Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

  He always took the Pilot-books of ships he captured. ‘These we found by Experience to be very good Guides’ and he charted the ‘Trade Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides and Currents’.

  In all my Cruisings among the Privateers, I took notice of the risings of the Tides; because by knowing it, I always knew where we might best haul ashore and clean our ships.

  He kept journals of his Cruisings and in 1697 an edited version of these, A New Voyage Round the World, went into four editions. Its title-page lured with the scope of his travels:

  the Isthmus of America, several Coasts and islands in the West Indies, the Isles of Cape Verd, the Passage by Terra del Fuego, the South Sea Coasts of Chile and other Philippine and East-India Islands near Cambodia, China, Formosa, Luconia, Celebes, &c. New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar Isles; the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Helena.

  Here were undreamed-of places, journeys of wonder and terror, beyond the reach of most. Safe in their Armed chairs, Dampier’s readers might brave a tornado in a canoe ‘ready to be swallowed by very foaming Billow’, survive storms that ‘drenched us all like so many drowned Rats’, hear how undrowned rats aboard ship ate the stores of maize, how men died of scurvy and ‘malignant fever’, got eaten by sharks, attacked by snakes and murdered by the Spaniards ‘stripped and so cut and mangled that You scarce knew one Man’.

  Dampier offered his readers quotidian detail, casual cruelty and wild adventure. Plunder was the goal, but he was a keen observer. He interspersed his accounts of pillage and arson with lessons in ethnography, anthropology, hydrography and natural history. He described the anatomy and behaviour of a shark and drew its picture, before advising how to eat it: boiled, squeezed dry, then stewed with vinegar and pepper. The guanos of the Galapagos Islands were ‘so tame that a Man may knock down twenty in an Hour’s Time with a Club’. Giant tortoises were fat and sweet to eat and stayed semi-alive and edible for days if turned on their backs. Turtle doves were so trusting ‘that a Man may kill 5 or 6 dozen in a Forenoon with a Stick’.

  Dampier had eaten monkeys, penguins, locusts and anything that moved. Flamingoes, he wrote, made

  very good Meat, tasting neither fishy nor in any way unsavoury. Their tongues are large, having a large Knob of Fat at the Root, which is an excellent Bit, a Dish of Flamingoes Tongues being fit for a Prince’s Table.

  His readers might learn the practicalities of careening a ship, or of mending sails, the logistics of finding a harbour or of ransacking a town. He told them of the symptoms of scurvy, the supposed influence of the moon on tides and how in a storm to furl the mainsail and ballast the mizzen. He wrote of sago trees, of vanilla pods drying in the sun, of antidotes for the stings of scorpions, of the Natives of Guam ‘ingenious beyond any other People in making Boats or Proas’ so swift and streamlined they could travel at twenty-four miles an hour, of war dances and pageants that celebrated the circumcision of eleven-year-old boys on the island of Mindanao: ‘The Mahometan Priest takes hold of the Fore-skin with two Sticks and with a pair of Scissors snips it off.’

  Dampier was circumspect about sex. For the more refined of his crew it was barter. They had their Delilahs or Black Misses, hired for a trinket or a silver wrist band. More often it was rape, unwanted offspring and abandonment. Tawny-coloured children of uncertain English paternity, were born on board ship to black slaves. At Mindanao, where ‘the Natives are very expert at Poisoning’ two sailors were murdered when they ‘gave Offence through their general Rogueries and by dallying too familiarly with Women’. The ship’s surgeon dissected their corpses and revealed livers as black as cork.

  For all their scandal and revelation, Dampier’s journals were selective. In England he courted acceptance in respectable circles. Piracy was punished on the gallows. He did not want it broadcast that he had assisted in mutiny, kept company with rogues, connived at the rape of women and the abuse of prisoners. In the Chancery Courts in London, down the years, testimony accrued against him for being indecisive, capricious, heedless of consultation and cruel.

  A ‘vexatious’ voyage under his captaincy, in 1698, in the Roebuck to ‘ye remoter part of the East India Islands and the neighbouring Coast of Terra Australis’ concluded with the mutiny of his crew, the sinking of the ship, a court martial on his return to England and the verdict of the Court that ‘the said Captain Dampier is not a Fitt person to be Employ’d as commander of any of her Majesty’s ships.’†

  In particular he was found guilty of ‘very Hard and cruell usage’ towards his first lieutenant George Fisher. He had belaboured him with a stick, confined him in irons ‘for a considerable time’, imprisoned him on shore ‘in a strange Countrey’, then sent him home. By way of justification, Dampier claimed that Fisher railed at him for hours, ‘shaked his Fist att me, Grind in my Face, and told me that he cared not – for me… called me Old Dog, Old Villain, and told my men, Gents take care of that Old Pyrateing Dog for he designs to Run away with you and the King’s Ship.†

  Such altercations were not included in Dampier’s edited New Voyage Round the World. He admitted to receiving editorial help. It was, he said, ‘far from being a Diminution to one of my Education and Employment, to have what I write, Revised and Corrected by Friends.’ He catered to refined readers and dedicated the book to Charles Montagu, President of the Royal Society and First Lord of the Treasury. It mattered to him to be invited to dine with the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn and the satirist, Jonathan Swift, and to be on terms with the writer and political advisor, Daniel Defoe and the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Orford.

  1691 Giolo of Meangis

  ONE OF Dampier’s lurid business ventures concerned Giolo, a prince from the royal family of Meangis, a small fishing island off New Guinea.† Giolo was a much tattooed man. A wife had covered him with maps and patterns – all over his chest, shoulders, thighs, back, arms and legs. She had pricked his skin then rubbed in pigments from the resin of plants.

  She did him a disservice in making him so conspicuous. Tattoos were uncommon in England apart from crucifixes on forearms. Giolo was captured by booty seekers and taken from his island. He was a curiosity, a marketable commodity. Dampier bought him in Madras in 1690 from a Mr Moody, then took him home, expecting to gain ‘no small Advantage to myself from my painted Prince’. He planned to exhibit Giolo for a fee to intrigued spectators and use him to impress affluent businessmen to put up cash for another venture. Giolo, he claimed, had told him

  that there was much Gold on his Iland, and I know he could not be inform’d of the manner of gathering it unless he had known it himselfe besides, he knew not the value of it neither have the people of his Iland any comerce with other People but what induced me to believe that there is Gold on his Iland is because all the Ilande near doe gather gold more or less therefore why should this be without.†

  Dampier knew the gold’s value. With Giolo’s guidance he would gather it. He would trade in spices too, for there were cloves and nutmegs on Meangis.

  Giolo sailed for England with Dampier in the Defence. He arrived in London in September 1691 his health broken by misery and the ship’s diet of salt meat and tainted water. His dream was to return home to his small, sunny island. Dampier’s enthusiasm for him faded when he gained scant financial advantage from him. He found him a burden to feed and house, so he sold him. Giolo’s new owners advertised him in a printed broadsheet:

  This admirable Person is about the Age of Thirty, graceful, and well proportioned in all his Limbs, extreamly modest and civil, neat and cleanly; but his Language is not understood, neither can he speak English.

  He will be exposed to publick view every day (during his stay in Town)… at his Lodgings at the Blew Boars-head in Fleetstreet, near Water-Lane: Where he will continue for some time, if his health will permit.

  But if any Persons of Quality, Gentlemen or Ladies, do desire to see this noble Person, at their own Houses, or any other convenient place, in or about this City of London, they are
desired to send timely notice and he will be ready to wait upon them in a Coach or Chair, any time they please to appoint, if in the daytime.†

  Captive and marooned, Giolo lost hope of rescue, of returning home. His new owners tried to make him more of a feature. They advertised that on his back, to be viewed for a fee, was ‘a lively Representation of one quarter part of the World while the Arctick and Tropick Circles center in the North Pole on his Neck’. Etched on one miserable man was the unmet world. His tattoos, they claimed, made him immune to ‘all sorts of the most venomous, pernicious Creatures …; such as Snakes, Scorpions, Vipers and Centapees &c.’†

  They displayed him too, for sixpence a peek, at market sideshows along with other wonders of nature: dwarfs, giants, dancing bears, hermaphrodites from Angola, two female children joined at the crown of their heads, a child covered in fish scales, and Jane Paterson of Northumberland who gave birth to a monster with the head, mane and hooves of a horse and the body of a boy.

  Giolo’s career as a freak was not happy nor his immunity to poison sure. He caught smallpox which made him tear at his tattooed skin. He scratched himself to death in Oxford.

  1680–4 A Man Named Will

  DAMPIER KNEW of The Island, how fecund it was and remote. It was not owned or claimed by any monarch. Booty seekers who roamed the South Sea could, if they found it, use it to careen their ships.

  It was Christmas Day 1680 when he first reached it. He was with a gang of buccaneers led by Captain Bartholomew Sharp, ‘a Man of an undaunted courage not fearing in the least to look an insulting Enemy in the faceroute down the coast’.† They had been at sea the best part of a year, had endured storms and torrential rains, scurvy and fever, and seen most of their crew murdered. A prize, a ship loaded with three hundredweight of gold, had escaped them. They were bedraggled, dispirited and ill. They wanted fresh meat, greens, clean water and dry land.

  A prisoner, a Spanish pilot, guided their ship, the Trinity, to the north-west bay near the hollowed rock and the cave. The bay offered no protection. They faced rocks dashed by high waves. Twice they lost their moorings in heavy swell and shifting boulders. They could see a grove of sandalwood trees, a clear stream, and goats in the mountains, but no place for a boat to land. They moved east to the Great Bay with the wide valley. The shore seemed to belong to the fur seals ‘the like of which I have not taken notice of anywhere but in these seas’ Dampier wrote. There were thousands of them

  I might say possibly Millions, either sitting on the Bays, or coming and going in the Sea round The Island… They lie at the Top of the Water, Playing and Sunning themselves for a Mile or Two from the Shore. When they come out of the Sea they bleat like Sheep for their Young; and though they pass through Hundreds of other Young Ones before they come to their own, yet they will not suffer any of them to suck. The Young Ones are like Puppies and lie much Ashore, but when Beaten by any of us, they, as well as the Old Ones will make towards the Sea and swim very swiftly and nimbly. On Shore, however, they lie very sluggishly and will not go out of our ways unless we Beat them but Snap at us. A Blow on the Nose soon Kills them.†

  There were plenty of Blows on the Noses. Such blows were sport and afforded pleasure. These creatures were there to be killed. Fur skins were wearable, seal meat edible, blubber was suitable for frying food and for lantern oil. Once there was nemesis. As a sailor skinned a young sea lion he had clubbed to death its mother came up unperceived:

  getting his head in her mouth she with her teeth scored his skull in notches in many places, and thereby wounded him so desperately that, though all possible care was taken of him, he died in a few days.*

  Christmas on The Island in 1680 was not tranquil for the buccaneers. It was summer but the weather was stormy and the men mutinous. They had gambled away their plunder, now ‘scarce worth a groat’. They blamed their captains for the failure of the voyage. They turned out Sharp, elected John Watling an ‘old privateer and stout seaman’, to replace him, and put Edmund Cook in leg irons when his servant, William, ‘confessed that his master had often buggered him’.†

  A fortnight later three Spanish warships headed in to The Island. In their haste to be gone the buccaneers abandoned a Miskito Indian*, a slave, a man of no consequence to them named Will. Will was in the mountains hunting goats. From high above the Great Bay he saw the Trinity departing and the Spaniards approaching.

  Will was one of any number of the marooned, but he fared better than Watling who within a month was killed in a sea skirmish. He went high into the mountains to evade capture by the Spaniards. He had with him a gun and a knife. When his powder ran out he notched the knife blade and sawed the iron gun barrel into pieces. Using his gun flint to spark fire, he hammered and bent the molten iron with stones to forge harpoons, lances, fishing hooks and a blade. ‘By long labour’ he ground these tools into shape.

  Out of stone he honed a ten-inch double-bladed hatchet and bored a hole in the middle for a wooden handle. Among the trees, by a stream near the sea he built a wooden hut. He spread his bed with goatskins and cut sealskin into fishing lines.

  For three years Will survived alone. In 1684 Dampier was again cruising in the South Sea. On 22 March from high in the forest, Will watched Dampier’s ship, the Batchelor’s Delight approach The Island. Knowing the crew would crave fresh food he cudgelled three goats and roasted them on stones with cabbages and herbs. He waited on the rocks as the men came ashore by canoe. Dampier described the encounter:

  When we landed a Meskito Indian named Robin, first leap’d ashore and running to his Brother Meskito Man, threw himself flat on his face at his feet, who helping him up, and embracing him, fell flat with his face on the Ground at Robin’s feet, and was by him taken up also.

  We stood with pleasure to behold the surprize and tenderness and solemnity of this Interview, which was exceedingly affectionate on both sides; and when their Ceremonies of Civility were over, we also that stood gazing at them drew near, each of us embracing him we had found here, who was overjoyed to see so many of his old Friends come hither, as he thought purposely to fetch him.

  He was named Will, as the other was Robin. These were names given them by the English, for they had no Names among themselves; and they take it as a great favour to be named by any of us; and will complain for want of it, if we do not appoint them some name when they are with us: saying of themselves they are poor Men, and have no Name.†

  1574–91 Juan Fernandez

  A MERCHANT SEAMAN gave The Island a name. Don Juan Fernandez sailed from Peru to Chile in October 1574 in his ship Nuestra Senora de los Remedios.* The accepted route down the coast from Callao to Valparaiso was unpredictable. It could take three months or a year. Strong currents and headwinds made the going hard and slow.

  Juan Fernandez sailed west to the open sea to try for better speed. After twenty-six days he chanced on The Island. It was one of two, a little archipelago. At its southern tip across a strait of turbulent water, was a satellite islet, a bare rock, five and a half miles in circumference. Ninety miles west its sister island rose from the sea to a height of five thousand feet. He glimpsed its gorge, its canyon walls, its waterfalls.

  He called the bigger island Mas a Tiera (Nearer Land), its satellite Santa Clara, the western island Mas a Fuera (Further Away). Collectively he called them the islands of Santa Cecilia for the 22 November, when he first saw them, was her feast day.** Others called them the islands of Juan Fernandez for it was he who had been blown near to them, had ‘discovered’ them. Thus they were in some sense his.

  He sailed due east and reached Valparaiso in four days. No one believed his claim to have made the voyage from Lima in only a month. He was accused of using sorcery to pervert the winds and tides and was interrogated by officers of the Inquisition. When other mariners proved his route he was rewarded with a country estate at Quillota for service to the King of Spain and given the title Chief Pilot of the South Sea.

  Merchants then went to The Island to fell its sandalwo
od trees and to kill fur seals and trap lobsters. Plans were mooted to colonise it, to use it as a base to defend the South Sea which the Spaniards viewed as theirs. A businessman, Captain Sebastian Garcia Carreto of Estremadura shipped lobsters, timber and sealskins back to the port of Valparaiso. Through this enterprise The Island became in some sense his. Don Alonso de Sotomayor, Governor of Santiago, Captain General and Chief Justice of the Kingdom of Chile issued him with a land grant on 20 August 1591:

  in the name of His Majesty, by virtue of the Royal Order which authorizes me to grant Lands, I concede to you Five Hundred cuadras of Land on the said Island … I commission you to take possession of the Land which I in the name of His Majesty grant to you, so that you make them yours with all their Fruits and Advantages.†

  Captain Carreto stocked The Island with goats, pigs, turnips and sixty South American Indians. The Indians felled trees, built boats and huts, grew crops, caught fish and lobsters and served his business plan. They observed the rainbow that arched the valley in the morning mist, heard the call of the fardelas, saw the hummingbirds drinking the nectar of flowers. Only for a time was The Island their home. Home was where they were taken to or was a place denied.

  Carreto’s colony failed. It was locked in the great valley in the northern bay. The Island was too remote from the mainland for business to succeed. He tired of the enterprise. The Indians left traces: abandoned huts and crude paths through the deep forest. When they left, the goats scampered high into the mountains, the crops grew wild, the seals and fishes thrived. Only occasionally did small ships ply from Valparaiso to plunder cargoes of wood, fish and fur. And only occasionally did mariners such as Dampier arrive to careen their ships, sow ‘Garden Seeds for Salading’ and replenish their supplies.

  1703 The St George and the Cinque Ports