1704–9 His Agility in Pursuing a Goat
SELKIRK VIEWED The Island as his, though he did not paint it, or describe it. A rainbow arched the sea, the night was lit by stars, the morning sun coloured the sky, and all for him alone. The Island had offered itself to him and made him safe. He carved the days of his banishment on a tree in the grove of his home. The past might not have existed, he had so few mementoes of it.
Sandalwood burned light and fragrant. In his lesser hut he stored food: turnips, cabbages and pimentos, dried oats, parsley and purslain and little black plums, gleaned from an orchard high in the mountains. He kept his food in boxes he had made, secured with stones and goatskins. On his improvised table with the knife he had honed he prepared his meals each day: a broth of goat and cabbage, flavoured with herbs, a roasted fish, baby seal fried with turnips, boiled lobster with oatcakes. He drank water and infusions of herbs, simmered plums for their juice, turned them into a kind of jam.
His shirt and breeches got torn to tatters in the forest foliage, the rasping tree ferns, and giant roots. He tailored himself a skirt and jerkin out of goatskin and sewed these garments with thongs of skin. ‘He had no other Needle but a Nail’. Out of the bale of linen in his sea chest he fashioned shirts, ‘and stitch’d ’em with the Worsted of his old Stockings, which he pull’d out on purpose’.†
He was, he thought, a better cook, tailor and carpenter than before, and a better Christian too.† Whatever he did on The Island seemed neither right nor wrong. He killed seals, bludgeoned goats, masturbated against palm trees, picked puffins’ eggs from their nests and intoned psalms: ‘I am become like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like a night raven in the house. My days have declined like a shadow and I am withered like grass. Hear O Lord, my prayer. Turn not away Thy face from me.’
Apart from such borrowed incantations he had no use for words. He learned The Island the way a child learns language, its moods and reiterations, the meaning of its hills. He tutted at the cats and kids and grunted as he pursued goats. Deceived that he was one of them, they turned to greet him until they smelled his sweat, heard his mumbling and saw the cudgel he wielded.
His exercise and lust of the day was hunting and fucking goats. ‘He kept an Account of 500 that he killed while there, and caught as many more which he mark’d on the Ear and let go.’ His tally was of their size and agility and the quality of the chase; a chart like those kept of the variations of the tide, the phases of the moon or the days of his captivity on The Island.
Goats worked out at about five a week. Most days he had a go. He devised various ruses for catching them. He would crouch on a concealed rock by their watering hole. As they drank at the stream he would leap on one and cudgel its head. Or he would pursue a herd down the mountain to the shore. In confusion and fear they jostled together and made easy prey. Or he would tie a looped thong with a circle at its centre across the path they took. One would catch its horns or neck in the loop. As it panicked and twisted the thong tightened.*
Fucking goats was perhaps less satisfying than the buggery and prostitution of shipboard life, the black misses of heathen ports. It lacked fraternal exchange. But Selkirk was an abandoned man. On The Island, at the day’s end, he would have liked a woman to cook for him and provide. He might have preferred it had the goats been girls.
His Agility in pursuing a Goat had once like to have cost him his Life; he pursu’d it with so much Eagerness that he catch’d hold of it on the brink of a Precipice, of which he was not aware, the Bushes having hid it from him; so that he fell with the Goat down the said Precipice a great height, and was so stun’d and bruis’d with the Fall, that he narrowly escap’d with his Life, and when he came to his Senses, found the Goat dead under him. He lay senseless for the space of three days and was scarce able to crawl to his Hutt, which was about a mile distant, or to stir abroad again in ten days.†
He computed the time that had passed from the waning moon. He supposed he might die on The Island, lie unburied and be food for the cats.
1706 Thorny Shrubs and Scented Laurels
IT WAS JULY when he fell. There was a light fall of snow. In the voyages he had made death was all that many booty seekers found. But it was death in the company of men, not alone in an implacable place like this.
The fire went out and he scarcely ate. When he was able to limp from his hut, he thanked God for not taking his life. He gathered a mound of dried grasses as tinder, crouched over it and on his knee rubbed together two pieces of sandalwood. The effort seemed endless, the sticks got warm and worn, his body ached, the cats sat around. A desultory spark hit the tinder and expired. He rubbed on. It had worked for Neanderthal man, it must work for him. He rubbed until it happened. The elemental change. Showers of light, grey smoke then flames.
He vowed never again to let this fire die, to guard it night and day, feed it, bank it. It gave him light and heat, it was a symbol of hope, a focus of rescue, a beacon to the seas that he might be saved.
As the days passed, day after day after day after day, he got inured to solitude. Company was not essential. His relationship was to The Island. He was a rough man but it seduced him. He had so much time to observe the sunlight on the sea, the mist in the valley, the shapes of the mountains, the shadows of evening. He came to know The Island’s edible plants, its thorny shrubs, scented laurels and palms, its useful animals and freshwater springs, its natural shelters, birds and fishes, its lizards that basked in the sun, its rocks covered in barnacles. He carved a map of it on a piece of wood.
Things he had thought essential he found he could do without: salt, liquor, tobacco, shoes. He built a walled enclosure, drove a few kids in, their mothers followed, he turned the kids out and started a small herd. He churned their milk to a kind of cheese.† He made a raft from the trunks of palm trees, carved a double-ended paddle and keeping close to the shore on a calm day explored the bay between what he called Great Rock and Great Key, around what he called Rough Point and Rocky Point. He came to a cave and thought it a place where a man might shelter. He fished from this raft and from the rocks and kept a few clawing lobsters at the brink of life in a barrel of seawater. In all that he did he thought ahead, in case the weather turned foul, in case he again was ill, in case an enemy came.
He carved a little flute, blew a few notes and imagined his tamed animals listened and moved to his tune. He was afraid of nothing on his island. Only of who or what might come to challenge his hegemony.
1707 The Stretch of the Mountains, the Fact of the Trees
SELKIRK SAW the irony of his fate. He had crossed the world in search of fortune and ended up with nothing. Less than when he began. He was marooned and penniless and resembled a goat.
Such treasure as he had was The Island. Such music as he heard was the wind in the mountains, the sea, the noises of creatures who cared for each other and nothing for him. The Island imposed a terrible boredom. He yearned to leave it. It was the death of ambition. It tested him to the edge of endurance. And yet in surviving it he found a strength.
He had times of anger, when the goats eluded him, when the fire smouldered and could not be coaxed to flame; times of satisfaction when turnips sprouted and there was an abundance of plums. He found repose in the glade of his home when he had fished and hunted, stoked the fire, fed the cats, milked the goats, done all that he had to do to stay alive.
But it was not the frustration and rewards of practical things that informed and changed him. Nor was it The Island’s scenic views, its turquoise ocean, pink horizon, tints and hues; rather it was the way it defeated everything that visited it, gave it food, provided shelter, dished out death. There were times when the intensity of the place overwhelmed him. Times that had nothing to do with the incantation of prayer, or of fear or danger. It was the sheer stretch of the mountains, the fact of the trees. It was as if The Island claimed him with its secrets, its essential existence, made him a part of its rhythms, turned him fleetingly into more than he was. In his pira
tical soul he knew that he would die in this place, whether he was rescued from it or not.
1707 The Craters of the Moon
STOOPING TO DRINK Selkirk saw a distorted reflection – a tangle of beard and hair, a weathered skin. He became immune to the bites of insects and to the ferocity of the sun. He tied his hair with a goatskin thong, used his nails as claws. He kept his knife and cudgel strapped to his waist.
He swung from lianas with the grace of an ape, ran faster than any creature on The Island, got the fruits of the cabbage palms by climbing. No creatures preyed on him. No scorpions or tigers. Only once he thought he saw a snake. It startled him in the long grass.
Though he looked like a goat there were times when he thought like a man. With the mind of a mariner, he thought of the forces and laws of nature by which the world might be understood. He had among his navigational instruments a glass that made the stars seem near. He observed the phases of the moon and how these influenced the tides. He watched the constellations of Orion and Andromeda, the light of the planets – Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars. With the hope that he might help to ‘find the so-much-desired longitude’ he tried to chart the movement of the moon against the stars.
It occurred to him that the stars he saw, like the horizon of the ocean, were also only the limit of his vision. He had learnt from Nicolaus Copernicus that illusion was delusion, that the sun was not moving across the sky. The truth held secrets and paradoxes. It occurred to him that time might move in the opposite direction from what was supposed, that the beginning of the world was in fact its end, that the men on the Cinque Ports were probably dead, washed by the ocean to the start of their lives.†
1705–6 We have Iron Crows on Board
THE CREW of the St George reckoned that the escape of the Manila galleon deprived them of two million pounds. As it sailed east, proud in the wind, its masts no more than splintered, its flags flying high, they urged Dampier to head for home. His response was that ‘he would not come home with his hands in his pockets’.†
Nor would he come home with his crew. They mutinied. At the end of January 1705, in desperation, he summoned them all to a meeting
and having given them a dram of Rum or Brandy or some other strong Liquor desired all who were willing to go along with him upon their own accounts exclusive of the Owners to go on the quarter-deck.†
It was an invitation to turn pirate and abandon any vestigial obligation to the agreements made. But ‘no more than twenty-eight Men and Boys, and most of them Landmen’ were willing to go along with him. The others deserted in Christian Martin’s ship. The purser Edward Morgan his partner in crime, went, so did William Funnell, John Welbe and thirty-one men. John Ballett the surgeon was the only officer to stand by him.
Their departure was violent. Dampier said Bellhash, the Master, ‘took me by the Throat, and Swore if I spoke a Word they would Dash my Brains out’. They turned all prisoners ashore to prevent him finding the route home. They demanded the keys to the powder room and arms’ chest. When he refused to hand these over, Morgan said, ‘“We have Iron Crows on Board, they are as good Keys as we desire,” and with that broke ’em open.’ They stripped the ship of arms, food, liquor, silver plate and gold and took its licence, its Letter of Marque. As they sailed off, ‘that Buffoon Toby Thomas by name, said, “Poor Dampier, thy Case is like King James, every Body has left thee.”’†
With two men at the pumps, bailing out, the St George continued to cruise. Someone stuffed its holes with tallow and charcoal ‘not daring to drive in a Nail, for fear of making it worse’. The four great guns which stood between decks, were put in the hold. There were no men to manage them and there was no ammunition.
Dampier headed ignominiously for home. The only prize his riff-raff crew now aimed for was life. They had to take a ship in which to sail ten thousand miles across the South Sea. In February they hijacked a Spanish brigantine.* Dampier headed west in it. He abandoned the decrepit St George at anchor.
The going was worse than hard. Provisions looted from coastal towns did not last. They drank water thick with duck weed and were rationed to less than half a pound of flour a day per man ‘and that very full of Vermine, Maggots and Spiders’. They scalded this concoction with water then ate it. They could not sleep for hunger, so they drank the green water. ‘This would satisfie us a little at the present, so that we could slepp; but as soon as we waked, we always found ourselves as hungry as before.’
At Batavia, because Dampier had no commission to show, he was arrested as a pirate and his ship impounded.* He spent more than a year in gaol before being sent back to England at the end of 1707 with nothing in his pockets at all.
A handful of other survivors had straggled back. Funnell’s party arrived in August 1706 ‘being but eighteen out of one hundred and eighty-three which went out with us’. They had sailed across the South Sea with no doctor, medicines or carpenter, no anchors, cables, or boat. All their experiences were appalling. They were consistently desperate for water and food. At the island of Guam when they tried to scavenge something to eat, naked men in boats followed them ‘menacing at a distance with their Paddles’. They endured gales and monsoon winds: ‘the Sea took us a-head, a-stern and on both sides, that we were always almost covered with Water.’ At the island of Manipa, colonised by the Dutch, the Governor refused them victuals, starving though they were.
They reached the spice island of Amboyna at the end of May 1705.* The Dutch towed them in and took their vessel. According to Sheltram and Clift, Morgan made ten thousand pounds for himself by selling the silver plate, bullion and jewels he had stolen and hidden away. Those who could not bribe their keepers were interned, badly treated and fed inedible meat. At night they were plagued by mosquitoes. ‘We were forced to put ourselves in a Bag, before we could go to sleep.’
At Batavia they met up with some of Clipperton’s men. Morgan sold the owners’ share of the plunder for £600 then made his own way back to London. Those without money lived off their wits. Survivors were shipped home with the Dutch East India fleet.
For the London owners the adventure was a disaster: both ships lost and no booty. Thomas Estcourt had died in 1704 at the age of twenty-three, and willed his estate to his younger sister Elizabeth. She had married a Richard Cresswell. The Cresswells listened to accounts from survivors, like William Sheltram and Ralph Clift, of theft, plunder, mutiny and lawlessness. They suspected fraud and deception, particularly from Dampier and Morgan.
They began litigation that went on for years. They would claim against any treasure Dampier might ever accrue. Those who had sailed with him, condemned him for bad language, drunkenness, mismanagement, dishonesty, and failure to take the rich prizes he promised.†
1707 They would Spare no Stranger
ON DAYS when Selkirk did not scan the south side of The Island he feared he might have missed the ship of rescue or the manoeuvres of an enemy sail. High at his lookout above the Bay, the air was cool when the valley was humid, there was shade from the luma and gunnera and the huge ferns. Away from the enclosing valley, he could see the fracture of the archipelago, Santa Clara, the little broken islets, the peaks and ridges of mountains stretching out.
It occurred to him that England might have been defeated in the war, that no friendly ship might again come to these seas, that the whole of the South Sea might now be occupied by Spain. Three times from this vantage point he saw a ship, far out, circle the island then traverse the bay from west to east. It was as if it was the same ship. He saw its sails. Each time he ran to the bay. He dragged a burning branch to the shore and stoked a fire until it blazed. The ship sailed by.
Then one dawn he went to the shore’s edge and a ship was there. Flying the red and yellow flag of Spain. Anchored in the bay with boats heading in. There were men like him on the shore. For a moment he stared, then turned and ran for the protecting trees.
His retreat was an admission. They pursued him, firing pistols and shouting in Spanish. Salvaje he hear
d, and perro. Had they been French he would have surrendered and hoped as a prisoner for transport to Europe. But he would rather die alone on The Island than fall into the hands of the Spaniards. They would murder him or use him as a slave in the silver mines.
Fit as he was, and sure of the terrain, escape was hard. There were many of these men, all armed. They pursued him, shooting, yodelling, as if he were indeed a goat.
He made for thick woodland at the eastern mountain, where he had fashioned a hideout, high in a tree. ‘At the foot of the tree they made water, and kill’d several Goats just by, but went off again without discovering him’. He feared they would smell him, sense his presence, flush him out. But they gave up. He was not big game. He was of no more consequence than a wolf or deer that got away.
Again The Island protected him. Its darkness and concealing woodland. At night he drank water, ate birds’ eggs and plums, saw other creatures that like himself searched cautiously for sustenance, scrabbled for cover and sniffed at the air.
His enemy stayed two days. Their sounds of departure reached him, then a palpable silence. When he returned to his glade his lamed kids were dead, the fire out, his hut burned to the ground. But again he had kept his life and again The Island, the shimmering sea and the hills.
1707 The Wheeling Terns, the Lumbering Seals
THEY HAD destroyed his sea chest, kettle, bedding, bible and books, the tools he had forged and nails he had whittled. He had few possessions when he arrived. They left him with even fewer.
It was a clear day. Hummingbirds fed on purple flowers (Rhaphithamnus venustus). Shearwater skimmed the sea, on which for once he was glad that no ship sailed. Cats came out of the undergrowth mewling. A kitten chased a leaf.
His visitors had left traces: picked bones and footprints in the sand. He scoured the shore for their debris: a gold coin, three arak bottles, a rusty anchor, a broken cask, a piece of sailcloth, a short length of chain, a coil of worn rope, discarded lumber. Their garbage became tools and materials with which to refurbish his home.
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