In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Whenever the weather permitted, the men went out in a small ship’s boat, which had also been salvaged from the wreck, and caught fish. The ever-industrious Popplestone forged metal hooks, which the fishermen attached to lines fashioned by twisting together lengths of ribbon, large quantities of which washed ashore from the wreck. For a time the fishing was very successful, but then we “were deprived of the benefit of that [fishery] by the roguery of some of the people who did one night (for what ends I know not) set the boat adrift and she was lost.” The loss of the little boat was a severe blow. As a replacement, some of the more ingenious sailors made themselves small coracles. They tied together slender branches into bowl-shaped wickerwork frames. Over these they stretched a membrane of sea lion skin. In these unstable basket boats they paddled out and managed to “catch the small fish near the shore, but dared not go out of the bay with them.” Only when the armorer finally finished making his small boat did the fishing improve. By then it was 9 September and Shelvocke and his castaways had been on the island for nearly four months.

  In all that time their accommodation had been miserable. Shelvocke described their huts as being “as mean and inconvenient as possible, some being made with the boughs of trees, some cover’d with seal and sea-lyons skins, and some with remains of the ship’s sails.” These flimsy shelters did not withstand the “flaws.” Sudden gusts of wind came rushing down the valley and stripped away the coverings to “leave us. . . in bed, exposed to the weather.” Equally inconvenient was the lack of any furnishings or utensils. The only cooking equipment was a few frying pans made from the lids of the Speedwell’s cooking pots. The ship’s pitch ladle which had once done duty for melting and pouring pitch into the deck seams, was now a saucepan. The food, fish cooked in seal oil and flavored with wild sorrel, was barely adequate. Even the famed “cabbage trees” were a disappointment. They were awkward to find now that they had been cropped so often, and when found were difficult to cut down, so that they scarcely rewarded the effort. “The whole tree seldom affords above two pounds that is eatable,” Shelvocke lamented. The last of the turnip gardens were stripped of their produce, and the sailors found a handful of pumpkins that had been planted by earlier visitors. They were so hungry that they did not wait for these vegetables to grow to size and ripen, but ate them while they were still hard and immature.

  The mysterious loss of the ship’s boat should have been a further warning to Shelvocke that more trouble was brewing. The carpenter’s angry outburst had been the first symptom of a gathering malaise caused by poor diet, bad accommodation, boredom, and a growing sense of hopelessness. The crew of the Speedwell had never been a cohesive unit. Each man had joined the venture out of self-interest, to acquire booty. Now, in the tedium and discomfort of island life, any vestige of solidarity faded. They became disaffected and grumbled, and Shelvocke was the scapegoat.

  Shelvocke realized that something was amiss when his senior officers began to avoid him. They were spending more and more time with the ordinary deck hands. Shelvocke was hurt. He was scornful that they “deserted from my conversation to herd with the meanest of the ship’s company.” Then he observed that work on the boat, which had made steady progress at the outset, was now trickling toward a complete halt. His officers were failing to exert their authority, and showed little enthusiasm for the project. When he met any of his officers and asked why they were negligent, their replies were evasive or downright pessimistic. One said that he did not think they would ever escape from the island; another referred to the half-built boat as “a bundle of boards.” The ordinary sailors were even less cooperative. If Shelvocke asked them what was going on, they refused to answer his question and maintained a surly silence or muttered that they would do what the majority decided. All these signs confirmed Shelvocke “in the suspicion that I had had for some time before that there was a black design a kindling which was now ready to break out into a destructive flame.”

  Suspecting the worst, he told his son George to hide his letter of marque. The young man was to go secretly and find “some dry place of the woods or rocks” and conceal the document. It was Shelvocke’s only form of insurance. Whatever his men decided to do, if they were caught by the Spanish and could not produce a letter of marque, they would be sure to be executed as pirates. The written “commission” was the expedition’s only fig leaf of legality. Keeping control of the letter was the sole bargaining counter that Shelvocke could prepare.

  The crisis came on an afternoon when Shelvocke realized that the only people in camp were him, his son, his nephew John Adams, the ship’s surgeon, and Mr. Henry, the owners’ agent. Thomas Dodd, the lieutenant of marines and Betagh’s former subordinate, was also there. But he was an elderly man and was of no consequence because “for some reason best known to himself [he] had feigned lunacy and had a mind to act the mad man.”

  That evening Shelvocke learned why the camp had been deserted. Everyone else had gone to a meeting at the spot they called “the great tree.” There they held a conference to decide a new structure for the expedition. The spokesman and prime mover was a midshipman whom Shelvocke disdainfully describes as someone “who both made and mended their shoes before the Speedwell was lost.” He calls him “Morphew”—though his real name seems to have been William Murphy, a name that appears on the crew list—and he insinuated that Morphew was not only a cobbler by trade but a thief who had stolen a ship’s boat on a previous voyage.

  Morphew addressed the meeting to tell them “that they were their own masters and servants to none.” He went on to say that although Shelvocke had been appointed as captain by the sponsors of the expedition, any future captain should hold the post only by the general consent of the crew. Shelvocke’s command “was too lofty and arbitrary for a private ship” and he would have been better off staying in the Royal Navy where the sailors were “obliged quietly to bear all hardships imposed upon them.” The decision of the meeting was that Shelvocke was formally deposed from his position as captain, and the entire crew placed themselves under “Jamaica discipline.” Jamaica discipline was the code of conduct of the Caribbean buccaneers. Its main components were that all men had an equal vote in the running of the expedition; they could pick and choose their own leader; and—above all—any booty would be shared out according to the wish of the majority. Speedwell’s men had taken a step that changed them from privateers operating under a letter of marque to the status of pirates.

  In the night the crew brought the new contract to Shelvocke’s tent for him to sign. The opening paragraph informed him that “whereas the Speedwell was cast away . . . they were now of consequence at their own disposal, so that their obligations to the Owners and to me were of no validity; the ship being no more.” Under these conditions “they had now thought fit to frame such articles as would be most conducive to their own interest.” Their first key demand was that in future all booty should be divided equally among the crew. Nothing was to be set aside for the owners. The second clause laid down that “in all attacks by sea or land, and everything else, the people’s consent was to be ask’d in general, every one to have a single vote, and their Captain to have two.”

  Examining the document more closely, Shelvocke noted that the mutineers had also decreased his allotment of shares in any booty. Under the previous agreement with the owners his entitlement had been sixty shares; now “I found myself reduced from sixty shares to six.” When he remonstrated, he was told that “I might think myself well off since the Jamaica captains were allowed but four shares and they had given me two more out of regard they had for me.” The mutineers also informed him that he was lucky to be asked to continue on as captain, and that they would only accept him if first he signed the Articles. “Otherwise they would not trust themselves under my conduct, because they should always be apprehensive that I had sinister intentions upon them.” The mutineers had in mind the recent case of a privateer captain who had agreed to his men’s demands verbally, but without signing a w
ritten agreement. Later, when the opportunity arose, “he denied them, and suffered eight of them to be hanged as pyrates, before his face.”

  ”I was at a loss, not knowing what to do in this dilemma,” Shelvocke pleads to his reader “and was distracted at the thought of subjecting my-self to the caprices of a giddy mutinous gang of obstinate fellows who were dead to reason and in a fair way of being hardened in all kinds of wickedness.” He claims that he had no alternative. If he did not sign, there was little chance that the rescue vessel would be built; or, if it was built, then he would probably be forcibly marooned on the island, or be murdered for the sake of the letter of marque and no one would ever know who committed the crime. As his final excuse, he stresses that he had already been betrayed by the other officers.

  True to character, he signed the Articles.

  Shelvocke hoped that once he signed, the mutineers would return to work on the half-built boat. But when he walked down to the building site early next morning, his hopes were disappointed. There was no one on the beach except the carpenter, Robert Davenport, and two or three assistants. They were at work on the hull, but Shelvocke was too petulant to give them much credit. They were still mutineers, as far as he was concerned, and their efforts were motivated “by the hopes of some money from me.” He wondered what the rest of the crew were doing, and “what mischief they possibly might have in their heads, after what they had already done.”

  He soon found out. The next morning Morphew reappeared at his tent accompanied by Matthew Stewart, whom the crew had appointed as their spokesman and who was probably still in collusion with Shelvocke. The deputation came to demand “in the name of all the people” that Shelvocke hand over all the booty previously set aside as the owners’ share. It included a stock of raw silver ingots valued at 750 pieces of eight, a large silver dish weighing 75 ounces, and 250 dollars in cash. Shelvocke had to agree to their demand, and the hoard was immediately shared out under the rules of the new Jamaica discipline.

  At this stage Shelvocke’s original ship’s company had effectively split into a competing number of factions. There was the main body of rebels, led by Morphew and Brooks; a dwindling faction loyal to Shelvocke; the older and steadier men who shared the tent of George Henshal, the bosun; a few cantankerous individuals like Mr. Coldsea, the master—“the most quarrelsome turbulent fellow in the ship,” who wanted nothing to do with any group; and six or seven craftsmen, notably the carpenter, who were still working on the boat. There was yet another, more dangerous, group on the periphery. About a dozen men had withdrawn from the camp altogether. They formed a band living in the hills. They contributed neither to the boat building nor the food gathering, but would come down in the evenings like brigands and extort rations. When they were caught trying to steal muskets and gunpowder, Shelvocke told them that next time they came within musket shot of the camp they would be treated as enemies.

  There was one more indignity Shelvocke had to endure: the entire body of mutineers came again to his tent and demanded that he hand over all the muskets in his care. The mutineers, Shelvocke claimed, feared that he might lead a counter-uprising, possibly with the assistance of the bosun’s faction. The confrontation over the muskets led to an ugly scene. Morphew and Edward Brooks, the first lieutenant, were again the ringleaders. They stood outside the tent and “used me with so much impudence and opprobrious language as never could have been believed to come out of the mouths of men.” When Shelvocke’s son George intervened to tell Morphew that he did not necessarily speak for everyone, he was promptly threatened by the mutineers. Shelvocke had been keeping the muskets near him for a practical reason. There was only a single flint for every gun, and he did not want the weapons damaged or neglected. Now he was obliged to hand the muskets over, and to his chagrin the men “had the pleasure of squandering away their time and powder and shot in firing at cats or anything else to waste the ammunition.”

  It took a real, outside threat to bring everyone to their senses.

  On 15 August a large sailing vessel was sighted on the horizon, apparently heading for the island. There was widespread panic. No one recognized the vessel. She was certainly not the Success under Clipperton. Shelvocke suspected she was a Spanish ship, probably a merchant vessel. If her lookouts saw the castaways there, her captain would turn away without anchoring and report to the authorities on the mainland that there were strangers on the island. Inevitably the Spanish authorities in Chile would send an armed force to investigate, and the castaways would be in peril of being captured and perhaps condemned to death as pirates.

  Shelvocke acted decisively. Before the strange sail came any closer, he ordered all the fires to be doused. The sight of smoke rising from the beach would have been a disaster. He also gave instructions to tie up all the Indians and the Negroes. His fear was that the foreign vessel might be becalmed near the island, and one of them might risk swimming out to the ship and giving the alarm.

  The Speedwell’s crew watched anxiously from their vantage points to see whether the strange sail would approach closer. The ship had only to pass across the mouth of Cumberland Bay for her lookouts to see the most telltale evidence of human occupation—the skeleton of the rescue boat sitting on its blocks on the edge of the beach. It was unmissable.

  Slowly the strange vessel moved across the horizon while Shelvocke tried to work out the course she was making. It was some time before he could be certain that the vessel was still keeping well offshore and would be too far away for her watchmen to notice any details on the island.

  When the danger was passed and everyone had relaxed, Shelvocke took the chance to reassert his authority. During the scare many of the mutineers had abandoned their independence and obeyed his instructions. Now he appealed to them to continue to work together. But they bluntly told him that they had carried out his orders only because it was in their own interests. Worse, the next morning the mutineers called another general council to consider the question of destroying the half-built escape boat. Some of them argued that the boat represented a constant danger. It was far too conspicuous from the sea, and might attract the attention of the Spaniards. These sailors wanted to burn the half-built boat where she lay, and instead build two smaller vessels in some out-of-the-way creek where the hulls could be camouflaged. Shelvocke argued vigorously against such a reckless scheme. He pointed out that if they burned the boat, there was not enough surplus timber to complete the substitutes, and the boat building tools which Popplestone the armorer had made, were nearly worn out. In the end the carpenter and his mates who had actually done the boat building work quashed the proposal. They were understandably opposed to the idea that their months of labor should go up in flames. It was typical, said Shelvocke, that the boat burning scheme was put forward by the men who “had never done an hour’s work since we had been cast away but had been on the contrary the first movers in perverting the minds of the rest and were, in return for my indefatigable pains to serve them, come to insult me and those few who had been my assistants on the strand.”

  This disaffected group now proposed, out of spite, that First Lieutenant Brooks should be promoted to captain and take command. Fortunately the bosun’s faction overruled them. To add to Shelvocke’s gloom, it became clear that the carpenter felt that some disaffected mutineer might set fire to the boat, whatever had been decided at the meeting. In the same night the carpenter quietly sent word to Shelvocke that he wanted to be paid the money he had been promised for completing the boat, even though the boat was not finished. Otherwise Shelvocke “should not see his face again.” Once more Shelvocke was forced to pay up.

  The arguments over the fate of the half-built boat marked the low tide of morale on the island. From now on there was a gradual return to cooperation between the main body of the castaways, as they began to realize that they would have to work together if they were ever to leave the island. It was First Lieutenant Brooks who made the first move toward a reconciliation. He re-appeared at Shelvocke’s
tent and asked if he could again take his meals with the captain and his associates. Brooks still remained on very good terms with Morphew the rebel leader, but he was now willing to take a hand with the boat building. His open cooperation encouraged other volunteers to join the team on the beach, and progress on the boat speeded up.

  The construction had now reached a critical stage. The carpenter and his team had completed the skeleton of the boat. Keel, bow, and stern pieces and all the frames stood in place, and the moment had come to begin planking. This was when the castaways felt most severely the lack of suitable boat building timber on the island. None of the native trees could provide the carpenter with the length and width of planking he required. Instead he had to send men to prise deck boards from the wreck of the Speedwell, and attempt to reshape those into hull planks. But the salvaged deck boards were poor material. They were stiff and dry from long exposure to the sun—almost impossible to coax into new shapes. The carpenter tried his skill in applying fire and steam to make the salvaged wood pliable. When his assistants struggled to bend the planks against the frames and fix them in place, the timbers “split and flew like glass.” Shelvocke began to lose heart. By now he was working alongside the men on the boat and “had substantial reasons to believe that all our labor had been in vain.” He felt they might have to give up the boat altogether and “quietly sit down with the disagreeable hopes of being taken off by some Spanish ship some time or other, and after all our troubles be led to a prison to reflect on our misfortunes.”