Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  13 R.E. Johnson, Thence Round Cape Horn: The Story of United States Naval Forces on the Pacific Station, 1818–1923, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1963, pp. 30–31; Berube & Rodgaard, A Call to the Sea, pp. 166–8; Billingsley, In Defence of Neutral Rights, pp. 151–7, 170–7.

  20

  Sea Stories

  In August 1834, Richard Henry Dana Jr, son of a prosperous Boston family, set out on a sea voyage. He was hoping to recover from ophthalmia, an eye condition that threatened his legal studies. The brig Pilgrim was heading for the Mexican province of California, to load a cargo of hides. While learning the ropes of his new profession Dana kept a journal. Returning to Boston in September 1836 he completed his studies and wrote Two Years Before the Mast, one of the best known of all sea stories. Dana skilfully engaged his audience of landlubbers by taking them through the stages of the seaman’s life – from green landsman, retching over the rail, to finished topman – as a journal of experience. He explained what he learned, what was being done, and dissected the unique and strange world of the square rigged sailing ship, a machine driven by teams of men, and a floating society with its own dynamics, rituals and precedents. It remains a wonderful guide to the life and language of the sea. Despite the prosaic attention to detail Dana was at heart a poet. Rapturous descriptions seemed to burst out of him as he responded to striking seascapes, landfalls and the changing of night to day. His voyage via Cape Horn was viewed from below hatches; neither hero nor leader, Dana follows, watches, learns and develops.

  An educated, well-read man, Dana was at once familiar with the latest trends in romantic writing, and the classic story of Robinson Crusoe. These elements shaped his response to Juan Fernández, which he first saw at daybreak on Tuesday 25 November 1834:

  it was dead ahead … rising like a deep blue cloud out of the sea … so high and so blue did it appear, that I mistook it for a cloud, resting over the island, and looked for the island under it, until it gradually turned to a deader and greener color, and I could mark the inequalities upon its surface. At length we could distinguish trees and rocks; and by the afternoon, this beautiful island lay fairly before us, and we directed our course to the only harbor.1

  The heightened state of Dana’s perception may have reflected the scurvy-inducing fact that when the anchor finally dropped into Cumberland Bay the Pilgrim had completed a non-stop 103-day voyage from Boston. He had not recovered his equilibrium, or his vitamin levels when he took the watch, at three o’clock that morning:

  I shall never forget the peculiar sensation which I experienced on finding myself once more surrounded by land, feeling the night breeze coming from off shore, and hearing the frogs and crickets. The mountains seemed almost to hang over us.

  Eerie noises from the dark, shadowy mountains only heightened his anxiety to see more of this ‘romantic, I may almost say, classic island’.

  Volunteering to join the boat crews sent to fill the ship’s casks Dana managed to get ashore. Delays in clearing the stream anchor gave him time to visit the area around San Juan Bautista. He described the village huts as ‘Robinson Crusoe like – of posts and branches of trees’, and recalled Lord Anson’s fruit tree planting exploits. He was markedly less impressed with the distinctly civilised edifices that accommodated the governor, the church and the barracks. After dawn everything lost a little of the romance of dusk and dark; the lowering mountains appeared less intimidating. ‘They seemed to bear off towards the centre of the island, and were green and well-wooded, with some large, and, I am told, exceedingly fertile valleys, with mule-tracks leading to different parts of the island.’

  Dana’s impressionistic writing reflected a basic problem. As an ordinary seaman he had little chance to walk the ground, and none to discuss the subject with those ashore. He had no Spanish, and Governor Thomas Sutcliffe – the only man on the island who spoke English – was ‘out of my walk’. Sutcliffe came aboard for dinner with a padre and a moustachioed junior officer in a dirty uniform. While the governor dined with the captain, New Bedford whaler Cortes came into harbour homeward bound, and anxious for east coast news. Dana may have picked up some useful Pacific information from her crew. When Sutcliffe’s boat arrived to take him back to the shore it brought local gifts, a pail of milk, a few shells and a block of sandalwood. Having stowed the water casks the Pilgrim unmoored shortly before sundown and, after some fiddly work with the two anchors, a fouled hawse and the uncertain flaws of wind, stood out of Cumberland Bay under the stars.

  It was bright starlight when we were clear of the bay, and the lofty island lay behind us, in its still beauty, and I gave a parting look, and bid farewell, to the most romantic spot of earth that my eyes had ever seen. I did then, and have ever since, felt an attachment for that island, altogether peculiar. It was partly, no doubt, from its having been the first land that I had seen since leaving home, and still more from the associations which every one has connected with it in their childhood from reading Robinson Crusoe. To this I may add the height and romantic outline of its mountains, the beauty and freshness of its verdure, and the extreme fertility of its soil, and its solitary position in the midst of the wide expanse of the South Pacific, as all concurring to give it its peculiar charm.2

  By the morning of 27 November the Pilgrim was once again all alone on a vast ocean. Although he would never again cast his eyes on the magic island of Defoe and Anson, Dana never forgot Juan Fernández, it fuelled his dreams and reveries, and he would add further reflections to his journal as the voyage progressed. These combined first-hand testimony, discussions with shipmates, additional reading, navigational information gleaned from books, and ship-to-ship conversations or ‘gams’ like those featured in Moby Dick. While his engaging prose brought the island to life, Dana’s imaginative response became popular as a prosaic guide. This search for the practical reflected a shift from the romanticism of the 1820s to the age of realism.3

  Dana’s Robinsonian reflections mattered because his book caught the attention of readers at a time when the South Pacific was remote but endlessly fascinating. Within a decade the sea passage to the west coast had become an obsession with gold hungry speculators and adventurers heading for the California Gold fields, many would repeat the Pilgrim’s refreshment stop at Juan Fernández and, Dana in hand, set off to impose their own Crusoe on a remarkably reluctant landscape. At least fifty ships called in 1849–50, but visits quickly tailed off as the Gold Rush subsided and the Trans-isthmian railway opened in 1855 to filter off the passenger traffic.4

  Arriving on the Anteus from New York early in 1849, American author John Ross Browne was struck by ‘the strange delight with which I gazed upon that isle of romance’:

  the unfeigned rapture I felt in anticipation of exploring that miniature world in the desert of waters, so fraught with the happiest associations of youth; so remote from all the ordinary realities of life; the actual embodiment of the most absorbing, most fascinating of all the dreams of fancy.5

  Browne was evidently set on earning a living with his pen in California, and his overloaded adjectives did not abate as his reflections meandered onward, to ‘wondrous’, ‘Utopian’, ‘dreamlike’ ‘sublimity’. There can be little doubt that while Browne did not record any scorbutic effects, he was retailing the disturbed exoticism of the sick, situated with lines from Shakespeare’s Tempest, where the magic island is said to

  suffer a sea-change

  into something rich and strange.

  Once ashore Browne and his companions quickly found Crusoe’s ‘rustic castle’, which he helpfully illustrated for less well travelled readers. Having paid his respects to the hero of his childhood Browne was in ‘ecstatic bliss’. He went on to complete the tourist trail by visiting Selkirk’s cave, which was being hacked about by 20 enthusiastic, heavily armed miner-tourists making a stop on their way to San Francisco. One of the tourists declared it ‘the most fascinating spot on the face of the globe … I hope to see the cave Robinson dug, or the ruins of hi
s little hovel.’ Browne recalled how the miners chopped out lumps of Robinsonian souvenir rock, ‘every man had literally his pockets full of rocks’. Overwhelmed by the romance of the island, the miner’s thoughts quickly turned to gold, and American annexation.6 Such mismatches between fiction and fact helped to confuse the meaning of the island, which evolved in new and strange directions in the years that followed.

  The indolence of anglophone newspapermen ensured American visits to Juan Fernández frequently turned up in British newspapers, especially when they were linked to Crusoe. In July 1859 The Times carried a typical piece of second-hand reportage from the San Francisco Times, which stressed both continuing British interest, and a remarkably wide access to the global news industry.

  A VISIT TO ROBINSON CRUSOE’S ISLAND.

  While on board the ship Golden Rocket, lying at Greenwich Dock, we were permitted by Captain C. N. Pendleton to examine his log book, in which he gives an account of his visit to the island of Juan Fernández (Robinson Crusoe’s island). The ship was on her last passage to this port [San Francisco] from Boston, and had on board 55 passengers (25 of whom were ladies) who intend to make California their future place of residence. Getting short of water Captain Pendleton decide to stop at Juan Fernández for a further supply, and therefore shaped his course thither – the island being nearly in his track. At 6 pm on the evening of the March 24 they doubled the eastern end of the island, and at 7 rounded too off the Bay of St. Joseph [Cumberland Bay], at the head of which the few inhabitants now remaining on the island are located. The facilities for loading water at the island Captain Pendleton reports to be not very good. The casks must be taken on shore and filled, rolled back into the water and parbuckled into the boat. While the crew were at this work the passengers rambled off in different directions to make discoveries. The island is about 25 miles long by about four in breadth [a considerable exaggeration]. The land is very high, rising in ragged, precipitous peaks – one of them called El Yunque 3,500 feet above the level of the sea. The peaks are generally overhung with clouds. The valleys are exceedingly fertile, the grass growing to the height of six or eight feet. Figs, strawberries, peaches, and cherries abound in their season. The Golden Rocket was there in the season of peaches, and the valleys and hill sides were full of trees loaded-down with delicious fruit. Captain Pendleton bought four barrels of the inhabitants, and the passengers about as many more. Strawberries flourish best in December and January. There are three remarkable caves in the side of the hill facing the harbour, about 30 feet in length, 25 in width, and about the same in height. The inhabitants now number but 14, of whom Messrs Day and Kirkaldie from Valparaiso are the chief persons, they having been appointed overseers of the island by the Chilian Government. Formerly a penal colony, numbering 500, was located here, and the caves above mentioned were used by them, but the project was found to be impracticable and the convicts were taken back to the mainland. The Golden Rocket anchored on the opposite side from that upon which Selkirk lived, and there being a mountain to cross to reach the Robinson Crusoe abode, no one ventured to make the journey. The best landing is on the eastern side, but the water is 20 fathoms deep at the head of the bay, and in some places so bold is the shore that a boat tied by her painter and drifting to her limits would be in 75 fathoms. An immense number of goats are running wild over the island, and an abundance of fish are taken on every cast. The water is obtained from a number of never-failing rivulets trickling down over the rocks from this cloud-capped mountain.7

  The combination of solid, seamanlike information about water supply, fishing and the anchorage with rhapsodies on the subject of Selkirk/Crusoe, reveal the article began life in Golden Rocket’s log book, before falling into the hands of a half educated hack writer needing some copy. Facts and figures artlessly combine with attempts at romantic scenic imagery. By this date the Selkirk cave was well known, while the striking ellipse by which it becomes ‘the Robinson Crusoe abode’ in the same sentence had many precursors. It would have been interesting to learn if Day and Kirkaldie were English, American or Scottish. The Times reprint will have been read by far more people than the original San Francisco article, because the London paper had astonishing circulation figures, and the British had never forgotten Crusoe, the fictional embodiment of their imperial achievement.

  NOTES

  1 R.H. Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, Boston, 1840 (all quotes taken from the 1911 London Macmillan edition), pp. 44–51.

  2 Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, pp. 44–51.

  3 Blum, The View from the Masthead, pp. 72–3.

  4 D. Loveman, No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2010, pp. 107–10.

  5 J.R. Browne, Crusoe’s Island: A Ramble in the Footsteps of Alexander Selkirk, with Sketches of Adventure in California and Washoe, New York, 1868, p. 24.

  6 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 184–91 quoting Browne.

  7 The Times (12 July 1859), p. 9, col. F (my insertions in brackets).

  21

  Poet of the Pacific

  Among the great books of the sea, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale of 1851, has few peers. Around the simple narrative of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the great white whale that had taken his leg, the whale’s deliberate destruction of his ship, and the loss of all but one member of the crew, Melville created an epic vision that melded the limitless ocean with the obsessions of a small community, the very real menace of the mighty sperm whale and the emerging American assumption of ownership over the vast Pacific. Melville used his own experience to draw together many strands of the Anglo-American imagination, along with the rich history of a savage trade, into a philosophy of the ocean.

  Melville began his seafaring career in 1839 as a crewman bound from New York to Liverpool. He encountered another Yankee intellectual reflecting on his experience as a merchant seaman in Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, a book that provided a sense of camaraderie, even kinship. How far Dana inspired his whaling voyage to the Pacific is unclear, but the example was fresh and strong. Not that Melville was the only budding author to see the opportunity. By the 1840s, American sea writing in the Dana mould was at its apogee. These stories were generally ‘useful’, reflecting first-hand experience, with an emphasis on authorial expertise. They recounted voyages in a ship-shape and seaworthy manner, rendering the romantic writings of Cooper and Irving passé. These texts relied on their journals, the inevitable commonplace book of recorded facts and readings. Melville would both play to the new sensibility, and subvert it, using the entomology section in Moby Dick to connect, the more effectively to disguise his deeper purpose.1

  Melville’s Pacific was both a familiar and familial ocean. In 1827, when he was only eight, cousin Thomas wrote home from the USS Vincennes at the Peruvian port of Callao, anticipating a voyage among the islands. He visited the Marquesas, the islands that dominated Porter’s narrative, entering the Typee valley, home of a cannibal tribe. In 1831 his uncle bought the book that recounted these adventures, admittedly through the oft-averted eyes of Chaplain Charles Stewart. These experiences came tumbling in on Melville at an impressionable age: he and his elder brother idolised their cousin, and the impact of such exotic voyaging would become obvious. When he joined the whaleship Acushnet, Melville found an ideal environment for reading, listening and reflecting: the voyage would be long, and the library limited.2

  In May 1841 the whaler may have passed in sight of Juan Fernández, or Más Afuera, but the voyage from Rio had been quick, there was no need to stop for refreshment. Instead Melville listened intently to the tale of the whaleship Essex, stove and sunk by a giant sperm whale, as told by Owen Chase’s son. This combination of disaster, starvation, cannibalism and the vast, glittering expanse of the Pacific laid the foundations of a great book. Still sailing north, the Acushnet met another whaler, and as the crew exchanged tall tales a
nd domestic gossip Melville met Owen Chase’s son, borrowed a copy of the whaleship Essex narrative and entered a world of sublime imagery: ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me.’ He even imagined that he had seen Owen Chase, albeit at a distance. Later he obtained a copy of Chase’s book, which he greatly prized, filling it with annotations and notes.3

  Sailing across the South Pacific, the Acushnet’s crew began to suffer the effects of poor diet. There is little reason to doubt that Melville was already mildly scorbutic when he gave vent to a line about the Marquesas, the first island they stopped at. ‘No description can do justice to its beauty’ could have been written by Chaplain Richard Walter a century before, wrapping romantic reveries of an island paradise in a suitably scorbutic confession of literary inadequacy. However, this island had something else to offer, something that was not available at Juan Fernández. Sailing into Nukahiva Bay on 23 June 1841, Acushnet was boarded by a bevy of naked girls and, as was customary, the rest of the day and the night were given over to an orgy, proving the veracity of David Porter’s account. ‘Our ship was now wholly given up to every species of riot and debauchery. Not the feeblest barrier was interposed between unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification.’ Melville’s claims that he stood aside, merely observing were, one suspects, addressed to his mother. They carry little conviction in the light of his subsequent actions.4