Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  The two ships finally left Callao on 4 December 1742, running past Más Afuera to anchor at Más a Tierra on 9 January. They found ample evidence of English ‘occupation’, but no Englishmen. A merchant ship sent three months earlier from Chile had recovered two cyphered messages in bottles from Anson’s campsite. Without Shelvocke’s book the papers were impenetrable, although their purpose must have been obvious – Anson advising any laggard ships to follow him up the coast. Examining the campsite in minute detail Jorge Juan and Antionio de Ulloa found only ‘the picquets and poles of the tents, with their small wooden bridges for crossing the branches [of rivers], and other things of that kind’. Such marks in the landscape may have been little more than garden furniture, but they represented a significant act of occupation.

  The Spanish officers spent the next fortnight conducting the most accurate scientific survey of the islands to date, departing on 22 January. They observed that the dogs on Más a Tierra, which had driven the goats up onto the mountainous heights, no longer barked. They recovered their voices when placed with other dogs, with the same hesitation and uncertainty as Selkirk had spoken on first meeting his fellow countrymen. The culinary highlights of the expedition were crayfish weighing up to nine pounds. After joining the unfortunate Commodore Pizarro at Valparaiso the two ships continued cruising along the Chilean coast between Valdivia, Valparaiso and Juan Fernández until the middle of the year, calling frequently at Juan Fernández, just in case more British ships arrived. Ulloa paid another visit while sailing home round Cape Horn. Ulloa and Jorge Juan’s reports, public and confidential, demonstrated the moribund state and defensive weaknesses of Peru. Their Relación Histórica del Viage a la América Meridional of 1748, an Ansonesque travelogue, would be available in English before the next Anglo-Spanish War.4 Their private report for the King, the Noticias Secretas de América of 1749 (only published in English in 1826, after the fall of Spanish America), highlighted the incompetence and injustice of the regime. Their strategic analysis was clear. Spain needed a fleet and arsenal at Guayaquil to control the silver route. They also provided detailed instructions for navigating into Cumberland Bay, and the best location for fortifications. Although the anchorage was not ideal, exposed to strong northerly winds, with poor holding ground, occasional violent southerly wind sweeping down from the mountains and a difficult landing, they recommended that the island be occupied and fortified.5

  Whatever the Viceroy of Peru thought of these reports he had little incentive to act, and even less ability to do so after a catastrophic tidal wave swept over Callao in October 1746, killing thousands. The Spanish Court proved more receptive. Early in 1749 King Ferdinand VI ordered the new Viceroy of Peru, the Count of Superunda, to fortify Juan Fernández, ‘at all costs against the hated and covetous English’. Rumours abounded that the British were planning to settle the Falklands and Juan Fernández. These rumours became concrete in April 1749 when Jorge Juan, in London at the time, uncovered plans for HMS Porcupine and another sloop to enter the South Pacific. He collected a formidable library of texts that addressed the English view of the island, one that he continued to update after returning to Spain.6 His timely warning gave Madrid the opportunity for a diplomatic protest.7 At this point Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, communicated the scheme to his political mentor the Duke of Bedford, Secretary of the State for the Southern Department (the Foreign Secretary for Southern Europe). Bedford wrote to the British Minister in Madrid, arguing the report may be open ‘to many misrepresentations’, creating ‘uneasiness and suspicion’ between the two courts as major commercial negotiations were in progress. The Admiralty planned to chart the Falkland Islands, and the mythic Pepys Islands, before retiring to Portuguese Brazil to refit. The second stage involved entering the South Seas, ‘in order to make further discoveries there. As this latter part of the scheme cannot be carried into execution without wooding and watering at the Island of Juan Fernández, and possibly coming sometimes within sight of the Spanish Coasts of Chile and Peru’ it should be abandoned, lest Madrid thought the British were ‘preparing to be ready to attack them upon a future rupture, in a part where they were undoubtedly weak, and of which they must consequently be more than ordinarily jealous. The reduced scheme, Bedford concluded, could not ‘give any umbrage at Madrid’.

  Such hopes were quickly dashed. Spanish Chief Minister Carvarjal recognised any such endeavour would bring British and Spanish possessions and trade into close proximity, leading to collisions more serious than those that had led to the outbreak of war in 1739. Furthermore, ‘neither he nor anyone else could be a stranger to the rise and intent of such an expedition, since it is so fully explained in the printed relation of Lord Anson’s voyage’. He dismissed claims that the voyage was purely exploratory, and would benefit Spain more than any nation.

  Carvajal also claimed Spain had already charted and settled the Falklands, and the non-existent Pepys Islands. The object of the British plan was obvious and hostile, to create a refitting station at the mouth of the Straits of Magellan, to avoid the problems experienced by Anson in his Pacific adventure. Carjaval launched a furious verbal assault on the British minister. Spain had no desire to increase the oceanic and navigational knowledge in the Pacific, or any other sea over which it claimed control. When Carvarjal was called away by King Ferdinand the Navy Minister, the Marques de Ensenada took up the subject, and the attitude. In his report the British Minister stressed the Spanish had not offered any legal reason why the British should not sail in the Pacific, condemning their ‘whimsical notions of exclusive rights in those seas’, to ‘keep those possessions as mysterious as they can, and the utility and preservation of them depend upon their not being known, nor having any other possession or competition in their neighbourhood’. The British decided to lay aside the scheme ‘for the present’, to safeguard larger political and economic agendas in Europe, while reserving the right to enter the Pacific at a later date. The British project depended on occupying Juan Fernández, which Anson knew would ‘make us masters of those seas.’8 Although sacrificing the 1749 expedition to wider considerations was reasonable, given the marginal commercial value of the Pacific, Anson regretted the lost opportunity to the end of his days.

  The British were not alone in dreaming of a Pacific future. A French translation of Anson’s Voyage inspired savant Charles des Brosses’s 1756 Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, which recommended his countrymen settle Juan Fernández, citing Roggeveen’s text, and a boyhood engagement with Robinson Crusoe. Entirely unaware that the source was flawed, des Brosses developed Roggeveen’s argument to stress that France should pre-empt Britain. A decade later the British could read his text in translation. Des Brosses had analysed 65 narratives of Pacific voyaging in search of a great Southern Continent, creating ‘the most weighty combination of history and propaganda as yet devoted to the enterprise of the South Sea’, a more sophisticated argument than that advanced by Campbell.9 The distinction reflected both the intellectual merits of the authors, and those of their intended audiences. While des Brosses targeted savants and scientists, Campbell addressed the great commercial companies of London, the East India, South Sea and Royal African. Where Campbell spoke of commercial opportunity, des Brosses affected to see only national glory. That the Frenchman profited from the industry of Campbell and his British precursors is impossible to deny, not least in his focus on Juan Fernández. Des Brosses’s writings prompted a series of French voyages into the Southern Ocean seeking Terre Australis, but none would anchor at Juan Fernández.10 That did not stop the British assuming that they would.

  Late in 1749 King Ferdinand’s orders to occupy Más a Tierra reached Lima, where an engineer was directed to fortify Cumberland Bay, Bahía Pangal, Puerto Inglese, and any other sites associated with English raiders. The occupation was necessarily substantial, and therefore costly. As the island had no economic prospects these were sunk costs, so much money poured into the sea in gilded tribute, a vain attempt t
o compensate for the absence of effective naval defence. The initial settlement comprised 62 soldiers, 175 colonists, 22 convict labourers and 18 cannon, with ample supplies of food and military stores. Once ashore Lieutenant Colonel Juan Navarro Santaella laid out the town of San Juan Bautista around the Church of San Antonio and Fort Santa Barbara. While this was standard Spanish colonial practice, it was far cry from Anson’s tented camp, let alone the transient occupations or earlier Dutch, English and French mariners. The new governor began charting his territory with Anson in hand, noting where he improved on the English record. Maps have always been tools of power and control and his purpose was to establish the Spanish Crown’s superior title to this long abandoned outpost, backing a claim based on prior discovery with superior cartography.

  A second wave of soldiers, settlers and convicts arrived from Concepción, the main base for the island throughout the remaining years of the Spanish empire. On 25 May 1751, before the infant colony had time to settle, a massive earthquake struck the Chilean coast, devastating Concepción, Valparaiso and San Juan Bautista, where the effect was doubled by the subsequent tsunami. Around forty people drowned, including the governor, and most of the new buildings were ruined. With help from the mainland the settlement recovered and a new fort was begun on higher ground. This nine-gun work stood ready for service by December 1751. Although the engineer, now safely back on the mainland, claimed his works were adequate to keep the entire British Navy out of Bahía Cumberland, such bombast was only meant for Imperial consumption. The defences were adequate to mark Spanish ownership, and keep out private vessels: had Anson returned they would have been overwhelmed. Proving that even a natural catastrophe could not destroy the island’s reputation the engineer declared it so healthy that ‘only the old could die’.11 That may have been true, but the colony itself was entirely dependent on the mainland for supplies and manpower, and the Spanish Empire was already chronically over-stretched financially. Simply rebuilding the fort cost $12,000, and the island had no economic value to justify either the capital outlay or the continuing costs of garrisoning and feeding a substantial village with little agricultural activity and no trade whatsoever, some three days sail from Valparaiso. Every six years governor and garrison were replaced from the Concepción regiment. In 1762 the governor of Chile proposed ending the colony, on the reasonable grounds that an island unseen by a foreign vessel for seventeen years needed no defences. He was overruled by the Viceroy. With the English agitating new ventures in the Falklands and openly discussing the Pacific Spain was unable to cut its losses and withdraw. In the long term the cost of the settlement had to be carried because the tiny Spanish Armada of the South Seas, dedicated to the safe transport of silver, had no pretension to command the ocean. Spain faced an obvious conundrum, a costly naval force could secure the seas, but forts were cheaper, in the short term. Ultimately the decision to favour land defences reflected deep-rooted cultural assumptions. Not that the fortifications were deterring anyone; Spain, as was customary, kept their existence a profound secret.

  Having frightened the Spanish into occupying the island, Anson also generated a ‘treasure’ story. Cornelius Webb claimed Anson had buried gold on Juan Fernández before setting off for Acapulco, and after returning to England sent him to recover it. As Anson had acquired no treasure before leaving Juan Fernández, the story made little sense: the only things he buried there were dead sailors. The denouement, in which Webb deliberately burnt his own ship while on passage to get a new mast at Valparaiso, was simply laughable.12 Treasure hunters, preferring myth to reality, would arrive in the twentieth century.

  NOTES

  1 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 92.

  2 Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 258–63.

  3 L.D. Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped Our World, Basic Books, New York, 2011, pp. 190–6 for the impact of Anson’s voyage.

  4 J. Juan and A. de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, London, 1758, vol. II, extracts in Williams, Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 138–44, quote at p. 143. Originally published in Madrid, 1748.

  5 I am indebted to Catherine Scheybeler for information on these texts.

  6 R. Navarro Mallebrera and A.M. Navarro Escolano (eds), Inventario de bienes de Jorge Juan y Santacilia, Instituto de Estudios Juan Gil Albert-Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, Alicante, 1988.

  7 Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, pp. 238–41; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 82. Juan wrote on 16 June 1749 after visiting the ship at Deptford (information from Catherine Scheybeler). R. Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1714–1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates, Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, p. 273.

  8 Frost, ‘Shaking Off the Spanish Yoke’; Bedford to Keene, 24 April 1749, SP 94/135 ff. 177–8; Keene to Bedford, 21 May 1749; Bedford to Keene, 5 June 1749, SP 94/135 ff. 177–8, 265–8, 271–3; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 78.

  9 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. III, p. 71.

  10 C. de Brosses, Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, Paris, 1756; Marshall & Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, p. 260.

  11 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 82–5.

  12 Edmundson, A History of the British Presence in Chile, p. 24.

  12

  Mastering the Pacific

  After the disastrous losses of 1739–48, Spain wisely stood aside when the Seven Years’ War erupted in 1756. However, a change of monarch and French blandishments brought Madrid into the war early in 1762, when France was defeated. Britain already had plans for the South Pacific, and they did not envisage sneaking to Juan Fernández like fugitives on a Spanish Lake. They would seize the Falkland Islands and then Valdivia, the best harbour in southern Chile.1 Anson’s last great project, a two pronged assault on the Spanish Empire reflected the startling increase in British knowledge, power and ambition. He revived the Manila mission originally conceived in 1739, adding a devastating strike at Havana, the beating heart of Spanish power in the Americas. In the intervening two decades the strategic balance had swung decisively in Britain’s favour; in place of straggling raids across vast ocean spaces they would strike high value targets. Rather than loiter at Juan Fernández the British would pick up silver from Peru and Mexico at Havana. The little island in the Pacific was no longer adequate to sustain British ambition. Although Anson died before the operations began the British captured Havana and Manila, shattering Spain’s global empire.

  When the war ended in 1763, Imperial Spain had been reduced to the second rank. The British returned the captured cities, because they could come back at any time, and launched new missions seeking bases in the South Atlantic and the Pacific. British interest had been piqued by the 1764 translation of des Brosses’s Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, and Louis de Bougainville’s attempt to pre-empt them at the Falkland Islands – gateway to the South Pacific. The response from London was swift.2 While the British saw no need to challenge Spain for Juan Fernández, they responded to French interest in the South Atlantic archipelago by dispatching John Byron, a survivor of the wreck of the Wager, with HMS Dolphin and HMS Tamar around the world on the expedition Anson had planned in 1749.

  After Anson’s death in 1762 his circumnavigators continued the Pacific agenda of expanding trade and tapping the riches of Spanish America, in peace or war. Byron’s mission was planned in profound secrecy; it seems that only the Admiralty and the King were in the know, and further disguised by giving Byron command of the East Indies squadron with orders to sail via Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope. This was a strategic voyage, using the Falklands and Juan Fernández as way stations to a Pacific empire of trade. After annexing the Falkland Islands in January 1765, Byron passed the Straits of Magellan and returned to the South Pacific in 1765, seeking new lands and trade opportunities that would ‘redound to the honor of this Nation as a Maritime Power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain
and to the advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof’.3

  Byron approached the Juan Fernández Islands from the south in late April. With Más a Tierra shrouded in a sea haze he sighted Más Afuera, Anson’s carefully delineated fallback position for an isolated cruiser in those seas and hove to (i.e. furled sails to loiter) on 27 April. After inspecting the northern end of the island from the deck of his ship the following day, producing three excellent coastal perspectives, Byron looked for Saumarez’s anchorage: ‘This island is very high & mostly cover’d with wood, the only clear spots I saw upon it were towards the N[orth] end. They appeared very green & pleasant & there were hundreds of goats feeding there.’ The boat failed to find the anchorage, or a secure landing, but returned full of fish. Desperate for wood, water and goat meat, Byron sent another boat, equipping the crew with cork lifejackets to help them swim, and protect them from the rocks. His boats secured useful quantities of wood and water, despite the heavy surf and large sharks ‘that come into the very Surf when they see a Man in the water’.4

  They also shot some goats that tasted ‘as good as any venison’, including one with the obligatory Selkirkian slit ear. Because Juan Fernández had achieved mythic status, all the best stories could be retold without question. In reality Selkirk had never been on Más Afuera. On the 30th the surf was so heavy that a sailor who could not swim preferred to take his chances ashore. He was forcibly rescued from his Selkirkian ambition by a junior officer. Byron weighed anchor and headed off into the Pacific, his water butts replenished, and plenty of firewood in the hold. The ‘other’ island had provided useful refreshment, compromised by heavy seas, poor landing sites and aggressive sharks. Little wonder the Spanish had made no effort to colonise the outer island. Byron had missed Más a Tierra, and the fortifications in Cumberland Bay.5