Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  The relief and release was wonderful, a fine meal of local fish and Chilean wine restored the spirits, and we had a chance to reflect on exactly what had brought us to the ends of the earth. We had come in search of Alexander Selkirk, the Scots mariner who spent four years on the island, and his legendary alter ego Robinson Crusoe; we had also come to find Lord Anson and Juan Fernández. These ancient names still owned the island, but the reality of their occupation had long since been lost. The film crew had come to tell these stories, I was here to add some history, while the German scientists knew a great deal about the island’s ecological history. The search would be long – an opportunity for an ongoing expert seminar, mixing local and imported knowledge, both unique, and largely distinct. Once again I had landed in a strange place with some engaging companions. This book is the result of that journey, as well as a longer, more fluid exploration of the subject across the myriad of sources, subjects and situations that it inspired.

  It had not always been so easy to reach the island, but even in the twenty-first century it retains an other-worldly quality, a place out of time and mind, one that inspired diseased and excited mariners to fantasise about paradise. Even now it grips the post-modern imagination as the putative home of Robinson Crusoe, the ultimate castaway, a universal story of the human spirit overcoming adversity. Three hundred years later Defoe’s tale still has the capacity to upset the equilibrium of otherwise sane people.

  NOTES

  1 W.A. Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World; First to the South-Seas, thence to the East-Indies, and Homewards by the Cape of Good Hope. Begun in 1708, and Finish’d in 1711, London, 1712, p. 122.

  1

  Of Islands and Englishmen

  Juan Fernández exists in the English imagination because it is a distant, tiny island that was never English, a shimmering rocky speck, wrapped in lush vegetation, set in an azure ocean of dreams. In the fifteenth century, before America had been discovered, English writers began to emphasise that their island stood apart from Europe, emphasising the commercial and strategic advantages that flowed from controlling the sea. Such thoughts pre-dated the disastrous end of the Hundred Years War, and the shattering Wars of the Roses. Ambitious monarchs still dreamed of an English Empire in Europe, but the reality proved less glorious. Defeated in Europe and diminished by internal strife English monarchs did well to die in their beds. Their weakness invited invasion. Without control of the Channel no English King was safe against invaders bent on usurping his throne. Successful usurper Henry VII adopted a different approach, based on warships, coastal defences and the search for new markets outside Europe. Insularity became the basis of a policy, driven by weakness and fear, but it had limited economic value until New Worlds were discovered. In the meantime the English created a suitably mythic seafaring identity, an island nation at once enterprising and outward looking, tales retold so many times that they acquired a sort of truth.

  Reformation, religious persecution and the French invasion attempt of 1545 emphasised differences, unifying the country against a European ‘other’, foreign in tongue and faith, and all too obviously hostile. The English sense of insularity, being set apart, and self-contained, kept on growing. Shakespeare’s England may have been ‘set in a silver sea’, but it was the ability of his contemporaries to command that sea that allowed the English project to progress despite the weakness of the state, in manpower and money, when set against Habsburg Spain and Valois France. Little wonder imaginative Englishmen chose distant island settings for their imperial dreams.

  As Tudor England struggled to find a place in a Europe of expanding nation states, an over-mighty Habsburg Empire that spanned the Atlantic and a Universal Church, Thomas More offered the policy-makers of the era an idealised England far from danger. More understood Continental politics only too well. His Utopia of 1516 was an alternative England, a place of peace and equality, beyond the menace and violence of the continent, and the threat it posed to English interests.1 The book opened in Antwerp, the greatest commercial city of northern Europe, where Raphael Hythloday (literally Raphael Nonsense), a Portuguese traveller, brought news from Utopia, which he had visited after sailing to America with Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine adventurer who gave his name to two continents. The imaginative way in which More read Vespucci’s text reflected the realities of contemporary travel writing – a fanciful, sensationalist literature.2 Older texts were read into the landscape, travellers expecting to experience the same sensations as their precursors. Vespucci’s hyperventilated descriptions of his first encounter with America suggest the effect of scurvy, a reality that quickly unravels any attempt to assess truth and falsehood in his writings. More reworked these imaginative writings into an English vision, building on the classical learning of the Renaissance. The facility with which the Utopians learned Greek, and developed printing, emphasised More’s humanist approach, as did the reference to Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Among the Greek texts Hythloday passed to the Utopians were Aldine editions of Thucydides and Herodotus, the core texts of seapower imperialism.3

  More placed his island in Vespucci’s America. He wrote only twenty years after Columbus’s first voyage, when this largely unknown land was still being read through layers of classical philosophy and geography. Vespucci’s America linked the new world with Paradise. Yet behind the humanist scholarship and American discoveries, real or imagined, More recast English diplomatic and strategic policy to escape the snares of a European diplomatic system increasingly beyond English control. He advised retreating to the island and changing the economic model. To represent his policy choice More made the island an artificial construction. King Utopos had cut a fifteen-mile-wide channel and civilised the Utopians at the same time: the two processes were intimately connected. His quest for insular security created Britain’s enduring preference for island bases. Far from compiling a text on an ideal political and social system, More stressed that in order to avoid the baleful influence of Europe it would be necessary to live without the advantages of external trade.

  Parallels with the mature British Empire are obvious. His imagined society had strikingly English characteristics. While generations of commentators have been fascinated by communist approaches to private property and production, and the more unusual social customs of the imaginary islanders, few have troubled to ask why Utopia was an island, and an artificial one at that. More moved among the policy-making elite of Tudor England, he worked closely with the Chief Minister, and grew up in the household of his predecessor. He did not invent these policy options, he retailed ideas that were already beginning to transform the idea of Englishness, in response to a changing European power structure.

  The island identity extended across the new world: Utopians, like all islanders, were curious about the outside world, and carried their exports to market in their own ships – an approach that anticipated the Navigation Laws in the mid-seventeenth century. He wrote, it should be recalled, at a time when the English had little expertise in oceanic navigation, most English exports travelled to Antwerp or the Mediterranean in foreign ships. Among the greatest achievements of Utopian science were studies of the heavenly bodies, the key to oceanic navigation.4 Such attainments echoed Vespucci’s boasts, and appealed to the scientific mind of Francis Bacon.

  The key to More’s text was a woodcut illustration, with three-masted ships in the foreground. Three-masted ships made it possible for the English to choose another identity, as an island race, seeking out and trading with the rest of the world, exerting power by controlling the sea. Utopia helped shape the English world view, providing it with an enduringly insular character.

  More opened the English mind to ideal islands, linked to Plato’s Atlantis. A century later Francis Bacon, another philosophical statesman aiming to influence policy, took the concept a stage further, situating his island in a Pacific Ocean unknown to More or the ancients. Bacon’s New Atlantis of 1627, which opened with the evocative phrase ‘we sailed from Peru’
, constructed an insular location that melded contemporary knowledge of the ‘South Sea’ and the nature of scurvy, with a smattering of seaman-like terms, mostly borrowed from travel narratives. The more immediate models for such writing were the voyage narrative of Fernández de Quirós, reporting a possible Terra Australis Incognita in the South Seas, Will Adams’s letters from Japan, and Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana. All three were in print in England when Bacon wrote; elements from all three appear in his text. When the planned voyage to China or Japan falters the navigators find themselves at a South Sea island state of advanced Christian peoples. After a period in Quarantine, a distinctly Mediterranean approach to sickly mariners, although in this case taken from Adams’s account of his reception in Japan, the travellers joined their hosts. The islanders had long been aware of the outside world, using covert missions to collect information, while their intellectual resources included otherwise unknown ancient wisdom, including books on natural history written by King Solomon, deliberately confused and conflated with an ancient king of the island named Solamona, architect of the islanders’ universal search for knowledge.5 Bacon’s link between advanced islanders, ancient learning and sea-based research methods was a classic statement of the humanism, inspired by the transmission of ancient wisdom through Byzantium and the Arab world to Europe, specifically through the print shops of Venice.

  Ultimately Bacon’s magical island was both a haven of peace and civilisation, and universal research centre. This imagined land reflected a personal agenda, voiced by one of the islanders: ‘The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ Nor was Bacon alone in seeking insular wonders in the distant seas. Shakespeare had already created Prospero’s Island, another magical place where the wickedness and folly of men would be defeated. Bacon reinforced his biblical theme by referring to the navigational expertise of the ancients: ‘The Phoenicians, and especially the Tyrians, had great fleets; so had the Carthaginians their colony, which is yet further west.’6 As in so much of Bacon’s maritime writing his dependence on Raleigh was obvious, but the westward trend he gave to Phoenician seafaring hinted the islanders were of Carthaginian descent.

  Bacon’s view of British expansion echoed More’s equivocation: the New Atlanteans, an advanced and learned people, were not interested in colonies. Yet European expansion had been the key to their discovery. Bacon had already explicitly linked the search for colonies with the search for knowledge; the illustrated frontispiece of The Great Instauration featured a fully rigged galleon heading out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of the Ancient World, and the emblem of Spanish global power, on a voyage into the unknown.

  While More and Bacon shaped subsequent English/British island writing, many of their subtler insights have been missed by readings that privilege universal themes over contemporary English concerns. They made the island a central focus of Englishness in the formative century that separated Henry VII from James I, and their texts lived in the libraries of all literate Englishmen, read into the mental world of statesmen, scholars, warriors and travellers, generation after generation.

  While the magical qualities of these idealised islands have fascinated the English across the centuries, they can never be realised by those who live on continental land masses. Continentals must abandon their homes to find the island dream. The success of Robinson Crusoe in Europe, especially in Germany, spoke to a profound longing for a fresh start, a new world, and above all peace and tranquillity. After a century of bloody conflict, a succession of major wars ravaged much of Germany between 1618 and 1713, imaginary islands were the last refuge of hope and dreams. So profound was this longing that Crusoe has inspired any number of Germanic robinsonades through the three centuries that separated the age of Defoe from that of space flight.

  There are other ways of reading the English connection with islands and oceans. Linda Colley has argued that Crusoe’s version of Empire, occupation, control and enlightenment leading to well-earned reward should be set alongside the experience of his contemporary Gulliver, endlessly enslaved, abused and exploited by other peoples.7 While captivity was a major theme in the British imperial project, one shared by Crusoe, most captives were taken as they voyaged for an oceanic empire because Britain was a small, weak state, incapable of exerting power on the European mainland. Recognising this inherent weakness Bacon and Raleigh laid out the philosophical basis of seapower as an alternative to the ‘Roman’ military might of continental empires. Ancient ideas and concepts, transmitted through Venice, the quintessential seapower state, began to have a significant influence on English thought from the first decade of the sixteenth century.8 More, John Dee, Raleigh, Bacon and John Selden used them to evolve an English concept of seapower, linked to the development of a sea empire, a critical phase in evolution of a national identity. These works defined the parameters of seapower in an English setting. In 1607 Bacon defended the Union of England and Scotland in the House of Commons by stressing the strategic benefits of seapower:

  this kingdom of England, having Scotland united, Ireland reduced, the sea provinces of the Low Countries contracted, and shipping maintained, is one of the greatest monarchies, in forces truly esteemed, that hath been in the world.9

  Such texts, addressed to Kings and Councillors, looked to influence policy, providing historical, strategic, legal and economic arguments for an empire of islands at a time when England was perfectly incapable of attempting anything else. Later English voyagers would build on that vision, none more assiduously than that expert textual voyager Daniel Defoe.

  The imperial and strategic writings of More, Raleigh, Bacon and Defoe matter because an empire, like a state, is a work of art, a cultural construction.10 These ideas shaped the English/British response to Juan Fernández, and many another distant island. Once the Tudors had begun the ‘British Empire’, a phrase coined by John Dee in the 1570s, it was taken up, repeated, developed and sustained. Each generation built on the achievements of the last, and added to the stock of heroic texts, images and structures that repeated the message to the ignorant, and bolstered the fragile self-confidence of a small, weak nation situated off the coast of a great continent, and desperately vulnerable to larger states.

  NOTES

  1 T. More, Utopia, tr. & ed. P. Turner, Penguin, London, 2003; R.B. Wernham, Before the Armada: The Growth of English Foreign Policy, 1485–1588, Jonathan Cape, London, 1966, pp. 1–98.

  2 F. Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2006, pp. 95, 109, 133 discusses explorer’s tales and the confusion that follows them into print.

  3 More, Utopia, p. 81.

  4 More, Utopia, pp. 50, 71, 82.

  5 P. Salzman, ‘Narrative Contexts for Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in B. Price (ed.), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003, pp. 30, 32–3, 36; F. Bacon, ‘New Atlantis’, in The Essays: The Wisdom of the Ancients and the New Atlantis, Odhams, London, n.d., p. 316. First published in 1627, the essay is considered incomplete.

  6 Bacon, ‘New Atlantis’, pp. 329, 310.

  7 L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002.

  8 M. Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, Oxford, 1979, p. 144. Herodotus and Thucydides were published in England in 1502.

  9 Bacon speech, 17 February 1607 in J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis & D.D. Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, Longman, London, 14 vols, 1867–74, vol. 13, pp. 221–3.

  10 This concept, brilliantly developed in the opening section of Jakob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of Italy in the Renaissance (tr. S.G.C. Middlemore, London, 1878), is applicable elsewhere, especially in the constructed spaces of seapower empires.

  2

  Spanish Lakes and English Dreams

  Islands are nothing without people to see them, and voyages
are pointless without landfalls. Spanish conquistadores first sighted the South Pacific early in the sixteenth century. Driven by the lure of gold, a habit of conquest and an aggressive religious mission, they overthrew the Aztec and Inca empires in three decades. The resulting flow of unprecedented riches, coinciding with a fortuitous turn in the dynastic politics of Europe, transformed Spain from a tough frontier state with Mediterranean ambitions into the first world power. American wealth funded a Habsburg drive for European hegemony, and the Catholic Counter-Revolution. For Protestant England, Spanish bullion and military might posed the ultimate threat: invasion, conquest and the forced reimposition of an older religious settlement. Little wonder English seamen, politicians, merchants and geographers dreamed of the South Sea and the silver mines of Peru. Redirecting Peruvian bullion from Seville to London would restore a European balance of power, secure the English kingdom and the new religion. The original Elizabethan search for an alternative source of bullion ended in the icy fiasco of the Northwest Passage, while raiding in the Caribbean met stiff resistance. By the early 1570s the English were ready to attempt the South Sea. That they knew anything at all about the region reflected insatiable curiosity, and not a little spying.