The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe

by Rick Wilson

  In any case, this was surely ‘Gun No 1’ and after much affable humming and hawing, Mr Baker volunteered more information about its possible location and promised to send me a copy of his Sporting Gun article. This is it.

  DESERT ISLAND FLINTLOCK?

  Could this gun really have once belonged to Robinson Crusoe? David Baker endeavours to solve the puzzle.

  I never cease to be amazed at the multitude of facets of ‘the antique gun’. There are twists and turns that prove over and over again that truth is stranger than fiction.

  So it was a while ago that one evening the phone rang and a friend of a great many years standing simply said: ‘Would you like to see Robinson Crusoe’s gun?’

  Daniel Defoe’s classic of Robinson Crusoe is, of course, fiction, but it is based on the true story of a certain Alexander Selkirk who hailed from Lower Largo, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, and who was marooned for four years on the island of Juan Fernandez in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean in the early 18th century. Incidentally, there is a statue of Selkirk in Lower Largo.

  What my friend wanted to know was if the old gun that he had acquired along with this tale could possibly be genuine.

  He had no great illusions from what he knew of its provenance, which was that his late uncle had bought it for 50 shillings at Swaffham market many years before.

  The whole affair, therefore, hinged on the question as to whether the gun could have dated from the island adventure time or not ...

  Such a challenge was not to be missed and so I took myself and my family one summer’s afternoon to see this curio.

  What I had half-expected was some sort of percussion gun with a lock off a P. 53 Enfield rifle which would permit me to give a definite ‘No’ for an answer. In the event, it was a far more subtle question than that.

  Firstly, it had been restocked by an amateur hand in some indeterminate piece of wood to a fanciful design. So all the clues and indications of age based on style of stock were lost.

  The only half-clue that could be gleaned from the stock was the fact that it was carried right to the muzzle – the style of the 18th century and later. So we can argue that probably the original was of this form as well. As if to compound the mystery, the metal work was all rusted to a degree that would obliterate any proof marks or engraved inscriptions – another potential set of clues removed.

  The plot thickened and in place of a simple answer, I was deep in ‘Don’t Know’ country.

  The problem was that in the relevant time the true flintlock was known, so Master Selkirk could have had one with him.

  The strange wood of the stock, even had it been possible to identify, would be no help – it could have started out as part of a ship or even driftwood if it did not grow on Juan Fernandez.

  As is the way of such things, there are several other Robinson Crusoe guns – but what help is that? Most shooters acquire a battery, if only to have a spare in case of a breakdown. So in truth, I cannot give a definite yes or nay ...

  Elated now, I contacted the owner, whose details David Baker had given me. Did the name still have the gun? Well, no, and how had I found him anyway? Pure detective work, I said, drawing up my mackintosh collar around my face. Who had it then? ‘My sister,’ was the reply. Might I have her name and number? To my delight and astonishment, he gave me the information.

  And so I made a call to a Mrs Florence Osbourn, of East Dereham, Norfolk. She sounded very nice and very surprised. Yes, of course she had the gun; and her description of it also seemed to fit that of the ‘Sothebys’ model. Might I come and see it? She hesitated and said she would call me back in a few days.

  In the meantime, Mr Baker’s article reached my well-bitten fingers. To my horror, the pictures showed it was NOT the gun I thought but a totally different one that, at first sight, looked less than convincing with rather clumsy knife-gouged lettering across its equally clumsy butt. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I felt it could be ... I mean, Selkirk wasn’t a professional wood-carver and why should a faker make such an amateur job of a phoney? In any case, we were now clearly talking about ‘Gun No 3’. Eventually Mrs Osbourn telephoned and agreed to let me see it.

  Charming, white-haired and recently widowed, she lived in an elegant modern house on the outskirts of East Dereham and served lovely spongey biscuits for tea. After we had chatted for a while over a cuppa, she disappeared and returned with a long, brown-paper parcel which she unwrapped on the carpet.

  There, in all its long-and-rusting glory, was ‘The Selkirk Gun’. Or was it? Mrs Osbourn was convinced that it was, as her husband – who discovered it gathering dust in a Newmarket antique shop 33 years before – felt pretty certain about it. A concrete manufacturer with an eye for antique wood, he paid only ‘a couple of pounds’ for it but valued it highly himself; and Mrs Osbourn had, since his death, wondered how best to end its story for him ‘before I go too’.

  ‘It seems very odd,’ she said, ‘that you should just turn up like that and tell me about the family and the museum wanting so much to have it. I have a feeling that this is what my husband would have wanted for it, but ... ’

  A cautious lady, Mrs Osbourn did not want to release the gun immediately when I asked if I might (at least) have the age and type of wood used in the butt established. She was naturally worried about its future safety and wellbeing. And up in Lower Largo, the Jardines fully understood. They had no wish to wrest the gun away; it had to be gladly given or sold. Indeed, this is what Mrs Jardine wrote to me from Largo on February 6, 1985:

  Dear Rick,

  It is great news that you think you may have tracked down the Selkirk Gun at last!

  If it turns out to be ‘the gun’, will you ask the owner of it if we, the Selkirk descendants, can have the chance to buy it from her? She would be very gracious to present the gun to the Alexander Selkirk Museum in Largo – I can’t think it would be of any interest to anyone but the family and the people of Largo. We would probably not be able to compete with an auction room sale.

  If you go down to England again to visit the owner, please ring me (reverse charges) and let me know from England.

  Meantime, my best wishes. Ivy

  After my visit, a good telephone relationship was set up between Mrs Osbourn and Mrs Jardine and optimism abounded. On returning to Edinburgh, I showed pictures of the gun to Dr Caldwell of National Museums Scotland and Stephen Wood of the Scottish United Services Museum at Edinburgh Castle. Neither was quite convinced that here was a genuine Selkirk relic. They had reservations about the apparent age of the lock. ‘I am not convinced it has a lot going for it as a genuine Selkirk relic,’ Dr Caldwell wrote to me. But as it was thereafter off to play its role in the Largo museum, I didn’t have the opportunity to follow up his suggestion that its authenticity (or not) be checked out in the flesh.

  With Mrs Osbourn and Mrs Jardine having come to an agreement that it would go north after all, for a price that represented, to its seller at least, quite a sacrifice, there wasn’t much interest in its provenance being written off. Confronted by the experts’ reserve, Mrs Jardine’s first thought was that, when the family museum did acquire the gun ‘visitors will just have to share the doubts about it.’ But she suddenly adjusted her attitude with characteristic determination: ‘No, on second thoughts,’ she said, ‘when it comes back here to Lower Largo it IS the Selkirk gun and that’s that.’

  So far, so good. I closed my file and – this still being a time when detectives were obliged to smoke – stubbed out my Lucky Strike with a satisfied smirk. It had been a hard slog and, as write this today, I try not to think of how much easier it might have been in this age of the Internet ...

  Anyway, as so rashly promised, a ‘Selkirk gun’ came to the little Largo museum as one of the few substantial items that would not have to be returned under the conditions of the larger museums’ short-term loans with all their attendant security concerns; which was partly why of course, the mini-museum concept was so sh
ort-lived.

  The gun was presented there as Alexander’s Selkirk’s from his island sojourn – a contention supported to some degree by its butt of ‘strange tropical hardwood’ – but to be honest, in the absence of in-the-flesh examinations, few knowledgeable people have ever been totally persuaded about its authenticity.

  So where is the gun now? The National Museum had it for a while but returned it to the family in Largo. Those who might know now seem shy of talking about it. In his excellent book In Search of Robinson Crusoe, the Japanese author Daisuke Takahashi (see chapter 4) – who kindly called my gun saga ‘fascinating’ – records visiting, in the late 1990s, the Firearms Division of Christie’s saleroom in London, where he was shown a familiar-sounding large antique gun with the name ‘SELKIRK’ carved in large letters on one side of the butt and the year ‘1705’ on the other. ‘This is the musket given to us by Selkirk’s descendants in Scotland,’ said the man in charge. ‘They wanted it put up for auction, but after examining it we concluded it couldn’t possibly be genuine.’

  In his opinion, it was entirely of 19th-century English origin, was no longer suitable for auction, and would be returned in due course to Scotland. There is some talk that it now resides in Germany and the family shrugs with indifference about its whereabouts, ‘as it wasn’t authenticated anyway.’

  Hmmm. Could I, despite the old musket being missing again, finally settle the matter for this book? I still had a photograph of it with which to follow the Edinburgh castle museum’s suggestion that I consult – in turn – experts at the Royal Armouries establishment in Leeds.

  I duly did so and ... well, this is where I cannot hide my disappointment. The museum’s firearms curator Peter Smithurst sounded extremely authoritative when, after studying the picture, he declared: I’m afraid the lock mechanism and the flintlock cock are very typical of the late 18th century.’ Late, not early then? ‘No, I think we are talking a date of around 1790. And the general overall form of the gun is also from that period. It’s a model that was made in England for export to the Americas.’

  So there was absolutely no possibility that this gun with Selkirk’s name emblazoned all over its butt could be a genuine relic? ‘Only if it belonged to someone else called Alexander Selkirk,’ said Mr Smithurst with a chuckle. I have to say I didn’t find his comment quite so funny.

  If anyone reading this knows where the gun is now, I would be moderately interested to hear of it if only to put a full point at the end of this part of the story. As I wrote earlier, the Selkirk story today is all about tantalising loose ends ... and many cul de sacs.

  WHEN GUN NO I WAS BOUGHT:

  New York Times, March 23, 1911

  CRUSOE MAY HAVE OWNED THIS GUN

  English Tourist Here Tells of Buying an Old Flint-Lock for Twenty Shillings

  The man who thinks he owns what is probably the most read-about weapon in the world is in town. Thousands of boys who have read of Robinson Crusoe’s gun will doubtless be interested in him. As everybody knows, the real Robinson Crusoe was Alexander Selkirk, and the gun he is supposed to have carried has that name carved on one side of its stock as if done with a large knife. On the other side of the stock is similarly carved ‘Anne – R. 1701.’

  The ‘R’ stands for Queen, but Queen Anne did not come to the throne until 1702, so it has been thought since the discovery of the gun in a section of the London slums that it may not be genuine. The British Museum made an investigation and finally decided that the gun was probably that of the famous Scotch buccaneer. The owner of the gun is positive it is the one ‘Crusoe’ had with him on the island.

  He is Randolph Berens, of 14 Prince’s Gardens, South Kensington, London, who is here on his way to Florida for the winter.

  In his youth, Berens, like other boys in England, longed for Crusoe’s treasure chest, drinking cup, gun and desert island. He went to the British Museum and there saw the drinking cup made of a coconut and the seaman’s chest with which Selkirk was put ashore from Captain Stradling’s treasure-hunting vessel; but the gun, he was told by the museum authorities, had been lost.

  Many years later the gun came into Berens’ hands, and yesterday he read in the Sunday Times about the uncrowned monarchs of little island kingdoms who have furnished inspiration to novelists ever since Defoe created Robinson Crusoe, Mr Berens sent this telegram from the Plaza to The Times:

  Have just seen your interesting article on page 1a of this mornings Times on Robinson Crusoe’s Island of Juan Fernandez. I have for several years had his gun in my London house, having acquired it by a lucky fluke. If you think it sufficiently interesting to care to send a press man this afternoon, I would like to tell him all about it.

  Mr Berens was found wrapped in a dressing gown in his room.

  ‘Ah, that fluke: yes it was indeed lucky for me,’ he began. ‘If the master of the famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford knew about it I suppose he’d be astonished. But the fluke occurred and I got the gun, and his poor little porter gave it to me for twenty shillings and a bit of a tip for himself.

  ‘It all happened this way: I was at Oxford one day and, having an odd half-hour, I took in the museum. The master was away digging in Rome for vases and the little porter showed a friend and myself about the rooms.

  ‘As we looked them over, I complained that the curio stores in the town had nothing in them of interest. I asked him if there wasn’t something in the town I could take away as I was a bit of a collector on my own account.

  ‘ “Nothing,” the boy answered. “Nothing, that is, unless you might be interested in an old gun a man brought in here yesterday. It isn’t old enough for us.”

  ‘We went on looking about the rooms and at last got to the top floor. “Look here, my man,” I said to the porter, “how about that old gun you were speaking of?”

  ‘ “Here it is,” he said, getting a dusty old flintlock out of a corner, and also some knives and things that were with it. I looked the gun over, and on brushing the dust off the stock, found some letters. They were ASEL in script capital. Then I brushed some more and the letters turned out to read “A. SELKIRK”.

  ‘I asked the boy if he had examined the gun stock for writing, and he said yes and that he had made out the word “Asel”. He said the man who brought it in wanted twelve shillings and he would take that plus as much more as I would pay. I made it twenty and I took it.

  ‘I cleaned up the gun after a bit and found this verse on the back of the flintlock:

  With three drams powther

  Three ounces haille

  Ram me well and pryme me:

  To kill I will not faille

  ‘Then under the name “A. Selkirk” I found in smaller script, “Largo N.B.” I knew at once that “N.B.” meant “North Britain”, which was a usual term for Scotland in the eighteenth century, and that Largo was the place where Selkirk was born.

  ‘On cleaning up the other side of the stock the “Anne – R. 1701” became very clear. I doubted that 1701, but on looking it up, I found that Queen Anne ascended to the throne in March, 1702, and that in the old-style calendar March was included in the previous year, so that according to old style, the date was right.

  ‘Forward of the Queen Anne inscription was a seal carved into the wood, sitting on top of a rock. Under it were the words “Seal Kraig”, Kraig being a Scotch word for cliff, and I suppose Selkirk meant by the emblem to indicate the origin of his family name. Seals often came then into the water at Largo.

  ‘I took my find, now fairly well convinced that it was genuine, to the British Museum for expert examination. The officials looked it over minutely, and I saw one of them looking with a magnifying glass at the triggers and the wood right around them. It was finally decided that the gun was probably genuine because the wear on the triggers could not have been produced fraudulently.

  ‘Remembering the boys who went trooping in to the British Museum to see Crusoe’s cocoanut drinking cup and his sea chest, I loaned the gun to the museum so they
could see that also. But I was restless about it and wondered if there might be anybody in Selkirk’s home town who could tell about it. I took it up there, went to the church where Selkirk’s mother recognised him when he came home again after his long absence, and met many descendants of the family’s neighbours. None of them knew about it, or ever remembered having heard of it.

  ‘I then went back to the Ashmolean Museum and got from the porter the address of the man who took the gun to him. I found him by the directions given in a poor section of the city and asked him how he came by the weapon. He told me that at one time he had engaged in the antiques trade, buying up antiques advertised in the newspaper. One day he saw a gun advertised by someone in the Clapham district [of London] and he bought it for ten shillings, although one pound was asked in the advertisement.

  ‘In two years he made nothing in his antique store so he took the remnants of it, including the gun, down to the museum where I was fortunate enough to arrive before the master came back from his digging in Rome, and after his porter had decided to reject it.

  ‘The British Museum authorities helped me hunt up the records of Selkirk’s life and career, hoping we could find a clue to his disposition of the gun. We found that “haille” as used in the rhyme beside the flint meant “shot” and was quite a common name for it in Scotland, although not used in England. On his return from the lonely island Selkirk bought a little schooner, with which he traded out of Bristol down to Clapham. That brought him into the district whence his gun finally reappeared.’

  WHEN GUN NO I WAS SOLD.

  The Times, May 22, 1924

  CRUSOE’S GUN