Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Even on deck Chileans shook my hand and told me that Galtieri was bad, Mrs Thatcher was good. It would have warmed Eric Hart’s soul. Armanduco’s friendly shouts reached me at frequent intervals from the wheelhouse, from the galley door, from the fo’c’sle, anywhere, until in two days’ time the spurs and headlands of the island of Mas a Tierra, more commonly known as Robinson Crusoe Island, hove into sight. Supreme among them was the flat top of El Yunque, the Anvil Mountain, on which Alexander Selkirk had sat year after year, staring out for a sail on an empty ocean, reluctant master of all he surveyed.

  *

  The aldea of Maria Eugenia, Tony’s friend, was a group of simple log cabins on the edge of Cumberland Bay. Maria Eugenia herself was an attractive Chilean lady speaking perfect English, cheerful and energetic, who had a practical but easygoing way with guests. There was no formalilty at the aldea any more than there was in the whole bailiwick, except perhaps round the bungalow where the alcalde, the governor, had his office – it was not at all that sort of place.

  The modest, wood-built settlement reminded me of a well-gardened and peaceful American frontier town in the 1890s, but the line of longboats drawn up along the beach on either side of the tiny wharf signalled otherwise. San Juan Bautista was inhabited mostly by fishermen, and wives and children of fishermen. Catching langostas, the giant crayfish, was the special industry here; there was no other that I could see. The day the Carlos Darwin pulled into Cumberland Bay most of the island’s population crowded onto the wharf to lug away the cargo on their shoulders or in borrowed wheelbarrows. There was one jeep, I think; perhaps it was the only one on the island – it belonged to the alcalde.

  Robinson Crusoe Island felt as remote as Nuku Hiva. The little town straggled in a thin semicircle along an unpaved track among pine trees and eucalyptus in such a tentative fashion that it seemed about to be nudged into the sea by the mountains that swept down on it from every side. Dominating everything, El Yunque spread its long, flat anvil’s top under the clouds, and in the highlands at its feet were the goat-filled caves once so familiar to Sailing Master Selkirk, late of Largo, in the county of Fife in Scotland.

  It had been raining. I stamped and slipped down the track from the wharf to the aldea, saluted along the way by men with white faces and stubbled chins muffled by scarves or woolly caps. They could have been Swiss, German, Italian, Spanish or English – and they probably were a bit of a mixture of all these things – but they were not Polynesians. Certainly no one like Man Friday had ever lived on this island.

  *

  While his ship was at the wharf, Captain Pedro of the Carlos Darwin often came to Maria Eugenia’s and seemed in no particular hurry to return to Valparaiso. He came for meals and long, cheerful drinking sessions with Maria Eugenia and myself, bringing Armanduco with him. We sat in the kitchen at a wooden table and drank the colourless Chilean brandy called pisco or the red wine called Concha y Toro that came in wicker-covered jars. Armanduco had taken a fancy to Maria Eugenia’s cook, a plump young woman with a wall eye, and he was sometimes difficult to dislodge. Now and again, a group of boisterous young fishermen brought a guitar and sang songs they had written themselves about ‘Juan Fernandez, island of fishermen, island of enchanted summits’. Into the night they roared, ‘If only I could be buried on the Yunque, with my face towards the sea….’ Then they coyly fingered the bottles, murmuring, ‘Pisco – pocito, eh?’

  One of these singers, a pale youth, came to the aldea with a small animal half concealed in his jacket. A little wiggling, questing nose – almost a small trunk – poked out between the buttons and delicately tested the air. It was a coati, he said; there were quite a few of them on the island. Like his pet, he had melancholy eyes and a long nose that wriggled, so I called him Coati and he didn’t seem to mind.

  It was with Coati that I saw some relics of the Dresden. Of course, the ghosts of Admirals Sturdee and von Spee hung about Cumberland Bay, and no doubt that of Captain Luce, too, commander of the Kent and the Glasgow, who finally trapped the German cruiser.

  The object of the Anglo–German naval contest in the South Atlantic in 1914 was control of the sea routes to and from the Pacific. It was sharp and very short – all over within the space of the thirty-eight days between the Battle of Coronel on 1 November and the Battle of the Falklands on 8 December. Off Coronel, on the south-western coast of Chile, the German East Asiatic Squadron, a powerful group of modern armoured cruisers commanded by Vice-Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee, was attacked by a force of ageing warships under Rear-Admiral ‘Kit’ Cradock. Cradock was a dashing bachelor who had always wanted to die in the hunting field or in action, and he had his wish. He and his flagship, the Good Hope, went to the bottom after a futile engagement with von Spee’s flagship the Scharnhorst, her sister ship the Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Dresden, Nürnberg and Leipzig.

  Who was to blame for Cradock’s ill-advised attack? Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, has been accused. But whoever it was, humiliation was soon followed by victory. Vice-Admiral Doveton Sturdee caught von Spee’s ships off the Falkland Islands and sent nearly all of them to the bottom. Admiral von Spee himself perished when the Scharnhorst turned turtle and sank with her complement of 765 men. Only one light cruiser, the Dresden, escaped, and headed west to southern Chile. Trapped at last at anchor in Cumberland Bay, Captain Lüdecke of the Dresden had a cable in his pocket from the Kaiser telling him to let himself be interned by the Chilean Government. Captain Luce had received a different sort of cable from Winston Churchill: ‘Object is destruction not internment.’

  On 14 March 1915 the Glasgow opened fire, and within three minutes the Dresden had suffered enough damage for Lüdecke to hoist a white flag. Seeing this, Luce ordered ‘Cease fire’ and awaited the arrival of a boat from the Dresden flying a flag of truce brought to him by a lieutenant called Canaris – who lived to become an admiral and head of German Intelligence in the Second World War. It was a clever plan. While Canaris talked, Lüdecke scuttled the Dresden, not only opening her seacocks, condensers and torpedo tube doors but blowing up her magazine as well. As the Dresden sank for ever her ship’s company cheered from the shore, and the British, moved by the sight, cheered too. Lüdecke and his men were interned by the neutral Chileans, but eight Germans had been killed.

  With Coati I walked along the beach and tried, among driftwood, lumps of cork, plastic bottles and broken glass, to imagine the ear-splitting crack of the exploding magazine resounding round this little bay. The German colony in Valparaiso erected a monument after the war, and here it was, a small stone monolith with one or the Dresden’s lifebuoys and the ship’s anchor. The inscription said:

  In Treuer Pflichterfüllung für das Deutsche

  Vaterland Starben den Heldentod:

  Ing. Asn. Lerche

  Ob. Matr. Hunger

  Heizer Reuter

  S.M.S. Dresden 14 März 1915

  Coati told me that on a clear, calm day it was possible to see the Dresden lying at the bottom of the bay. I peered down from the gunwale of his longboat but all I could see were the jellyfish called Portuguese men o’ war, a large, hideously orange squid and the reflected sky. I made another attempt on the feast of San Pedro, the patron saint of all fishermen. Then a procession of barcos-longos, hung with gay bunting from masts to prows and sterns and carrying most of San Juan Bautista’s women and children, made circles and figures of eight in the bay and rolled on down the coast, passing under cliffs where goats skipped blithely on rock faces that seemed to lack the minutest hoofhold. An exhilarating morning, but I got no glimpse of the Dresden that day either. Still, the story of the Dresden is by no means dead. The young fishermen of Cumberland Bay have commemorated it in a song which they sang to me, a lilting tune:

  The fourteenth of March, the naval battle began. The English opened fire with their heavy guns, and Juan Fernandez was witness to the heroic German cruiser and how the ship was sunk with her flag still flying. It is useless to for
get that day, the fourteenth of March, when the naval battle started, the day Juan Fernandez saw the heroic German cruiser heel over with her flag flying….

  But the islands were named after Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk, not after Luce and Lüdecke. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, a fiction from the mind of Daniel Defoe, was based on the almost equally surprising adventures of Alexander Selkirk of Largo in Fife, the tall and powerful sailing master, or first mate, of the 120-ton privateer Cinque Ports (Captain Stradling), who after a dispute with the master refused to sail on with him from Cumberland Bay in October 1704. With the Cinque Ports was a second privateer, the St George, commanded by the famous buccaneer, Captain William Dampier.

  Luckily for Selkirk, when a Captain Woodes Rogers arrived off Juan Fernandez in 1709 the indefatigable Dampier was with him as pilot. Their two Bristol privateers, the Duke and the Duchess, had captured the Acapulco treasure ship carrying Mexican gold to the King of Spain and were about to take her to England, Woodes Rogers wrote, when their pinnace returned from the shore of Cumberland Bay ‘with a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them’. When Dampier assured Woodes that Selkirk had been on the Cinque Ports and the best man in her, ‘I immediately agreed with him to be a Mate on board our Ship’.

  Selkirk’s subsequent appearance in London caused a stir. Woodes Rogers wrote his account of him. Sir Richard Steele, founder of the Tatler and co-founder of the Spectator, interviewed him. Daniel Defoe seized on the story, enlarged on it fore and aft, and by transferring it bodily to the Caribbean (the struggle between England, France and Spain for the West Indies was much in the public’s mind just then), was able to give us Man Friday.

  *

  Hoping to see goats and caves and the umbrella-shaped plant that in some illustrations Crusoe is seen holding like a parasol, I set off on foot to walk the thirteen miles to the end of the island. Not alone. Three young islanders volunteered to come: Teddy, Miguel and Francisco. Miguel, small and sharp-nosed, brought a white mule named Mantequilla, or Butter, and Teddy, tall and gangling, an old, small dog called Cholo. In her sackcloth panniers Mantequilla carried a few metal dishes and spoons, knives and forks, bread and the ingredients of some sort of stew; also a kettle, a few blankets and useful odds and ends like matches and a bottle of pisco. We had, in fact, all that Selkirk took ashore from the Cinque Ports with the exception of a firelock, gunpowder, bullets, a hatchet, mathematical instruments and a Bible, none of which we seemed likely to need.

  The track shot straight up through the scrub on the long, broken slopes behind the little town. In my heavy lace-up boots and thick sweater I soon began to pant as I had following Marie to see the pae-paes, and even Mantequilla developed an increasingly melancholy expression. At the top of the steep escarpment called El Mirador de Selkirk, or Selkirk’s Lookout, the three young islanders themselves were quite glad of the halt that I justified by pausing near a large rock to read the Spanish on a metal plaque embedded in it:

  On this spot, day after day, for more than four years, the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk searched the horizon expectantly, anxiously waiting for a rescue ship that would free him from isolation and permit him to return one day to his fellow human beings, perhaps even to the place of his birth.

  A few steps further on the full length of the island was revealed, straggling away rather oddly. For the island was roughly the shape of a tadpole, the head of the tadpole ridged with mountain and at first shaggy with forest. Beyond the forest I could see a track winding like some yellow thread across hillsides and crevices as bare as the Sahara: the tail of the tadpole had withered. The green richness stopped as suddenly as if a terrible experiment in chemical warfare had completely defoliated half the island.

  Teddy and Francisco hurried down the steep descent beyond the plaque; Miguel and I followed more sedately with Mantequilla: it was awkward going. The track was terribly uneven and we slid and stumbled along it over boulders and fallen trees, among monster ferns, cabbage trees and umbrella plants that looked like giant rhubarb. There were even clumps of palm trees in this strange forest.

  ‘Hey! Mula!’ Miguel shouted to encourage Mantequilla. ‘Mula! Oh!’ He, like the others, wore nothing but ruined jeans, ragged shirt that hardly covered his bare chest, and battered shoes that in Europe would have been thrown away long before; yet it was far from warm. Teddy, the leader of the three, frequently left us to dash down the steep, rough hillside that dropped nearly sheer from the eroded ridge of the tadpole’s back into the sea. This plunging hillside, I thought, was extremely dangerous; it was pitted and riven with hidden gullies, potholes and depressions, and covered with rocks and occasional bushes as well. But Teddy in his tattered shoes raced up and down, whooping and whistling encouragement to Cholo, whose tiny legs worked overtime as she dived in and out of the stone-filled ravines. Rabbits were the quarry. The hillsides were full of them; they sat in the weak sun like black and brown currants on a cake. An amazing number were black – descendants, I suppose, of all the sailors’ pets that had ever escaped ashore. There had been no rabbits here in Selkirk’s time; only cats, rats, and goats. Teddy, racing about so dangerously but with such ease, might have been Selkirk pursuing wild goats for food. Woodes Rogers had written:

  Agility in pursuing a Goat had once like to have cost him his Life; he pursu’d it with so much Eagerness that he catch’d hold of it on the brink of a Precipice, of which he was not aware the Bushes having hid it from him; so he fell with the Goat down the said Precipice a great height, and was so stunn’d and bruised with the Fall, that he narrowly escap’d with his Life, and when he came to his Senses, found the Goat dead under him.

  ‘I am careful,’ Teddy assured me when I remonstrated with him, and rushed off again as dangerously as before. ‘We had a Bull-Dog,’ Rogers went on, ‘which we sent with several of our nimblest Runners … but he distanc’d and tir’d both the Dog and the Men.’ Teddy would have distanced and tired me in half a minute, so I watched him quite passively from the track with Miguel, Francisco and Mantequilla. He finally returned waving three rabbits over his head, saying that little short-legged Cholo, now dancing about his feet barking triumphantly, had caught them. It seemed something of a Selkirkian miracle.

  ‘Bravo, Teddy,’ I said.

  ‘Bravo, Cholo,’ he laughed, putting the rabbits in the pannier.

  ‘Hey, mula!’ Miguel cried to Mantequilla, and we went on.

  It was cold and windy, and to keep warm we drank the pisco out of the bottle. After two or three hours we came to a cave the boys knew well that lay a little way off the track. There Teddy and Francisco laid a fire with wood they had collected on the way, heated the stew and made tea with water from a nearby stream. The cave was cosy. It was low and smelled of sheep; the ashes strewn among the blackened stones were relics of shepherds’ fires. After the meal, we cloaked ourselves in blankets and I read bits of Woodes Rogers by torchlight. How had Selkirk passed the lonely weeks and months? He had sung psalms and prayed a good deal, and he had also invented odd pastimes. At first he was troubled a good deal by the wild cats and rats that had come ashore from ships and bred on the island. He told Sir Richard Steele he ‘was extreamly pester’d with Rats, which gnaw’d his Cloaths and Feet when sleeping. To defend him against them, he fed and tamed numbers of young Killings, who lay about his Bed, and preserved him from the Enemy.’ Odder still, he ‘likewise tamed some Kids, and to divert himself would now and then sing and dance with them and his Cats’.

  No one danced with Cholo or Mantequilla, but under Teddy’s direction the three islanders sang island songs which the low roof amplified while the wind rose around us. Long after the songs were over I woke to hear snoring, and rain swishing about the mouth of the cave, and felt something – a small creature – moving about under my blanket. Remembering Selkirk’s rats, I sat up quickly, took a look – and found the bright, apologetic eyes of Cholo looking back at me. The old bi
tch’s fur was sodden with rain, so I rubbed her and covered her with my blanket. With the same blanket over my head and inhaling the rich smell of rain-sodden earth, sheep droppings and damp dog’s fur, it was not difficult to feel a little like Alexander Selkirk. The trouble was that I was far too old to learn to catch goats as Cholo caught rabbits. Alone on this island I would have starved in no time. I heard Mantequilla stamping outside, and fell asleep.

  *

  Selkirk lived on turtles and the giant crayfish of the island as well as goat’s meat, and he told of huge colonies of seals and sealions whose ‘dreadful Howlings and Voices seemed too terrible to be made for human Ears – some bleating like lambs, some howling like dogs or wolves, others, making hideous noises of various sorts’.

  Next day we saw a party of fur seals at the end of the island, a long way below us, slipping on and off some rocks in a diminutive bay and barking happily. But the immense colonies Selkirk knew have quite gone. And we had yet to see the famous wild goats.

  We returned to San Juan Bautista along the same track in a gale and driving rain, soaked, frozen, yet somehow sweating at the same time. The scramble up the western slope of the Mirador de Selkirk was one of the most exhausting I have ever endured. I have known many steeper climbs, but the weight of the downpour battering my body turned my legs to rubber and seemed to fill my lungs with hot coals. There is no pride in such situations. I leaned abjectly against boulders and choked for breath, and the islanders kindly offered me Mantequilla’s back. But the poor old mula had enough to carry up that agonizing mountainside without my hundred and ninety pounds. Slow step after slow step, we plodded upwards through the hubbub. It was like walking up a waterfall. ‘Damn Alexander Selkirk,’ I thought, feeling old and useless. The downhill slope to Cumberland Bay should have been easier going, but the steep rutted slopes of mud-covered rock had been made slippery by the rain, and while I sped on ahead, leaving the boys to help Mantequilla, my feet were continually sliding from under me and dumping me in mud and bushes. My final humiliation was a spectacular flying fall to splosh face-up into a deep mire of black mud. Scratched, sodden and bruised, I lay for a moment half stunned in a puddle, spreadeagled like a beetle. Rising, I staggered, cursing, through Maria Eugenia’s front door. She stood there laughing. ‘You look more like Man Friday than Robinson Crusoe,’ she said.