In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The dictionary defines a novel as “a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, in which characters and actions of real life are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity.” The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was the first widely read book in the English language to meet that specification precisely and still be remembered by the public at large. At the work’s inception, Defoe knew what would sell well—another travelogue spiced up with a hint of piracy.

  He built on Selkirk’s experiences. Crusoe, like Selkirk, comes ashore with a knife, a tobacco pipe and a little tobacco. On his first night he is so scared of wild animals that he climbs a tree for refuge, in the manner of Selkirk hiding from the Spanish landing party. Hoping for rescue, he too makes trips to the top of a hill to look for passing ships and, later, lights a bonfire to attract their attention. Both Selkirk and Crusoe then pick a site for their habitation that overlooks the sea. In that dwelling both men keep navigational books and instruments. When their rescues are delayed, both Crusoe and Selkirk grow “dejected, languid and melancholy.” To console themselves, both men spend a great deal of time reading the Bible and communing with God. For physical survival the two solitary islanders hunt goats—one with a musket, the other by hand—and tame a private flock. Both men finish up wearing goatskins and domesticating cats.

  But Defoe gives each detail a new gloss. The cats are a good example. Recalling Funnell’s comment that “there are in this island a great many wild cats of the finest colour I ever saw,” the first land animal that Crusoe encounters is a wild cat. Crusoe has been salvaging items from the wreck of his ship and returns to the beach worrying that wild animals may have begun to eat the provisions that he has already placed on land. “But when I came back, I found no sign of any visitor, only there sat a Creature like a wild Cat upon one of the chests, which when I came towards it, ran away a little Distance, and then stood still; she sat very compos’d, and unconcerned and look’d full in my face as if she had a mind to be acquainted with me.” Crusoe aims his gun at the animal, “but as she did not understand it, she was perfectly unconcern’d at it, nor did she offer to stir away, upon which I tossed her a bit of Biskit. . . . She went to it, smell’d of it, and ate it, and look’d (as if pleas’d) for more, but I thanked her, and could spare no more, so she march’d off.”

  Selkirk’s and Funnell’s wild cats have become Crusoe’s cat, much more recognizable and behaving like domestic cats the world over. But then, several chapters later, the scene darkens as Selkirk’s tame and helpful cats meet quite a different fate at Defoe’s hands. Selkirk’s living quarters, according to Captain Edward Cooke of the Duchess, were cozily draped with dozens of cats and “kitlings” lounging about and contentedly fending off the rats and mice. In Crusoe’s domain the cats perform the identical service but then become too numerous for their own good. Crusoe worries that when he dies, his corpse will be eaten by his former pets. To reduce their number, he drowns kittens and shoots excess cats as vermin.

  Defoe also tinkers with the landscape. He adopts the feature of Juan Fernandez that puzzled visiting sailors: one half of the island is green and fertile, while the other is dry and barren, and yet for some strange reason it is the barren half of the island that has the most goats. This is also true of Crusoe’s island. It is as if Defoe had seen the map in Cooke’s story of rescuing Selkirk. Cooke’s Voyage to the South Sea has a chart of Juan Fernandez, accurately showing its bays and anchorages. The eastern half is decorated with a bosky forest of neat little trees and there is even a neat little sketch of a “cabbage tree.” The other half has a note that reads, “On this end there is but little Wood but abundance of goats.” To emphasize the point, the otherwise empty and treeless half of the island is embellished with two drawings of billy goats.

  Defoe then adds a cave for Crusoe to live in. When Crusoe arrives, he finds only an overhang of rock under a cliff against which he erects a lean-to, almost as temporary as Selkirk’s huts of grass and branches. But with time and energy, Crusoe gradually burrows back into the overhang and digs out a home for himself. Laboriously he excavates a sizable cavern, furnishes it with homemade table and chairs, builds a stout camouflaged stockade in front of it in case he is attacked, opens up a side entrance as a sally port, and makes himself an impregnable and comfortable refuge.

  The cave is the centerpiece of Crusoe’s world, the focus of his strenuous efforts to make the best of his circumstances, to learn how to fend for himself. His Strange Surprizing Adventures becomes a manual of selfhelp as Crusoe deploys the survival skills that will fascinate future generations of readers—how to bake pots, how to make clothes, how to till the soil, how to catch and train goats. Everything centers on the cave, Crusoe’s snug home.

  Selkirk never dug a cave nor lived in one. There is no cave in his story when told by Woodes Rogers, or by Cooke, or by Steele the essayist. The sailors who rescued Selkirk never mention a cave. Nor did any of the maroons and castaways refer to using a cave as their home. The home-in-a-cave belongs strictly to the “fictitious narrative” of Defoe’s novel. Yet so convincing is Defoe’s creation that Crusoe fiction has subsumed Selkirk fact. Today travelers take a twenty-minute boat trip from San Juan Bautista to visit “Crusoe’s Cave.” The assumption is that if Alexander Selkirk was the real Robinson Crusoe, then surely Crusoe’s world exists on Juan Fernandez.

  “Crusoe’s Cave” as created on the island today is a perfect match for the theatrical imagination. The rusty barrel of an old cannon lies in the shingle in front of it and the cave looks as much the part as the islander who dressed in goatskins, took parrot and dog, and paddled a raft out to visit tourist ships. The cave is about 250 feet from the edge of the sea and its mouth faces northeast across the anchorage that is now called Puerto Ingles and was named Sharps Bay on Basil Ringrose’s map. This is an old pirate anchorage. The cave is the very first feature to catch the attention—a deep cavity at the foot of the hillside where it slopes down to the beach. Inside, the cave is high enough to stand in comfortably, and is five paces deep and eight paces across. Its walls are scratched and pitted with tool marks. But a moment’s familiarity with Defoe’s description should raise suspicions that this cannot possibly be Crusoe’s cave—even the cave of fiction. Robinson Crusoe’s home was set high up, well back from the sea, and had an apron of open ground in front of it where Crusoe planted his crops. He did not want to be on the very threshold where any visitor first stepped ashore. But for 150 years visitors have wanted the cave at Puerto Ingles to be Crusoe’s cave. In 1849 an American writer, John Ross Browne, came across a group of Californians there. They were hopeful forty-niners on their way round the Horn to reach the gold fields, and their ship called at Juan Fernandez. Browne found them hacking away the walls with pick axes to take away souvenirs, convinced that Robinson Crusoe and his cave were genuine. Half a century later the first man to circumnavigate the globe alone, Joshua Slocum, brought his yawl, Spray, for a similar visit. He sailed away delighted that he had “paid a visit to the home and the very cave of Robinson Crusoe.”

  Selkirk’s story—truth, not fiction—has a similar myth-making power. Every tourist fit enough to make the exhausting climb sooner or later takes the footpath to “Selkirk’s Lookout,” high on the crest of the Cordon Central. Almost two thousand feet above the sea, it commands an incomparable view: on one side down to Cumberland Bay, on the other across to the southwest face of the island. According to firmly held belief, Selkirk climbed up here every day to scan the horizon for a passing ship. A plaque marks the spot, a bronze tablet left in 1869 by the captain and crew of a visiting British warship, HMS Topaze. The Victorian sailors failed to consider that “Selkirk’s Lookout” must be in the wrong place. It does not command a view to the east, the direction from which the Duke and Duchess saw his bonfire as they were approaching. If Selkirk had a lookout—as he probably did—it would have been a place where he could watch for any ship standing in to Cumberland Bay, Puerto Ingles, or Puerto F
rances. He needed a vantage point where he could ascertain whether the newcomer was friend or foe, a place from which he could flee and hide, or hurry down to the beach and greet—as he eventually did—Second Captain Dover and the oarsmen in the Duke’s yawl. His stay on Juan Fernandez dragged on far longer than he anticipated, but it was relatively uneventful. The key to his survival was patience and resignation. What happened next on his island was far more colorful.

  The day The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures . . . first went on sale to the London public, two more English privateer ships were already six weeks into an Atlantic voyage, bound for Cape Horn. Each captain had in his great cabin a copy of Woodes Rogers’s Cruising Voyage Round the World, gifts from the “Owners,” the merchants who had invested their money in this new enterprise, and a reminder that they expected their captains to repeat Woodes Rogers’s lucrative foray into the South Sea. The investors had also recommended that the island where Woodes Rogers found Alexander Selkirk would be a suitable place to rest and recuperate before the two ships came home with their anticipated booty. Captain John Clipperton of the thirty-gun Success already knew the place well. An ex-buccaneer, he had been twice to the Pacific and had served there as mate to William Dampier in 1704.

  Captain George Shelvocke of the Speedwell was, by contrast, starting out on his first voyage to the Pacific. A self-seeking rogue, he had served for thirty undistinguished years in the Royal Navy, reaching the rank of second lieutenant aboard a flagship. Now that he was retired from the Navy, his interest was money—how to make it for himself, and as quickly as possible. His path to the command of a privateer ship had been typically suspect. His former clerk in the Navy, Edward Hughes, had given him the job. Some years earlier Shelvocke had engineered the appointment of Hughes as purser aboard a naval vessel. It was a plum posting much sought after by unscrupulous individuals who made substantial sums by false accounting and peculation. By 1718, when Shelvocke had long since left the Navy and was out of work, Hughes had become a rich and successful merchant. With a group of likeminded investors he was putting together the finances for a two-ship raid on the South Seas. When Shelvocke approached him, Hughes repaid the earlier favor by promising him command of the expedition, though at the last moment the overall command was given to Clipperton, along with the larger ship, the Success. Shelvocke had to make do with the smaller, twenty-two-gun Speedwell.

  Shelvocke proceeded to staff his ship with a motley collection of officers that included his nephew as ship’s surgeon, a couple of exprivateers, a Frenchman as second mate, and several landsmen who made no pretense at being mariners. There was also his son George whose official “quality,” or rank, was listed as “Nothing.” An observer commented acidly that George “knew nothing of sea affairs or indeed of any thing else that was commendable or manly. His employment in London was to dangle after the women, and gossip at the tea table; and aboard us his whole business was to thrust himself into all society, over hear every thing that was said, then go and tell his father. So that he was more fit for boarding school than a ship of war.”

  Before the ship sailed from Plymouth Shelvocke posted upon the cabin door the Articles of Agreement, the crew contract for voyage, for all to see. Hughes and his fellow investors, the “Gentlemen Owners,” would receive half the profits of the venture. James Hendry, “Purser and Agent,” would look after their interest. The remainder of the profit was to be divided into 650 shares, or “dividends,” to be distributed in ever smaller amounts according to rank. Shelvocke would receive sixty shares, his first officer thirty shares, and the captain of marines twenty shares. By the time the lesser office holders such as the ensign of marines, the two surgeon’s mates, and the cooper had received their allocations, there would be little left for the men who actually worked the ship—the able and ordinary seamen. It was a division of the booty which was to skew the outcome of the voyage.

  Shelvocke was brisk in opening his account as a privateer. While the Speedwell was still in the Atlantic, he accosted a Portuguese merchant ship off the coast of Brazil. The vessel was not a lawful target for an English privateer as Portugal was at peace with England. So Shelvocke ordered the flag of imperial Austria to be hoisted. The flag, with its double-headed black eagle on a yellow background, was easily mistaken for a black skeleton on a yellow background—a pirate flag. After a musket shot across the bows, the Portuguese ship was suitably bamboozled and allowed Shelvocke’s men to come aboard. They extorted several valuable “gifts,” including a cash sum of three hundred moidores from the Portuguese captain and lengths of silk embroidered with gold and silver flowers. When their victim had gone on its way, Shelvocke directed that trimmings of this silk should be sewed to the pockets and cuffs of his officers’ uniforms—the gold flowers to set off the red silk suits which the Owners had given the sea officers; the silver flowers to go with the green costumes of the marines. Shelvocke’s son George obtained a cinnamon colored silk outfit, and Shelvocke himself sported a black silk suit with large silver loops across his chest. He must have cut a comical figure as he was, by his own admission, “very corpulent and crippled with gout.” The deckhands used the off-cuts to fashion themselves “waistcoats, caps and breeches” in silk.

  This early taste of booty led the Speedwell’s popinjay crew to calculate how much each man’s share should be. When they looked again at their contract, they became suspicious. They had a feeling that the document was not the same as the one that had been nailed to the cabin door in Plymouth. It seemed to have been tampered with. It was much longer and “written by several hands and intertwined in a great many places.” Led by one of the mates, Matthew Stewart, they demanded a new contract giving them a greater share of any plunder. They also insisted on an immediate share-out of booty as soon as a prize was taken. They had heard about the endless lawsuits that had delayed the payment of dividends to the men who came back to England with the Woodes Rogers expedition, and “it is known how the people aboard the Duke and Duchess were treated.” If the crew thought they were controlling the matter, they were mistaken. Matthew Stewart was almost certainly Shelvocke’s agent. He had started the voyage as Shelvocke’s steward, been promoted to officer rank, and was now encouraging the crew to change the Articles of Agreement. One significant new clause gave Shelvocke a 5 percent increase in his share of the booty.

  Simon Hatley, the first mate, knew all about the legal squabbles that had denied Woodes Rogers’s crew a quick payout of their plunder. Hatley had been aboard the Duchess when Woodes Rogers picked up Alexander Selkirk from Juan Fernandez, and must have seen the Scotsman dressed in his goatskins. Now, as the Speedwell struggled her way around the Horn and was driven as far south as 61 degrees 30 minutes south latitude by constant bad weather, Hatley was to have another brush with literary history. For several days the ocean had been empty. The sailors had seen only the gray Southern Ocean waves and the low scudding clouds. There had been none of the usual fish life and birds normally encountered in those waters except for one “disconsolate black albatross,” which, Shelvocke wrote, “accompanied us for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself.” In his frustration at the slow progress of the ship, Hatley eventually interpreted the presence of the great black bird as an ill omen. He decided that if he could get rid of it, better weather would follow. After several attempts, Hatley succeeded in downing the bird with a well-aimed shot—but to little effect. There were another six weeks of heavy weather and headwinds before the Speedwell sighted the coast of Chile.

  Hatley’s deed lived on. Like other privateers before him Shelvocke published an account of his voyage when he came home. Fifty years later the book was read by William Wordsworth. He mentioned Hatley’s killing of the albatross to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was working on a poem. Wordsworth suggested the theme that slaying an albatross brought bad luck, and Coleridge immortalized the idea in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” with his verse:

  God save thee, Ancient Mariner!


  From the fiends, that plague thee thus

  Why look’st thou so?—“With my cross-bow

  I shot the ALBATROSS.”

  Wordsworth and Coleridge had little knowledge of sea custom. First Mate Hatley used a musket or a shotgun, not a crossbow, to bring down the bird, and albatross were sometimes killed for food by hungry sailors. They set special fishing lines, the hooks loaded with floating bait and trailed in the wake of the ship to catch the giant seabirds. But the ill luck which soon enveloped Hatley’s ship at Juan Fernandez seemed to justify what became a lingering and gloomy superstition.

  Shelvocke’s enemies were to claim that their captain deliberately dawdled so that the Speedwell did not get to the rendezvous with the Success at Juan Fernandez on time. The Success arrived at Cumberland Bay on 7 September 1719, long before her escort. It was ten years and seven months since the now-celebrated moment when the Duke’s yawl had found Selkirk standing on the beach. This time the boulder-strewn waterfront was deserted.