Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Woodes Rogers, by contrast, now has a run of good luck. His force intercepts one small ship after another and robs their passengers at sword point. The marauders hold to ransom several coastal towns, and steadily amass a treasure in pieces of eight, gold necklaces and chains, and silver sword handles and plate. The only real disappointment is their failure to capture the larger of the two Manila galleons bringing that year’s shipment of treasure from the Philippines to Acapulco. The smaller galleon strikes her colours after a stiff sea fight, during which a bullet hits Rogers in the upper left cheek and carries away part of the jaw so that some of his teeth drop out on deck. With one treasure ship taken, Rogers then doggedly sets off to intercept the larger, richer galleon but she proves to be too powerful, though Rogers presses home the attack with his usual determination, lying on the deck in a pool of blood after a flying splinter strikes his heel. Selkirk behaves admirably throughout the expedition. He leads boat crews on raids along the rivers, and is appointed to command one of the prizes. By the time the Duke and Duchess eventually drop anchor in London, having sailed right round the world to get there, Selkirk’s share of the prize money is calculated to be worth £800. This is a very considerable reward at a time when a shopkeeper might expect to earn £45 a year, though just how much of the £800 he actually receives is uncertain because the division of the expedition’s spoils will be contested through the courts for years to come. Selkirk himself has been away for eight years, one month and three days.

  The successful return of the privateers in October 1711 causes a sensation. There are excited reports that the original investors will make more than 500 per cent profit. Dr Dover, for example, eventually collects £2,755 including ‘storm money’ (£100) and ‘plunder money’ (£24). Tavern gossips savour the tales of desperate battles and the whiff of gunpowder. Educated society picks over the descriptions of strange lands, their plants and animals, and the hitherto unknown customs of their natives. Edward Cooke, Second Captain of the Duchess, quickly publishes a book about his experiences on the expedition, A Voyage to the South Sea. Soon afterwards Woodes Rogers does the same. His volume is entitled A Cruising Voyage Round the World. Both volumes describe the bizarre episode of picking up the solitary islander dressed in his goatskins, and Selkirk becomes a celebrity. The essayist Richard Steele will claim in issue no. 26 of his magazine The Englishman, published on 3 December 1713, that he met and interviewed Selkirk, though this may be a journalistic fabrication. Steele writes that even if he had not known Selkirk’s story before he met him, there was something about the Scotsman’s demeanour which suggests that the man had been ‘much separated from Company’. There was a ‘strong but cheerful seriousness in his Look, and a certain disregard for the ordinary things about him as if he had been sunk in thought.’ Steele makes the point that it must have been an extraordinary experience for a mariner like Selkirk, who had spent his working life in the close company of sailors crammed aboard ship, suddenly to be left to live on his own. Steele also publishes the surprising assertion that Selkirk did not want to be rescued by the Duke and Duchess. All he had wanted to do was to help the sailors with the gift of fresh supplies and send them on their way. According to Steele, now that the Scotsman was back in normal life, he felt he was worse off than when he was on the island. Steele quotes Selkirk as saying, ‘I am now worth 800 Pounds, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a Farthing.’

  Steele has his own reasons for portraying the ‘Governor’ as a disillusioned man: he is promoting the theory that a man is most content when he lives a simple life. According to Steele, Selkirk managed to survive cheerfully on his island with only rudimentary food and shelter and therefore ‘this plain man’s story is a memorable example of that he is happiest who confines his Wants to natural necessities’. Steele underlines his message by claiming that when he met Selkirk in the street some time later, the process had been reversed. Selkirk had re-adapted to society, just as he had grown accustomed to wearing shoes again. Day-to-day contact with people had removed all trace of loneliness, and Steele scarcely recognized him.

  Alexander Selkirk should now have faded into the background. He was not the only mariner to be rescued from a lonely shore and to tell of his adventures, and the remainder of his life was away from the spotlight. He went to Scotland to visit his family and stayed there for about two years, presumably living off his prize money as it was dribbled out to the former crew by the shareholder consortium. By March 1717 he moved to London where he entered into a ‘marriage’ – whether formal or informal is not clear – with a Scottish girl, Sophia Bruce.

  So he was probably in London when advertisements began to appear in the London newspapers, announcing the publication of a romantic novel. The picture on the front page of the book bore a conspicuous resemblance to himself. The engraving was the book’s only illustration and showed a rather melancholy looking man standing on the shore of an island, gazing inland. He is dressed in a goatskin coat belted at the waist over shaggy breeches, his feet and shins are bare, and he has a heavy beard. On his head is an odd-looking conical hat. The man carries a flintlock musket on each shoulder – one more gun than Selkirk possessed – and the barrel of a pistol can just be seen, tucked into his belt. A bowlhilted sword hangs behind him and completes his armament. Even if Selkirk himself did not recognize the resemblance, others certainly did. As far as they were concerned, Alexander Selkirk, former sailing master of the Cinque Ports, was the true-life model for ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe . . . etc. etc. . . .Written by Himself ’.

  *

  IN A DRAWER in a second-floor office in the Old Customs House of Edinburgh lies a small cup. Six inches high, it is shaped like a burgundy glass. But it is not made of glass. The bowl is fashioned from the thin shell of a nut. It has a warm sheen, the colour of cafe au lait, and resembles a small hollow Easter egg, its top neatly sliced off. Someone has scratched a simple chevron pattern around the outside of the bowl with the point of a knife. The stem and base of the cup are of fine rosewood, turned and polished, and were clearly added much later to create the resemblance to a wine goblet. Riveted around the upper rim of the cup is a silver band. It bears the inscription The Cup of Alex. Selkirk whilst in Juan Fernandez 1704–07.

  ‘I think it is genuine,’ said Dr David Caulfield, Curator of Antiquities for the Royal Museum of Scotland. ‘The cup was purchased in the nineteenth century from Alexander Selkirk’s family in Fife. It was bought by a local landowner, who donated it to the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. From there it passed to us.’ The Old Customs House serves as an outbuilding for the Museum, and Dr Caulfield had promptly agreed to my request to see the Selkirk relics. According to the Museum records, the cup was sold by a ‘poor widow’ in the village of Largo, Selkirk’s native place. She was seventy-eight years old and a direct descendant in the fourth generation of Alexander Selkirk, mariner. At the time of the sale the widow claimed that the nut-cup originally possessed a silver stem and base, but these had been removed by her father. ‘I believe that Sir Walter Scott paid for the silver band to be added to the rim, with its inscription,’ continued the curator. ‘I will show you our other piece of Selkirk memorabilia – his sea chest.’

  He led me down to the ground floor and into a bleak stockroom with bare walls and row upon row of what could have been bookcases. Instead of books they held anonymous packages wrapped in dusty plastic sheeting. Packages too big to find space on the shelves had been stacked on the bare cement floor. He pulled aside a plastic sheet. It covered a substantial oblong box, two feet deep, eighteen inches wide, and three feet long. It looked like a large version of the sturdy plywood boxes which children used to take to boarding school to hold their personal possessions, except that its lid was curved instead of flat, and it was made of dark red timber, perhaps mahogany or cedar. The letters A.S., about two inches high, were lightly carved on the front left-hand corner of the battered and scuffed lid. I unfastened the meta
l hasp, and swung up the lid. The impression of a school box was reinforced by the presence of a little side compartment, the place where schoolchildren were required to stow their pens and pencils. There was a yellowing piece of notepaper stuck on the inside of the lid. Written in ink in a sloping hand were the words The Sea Chest which belonged to Alexander Selkirk the prototype of Robinson Crusoe.

  ‘I think the chest could also be genuine,’ said the curator. ‘It was acquired by the same collector, at the same time and from the same source as the drinking cup. Somewhere – though we don’t have it in the Museum – there is also a musket said to be the same one Selkirk used on Juan Fernández. It has the date 1705 carved on the stock. But the gun appears to have been manufactured at a later date, and so it is probably a fake. I seem to recall that there are at least two other “Selkirk muskets” in circulation. Both are supposed to have been the gun he brought back from his island, but they have never been authenticated.’

  I wondered about the sea chest. It seemed too big and bulky to have been taken aboard Woodes Rogers’ ship when Selkirk was rescued from his island, and then to survive the round-the-world voyage. And how had it arrived in Largo intact? If the chest had belonged to Selkirk, then it probably dated from his later days in the Royal Navy. There was a line of four broad arrow marks stamped along the rear edge of the lid. They could have been government stamps, or perhaps they were old museum marks. As for the curious drinking cup, I was puzzled. It was described in the museum catalogues as a ‘coconut shell’. What sort of coconut tree could have provided a nut of that size – only three and a quarter inches deep and two and a half inches in diameter? Did dwarf coconuts grow on the island where Selkirk was marooned? Or was it something he had collected at another landfall on his round-the-world voyage?

  I suspected that there was much more to be learned of Selkirk’s life as a maroon than the testimony provided by one or two souvenirs he brought home with him. If I visited the island where he was stranded, would I find practical details that would throw more light on what really happened to him during those four lonely years? And if I did find those extra details, how many of them, I wondered, would be really echoed in the story of Robinson Crusoe?

  My visit to the Royal Museum of Scotland was the essential first step in a much larger quest. I wanted to examine the truth behind our universal image of the maroon, Robinson Crusoe. My curiosity, I knew, ought to question much more than the single tale of Alexander Selkirk. There were other maroons and castaways who lived through similar adventures at much the same time, men of Selkirk’s period who were also shipwrecked, abandoned, or accidentally stranded in remote locations. Several had written graphic accounts of their escapades. They had described how they had struggled to survive, and how they had tried to escape their predicament. Their stories were less well known than Selkirk’s but they were central to my investigation because their narratives were autobiographical and not, like his, based on second-hand observation. Such tales were yardsticks against which to compare the imaginary world of Robinson Crusoe and, by the same measure, judge Selkirk’s particular experience. Already I had resolved to visit the scenes of their adventures and see those places in the context of being a maroon or a castaway in the early eighteenth century. A goblet made from a coconut and a mysterious dark-red sea chest were only the first clues along the trail.

  *

  DANIEL DEFOE neither denied nor confirmed that Selkirk was the model for his hero in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was a secretive man and busy writing a sequel that would cash in on his novel’s stunning success. Robinson Crusoe was a publishing phenomenon. Readers scrambled to buy it. A second edition appeared within two weeks, and another less than a month later in two versions by two different printers. So by mid- August the authorized publisher had churned out four editions and was farming out the printing and binding to subcontractors in order to harvest maximum sales before imitators began to issue illegal copies. The literary hyenas were quick on the scent. There were at least four bogus versions on the market at year’s end, and a popular journal brazenly began to serialize the novel for its readers in seventy-seven instalments, without asking the author’s permission. Daniel Defoe was soon identified as that author, but he chose not to put his name to the sequel – the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe – which he dashed off in less than four months. By then the leading character had little resemblance to Selkirk. In the second volume Robinson Crusoe pays a short return visit to his island, which is now a prosperous colony, makes several trading trips in the East Indies, and, an old man, comes home by the overland route through China and Siberia. And there was no echo at all of Selkirk in the third and final volume to appear with Robinson Crusoe in its title, as Defoe wrung the last scrap of advantage from his original publishing triumph. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was a dull book of moralizing, and it sank without trace.

  But Part One, with its Strange Surprizing Adventures, continued to delight its readers. They relished the practical details of how Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, manages to build himself a house, grow crops, and live quite comfortably by a mix of inventiveness and hard work. Defoe had a genius for describing his hero’s thoughts and worries, and he made Crusoe so plausible that many of his readers empathized with his hero in his predicament. Friday appears conveniently on the scene just when the narrative might be getting tedious, and there follows plenty of action with battles against cannibals and the arrival of a European ship in the hands of piratical mutineers whom Crusoe outwits and thus manages his escape from the island.

  The book had gone into its fifth edition when Alexander Selkirk died, at the age of forty-seven, on 13 December 1721. Ironically his death took place while his ship was on anti-pirate patrol off the coast of West Africa. The bestseller still carried a drawing of the man in goatskins as its frontispiece, an image which was to become the icon to represent a stranded castaway. And in Serious Reflections the printer had included a map of Crusoe’s island to show the location of the episodes which would become the stock memory of generations of children. Here is Robinson Crusoe with Man Friday standing beside him, both dressed in goatskins. They are on the seashore, muskets on their shoulders, sternly dealing with sailors from a ship anchored in the bay. The sailors may be the mutineers who have seized the vessel, or they may be the law-abiding crew who are appealing to Crusoe for help. In the woodlands behind the two men is a glimpse of a ladder, the entry to the camouflaged stockade which Crusoe laboriously constructs as his refuge. Further inland there is the other stockade, his ‘country bower’, in which reclines his talking parrot, Poll. A banner issues from its mouth with the immortal (and misspelled) line ‘Poor Robin Cruso’. Dotted around the perimeter of the island with its pleasant hills and dales are various bands of cannibals engaged in ghoulish activities – disembowelling a captive before eating him, dancing around their cooking fire with human limbs and scraps dotted behind them and, in the top right-hand corner, fighting their battle when Crusoe attacks them.

  The topography is a helpful fantasy. It is a diagram to assist the reader to follow Robinson on his exploratory walks around his desert island, carrying his gun, with a basket of provisions strapped to his back and sheltered by his great umbrella. It is an island terrain of the imagination. Yet Defoe was at pains to give the impression that the island itself really did exist and was to be found off the coast of South America, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea. The title of the first volume of Crusoe’s adventures brazenly states that it was the memoir of ‘Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account of how he was at last strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’. The text describes how the island is near enough to the mainland for Crusoe to see its mount
ains on the horizon, and the gulf that separates him from the continent is narrow enough for cannibals to paddle across in canoes and regularly hold human feasts on the strand. More precisely, the text states that the island lies at nine degrees and twenty-two minutes north latitude, and the island of Trinidad is visible to the west and north-west. The fourth edition, in early August 1719, even had a world map appearing in the front of the volume and ‘R. Crusoe’s I[sland]’ placed just off the delta of the Orinoco.

  There is no such solid island in the mouth of the Orinoco now. Nor was there one in Defoe’s time. There are only low shoals and shifting banks laid down by silt from the river delta or heaped up by current-driven sand. Robinson Crusoe’s island off the Orinoco is an invention. It is in the same category as the specious claim that the book of his surprizing adventures was written ‘by Himself ’.