unanswered.

  Selkirk waited. He believed this voyage must happen. It seemed inconceivable that such grand plans should come to nothing and such effort and money be squandered. He wanted again to sail with Rogers, the man who had rescued him, who called him Governor and Monarch. He wanted again to see The Island.

  The safe time for sailing passed. The acquired ships stayed idle. Their cargoes rotted. The South Sea scheme was a shining bubble, floating high and filled with air. The Island, remote and far beyond the seas, receded. Selkirk would not return to it. Boredom and drink led to trouble. On 23 September 1713 he was charged in the parish of St Stephens in Bristol, with common assault. He had beaten up Richard Nettle, a sailor. As with previous brushes with the law he did not show up for the hearing.† He moved to the obscurity of London for some months, then went home to Largo.

  * Woodes Rogers introduced Steele to women who, he said, would make him ‘throw away his cane and dance a minuet’. To one of these, a Mrs Roach, Steele paid some hundreds of pounds.

  *Addison and Steele when students shared lodgings in Bury Street. They co-wrote the Tatler. Addison was godfather to Steele’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth. In 1711 Steele owed Addison £100.

  *On 1 October 1713 the last issue, no. 175, of the Guardian appeared. On 6 October, the first number of the Englishman, Being the Sequel to the Guardian, was published.

  *Between 1708 and 1711, Selkirk had not had a moment’s separation from Company. He had been off The Island for three years.

  *These inventories and accounts, muddled and unsorted, are in dusty boxes in Chancery C104/36, in the Public Record Office, London. And see David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (1990).

  *There was no agreement by any scribe about the spelling of Acapulco.

  6

  HOME

  Selkirk’s Deposition of 1712 and the house where he was born.

  HOME

  1714 Punch or Flip

  EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS would buy the streets of Largo. The family legend was that Selkirk returned to his home town on a Sunday morning in Spring in gold-laced clothes. There was no one at his father’s house. He went to the Church. His parents were there. His mother, ‘uttering a cry of joy’

  Even in the house of God, rushed to his arms, unconscious of the impropriety of her conduct and the interruption of the service.†

  He had booty to show for his danger and daring. He impressed them with ‘Several Summes of Money’, silver and gold, ‘a considerable Parcell of Linnen Cloth’, his sea books and instruments, the accounts of his adventures by Edward Cooke, Woodes Rogers and Richard Steele.

  He had with him, too, his glazed, brown stoneware flip-can and four years and months of The Island etched into his mind. Drink was again an addiction, a kind of rescue. The can was engraved with a rhyme:

  Alexander Selkirk, this is my One

  When you me take on Board of Ship

  Pray fill me full with Punch or Flip†

  Largo had stayed still. The wide bay, grey ocean and low sky, the houses huddled by the harbour, the little fishing boats. There were the same habits of survival. The slaughter of farm animals, the drying of their hides, the harvesting of crops, the same prayers on Sundays, declaring gratitude, asking for forgiveness, profit and everlasting life.

  His mother, Euphan, was ill. His brother, David, now ran the tannery. He had a son named Alexander. Selkirk lodged first with his parents, then with his brother John and sister-in-law Margaret. But he was more estranged than ever from family life. He could not cope with its confinement and circumspection, the small-time conversation, the meals at table. He took no part in the daily round, was taciturn and at times in tears.

  There was a rocky piece of land, high and fissured with rocks behind his father’s house. Here he built a kind of cave. His consolation in the day was to be there alone and watch the sea. He watched perhaps for a passing sail. ‘O my beloved Island!’ he was supposed to have said. ‘I wish I had never left thee.’

  He tried to create the civilised life he had imagined on The Island. He bought a large house by the Craigie Well in Largo. He acquired adjacent ‘Lands, Tenements, Outhouses, Gardens, Yards and Orchards’. He found a naïve and compliant woman Sophia Bruce, the daughter of a crofter, whom he thought might be his wife. Her parents were dead and she survived on the charity of three uncles, all ministers: ‘Mr Harry Rymer, Mr James Rymer and another’.†

  Selkirk liked to meet her secretly high in the woodland of Keil’s Den, or in the ruins of Pitcruvie Castle among the ferns, grasses and bluebells. She endured his drinking, his moods and violence, was moved by his story and impressed by his wealth. She pitied his abandonment for all those years in an unimaginable place. He supposed he would marry her though she was no more to him than The Island’s goats, the women of Guayaquil, or Loathsome Negroes from a stolen prize. He called her his ‘beloved friend’, but the swamps of Darien, the ferocious winds of the southern ocean, the taunts and jeers of shipboard life, scavenging for sustenance alone on an island … none of it had primed him to be a married man.

  The sea was more real than a woman, the force of the tides. The Island resonated. He bought a boat and sailed the bay to the cliffs of Kingscraig Point. He lingered where the sea and land elided, observed the straddle of seaweed, the calling birds.

  He left Largo in a hurry, never to return. After a drinking bout he beat a young man almost to death.† The young man’s life was despaired of. Yet again, Selkirk did not face the inquiry that followed. He abandoned his attempts at status, the house and land he had bought. He took with him his plunder and money and Sophia Bruce. He left his sea chest, clothes and flip-can.

  1717 She Said He Married Her

  HE RENTED a house in Pall Mall and was sheltered again by the streets of London. The adventures of the past receded. Dampier was dead, Woodes Rogers had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas and was ridding the area of ‘loose people and pirates’.† Selkirk sought a more ordinary life. Sophia Bruce asked for marriage, and he agreed.

  The sea lured so he enlisted in the Navy. He joined HMS Enterprise, as Mate. It was an unremarkable job. The Enterprise was a merchant ship that plied the Channel ports taking and unloading cargo. Its destiny was not remote and far-off Isles beyond the Seas. There were no pirates or prizes, no storms or volcanoes, no chasing of goats or hiding in trees.†

  While the ship was being fitted, he made a Will. He signed it in Wapping on 13 January 1717. It ‘Called to Mind the Perills and Dangers of the Seas and other uncertaintys of this transitory life’. Sophia Bruce was its main beneficiary and his executor. In it, he left ten pounds to Katherine Mason who had consoled him when he first reached London. His father who was ill and old was, while he lived, to have the Largo house. Then it was to go to Sophia. She was to manage it, levy rents, and profit from it ‘to all intents as I myself might or could do being personally present’. After her death it was to pass to his nephew Alexander.†

  All his disposable wealth was for his ‘Loveing Friend’, Sophia: his lands, gardens and orchards, his wages, money, gold, silver, clothes, his ‘Linnen and Woolin’, everything owed to him as a mariner, ‘tickets, pensions, prize money, smart money, legacies and dues’.

  She said he married her. She gave the wedding day as 4 March 1717 but was vague as to where the ceremony took place or who witnessed it. Perhaps a notary took a fee and gave or did not give some salient piece of paper. Woodes Rogers had observed how, at Kinsale, men were ‘continually marrying’. They soon parted for all time from their brides.

  Selkirk was away at sea eight months. When he returned he and Sophia resumed a kind of married life for
nine months more. He was taciturn and absent. He drank too much, was violent and unsettled, but she thought she had the status of his wife, the security of inheritance, some sort of commitment from him. When the Enterprise left again, and he with it, she took it as part of the bargain of being a mariner’s wife: to be together then apart, alone then reunited. She had reason to believe him. He had bound his intentions in the language of the law. It was written down that she was his ‘trusty and loveing friend’, his ‘full and sole executrix’. Were he to die, he had recommended his soul into the hands of Almighty God, asked for his body to be committed to the earth or sea, and promised all his worldly goods to her.

  1719 The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

  SO SELKIRK became a naval officer, on a wage, with a pension and familial obligations. His story of abandonment faded, like the news of a day. He had survived alone on an unaccommodating island when all human support was withdrawn. He had made this island his home. But rescue meant return to society. And now he was with HMS Enterprise, plying the unremarkable ports of Sheerness and Woolwich, Plymouth and Portsmouth.

  While he was employed on this ordinary voyage, Daniel Defoe picked up the tale again. Selkirk’s ‘Fame of having lived four Years and four Months alone in the island of Juan Fernandez’ inspired Defoe to write a novel. He called it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oronoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. An account of how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’.*