by Tim Severin
At that same moment the two rangers, Will Ritch and Bill Tibbetts, were lying in the remnants of the hut they had salvaged from the destruction of ‘the ’32 Storm’. They had survived by taking shelter behind an empty thirty-gallon beef cask placed just below the crest of the highest dune on the lee side. For twelve hours they had sat there on the sand, arms clasped around their knees, while the hurricane blasted over them. The wind, the clouds, the rain, the sandstorm, the spume had combined to darken the sky so that they did not know whether it was day or night. When the storm passed over, they had emerged stiffly to find that the cay had been flailed bare. Hundreds of tons of guano that had covered parts of the island – the fertilizer they had come to collect – had simply been washed away. There was nothing left. The big shed where they stowed the guano sacks and the collected eggs had been flattened. There were no birds. The noddies, thousands upon thousands of them, had simply been blasted away by the gale like spindrift. Only a few boobies were left, and they had been buried alive. Here and there the beaks of boobies were sticking up from the sand, moving feebly. ‘We pulled all we could out of the sand,’ Ritch remembered, ‘and let them fly away, fly again, but most of them died there, buried alive.’
Their little hut, their living accommodation, was wrecked. The roof had been torn off and lay half buried in a dune. Fortunately the two rangers had shovels left over from their guano work, and they used them to dig out the sand, burrowing under the fallen roof to make a small cave. They cleared enough room for a single cot and space for the second man to sleep on the floor. Food was not a problem. They located the big galvanized tins that contained their stores. They were intact. The storm surge had contaminated the fresh water well with salt water, but not permanently. The two rangers cleared the well of storm-blown sand, and extracted enough brackish water to boil up a fish stew for their first meal. Later, the rain would wash out the salt and filter into the well, restoring the fresh water supply. The two rangers settled down to wait until they were picked up by their mother ship but wondered what had happened to the Managuan. They doubted that the vessel would have survived the storm.
Bill Tibbetts was stretched out on the cot and Will Ritch, as his junior, was lying on the ground inside the little shelter they had excavated. It was so cramped that Tibbetts’ feet were almost sticking out of the low entrance which served as their doorway. They were both awake in the small hours of that morning when Andrew Powery was washed up on the beach. ‘This night,’ recalled Ritch, ‘we were talking about ghosts, of all things, and pirates, and all kinds of treasures, and all that stuff.’ The moonlight shining in through the doorway was suddenly blocked by a shadow. With his head full of ghost stories, Ritch was petrified. There was so little space in the shelter, he could not scramble clear. He lay there in fright. ‘Are you alive or are you dead?’ he croaked. A voice replied, ‘Have you got any water?’ ‘Are you alive or are you dead?’ demanded Ritch again. ‘Well, I’m alive, but just about,’ came the answer. ‘Well, who are you?’ asked Ritch, and the voice said, ‘Andrew Powery.’
*
‘I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN my father as a very strong man,’ said Clarens, proudly patting her father’s shoulder. ‘He’s called one of the iron men in Caymans. He’s always so strong and could carry so many heavy loads. He would always pick up anything. Extra-heavy loads. He is one of the bravest men you have ever known, a real good man.’
I looked at the gaunt figure of Andrew Powery. He was a reminder of an era that was almost unimaginable in the context of modern Cayman with its cruise liners and more than 500 offshore banks.
I asked Andrew what he thought had kept him alive during the ordeal on the Serrana Cays. He did not reply immediately. He had slipped off into an old man’s reverie. Clarens repeated the question, pitching her voice in a way that she knew would make her father respond. He had no hesitation in his reply.
‘I know the Lord. He done nothing against me. He treated me fine. He kept the sharks from me. He kept me from drowning. He kept me life. Because it was just as easy to be drowned, just as easy for the sharks to eat me . . . I went off the reef a couple of times, and I was down in the ocean and couldn’t see a thing. Couldn’t see nothing of shore at all. That’s me out in the ocean. Ooooh yes . . . God respect me. You can believe that.’
His piety was worthy of God-fearing Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s novel. I reached over and took Andrew Powery’s hand. It was half as large again as mine. The skin was mottled with age, the bones of the fingers showed clearly, but his grasp was steady. I gave his hand a squeeze of appreciation. I thought it was the best way to express my admiration and gratitude. My circuit of the Caribbean in Ziska had provided me with an island and a maroon, Salt Tortuga and Henry Pitman, who were conspicuous candidates for the genesis of Robinson Crusoe. Andrew Powery had informed me what it was like to be cast away.
Chapter Six
CRUSOE FOUND
G. Crusoe returns to England to tell his tale.
‘THE SEA CHEST which belonged to Alexander Selkirk the prototype of Robinson Crusoe’. They were the words on the museum label glued to the lid of the seaman’s trunk in the stock room of the Royal Museum of Scotland, the place where I had begun my journey of investigation. Now I had more than a suspicion that the label’s long-accepted message fell short of the truth.
Also in the museum is the little silver-banded coconut goblet which, it was said, Selkirk had used as his drinking cup during his lonely exile. Maybe he did so. But after visiting Juan Fernández Island where Selkirk spent his four-year self-exile, I now knew that coconuts do not grow on Juan Fernández. If he had the little cup with him, then he brought it from somewhere else.
Alexander Selkirk, I was fairly sure, was not the prototype for Robinson Crusoe. He was the inspiration. The prototype was someone else.
Ultimately Crusoe springs from Defoe’s own imagination. Like the novelists who followed him, Defoe got his raw material by observing, listening, reading. He almost certainly took material from the accounts of the two ship’s officers aboard the Duke and Duchess who were present when Selkirk was collected from Juan Fernández, Woodes Rogers and Edward Cooke. The sensational story of Alexander Selkirk would probably have triggered the idea for Robinson Crusoe in the mind of Daniel Defoe. Selkirk was famous, and the salient details of his adventure – the goatskin clothes, the menagerie of cats and goats, his nickname as ‘Governor’ of his island – are reflected in the story of Robinson Crusoe. Yet everything that Daniel Defoe knew about Selkirk he had come by at second-hand, and there was not much: a few paragraphs in the voyage narratives of Woodes Rogers and Cooke and a commentary by Steele the essayist who may have met and interviewed the truculent sailing master of the Cinque Ports galley. Selkirk never wrote a book himself. Nor has any evidence come to light that Defoe ever met Selkirk face to face and talked to him to glean the extra details and the local colour which embellish the Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
The surly Scots sailor remains a silent and inadequate model for Defoe’s hero. Crusoe’s resourcefulness, the central strand of his character, is completely alien to Selkirk, who did little more than build huts, capture goats, and wait for rescue. Making pottery, planting crops, building a small boat, encountering cannibals, rescuing Man Friday – there is so much in Crusoe’s tale that has no equivalent in the history of Alexander Selkirk. He was on a temperate island far off the coast of South America while Crusoe is cast away within sight of the Spanish Main in a Caribbean context. My own travels to Juan Fernández had underscored how very far ‘Crusoe’s island’ is in both imagination and reality from the place where Alexander Selkirk lived by himself for four years and four months.
By contrast Henry Pitman did write his little book, and it contains far more about life as a maroon than Defoe could have extracted from second-hand reports of Alexander Selkirk’s experiences. Also Pitman’s adventures took place in the Caribbean on an island within sight of the mainland, as did Crusoe’s exile; in Pitman’s
book there was a Man Friday figure, a rescue engineered by the freeing of a prisoner, turtle-catching, pottery-making, soap-making from vegetable extracts, sewing with bone needles, and so on. As I reviewed the contrasting claims for Pitman and Selkirk as the more likely forerunner for Crusoe I realized that Pitman was probably the same age as the inventor of Crusoe. Could Defoe and Pitman have met?
There is one obvious overlap in their lives. At the time of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, in 1685, Defoe rode from London to the West Country to join the rebels. He could have met Pitman then, but that meeting would have taken place before Pitman was transported to the Caribbee islands as a ‘convict rebel’ and before he had his adventures as a maroon. Only in May 1687 was it made public that Defoe had joined Monmouth’s cause. In that year Defoe’s name appeared in a list of Royal Pardons issued to those who had taken part in the insurgency. This was two years before Pitman published the account of his adventures as a ‘convict rebel’, and Defoe was back in London. The best that can be said with confidence is that if Pitman and Defoe did meet some time later, then they certainly had much to talk about.
It was frustrating to know so little about Henry Pitman. There is only his little book, saved from obscurity by Professor Arber and reprinted. It does not appear in the catalogue of books auctioned after Defoe’s death. The rest of Pitman’s life was a mystery. What happened to him when he came back to London from his adventures? When or where did he live, this man with his extraordinary story of being a maroon among pirates?
Actually, there was a clue but I had dismissed it prematurely.
Pitman finishes his book with an effusive paragraph thanking ‘the Eternal and True GOD . . . who miraculously preserved me on the deep waters, and according to the multitude of His mercies delivered me when appointed to die etc.’. When I first read this paragraph in Arber’s reprinted version I thought it was a formula, overblown and meaningless. Then I heard Andrew Powery thank God for his salvation on Serrana Bank in similar terms, and I returned to Pitman’s text to reread his last paragraph. This brought me to the final line of the book. There Pitman prints his name in capitals – HENRY PITMAN. To give added weight to the truth of his remarkable tale, Pitman also notes where and when he wrote his memoir. It was ‘from my lodging at the sign of the Ship in St. Paul’s Churchyard, London. June the 10th, 1689.’
Then I remembered the picture of the lonely man in goatskins standing with his two muskets on the shore of his island. It faces a page on which appears the full title of the novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe etc., and at the bottom of the title page is the name of Daniel Defoe’s publisher, William Taylor; the address of Taylor’s shop was ‘the Sign of the Ship’.
I turned back to Pitman’s narrative. Professor Arber had reprinted its title page. Pitman’s publisher was J. Taylor. His bookshop was also at ‘the sign of the Ship’. Only the addresses of the two Taylor bookshops were different. J. Taylor’s shop was ‘in St. Paul’s Churchyard’. William Taylor was around the corner in Paternoster Row, where he was using the same trade sign thirty years later. Was this pure coincidence? Taylor was a common name, and the bookseller-publishers of London at the time clustered around St Paul’s. Fortunately, five years after William Taylor published the first volume of Robinson Crusoe he sold his business to an up-and-coming young publisher named Thomas Longman. The firm of Longmans flourished. For the next two and a half centuries a member of the Longman family was at the helm, and the firm continued to use a picture of a sailing ship as a logo. A history of the Longman firm, now part of a larger publishing group known internationally for educational books, revealed that Pitman’s publisher was John Taylor and that he was the father of William Taylor, Defoe’s publisher for Robinson Crusoe. It was a family enterprise. Father and son had worked together, first at the sign of the Ship in St Paul’s Churchyard. Then in 1711 the son set up on his own, just around the corner in Paternoster Row, taking their trade sign with them. Until that time Paternoster Row had been a popular location for mercers, members of the cloth trade. And now I remembered how in 1689, the year Henry Pitman published his book, Daniel Defoe was a hosier, selling socks. The natural place for him to conduct his trade would have been among the mercers concentrated around Paternoster Row.
The coincidences were becoming more and more intriguing.
I returned to the British Library and asked to see an original copy of Pitman’s book. Until then I had depended on Professor Arber’s reprint. When the original arrived, I compared it with Arber’s text. They matched perfectly, the pages were the same, the title was the same. There was only one difference: Pitman’s original book had an extra page. Professor Arber had not bothered to reprint it because the page was nothing more than a commercial advertisement. But this advertisement was a real surprise. It was from Henry Pitman himself. It was promoting his patent medicines. After telling the story of his adventures, he took the opportunity to tout his wares. At ‘1 shilling a bottle’ he was selling ‘The Quintessence’. It contained ‘the Powers of Scurvy Grass’ and could be had in two versions ‘both plain and purging’. He was also peddling two sorts of pills: Magisterium Anodium, ‘so called from its great and admirable faculty in easing all manner of pains’, and Pillulae Catharticae, for, among other complaints, ‘old and inveterate headaches’. The fourth offering in his pharmacopoeia was Spiritus Catholicus, which was good for ‘Cholick, Stone, Gout, Scurvy, Hypochondrial Melancholly, Kings-Evil, Rickets, Fevers and Agues’. Pills or potions, the price was the same – one shilling, box or bottle.
Apparently Pitman’s preparations of these medicaments draw on his experience as a surgeon to pirates and mariners. He had come back from his Crusoesque adventures as a white slave, a runaway, and a maroon among pirates, and set himself up in London as a surgeon-pharmacist. While writing his book, he was also finding time to prepare and sell medications.
But that was not all. I had supposed that the address Henry Pitman gave as the address where he wrote his book – ‘at the Sign of the Ship’ – was his publisher’s address and some sort of accommodation address. But his medical advertisement ended with an exhortation to his customers. If they wanted his medicines, they should come to buy them at the place where ‘these medicines are prepared and sold (with printed directions giving a more full account of their virtues etc.) by Henry Pitman’. The address was – once again – the ‘Sign of the Ship in St. Pauls Churchyard.’
I had stumbled on the final link: when Henry Pitman the former maroon came back from the Caribbean he rented rooms at the premises of the publisher of his adventures. He wrote his book there, presumably while living over the shop; he was grinding and mixing his medicines there; and he was selling his pills and potions over the counter to customers who came through the door. In sum, he was a family fixture in the publishing house that was later to publish the story of Robinson Crusoe. The chances were very high that Daniel Defoe, if he visited the mercers of nearby Paternoster Row on business, met Henry Pitman at the sign of the Ship in St Paul’s Churchyard. Much more important, Pitman must have known William Taylor, the son of the family, and surely talked to him about his adventures. Even if Henry Pitman had gone elsewhere or died by the time the Taylors moved to Paternoster Row and Daniel Defoe came to William Taylor with the draft of Robinson Crusoe, it is inconceivable that his publisher did not tell Defoe about the ex-maroon who had shared their shop. If the Taylors had a leftover copy of Pitman’s Relation of his great sufferings and strange adventures, surely they would have drawn Defoe’s attention to it before William Taylor agreed to publish the Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
So there was a real-life maroon whose adventures on an island in the Caribbean were known to Daniel Defoe, either in print or in person or both: the man whose true story provided details for the creation of Robinson Crusoe was the ‘Chirurgeon to the late Duke of Monmouth’ – Henry Pitman.
Acknowledgements
The patient perceptive work of an
American scholar, Arthur Wellesley Secord, provided the baseline for my survey of how Daniel Defoe might have created the character Robinson Crusoe. In 1924 Secord published Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe in the University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature. Summarizing Defoe’s sources for the ‘island story’, Secord drew a neat little table with three columns headed Sources Certain, Sources Probable, and Sources Possible. He placed Peter Serrano in the Possible column with two earlier novels about island life, one in German, the other in Dutch. In the Probable category he put the manuscript notes of an English sailor, Robert Knox, who lived for nineteen years in Sri Lanka. Secord believed that Knox had the strongest influence on Defoe and that the two men very probably met. So Knox’s published book Ceylon, which was in the library sold after Defoe’s death, heads the Sources Certain column. The other items in that column are the published accounts of Selkirk, William Dampier’s Recollections, the travels, probably ficticious, of a French traveller, Leguat, and Henry Pitman’s Relation. Secord was apparently unaware of the possibility of a direct link between Defoe and Pitman, though it was Secord’s mention of Surgeon Pitman that eventually brought me to Salt Tortuga.
My working copy of The Strange Surprizing Adventures was the Norton Critical edition prepared by Michael Shinagel (1994), and Professor Pat Rogers’ urbane Robinson Crusoe (George Allen, 1979) provided a wide-ranging field guide to further reading. Defoe’s mysterious and incredibly productive life continues to fascinate biographers, and I am grateful to biographies, in chronological order, by J. R. Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (1958), Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, His Life (1989), Richard West, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe (1997), and Maximilian Novak, Daniel Defore, Master of Fictions (2001).
