In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Captain Clipperton followed the usual routine: the ship was unloaded and cleaned, the crew set up tents ashore for scurvy victims—there were sixteen, of whom three failed to respond to the fresh diet and died—and shore parties went off to hunt goats and seals to replenish the ship’s stores. Selkirk had complained about the lack of salt to preserve or flavor his food when he was on the island. Now the men from the Success found a cache of salt. It had been left subsequent to Selkirk’s visit by visiting French ships. Clipperton’s men used their convenient discovery to salt down goat’s flesh for the forthcoming cruise along the Peruvian coast.

  After a month, Clipperton could see no point in delaying further and decided to get on with the attack on the Spaniards. Before he left the island, he sent his first officer with a shore party to bury a message in a bottle. The note was for Shelvocke, to tell him the new plan, and to arrange a further rendezvous. The shore party erected a wooden cross to mark the place where they had buried the bottle. As insurance, they also cut a mark into a prominent tree near the landing place to let Shelvocke know that the Success had been at the island and left. Clipperton was too canny to leave his full name or the name of his ship in case the Spaniards found the mark and learned that a known privateer had returned to the area. So his men carved only his first name, and then the name of the ship’s doctor, a man known to Shelvocke. The mark read

  Captain John –—

  W. Magee

  1719

  Clipperton was worried that the bottle might be dug up mischievously by two would-be Selkirks. They were part of a group of four sailors from his crew who had earlier taken it into their heads to stay behind on the island and had run off into the interior and hidden. Their plan was to find the huts Selkirk had left behind and live in them once their ship had left. Their flight was a spur-of-the-moment decision because they took no food or equipment with them, not even a flint and steel for making fire. Selkirk’s captain had been glad to be rid of the Scotsman, but Clipperton was not so charitable toward deserters. He gave orders that the absentees were to be brought back to the ship and he sent out a search party to find them. Two were quickly caught. A party of goat hunters from the Success stumbled across the four runaways, and gave chase. The pursuit up and down the steep hills was so exhausting—the hunters said it was twice as difficult to chase men as goats in such terrain—that the hunters had to resort to firing shots at the fugitives to try to make them stop and give themselves up. Two of the runaways halted their flight, but their colleagues got away. The pair who were brought back to the ship confessed that their escapade had its drawbacks. For the first five days they had been extremely hungry and had to live off raw leaves from the cabbage trees. Life became marginally more comfortable when they managed to obtain fire from the embers of a campfire carelessly left behind by one of the hunting parties from the Success. Clipperton decided to waste no more time and effort looking for the other two stragglers, and at eight o’clock on the morning of 7 October gave orders to weigh anchor.

  Thus, two more maroons joined the list of refugees on Juan Fernandez, though their tenure was brief. Clipperton captured a Spanish coastal vessel six weeks into his cruise, and his victims neatly turned the tables on their captors, who had been left behind on the prize. Waiting until the Success had sailed over the horizon in search of other prey, the Spaniards rose up and overpowered the English prize crew and retook their ship. Then they deliberately ran her ashore on the mainland coast so that their former jailers fell into the hands of the Spanish authorities. Under interrogation, the Englishmen revealed the existence of the buried bottle and the fact that there were two deserters living on the island. A Spanish patrol visited Juan Fernandez early in December, dug up the bottle, and its message, and captured the two runaways. Their stay as would-be Selkirks had lasted just two months.

  The two men probably gambled on the fact that the Speedwell would soon arrive to pick them up. As it turned out it was a full three months after the Success had left the island that Shelvocke finally appeared in the offing and on 11 January 1720 brought his ship in leisurely fashion toward the island. As a ship commander, Shelvocke had proved to be as rude and abusive to his men as Dampier had been, and with the same result: members of the crew had deserted or were sacked at each Atlantic port of call so that the original crew of one hundred was down to about seventy men by that time they reached the Pacific. Furthermore, Shelvocke had stoked a seething row on board with one of his chief officers, a quarrel whose hostility equaled any dispute between Selkirk and his captain, Stradling. The chief malcontent this time was William Betagh, another former Navy purser who now held the rank of captain of the green-and-silver-clad marines. Betagh, along with Hatley, had been ringleader of the squabble over the revised crew contract, and Betagh and Shelvocke had been feuding ever since. Matters were made worse by the special instruction from the owners that Betagh was to be allowed to take meals in the captain’s great cabin, and this threw the two antagonists together even more closely. Shelvocke found Betagh “insolent” and at dinner one day hurled his drinking mug at Betagh’s head. Later he had Betagh placed under arrest and confined to the steerage. There, according to Betagh’s version of the story, he had to lie for twelve to fourteen days, stretched out on the arms chest, with not enough head room to sit up, and watched over by a sentry with a drawn sword. Planning his revenge, Betagh started gathering material ready to denounce Shelvocke to the sponsors at the end of the expedition, much as Funnell had collected evidence to censure Dampier.

  The Speedwell’s larder was so bare as she approached Juan Fernandez that for four days Shelvocke kept his vessel “standing off and on” so that his small boats could go fishing. As usual, Juan Fernandez’s rich fishing grounds provided a generous catch and the Speedwell had salted five casks of fish before Shelvocke finally got round to sending a search party into Cumberland Bay to go ashore and look more closely for any traces of the Success. Very soon they came across the mark on the tree and realized that Clipperton had already left. Shelvocke was secretly pleased. He had a long-standing grudge against his fellow captain for accepting command of the larger, more prestigious Success, which Edward Hughes had originally promised to Shelvocke. Now he could blame his colleague for disobeying his instructions to wait for the Speedwell. Also, not knowing about the buried message in a bottle, he accused Clipperton of sailing off on his own account without leaving any information. More to the point, Shelvocke was now free to go raiding the mainland and Clipperton and his crew would have no share in the proceeds.

  Shelvocke set off to attack the Spanish as soon as his ship had taken on fresh water. The cruise had only modest success. Its high point was the sack of the town of Payta, close to the modern boundary between Peru and Ecuador. The nadir was the capture of a coaster whose cargo turned out only to be guano, or “cormorant dung.” With the capture of this guano carrier Shelvocke showed his true colors, according to Betagh, who was still gathering evidence against his captain. Aboard the Speedwell was a young marine officer, Ensign Gilbert Hamilton. He was a Scot and he spoke with a broad regional accent, and he was keeping a daily journal. His pithy summary of the incident, which he read aloud to his messmates, was “This geud day we a taen a sma vashel lodded wi turds.” Naturally this raised hoots of laughter in the crew’s quarters, and Shelvocke sent his son George from the captain’s cabin to investigate the reason for the mirth. When son George reported the reason, Shelvocke himself stormed into the crew’s accommodation and ordered Hamilton to stop keeping a journal, vowing there would be “no pen and ink work aboard his ship.”

  Soon afterward Shelvocke parted company with his foe, Betagh, who set off with Hatley in one of the prizes and never returned. Never one to lose the chance of blackening another’s reputation, Shelvocke claimed that Betagh had in fact deserted because he was an Irish Catholic and secretly in league with the Spanish. Betagh counterclaimed that Shelvocke deliberately sent him and his crew away so that he would not have to share any of the boo
ty with them. What Shelvocke did not realize was that although he was rid of Betagh, his gadfly was not about to let the feud drop.

  So it was an already disgruntled crew that reappeared off Juan Fernandez under Shelvocke’s command on 6 May 1720. There were still about seventy men aboard the Speedwell. Their numbers had been depleted by the departure of Hatley and Betagh and the various prize crews, but then increased by the acquisition of several blacks and Indians. These unfortunates were regarded as human loot, “liberated” from the Spanish colonists. A few might become free members of the shipboard community, but usually they were treated as little better than slaves and regarded with suspicion in case they betrayed the privateers to their former masters.

  When the familiar outline of the Anvil came in sight, every man aboard the Speedwell knew that they had little to show for their efforts: their loot was meager, they were low on fresh water, the mainland coast was in uproar against them, and there had been a couple of narrow escapes from patrolling Spanish warships. The risk of being trapped in Cumberland Bay by a Spanish warship led Shelvocke to decide that he would not even anchor there. For ten days he again “stood off and on,” sending boats to fill water barrels and bring them out to the ship. But it was such slow work that it was calculated that the men aboard were consuming more water than was being brought aboard. This, wrote Shelvocke, “made me think of anchoring in the road [the anchorage] for a few hours.” He intended only to stay long enough to fill twenty casks. As it turned out the stay was over four and a half months.

  The ship’s cooper prepared the twenty casks while the Speedwell cautiously worked her way into the treacherous-looking harbor at Cumberland Bay. The poor holding ground and the rapid dropoff of the sea floor meant that the ship was only six hundred yards from the shore before she could anchor effectively. Even so close to land the depth was forty fathoms, or 240 feet. Everything now proceeded according to routine. The twenty empty casks were lashed together to form a raft. A long rope was rigged between the ship and the shore along which the raft was hauled to the beach. There the casks were unlashed, rolled to the stream, filled and bunged, and rolled back to the water’s edge, where they were floated off to the ship. The sailors had done similar chores many times before, and by the morning of May 21 the Speedwell was getting ready to depart. The only men ashore were a party of woodcutters gathering firewood for the ship’s cook.

  Once again, Shelvocke dawdled. He does not say why. Only that “we were ready to go to sea, but had not the least opportunity in 4 days.” The most likely explanation is that he was waiting for a break in the weather. It was now the southern winter and sailing conditions were at their worst. As for other sailing ships of her time, it was prudent for the Speedwell to wait for suitable conditions—an offshore breeze and little swell—to work her way out of an anchorage, particularly when she was moored so close inshore that a false move could send her onto the rocks. She needed expert handling in the crucial moments after the anchor lost its grip on the seabed, and before the vessel had adequate way to be able to be steered effectively. If she had been a galley like the Cinque Ports she might have rowed out of the bay, then set sail. If the waves and swell had been less, her small boats could have towed her out. As it was, Shelvocke and his crew simply waited.

  On 25 May 25 the weather did change, but for the worse. A gale blew straight into the bay from the northeast, its most exposed direction. The Speedwell hung on her anchor, and continued to wait. As the waves and swell grew larger, driving into the bay, the ship rolled and pitched uncomfortably. It was overcast and rainy. But the anchor cable was new, and there was no need for alarm.

  What happened in the next few hours depends on whose account is to be believed. According to Shelvocke, “A hard gale of wind came out of the sea upon us (a thing very uncommon as has been reported) and brought a great tumbling swell, so that in a few hours our cable (which was never wet before) parted.” With her anchor cable snapped, the Speedwell, lying so close to the shore, immediately drifted toward the stony beach. Pushed by the onshore gale, the hull hit the beach within moments. It was providential, according to Shelvocke, that the ship struck where she did, on an open stretch of foreshore. If she had hit “a cable’s length farther to the Eastward or Westward of the place where we did, we must inevitably have perished.” As it was, the impact of her grounding was so severe “that as soon as she touched the rocks we were obliged to hold fast by some part or other of the ship, otherwise the violence of the shocks she had in striking, might have been sufficient to have thrown us all out of her into the sea.” With the swell pounding the hull against the shore, the vessel began to break up rapidly. “Our main mast, fore-mast, and mizzen top mast went all away together,” reported Shelvocke, and the planks began to splinter and to spring from their fastenings. The hull “bulged,” opening up and filling with seawater.

  The death of the Speedwell was remarkably quick. The water flooded her lower compartments so rapidly that very little gear could be saved from below decks. The surgeon’s chest had been stowed below and disappeared underwater and “little or nothing preserved out of that,” though—an echo of Alexander Selkirk—“we saved 2 or 3 compasses and some of our mathematical instruments and books.” The loss of all three masts over the side left enough clear space on deck for the crew hastily to assemble a life raft from spare timbers. Launching the raft over the side of their doomed and disintegrating ship, the crew rode it into the shallows and scrambled through the surf and onto the beach. “Before it was quite dark we were all ashore in a very wet uncomfortable condition . . . [with] no place . . . to recourse to for shelter from the boisterous wind and rain except the trees; nothing to cheer up our spirits after the fatigue and hazard in getting from the wreck to the rocks, and no other prospect but that, after having suffered much in this uninhabited place, we might in process of time be taken away by some ship or other.” During the evacuation just one man lost his life. Shelvocke entered his name in the list of those who never returned from the South Sea: “John Hannah—drowned when the ship was cast away on the Island of Juan Fernandez.”

  Captain of Marines Betagh was to dismiss Shelvocke’s account of this so-called “dismal accident” as a farrago of lies. What really happened, according to Betagh, who relied on hearsay from the sailors involved, was that Shelvocke deliberately wrecked his ship. Betagh’s far-fetched theory was that Shelvocke planned the whole crisis in order to annul his contract with the backers of the expedition. He piled up his ship on the rocks so that he no longer used a ship provided by the merchant-sponsors, and so would be free to go plundering on his own account, without having to put aside a share of the spoils for his backers. As Betagh interpreted the situation, Shelvocke was expecting to be picked up by another vessel or to construct a vessel of his own. He knew that being cast away on Juan Fernandez was no great ordeal. Members of Shelvocke’s crew had often heard their captain state that “it was not difficult living at Fernandez, if a man should accidentally be thrown there, since Mr. Selkirk had continued upon it four years by himself.”

  Betagh went to great trouble to support his version of events with statements from survivors of the wreck. The true scenario of the wreck, as sketched by Betagh, was that there was no gale that day, only a heavy swell. The “hard gale” was “a wind raised only in his [Shelvocke’s] brain and of his own invention.” In preparation for his disgraceful scheme, Shelvocke had secretly sent some of the ship’s stores onto the beach during the watering operation. He also made sure that nineteen members of his crew were already on land, ostensibly cutting firewood but in reality prepared to rush down to the beach and help when the “accident” happened. Before the anchor cable broke, claimed Betagh, Mr. Brooks, the first lieutenant, had noted the danger of riding to only a single anchor when so close inshore. He warned Shelvocke and “advised slinging two of their heaviest guns” overboard and using them as drags in case the anchor rope snapped. But Shelvocke “rejected all these things with a steadfast tranquillity.” Instead
, as the Speedwell pitched and rolled on the swell, he ordered that a spring hawse—an additional rope—be attached to the anchor cable and be hauled in so that the ship came broadside to the waves. This maneuver, according to Betagh, was deliberately designed to exert extra strain on the anchor cable so that it snapped. Mr. Dodd, lieutenant of marines and presumably a confidant of Betagh, who was his ex-commander, noticed “about three hours before the ship went ashore some hands at work on the quarter deck hawling in a hawser (the spring) which was made fast to the cable.” Dodd had no knowledge of ship handling and, puzzled, asked the gunner, Gilbert Henderson “what that was for.” Henderson answered him “that if he would be rightly informed, he must go and ask the captain.” Gunner Henderson’s testy reply was probably a way of telling the landsman to mind his own business, but in Betagh’s interpretation it had a more sinister tone: Shelvocke was putting into action his criminal scheme.

  “Soon as the cable parted,” Betagh continues, “Mr. Laporte his third lieutenant seeing immediate ruin, cried out ‘Set the Foresail!’ hoping thereby to do some good. And while Edmund Philips and other were actually upon the yard, Shelvocke hastily ordered them down, and taking the helm in his hand said ‘Ne’er mind it boys; stand all fast, I’ll lay her on a feather bed.’ ” It proved “a plaguey hard one,” adds Betagh sourly. Speedwell had set out from England with four anchors and four cables, and it was inconceivable, Betagh wrote, that such an experienced mariner as Shelvocke did not have a spare cable and anchor ready to hand for such an emergency. “He brags of his being thirty years an officer in the navy; what then must we say to a man of such experience who will. . . save not an anchor and cable for a time of need? There is nothing can excuse it. . . either way it’s very bad. His judgement and his honesty being both in great danger.”