Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  After the Restoration of 1660, maritime monarch Charles II understood ‘the great and principal interest of this nation’ to be overseas trade.22 This insight prompted Charles and his brother James, Duke of York to send an expedition to the Straits of Magellan in 1669. Captain John Narborough, HMS Sweepstakes had orders to chart the entrance to the Pacific, and ‘if possible lay the foundations of a Trade there’, by finding an unoccupied region to colonise, to avoid war with Spain. Narborough got no further than the port of Valdivia in southern Chile, although he produced an excellent chart of the Straits. He turned back without stretching into the open ocean, let alone reaching Juan Fernández. Even so the islands appeared on John Seller’s 1675 ‘Chart of the South-Sea’.23 Seller a London instrument maker, teacher of navigation and publisher of charts and pilots, had been appointed hydrographer to the King in 1671, backed by a monopoly and an import ban designed to break Dutch domination of charts and navigational texts. Seller’s Atlas Maritimus of 1675, the first English sea atlas, featured the royal warrant, and the two English circumnavigators, Drake and Cavendish. His South Sea chart included the Juan Fernández Islands and the San Félix–San Ambrosio group to the north, all ‘borrowed’ from Dutch charts. The meaning of the latter was as yet little known in England: while Juan Fernández had a history in English, the distant Desventuradas would not trouble the English for another century. Seller’s work may have been imperfect, even by contemporary standards, but his appointment and his publications created an English hydrography, aimed at merchants and mariners travelling to the far flung corners of the globe.24 The English had yet to visit Juan Fernández, but it could be found on an English chart, one that carried the Royal Warrant.

  NOTES

  1 I am indebted to the panellists and discussants at the 2011 United States Naval Academy Naval History Conference, chaired by Dr Larrie Ferreiro, for the discussion of Imperial Spain’s Pacific naval defence. Also C. Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1986, pp. 3–19.

  2 O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Volume I: The Spanish Lake, Australian National University, Canberra, 1979, pp. 213–20.

  3 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. I, pp. 117–18.

  4 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. I, pp. 140–41; R.L. Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1969, pp. 9–12; G. Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997, pp. 55–7.

  5 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. I, pp. 233–64.

  6 J.A. Williamson (ed.), The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Argonaut Press, London, 1933, pp. lxxxii & 100 (first edition London 1622). The 1878 edition was edited by Clements Markham, who had visited the island. P. Bradley & D. Cahill, Habsburg Peru: Images, Imagination and Memory, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2000, p. 23; W. Edmundson, A History of the British Presence in Chile: From Bloody Mary to Charles Darwin and the Decline of British Influence, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2011, p. 16.

  7 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. I, pp. 265–79.

  8 On Raleigh and his voyaging see M. Nicholls & P. Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend, Continuum, London, 2011; V.T. Harlow (ed.), Raleigh’s Last Voyage, Argonaut Press, London, 1932; J. Lorimer (ed.), Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), Hakluyt Society, London, 2006.

  9 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. I, p. 119.

  10 O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Volume III: Paradise Found and Lost, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 33.

  11 C. Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, 3 vols, Almqvist & Wiskell, Uppsala, 1956. The best source on the geological, biological and ecological history of the island.

  12 William Cornelison Schouten in P. Samuel (ed.), Haklutus Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. II, MacLehose, Glasgow, 1905, pp. 246–8. Schouten appeared in the third edition of 1625.

  13 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 17.

  14 O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Volume II: Monopolists and Freebooters, Australian National University, Canberra, 1983, p. 23.

  15 P. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701, St Martin’s Press, London, 1989, pp. 60–4.

  16 Bradley & Cahill, Habsburg Peru, p. 31, from W. Schouten, Journal afte beschrijvinghe van der wonderlicke reyse, Amsterdam, 1618.

  17 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 18 uses a later version from J. Campbell (ed.), Navigantium; or A Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels, London, 1744, vol. I, pp. 6–130.

  18 Bradley, The Lure of Peru, pp. 52–3, 60–4.

  19 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 20–21.

  20 S. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, Collins, London, 1987; L. Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, HarperCollins, London, 2008 manages to ignore the ocean.

  21 Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 72–5.

  22 Charles II to Henrietta Maria (his sister), 20 January 1669: J.D. Davies, ‘Chatham to Erith via Dover: Charles II’s Secret Foreign Policy and the Project for new Royal Dockyards, 1667–1672’, in R. Riley (ed.), Pepys and Chips: Dockyards Naval Administration and Warfare in the Seventeenth Century, Naval Dockyards Society, Southsea, 2012, p. 116.

  23 Reproduced in Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 69.

  24 J. Seller, Atlas Maritimus, or the Sea Atlas, London, 1675, preface & pp. 8–9.

  3

  Pirates and Freebooters

  While the King opened the door to the South Seas the initiative to exploit the opportunity came from an altogether less dignified quarter. Behind the carefully chosen language of Stuart expansionism lay the age-old lure of gold and silver. Plunder and trade along the rim of the Spanish empire was the object, rather than the vast, unknown ocean that lay beyond. The offshore islands would be the service stations that refreshed incoming expeditions before they struck the coast, not the launch pad for new and distant enterprises. At the heart of the English Pacific lay the silver mines of Peru,1 the contemporary standard for fabulous wealth. Drake and Cavendish had demonstrated that the ships carrying the precious metal north to Panama were effectively unguarded. By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish convoyed bullion across the Atlantic, but not between Callao to Panama, or the annual Acapulco to Manila voyage that funded Spanish trade with China. This combination of wealth and weakness proved irresistible to financially compromised Stuart Kings and wild, piratical men from the lawless margins of empire.

  The ‘South Sea’ exerted a powerful pull on men already beyond the bounds of lawful business, their appetites whetted by Henry Morgan’s 1670 sack of Panama, and a growing familiarity with the Pacific voyages that terminated at the great isthmian depot. While buccaneers introduced their contemporaries to the exotic unknown their deeds became a significant literary genre, introducing Juan Fernández to a wider English audience. In 1678 French chronicler Alexandre Exquemelin published a record of Caribbean piracy, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, in Amsterdam. Exquemelin went to the French West Indies in the mid-1660s and spent almost a decade with Henry Morgan, the prince of buccaneers. Returning to Holland in 1674 he qualified as a surgeon, and compiled an account of his experiences. His tales of lawless men on the wild Caribbean frontier became an instant best seller, quickly translated into German, creating an enduring fascination for golden, exotic and violent stories at the heart of central Europe. A Spanish edition followed, for an audience more concerned to exterminate than emulate. This version added new material and occasionally garbled the original text. The first English edition of 1684 seems to have followed the Spanish text. A French edition of 1686 was effectively a new work, and this may have led to the second English edition, which contained an account of the Pacific voyages of English mariner Basil Ringrose, who touched on Juan Fernández.2 By this time Exquemelin’s book had becom
e a franchise operation, each country effectively creating a distinctive version. One thing is clear: the myriad forms of this text became a key resource for early eighteenth century South Sea pioneers and projectors.

  Exquemelin reported that Englishmen first reached Más a Tierra on Christmas Day 1680. Their route to the island had been unusual. A loose confederation of Caribbean buccaneers had crossed the isthmus and captured three large ships off Panama, together with local pilots. Suitably equipped they set off to raid the Pacific coast. Over the next two years the buccaneers would seize 25 ships, kill at least two hundred Spaniards, and cause damage estimated at four million pesos. Such success was all the more remarkable for a small group of ill-disciplined, violent men prone to mutiny and frequent changes of leadership.3 The island witnessed a recurring pattern of disasters, as the raiders brought mutiny, disaffection, shipwreck and death in their wake.

  Relying on a captured Spanish pilot Captain Bartholomew Sharp initially anchored on the south side of the island, close to the southern end of the modern airstrip, a desolate spot bereft of wood and water, before rough weather forced them to shift into what became Sharp’s Bay and later Puerto Inglese. This was a poor anchorage; ships were frequently driven out to sea by fierce offshore winds. These events were recorded in five journals, for among the crew were navigator author William Dampier, cartographer author Basil Ringrose and surgeon author Lionel Wafer. Dampier, the most engaging of them, was an inveterate recorder of data, be it hydrographic, cartographic, animal, vegetable or mineral. Born in Somerset, he had taken the chance of a seafaring career, wandered into the Caribbean, and fallen in with the buccaneers. Navigational skill and endless curiosity ensured he would be employed long after his less attractive character traits – drunkenness, cowardice and double-dealing – had been exposed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge pillaged Dampier’s work in the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (much as the old buccaneer had pillaged Spanish ships), but acknowledged him as ‘a man of exquisite refinement of mind’, although the compliment may require revision.

  Dampier’s works were brought to print with considerable editorial support, improving a pedestrian, unpunctuated prose that was just one thing after another. Having dismissed Más Afuera as ‘a mere rock’, Basil Ringrose landed on Juan Fernández to shoot goats and obtain fresh water, ‘a very refreshing Place to us’. He recorded several gales of wind, shooting at least six goats, and fish ‘so plentiful that in less than one hour’s time two men caught enough for our whole company’. Once refreshed, discipline collapsed; the buccaneers deposed Sharp from command, ‘the company being not satisfied either with his courage or behaviour’.4

  On 12 January 1681, eighteen days after their arrival, the buccaneers sighted three Spanish ships; one of many squadrons organised by the Viceroy of Peru to protect vital silver shipments to Panama. In their haste to get away the buccaneers, now led by Captain John Watling, left behind a ‘Miskito’ Indian named Will. Men from the Mosquito Coast of Central America were often recruited for buccaneering voyages, being expert fishermen.5 Out hunting goats when the alarm was raised, Will could not get back to the beach in time.

  After their hasty departure the buccaneers took more than twenty ships, considerable treasure and a priceless haul of cartographic knowledge. On 29 July 1681 Sharp captured the ship El Santa Rosario, and ‘secured a Spanish Manuscript of prodigious value’, a ‘great Book full of Sea-Charts and Maps’:

  It describes all the ports roads, harbours, bayes, sands, rocks & riseing of the land & instructions how to work a ship into any port or harbour between the Latt. of 17° 15 N and 57°S Latt. … The Spaniards cried when I gott the book (farewell South Sea now) … They were going to throw it overboard but by good luck I saved it.6

  The Spanish charts and sailing directions included maps and coastal perspectives of Juan Fernández. It was no accident that the chart of the island was the last in the manuscript, Juan Fernández was the key to an entire ocean. Ringrose and Dampier found the charts reliable. Soon after Dampier and Wafer took their leave and recrossed the Isthmus of Darien.

  The Spanish manuscript saved Sharp’s neck. Hauled before the Admiralty Court on a well-merited charge of piracy his judges included several senior officers, including Narborough. With the charts in hand Sharp was acquitted on 10 June 1682, to the disgust of the Spanish Ambassador. They were translated into English, and Thameside chart-maker William Hack produced several manuscript copies, ‘including handsome presentation copies given to Charles II, ministers and courtiers’. The work was not published, to keep the intelligence from yet other hands. Charles rewarded Sharp with a Captain’s commission in the Royal Navy. Hack noted Juan Fernández was:

  not inhabited, but if it were it would prove the sharpest thorn that ever touched the Spaniards; for it is naturally fortified: & with a £100 charge & good management 100 men may keep it from 1000 if it should be invaded; it lyes 120 leagues (330 nautical miles) west from Valparaiso. In a word if this isle was inhabited it would be very profitable in matter of trade in time of peace with the Spaniards; & if a war very useful to the English.7

  While the island is actually a little further out to sea the basic argument remained sound until the end of Spanish America.

  On 22 March 1684 two buccaneer ships met off Juan Fernández: John Cook’s Batchelor’s Delight (a captured Danish slaver, complete with a cargo of female slaves) and John Eaton’s vessel. When they landed the next day Will had prepared a fine stew of goat meat and tree cabbage for his scorbutic guests. The fresh victuals came too late for John Cook, who took sick at the island, and did not recover. Dampier records that his funeral on the coast of Costa Rica involved rather more ceremony than was usually accorded his kind. The Batchelor’s Delight had another strikingly literate pirate crew, Dampier, Wafer and Ambrose Cowley keeping journals. The two ships remained at the island for 16 days, exploiting the food and water to recover from the inevitable scorbutic epidemic. They also recovered Will, who had survived for three years, using his skills to find food and evade capture. While such resourcefulness made him a model for Robinson Crusoe, Will became Man Friday. Friday was described as tall and olive-skinned, with long straight black hair, a typical Miskito. Will had been met on the beach by fellow Miskito Robin, their striking greeting ceremony transferred into Defoe’s book from Dampier’s account. In 1687 four men from the homebound Batchelor’s Delight were marooned on the island at their own request, having gambled away all their prize money. In 1689 they drove off a Spanish landing party.8

  Whatever the financial rewards were, the buccaneers had a striking impact on Spain. By 1686 they had seized 72 coastal traders, close on two-thirds of all local shipping. The Spanish fortified the coastal ports, and often mobilised armed ships, but the era of cheap security based on distance and ignorance was over. Trade disruption crippled customs revenue, a key income stream, making any local action even more difficult. The Peruvian squadron, a miserable under-funded half-measure, was left to rot when the threat abated. Imperial Spain simply would not fund effective seapower in the Pacific. Short term measures, landing dogs on Juan Fernández in 1675 and searching the Straits of Magellan for English settlements were the best the Spanish could manage. Finally they resorted to private enterprise; a local company provided ships, armed with royal cannon, to cruise against the buccaneers. Having cleared the coastal zone by the late 1680s the company wound up. The respite would only be temporary. An empire of isolated ports, dominated by the extraction of bullion, and connected by unarmed coastal shipping was little more than an open invitation to enterprising raiders. That it existed without naval protection, preferring the local comfort provided by a handful of forts reflected Spain’s continental mindset, and the chilling economics of seapower.

  Between 1686 and 1690 Peru spent 6.5 million pesos on local defence, remitting only 750,000 to Spain.9 This was not the purpose of empire. Moving silver from Callao via Panama to Madrid mattered; sea control and insular possessions did not. Silver sustained the Habsburg I
mperial system; Juan Fernández did not. In an extractive empire of exploitation the cost of defending silver shipments had to be balanced against the value of the metal being moved. Three times in the seventeenth century the cost of defending Peru rose to unusual, unsustainable levels: in 1624, in response to an advanced warning of l’Hermite’s fleet; in 1658, to rebuild the South Seas Armada; and in 1679–80, in response to the buccaneer incursion. In all three cases security costs threatened to outstrip the value of the silver being moved along the coast, and led to the suspension of all other seaborne commerce.

  In the next major war, which began in 1688, England and Spain were allied against France, so the next English privateer to head into the South Pacific, Captain John Strong’s Welfare, carried trade goods and a commission to take French ships. Even so, the investors considered occupying Juan Fernández. ‘If these two islands with Mocha were fortified by the English they would be capable, in cases of a Breach with Spain, of doing them a great deal of mischief.’ In 1690 the Welfare stopped at Más Afuera, and picked up the four buccaneers left on Más a Tierra three years before. The men had undergone a religious experience while marooned; they proved awkward shipmates, not least when they reverted to their piratical opinions despite the voyage being intended to trade peacefully. Near Concepción a boat party was lured ashore by the Spaniards and captured. Among the prisoners two Juan Fernández maroons were executed, to prevent them spreading their knowledge. The rest were imprisoned. While the Welfare voyage had been a financial disaster, it completed a remarkable decade that put Juan Fernández on the English world map. Soon it would occupy a central place in the national imagination. Even though the next expedition to call at the islands was French it had an English pilot. Captain Franco’s ship not only remained at Juan Fernández for five months in 1691, but it returned in December 1692. The privateers had little to fear. Spanish Peru lacked the resources to control the sea, falling back on old methods, occasional patrols, removing the sheep and horses and attacking the goat population with savage dogs.10