In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The present islanders are comparative newcomers. The longest established family is the Charpentiers—the first of whom arrived in 1889. Two years later, when the commercial langosta fishery began, the total population of the island was only fifteen persons. Today the population has barely reached six hundred—virtually all of them living in San Juan Bautista, as Alexander Selkirk Island, formerly Más a Fuera, has no permanent inhabitants at all—and the population has been hovering at that level for half a century.

  The notice board outside the harbor master’s house confirms the predictable claustrophobia of the place. I count fifty-two individuals on a civil list announcing boat registrations. Again and again the same family names appear—Recabarren, Celedon, Gonzalez, Rivadenaria, Green, Charpentier. Some are interrelated. There is an Aldo Recabarren Green and a Teodoro Rivadeneira Recabarren. The owners of the names whom I meet are uniformly short, stocky, and cheerful. Two langosta boats return to the anchorage and their crews come ashore and clump past me in their sea boots. One of them cheerfully holds up a spasmodically flipping crayfish in triumph. He has every reason for his smile. The legal retention size for a langosta is four-and-a-half inches along the tail, and even when sold on the island such a modest catch fetches sixteen dollars. Purchasers are found in the kitchens of a half dozen tourist chalets whose names repeat the familiar refrain—the Hosteria Villa Green, Hosteria Martinez Green, Cabaña Charpentier, and by way of variety the Aldea Daniel Defoe (“Now Closed”. . .). In such company the Cabaña Dafne and Rita seem positively exotic.

  The record of human settlement on Juan Fernandez Island, as Isla Robinson Crusoe is still habitually called, is like a faulty newsreel winding through a worn projector. Brief, jerky sequences of activity abruptly end in intervals of black. Each scene begins with men arriving in an empty space, busily rushing here and there, then stopping as if in freeze-frame. Suddenly the screen goes dark. After some moments the film briskly starts again, the same setting is immediately recognizable, but it is once again empty until the screen is abruptly filled with more activity of arrival, different people this time, more animation, and again brought to an end by yet another break, followed by nothing but darkness.

  The first stuttering attempt to make something of Juan Fernandez was seventeen years after “the Witch” discovered the islands in 1584. Captain Sebastian Garcia applied for, and was given, a grant of five hundred cuadras (blocks or squares) of land for development on what was to become Isla Robinson Crusoe. Garcia had been running a shipping service for the kingdom of Chile, and probably imagined that a profitable way station could be developed on the route that Don Juan Fernandez had pioneered. Garcia put a few settlers and some goats on the island. Within five years all the settlers had given up in disgust and returned to the mainland, leaving the goats behind. Three years later a similar attempt to settle sixty indigenous South Americans as colonists also failed, watched by the goats, which were now feral. For the next three hundred years the goats were witnesses to an extraordinary succession of visitors, few of whom stayed for long.

  Juan Fernandez always seemed so attractive to these new arrivals. Twenty-nine-year-old Jakob Le Maire was disappointed “for not being able to stay longer” at what he called “so pleasing an isle.” He was the first non-Spaniard to record a visit here and had arrived with the same ambition as Columbus—to find a new route to the wealth of the China and Japan. His father, Isaac, a wealthy Dutch merchant, had given him command of an expedition to explore for a more southerly course than the usual entry into the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan. Guided by the veteran pilot Willem Cornelius Schouten, the two-hundred-ton Eendracht succeeded in doubling the southern tip of the continent, steering past a steep rocky headland. Here, according to the official account, the sailors threw their caps in the air and shouted “We name it Cape Hoorn after our beloved village of Hoorn.” Arriving off the future Robinson Crusoe Island in March 1616, Schouten did not like the look of the anchorage and wisely preferred to send small boats to see what they could find by way of provisions. His landing party came across the inevitable goats, the usual crayfish, some half-wild cows, and traces of human visitors. The latter had been left by Spanish sailors on the by-now conventional Juan Fernandez sailing track who had been stopping off to replenish with fresh water, cut firewood, catch fish, and kill seals and sea lions for oil. Le Maire’s men refilled their casks with good clean water from the island’s springs and made a splendid catch of fish, sailing onward very enthusiastic about the island’s potential.

  Le Maire’s endorsement meant that the next Dutch fleet to round the Horn headed straight for the island to rest and recuperate. Once again they were wary of the anchorage, and laboriously, cautiously, felt their way in, as “it was necessary to come within half musket shot of the shore.” But it was worth the effort. They found pleasant woodlands, easy watering, and the fish so eager that they were jostling for the bait before the hooks had sunk six inches below the surface. In fact, six Dutchmen—three soldiers and three gunners—asked to be left on the island when that fleet sailed onward, because they felt too ill to continue with the voyage. They were the first deliberate maroons—nearly 80 years before Selkirk expressed the same wish. What happened to the six Dutchmen is not known. They may have been picked up by the Spanish. More likely, they died on their refuge, though their skeletons were never found.

  It was no surprise that Juan Fernandez was a haven beckoning any seafarer who succeeded in entering the Pacific in those early days. Whether sailing through the Strait of Magellan or around the Horn, the entry to the Pacific was a hellish ordeal. It involved weeks of handling the ship in rain or sleet and snow, heavy seas, bad visibility, adverse gales and biting cold. Sailors claimed that the stress of one trip to the Pacific was the equivalent of two round trips to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Le Maire’s men pioneering the Horn route met “such rain, hailstorms and changeable winds that course had to be altered repeatedly and at every opportunity. In spite of it being midsummer, the cold was appalling and frequent southwesterly gales forced us to sail under reduced canvas.” Huge albatrosses landed in the rigging—the largest birds the sailors had ever seen—and when the starving men tried to kill them for food, the birds reacted viciously. It was claimed that sailors fell from the rigging, their skulls shattered by the great beaks. Captains bound for the South Sea via the Horn or the strait sometimes chose not to tell their crews where they were going for fear they would not sign on for the voyage. To hide the deceit the ship owners did not load warm clothing aboard. So when the vessel did reach southern latitudes the wretched sailors were even less prepared for the freezing conditions than they could have been. Vessels calling at the coast of West Africa to take on fresh provisions before the long slog across the South Atlantic often loaded up with disease as well. By the time they reached the tip of South America the crews were decimated by illness. Some captains waited at the entrance to the Straits, hoping to pick a weather window. Unfortunately their delay often stretched into weeks, sometimes months, and the crews were reduced to living off penguins and raw shellfish. During the passage itself iron discipline was needed to stiffen the resolve of ships’ crews. In 1599, the vice admiral of a Dutch squadron became perhaps the most senior maroon in history when he was accused of faint-heartedness and was sentenced to be set ashore and abandoned in a region where the natives—the Patagonians, or “Big Feet”—were rumored to be eleven feet tall, red-haired, and fond of eating human flesh. The reports were exaggerated, but the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego did ambush landing parties and, not content with picking off stragglers, would dig up the bodies of men buried by their shipmates and shoot them full of arrows. The Dutch vice admiral was not heard from again.

  The harsh facts of maritime geography were still the same when Woodes Rogers and Captain Courtney rounded Cape Horn, aware that they had scurvy onboard. The prevention and treatment of scurvy was known to many captains—Le Maire’s expedition had taken on 25,000 lemons in S
ierra Leone, and just 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day is enough to fend off the sickness—but scurvy was still commonplace during voyages of longer than three to four months. William Hutchinson, a writer on marine architecture, himself contracted scurvy in 1738–39 on a voyage to the East Indies and described how it felt. The symptoms began to appear after four months at sea when his shipmates “took to their hammocks below and became black in their armpits and hams, their limbs being stiff and swelled, with red specks and soon died.” Hutchinson determined to fight off the effects. “I therefore kept exercising in my duty and went aloft as long as possible, until forbidden by the officers who found it troublesome to get me down with safety as I frequently lost the use of my hands and feet. . . . I then endeavored to be useful below and steered the ship till I could not climb by the notches of the fore hatchway, upon deck, which I told the Captain, who then ordered the carpenter to make a ladder that answered for the purpose for the sick, who were able to get upon deck for the benefit of exercise and pure air, as that below being tainted by so many sick. I thus struggled with the disease so that my armpits and hams grew black but did not swell, and I pined away to a weak and helpless condition, with all my teeth loose, and my upper and lower gums swelled and clotted together like jelly, and they bled to that degree that I was obliged to lie with my mouth hanging over the side of my hammock to let the blood run out, and to keep it from clotting so as to choke me.”

  The scurvy victims aboard the Duke and Duchess knew that the island of Juan Fernandez held out a lifeline. It was common knowledge that several species of native plants on the island were edible, and that visiting mariners had left behind small gardens planted with greenstuffs specifically to serve as antiscorbutics. This random gardening was not necessarily altruistic. The men who planted the vegetables expected to return and eat them. By the time the Duke and Duchess appeared on the scene, the island had served for nearly half a century as a forward base for buccaneers.

  The buccaneers first irrupted from the Caribbean into the Pacific by walking through the jungles across the Isthmus of Panama, the narrow waist of the Americas. When they reached the Pacific beach, they relied on hiring or stealing canoes from the Indians and using them to board and capture Spanish coastal vessels, which they then converted into sea raiders. Their prizes were small vessels, often in poor repair and in need of frequent maintenance, and they were inadequate to carry food and water for large groups of men. The buccaneers had to find places where they could mend these small vessels out of reach of the Spanish forces and, if possible, lay up caches of food and materiel. The Galápagos islands in the north and Juan Fernandez in the south were both suitable as they were so far away from the mainland; Juan Fernandez was the more popular of the two because it had the better water, and the strong currents around the Galápagos made the approach there uncertain. Buccaneers came there to scrape and patch worm-infested hulls, replace worn rigging, divide up their spoils, and argue over their past mistakes or future prospects.

  A particularly notorious gang of these cutthroats, under Captain Edward Davis, came annually to the island between 1684 and 1687, and when their ship finally headed for home, they left behind another company of proto-Crusoes. Nine of the buccaneers—five white sailors and four negro boys—had lost their share of the plunder through gambling, and decided that rather than return home empty-handed they would remain on the island, hoping to be picked up by the next buccaneer ship and resume their plundering. They were allocated a small boat and some cooking equipment, axes, corn seed, and enough basic provisions to set up camp. For nearly three years they got along very well. They planted and harvested the corn, caught and tamed wild goats, and cultivated and enlarged the gardens of turnips and vegetables planted by earlier visitors. Their little colony was only disturbed by the arrival of a Spanish squadron checking the island for pirates. One of the buccaneers, named Cranston, gave himself up to the Spaniards, but the rest kept up a guerrilla warfare, hiding in the bushes, ducking down into underground hideouts and evading the Spaniards until they withdrew. Their stubbornness was rewarded when in late 1690 a privateer ship, the Welfare, called in to the island and the captain asked them to join the crew. Coyly the residents refused to join unless they were given shares in the privateering expedition. Otherwise they would prefer to remain on the island, or so they claimed. When the Welfare’s captain rejected their demands, the eight came aboard rather than continue in their exile. Smugly one of them boasted that he would reform the privateer crew in much the same way that his “hermetical life” on the island had improved the morals of him and his colleagues. But, wrote one of the Welfare’s officers, “He found himself much mistaken, for instead of the good he proposed to do, he again learned to drink and swear.” It seems that, like Alexander Selkirk, who also lost his air of lonely introspection after months in London, maroons soon reverted to their former ways once they had left their solitude.

  Selkirk’s ship, the Cinque Ports, was an ocean-going galley, a hybrid vessel designed to be both rowed and sailed. In theory a galley was ideal for the purpose of privateering in the South Sea—she could make the passage from Europe under sail and then cruise the South American coast searching for her prey. When the wind dropped, her crew could rig the long oars called sweeps and row her into river mouths or pursue prizes whose sails were hanging slack. In practice, very little rowing seems to have been done. Perhaps the crews were unwilling or too weak to pull the heavy sweeps. During calms they found it easier to chase their prey using small boats which they had towed along behind the galley or kept stowed on deck. In her “letter of marque and reprisal,” the Cinque Ports is described as being 130 tons, with twenty guns and a crew of ninety. But William Funnell, the sailing master aboard the accompanying St. George as was Selkirk on the galley, states that the galley was just ninety tons, with sixteen guns and sixty-three men. In either case, the Cinque Ports was small and overcrowded. However, she was a new ship and, according to Selkirk himself, was “in very good Condition as to Body Mast and Sayles.” His only complaint was that she “wanted Sheathing,” this being the layer of planks and sometimes lead plates nailed to the outside of the hull and intended to shield it from the gnawing attack of shipworm as well as to discourage the growth of barnacles and weed. This “want of sheathing” would be a contributory factor to the galley’s eventually having to limp to Juan Fernandez to find and repair leaks, and to the loss of her sailing master.

  The Cinque Ports and the St. George completed their fitting out in the southern Irish port of Kinsale in the summer of 1703, and on 11 September set sail for the South Sea. Two ships with no commercial cargo and carrying at least two hundred men and thirty-two guns was clearly not on a peaceful merchant venture. In fact the plan was to intercept and rob that perennial target, the Manila Galleon. The piratical nature of the expedition was underscored by the fact that its “Purser and Agent,” the chief keeper of accounts, was an ex-buccaneer who was serving a jail sentence when the expedition was being organized. The expedition had to delay its departure until he was released. He shipped out aboard the St. George at the insistence of the expedition’s overall commander, William Dampier, a former colleague in piracy who is a principal, if not pivotal, figure in the creation of Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe. It is a map from his book of travels, New Voyage Round the World, that shows the nonexistent islands off the mouth of the Orinoco, one of which Defoe seems to have selected to be “Crusoe’s island.”

  William Dampier’s portrait, painted by the artist Thomas Murray in 1697 or 1698, is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London and shows how their commanding officer must have looked to the crews of the St. George and Cinque Ports: long-nosed, with a pallid complexion, high forehead, and dark eyes, he gazes sardonically at the artist. The puffiness below his eyes gives the impression of a man suffering from a hangover, and his lower lip slightly protrudes, leaving him with a vaguely petulant and dissatisfied expression. At the time of his new expedition Dampier was the best-known nav
igator in the English-speaking world, and he had promised “Vast Profits and Advantages” to sponsors if they invested in the new project to launch a raid into the Pacific drawing on his own considerable experience as a buccaneer. Now fifty-one years old, he had made several voyages to the Caribbean, twice circumnavigated the globe, and served in every sea-going capacity, from foremast hand on a merchant ship to captain of a Royal Navy exploring vessel. Yet only the previous year Dampier had come home from a Royal Navy voyage of discovery to face a court-martial. The court heard how the expedition had scarcely left home waters when Dampier had a blazing row with his lieutenant, George Fisher, beat him with a cane, put him in irons, and dumped him in Brazil to be sent home as a prisoner. After hearing the evidence the judges court found Dampier “guilty of very hard and cruel usage towards Lieutenant Fisher,” fined him all his pay for the expedition, and pronounced that “Captain Dampier is not a fit person to be employed as commander of any of his majesty’s ships.”

  The strictures of a Navy court-martial carried no weight with the sponsors of the new expedition, or perhaps they thought that a hot-tempered ex-buccaneer given to thrashing his shipmates was the perfect leader for an enterprise manned by former jailbirds and adventurers. Their commander’s irascible behavior on the first stage of the voyage of the St. George and the Cinque Ports reflected his reputation. Again Dampier had a heated row with his senior lieutenant, and again the quarrel ended with the subordinate’s being ordered off the flagship, this time in the Cape Verde Islands, where the unfortunate officer was abruptly set ashore at midnight with his sea chests and his servant, and the ship sailed next morning without him. His replacement lasted only as far as the coast of Brazil. A violent quarrel with Dampier ended when the new first lieutenant stormed ashore, accompanied by eight disgruntled sailors from the St. George. A change of officers aboard the accompanying Cinque Ports was to prove just as disruptive. Her original captain, Charles Pickering, died during the Brazilian stopover and was replaced by the twenty-one year old first officer, Thomas Stradling. He was a “gentleman mariner” who kept a monkey as a shipboard pet. This was the man whom Selkirk, with his working-class origins and fractious nature, would soon come to detest, and he was not alone. By the time the Cinque Ports dropped anchor at Juan Fernandez, the entire crew of fortytwo men was at loggerheads with Stradling and walked off the galley, leaving only the captain aboard with his monkey.