Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

  It was the first English novel and became known as Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was nearing sixty when he wrote it. He lived in a ‘very genteel’ manner, in a house in Stoke Newington. He had a fine library, stables, a large garden and seven children.

  Like Steele he was in debt and keen for money. He needed cash to pay for his daughter Maria’s wedding.* Robinson Crusoe took him a few months to write and was his four hundred and twelfth publication.* He did not wrestle with his prose. He was the author of daily broadsheets, political and religious essays, satires in verse, odes and hymns. He propounded tolerance, reason and practical work, advocated free trade, union between Scotland and England, the establishment of savings banks, and a review of bankruptcy laws. He denounced corruption at elections, and the persecution of dissenters.*

  Fiction, though, was new ground. He intended Robinson Crusoe as a money-making yarn. It was published anonymously on 25 April 1719, reprinted on 9 May, 4 June and 7 August and from then on. There was no definitive manuscript. The first edition was changed even while at the printers.†

  The book was a winner. Here was the quintessential survival story: a man cut off from the world, who trusted in God and did what he could for himself. Though Defoe was chided for ‘Solecisms, Looseness and Incorrectness of Stile, Improbabilities, and sometimes Impossibilities’, his readers were undeterred.* They identified, projected and asked the question, what would I do, if that were to happen to me.

  Robinson Crusoe was serialised, abridged, pirated, adapted, dramatised and bowdlerised. It was translated into French in 1720and into Dutch, German and Russian in the 1760s. It was banned in Spain in 1756. An abridged French version of 1769, gave Richard Steele as the author. In the 1770s it was printed as a Chapbook, a penny book printed on a single sheet of paper, folded twelve times, and distributed by walking stationers called chapmen, hired by printers, who sold it in towns on market days.

  It became a world classic. By 1863 it was in the Shilling Entertaining Library, by 1869 there was ‘Robinson Crusoe in words of one syllable’ by Mary Godolphin, with coloured illustrations, and by 1900 it was being given away in promotions by grocers. Crusoe inspired literary criticism, picture books, pop-up books, cartoons, puppets and pantomimes. His image was universal. He was portrayed standing alone on a circle of sand, with a palm tree and the surrounding sea; barefoot in goat skins with a musket at his shoulder and a sinking ship behind him; leaning on a rock with a spy glass and umbrella; shooting goats, discovering Man Friday’s footprint in the sand.*

  Down the years, Selkirk transmuted into Crusoe’s mythical world. His own reality blurred. His time on The Island, claimed first by journalists, was reinvented in the bright world of fiction. What had really happened and who he was were incidental. It was the story that mattered, not The Island or the man.

  Defoe capitalised on Crusoe’s success. Within a year he produced two sequels: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life and of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe, and then, in 1720, a work of awful piety, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelic World. In a preface to this he teased:

  there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes.

  Part Two was widely published if not widely read. Part Three was instantly forgotten. And of the thousands of references and allusions to Robinson Crusoe that were to follow, none were to Crusoe in China, Russia, France, Persia, India, Russia, or Heaven. They were all to the core theme: the Man alone on the island.

  1719 A Large Earthenware Pot

  CRUSOE’S ISLAND was an unexplained place, though he inhabited it alone for twenty-eight years. He was swept to its shore by a storm that wrecked his ship and all those on it except himself. The sea that saved him and drowned them was ‘as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy’. It buried him under thirty-foot waves.

  His island, like Selkirk’s, was volcanic, part of an archipelago and uninhabited by man. It was susceptible to earthquake, with freak waves and hurricanes, great rains and uprooted trees. It had mountains and a brook of running water. But it had scant reality of its own. It existed to serve Crusoe. Providence dictated that it should be his estate. It ‘looked like a planted garden’. ‘Leadenhall Market could not have furnished a better table.’ It provided him with pigeons, hares, lobsters, tobacco, sugar, melons, grapes, cocoa, oranges, lemons and limes.

  But more than this unmysterious market garden, his true storehouse was the wreck of the ship from which he escaped. From it, he retrieved all he needed for civilised life. Its contents rivalled that of a fleet of prize ships. It was astonishing what was spared by the sea as high as a hill and as furious as an enemy.

  He made a raft and salvaged supplies for more than a lifetime: gallons of liquor (enough for twenty-eight years), chests of bread, rice, cheeses, dried meat and corn, barrels of tobacco, flour and sugar, cables, hawsers, carpentry tools, barrels of gunpowder, quantities of ammunition, pistols, swords, two dozen hatchets, a grindstone, crowbars, bags of nails, clothes, hammocks, bedding, sails, rigging, canvas, ironwork, scissors, knives, forks, pens, ink, paper, compasses, mathematical instruments, charts, books on navigation, a ‘perspective glass’, three bibles and some Portuguese prayer books.

  Thus supplied, he insulated himself against his fictional island. He was gentrified, with a ‘country seat’, a bower, kitchen, orchard and winter stores. He was ‘removed from all the wickedness of the world … the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life.’ No goat fucking for Crusoe. Like Selkirk he went barefoot, but unlike Selkirk he had scissors with which to cut his hair and beard, and shape his moustache into ‘Mahometan whiskers’.

  He ate raisins for breakfast, broiled goat for lunch and turtles’ eggs for supper. He built huts and a barn for his corn. He made tables and chairs, hollowed a canoe, made an umbrella, wove ‘an abundance of necessary baskets’, tailored breeches and waistcoats and fashioned a hat. He made a goatskin belt to carry his hatchet, saw and guns, and he made very good candles out of goats’ tallow. He caged a parrot and called it Poll; it spoke his name.

  No man could have applied himself more. His production was extraordinary, and it was all for himself. He resisted solitude by keeping busy. His activity went way beyond need. It was an addiction. He built things, made things, fixed things. He no more wondered at the stars or considered the lilies than does a dog. He believed in God as Creator and Arbiter, was reassured to read in one of his Bibles ‘Call on Me in the day of trouble and I will deliver,’ and then gave sublime attention to the ordinary. Untroubled by sex, grief, abandonment and the complexity of life, his twenty-eight years alone on a volcanic island passed on the level of the husbandry and carpentry of the day.

  Two hundred years after Robinson Crusoe’s creation, in a celebratory essay, the novelist Virginia Woolf described Crusoe’s mundanity as a virtue. Defoe, she wrote, kept to his own perspective:

  There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face, nothing but a large earthenware pot.*

  Crusoe’s pots were of fireproof clay. He cooked meat and fish and broth in them. He made clay ovens too, in which he baked barley loaves, rice cakes and puddings.*

  With all his provisions and things, and with God, the parrot and a goat for company, he reflected, as did Selkirk, that he was happier in isolation than with ‘the wicked, cursed, abominable life of earlier days’. He had also retrieved a parcel of money from the wreck, which prompted him to preach aloud:

  O drug, what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to men, no, not the taking off of the ground … Alas! There the nasty, sorry, useless stuff lay; I had no business for it.

  What he had instead, were the convenient things that money might purchase. And when, after twen
ty-three years alone, he found first the print of a bare foot in the sand, and then the man who made it, his dominion was complete:

  I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life … I likewise taught him to say master, and then let him know that was to be my name.

  Friday was twenty-six, strong, tall and manly. He was olive coloured (not too dark) with black straight hair and fine white teeth. Crusoe made an Englishman of him. He forbade him to eat human beings, tailored linen drawers for him and a jerkin and cap and ‘instructed him in the knowledge of the true God’:

  I told him that the great Maker of all things lived up there, pointing up towards heaven; that He governs the world by the same power and providence by which He had made it; that He was omnipotent, could do everything for us, give everything to us, take everything from us; and thus, by degrees, I opened his eyes. He listened with great attention, and received with pleasure the notion of Jesus Christ being sent to redeem us, and of the manner of making our prayers to God, and His being able to hear us, even into heaven.

  So, for Crusoe, he had the company of a slave, God was all consoling, and there were many jobs to be done. Abandonment was not abandonment at all. And as for the scarlet shafts of sunrise, they passed him by.

  1720 My Said Wife Frances

  WOMEN WERE of passing interest to Selkirk and Crusoe. There was none on their respective islands. Crusoe found his ideal relationship with a male slave. Selkirk made do with goats.

  Back in society the terms differed. A man was not a man without a wife. Crusoe married when he returned to England at the age of fifty eight and after a voyage that had lasted thirty-five years. So as not to slow the narrative, his insignificant wife mothered three children then died, all in the same paragraph.

  Nor did Selkirk find a sense of home through marriage. It took a ship, an ocean and a can of flip, to define the work of a day. Women were shadowy creatures, black nymphs, angels, tarts and Jezebels, to be taunted and conquered in the company of men.

  In November 1720 he was at the port of Plymouth. He did not find his way home to his ‘loveing friend’ Sophia Bruce. He signed on as First Mate of a naval warship HMS Weymouth which was to make a ‘Voyage to Guinea’. For some weeks it was fitted and revictualled: ‘Rum and Biskett (20 Baggs)’, salt beef, pork, dried peas, oatmeal, butter and fifteen cheeses.

  Selkirk drank his flip in a public house in Oarston, a haunt of sailors. Frances Candis, its owner, was as tough a booty seeker as any privateer. He flirted with her, urged on by other drinkers. He told her of the Manila Galleon and that he was worth a thousand pounds.†

  She would not have sex with him unless they married. He would marry her, he said, before the Weymouth sailed. She called him ‘very importunate’. He was also very drunk. Asked if he had a wife he ‘Solemnly declared he was a Single and an unmarryed Person’. She voiced her doubts, a man of his age and fortune … His drinking friends swore he was free. She knew that drunken sailors were not to be believed.

  She claimed she was averse to marrying him but that he insisted. She protested that she could have no life with a man such as he. His ship was leaving within a month. There were the perils and dangers of the seas. She would be a widow before the year was out. She wanted security, so if they married, they must go from the church to her lawyer. Selkirk must make a Will leaving his wages, estate and all he had to her.

  The wedding she arranged was on 12 December 1720 in St Andrew’s Parish Church in Plymouth. It was a Church of England ceremony. Curate Robert Forster granted the licence. Frances Candis claimed her husband was sober at the time. Her acquaintances – William Warren, John Kimber and Samuel Rhodes witnessed the ceremony.

  She took him from the Church to a Plymouth notary. Mr Samuel Bury expressed what he gathered to be Selkirk’s intentions in a Will. It was a simpler document than the one lodged with Sophia three years previously. A brief document of betrayal. It made no mention of Katherine Mason, Largo, his family, or Sophia. It simply revoked all former Wills, commended his ‘Soul to God that gave it’, committed his body to the earth or sea, and bequeathed all his worldly Estate – his Wages due, money, Lands, Tenements, and Estate to his ‘wellbeloved wife Frances Selkirk of Oarston & her assignes for ever’.†

  In the island of his mind it was only a piece of paper, the price of sex. This woman was no more his wife than Sophia Bruce. He lived for the opportunism of the moment, without regard for society’s rules. Had his ship docked at Wapping he might have found his way to Sophia. But it went to Plymouth.

  Within days he was heading for the West Coast of Africa, the chase over, the notch made. Again the wind and the sea were his rescue. The sea got him away. The Weymouth’s task was to protect merchant ships and rout pirates from the Gulf of Guinea. Across the familiar ocean was a manly battle to fight, a journey to be made.†

  1721 Small Breeze and Fair

  IT WAS a doomed voyage. It took him far from The Island’s heart and to the sea’s bed. He went to search out pirates who preyed on English ships and all he found was death. It did not matter to him to be a turncoat, fighting his own kind. There was the familiar ghetto of the ship: sparse rations, mutiny and violence.†

  The Weymouth reached the mouth of the river Gambia in March 1721. There were gales, haze and great waves. It seemed an omen of disaster when Alexander Clark wrestling to reef the sails ‘was struck overboard with the saile from the topsl. yd. and was drowned’. In wind and rain the ship then grounded in sand. An anchor broke, a cable was damaged. At high tide there was only fifteen feet of water, at low tide, seven. For four days the crew heaved and hauled before the ship was free.

  Villagers who lived along this Gold Coast had no reason to be accommodating to these colonising Whites. Messengers from the ship who requested water were taken hostage. The ransom demanded for them was of gold and food.

  At the rivers and fresh water places, in the dark forests where the men went to cut wood, the dank air was thick with mosquitoes. They were seen as pests and an irritation not as creatures that might kill with a deadly bite. But in June the men of the Weymouth began to die: Mr White, Purser, deceased. Mr Peine, Schoolemaster, deceased. Charles Fanshaw, departed this life. John Pritchard, died this day.

  The sick could not know their mortal illness was caused by a virus, transmitted by mosquitoes that fed on infected monkeys and then on them. The surgeons blamed the foetid air, the proximity to Negroes. They plied their hopeless craft: phlebotomy and mulled spices.

  By late September so many men were dying a makeshift hospital was erected on shore. Twenty Negroes were commandeered without whose help the ship could not be crewed. On 23 October the Governor of Cape Coast Castle informed the Weymouth’s Captain, Mungo Herdman, of pirates who had done much damage and taken a Royal African Company ship. The Governor asked for a Muster to be called of men on board who were fit for service. The call was seventy-two: ‘Officers, Seamen and Learners, all included’. The following day it was fifty-seven.

  Deaths were entered in a daily log, along with laconic comment on the weather, the fixing of a halter around a mutineer’s neck and putting him under the Boatswain’s command as a Swabber, the taking of men and stores from other ships, the employment of Negroes as a last resort.

  In late November Selkirk, too, became unfit for service. His symptoms were the same as those of other men: burning fever and a shivering chill, headache and muscle pains, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea. He knew that he was dying. It was not the loneliest journey of his life, or the judgement he had feared from The Island’s might. He was in the company of men. They offered consolation. As he died he bled from his eyes and mouth.†

  On 13 December John Barnsley, First Lieutenant of the Weymouth wrote in his Log, ‘North to northwest. Small Breeze and fair. Took 3 Englishmen out of a Dutch ship and at 8 pm Alexander Selkirk and Wm King died’. The following day it was the turn of William Worthington, Owen Sullivan and Abraham Hudnott.

  Wednesday 13 December was
a day of small consequence, like the day that preceded and the day that followed. Selkirk’s soul was committed to God, his body to the sea, the usual prayers were said. It was not, as he had supposed, The Island’s cats he tamed that fed on the meat from his bones, but the fishes of the Atlantic Ocean.

  By dying he missed the drama of the pirates’ capture: Their trial on board ship. The erection of a scaffold by the shore. The parade of those deemed guilty. The singing of psalms for the sake of their souls. The execution of six men one day, fourteen the next.

  In Defoe’s novel, Crusoe reached a safe old age. Death for him was another fictional journey. He travelled to heaven in the company of angels, God and Jesus Christ. Selkirk was forty-one when he died. His death was registered in his paybook. There was no other comment on his going. It was silent and unexplained like The Island’s night. Money, as ever, signified. The wages owing to him were £35 15s 9d. From this was deducted fifteen shillings for the cost of his seaman’s chest and seven and sixpence for fifteen months’ medical insurance with the Greenwich hospital.

  1722–4 Wages, Estate and Effects, Goods, Chatells and Credits

  IN HER public house in Plymouth, Frances Selkirk heard of her husband’s death at sea. Her thoughts turned to his ‘Wages, Estate and Effects’ his ‘Goods, Chatells and Credits’. She wished to marry a more suitable man, Francis Hall, a tallow chandler.*

  She applied to His Majesty’s Navy office in Broad Street for Selkirk’s wages from the Weymouth. Her application was blocked. Sophia Bruce had put in a prior claim. She too said she was Selkirk’s widow. She had had his Will proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.* In it, he had, devised and bequeathed to her his ‘Wages Goods Weres Profitts Merchandizes Sume and Sumes of Money Gold Silver Wearing Apparel Bonds Books and any other Thing whatsoever’.

  The wives went to lawyers. Sophia protested that she had married Selkirk in March 1717. Her grievance was acute. She claimed the later Will was fraudulent. He had not been free to marry another woman. If he had gone through some spurious wedding ceremony, it was ‘when he was much intoxicated with Liquor and non Compos Mentis’.