In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Twenty-six years later, in 1895, another Defoe scholar, George Aitken, observed in the learned journal Athenaeum how “others have echoed Mr. Lee’s regret at the loss of the Catalogue.” With a scholar’s reproving tone Aitken scolded those experts who, not finding the list, had “indulged in speculations, based upon Defoe’s own works, respecting the books he must have read.”

  Then George Aitken dropped his bombshell. “The missing Catalogue,” he announced, “has . . . been lying all these years in the British Museum.” Payne’s catalogue would have been found much earlier, he observed tartly, if “there had been a cross-reference under “Defoe” to “Catalogues.”

  Aitken’s treasure trove has fifty-three pages. At the start of his catalogue Olive Payne states that he is offering the books of “the ingenious Daniel De Foe, Gent., lately deceased.” The auctioneer promises that the books “will begin to be sold very cheap (the lowest price marked in each book).” The sale is to begin on Monday, 15t November 1731, “and to continue daily until all are sold.” With typical auctioneer’s puff, Payne adds: “N.B. The books are in very good condition, mostly well bound, gilt and lettered.”

  The discovery of the catalogue raised a new problem for scholars. Olive Payne had sold off two private libraries at the same time. One book collection had belonged to Daniel Defoe, the other to “the Reverend and Learned Philip Farewell, D.D., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.” Unfortunately, Payne did not bother to note on his list which books had belonged to which of his two deceased clients. This oversight sparked a fierce debate among the scholars of Defoe’s work, a debate that continues to this day. Some argue that there is no way of knowing which books really belonged to Defoe; others that it is reasonable to ascribe the books on theology, divinity, canon law, and classical literature to the Cambridge don and divine. The books on history, travel, geography, and the “several hundred curious Tracts on Parliamentary Affairs, politics, husbandry, trade, voyages, natural history, mines, minerals etc” surely had attracted Defoe’s jackdaw mind. Among them are a Spanish-English dictionary, Raleigh’s History of the World (“a very fine copy”), History of the West Indies, by the humanitarian Spanish cleric Bartholomé de Las Casas, and a volume of the political writings of Richard Steele, the essayist who said he interviewed Alexander Selkirk after his return from Juan Fernandez.

  Four of the books reveal Defoe’s fascination with tales of buccaneers, pirates, and privateers, both before and after he dreamed up the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. On his shelves was a copy of Betagh’s Voyage round the World describing his troubles with the knavish Captain Shelvocke, as well as an Account of the Proceedings in relation to Captain Kidd, who was hanged for piracy at Execution Dock in 1701. Defoe also owned the 1699 edition of The Buccaneers of America, by A. O. Exquemelin. The volume contains a firsthand narrative of the raid by Bartholomew Sharpe and his “Merry Boys” into the Pacific and mentions how Will the Moskito was stranded on Juan Fernandez Island. Also in Defoe’s library was a copy of another major “castaway story”: A new Voyage and Description of The Isthmus of America tells how a buccaneer surgeon, Lionel Wafer, was marooned and lost not on some lonely island but in the green depths of the Central American forest.

  Captain Simon Rowe of His Majesty’s Ship Dumbarton, cruising off Chesapeake Bay in June 1688, was well pleased: he had arrested four pirates and impounded their spoils, nearly a quarter ton. Captain Rowe’s squadron commander, Admiral Sir Robert Holmes, had struck a most unusual—and lucrative—arrangement with his sovereign, King James II. In return for suppressing piracy in the Caribbean and adjacent waters, Sir Robert was allowed to keep all the profits from the sale of vessels, valuables, and other property that his agents and officers confiscated from anyone shown to have engaged in piratical acts. Captain Rowe could reasonably expect that part of the value of that quarter ton of pirate loot would eventually find its way into his own pockets.

  Captain Rowe had no doubt that the four persons he had caught were pirates. They had been arrested, if not red-handed, at least with damning evidence in their possession. Their sea chests were stuffed with an incriminating assortment of silverware—plates, dishes, basins, and cups. Many items were broken or dented and looked as if they had been pillaged from church altars. There were lengths of silver lace, strips of silk ribbon, and several bags plump with dollars and pieces of eight, all Spanish coins. The suspects might as well have had “pirate” branded on their foreheads.

  Naturally the four rogues were denying everything. They hardly knew one another, they said, but happened to be traveling together. They were honest citizens, not pirates. They had acquired their motley selection of valuables by hard work and legitimate trade. They admitted knowing privateersmen, had even sailed with them on occasion. But they had never committed any acts of violence themselves or stooped to commit larceny on the high seas. They were honest men who had bartered the silver utensils from their former shipmates, with no idea that it might be plunder. They had earned the pieces of eight and the other Spanish coins in lawful trade with the Spanish. One of the four rascals even had the impudence to protest that five hundred of his pieces of eight—they were in a bag clearly marked with his initials—were a bequest from a friend. Of course, that friend was now conveniently dead and could not be questioned.

  The four suspects dropped juicily into the captain’s clutch when the Dumbarton intercepted them rowing a small boat surreptitiously along the backwaters of the Chesapeake. The place was a known retreat for outlaws, and that is precisely why Captain Rowe had taken his patrol vessel nosing in there. Captain Rowe now planned on turning the prisoners and their treasure over to the civil authorities in Virginia. They would take a precise inventory of all the confiscated goods—including the quantity of “fowle lynnen” found in one sea chest. He expected the Virginia courts to impound the treasure and cross-examine the miscreants to establish their guilt. Doubtless their lame alibis would collapse in court. If any of the gang were found to have committed murder during their piracies, then they would be hanged. One of the four men, the only black man, was likely to turn King’s evidence. His name was Peter Cloise, and whether he was slave, servant, or collaborator was not clear. But he was the one pulling at the oars when the Dumbarton caught them. The three white men had just been sitting there taking their ease.

  Captain Rowe would have been incredulous to know that he would never get his cut of the spoils, later valued at £2,316 19s. He was not yet aware that he had arrested, by sheer luck, one of the most slippery of all pirate-privateersmen: Edward Davis, ex-captain of the Batchelor’s Delight, the ship that had rescued Will the Moskito from Juan Fernandez.

  By a remarkable coincidence, the two other white men in the captured rowboat were also former castaways of a sort. One of them, the glib fellow offering the cock-and-bull story about a dead man’s legacy of five hundred pieces of eight, was to have a hand in shaping both American and European history. He was also the most literate of the group. When the three white prisoners signed their petitions of innocence, the former captain of the Batchelor’s Delight wrote only the letter E, the first letter of his Christian name. The second suspect, John Hingson, managed a mere squiggle as his “mark.” But the third signed his full name with a flourish: Lionel Delawafer.

  Lionel Wafer, or Delawafer, or Wasser, as he variously called himself, was a buccaneer surgeon. It was a job that paid well. Privateers, buccaneers, and pirates needed surgeons to tend them just as much as they needed Miskito strikers to feed them. Battle injuries were an obvious occupational hazard of their trade. A badly wounded privateer was unlikely to last long if he did not get prompt medical attention. Even minor injuries could fester and lead to complications, particularly in the tropics. There was also the risk of contracting fevers and venereal disease or picking up such unwelcome parasites as the fiery serpent. A waterborne parasitic worm, the fiery serpent, or guinea worm, enters the human stomach as a microscopic larva, then penetrates the gut and takes up residence in the h
ost’s subcutaneous tissue. There, the white female worm, though only two millimeters in diameter, feeds and can grow to a length of three feet in a year. When the creature is ready to lay her own larvae, she burrows up to the surface of her victim’s flesh.

  Usually the first sign her host notices of the parasite’s presence is the appearance of a painful boil or pustule on the feet or legs. When the boil bursts, the worm’s head appears. William Dampier was infected with a guinea worm and describes how, when the head of the parasite came out of his leg, he “roll’d it up on a small stick” and every morning and evening “strained it out gently about two inches at a time, not without some pain, till at length I had got out about two foot.” Dampier warned that, if roughly handled, the worm breaks. The broken part stays inside the human body and may mortify.

  Faced with such diverse challenges, the ideal medical attendant for a pirate crew needed steady hands and a pragmatic approach to treating his patients. Formal medical qualifications were less useful than a roving disposition, a set of well-honed surgical instruments, and a knowledge of practical pharmacology.

  Lionel Wafer met this prescription very well. He had gone to sea in his teens “in the Service,” as he put it, of a surgeon aboard an East Indiaman bound for Java and Sumatra to pick up a cargo of pepper. Of all commercial shipping, the East Indiamen had the best record for providing medical facilities. This was due to the efforts of John Woodall, the “father of sea surgery.” For thirty years he had been surgeon-general to the East India Company and had been responsible for “ordering and appointing fit and able Surgeons and Surgeons Mates for their ships and services, as also the fitting and furnishing of their surgeon’s chest with medicines instruments and other appurtenances thereto.” Woodall had become so tired of writing out, again and again, the list of instructions for each surgeon that he had published a manual on the subject. It was the first medical text ever written for surgeons at sea. Woodall had been dead for thirty-five years when young Wafer first shipped out, but Woodall’s manual, The Surgions Mate, was to be found on every East Indiaman. The manual was comprehensive. It listed the instruments and medicines to stock the ship’s medical chest, had instructions on how to treat wounds and medical emergencies, including how to cut off limbs, discussed the causes and treatment of scurvy, and finished up with a section on the chemistry of the day, alchemy.

  Young Wafer found he liked seafaring. Barely a month after getting back to England from his two-year East India voyage, he signed on again. This time he sailed as the servant to a surgeon on a packet ship bound for the West Indies. Wafer’s “chief inducement” to make this trip was to visit his brother, who was the manager at a sugar estate in Jamaica. So when Captain Buckenham delivered his cargo and mail to Jamaica and decided to continue onward to the Campeche coast of the Yucatan for a load of logwood, Wafer chose to stay behind in Jamaica. It was as well that he did. He later heard that Captain Buckenham was arrested by the Spanish as a poacher and taken to Mexico. There he was seen working as a baker’s delivery man with “a Log chained to his Leg and a Basket at his Back, crying Bread about the streets.” Wafer had clearly been paying close attention to what went on in the ship’s sick bay during his years as a surgeon’s servant, and now with the help of his brother he set himself up as a practicing surgeon on his own account in Jamaica’s chief harbor, Port Royal.

  Port Royal was notorious. Built precariously on a sand spit that twelve years later would dissolve partially into the sea during an earthquake, its population of some six thousand included many who catered to the recreational tastes of privateersmen, smugglers, and seafaring low life of all sorts. It was claimed that two out of every ten buildings were “brothels, gaming houses, taverns and grog shops.” It was home to a “walking plague” of prostitutes, the most famous being Mary Carleton, notably described as being “as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out, but another was in.” When ships docked at Port Royal’s wharves to unload, the crews went ashore to spend their pay, carouse, trade on their own account, look for new berths on other vessels, and gamble. Some of them went to find a surgeon for medical treatment. Their medical bills could be three times more expensive than in Boston, the only equivalent-sized English port in the Americas, because Port Royal—particularly when the crew of a buccaneer ship had come ashore—was sometimes awash with cash.

  Lionel Wafer, still in his early twenties, found that he was not yet ready to settle down. He was more attracted by the prospect of travel and adventure than the daily chores of a seaport medical practice. He met two privateering captains who were recruiting crew in Port Royal and, in his deliberately vague phrase, “they took me along with them.” Captains Cook and Lynch told Wafer that they were planning a voyage to Cartagena. This was their cover story. In fact they were setting off for the great buccaneer rendezvous on the coast of Central America where it would be voted to launch an overland raid on Panama. Thus it was that in the first week of April 1680 Lionel Wafer found himself landing—in the company of William Dampier and Will the Moskito—to join the “Pack of Merry Boys” as they disembarked near Golden Island, and Captain Edmund Cook raised his personal red and yellow banner with its badge of a hand and sword.

  Wafer was not the only surgeon in the expedition. There were at least four others. Three would be captured by the Spanish in January the following year during a disastrous attack by the pirates on the Chilean town of Arica. The buccaneers fought their way into the main square but suffered such heavy casualties during the Spanish counterattack that they were forced to retreat. They left behind their wounded laid out on the floor of Arica’s church—which they had already looted—and the three surgeons to tend them. The Spaniards retook the town and executed the wounded men, but spared the three surgeons on condition that they stay in the Spanish colony and practice medicine there. The fourth surgeon had already left the expedition within the first few weeks. He was surgeon to Captain Coxon’s war band, and when his captain turned back with fifty of his men, he went with him. According to one disgruntled buccaneer, Coxon took not only his surgeon but also “the best of our medicines, unknown to the major part of us.”

  A medical chest stocked according to John Woodall’s specifications was far too heavy and bulky for the expedition’s porters to shoulder through the rain forest. It contained plasters, unguents, salts, natural oils, “chymical oils,” syrups, elixirs, pastilles, spices, gums, simples, opiates, and laxatives. Only a limited selection of the drugs could be carried on the porters' backs or in the surgeons' knapsacks on the march over the isthmus to the South Sea. The logical choices of what to take included laudanum, a painkiller; Jesuit's bark, or quinine, against fever; and various ointments and salves such as ferric chloride—known as “soldier's ointment.” The relevant surgical tools were specula for widening wounds and gashes; forceps for removing bullets and splinters; metal syringes for administering enemas—constipation being a chronic affliction of seafarers, according to Surgeon General Woodall; needles and thread; and an awesome array of scalpels, knives, and saws to cut bone and flesh, as well as cauterizing irons to seal the result.

  Wafer spent a year with the rapidly dwindling band of “Merry Boys” and accompanied them as far south as their landing on the island of Juan Fernandez to spend Christmas. There he took part in the scrambled embarkation that left Will the Moskito stranded on the island. The Arica debacle came soon afterward, and the capture of the three other surgeons may have led Wafer to reconsider his own future. In April 1681 he elected to join a breakaway group, including William Dampier, who had decided they'd had enough of the South Sea adventure. They would leave their ship, the Trinity, then commanded by the untrustworthy Bartholomew Sharpe, and try to sneak back across the narrow waist of Central America and reach the Caribbean on foot, each man carrying his share of the plunder.

  Their plan was desperate enough. The Spanish authorities were expecting the buccaneers to try just such an evasion. Every small town had been put on watch for gangs of buccaneers
trying to slip past. Search parties had landed at various isolated points and checked for buccaneer hideaways. A squadron of three warships was on standby in the city of Panama, on the Pacific coast, waiting to put to sea the moment there was any sighting of buccaneers. The organizers of Wafer's breakaway group worried that some of their volunteers lacked stamina if the Spanish came in hot pursuit. For one reason or another—age, poor health, lack of brawn—some of the group might not be able to keep up with the main party as it made the quick dash across the rugged terrain of the isthmus. “We knew,” wrote Dampier, “that the Spaniards would soon be after us, and one Man falling into their hands might be the ruin of us all, by giving an account of our strength and condition.” There was a ferocious announcement before the group set out, that anyone who lagged behind “must expect to be shot to death.”

  Forty-four of the surviving buccaneers resolved to make the bold attempt. They demanded from Captain Sharpe—and received—five captured slaves as part of their booty. The slaves were to carry their marching rations, a quantity of flour ready-sifted for making bread and dumplings en route, and twenty or thirty pounds of chocolate “rubb’d up . . . with sugar to sweeten it.” They also selected a large cook pot from the ship’s stores, and persuaded an Indian auxiliary to accompany them. This Indian was a native of Darien, as the isthmus was called, and he had joined the buccaneers a year earlier on their way into the Pacific. He proved to be useless as a guide but he could speak Spanish and was invaluable as an interpreter. Better, two of the Miskito Indian strikers decided to go with them. The Miskitos were able to hunt fish and turtles to feed the group as they made their way in small boats for 600 miles along the coast to the Gulf of San Miguel in present-day Panama.