Selkirk had lived on goat, crayfish, cabbage trees (Juania australis) and turnips sown by Spanish settlers. The latter now covered several acres. He had given up fish, Rogers noted, because without salt it upset his stomach. Rogers also observed the effect of isolation on Selkirk’s spiritual life, and the value of plain, temperate living for bodily health and mental vigour. The quasi-religious nature of Selkirk’s existence during a residence of four years and four months provided an important element for Defoe’s reworking. The slow adjustment to solitary life and endless search for sails make it clear that Selkirk had not intended to wait for years: he expected to be picked up by another English ship within a few weeks. Instead he saw only a few passing Spanish ships, and a single Spanish landing. Well aware that if captured he would be enslaved and sent to the silver mines of Potosi, Selkirk scuttled up a tree for safety. Despite stopping to piss on the very tree where he was hiding, the Spaniards were unable to spot the terrified Scotsman amid the branches. They shot some goats, wrecked his camp and left.
Almost as soon as he rejoined the world of men Selkirk became encrusted with myths. His legendary physical agility and prowess as a goat hunter is easily explained. According to modern islanders, for whom goat hunting is the national sport, the goats use the same well-worn paths and when moving in flocks are easily caught by hand from ambush.9 Similar confusion attends his many alleged island residences. Recent excavations at Aguas Buenas accepted the old story that Selkirk lived in a hut halfway up the mountain, on the track to the famous look-out. This makes little sense. The site is more than an hour’s climb from the beach, and the food supply. It is dominated by the remains of a Spanish gunpowder magazine, littered with the shards of a large water pot made in southern Chile. It did not exist in Selkirk’s day. Selkirk never left Windy Bay and he had no reason to climb the mountain. He was expecting to be rescued by a ship, and needed to light a signal fire on the beach. The discovery of the broken tip of a pair of eighteenth century dividers in the powder magazine adds very little. While contemporary English and Scottish dividers were made of brass, the find is bronze. While Selkirk had his navigational equipment on the island, he brought it on board when he joined the Rogers expedition; he had no reason to use it, let alone break or discard it while stuck on Juan Fernández. The excavation report ignores Anson’s occupation, and in an effort to sustain the building’s link with Selkirk indulges in a line of argument that starts from a flawed premise, and proceeds through strikingly flimsy data ‘clearly not amounting to much as evidence’, linked by all too many ‘speculative’ and ‘probable’ connections to reach a dubious conclusion. The only ‘meagre’ rationale for the claim ‘We believe that the remains left at Aguas Buenas were left by Selkirk’ seems to be that ‘our work has provided some justification for renaming the island Robinson Crusoe’.10 Such ‘evidence’ would not get very far in a court of law.
The location of Selkirk’s camp was described by Dr Thomas Dover. Hobbling ashore, weakened by scurvy and months at sea, Dover recorded the camp lay within half an hour of the beach, hidden from the sea, close to a stream, in an area where a distinctive white grass grew. Selkirk used the grass to stuff his mattress. The 2010 Caligari film expedition discovered a location that satisfied all of these requirements, just outside San Juan Bautista, and easily reached by following a stream. Intervening high ground offers a fine view of the bay, while hiding the camp from passing ships. The soil appears to have been under grass for many centuries, being too wet to sustain trees. This would be the ideal hideout for a nervous beachcomber, anxious to see but not be seen. It would allow him to find food without undue effort, and made a fine goat pen.
As the two ships sailed away Juan Fernández was once again unoccupied and silent. In December, Rogers’s ships took a Manila galleon, worth around £200,000, and brought it home in triumph to the Thames in October 1711. Sorting out the money proved as problematic as ever, but the treasure helped sell a financial scam to a credulous nation. Set up in the same year the South Sea Company promised to buy up the floating national debt, about £10 million, and pay it off in return for 6 per cent interest and a monopoly on British trade with Spanish South America. While the scheme had far more to do with domestic politics and speculative finance than the South Pacific it fed off the growing sense that this was the ocean of opportunity, one that had an obvious if minute epicentre at Juan Fernández. Critically, the Company acquired a copy of Hack’s edition of Sharp’s Waggoner, and hired Herman Moll to produce a large map. The Tory ministry supported the Company because it was anxious to exchange the bloody battlefields of Flanders for the profitable pursuit of trade war against Spain. This strategic shift was popular and largely correct once the key issues of the Spanish Succession had been resolved. The projectors, profoundly ignorant of the South Seas, relied on Rogers and his men for South Pacific voyaging. Juan Fernández, the obvious base for any new venture, was high on their list of priorities. Cartographer Herman Moll produced a chart to represent the limits of the new Company’s remit, placing Juan Fernández at the centre of the sheet. While the island’s location remained imprecise, it was loaded with meaning. Moll, like fellow navigator of buccaneer voyages Daniel Defoe, understood the limits of the buccaneers as accurate reporters of fact, lamenting their irritating habit of renaming features already named. Moll’s chart sold well; it seems Defoe owned a copy.11
Once the market had been aroused by a spate of South Sea yarns, spurious and then fictional versions quickly followed. Defoe was the best-known creator of South Pacific fiction, but there were others. William Chetwood’s 1726 tale Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle provided a connection with the theatre. Chetwood, the prompter of Drury Lane, added a degree of veracity by introducing William Dampier as a historical character and landed his hero on Juan Fernández, before taking the Manila galleon. Jonathan Swift brilliantly subverted the fantastical quality of the genre with Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, another South Sea story to name Dampier, in the very first sentence, along with cartographer Herman Moll.12 This was a sea of wonder, and the lands it contained, little known but much imagined, contributed a disproportionate element to the evolving imaginative concept of Britishness just as an Act of Union linked two ancient polities with very different traditions of empire.
Defoe’s expertise on the region may explain why his erstwhile paymaster Chief Minister Robert Harley chose not to consult him about the South Sea project. While Defoe favoured extending colonial settlement and avoiding open conflict with Spain, he was among the most prominent critics of the South Sea speculation. Inspired by the success of French traders on the Chilean and Peruvian coasts in the previous decade, Defoe pushed for a sustainable colonial trading policy, not occasional raids seeking plunder. Harley’s plan to acquire a base in Spanish America under the Treaty of Utrecht faltered, and he accepted the lesser prize of the Asiento, a contract to supply slaves to Spanish American Colonies, and tariff concessions. By the time the South Sea Company went public any hope of a trading profit had evaporated. The fortuitous arrival of Rogers with the Manila galleon helped distract attention from this unpleasant reality. Amid a frenzy of publishing new information appeared, derived from pilot books taken from the Manila galleon, information quickly accessed by the Company, through Rogers and Edward Cooke, second Captain of the Duchess.13
While Woodes Rogers waged a fraught, prolonged legal battle over the prize money, Cooke rushed into print with A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World in March 1712, barely five months after his return to London. Such haste meant Cooke devoted less than half the 640-page text to the voyage, packing the remainder with a curious combination of borrowed history, Spanish coastal pilots and commercial intelligence. It was ‘both propaganda and an intelligencers hand book for commercial aggression’. The fold-out map and coastal profiles were the very things a mariner would require, while woodcuts of animals, birds and fish reflected the influence of Dampier’s New Voyage. However, Cooke lacked the intellectual curiosity and
expository power of the older text. His object was to curry favour with a powerful patron, dedicate Robert Harley, the dominant figure in British politics. Cooke dismissed the Selkirk story, ‘the most barren Subject that Nature can afford’, revealing a monumental failure by author, editor and publisher to understand the book market. When the audience demanded to know more about the wild man dressed in goat skins Cooke complied, with striking ill-grace. While Cooke interviewed Selkirk to gather more material, he refused to introduce romantic fables, or turn the Scot and his survival instinct into a philosophical enquiry.14 In his defence Cooke reflected the views of most contemporary seafarers; rocks and solitude were just plain dull.
Although Cooke beat his captain into print by three months, Rogers’s text became the standard account. Rogers’s compelling descriptions, notably his extended treatment of Selkirk, caught the attention of the reading public. Rogers’s introduction revealed much of the logic of the South Sea Company, emphasising the wealth of Spain in the Pacific, and the prospects for trade demonstrated by French merchants. A British base on Juan Fernández ‘might be of great use to those who would carry on any Trade in the South Sea’.15 It has been suggested that Daniel Defoe helped compile Rogers’s introduction, stressing the wider strategic and commercial imperatives that might have escaped the attention of a hard-bitten privateer. Defoe had debated the merits of the South Seas in the pages of the Review between June and August 1711, but fellow journalist/author Sir Richard Steele provided editorial support for Rogers. Dampier did not add a book to the list, distracted by litigious investors and crewmen from the St George fiasco. Some demanded pay and prize money; others, like John Welbe and William Funnel, attacked his conduct. Selkirk testified against Dampier, on behalf of the St George investors. His savage indictment of incompetence, cowardice, greed and knavery was confirmed by other witnesses. Dampier’s day in the spotlight was done; no one wanted to go voyaging with the sick old man, on board ship, or across pages of text. He had made the market for travel books, and visited Juan Fernández more often than any other Englishman, but Rogers’s voyage threw his tales into the shade. Dampier died in debt in 1715.
Steele’s editorial interventions turned Rogers’s simple narrative of Selkirk and his rescue into a Christian morality tale: necessarily stripped of goat abuse, the Scot became a Christian gentleman, British patriot and imperial governor.16 This public version of the story endured for three centuries largely unchallenged. It was charming, effective, and quite untrue. Even if the philosophy and reflection of Selkirk’s island years had been genuine, they proved strikingly ephemeral. Returning to the flesh-pots of London, he reverted to his old boozing and brawling habits, signing on for a final voyage to escape a complex marital situation.
By 1712 Selkirk’s experience had been recorded, and placed in the wider context of English voyaging, alongside the stories of Sharp, Ringrose, Dampier and Will the Miskito Indian. In December 1713 Steele returned to the subject, in all probability to fill out the pages of his new journal The Englishman. Recalling conversations with Selkirk soon after his return to England, he reported the Scot, who had done very well from prize money, observing, ‘I am now worth eight hundred pounds, but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing.’ Although struck by his faith, Steele realised the sailor was slowly slipping back into another life, that of a common seafarer ashore. In truth Steele had completely forgotten the man behind the story, failing to recognise Selkirk when they met in the street. Steele’s article revealed how far the Act of Union of 1707 had changed English attitudes. Selkirk may have left England a foreigner, but he returned a British mariner, and his deeds were suitably recorded. Selling the Act of Union with Scotland had been a major project for the author who turned Selkirk and his island into a literary masterpiece.
Selkirk’s was one of many buccaneer tales that created a market for voyages, a national thirst for knowledge about the rest of the world, one that would be serviced by a rapidly expanding, newly uncensored book trade. These island-hopping texts fuelled a new round of travel collections, fictional writing and geographical speculation, turning the South Seas into an obsession that lured otherwise sane men to risk their money on visionary voyages and speculative investments.17 Rogers, Cooke and Selkirk replaced Dampier as regional experts; soon all three would be embroiled in the scandal of the South Sea Company. When Rogers met key players at South Sea House in late 1711 it seemed that Juan Fernández would soon become a British colony.
In January 1712 the South Sea Company projected a massive combined operation by the Navy and the Company to smash down the gates of the South Pacific. The directors planned a settlement on ‘the Gibraltar of the Pacific’, but Ministerial support for such plans reflected the need to leverage peace with Madrid. Once a general European peace had been signed at Utrecht the expedition vanished, leaving the South Seas Company with a Treaty concession to supply slaves and an annual trading ship to Spanish America. The expedition had been little more than diplomatic posturing. A year later bankrupt South Sea veteran John Welbe circulated a project to control the South Seas by occupying and fortifying Juan Fernández, as a springboard to new lands to the west, which he conveniently assumed were rich in gold. By 1715 Welbe had cut his scheme to suit the straightened times, merely sending a ship via ‘Juan de fardinandos … to get wood and water’.18
In 1720 the madness of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ saw shares sold at thirty-two times face value. It could not last. In the wake of the 2008 banking disaster, the stunning, shocking collapse of the Company became a morality tale for contemporary audiences. While ‘Bubble’ entered the lexicon to describe hyperinflated markets, the original ‘Bubble’, which combined the key elements of greed, ignorance, misleading promotion and political interference, remains the ultimate case study. Harley adopted the scheme to pay off the National Debt, as part of a complex political programme. Long after he left office the government had to cover-up embarrassing links to the new Hanoverian monarchy.19
Meanwhile, the island was briefly turned to account. A French/Chilean fishery of 1712 collapsed when the solitary ship was wrecked. The War of the Spanish Succession had weakened Spain, and emphasised the shipment of Peruvian bullion. The restoration of peace changed little; Philip V, the new Bourbon King of Spain, wanted to recover his lands in Italy, with American cash. Nothing was done about the offshore privateer haven. It remained the secret haunt of interlopers, illegal traders and pirates from Britain, France and Holland, only to be catapulted into international celebrity by a work of imaginative fiction.
By the close of the Spanish War, British buccaneers had rendered the seas of Peru familiar. Dampier’s texts, complete with maps, by leading cartographer Herman Moll, created a Pacific voyage genre, mixing navigation, strategic analysis, science and wonder, shaping the national debate. Woodes Rogers added the exoticism of Selkirk’s story and the lure of treasure galleons, transforming the South Seas into the field of dreams, a place to find fortune and found an empire.20 After the collapse of the South Sea Bubble Sir Robert Walpole’s government ignored the subject for twenty years, reflecting an alliance with France, the primacy of the European Balance of Power, and less risky economic opportunities in the Atlantic region. The South Sea projectors fell silent, they would resurface when relations with Spain began to spiral down to war.
The emergence of England as a global player prompted the publication of two major travel anthologies in 1704 and 1705, books that kept the South Seas at the forefront of an emerging world view. Not only was travel literature essential to any gentleman’s library, it also quickly became a mainstay of the book trade. Booksellers Awnsham and John Churchill consulted the voyage collector Sir Hans Sloane and the philosopher John Locke for their four-volume A Collection of Voyages and Travels. The preface, which may have been compiled by astronomer and magnetic voyager Edmund Halley, included a ringing endorsement of the economic value of oceanic exploration, backed by 1,600 folio pages of travel narratives, mostly unknown in Engla
nd. To help clear unsold copies, two more volumes were added in 1730 and 1732. The description of Juan Fernández echoed Schouten’s journal:
They say besides, that coming to this, which they call the Fine Island, they found a port very safe for their ships, having twenty or thirty fathoms depth, the shore al sandy and even, with a delicate valley full of trees of all sorts, and wild boars, and other animals feeding in it; but they could not distinguish them, by reason of the distance they were at. They extol particularly a most beautiful fountain, which coming down from high rocks, rowls into the sea by different canals, which form a pleasant prospect, and its water is very sweet and agreeable.21
They saw also great store of seals, and other fish, which they caught in great plenty. In short, they were so in love with this island, for the good qualities they discovered even at its entrance, that they were very unwilling to leave it, though pressed in point of time: ‘I do not doubt, but that this is a very pleasant situation … And without doubt these islands will be peopled in time, when the continent grows populous.’22
This brief account would influence the scorbutic ramblings of later British visitors, building a chorus of rapture that turned a useful watering place island into a magical island. John Harris produced a smaller and less original text, while Dampier received the accolade of a collected edition in 1729. Interest in the South Seas revived when Britain went to war with Spain in 1739, prompting fresh works and new editions. Prolific author John Campbell produced an enlarged edition of Harris in 1744–8. These were costly productions, often funded by advance subscription, reflecting both public taste and economic interest. ‘The literature of travel now found a public, not only among dilettanti who read for amusement, but also among merchants and brokers who had invested money in commercial ventures to Africa, Asia and the Pacific.’23 Cheaper books, and the growing market for monthly and quarterly reviews, spread this knowledge across polite society. The profusion of voyage literature, historical and contemporary, designed to push the pace of exploration and economic exploitation, profoundly altered the British world view.
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