Crusoe’s Island
A Rich and Curious History of Pirates,
Castaways and Madness
ANDREW LAMBERT
This book is dedicated to my fellow travellers
on the 2010 Caligari Expedition
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Of Islands and Englishmen
2 Spanish Lakes and English Dreams
3 Pirates and Freebooters
4 ‘The Absolute Monarch of the Island’
5 The Magical Island of Daniel Defoe
6 Shelvocke’s Sojourn
7 George Anson’s Voyage
8 The Magical Island
9 Making Juan Fernández English
10 Making Books
11 Closing the Stable Door
12 Mastering the Pacific
13 Scurvy Resolved
14 Distant Despair
15 Whaling and the South Pacific
16 The End of an Era
17 Imaginary Voyages
18 An American South Pacific
19 A Literature of Defeat: Reconstructing the Loss of the USS Essex
20 Sea Stories
21 Poet of the Pacific
22 A British Base in the Pacific
23 The Admiral’s Picnic
24 Occupation, Possession, Ownership and Title
25 Settlers
26 The Battle of Cumberland Bay
27 From the Challenger to the Admiralty Handbook
28 Making Robinson’s Island
29 Islands, Nations and Continents
30 Another Tragedy
Bibliography
Index
Plates
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
List of Illustrations
Victorian statue of Alexander Selkirk (photograph by Sylvia Stanley)
Daniel Defoe, creator of Robinson Crusoe
Frontispiece illustration and title page of the first edition of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (© Bettmann / Getty Images)-
The island of Utopia from Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516 (© Culture Club / Getty Images)
Herman Moll’s ‘New and Exact Map of the Coast, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South Sea Company’
Coastal perspective of the anchorage in Cumberland Bay, Juan Fernández (The National Archives, ref. ADM344/2256)
William Dampier, buccaneer author
George, Lord Anson
Lord Anson’s encampment on Juan Fernández (courtesy of King’s College London, Foyle Special Collections Library)
Elephant seals on Juan Fernández (courtesy of King’s College London, Foyle Special Collections Library)
Selkirk’s fabled cave, Juan Fernández (© Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo)
Advertisement for ‘Scientific & Sporting Cruise’, 1910 (pg. 4; Issue 39303 © Times Newspapers Ltd)
SMS Dresden in Cumberland Bay (© IWM, Q 46021)
View of El Yunque, Juan Fernández (Andrew Lambert)
Cumberland Bay, Juan Fernández (Andrew Lambert)
Preface
This book addresses the long, curious relationship between English identity and an island on the other side of the world, one that was never owned by Britain, and only very briefly occupied by British sailors. Despite that, Juan Fernández (now officially known as Robinson Crusoe Island) assumed a remarkable place in British naval and imaginative literature in the first half of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Commodore Anson’s Voyage, the best-selling publications in their respective genres, set the island within a distinctive English vision, at once oceanic, global, insular and dynamic.
Both quickly escaped their intended audience, achieving striking international success. They helped to sustain British dominance of the oceans in an easily accessible and yet highly structured way. Not only did eighteenth-century Britons have the self-confidence to project themselves onto an island on the other side of the world, but these texts, and the genres they created, shaped ideas of Britishness, as Scotland, Ireland and Wales adopted a predominantly English approach to the world, and those ideas stretched around the world. Over time, these quintessentially English cultural productions would escape the distinction between fact and fiction, and were translated, copied, emulated and developed into truly international possessions.
Ultimately Juan Fernández became a mirror held up to the English, one in which they perceived themselves and their ambitions. It acquired an abiding place in the national culture because every generation found a reason to return. If their Spanish and Chilean owners ever thought about these tiny islands, they saw them as a burden, a threat or at best a navigational beacon. There was no land to farm, there were no minerals to extract, and there seemed little reason to remain beyond denying them to English pirates. By contrast Juan Fernández played a critical role in expanding English intellectual horizons, one that is hard to estimate. Literate visitors like William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and George Anson offered the English a way of seeing the world, one that suited their insular character and seafaring focus. Those voyages opened new horizons, and this book tries to locate them.
Defoe Avenue, Kew, 2015
Acknowledgements
A project of this scope incurs many debts, first and foremost to Jürgen Stumpfhaus and everyone at Caligari Films, for the journey that inspired the book, and the fine company they assembled on the island. A sense of place is essential to any historical enquiry, nowhere more so than that outlandish place Juan Fernández. Once again the forbearance and understanding of my family meant I could travel, and the Department of War Studies at Kings College, London allowed me to reorganise my teaching to create the necessary space. My thanks are due to staff and students for that indulgence. It was greatly appreciated. I hope this small book is at a least a record of not entirely wasted time. Once I returned, absorbed with Crusoe and the Great South Seas, I turned to those who knew far more than I, among whom Glyn Williams was, once again, an unfailing source of wisdom and insight. The Great South Sea is his domain, and I a mere interloper. I have debts to many more, Larrie Ferreiro, Jonathan Lamb, Anne Savours, Catherine Scheybeler, Carlos Corben Trombalen, and many more who indulged in conversation about an island at the end of the world. They did much to save the author from his errors and omissions, but I alone bear final responsibility for what appears.
And then there is Julian Loose, editor extraordinaire, who once again indulged a strange idea from a wild-eyed, scurvied traveller, sketched in a salt-stained journal. The production team at Faber have once again rendered the traveller’s tale coherent, and delivered a book that melds the worlds of travellers, poets, scientists and artists, with war, cannibalism and madness.
Introduction
Robinson Crusoe emerged into the daylight on 1 February 1709, when an English boat crew encountered ‘a Man cloath’d in Goat Skins, who looked wilder than the first Owners of them’1 on the beach of a distant island. The goatskin-clad castaway, Alexander Selkirk (a Scot), had been marooned on Juan Fernández Island for four years and four months. When he arrived home his story, suitably garnished with captured treasure, caught the imagination of a newly forged British nation, tired of continental wars and despotic monarchs. Selkirk became an instant (if short-lived) celebrity. His tale helped promote the greatest stock market fraud of all time; it also inspired the modern novel, and ultimately came to define a peculiarly English way of seeing the world. In the process his island found a place on every map, its minuscule dimensions and long name defeating all attempts to preserve the scale of the South Pac
ific.
When Daniel Defoe created Crusoe he set the story on a very different island, on the other side of South America, but no one cared. Juan Fernández became Crusoe’s island despite the author’s intentions – and so it has remained. Defoe had other plans for Crusoe: he created this half-German hybrid hero as an exemplary Englishman, a model for George I, the incoming Hanoverian King, who Defoe hoped would become an enlightened, insular ruler, keeping his island apart from the entangling dangers of Europe, the better to prosper through expanding worlds of trade and maritime endeavour. In the two centuries that followed the vision Defoe set out in 1719, dominated British policy. George’s great grandson George III became a Robinsonian leader, promoting trade, exploration and agriculture, while refusing to visit his continental dominions. In this maritime world view, an empire of islands and oceans mattered far more than European territory and subject peoples.
Focusing on the English/British engagement with this one tiny green speck amid a vast ocean will help to unravel the complex DNA of a unique world view, tracing its lineage through buccaneers and pirates, intellectuals and lunatics, explore its later development and ask if such distinctively oceanic ideas have any place amid the ever-closer homogeneity of a European Union. Meanwhile Scotland debates the dissolution of the United Kingdom, and the three hundredth anniversary of Crusoe’s publication looms. It seems the British, having forgotten their past, cannot plot a course for the future. We need to remember the stories that made us, and re-examine what they mean, to be reconciled with any present, or future. Until we admit to an oceanic and insular past there can be no intelligent debate about the future, because we are the children of Crusoe.
*
This book is about journeys – journeys made, imagined and remade. It revolves around a very small island in the South Pacific, one that witnessed many such journeys – journeys that made it famous, and gave it the name of a fictional character.
My journey was driven by a combination of older journeys, curiosity and opportunity. On 28 November 2010 I left Defoe Avenue in Kew, heading for Robinson Crusoe’s Island, Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández group, via Heathrow and Frankfurt, where I met up with a German crew from Caligari Films, led by director Jürgen Stumpfhaus, and two German academics. After the interminable ordeal of checking in a complete arsenal of camera and lighting gear, boxes of props and a little personal luggage, we boarded a flight to Santiago de Chile via Madrid.
Having come straight from a hectic work schedule, essential to free up time for the trip, it only slowly began to register that we were heading for a quasi-mythic island, in pursuit of Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, Lord Anson, and even the eponymous Juan Fernández. We split up for the flight; we would be spending a lot of time together once we arrived. By the time we touched down at Madrid I had reread Defoe’s classic, and begun to contemplate islands. Jürgen had been before, filming the German Juan Fernández story, the sinking of the cruiser Dresden in 1915. He retailed wild and strange tales, which I would come to recognise as modern-day robinsonades – tales of adventure set in a real landscape, but endlessly retold to the point of mythology.
Fourteen-hour flights are rarely a pleasure, but this one passed without undue strain. The moving map of the world ticked off well-known names in Africa and then Brazil, food arrived at intervals, and the cabin was largely lost in the silence of sleep and the curious practice of watching cinema blockbusters on a thumbnail screen, only inches away. Leg stretches and meal breaks broke the monotony. By the time we reached South America the sun was high, showing the country around the Argentine city of Cordoba in stark relief from 30,000 feet. Then we reached the Andes, top-lit by the noonday sun, a mighty range of implausibly steep, jagged peaks each one seemingly reaching up to heaven, many flecked with snow. This monstrous wall barred the path west to mere mortals, but we sailed over, serene and swift. No sooner had we crested the peaks than Santiago hove into view, a fresh sensation of sparkling light and brown smog as the descent began. Touchdown was a relief, but it heralded fresh toil. Having queued through immigration, and begun collecting and checking the mass of bags, we were relieved by the arrival of Martin Westcott, our Anglo-Chilean facilitator, who turned up just in time to explain the German invasion to a nervous customs officer. A friendly face, local expertise and colloquial Spanish was most welcome as the Chileans wanted every detail of our immense baggage train. Eventually the ordeal was over, and we moved to the domestic side of the airport.
Only now did we venture outside, into a baking hot Santiago summer afternoon. Fresh in from freezing London and dressed accordingly, the heat was a shock, but a pleasant one. After crossing the airstrip we found the Aerotransportes Araucana aircraft that would take us over to the island, a pair of twin-engine Beechcraft. Given the slightly lurid stories passing round about the short airstrip I took some comfort from the fact that the pilot was of a good vintage. Both planes were packed with gear, bags and finally bodies, every space occupied. Even so this leg of the journey contained strong elements of normality, aircraft, airports and passengers. We were just flying to another place; surely it would be much like everywhere else.
Then we landed. Everything changed. First impressions were not good. The airstrip ran from one side of the island to the other, it was metalled, but strangely quiet. There was a new airport building, but there was no one in the tower, indeed the whole building was empty. Outside a small group of passengers were waiting to board our plane, and they were going to share the journey back to Santiago with a stack of wriggling banana boxes. The second plane landed and we began the heroic task of getting all the gear out, loading it onto a battered truck and moving off. One of the outbound crew was a Chilean archaeologist who had been studying the defences, recording the artillery pieces of the Spanish era. Befuddled by the journey, I forgot to make any notes of his conversation, or his name. I lifted the lid of a banana box only to find a dozen bound crayfish, clawless crustaceans of truly gargantuan proportions. Destined for the surf and turf restaurants of Santiago, they had little more than six hours to live.
I may have been stunned by the gaunt, grim landscape, a scattering of vibrant red poppies lighting up the desiccated remains of what had once been topsoil, deep gullies evidently eroded by rain and wind, filled with rocks and other debris. There was something post-apocalyptic about these ridges of reddish/brown desert emptiness, stretching out to sea in most directions. We hurried on down the road to Horseshoe Bay, la Heradura, otherwise known as Bahía del Padre. Rounding the crest of the ridge opened a magnificent view of an almost perfectly circular bay, with a single exit, a deep wet space, packed with seals and sea lions. The steep cliffs were savagely eroded, with jumbled rocks piled up closer to the shore. Once we reached the jetty there was more loading to exercise tired, stiff muscles, filling two open boats with gear and passengers. All around the bay seals and sea lions sported and snorted.
The boats took us along the coast, past strange rock formations jutting out of the sea, so weirdly anthropomorphic that they seemed to come straight from the set of King Kong. Elsewhere waterfalls fell into the ocean, while valleys of lush greenery, desiccated peaks, sheer cliffs and the odd rocky ledged linked island and ocean. Wherever an opening existed seals and sea lions clustered. Dolphins sported in the free rider zone just ahead of the boat. Birds clustered above, a sure sign that far below immense cetaceans were hunting these rich waters. Almost as soon as we left the bay, the light faded and the wind picked up, hinting that rain was not far away.
The journey was long, for around each new headland another stretched into view, a landscape seemingly without end. Those who had been before offered a little guidance, but the spectacle defied easy comprehension. Our boatman and his son were amused by our surprise; for them this was the daily commute, not a voyage of wonder.
Finally we rounded the last headland, pushing into Cumberland Bay under a lowering sky and scudding clouds, the temperature already 20 degrees lower than it had been on the sunlit concrete
airstrip at Santiago. Ahead a Chilean Navy landing ship, tied up alongside the prominent concrete jetty, was loading scrap metal by noisy crane-loads.
As we stepped out of the boat and began hauling our gear up weed-encrusted steps, the low cloud base, a cool breeze and the lugubrious face of our new guide left me wondering just what I had let myself in for. Pedro Niada spoke movingly of a great wave that had roared into the bay ten months before, smashing into the village, and washing his new waterfront hotel into the bay, along with his wife and children. He pointed to a platform of smooth stones, and the low cover of nasturtiums, before describing their miraculous escape. As Pedro and his wife struggled to keep the children afloat, a boat drifted past, they scrambled aboard, and reached the shore. They lost everything but their children. The hotel was reduced to matchwood; the old Land Rover became a fish trap.
There were raw gashes in the foreshore, recently turned earth, wild poppies and a striking growth of scrub. Old donkeys and broken-down horses grazed amid the chaos. On the beach bundles of twisted metal, corrugated iron sheet, smashed timber and weed-encrusted wreckage lay ready for embarkation. Just then a team of scuba divers came back to the shore, at the end of another day spent clearing the bay. As they trooped off to the container that provided a base I was transfixed by the sight of a large satellite dish, at least 30 feet across, parked amid the trees at a crazy angle. Festooned with weed, twisted out of shape and broken it looked for all the world like the paddle wheel of some long lost Mississippi steam boat, abandoned in the shallows of Louisiana bayou.
Another day would reveal much more, but first impressions linger. San Juan Bautista had been hit hard, and so had I. Before I had time to ask any more questions another boat arrived, and we began to load the gear for a short journey across the bay. The metallic clanging crash of bundled scrap hitting the deck of the landing ship punctuated the evening, the wind fell away and the boats puttered across to Bahía Pangal, the last hotel left standing. Here we resumed the routine of heavy lifting, this time up slippery, broken steps. We were tired and hungry, and the work was harder than ever as we laboured like ancient donkeys under a weight of stores that implied prolonged occupation. Finally the procession ended and we took possession of a curious hotel with all mod cons, save the two we really wanted: hot water and global communications.
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