In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  With Robinson Crusoe’s unnamed island safely located in the Caribbean, Daniel Defoe could rapidly enhance his narrative with halfremembered and tantalizing snippets of geography and local color. Defoe wrote astonishingly fast. For nine years he had produced a newspaper single-handed, writing every article in it, and publishing as often as three times a week even when he was locked up in prison. Such a literary prodigy had neither the time nor the inclination for detailed research on background material for a quick novel about a luckless castaway. It is estimated that Defoe dashed off the Strange Surprizing Adventures in less than six months. He scattered his story with gritty details from his memory as briskly as shaking sand to dry the wet ink on a page of parchment. And placing Crusoe on the Spanish Main, the Caribbean shore of Latin America, gave Defoe a special bonus: he could write about his favorite theme—pirates. Defoe was an avid fan of pirate lore. He read everything he could about them, their deeds, their customs, their trials and escapades. He wrote books and plays about pirates, both fictional and real, and for a long time scholars believed—though this theory is now largely discarded—that the mysterious “Captain Johnson” who wrote the main source of all pirate stories, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, actually was Defoe.

  In the end it is pirates who give Crusoe his chance to escape his island. So where did Defoe find the idea of an imaginary Crusoe’s island? The Duke’s ex-buccaneer pilot, William Dampier, provides a clue. He too wrote a best-selling book about his adventures. Dampier’s book has a sober map of real places in and around the Caribbean. Here are genuine islands and coastlines, instantly recognizable when compared to a modern atlas, and accurately drawn by a leading London cartographer, Herman Moll. The map of the Caribbean and Spanish Main in Dampier’s book summarizes what was publicly known about Caribbean geography when Defoe was writing The Strange Surprizing Adventures, and Dampier’s book was one of Defoe’s main sources for Caribbean geography. It locates the islands whose names turn up frequently in the pirate and adventure narratives that Defoe was also reading. Here are the locations for real maroons and castaways and the rendezvous of buccaneers—Aves, the “island of birds’ off Venezuela; Golden Island in the San Blas archipelago off Panama; the Moskito Shore of what is now Nicaragua and Honduras; and several islands named Tortuga because turtles came ashore to lay their eggs on so many Caribbean beaches that island after island was given the Spanish word for turtle. One of these Tortugas lies less than three days’ sail from the spot where Robinson Crusoe is alleged to have spent his lonely days.

  And Crusoe is not just a clone of Alexander Selkirk. Crusoe, like his island, is a composite. The “surprizing adventures” of the man in goatskin garb quickly diverge from what happened to the cranky Scots sailor. Selkirk leaves the Cinque Ports of his own free will to go to live on the island, but Robinson Crusoe is a castaway, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Selkirk had only his meager supplies from Captain Stradling and nothing more, but Robinson Crusoe spends his early days shuttling on a raft between the beach and the shipwreck so he can salvage all manner of useful goods from the wreck—muskets, kegs of powder, bags of nails and spikes, hatchets, crowbars, and even a grindstone. Crusoe encounters cannibals and enlists Friday, whereas Selkirk is never visited by native peoples. Selkirk spends fifty-two months on his island; Crusoe is stranded for a nearly impossible twenty-eight years. In the end Crusoe is much more interesting and diverse than Alexander Selkirk, and more complex. To inhabit his island of magpie geography, Defoe assembles his hero from a jumble of half-remembered tales of adventures, maroonings, and shipwrecks drawn from real life. When Defoe died twelve years after writing Crusoe’s story, his private library was sold at public auction. The auctioneer’s bill of sale cites volume after volume of travel books. Some of them could well have provided events and details that Defoe included in his novel.

  No one has been able to find any hard evidence that Defoe met Alexander Selkirk in person. If he had, Defoe would have realized at once that his hard-working, God-fearing Robinson Crusoe was a continent apart in character, as well as location, from the Scots maroon. Trawling court records, Selkirk’s biographers have discovered that Selkirk’s true character was appalling. He was a troublemaker, cheat, and bully. At home in Scotland he beat up his close relatives during family rows, and after his return with Woodes Rogers’s expedition was embroiled in a brawl with a shipwright in Bristol. A warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of assault. He treated his “wife,” Sophia Bruce, abominably. She came from Scotland to London, presumably to marry him, but he delayed their wedding, then neglected her. Two years later, after he joined the Navy, he probably committed bigamy by marrying another woman, his landlady in Plymouth. The result was that after Selkirk’s death at sea, two women showed up to claim his back pay from the Navy and what seems to have been the remnants of his booty from the South Sea—four gold rings, a silver tobacco box, “one gold head of a cane,” a pair of gold candlesticks, and a silver-hilted sword. Each woman produced a will made out in her favor, and Sophia claimed that her husband must have been drunk when he married his landlady. The ex-landlady countered with the claim that Selkirk had “solemnly declared . . . that he was then a Single and unmarried person, and was very importunate” in his courtship. She won her case. Selkirk, evidently, could create his own plausible fiction.

  Crusoe uses a raft to salvage supplies from the wreck of his vessel.

  Chapter II

  ISLA ROBINSON CRUSOE

  In 1966 the president of Chile, Eduardo Frei Montalva, signed a decree to rename the island where the Duke found Selkirk. It was to be called Isla Robinson Crusoe in future. Similarly rebranded was one of its neighbors, a slightly larger island one hundred miles farther out in the Pacific. It was dubbed Isla Alejandro Selkirk. No one seems to have found it strange that the new names commemorate a fictitious foreigner and a heretical, cantankerous sailor who came to Chile to plunder its citizens and sack or its towns and churches or hold them for ransom. Previously, the islands had been referred to—when anyone bothered to refer to them individually at all—as Más Afuera and Más a Tierra. This offhand description means nothing more than “Farther Out to Sea” and “Closer to Land.” Collectively the two islands and some small islets had long been labeled in a more conventional way—after their discoverer, the Spanish navigator Don Juan Fernandez. Sailing southward from Peru toward Chile in November 1574, Don Juan abandoned the usual coasting route, which is a hard slog against the prevailing winds and adverse north-flowing currents. He tried a wider-than-usual loop offshore into the Pacific, and succeeded in halving the usual voyage time, a feat so astonishing that he was accused of black magic. One result was that he acquired the nickname “the Witch”; the other was that he stumbled on these far outliers of land.

  The islands’ new names, it was hoped, would lure tourists. Remote as the islands are, there had been sporadic tourism between the two world wars. Excursion boats would bring tourists from Valparaiso on the mainland coast to spend a few days on Más a Tierra. Sometimes they were greeted by an enterprising islander paddling out on a home-made raft and wearing a goatskin costume and with a parrot or dog as his shipmate. He would peddle some local goods or, for a few coins, take the visitors ashore to guide them around “Crusoe’s Cave” and “Crusoe’s Lookout.” But these charades had ceased by the time the Island of Robinson Crusoe got its new tag. The publicly available access from the outside world was aboard a veteran supply ship which set out from Valparaiso about every six weeks and took three days to chug slowly across a stretch of water notorious for its fickle currents, poor visibility, and sudden gales.

  The newly christened Island of Robinson Crusoe received an airstrip as a baptismal present, and light aircraft began to ferry tourists back and forth, and airlift “lobsters” to the mainland on a one-way journey to the expensive restaurants of Santiago and Valparaiso, or even Paris. The crustacean Jasus frontalis is actually a crayfish. It lacks the heavy front c
law that is the mark of a true lobster. But the Spanish word langosta does not distinguish between lobster and crayfish, and no one on the island pays any heed to the distinction. What matters is that the scrabbling pink crustacean, which was food and “jellies” for Alexander Selkirk, is more lucrative than tourists and is the economic mainstay of the islands. They are no longer caught as easily as when the Duke’s boatmen could pluck them from the shallows with their bare hands. Now they are trapped in double-chambered square pots of maqui wood lowered into forty to two hundred feet of water on lengths of rope. Nor are the langosta as large. At the end of the nineteenth century, monstrous crayfish four feet in length were recorded. Today they are exceptional when they reach half that size. The crayfish season runs from October 10 to May 15, and urgent consignments leave the island by air. The rest of the catch is packed alive into cardboard cartons, sealed with parcel tape, and sent aboard the humdrum supply ship Navarino, which trundles across to Valparaiso. Every couple of months she arrives with as many as sixteen thousand crayfish in her hold.

  Transportes Aereos Isla Robinson Crusoe also has a trap on a rope, but to catch tourists. The airline uses the obsolete Los Cerrillos airport in the south of the country’s capital, Santiago. The modest terminal building has a glass door leading to the concrete apron, where the aircraft load up. Crawling past the door in front of me comes a battered van, then a taut blue rope, and finally, like a toy on a string, a sturdy, well-worn aluminum-silver aircraft. The driver of the van steps out of his cab, unhitches the tow, and parks the van. Then he returns on foot, pushes a trolley in through the door for his passengers’ luggage, and finally goes back outside and climbs into the cockpit. He is the pilot. Air Robinson Crusoe is a no-frills airline and I am grateful to see their only aircraft has a pair of engines.

  The flight to Robinson Crusoe Island takes three hours from Santiago, and travels straight out to sea. This is a trip with a halfway point-of-no-return. There are no alternative landing places if there is a problem. You either continue directly ahead for the island, or the plane turns round and tries to reach the coast of Chile before it is obliged to ditch in the water. It is a bleak prospect. Beneath you is a wind-flecked sea where the strong winds that baffled Don Juan Fernandez the sailor blow steadily northward, whipping up crests on the cold waters of the ocean current flowing out of the Antarctic. The ride in the little plane feels very lonely and exposed. In early November, the tourist season is only just beginning. The other passengers that day are a returning islander with a selection of groceries crammed into a rucksack, and a gray-haired and enthusiastic Chilean gentleman wearing a tweed cap. He is a retired engineer. He has traveled all over Chile but has never been to Juan Fernandez. Hardly any Chileños ever go there, he says. I note that he still calls the island by its old name and uses Juan Fernandez to mean Más a Tierra on its own, and also the entire archipelago. I also observe that the brown paper bags containing our Aerolinas Robinson Crusoe sandwiches are printed with an antique map of the island originally drawn by an English buccaneer, Bartholomew Sharpe, eighteen years before Daniel Defoe launched Robinson Crusoe on the world.

  The balmy image of Defoe’s island does not survive the first glimpse of Isla Robinson Crusoe. The island thrusts aggressively out of the Pacific, stark and jagged. It looks exactly what it is—the craggy ridge of a submarine mountain chain. The Juan Fernandez Dorsal is a ridge 250 miles long and 30 miles wide that is an active volcanic zone. Robinson Crusoe Island has had four million years to erode into its present sawtooth form. Along its length are sharp crests, slashes of deep ravines, and steeply angled slopes. Many end in tremendous black precipices that fall sheer into the sea. There is scarcely an acre of flat ground. The aptly named Anvil is a great solid black stump of mountain that dominates the western end of the island. Its flat top is soaked for most of the year in mists and cloud, and would make a fit setting for Professor Challenger’s Lost World. The Anvil is such a dismal and discouraging sight that no one scaled this highest point on the island for two centuries after its discovery, and the first people to reach its summit were a pair of convicts who were promised their freedom and fifty dollars if they succeeded in making the soggy climb (they did, in 1796). Seen from the air Robinson Crusoe Island offers not the slightest hint of the low, gentle, fertile island where the hero of Defoe’s novel wanders over pleasant hill and glen with his dog at his heels and gathers wild fruits. From the air I could see very few beaches, all but one composed of tumbled rock and shingle. Only on the western end of the island, at the farthest point from any chance of settlement, is there a single sandy beach where Crusoe could have found the imprint of Man Friday’s foot. And of course Man Friday would have had to have paddled across 400 miles of rough sea to get there.

  Our pilot has been steering his way around the coast and now overflies the little town of San Juan Bautista to let the citizens know that he has arrived, then scoots off to the west. He seems intent on suicide, aiming the aircraft at a cliff face only at the last moment lifting the little plane over the cliff edge to set it neatly down on the sloping runway of packed red volcanic soil. It is like landing on an aircraft carrier.

  We walk from where the plane is parked near a pile of fuel drums, and take a rutted zigzag track down the nearest cliff face to a semicircular bay. It is obviously a drowned volcanic crater. Here the municipal motor launch is waiting at anchor, sensibly clear of the heaving swell which surges up against a rickety jetty. The orange-painted launch comes to collect passengers when alerted by radio by the approaching pilot, and it is a two-hour boat ride along the coast to get back to San Juan Bautista. On the way the launch passes curtain after curtain of grim cliffs, and every sea mile confirms the impression that Isla Robinson Crusoe is at best a forbidding location. The cliffs are built of layer upon layer of compacted volcanic ash, a vast mille-feuille crumbling and dripping at the edges. Sometimes the tiered layers of the cliff face are as white as wood ash, more often they are alternating bands of buff or beige with occasional terra-cotta. All are peppered with dark embedded lumps of hardened lava bombs. Every so often there gleams a vertical vein of basalt running jaggedly down through the ash layers. The basalt has hardened and splintered into chunks and shards, hexagons and crosses that look like rock candy. Every sense tells you that this island is a stark and alien intrusion in the ocean. For mile after mile there is no accessible landing place. The only shore is rock-bound ledge, sheer cliff, or screes of volcanic boulders against which the swell pushes sullenly. The sea under the launch’s keel has the heavy cold feel and dense green of deep water. There are millions of potential nesting ledges along the ash cliffs, yet there are almost no sea birds. Only a few gannets glide past, or a scatter of rock doves bursts from the cliffs, dashes anxiously in a circle, and hurries back to land. Human activity is restricted to the occasional brief encounter with a crayfish boat. Its design is based on that of a motorized whale boat: about twenty-five feet long, double-ended and open-decked. It is manned by one or two fishermen who stand upright, bright yellow in their high-waisted oilskins. They wave briefly to the passing launch, then turn their attention back to the chore of locating the next orange buoy, leaning over to grab the tether line, and hauling the trap to the surface for inspection. When you look back a few minutes later, the fishermen have disappeared into the folds of the ocean swell.

  Eventually the launch passes the mouth of a green, open valley, bare except for a grove of eucalyptus trees and the meandering gully of a dried-up stream, rounds a final cliff headland, and arrives at Cumberland Bay, so named by the commanding officer of a Royal Navy expedition who arrived there in 1741, twenty-two years after Alexander Selkirk departed aboard Woodes Rogers’s ship.

  To an arriving sailor Cumberland Bay is an uneasy place. The bay is open to the north-northeast and is poorly protected from gales and heavy swells from that direction. The holding ground for anchors is treacherous. Soft mud or sand would be better than the loose rocks and stones that litter the seabed. A vessel has to
go worryingly close to the rocky beach before the water is shallow enough to anchor. A sudden change of wind, an anchor dragging, an anchor cable severed by the sharp stones, and the vessel will be cast up on the boulders within minutes. But the harbor’s real menace is invisible. Woodes Rogers called them “flaws.” They are freak wind gusts that suddenly sweep down the steep slopes of the valley and strike an anchored vessel with shocking force, tearing out the anchor, breaking spars, and shredding sails. One buccaneer map labeled the place “Windy Bay.”

  Two other anchorages on Robinson Crusoe’s island—Puerto Ingles and Puerto Frances—are even less secure, so Cumberland Bay is where Woodes Rogers and Captain Courtney brought the Duke and Duchess to refresh their crews, and it is where the oarsmen in the Duke’s yawl saw the shaggy man in goatskins beckoning them urgently from the rocky beach.

  San Juan Bautista’s unpaved main street runs parallel to that same beach. It is a two-minute stroll from the concrete pier, past the harbor master’s office with its blue and red Chilean flag on a pole and two Dobermans chained underneath the porch. Appropriately, on the day I arrived, a giant scarlet langosta on wheels lay stranded on the roadway. It was the most colorful item in the place, a carnival float made from cardboard and old oil drums and abandoned after the Discovery Day parade. A handful of the houses by the central plaza have two stories and are built of wooden boards, but most of the houses on main street are little more than boxes, their walls made of plywood. Every second cabin is both shop and dwelling and offers a near-identical small selection of tinned goods brought in on the Navarino. The newer, smarter houses occupy the steeply rising slope behind the main street. Built in chalet style, they give San Juan Bautista an alpine air. Nine out of ten houses, whether on the street or along the beach or on the upper slopes, look out over the anchorage. It is as if, like Alexander Selkirk, the inhabitants are watching for a ship to come to rescue them.