Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The strictures of a navy court martial carried no weight with the sponsors of the new expedition, or perhaps they thought that a hot-tempered ex-buccaneer given to thrashing his shipmates was the perfect leader for an enterprise manned by ex-jailbirds and adventurers. Their commander’s irascible behaviour on the first stage of the voyage of the St George and the Cinque Ports reflected his reputation. Again Dampier had a heated row with his senior lieutenant, and again the quarrel ended with the subordinate being ordered off the flagship, this time in the Cape Verde Islands where the unfortunate officer was abruptly set ashore at midnight with his sea chests and his servant, the ship sailing next morning without him. His replacement lasted only as far as the coast of Brazil. A violent quarrel with Dampier ended when the new first lieutenant stormed ashore, accompanied by eight disgruntled sailors from the St George. Just as disruptive, it would turn out, was a change of officers aboard the Cinque Ports. Her original captain, Charles Pickering, died during the Brazilian stopover and was replaced by the twenty-one-year-old first officer. Thomas Stradling was a ‘gentleman mariner’ who kept a monkey as a shipboard pet. This was the man whom Selkirk with his working-class origins and fractious nature would soon come to detest, and he was not alone. By the time the Cinque Ports dropped anchor at Juan Fernández, the entire crew of forty-two men was at loggerheads with Stradling and walked off the galley, leaving only the captain aboard with his monkey.

  Dampier arrived at the island two days later with the St George and with his reputation as a skilled navigator badly dented. He had been to Juan Fernández on two previous occasions in the company of buccaneers, yet according to Funnell the famous navigator failed to recognize the island when it came in sight from the masthead. He mistook it for another island and wasted a couple of days sailing in the wrong direction, looking for the real Juan Fernández. Realizing his error, Dampier eventually doubled back, only to compound his mistake by putting in at the treacherous anchorage at Puerto Ingle´s. No explanation is given for this erratic conduct, but Funnell, who had come to dislike his captain and was making notes for a very caustic description of the expedition, leaves no doubt that in his opinion William Dampier was overfond of strong drink. Eventually the St George shifted to the safer anchorage at Cumberland Bay, and Dampier cajoled Stradling’s men into ending their strike. Funnell does not say how this was achieved, but according to his biographer, Dampier’s ‘highest idea of discipline was calling his subordinate officers “rogues, rascals, or sons of bitches.” ’

  The element of farce continued. It was customary after the long and arduous passage around the Horn to unload the battered ships, put as much of the gear and cargo as possible ashore on the beach at Cumberland Bay, clean and disinfect the hulls, make good any damaged spars and rigging, and generally put the vessels in good order. The men of St George and Cinque Ports were halfway through this routine when their lookouts spotted a strange sail on the horizon. A hectic scramble followed as the men rushed to get back aboard. There was wild speculation whether the strange sail could be a Spanish warship that must be intercepted or a passing merchantman to be plundered. Either way, the distant vessel should be no match for the two well-armed English vessels. The embarkation became a burlesque. In their haste to make sail, Dampier and his people left behind five men ‘who were gone to the west part of the island and knew nothing of our going out against the Enemy.’ They also abandoned a miscellany of various anchors, ropes, water casks and ‘a Tun of Sea-Lions Oyl’ with other stores scattered on the beach. The St George slipped her cable, leaving one of her boats, the longboat, attached to the anchor rope as a marker. Her second boat, the launch, was taken along in tow, but during the chase it was towed under and had to be cut loose and was lost. The Cinque Ports also hoisted sail in such a hurry that Stradling’s men omitted to retrieve a small boat which was tied up behind the galley. By the time the ship was under way, it was either impossible to pull this tender against the flow of water, or it had been forgotten in the pandemonium. The ship hurried on until the strain on the towrope increased and the towrope broke. The tender drifted free with its occupants – a sailor and a dog. Neither Stradling nor Selkirk his sailing master gave the order to turn back to pick them up.

  By 11 p.m. the privateers had caught up with their quarry, only to discover that they had set upon a prickly opponent. The strange vessel was a well-armed French merchantman, the 400-ton St Joseph with thirty-six guns, and – though the privateers did not know it at the time – one of a three-ship squadron in the area. In daylight the following morning the two privateers closed in for the attack in characteristically bungling fashion. The St George sailed into the way of the Cinque Ports, impeding her line of fire. The French captain noted that ‘the smallest of the two [privateers] fired but eight or ten guns at him and then fell astern, and did not come up again during the fight, as he believed, for want of wind.’ This was the Cinque Ports, the galley supposed to be ideal for these calm conditions, and Stradling’s faint-hearted action cannot have endeared him to Selkirk and the rest of his crew.

  Meanwhile the St George managed to close with the enemy and began to exchange cannon fire. The two ships, reported the French captain, then ‘fought . . . broadside and broadside for more than six hours’ and his own crew took heavy casualties, with many killed and at least thirty-two men badly wounded. Nine men aboard the St George lost their lives. Then, just when it seemed that the Frenchman was about to surrender, Dampier abruptly ordered the attack to be broken off. He later made the excuse that his crew was still weak from their ocean voyage and many of them had fled below decks in fright. Funnell, by contrast, said that it was Dampier who was the coward, and his crew had urged him to finish off the fight. John Welbe, another of Dampier’s crew, agreed with Funnell’s assessment. Dampier spent most of the action cowering ‘upon the Quarter-Deck behind a good Barricado which he had order’d to be made of Beds, Rugs, Pillows, Blankets etc.’ In this spirit of mutual acrimony the two ships turned back to Juan Fernández.

  Luckily for the drifting sailor and the dog, the remaining two ships of the French squadron had now arrived off Juan Fernández, seen the loose ship’s boat, and rescued the castaways. They then proceeded to Cumberland Bay, where they found the ships’ stores abandoned by the English expedition and helped themselves. They also seized three of the five men who had been marooned, though the other two managed to run away and hide. So when Dampier and Stradling returned to the island, they found the French in occupation. The Cinque Ports crept in under oars to investigate and was met with gunfire and hastily retreated. Dampier decided that the Frenchmen would be difficult to dislodge, and, regretting the loss of the ships’ stores, sailed off to begin his campaign on the mainland. He had added two more men to the growing list of maroons abandoned willy-nilly on Juan Fernández.

  *

  THE FRENCH SHIPS had long since left Cumberland Bay when the Cinque Ports eventually limped back to Juan Fernández for repairs. Now the galley was cruising on her own. In the intervening six months Dampier had succeeded in alienating most of his officers, Stradling had parted company with the expedition commander, and Selkirk’s dislike of his young captain had deepened. The main reason for his hostility was the one that bedevilled so many piratical enterprises: the division of booty. The Cinque Ports had captured a Spanish vessel, Ascensión, and Selkirk felt he had not received his fair share of the plunder. He was already thinking of leaving the ship. Arriving back at the island, the Cinque Ports found the two men who had managed to escape the French. The refugees were fit and well, and their experiences on the island must have influenced Selkirk’s decision to stay on. If the two men had managed to survive for half a year, then so could he. Of one thing Selkirk could be certain – when he told his captain that he intended to stay behind on the island while the Cinque Ports sailed away to continue her privateering cruise, Stradling would raise no objection. Selkirk would be just another in a succession of men left behind.

  The items that Selkirk took ash
ore suggest that he left with his commander’s tacit agreement, if not encouragement. ‘He had with him his clothes and bedding,’ wrote Woodes Rogers, ‘with a fire lock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instrument and books.’ The cooking pot and hatchet and gunpowder would have come from ship’s stores with Stradling’s permission, and possibly the firelock as well. Richard Steele the essayist adds that Selkirk also took ‘a Sea Chest’ – and this lends some support to the idea that the sea chest now stored in the Royal Museum of Scotland is Selkirk’s. Also, according to Steele, Selkirk has – and ‘a large quantity of Bullets’ but only a pound of gunpowder. So either Stradling was being parsimonious or Selkirk was not intending to do much hunting, or, perhaps most likely, the galley was running low on this essential privateering material. Selkirk actually had more tobacco, ‘a few pounds’, than gunpowder.

  The remainder of his kit was his personal property – his clothes and bedding, a flint and steel, his knife, and his ‘mathematical instruments’. These last would have included some sort of anglemeasuring instrument, most likely the device known as a navigator’s backstaff, which Selkirk normally used for taking sun, moon, and star sights. As sailing master he would then establish a ship’s latitude position by collating the results against the columns of figures in what Steele called his ‘Pieces that concerned Navigation’, his books of navigation tables. These Selkirk also took off the galley with him, possibly also a sandglass for measuring the pace at which a logline ran out from the stern of a vessel and thus calculating the vessel’s speed, and a ‘perspective glass’ or telescope. Together they were the tools of Selkirk’s trade and, with the exception of the telescope, were useless to him while he was on the island. But they would make him a very welcome recruit to any vessel that happened to call at Juan Fernández. Few captains would miss the chance to take on board a navigator who came so ready equipped. By every indication Selkirk was expecting to stay on the island for only a short time. He may even have anticipated that he would be able to leave before his gunpowder or his tobacco ran out. He cannot have anticipated that his sojourn would drag on for four years and four months.

  In a final gesture of meanness Stradling, according to Steele, gave Selkirk only enough food to last just two meals. After that he would have to forage.

  The ease of catching fish at Juan Fernández had been renowned since the time of Le Maire’s visit. Shoals of mackerel, cod, rock salmon, tuna and vidriola feed in the rich waters off the island, particularly the north-east corner, and the Dutch had taken two tons of fish in a single day. Yet there is no mention that Selkirk took with him a net or any hooks and lines. Perhaps he planned to spear fish in the shallows or expected to live off shellfish collected along the shore. This required no equipment. But Selkirk soon found that he was relying so much on catching and cooking the ever-present crayfish that he grew sick of the taste. Steele maintains that the Scotsman ‘found great quantities of Turtles, whose flesh is extremely delicious, and of which he ate very plentifully on his first Arrival, till it grew disagreeable to his Stomach, except in Jellies.’ Steele was wrong. Turtles are not found on Juan Fernández, and Steele was confusing turtles with the langostas. It was a natural mistake, as we shall see, because turtles were the customary food of castaways and maroons.

  Expecting a short stay, Selkirk made little attempt to order his daily life or plan for the future. He ate casually, only when he was hungry, and he stayed up late into the nights tending a fire to keep it burning brightly. He discovered that the wood of the ‘pimento trees’, Myrceugenia fernandeziana, burns with a radiant steady flame. It served him ‘both for firing and candle, and refreshed him with its fragrant smell’. Woodes Rogers also claimed that Selkirk ignited his fire by rubbing two pimento sticks together. This seems unlikely as the firelock on his musket would have served the same purpose, even if he did not have the flint and steel that Steele lists as part of his equipment. A man who does not go hunting nor builds a permanent shelter, but walks the beach to gather ‘lobsters’ and sits through the night tending a bright fire, is a man who does not expect to stay long. For those first few weeks Selkirk was biding time, keeping a beacon alight, and expecting to be picked up soon by the next passing ship.

  Gradually, as no ship appeared, he began to grow despondent. The weeks of solitude lengthened into months, and still no pickup came. It was at this stage that he became deeply depressed and morbid, oppressed by a growing sense of loneliness. ‘The Necessities of Hunger and Thirst were his greatest Diversions from the Reflection on his lonely Condition’, wrote Steele. ‘When these Appetites were satisfied, the Desire of Society became as strong a Call upon him . . . he grew dejected, languid, and melancholy, scarcely able to refrain from doing himself Violence’. Woodes Rogers adds that Selkirk ‘had much ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror of being left alone in such a desolate place’ and it took him eight months to come to terms with his predicament. According to Steele it was even longer, eighteen months, before Selkirk regained his mental equilibrium and his gloom was enhanced by ‘Monsters of the Deep which frequently lay on the Shore [and] added to the Terrors of his Solitude; the dreadful Howlings and Voices seemed too terrible for human Ears.’

  These fanciful ‘Monsters of the Deep’ were the enormous herds of fur seals and elephant seals which congregated at the island. There were so many of these animals – at least 3 million fur seals according to a calculation for 1793 – that it was difficult to find enough space between their recumbent bodies to walk along the shoreline. ‘They lay about in Flocks like Sheep, the Young-ones bleating like Lambs,’ was how Edward Cooke put it. ‘Some of the Sea Lions [more probably bull fur seals] are as big as our English Oxen and roar like Lions . . . both the Seels and Lions are so thick on the shore that we are forced to drive them away before we could land, being so numerous that it is scarcely credible to those who have not seen them.’ The never-ending roaring, moaning and grumbling of these animals was Selkirk’s torment, not any fear of physical harm. Buccaneers and privateers were long since used to the animals, and for amusement had developed a particularly cruel sport. Forming a circle around a cumbersome elephant seal they would ‘prick’ the beast with half-pikes and then jump back as the animal tried to retaliate or lumber away. The coup de grâce was a pistol ball fired down the animal’s throat at close range.

  It was a sign of Selkirk’s return to normalcy when he began to crop the herds of seals for food. As soon as he was ‘unruffled in himself’ says Steele, ‘he killed them with the greatest ease imaginable . . . For observing that though their Jaws and Tails were so terrible, yet the animals being mighty slow in working themselves round, he had nothing to do but place themselves exactly opposite to their Middle and as close to them as possible, and he despatched them with his hatchet at will.’ A lusty fur seal, observed Cooke with a butcher’s eye, ‘cut near a foot in the fat.’

  The wildlife of the island posed no threat to Selkirk. ‘We saw no venomous or savage creatures on the island,’ Woodes Rogers notes, ‘nor any other sort of beasts but goats.’ The most noxious creatures were hordes of rats which had hitchhiked there aboard visiting ships. They were genuine pests, fearless and hungry, and they bit Selkirk’s feet as he slept and they chewed on his goatskin clothes. In defence he befriended a number of the wild cats which lived on the island. They were also refugees from visiting ships, and, wrote Funnell, ‘of the finest colour I ever saw’. There were so many of these cats that Selkirk began by treating them as just as much a nuisance as the rats. But when the rat infestation became unbearable, he began to attract the cats with titbits of goat flesh until they took up residence in and around his huts and soon disposed of the rat problem. ‘He fed and tamed numbers of young Kitlings who lay about his bed, and preserved him from his Enemy,’ observed Steele; ‘hundreds’ of cats ‘would lie about him’ according to Woodes Rogers, who also created the celebrated conceit that Selkirk taught the ca
ts and tame young goats to dance with him as a diversion, though it was probably nothing more than the Scotsman singing and dancing to himself while his tame menagerie looked on.

  Oddly, Selkirk found no dogs on the island to domesticate as his companions. Dogs were often carried aboard ships which called at the island; there was the dog in the boat which broke adrift from the stern of the Cinque Ports, and the Duke arrived with a bulldog aboard which Woodes Rogers sent ashore to help the men hunt goats. More surprisingly, no dogs remained of the fierce mastiffs that it had been Spanish policy to release on the island. The most recent release had been just fifteen years earlier, when Admiral Antonio de Vea of the Flota del Sur had made a sweep of the area. The theory was that the marooned dogs would attack the goats as food and exterminate them. This in turn would deny the buccaneers and pirates an important source of rations. But the theory did not work. The mastiffs died, and the goats survived. Prior to Selkirk’s visit, nearly every buccaneer who came to the island reported finding an abundance of goats, and there are no reports of wild dogs, though Funnell had heard rumours that the Spaniards had deliberately released dogs with rabies.

  Technically, the climate of Juan Fernández is Mediterranean, but Selkirk must often have been reminded of his native Scotland. The island weather is damp, windy, and fickle. The overpowering influence is the surrounding ocean. Its weather system brings over forty inches of rain each year, and although the average temperature is a mild 15°, the daily conditions veer abruptly from warm sunshine to gusts of cold wind and rain showers. Selkirk came ashore in the best of the weather, in October when the summer dry season is beginning. But there are still showers and damp, muggy days, and he was in a place where the sun shines for less than 40 per cent of the daylight hours and the relative humidity is high. In this environment it is difficult to keep anything properly dry without decent shelter. Yet Selkirk constructed only a rudimentary lodging – two huts made of pimento branches, covered with grass and lined with goatskins. Once again, he did the minimum, only enough to tide him over until he could leave.