Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Section by section, the carpenter and his team persevered. They kept working at the shape and fit they needed, using the makeshift tools and stubborn timber. It took them ‘constant labour and a variety of contrivances, [until] we patch’d her up in such a manner that I dare say the like was never seen, and I may safely affirm that such a bottom never swam on the surface of the sea before.’

  Now that the escape boat was nearly planked up, Shelvocke turned his attention to laying in a stock of food for the forthcoming voyage of deliverance. From the Speedwell’s stores they had kept the emergency ration of one cask of beef and five or six bushels of cassava flour. But this was nothing like sufficient food for the number of men the boat was expected to carry. The rations would last no more than four or five days, enough to bring them directly to the coast of Chile where they would have to force a landing and hope to seize more supplies. But Shelvocke wanted to keep his options open. It would be better if the boat could stay at sea, proceeding along the mainland coast until they found an undefended target, or even intercept a Spanish ship off guard and loaded with supplies.

  But without salt the men found it impossible to cure the fish and seal meat that ships normally carried away from the island as ‘sea stock’. They made various experiments to preserve their catch, but nothing succeeded until they discovered a way to conserve the flesh of conger eel. First they removed the eel’s backbone, then dipped the meat in sea water and afterwards hung up the strips of flesh in the thick smoke of a fire. This combination of pickling and smoking conserved the conger eel meat sufficiently for their purpose.

  In camp there was an increasing expectation that the plan of evacuation would succeed. The cooper checked and sealed water casks, the sailmaker’s team re-cut and sewed the Speedwell’s old canvas to make a fresh suit of sails, and the boatswain’s team picked apart her old ropes, spun and relaid the yarn, and spliced rigging for the new vessel. Lieutenant Brooks was now so fully committed to the escape plan that he went out to the Speedwell’s hulk to see what else might be usefully recovered. The wreck was now largely underwater but Brooks was a trained diver, the only one in the crew. He succeeded in locating two pieces of a large church candlestick ‘which was part of the Gentlemen Owners plate’ and – more important – a small gun which had been mounted on the Speedwell’s quarter as part of her armament. Brooks managed to get a line attached to the gun, and lifting it with the help of a float, buoyed the weapon and brought it ashore to be fitted to the rescue vessel.

  The final and most problematic stage of the boatbuilding had now arrived: the caulking of the hull. This was the process when lengths of fibre, stripped from old rope or made up from twists of cloth or even vegetable matter, would have to be pushed into the crevices between the planks to make the hull watertight. Shelvocke had low expectations. He knew that the earlier work had been very awkward, the tools makeshift, and the workmen were not professional shipwrights. It was impossible that the hull would be tight. The workmen tried caulking the hull as best they could, then poured water into the boat to check the result. He was not surprised that a cry went up: ‘A Sieve! A Sieve!’ Water was gushing from dozens of leaks in the hull. It required the last reserves of optimism for the workmen to return to the tedious chore of locating and plugging each leak, one by one, until the hull seemed watertight. As a precaution Shelvocke asked the cooper if he had sufficient materials to make every man a wooden bucket to bail with.

  The next spring tide, the best moment to attempt to launch their vessel, was on 5 October, more than four months since the Speedwell was lost. The cooper had his water barrels on hand to be filled with fresh water from the stream that trickled out through the boulders near the building site, and the eel fishermen had outdone themselves. They had prepared a massive supply of 2,300 smoked conger eels, each weighing about a pound, with sixty gallons of seal oil to fry them in.

  The launch team assembled on the beach, and the keel blocks were knocked away. The hull should have settled down on the chocks placed to receive her, but there was one last, heart-stopping hitch. The hull came down awkwardly, and the chocks shifted. The stern dropped heavily on to the shingle. For a moment Shelvocke feared that the boat was irretrievably stuck and that all was lost. It was the same black disappointment that Robinson Crusoe felt when he found that after months of labour carving a dugout canoe from a large tree trunk, his vessel was too awkwardly placed and heavy to get into the water.

  But Shelvocke’s vessel was not stuck as fast as he had feared. The carpenter had built the boat with her bow toward the sea, and by lacing a cradle of ropes and tackles around her stern, the launch team was able to break the inertia. Before the tide had retreated, the castaways succeeded in dragging their creation into water enough to make her float. For an anchor they had only a rope attached to a heavy boulder, and remembering how the Speedwell had been driven ashore in that same bay, they knew they should not delay for an instant. The fresh water and stores were loaded that day, and by next morning she was ready to set sail. Shelvocke was immensely proud of what he saw as his masterpiece: ‘She had two masts and was about 20 tons burthen, and to my great satisfaction, found that one pump, constantly working kept her free.’

  A hundred and thirty-four days of miseries, mishaps, mutinies, bribes, and intermittent labour had produced the means of escape for the castaways. With a fine dramatic sense Shelvocke named her – Recovery.

  *

  THE SMALL BOAT was an extraordinary sight. More than forty men were crammed together so tightly that they had to lie on the bundles of smoked eels and ‘being in no method of keeping themselves clean, all our senses were as much offended as possible’. To add to the squalor they had with them the four hogs, which had been kept alive on Juan Fernández by being fed putrid seal carcasses. To drink, the men sucked fresh water from the water butts through a musket barrel passed from hand to hand. Food was rationed to one eel per man per day, and there were frequent quarrels over extra scraps.

  This noxious crew of ruffians prowled the coastal shipping route of Peru in search of a better vessel. After several thwarted attacks, they succeeded in capturing a ship four times larger than their own – the 200-ton merchantman Jesu Maria. The Spanish captain offered to raise a 16,000-dollar ransom if he could retain his ship, but – for once – Shelvocke turned down the cash. He transferred his men and booty to the captured prize, and left the unlucky Spaniards to find their way to port aboard the frail Recovery. Meanwhile he sailed off in his new command which, with his flair for words, he renamed Happy Return. To the surprise of both captains he encountered his former commander, John Clipperton, cruising in the Success off the coast of Central America. The last time they had seen one another was two years earlier in the English Channel. It was a frosty meeting. Clipperton demanded that Shelvocke and his crew hand over the Owners’ share of plunder. But it had already been distributed under the ‘Jamaican discipline’. Shelvocke refused, and he and Clipperton sailed in company for only a few weeks.

  Shelvocke and his band next captured a valuable prize, the 300-ton Sacra Familia, only to learn that peace had been declared between Spain and England and therefore their letter of marque was invalid. Undeterred they made off with their catch and soon afterwards took another Spanish ship, La Conceptión. This time Shelvocke used the excuse that he had been attacked first. He claimed that he had approached the Spanish ship to ask for a pilot, and had been fired on when he hoisted the English flag. Naturally he had to fire back, and the encounter ended with Shelvocke’s men boarding and ransacking the Concepción of more than 100,000 dollars in coin. They released the prisoners only after they had agreed to sign a document to say that Shelvocke had acted in self-defence.

  Shelvocke now wisely made his exit from the South Seas. He took the Sacra Familia across the Pacific to China where he sold her in Canton for cash to be divided among the crew. But he seems to have hoodwinked them by entering into a fraudulent arrangement with the Chinese customs officials. The Sacra Familia was sold
for £700 but her customs dues had been officially calculated at £2,000. The gross disparity between what Shelvocke claimed he paid the Chinese in customs dues and the real value of the vessel would indicate that part of the customs money must have found its way back into Shelvocke’s pocket. Without a ship and with a personal profit of at least £7,000, he landed in England on 30 July 1722 accompanied by his son George. He had been away three years and seven months. Of the original 106 men who had sailed out from Plymouth aboard the Speedwell only 33 were left.

  When Shelvocke called on his former mentor, Edward Hughes, he was arrested. Hughes was acting on information received from Betagh, who had come home almost a year earlier and denounced Shelvocke as a fraudster. Hughes, as an investor in the original endeavour, was determined to bring Shelvocke before the courts to extract his share of any plunder. At the same time the Spanish Ambassador demanded that Shelvocke be tried for piracy. Shelvocke slipped adroitly through their fingers. He was acquitted of the piracy charge through lack of evidence, and while Hughes’ court case was pending he escaped from the King’s Bench Prison, ‘probably through bribery’ according to his official biography. He vanished. Betagh believed that Shelvocke fled abroad with his ill-gotten gains, escaping before a writ could be served on him with a penalty of £8,000 if he fled the kingdom. Yet less than two years later Shelvocke coolly surfaced again. He presented a copy of his journal to the Admiralty, and soon afterwards published his story as a successful book which Betagh furiously denounced as ‘the most absurd false narrative that was ever deliver’d to the publick’. It opened with a brazen dedication to the Board of the Admiralty. Shelvocke also put his son George on the first rungs of a respectable career in government service. When Captain George Shelvocke died in 1742 at the age of sixty-six his son had risen to become Secretary to the General Post Office. Thus the old sea officer was able to spend his last days at his son’s official residence, a substantial London townhouse, where the retired sailor and self-promoting adventurer was, to all appearances, a senior and reputable citizen.

  Rascal, humbug and knave, George Shelvocke was nevertheless the only Juan Fernández castaway who succeeded in getting himself and his companions off the island by their own efforts. His version of events on the island is not the ‘just History of Fact’ which Defoe claims, tongue in cheek, for Robinson Crusoe’s story. Every paragraph of Shelvocke’s narrative betrays vanity, self-interest and mendacity. Yet he was the driving force which created the Recovery, and it was a remarkable achievement. Sadly, Robert Davenport the surly carpenter and John Popplestone the hard-working multi-talented armourer both died on the trans-Pacific passage so neither got to enjoy the dividend they were awarded from the capture of the Concepción – £880 for Davenport, and £660 for Popplestone. Shelvocke, by contrast, had a charmed life. He may have protested loudly about his tribulations on Juan Fernández, pleading that he was insulted by his men, half-starved, and the victim of one plot after another, but he actually enjoyed some of his time there. It is clear that he was very closely involved in the building of the Recovery, and took great pride in the little ship. His description of the building process, stage by stage, is by a man who knew a great deal about boatbuilding. Almost as an aside, he mentions that there came a time when he was working alongside the carpenter and his team. A reduced diet and hard work, he proudly states, meant that he ‘became one of the strongest and most active men on the island, from being very corpulent and almost crippled with Gout.’ His stay on Juan Fernández did him good.

  Not everyone had Shelvocke’s confidence in the Recovery. When the little ship was about to set out on her perilous passage toward the mainland, Shelvocke contacted the gang of a dozen renegades who had been skulking in the bush. But none of them would risk going aboard the overcrowded vessel. They declared that ‘they were not yet prepared for the other world’ and chose to stay on the island. They were joined by ‘the like number of Blacks and Indians’ who had no choice. They were discarded so as to leave more room aboard the escape vessel.

  These two dozen men were the last known maroons to have been living on Juan Fernández during Daniel Defoe’s lifetime. Their tenure of the island was brief. That summer the Spaniards must have come and removed them, because a Dutch squadron visited the island the next year and found the place again deserted. The Dutch revictualled at the island and sailed away leaving one man buried there. He fell to his death while climbing in the mountains. The tragedy recalled Shelvocke’s memories of the alarming hours of darkness – and Robinson Crusoe’s gloomy thoughts and night-time fears – when ‘nothing can be conceived more dismally solemn than to hear the silence of the still night destroyed by the surf of the sea beating against the shore, together with the violent roaring of the sea lions repeated all around by the echoes of deep vallies, the incessant howling of the seals.’ To these dismal noises, wrote Shelvocke, must be added ‘the sudden precipitate rumbling of trees down steep descents; for there is hardly a gust of wind stirring that does not tear up a great many trees by the roots, which have but a slight hold on the earth especially near the brinks of precipices. All these, or any of these frightful noises would be sufficient to prevent the repose of any who had not been for some time inured to it.’

  Today, the sounds of the island provide a link with the days of the maroons. The thrash and suck of the waves on the rocky shore, the incessant uproar of the sea colonies, the rustle of the wind through the brushwood on the higher slopes, and a great empty echoing of the wind across the high ridges are the same sounds they heard. The movements of cloud shadows on the slopes, the colours of the vegetation, the vast prospect of the ocean in every direction are the sights they saw every day they lived there. Yet the timelessness of these links leaves a feeling that the brief visits of the maroons and castaways are paltry events in the long history of the island. They have left no physical trace. The island flicked off its puny visitors like a large animal shivering its skin to remove a tiny insect. Indeed, Juan Fernández Island is constantly shedding its skin. The mantle of volcanic soil is forever sliding and slipping down towards the ocean edge. It carries away the particles and remnants of human occupation. The pace of erosion is visible. Gulleys appear overnight in the soil; a signpost hammered into the soil grows taller each month as the soil around it is blown or washed away, a waterpipe laid on the soil is exposed six inches above the ground within three or four years. There is a slow but constant erasing of human endeavour.

  Only names survive. ‘Crusoe’s Cave’ and ‘Selkirk’s Lookout’ are there to evoke the past. So too are the ultimate accolades – Isla Robinson Crusoe and Isla Alejandro Selkirk. But there is no mention of the true castaways – Shelvocke and the crew of the wrecked Speedwell. Nor is there a memorial to remind the visitor that the island was home to another maroon who was as real as Selkirk, and almost as famous as Robinson Crusoe – Man Friday.

  Chapter Three

  MOSKITO MAN

  D. Friday and Crusoe finally leave their island.

  THE BACHELOR’S DELIGHT found Man Friday on a Sunday.

  It was 23 March 1684. The model for Defoe’s native hero had been on Juan Fernández, marooned and solitary, for more than three years. Yet he was remarkably nonchalant when the landing party from the Batchelor’s Delight stepped ashore and ended his long solitude. He greeted the piratical crew as if he had been expecting them, and he had a meal ready – three goats cooked with some white leaves of cabbage palm. It was as though they had come to the island with the express intention of finding him, and he thanked them graciously. In a sense, he was right to do so.

  Man Friday’s story is in the fourth chapter of the richly bound volume that the ex-buccaneer William Dampier, the pilot of the vessel which rescued Alexander Selkirk, holds, spine towards the artist, in his portrait by Thomas Murray. When Murray painted the picture, the book was an obvious prop. Dampier’s A New Voyage round the World had recently been published, and so great was demand that three editions were printed in the first year, 1697
. Its far-travelled author was the talk of London society. Dampier’s true-life mix of first-hand adventure, travel and geography was so exotic that it was natural that Defoe, twenty-two years later, would take inspiration from his absorbing tale. Defoe’s concept of Man Friday was to be shaped by events that Dampier witnessed, beginning on the shores of the Caribbean in the spring of 1680.

  A flotilla of seven small ships was anchored in the lee of Golden Island, a tiny island as the Caribbean side of the isthmus of Panama, close to Cape Tiburon. The anchorage is a few miles north of what is now the border between Colombia and Panama, and was a favourite rendezvous for pirates, or as their unofficial historian A. O. Exquemelin called them more genteelly, buccaneers. Three hundred and thirty-one heavily armed men had disembarked, ready for a route march into the rainforest. The standard equipment each man carried was a ‘fuzee, pistol and hanger’; that is, a musket, a hand gun, and a short sword or cutlass suspended from the belt. Many wore ‘snapsacks’ on their backs to carry their spare clothing, gunpowder and shot. The ships’ cooks had made three or four ‘doughboys’, small loaves of bread, for each man as his marching rations. For water they anticipated drinking from the numerous streams which drain the mist-covered mountains that lay ahead of them.