Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  In September 1801 the Boston sealing ship Belle Sauvage was seized in Cumberland Bay, engaged in smuggling to acquire vital Lima dollars for the China market. Delano visited Más a Tierra twice. In 1800 he landed safely on the western coast, far away from the settlement, and again 1805, when Governor Don Thomas Higgins upheld the law laid down by the Viceroy, his uncle Don Ambrozio, refusing to supply fresh food. Delano knew the Crusoe and Selkirk stories, including Entick’s claim that Defoe stole Selkirk’s journal. Matthew Folger set off on another Pacific voyage in 1807, commanding the Topaz. This time his luck ran out. After discovering John Adams, last of the Bounty mutineers and his extended family on long forgotten Pitcairn Island Folger’s crew went down with scurvy. Despite the evil reputation of the garrison Folger set course for Juan Fernández. Arriving in Cumberland Bay he requested assistance: this was granted, but no sooner had he reached the shore than the Spaniards opened fire with eight twenty-four pounder cannon, cutting up the rigging and shattering the foretopmast of his ship. The ship was seized and ransacked. A new governor arrived, and sent the Americans back to Valparaiso, where further trials awaited. While in detention Folger managed to pass on the news of Pitcairn to the Royal Navy. Folger finally received compensation for his detention in 1809, including permission to sail the Topaz with a cargo for Spain.6 Soon after that the Spanish regime in Chile was overthrown, opening a new era in South Pacific navigation. Then, in June 1812, America declared war on Britain.

  NOTES

  1 F.W. Howay (ed.), Voyages of the Columbia to the North-West Coast 1787–1790 and 1790–1793, Oregon Historical Society, Portland, OR, 1990, pp. 23–4. The reference is to page 322 of volume I.

  2 Howay, Voyages of the Columbia to the North-West Coast, pp. 22–6 (quote at p. 24).

  3 Howay, Voyages of the Columbia to the North-West Coast, pp. 162–3.

  4 A. Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and the Oriental Islands, Boston, 1817, reprinted ed. E.R. Segroves, Stockingbridge, MA, 1994, pp. 234–44.

  5 H. Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories, ed. H. Beaver, London, 1967, pp. 215–309, 443–50; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 107–9.

  6 Keeble, Commercial Relations between British Overseas Territories and South America, pp. 1–3; Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 239–43. For the Bounty chronometer, see W. Hayes, The Captain from Nantucket and the Mutiny on the Bounty, William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, MI, 1996, p. 86 (see also pp. 30–6, 42–7, 79).

  19

  A Literature of Defeat: Reconstructing the Loss of the USS Essex

  Captain David Porter USN brought the frigate USS Essex into the South Pacific to protect American whaleships and attack their British rivals. The influence of whaling voyages on his cruise and his book was obvious.1 He exploited British texts, local knowledge and American whaling men to seize a dozen British whaleships off the Galápagos Islands. Then he refitted in the Marquesas Islands, taking part in a local war, while his crew savoured the sensuous delights offered by local custom and practice, including the tradition that naked girls swam out to greet incoming ships. Suitably refreshed, the Americans headed back to Valparaiso, where the Essex was blockaded and then captured. Porter went home as a prisoner of war on parole. With little else to occupy his time he compiled an extensive account of his voyage, one that made him the hero of his own tale. He had much to explain, having ignored specific orders to avoid combat with enemy warships, and needlessly prolonged the action after defeat had become inevitable, at the cost of many brave men’s lives, simply to demonstrate his own courage.

  Porter must have been relieved to receive a hero’s welcome when he reached New York in July 1814. The public and the press accepted his version of events without demur; public ovations, dinners and other celebrations helped Porter rewrite the meaning of defeat along lines suggested by Navy Secretary William Jones, who claimed Porter and his crew arrived, ‘in triumph though captives’.2 After that Porter spent a frustrating few months unable to get to sea or achieve anything worthy of his celebrity before the war ended.

  While he waited at New York, Porter, assisted by old roommate and drinking buddy Washington Irving (the leading American creative writer of the era), transformed his narrative into a Journal of a Cruise to the Pacific Ocean by Captain David Porter … Containing descriptions of the Cape de Verde Islands, Coasts of Brazil, Patagonia, Chile and of the Galápagos Islands of 1815.3 This energetic, ambitious, and occasionally unreliable account found a ready audience. Porter used the text to declare himself a hero, claiming he had devastated the British whale fishery, inflicted $2.5 million in damage, and cost the British $6 million to counter his cruise, redeploying ships and men that could have been used to attack the United States. In truth the damage inflicted by his cruise had been negligible; only one prize made it back to the United States, as a cartel, and the British warships that rounded Cape Horn in pursuit of the Essex did not come from the North American station. The British had ample reason to reinforce their squadron on the west coast, to protect their trade in the chaotic conditions caused by the Spanish American revolutionary wars. Despite such reservations Porter’s book became a central pillar in the mythology of American victory in the War of 1812.

  This was something rich and strange, mixing art, literature, history and travelogue. While Porter described his book as a ‘Journal’ to create the illusion that it was a ‘simple’ narrative, Pacific voyaging in the wake of Captain Cook, he had many agendas.4 The most obvious was the conquest of empire, Porter took possession of Nukahiva in the Marquesas Islands, because ‘the climate, fertility, local situation, friendly disposition of the natives, and convenience of this island promise to make it at some future day or great importance to the vessels of the United States navigating the Pacific’. His government took a very different view, ignoring his assertion of sovereignty over ‘Madison’s Island’, named for the president.5

  Porter’s self-justificatory travelogue created an American Pacific, revealing an ocean open for trade to American audiences. In his wake sailed Owen Chase, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Herman Melville and Joshua Slocum. By way of the whaleship Essex narrative, Porter’s USS Essex Journal lies at the heart of Moby Dick, the ultimate American novel.

  After 1812 American literature consciously strove to create a sense of national identity. The much hyped heroics of the Navy, and the privateers made the sea and the seaman interesting subjects.6 For the next thirty years America would have a cultural frontier on the ocean, one that waxed and then waned in harmony with the glory days of post-war deep-water commerce, whaling and travel, replaced by a continental vision in the railroad age. While America took up Porter’s book, and placed a copy on every American warship, contemporary British reviewers were unimpressed. They lambasted his honour and integrity, while affecting to be outraged by his salacious tale of promiscuous liaisons with the girls of the Marquesas Islands. In fact Porter’s more exotic stories were true, providing Pacific literature with its defining metaphors, islands that combined sensual abandon with the cannibal and his feast.

  By the early nineteenth century, literacy rates among foremast sailors were increasing rapidly, with New England men leading the way. On long voyages (and there were none longer than a whaling venture to the South Seas), sailors would read and reread their limited supply of books, bringing the illiterate into their world by declaiming the texts. Often they memorised slabs of text, a trait evident in Melville’s work. Sailors exchanged books with any ships they met, caring more for novelty than quality or relevance. Seamen were both consumers and producers of literature, while they read they also created and reimagined other stories, stories that melded fact and fiction through their own experience. The construction of commonplace books, transcribed collections of things read or heard, reached its apogee in the entomological section of Moby Dick. American seamen were acute
critics of popular literature, especially sea writing, condemning James Fenimore Cooper’s absurd use of sea terms.7 By contrast, sea writing was largely conceived as a literal (rather than imaginative) genre, concerned with understanding, navigation, trade and new countries. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the next great Pacific book. The curious career of the USS Essex in fact and fiction was followed by a gothic horror that inspired the greatest American work of fiction.

  After the British and Americans stopped fighting in the Pacific, the Pacific decided to fight the Americans. In 1819 the Nantucket whaleship Essex sailed with a crew of twenty. After a hard five-week passage, battling heavy seas and westerly gales to round Cape Horn, the ship called at St Mary’s Island on the coast of Chile, a well-known whaler rendezvous, looking for news and reports. Then they made Más Afuera, ‘where we got some wood and fish’, before heading onto the whaling grounds in search of prey.8 Eleven months later the ship was attacked in the middle of the ocean, at a position on the equator some 120° west, by a huge bull sperm whale. The whale rammed the ship twice; her hull smashed open, the Essex sank. The crew took to their boats with few provisions, alone on a vast empty sea.

  While food soon ran short, water was rarely a problem as the boats encountered frequent drenching storms. They had enough canvas to rig sails and managed to catch fish and birds, even lighting fires to cook them, but they were a very long way from any known inhabited island across the great sweep of the sea. The wind was adverse, and the navigation less than perfect. Three men were left on bare, uninhabited Ducie Island the day after Christmas and a course shaped for Easter Island. A week later the men were beginning to despond; food ran short, and with it hope. On 4 January 1821 the boats were still in company to the south of Easter Island; incapable of beating up into the wind to reach it, they were obliged to set a course for Juan Fernández, ‘which lay east-southeast from us some two thousand five hundred miles’.9

  Second mate Matthew P. Joy died on 10 January, and was buried at sea. On the 12th First Mate Own Chase’s boat became separated from the other two. On the 20th Richard Peterson, a black man, died in Chase’s boat. He too was buried. By now the remaining men in the boat were becoming delusional. On the 28th Isaac Cole died. He was carved up to feed his friends: they stripped off his flesh and took out his heart, before heaving the bony carcass and remaining offal over the side. They ate him first as raw flesh to satiate their hunger, then roasted over a small fire; finally they trimmed Cole into thin strips that could be dried in the wind for later consumption. By 15 February the boat was, they estimated, about three hundred miles from Juan Fernández, but their provisions were almost out. On the 17th Chase spotted an island which he believed to be Más Afuera, ‘and immediately upon this reflection, the life blood began to flow again briskly in my veins’. Early on the following morning a sail was sighted, and they were rescued by the British brig Indian, outbound from London. A few hours later they passed Más Afuera, heading for Valparaiso, where they arrived on the 25th.

  The other two boats, led by Captain George Pollard Jr, remained in company. While Chase’s bald narrative of what transpired lacks the first hand immediacy of his account of life and death on his own boat, the story demands further examination. At its heart is a tale of horror in which twelve men put to sea in two boats, and a month later two were rescued from a single boat. In the process four black crewmen had been eaten by their companions. The first, Lawson Thomas, probably died on 15 January (the record states 25 January, but that seems to be a misprint). Charles Shorter died on the 23rd, and ‘his body was shared for food between the crews of the two boats’. On the 27th Isaiah Shepherd died, and on the 28th another black man named Samuel Reed died. As Chase observes; ‘the bodies of these men constituted their only food while it lasted’. That four black men, in all probability the only black men in the two boats, should die at convenient intervals after the food ran out is unlikely to have been a coincidence. It is more likely they were selected for execution as less ‘important’ than their white brethren. The two boats became separated during the night of 28 January, and Chase does not record whether these grim ‘provisions’ were held equally. The third boat was never seen again. Three days later the Captain’s boat had run out food. There were no more black men who could ‘die’, so Charles Ramsdell shot Owen Coffin, after the usual cannibal excuse of ‘drawing lots’. Brazilla Ray ‘died’ next, Coffin having lasted the party (by now much diminished) a whole ten days. That left the Captain Pollard and Ramsdell to eke out their grisly provisions. On 23 February they were rescued by Nantucket whaleship Dauphine, which, in a terrible twist of fate, was commanded by one of Coffin’s relatives.10 Chase’s decision to pass swiftly over these events with no more than a bare two-page statement of fact is deeply suggestive. The sheer horror of his tale needed no embroidery; a typhoon of adjectives could not improve his clinical chronicle.

  The men left on Ducie Island were luckier, all survived, although they had to wait far longer for rescue. Captain Charles Ridgely of the USS Constellation paid the English merchant ship Surrey to call at the island, and they were finally picked on 5 April 1821.11 The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, A Narrative by Owen Chase, First Mate appeared later that year. While it was not a runaway success with squeamish landsmen, the story had great traction among whalers.

  The Essex was only one among many American vessels operating on the vastness of the South Pacific. Once the War of 1812 had ended American ships returned to the South Pacific in growing numbers, both to pursue the sperm whale, by 1818 at least sixty whalers were in the area, and to trade with both Spanish and rebel provinces as the Wars of Independence raged. These trades were important, and the men who ran them had influence, so from 1817 at least one American warship was on station, protecting American interests. In this the Americans found themselves working closely with the Royal Navy to ensure both sides in the conflict acted lawfully, and did so without undue partiality toward the insurgents. Juan Fernández remained a popular rendezvous and refreshment stop.

  In 1822 Commodore Charles Stewart called at the island on his way to Chile, as the rendezvous for his battleship, the USS Franklin, the sloop USS Dolphin, and three merchant ships that sailed with him from New York. The crew of the Dolphin, the first ship to arrive, had five days to enjoy the island, which had a tiny Chilean population, and an abundance of fruit, wild hogs and fresh water. Commander David Connor charted Cumberland Bay while he waited, and piloted the flagship to the anchorage when she arrived. He had already brought the merchant ship Canton into the bay. Two of Stewart’s midshipmen planned to duel when they reached the island, but the Commodore issued a stern warning, stopping their plans. Midshipman Charles Wilkes recalled an exciting hunt for wild cattle, a lot of fishing, and visited the ‘Cave of Selkirk and the other marked objects,’ before taking in the ‘beautiful foliage, and enduring the frequent showers’. He did not mention Crusoe. After a few days refreshing and watering the American ships headed for Valparaiso, where they picked up the terrifying story of the whaleship Essex. In an instant the vision of an island paradise had been swept away by cannibal horror, ‘too terrible to be told’.12

  In January 1823 Stewart landed a party on Juan Fernández, where they built a small schooner for his squadron using a precut frame purchased from the American merchant ship Pearl eight months before. The suitably named Robinson Crusoe and her sisters Water-Witch and Peruvian were used as dispatch vessels to keep up communications between the flagship and the Caribbean via Panama. The ship was sold later that year, taking part in the liberation of Peru.13

  NOTES

  1 D. Porter, Journal of a Cruise to the Pacific Ocean by Captain David Porter in the United States Frigate Essex, in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814, Containing descriptions of the Cape de Verde Islands, Coasts of Brazil, Patagonia, Chile and of the Galapagos Islands, 2 vols, Bradford and Inskip, Philadelphia, PA, 1815, p. 180, citing Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic. Porter had planned an expedition into the Pacific
before the war.

  2 D.F. Long, Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter 1783–1843, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1970, p. 170.

  3 The second edition, ‘to which is now added an introduction, in which the charges contained in the Quarterly Review, of the first edition of this Journal and examined’, appeared in 1822 from Wiley and Halstead, New York. See Long, Nothing Too Daring, pp. 71–2, 331–2. The Cambridge History of American Literature, p. 763 lists Porter as an ‘important text on or concerning the New World’, the only naval work so noted for this period. G.S. Hellman, Washington Irving, London, 1924, p. 82.

  4 See S.E. Morison, ‘Old Bruin’: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794–1858, Little, Brown, Boston, MA, 1967, pp. 270–409 for the expedition. Critically, Perry’s squadron entered the Pacific via the Cape of Good Hope.

  5 Long, Nothing Too Daring, pp. 124–6.

  6 H. Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2008, pp. 119, 30–8, 204–5.

  7 Blum, The View from the Masthead, pp. 9, 14, 72–3, 128–9.

  8 O. Chase, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex: A Narrative by Owen Chase, First Mate, 1821, new edition ed. I. Haverstick & B. Shepard, Harcourt Brace & Co., London, 1997, p. 6.

  9 Chase, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, p. 67.

  10 Chase, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, pp. 86–7

  11 Billingsley, In Defence of Neutral Rights, p. 126.

  12 C. Wilkes, Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes US Navy 1798–1877, Naval Historical Centre, Washington, DC, 1978, pp. 141–5, 168; C. Berube & J. Rodgaard, A Call to the Sea: Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution, Potomac Books, Washington, DC, 2005, pp. 146–88.