Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  On 14 December 1847, the day before departure, the admiral, his wife and three daughters ‘gave a delightful picnic in West (or English) Bay’ (i.e. Puerto Inglese). The officers dined in tents, spread among the myrtle trees, and then took a wander through an idyllic landscape of low trees and rivulets, smoking Raleigh’s ‘fragrant weed’, a necessary occasion, the admiral having banned such filthy habits from the flagship. Strolling through this delightful scene, wreathed in smoke, Walpole affected to be reminded of the ‘hardy adventurers’ of older days, and recognised with becoming humility the very different nature of his own voyage to this paradise for scorbutic mariners. Such reveries concluded with a knowing paragraph that placed the island and the diffuse memories it evoked firmly in the Victorian imagination:

  After a delightful stay we went back to comparatively civilized places, townships, traffics, and all the paraphernalia of this money-making world. I must not forget to mention, to the credit of the moderns, that one of our number petitioned our chief for leave to remain on the island: emulous of Selkirk, or wishing to verify Defoe’s account of Robinson Crusoe, he seriously begged to be left behind. It is needless to say his request was not granted.17

  By leaving the inspiration that prompted this new Selkirk unclear, Walpole adroitly enlisted the lure of Robinsonian residence and Selkirkian survival as familiar signposts for readers grappling with prosy descriptions of the vistas and visions he had experienced. While hardly in the ranks of Darwin and other Humboldtian scientific travellers, Walpole reflected the mental world of the 1840s, just before Melville’s Typee reinvented the Pacific island story. Walpole’s publisher had no doubt Juan Fernández would attract readers, much as it had in the days of Dampier and Woodes Rogers 150 years before. Walpole’s cultured observations mark a turning point in discussions of Juan Fernández. It was published by Richard Bentley. Two years later Bentley published Melville’s mighty whale book. While Walpole’s slight, charming Pacific memoir required a second edition, and opportunistic Parisian publishing maestro Galignani knocked off a pirate edition, Moby Dick foundered.

  Seymour enjoyed the book. He may have noticed a passage, hidden in the historical introduction to Walpole’s travelogue, which reflected British interest in the island as a naval station. In a secret report Seymour accepted Chile was unlikely to give up the island, but he hoped to secure effective control through a contractor.

  If this island was obtainable it would be desirable to secure it. The anchorage is exposed to the North and the depth of water too great for improvement by breakwater, but it is better than St Helena and Ascension as I am told for anchorage and very superior garden cultivation and climate.18

  There was no need to act; the Pacific soon calmed down. Walpole sought to undermine Chilean sovereignty, focusing on the Spanish ‘lust of dominion’, Chilean idleness and the endless disasters, both natural and man-made, that afflicted the island under Hispanic rule, a theme that culminated with the declaration that it had been ‘abandoned’ to nature. His words hinted at the notion of ‘terra nullius’, an island free for occupation, as the Falkland Islands had been only a decade and a half before. Anxious to provide good title, Walpole even looked for the signs of earlier British occupation; he found Anson’s camp with ease, but not the graves of the expedition. Instead he noted the fruit trees that his Lordship had introduced.19 Tasty as their fruits might be, they were a poor substitute as indicators of title to some solid grave markers.

  NOTES

  1 D. Crane, Men of War: Courage under Fire in the 19th Century Navy, Harper Press, London, 2009, p. 327

  2 The Times (9 March 1848). Log book 6-17-12.1847, HMS Collingwood: ADM 53/2281. Admiral Sir George Seymour’s Journal: ADM 50/213, p. 489.

  3 A.H. Markham, A Brief Memoir of Commodore J.G. Goodenough, Portsmouth, 1877.

  4 Crane, Men of War, pp. 327–32. Markham added the shrieks of nonexistent owls to an overnight ordeal he did not share! For a different perspective on Goodenough, see J. Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, 1998, pp. 147–75.

  5 Seymour diary of places visited, 6 December 1847: CR114A/421, Warwick Record Office. F. Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific in Her Majesty’s Ship Collingwood, from 1844 to 1848, second edition, 2 vols, Richard Bentley, London, 1850, p. 378.

  6 Crane, Men of War, pp. 319–422; J. Samson, ‘Hero, Fool or Martyr? The Many Deaths of Commodore Goodenough’, Journal for Maritime Research 10(1) (February 2008), pp. 1–22.

  7 H.A. Kay (ed.), HMS Collingwood, 1844–48: From the Journals of Philip Horatio Townsend Somerville, Pentland Press, Edinburgh, 1986, pp. 244–6.

  8 Walpole sat as Conservative MP for North Norfolk from 1868 until his death in 1876. His decision to leave the sea may have followed a near-death experience: Walpole fell overboard and was lucky to be rescued. See Naval and Military Gazette (26 October 1844). Admiralty to Seymour, 22 November 1844: ADM 172/4 27.

  9 Journal entries 30 March 1845 & 5 March 1846 in Kay, HMS Collingwood, pp. 49, 175.

  10 Journal entry 13 June 1846 in Kay, HMS Collingwood, p. 196.

  11 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, ch. 14 (quote at p. 362).

  12 Anyone who has suffered the irritation of clothes washed in salt water will understand this reference.

  13 Woodward identifies one man as Pedro Maurelio.

  14 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, pp. 359–60.

  15 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, pp. 367–8.

  16 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, pp. 370–6.

  17 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, pp. 379–81.

  18 Seymour to Walpole, 27 September 1849: CR 114A 414/4 f281. Seymour to Lord Auckland (first lord of the admiralty), 28 November 1846: CR114A 418/3, p. 54. Journal for 10 December 1847: CR114A /421. Seymour to hydrographer Francis Beaufort, 29 December 1847: CR114A 414/4 ff.61–3.

  19 Walpole, Four Years in the Pacific, pp. 354–5, 361, 365, 373.

  24

  Occupation, Possession, Ownership and Title

  Legal title to Juan Fernández and Más Afuera was never in doubt. They belonged to Spain, which first discovered and occupied the uninhabited islands, and then to Chile, as successor to the defunct Spanish Empire. However, the value of that legal title had been challenged, in fact if not in law. They had been left vacant for close on 200 years, with Dutch, English, British, American and finally Peruvian occupation undermining any continuity of title. Furthermore, the occupants of Juan Fernández had no means of controlling Cumberland Bay, let alone the rest of the island, Santa Clara or Más Afuera. The steady accumulation of cartographic and text information in other countries, first Holland and then Britain, meant that by the 1740s the islands were wide open to hostile occupation: the Spanish were obliged to occupy Juan Fernández. Occupation worked, blocking a British take-over, short of war, until the end of the Empire in South America. Combining a fort with legal title provided a solid basis for possession.

  While the Spanish retained some of Anson’s place names, such as Cumberland Bay, they seem to have taken a more thorough approach to removing land markers, notably those of burial. No corner of this foreign field would be ‘for ever England’; indeed the cemetery at San Juan Bautista is dominated by a memorial to German sailors.

  The island that Somerville and Walpole enjoyed was fast becoming the romantic ruin of the southern seas, a curiosity to be seen, examined, and tasted. The Chilean government had no interest in the place; in December 1847 Captain Benjamin Munoz Gamero, who had been to Juan Fernández a decade earlier, concluded the abandoned settlement was rapidly decaying, and would soon disappear altogether ‘if steps are not quickly taken to remedy its condition’. Not only were the goats eating the island bare, but visiting ships and the few inhabitants were wasteful and destructive. The Royal Navy continued to picnic on the idyllic islands and inlets of Chile. The battleship HMS Asia called in 1848; two years later HMS Portland visited San Ambrosio and San Félix, to ch
eck their suitability as naval bases.1 The 1849 California Gold Rush created a sudden upsurge in traffic, many American ships stopped off to visit the romantic sites, a few Americans even speculated on the possibility of seizing the islands for the United States. Suitably alarmed, the Chilean authorities sent out two more penal colonies; both ended in revolt, escape and disaster. Finally the steamship made Juan Fernández a backwater.

  The island had been on the track used by sailing ships heading north and south, but steamers hugged the coast 300 miles to the east, rarely troubling the islands without good reason. Good reasons to visit an island so far away, and so nearly empty, were few and far between. In 1854 a boat load of survivors from the Boston ship Townsend, destroyed by fire after rounding the Horn, fetched up at Más Afuera, and then limped into Cumberland Bay, where they found food, shelter, and ship to the mainland.2 Another American ship sank at sea nearby in 1860, this time the entire crew managed to reach the island.3 Such occasional disasters aside, Juan Fernández drifted out of mind. Spanish warships visited briefly in 1865–6 during a naval war with Chile. British and American warships stopped more often, to make maps and relax.

  In February 1865 HMS Clio called; midshipman Lord Charles Beresford led a party of seamen ashore to hunt goats, only to discover three Robinson Crusoes, living on a diet of crayfish.4 Action man Charlie added to the repertoire of hunting techniques; diving to recover goats that fell into the sea after being shot by sportsmen on the ship. In 1868 Commodore Powell and the officers of HMS Topaze, flagship of the Pacific Squadron, had a large iron plaque specially cast in Valparaiso to commemorate Selkirk, it was then carried up to the newly imagined ‘Lookout’, by a squad of perspiring matelots, then hammered into the mountain:

  In Memory

  of

  Alexander Selkirk,

  Mariner

  A native of Largo in the County of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude for four years and four months, he was landed from the Cinque Ports galley, 96 tons, 18 guns, AD 1704, and was taken off in the Duke, privateer, 12th February, 1709. He died Lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth , AD 1723, aged 47. This tablet is erected near Selkirk’s lookout, by Commodore Powell and the officers of HMS Topaze, AD 1868.5

  For all the apparent innocence of modern sailors marking their sense of a heroic precursor, the plaque could equally well be read as an indication of ownership, a very solid piece of engineering that helped build a British title. It remains where Powell left it, commanding the pass over the island’s mountainous spine, surrounded by innumerable maritime graffito carved into the rock to remind visitors of the enduring bond of sailors, and their love of a run ashore. Close by, an incongruous viewing platform has been erected, in case visitors miss the scenic majesty of ‘Selkirk’s Mirador’, the most romantic spot on the island. Commodore Powell also reported Juan Fernández had been hit by a tidal wave after a major earthquake on the South American coast.6 This time there were no casualties.

  In February 1872 the sloop HMS Reindeer stopped at Juan Fernández, Captain William Kennedy being ‘desirous of visiting the spot associated with the story of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. He found HMS Scylla already there, with orders cancelling his return to England round the Horn. He profited from the news by remaining for a few days:

  hunting the wild goats and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. The day before our departure some of our sportsmen accidentally set fire to the brushwood and destroyed a quantity of stacked timber. A claim was made against me for 2000 dollars for the damage done.

  Nothing came of the claim. While Kennedy reported the affair in his usual breezy offhand way, the damage was significant, about a square mile of standing trees were destroyed. This naval carelessness led to a belated but essential Chilean ban on further logging, to preserve the soil and island resources.7 Predictably, the order was ineffective.

  British concepts of ownership took on a new character when HMS Challenger arrived in Cumberland Bay on 13 November 1875, anchoring with scientific precision at exactly 6.30 pm. The Challenger was nearing the end of a pioneering oceanographic circumnavigation of 68,690 miles, inspired by the strange and disturbing things that had emerged from the primordial slime at the bottom of the deep ocean. This weird new world had come to the light during naval surveys of the ocean floor, undertaken to ensure the fast expanding network of privately funded British submarine telegraph cables was laid on suitably flat terrain. So compelling was the Royal Society’s case that notoriously stingy Prime Minister William Gladstone sanctioned the cost. The expedition sailed in the wake of other scientific navigators, of Cook, Flinders and Franklin, men who gave the British possession of vast swathes of the littoral by charting the seas, and naming the headlands, inlets and rivers. These scientific navigators worked at the meeting point of astronomy and terrestrial magnetism, where heavenly bodies and magnetic fields contributed to safe oceanic passage making.

  Stripped of cannon, the ship had been fitted out as a mobile laboratory for the scientists, a strong supporting cast of officers and seamen would get them to their many destinations, operating dredges, grabs, sweeps and trawls to collect natural wonders that ranged from the beautiful to the downright bizarre.8 Challenger supplemented the existing British possessory catalogue of books and charts with a library of data; the Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of HMS Challenger9 implied British dominion over the ocean, the deep sea trenches, fisheries and any number of well-catalogued islands. That Juan Fernández, the ‘natural habitat’ of British castaways and maroons, would be among those rocky outposts was never in doubt. Consequently when the Times reviewed the text it was more concerned to link the island to Anson, Defoe and Selkirk than trouble its readers with scientific issues.10

  While the Challenger narrative tried to explain the world that had been observed, the voyagers, doubtless driven into the ship’s library by the long, tedious days spent on open ocean passages, were heavily influenced by the past.11 Their version of Dampier, Defoe and Darwin was the one that would be taken up by their successors. They provided a check list of reasons why the island should be seen in a British setting, one that had been created on the forty day passage from Tahiti. With twelve of those days spent totally becalmed, and many more under easy sail, the scientists had ample opportunity to catch up on their reading. Furthermore deep sea sounding and sampling on this passage had been largely unrewarding. Henry Moseley read Woodes Rogers, Dampier, Funnel, Shelvocke, Anson and many more.12 He would not have been alone in taking such a liberal survey of Britain’s long relationship with the island. This was no ordinary stop; it had a uniquely British history and romance. ‘It was with the liveliest interest that we approached the scene of Alexander Selkirk’s life of seclusion and hardship.’ The very existence of Juan Fernández was the main reason why most of his scientific colleagues had undertaken the voyage in the first place:

  The study of Robinson Crusoe certainly first gave me a desire to go to sea and Darwin’s Journal settled the matter. Defoe was obliged to lay the scene of his romance in the West Indies in order to bring in the Carib man Friday. He thus gained the parrot, but he lost the sea-elephants and fur seals of Juan Fernández, one of the latter would have made a capital pet for Robinson Crusoe.

  After reading Philip Parker King’s account, Mosely concluded, ‘no doubt the general appearance of the vegetation is very different now from what it was when the island was first visited’.13

  Selkirk’s tale had an obvious resonance with the large number of Scots officers and scientists. Midshipman Lord George Campbell, son of statesman-scientist the eighth Duke of Argyll, maintained a detached perspective in his ‘log-letters’, a running commentary published soon after his return to Britain. He was neither blinded by mythology, nor deluded by scurvy. While Moseley recognised a landscape of devastated nature Campbell believed, a single house and a few cattle aside, the island was unchanged since the buccaneers, Selkirk, Anson and his diseased crew had departed:

  Certainly until I sa
w Juan Fernández I had never sufficiently pitied Selkirk, for I had dreamed that the real island must be like Defoe’s ideal island, a pretty, pleasant little spot, with tree clad hillocks rising here and there from low undulating land, forming a foreground to more distant crags and rocks among which he learned to catch the goats – rivalling them in speed and activity among the rocky fastnesses. But all that imaginary foreground exists not at all, for Juan Fernández is all steep hill and mountain.

  The scenery is grand; gloomy and wild-looking enough on the dull stormy day on which we arrived, clouds driving past and enveloping the highest ridge of the mountain, a dark-coloured sea fretting against the steep cliffs and shore, and clouds of sea-birds swaying in great ‘flocks, to and fro, over the water; but cheerful and beautiful on the bright sunny morning which followed – so beautiful that I thought ‘this beats Tahiti’. Our anchorage is in Cumberland Bay: shallow in form, but disagreeably deep in depth close up to the shore, from which rises a semicircle of high land, forming bold headlands on right and left, and sweeping brokenly up thence to the highest ridge – a square-shaped, craggy, precipitous mass of rock, with trees clinging to its sides to near the summit. The spurs of these hills are covered with coarse grass or moss, and in the ravines are woods of myrtle and small tree-shrubs. The soil beneath these trees is singularly loose, and where they grow, as they do, on exceedingly steep slopes, it is dangerous to trust to them for help, as the roots easily give way, and down you go, carrying tree after tree with you in your descent.