Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  Half a mile from the ship there was splendid, but laborious, cod-fishing; laborious on account of sharks playing with the bait, and treating your stout fishing-line as though ‘twere made of single gut; also on account of the forty-fathom depth these cod-fish lived in. From beneath the ship’s keel we hauled up cray-fish and conger-eels in lobster-pots by dozens; and round about her sides flashed shoals of fish –cavalli – only requiring a hook with a piece of worsted tied roughly on, and swished over the surface, to be caught one after another, giving splendid play on a rod.

  And on shore, too, there was something to be seen and done. There was Selkirk’s ‘look-out’ to clamber up the hill-side to – the spot where tradition says he watched day after day for a passing sail, and from whence he could look down on both sides of his island home, over the wooded slopes, down to the cliff-fringed shore, on to the deserted ocean’s expanse.

  Down the beds of the small ravines run burns, overgrown by dock-leaves of enormous size, and the banks are clothed with a rich vegetation of dark-leaved myrtle, bignonia, and winter-bark, tree-shrubs, with tall grass, ferns, and flowering plants. And as you lie there humming-birds come darting and thrumming within reach of your stick, flitting from flower to flower which dot blue and white ‘the foliage of bignonias and myrtles. And on the steep grassy slopes above the sea-cliffs herds of wild goats are seen quietly browsing, quietly, that is, till they scent you, when they are off – as wild as chamois.

  These humming-birds – ruby-throated, and one other kind – are peculiar to the island, and in great numbers. A wild kid was shot, and we thought that we had never tasted better meat.14

  When the ship came to anchor in Anson’s Cumberland Bay the weather was windy and dull, thick scudding clouds obscured El Yunque. The next morning was calm and sunny. Once they reached the shore the visitors found the island but lightly held. Campbell reported a Chilean entrepreneur was raising cattle to sell to passing shipping, and harvesting the seals for pelts. The business was failing, and the owner seemed intent on annihilating the seal population, by now restricted to Santa Clara.15 Despite his initial scepticism, Campbell had fallen under the spell of the island. He bought the romantic ‘lookout’ story, enjoyed some sport with the rod, noted the flora, the hummingbirds, and like Moseley waxed lyrical about the flavour of a Juan Fernández goat. Campbell even explained Mr Goodenough’s fall, his access to scientific expertise and sharp naval eye provided a fine introduction to the island.

  Moseley recorded the trees had been clear felled to around 700 feet above sea level, but he pushed on into the fields of Gunnera chilensis, the immense leaves of which spread above his head like natural marquees. In this paradise of biodiversity Moseley was another convert to Commodore Powell’s ‘Lookout’:

  Selkirk’s monument is placed on the crest of a short, sharp ridge in a gap in the mountains at a height of about 1,800 feet above the sea. From this a steep descent leads down on either side to the shore. Here Selkirk sat and watched the sea on both sides of the island in long-deferred hope of sighting a sail.

  Here we rested for some time, enjoying the view. Juan Fernández is only ten miles in length, and 20 square miles in area, and from this elevated point nearly the whole extent of the island can be overlooked. Yet this tiny spot of land contains birds, land shells, trees and ferns which occur nowhere else in the vast expanse of the universe.

  Having cut down and eaten a cabbage palm, and sampled the goats, Moseley was especially pleased with the crayfish Palinurus frontalis (now known as the Juan Fernández rock lobster, Jasus frontalis), as good to eat as it was to study. ‘The soil is good wheat ground, the stones about the spot are of lava, and the hills at the back contain basalt.’16 The navigators took terrestrial magnetic readings every day with Fox dip circles, and recorded the weather as very humid, with temperatures of 57–60° Fahrenheit. The ship’s officers also took sights to fix the location:

  Latitude 33° 37' 36'' south

  Longitude 78° 53' 0'' west.

  Juan Fernández gave the scientists and the officers an opportunity to ramble ashore, eat some fresh food, and enjoy the historical links of this little fragment of the English imagination, defiantly located in a great ocean named by a Portuguese Captain in Spanish service, whose rich fisheries were sustained by a major ocean current from the far south, named for Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian demi-god of the observational sciences they pursued. Humboldt’s travels in the Americas had inspired Darwin, and revolutionised scientific methodology. The distractions of the past, and the dining table, help to explain the bucolic flavour of the resulting texts.

  Challenger’s anchor was raised at precisely 6.30 pm on 15 November, a mere 48 hours after it had been dropped, and the ship headed for Valparaiso. Here Campbell took his leave, following promotion to lieutenant. The scientists had taken on board a kid, ‘a direct descendant of Alexander Selkirk’s goats’; in a sign of changing times it became part of the shipboard family, rather than Christmas dinner.17

  The Challenger expedition transformed oceanography, earth sciences and marine biology, a pioneering achievement honoured by an ill-fated American space shuttle, one of three to be named for Royal Navy survey vessels. It also influenced British imperial policy. Lord George Campbell’s father was in no doubt about the value of science to the Imperial project, or of Pacific Islands to the British economy. In 1888 Challenger veteran Sir John Murray recommended annexing Christmas Island, to exploit the rich deposits of phosphates. Argyll agreed, and Prime Minister Gladstone acted.18

  NOTES

  1 Blum, The View from the Masthead, p. 167. Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 181–3; ‘Naval Intelligence’, The Times (9 January 1849).

  2 ‘Burning of the Ship Townsend’, The Times (26 August 1854), p. 5, col. E. In 1855 a damaged British ship put into Cumberland Bay: ‘Ship News’, The Times (2 January 1855), p. 10, col. B.

  3 ‘Shipping Intelligence: The Ship Horsburgh, Laden with Guanao’, The Times (29 October 1860), p. 9, col. B.

  4 G. Bennett, Charlie B: A Biography of Admiral Lord Beresford, London, 1968, p. 32.

  5 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 47; ‘Alexander Selkirk, the Original of Robinson Crusoe’, The Times (21 December 1868), p. 6. Selkirk actually died in 1721.

  6 ‘The Earthquake in Peru’, The Times (23 October 1868), p. 10, col. D.

  7 W. Kennedy, Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor!, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1900, p. 173; ‘Naval and Military Intelligence’, The Times (16 April 1873), p. 3, col. E; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 206–7.

  8 M. Deacon, Scientists and the Sea: A Study of Marine Science, Academic Press, London, 1971, pp. 306–66; H. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery of the Deep Sea, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005, p. 28; E. Linklater, The Voyage of the Challenger, John Murray, London, 1972, pp. 243–9.

  9 J.Y. Buchanan, H.N. Moseley, J. Murray & T.H. Tizard, The Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of HMS Challenger during the Years 1873–1876. 50 volumes were published between 1885 and 1895. The ‘Narrative’ formed volume one, and even that came in two parts.

  10 Linklater, The Voyage of the Challenger, p. 243; The Times (31 March 1877), p. 7, col. A.

  11 Lord G. Campbell, Log Letters from the Challenger, Macmillan, London, 1877, p. 392.

  12 H.N. Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 466–71.

  13 Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, p. 466. Friday was a Miskito Indian based on Will.

  14 Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, p. 467.

  15 Campbell, Log Letters from the Challenger, pp. 392–4.

  16 Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, pp. 469–70; Report of HMS Challenger, part II, p. 51.

  17 Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, p. 517.

  18 G. Douglas, Autobiography and Memoirs, London, 1906, vol. II, p. 513.

  25

  Settlers

&nbs
p; It was now too late for the British to occupy Juan Fernández. Modern settlement began in 1877 when former Austrian army officer Alfred de Rodt proposed a fresh settlement to the Chilean authorities. He offered to take sixty people and a thousand head of cattle to the island, to produce charcoal, export native palms and sell food to passing ships. Basking in the suitably pointless title Inspector of Colonisation de Rodt recruited settlers from Spain, France, Germany, Mexico and Switzerland, and their names still dominate the island: Gonzalez, Charpentier, Camacho, Recabarren, Lopez and Schiller. Despite the harsh economic realities of island life, and limited opportunities for trade, the population slowly increased. However de Rodt, bankrupted by his project, began systematic forestry to keep his little colony alive. By 1900 the accessible parts of the island had been clear felled. When the timber supply failed crayfish exports took over, a German cannery operated in the 1890s, replaced by a French service running live langosta to Valparaiso. Tourism began in the 1890s. When de Rodt died in 1905 there were 122 souls in residence, and they considered themselves the masters of the island, exploiting the natural resources untroubled by modern concerns for biodiversity, unique species, or the stability of the thin soil clinging precariously to the mountainside.1

  By the 1890s Dampier, Selkirk, Anson and Malaspina were but dim memories, treasured by dusty historians and the odd romantic traveller. The brief moment in time when the interaction of politics, geography, ocean currents and disease had turned Juan Fernández into a little English heaven amid the epic vastness of the South Pacific were done. Few ships visited, and the inhabitants were annihilating the forests to make charcoal. Ecological devastation and new patterns of oceanic voyaging had reduced the place to irrelevance; isolation and otherness took over. The only vessels that passed the island were large sailing ships carrying bulk cargoes of grain, guano and coal around the globe. These ships were larger, faster and more seaworthy, while improved food preservation and anti-scorbutics extended their port to port range. They had no need to stop for food or water.2 Those that did sought refuge rather than a run ashore.

  One such was the full-rigged sailing ship Rappahannock, a large ‘Down Easter’ that arrived in Cumberland Bay in November 1891. Built at Bath (Maine) a little more than a year earlier, this mighty wooden ship carried an enormous spread of canvas, including three sets of sky sails to catch every hint of breeze. The crew christened their strikingly beautiful vessel ‘the big bird’. Vessels of this size and power operated in truly global trading patterns, carrying bulky cargo over vast distances, distances and oceans that remained uneconomic for contemporary steam ships. Her maiden voyage began at Philadelphia, loading 120,000 cases of kerosene for Japan. The next leg of the voyage carried 4,400 tons of Japanese coal to San Francisco. Wheat from Port Costa was hauled round to Liverpool, where another coal cargo for San Francisco was loaded on 27 July 1891. The voyage south was slow, taking an excruciating 44 days to round Cape Horn. Shortly after rounding the Horn, Captain Wiley Rogers Dickerson discovered the coal in the forward hold had caught fire. He set course for the nearest land, Juan Fernández. Two days later, on 11 November, Dickerson brought the ship into Cumberland Bay and moored her head and stern over a sand bank, with the bow pointing inshore, trying to keep the wind blowing from astern, to limit the spread of the fire. Unable to put out the blaze Dickerson tried to scuttle the ship, but the conflagration deep in the hold was already out of control. He ordered the crew to abandon ship with whatever they could save of the ship’s stores. Around midnight the forward hold exploded. Dickerson observed the deck seams open, revealing a raging inferno at the heart of the tightly packed cargo. The ‘big bird’ sank in six fathoms at the bow and four at the stern. By the following evening the mighty ship was little more than smouldering wreck. Dickerson, his wife, two daughters and twenty-seven crewmen were marooned. De Rodt’s loggers did not have a fishing boat, let alone a ship.

  To make matters worse, the Chilean Civil War meant the normal supply ship had not arrived, obliging the loggers and their unexpected guests to exist on the old Selkirkian diet of goats and fish. Then there was the language problem. The Americans had no Spanish; fortunately, one of the Portuguese loggers knew enough English to liaise. The next task was to get off the island. Dickerson observed:

  We established a lookout on Crusoe’s mountain and kept two men on duty there at all times. Several times the men on watch saw sails and signals were made, to no effect. Once the men tried to row off to a passing ship, but she got away without noticing us.3

  Finally a small Chilean barque took the mate back to Valparaiso, carrying a letter to the American Consul. At this time relations between Chile and the United States were strained, but on 29 November the Chilean naval vessel Huemal (deer) arrived and took the shipwrecked party back to the mainland. They returned to America on the warship USS Baltimore, which had been stationed at Valparaiso during the Chilean Civil War.4

  The spontaneous combustion of coal on long voyages was not uncommon. All four of the ships that loaded at the same coal jetty as the Rappahannock were lost in the same way, which suggests the coal had been loaded wet. Today Rappahannock’s mighty iron capstan sits in the surf, between the tides at San Juan Bautista, just across the bay from the jetty, mute testimony to a long forgotten disaster. A century and more in the sea, constantly grinding against the smooth steely rocks of the foreshore have left it worn and weather-beaten, almost indistinguishable from its surroundings. Another crew was reported to be at Juan Fernández that year, from the British ship Carpathian. HMS Melpomene was detached to check. Although the brief visit to the two islands did not turn up any shipwrecked sailors her captain produced a useful report on Más Afuera and Juan Fernández.5

  Herman Melville died in 1891. Five years later fellow American Joshua Slocum began a single-handed circumnavigation, a faint echo of earlier glory, reducing the great unknown to a pond that could be crossed by a single man in a decked boat. Where Porter, Dana and Melville went to sea on voyages of war, whaling and trade, Slocum’s voyage had been designed from the outset as a literary adventure. He set off with a book deal in his reefer jacket. Sailing Alone Around the World recorded a 46,000-mile voyage that took three years to complete. With Slocum’s story the Pacific moved from the age of endeavour to the age of leisure.

  For all his hard-won seafaring expertise, Slocum was at heart a romantic. Sighting the island in the far distance on 26 April 1895, he wrote that ‘a thousand emotions thrilled me’. After a long day’s sail, hovering off the rocky coast overnight he got a tow into Cumberland Bay the next morning. Here he met the ‘king’ of the island, long-time resident Manuel Carroza, an Azorean seaman who had come ashore at this isolated spot after many years serving on New Bedford whalers. He also heard about the absent ‘governor’ Alfred de Rodt. Slocum fried up some donuts and served them with coffee, taking payment in ‘ancient and curious coins … some from the wreck of a galleon sunk in the bay no one knows when’. In all probability they came from Shelvocke’s Speedwell.6

  Like any deep-sea mariner, Slocum delighted in a run ashore. His description of the island provides lyrical flourishes similar to those of his scorbutic precursors. It was ‘a lovely spot’, he wrote: ‘The hills are well wooded, the valleys fertile, and pouring down through many ravines are steams of pure water.’ There were goats, and perhaps a wild dog or two, but no serpents marred this Pacific Eden. (Descriptions of rambling in the undergrowth with beautiful children take on a sinister twist in the light of his 1906 trial for raping a minor.) The graveyard on the point already contained a fair few burials, of seamen and settlers alike. He heard the sad story of the Rappahannock, which he turned to literary effect, noting how the islanders recovered her timbers and utilised them in the construction of houses, which naturally enough presented a ship-like appearance. He made the by now obligatory pilgrimage to the Lookout, and recorded the text of Commodore Powell’s plaque. His oft-quoted admonition, ‘Blessed Island of Juan Fernández! Why Alexander Selkirk ever left you w
as more than I could make out’, needs to be read in context; Slocum, unlike Selkirk, was enjoying the society of the islanders. Having had his fill of the solitary Selkirk, Slocum took a boat trip to Puerto Inglese (which now rejoiced in the name of Robinson Crusoe Bay), to the hero’s cave, which he found ‘dry and inhabitable’, and well located to avoid the wind. Slocum sailed on 5 May, after a ten-day ‘visit to the home and to the very cave of Robinson Crusoe’, and wrote the island back into world literature.

  Yet nothing on the island is ever quite what it seems. A week later Slocum discovered his ‘friend’ Manuel Carroza had bilked him out of his potatoes, exchanging a sack full of rotting tubers for his sound vegetables.7 To his credit Slocum left his initial, favourable, impressions of the Azorean vegetable bandit in the text.

  Slocum’s romantic sentiments came easily to an old man sailing round the world in a wooden boat: they would become increasingly fashionable as twentieth-century humanity worked ever harder to seek out the last refuges of imagination and eccentricity, isolated places where it was still possible for lost souls to hide. British attention had long been focused elsewhere. American and French naval challenges collapsed in the 1850s, leaving the South Pacific under British imperial dominion. British ships just kept on coming back. In late February 1902 the flagship of the Pacific Station, HMS Warspite added her name to an unwritten visitor’s book. Rear Admiral Bickford reported:

  On the 19th of February I left Valparaiso in the Warspite, and arrived off Juan Fernández Island on the morning of the 21st February. Part of the Quarterly Target Practice was carried out that forenoon, and the ship anchored in Cumberland Bay in the afternoon. General leave was given by watches, which appeared to be much appreciate (judging by the numbers who availed themselves of the opportunity) and fresh beef of very good quality was obtained for the crew.8