Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  NOTES

  1 Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, p. 107.

  2 Notably in the case of Captain William Kidd.

  3 Cordingly, Spanish Gold, pp. 16–24.

  4 Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, p. 122.

  5 Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, p. 122.

  6 I. James, Providence Displayed: or, The Remarkable Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, of Largo, in Scotland; Who Lived Four Years and Four Months by Himself, on the Island of Juan Fernandez; from whence He Returned with Capt. Woodes Rogers, of Bristol, and on whose Adventures was Founded the Celebrated Novel of Robinson Crusoe, London, 1800, pp. 6, 9.

  7 Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, p. 122.

  8 Cordingly, Spanish Gold, pp. 51, 253.

  9 Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, pp. 123–31; James, Providence Displayed, p. 6. I am indebted to local expert Felipe for a discussion of goat hunting techniques and goat habits. In addition to his expertise he has the most formidable goat’s head tattooed across his belly, at a level where not all of the beast’s features are discernible in polite company.

  10 D. Takahashi, D.H. Caldwell, I. Càceres, M. Calderón, A.D. Morrison, M.A. Saavedra & J. Tate, ‘Excavation at Aguas Buenas, Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile, of a Gunpowder Magazine and the Supposed Campsite of Alexander Selkirk, together with an Account of Early Navigational Dividers’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 41(2) (2007), pp. 27–304, here p. 300.

  11 Bradley, The Lure of Peru, p. 189; D. Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and his Intellectual Circle, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, 1997, pp. 75–97, 113–30; Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 160–67.

  12 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, pp. 156–8.

  13 Cordingly, Spanish Gold, p. 27.

  14 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, p. 195; Cordingly, Spanish Gold, pp. 92–3; Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, pp. 171–2.

  15 Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 148, from Rogers Cruising Voyage, p. 137; Cordingly, Spanish Gold, pp. 93–5, 253, fn 6.

  16 Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, p. 173

  17 Marshall & Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, p. 40.

  18 Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 170–4, Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 51–2; Welbe, 27 May 1715, cited by J.A. Williamson in introduction to W. Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland, &c. in the year 1699, Argonaut Press, London, 1939, pp. lx–lxii.

  19 J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, Sutton Publishing, Gloucester, 1993 remains the standard account.

  20 See Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati, pp. 113–30 for the South Sea Company.

  21 A. Churchill & J. Churchill, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca: A Collection of Voyages and Travels, London, vols I–IV, 1704, vols V–VI, 1732, vol. III, p. 46.

  22 Churchill & Churchill, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, vol. III, p. 46.

  23 Marshall & Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, pp. 48–51, 54–7; G.A. Crone & R.A. Skelton, ‘English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625–1846’, in E. Lynam (ed.), Richard Hakluyt and his Successors, Hakluyt Society, London, 1946, p. 87; Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, pp. lii–lvii.

  5

  The Magical Island of Daniel Defoe

  In 1719 the forty-year engagement between English mariners and Juan Fernández was finally consummated by journalist, author, spy and economic propagandist Daniel Defoe. The Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Mariner reflected the hopes and fears of a dynamic, prosperous nation in the grip of the South Sea Bubble, facing the threat of Jacobite insurrection. For Defoe the solution was obvious. Increased overseas trade would calm the masses at home, and repay the astronomic debts piled up by two major wars. Everyone assumed the long-closed markets of Spanish America were the best place to find extra trade; indeed the mere suggestion had deluded an entire nation into believing the South Sea Company could pay off the National Debt.

  Books by Rogers and Cooke put the Selkirk story into wide circulation, and found their way into Defoe’s extensive library, joining Dampier and other buccaneer/survivor tales. Voyage narratives had become very popular in the previous thirty years, while the fact that both Rogers and Cooke named Selkirk on their title pages demonstrated the allure of the island for potential buyers.1 The return of peace after almost twenty years of war prompted discussions of the new, inclusive Britishness. While Selkirk’s story put a Scotsman into the mainstream of oceanic voyaging just after the Act of Union, Defoe wrapped the new monarchy into his novel. Crusoe was half German – his real name was actually Kreutzenaer, ‘my father being a foreigner of Bremen’. That this Anglo-German hybrid became, like King George I, an exemplary Englishman, was testament to changed times and the imaginative power of islands, great and small. George was Crusoe’s German father, mentioned on the first page of the book, and Crusoe was an example of Britishness set before the new monarch.

  For all his mastery of invention Daniel Defoe was strikingly well read. In an age without public libraries he owned more than 2,000 books, far more than other contemporary authors, including Swift, Locke, Addison and Johnson. Furthermore, this was a carefully developed working collection, focused on history, travel and geography, enabling him to make striking, rich and curious journeys without leaving his house in Stoke Newington. Literary men of later generations had little difficulty spotting his sources, although Defoe only named those he used for direct quotations in non-fiction works. A commercially successful author, he despised pedantic displays of bookish learning. Voyage narratives included maps and drawings, descriptions and detailed observations that informed his imagination. Alongside key collections, including both editions of Hakluyt and Purchas, were more specific items needed by anyone thinking about Juan Fernández, identity and trade, including Bacon’s Essays, Raleigh’s History of the World, William Camden’s Elizabeth, Grotius, Bynkershoek and Selden on maritime law, Flamsteed and Kepler on astronomy, Pepys’s Memoirs of the Navy, Thucydides, and Hobbes’s Leviathan. South Seas expertise came from Lionel Wafer, Betagh, Cooke, and the second edition of Exquemelin, which included Basil Ringrose’s Juan Fernández narrative. These books and pamphlets provided the raw material for invention, making ‘the tour of world in books’, travelling ‘by land with the historian, by sea with the navigators’.2 Defoe collected navigational, cartographic and legal texts, along with those addressing the diseases of the sea.

  Crusoe, a complex, multilayered text, reflected a deep engagement with various literary genres. While a significant literary industry has grown up over the past two centuries, attempting to attribute the basic story to other sources, or to ‘prove’ Defoe met Selkirk and stole his journal, Defoe was far too skilled an author to pirate a single buccaneer tale for a storyline. The idea that Defoe took Selkirk’s non-existent journal was created (or at least retailed) by John Entick in 1757. Entick offered no evidence to back his assertion.3 Selkirk’s story was ‘the most obvious source’, but the wealth and variety of conscious and unconscious borrowing by a veteran author and exponent of maritime exploration meant it was only one element in his creative process.

  The presence of Sir Walter Raleigh, colonialist, promoter of an Orinoco Empire and national hero in Crusoe’s DNA is impossible to ignore. That the spellbinding literary creator of the Jacobean age should attract the admiration and emulation of his literary successor a century later should come as no surprise, but no one seems to have noticed. Defoe drew a great deal of material from Raleigh’s History of the World for his imperial and geographical writings.4 Raleigh sought gold on the Orinoco, and Defoe deliberately located Crusoe’s island off the mouth of the river, exploiting the fact that Dampier had visited and described the island of Aves off the Orinoco, the river that, according to Columbus, flowed into Paradise.5 Building on Steele’s interpretation of Selkirk’s island sojourn as a moral tale of British redemption, colonial domination and success Defoe reimagined Juan Fernández, using maps and eyewitness accounts. Then he a
dded new features, notably the cave that has haunted romantic imaginings of Juan Fernández ever since.6 There is no cave in any Selkirk narrative; he lived in a hut made of sticks and grass. Crusoe lived in a fortified cave, a residence suitable for a colonial overlord in savage lands, not an unarmed maroon expecting to be rescued by English sailors. Indeed the whole island has been reimagined by later visitors to satisfy Robinsonian dreams, without taking the trouble to separate fact and fiction. Armchair travellers who commingle Selkirk and Crusoe, Juan Fernández and an imaginary island off the Orinoco make a serious error. Defoe did not stoop to plagiarise; he created the narrative and employed telling details borrowed from his rich library to make it ‘real’. If he wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to be believable.

  Defoe’s hero was a curious compound of Anglo-German attitudes, a hybrid who could be held up as the exemplary Englishman. He met triumph and disaster with equanimity and worked hard to improve his lot, to develop his ‘empire’, rescue benighted savages from the darkness of cannibalism, and reconcile Europeans of different faiths. He was building a better world, a modern world, if only in microcosm. Crusoe may have been the first truly middle-class hero. There was nothing of Selkirk in this. Crusoe’s stoicism, self-control and determination in the face of adversity became quintessential ‘British’ virtues. By the nineteenth century his cool courage under fire and under pressure had come to define the British, a convergence that kept him at the top of any literary list. Crusoe survived the shifting patterns of culture and taste across three centuries, endlessly read, reimagined in new locations, and subjected to a staggering industry of academic enquiry, a curious fate for a piece of hastily executed polemical ephemera littered with glaring continuity errors.

  Defoe had far more important things on his mind than a simple tale of a marooned sailor. His audience were the movers and shakers of early eighteenth-century London, and his targets were contemporary. He had never believed South Sea Company hype, doubting the Spanish would allow the company to profit from an Asiento wrung out of them by force. For him the Company was a front for a Jacobite Tory revival, something that alarmed a man of progressive democratic views. After publishing Crusoe he produced a savage indictment of the Company. He preferred an English colony in South America, suggesting various locations including the mouth of the Orinoco River, site of Raleigh’s misadventures, and those of Crusoe, or further south in what is now Argentina.

  In February 1719, while drafting Crusoe, Defoe advocated the Orinoco scheme in the Weekly Journal. These links explain the timing of the book, the strongly colonial theme and the precise location of Crusoe’s island. He expanded on the colonial theme in the second, largely forgotten, Crusoe story. Defoe did not connect Crusoe to Juan Fernández because it was too far away to be a practical option for colonial projects, but the island was never far from his mind. His next novel – The King of Pirates of 1720, a fictionalised life of pirate John Avery – had Avery crossing the Isthmus of Panama and returning to England with Bartholomew Sharp, a voyage that visited Juan Fernández.7

  Alongside the three Crusoe stories and pirate novels, Defoe also wrote extensively on the South Sea Bubble scandal, commerce and economics, in fact and fiction. The fictional travelogue A New Voyage Round the World of 1724 reshaped and refreshed the seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge he had accumulated across a long and busy career. Defoe used this ‘voyage’ to stress the distinction between travellers who merely record what they found, and when they found it, and those who analysed the meaning of what has been discovered. In this way he empowered imaginative, reflective armchair travellers over mariners and buccaneers who brought home confused tales of seas and islands, ports and storms. The obvious inspirations for the book were two familiar texts, Dampier’s book of the same title, the author being conveniently dead, and Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage Round the World printed in 1712 and 1719. He may also have had access to the latest Juan Fernández narrative, George Shelvocke’s voyage, in manuscript. Defoe reckoned these voyagers ‘illiterate sailors’ who had learned a thousand times more than they recorded. He included an extensive description of Juan Fernández. Once again his object was to prompt exploration and colonisation for commercial purposes, not celebrate piracy. Defoe created a synergistic vision of the world ocean as a fit space for British enterprise and exploitation. His analytical turn of mind included imaginative writing, some of the best centred on Chile, in which he returned to the theme of British colonies in South America. The old idea of colonising Valdivia survived and prospered in an imagined land, uninhabited and yet heaped with gold.

  In 1727 the prospect of war with Spain gave Defoe another opportunity to expound his commercial, colonial maritime vision. Dismissing Spanish sabre-rattling as ‘Quixotisme’, he coined the maxim ‘England may Gain by a War with France, but never Loses by a War with Spain.’ The old glory of Drake and Raleigh was once again to the fore, Defoe revelling in the heroic deeds of the greatest pirate, and the elegant prose of an admired imperial projector.8 In 1728 Defoe published two major works on trade: A Plan of the English Commerce and a 300-page contribution to ‘an extensive survey of the commerce of the whole world’. The ambitions of this 862-page text were revealed by the full title: Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis: Or, a General View of the World, so far as Relates to Trade and Navigation: With a Large Account of the Commerce carried on by Sea to Which Are added Sailing Directions for Coasts and Islands on the Globe. In other words, a guidebook to the commercial opportunities of global trade, aimed squarely at the mercantile men of London and, like Crusoe, published by William Taylor with a syndicate of London printers and cartographers.

  Taken in the round, Defoe’s writings form a manifesto for an ever-expanding global economy, centred on London, linked by sea. This would create more employment, leading to a happier working population, and ultimately ‘An Encrease of Colonies encreases People, People encrease the Consumption of Manufactures, Manufactures Trade, Trade Navigation, Navigation Seamen, and altogether encrease the Wealth, Strength, and Prosperity of England.’9 In this he recognised the deeper meaning of the British experience. Britain would be a maritime trading empire, like the Carthaginian state he discovered in Raleigh’s History of World. He lamented the downfall of Carthage at the hands of the Romans, those ‘Destroyers of Industry and Trade’.

  The lesson was clear: first Spain and now France were new Roman Empires, Continental Universal Monarchies that opposed the liberties and the commerce of Britain, the new Carthage. The message would be repeated down to his death in 1731. A self-made man of the Augustan age Defoe believed history and geography had replaced ancient languages and ancient knowledge as the key to progress. His argument was exemplified by the Americas, lands beyond the classical world. This was just one more way in which his unique mind grasped a distant future. That Montesquieu reached a very similar conclusion at the same time, based on severely classical models, provides a striking endorsement for the Englishman’s insight.10

  The advocacy of colonisation in the Americas, North and South, addressed an ongoing debate. While many saw the colonies as profiting at the expense of the mother country, Defoe disagreed: ‘The Wealth and Strength of our Colonies is our own Wealth and Strength … we are great in their Greatness’.11 He preferred trade and agriculture to the Spanish model of asset-stripping mineral wealth while leaving the land to subsistence cultivation and blocking foreign trade. British Colonies, he argued, generated more real wealth than those of Spain. As the Empire became global, the options for colonisation spread. Crusoe the castaway quickly becomes an idealised colonial and commercial pioneer, a diminutive King George, and Juan Fernández, like More’s Utopia, a diminutive Britain. Juan Fernández was never far from his thoughts.

  Defoe established the central place of this tiny island in eighteenth-century English culture, melding rough tales of buccaneering men and the economic ambitions of a dynamic maritime state into an original text for mass consumption. Crusoe’s enduring success refl
ected Defoe’s understanding of his audience and the timeless quality of his vision. Within a year the book had been translated into French; Dutch, German and Russian versions followed over the next forty years. Cut-down editions, as badly printed as edited, became staple fare for eighteenth-century chapbook peddlers, the cheapest and most accessible English texts. While Crusoe provided the English with a world view at once moral and commercial, Defoe continued to push the idea of a global empire of trade on his fellow countrymen in fiction, geography, history and journalism for another decade, a decade in which Juan Fernández would witness a striking example of Karl Marx’s jest that history always repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. As Diana Souhami observed, ‘Selkirk transmuted into Crusoe’s mythical world. His own reality blurred. His time on The Island claimed first by journalists, was reinvented in the bright world of fiction. What had really happened and who he was were incidental.’12 The Crusoe version avoided subjects that worried British audiences, sex, death, religious doubt and above all boredom. The real Selkirk died at sea, off the coast of West Africa, on 13 December 1721. As if to mark the meaning of his passing, Selkirk’s ship, HMS Weymouth, captured a pirate vessel a few days later, and hanged the crew. The age of the buccaneer was over.