Selkirk's Island

by Diana Souhami

  Frances was determined to get every penny of Selkirk’s this Sophia had. She maligned her as ‘a person of very indifferent character and reputacion’. She married her tallow chandler and let him know that her previous husband had been a worthless rogue.

  From scrutiny of Sophia’s Will, Frances found that her husband of a week had been richer than she knew. She learned of the Largo house at Craigie Well, rental income, gold and silver, bills, bonds and smart money.* She filed an objection at the Canterbury Court. It was upheld. The Court ruled Sophia’s Will null and void. Its probate was revoked.

  Frances then applied to have her own Will proved. Sophia contested the application and reiterated her case. Frances and her new husband sued her for refusing to part with Selkirk’s goods, money, estate and effects ‘although she hath been severall times thereunto requested in a friendly manner by your Orators’. She had, they said, ‘pieces of Gold, gold rings, and other particulars and effects of a Considerable Value’.

  Sophia was arrested, offered bail of £500 which she could not raise, and so was imprisoned. While she was in gaol Frances had her own Will probated. She collected Selkirk’s wages from the Weymouth then went up to Largo and claimed his land, tenements, orchards and house at Craigie Well.

  It was not enough. When Sophia was released from gaol Frances Hall asked her to relinquish all she had in her possession that had once been Selkirk’s. But Sophia would not part with such inheritance as she had: his silver tobacco box and gold-headed cane, his clothes and sea books and silver-hilted sword ‘and other particulars left in her custody’.

  Though harassed and goaded, she would not give in. If Selkirk had been married to anyone it was to her. It was she who had offered him consolation for his abandonment on The Island, stayed with him when he was in trouble with the law and lived with him for months on end, not for mere days like this avaricious woman who craved his money, but had cared nothing for his life.

  The lawsuits were protracted.† Frances’s Petition was heard in the Chancery Courts in January 1723. Selkirk, she said, had sworn he was single when he wooed her. She repeated that she had not wanted to marry him, but he insisted. She gave proof of when and where this marriage took place, its registration and who had witnessed it, and proof of the Will, signed that same day.

  She asked that Sophia give account of where and when she had been married, ‘in what particular parish Church or place was such pretended marriage solempnized’, where was it registered and who had witnessed it. Sophia’s Will, she claimed, was a pretence, Selkirk must have been intoxicated and out of his senses if he made it, and anyway it was of a much earlier date, it was null and void, its probate had been revoked.

  A year later, on 6 December 1723, Sophia’s Petition was heard in Court. The Will in her favour was read out. She claimed she married Selkirk on 4 March 1717. He had then gone to sea with the Enterprise. He returned after eight months and stayed with her in London for best part of a year.

  This Frances, she said, knew he was already married. She had ‘contracted an acquaintance’ with Selkirk while he waited for the Weymouth to sail. He must have been drunk if he went through a ceremony with her. She had inveigled him into it.

  Sophia wanted an injunction to prevent Frances and her new husband taking out further proceedings against her, and to stop them seizing such assets as she had. They were harassing her. They had caused her to be wrongfully imprisoned and had deprived her of her husband’s estate.

  Frances’s reply was sworn at Plymouth in February 1724. She could not say, for she had no proof, whether Selkirk had ever married Sophia. But when he courted her, Frances, at her public house in Oarston, he ‘swore he was a Single and an Unmarryed Person’. He was not drunk. He knew what he was doing. Nor had she known of any previous Will. All she knew was of the Will she had. It revoked all other Wills. It had been witnessed, registered and probated. He had not made any subsequent Will, gift, or bequest. She and her new husband wished to keep the forty pounds of Selkirk’s wages they had received and to have it clarified by the Court that they were entitled to benefit from his Estate and Effects according to the last Will he had made. They wanted all costs and charges paid by Sophia.

  Sophia lost everything except her belief that she was Mrs Selkirk. The winter of 1724 was bitterly cold. Among the begging letters she wrote was one to the Reverend Say in the Parish of Westminster. She was, she said, ‘a person much reduced to want’. She was ‘the widow of Mr Selchrig who was left four years and four months on the island of John Ferinanda’. She was sorry to trouble Mr Say. She prayed for his help. She was a woman of piety and Christian belief. Her three uncles in Scotland had been ministers.†

  Selkirk was adept at slipping away from the consequences of a brawl in church, violent assault, false promises or bigamy. Had he survived, in a different port or public house he might have desired some other Frances or Sophia, tempted her with plunder, netted her in a parody of law, notched her like an Island goat.

  Selkirk had lived with nothing and with help from no one. The constant of his life had been the call of the sea. It took him to the prospect of riches, to battles he thought manly, to the heart of The Island, to the grave of the ocean.

  But at his end all that was focused on was an inventory of booty: rings, clothes, wages and a silver-hiked sword. His legacy was a wrangle for it, claims and counter claims to it, the reduction to poverty of a naive woman, a litigious justification of greed. It was an echo of the wrangles for plunder on all the voyages he had ever made. It obscured his quest for the Manila galleon, his navigation of the ocean by the sun and stars, his isolation on the implacable Island.

  He could not bequeath The Island in words or kind. The Island where he had watched for a sail that only one day came, where his courage was tested, where he had survived abandoned, sustained and protected by its clear water streams, its creatures that foraged, its plants and its trees.

  *Oronoque was a fictional river.

  *Maria Defoe married a salter, a Mr Langley.

  *Defoe defeats bibliography. He probably wrote some 560 books, pamphlets and journals. Sixteen were published in 1719, the same year as Robinson Crusoe.

  *The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 1703, satirised extreme Tory views and provoked official wrath. Threatened with prison, Defoe went into hiding in Spitalfields. An informant who flushed him out got a reward of £50. Defoe was pilloried on three consecutive days, then sent to Newgate gaol. His satire was publicly burned.

  *Among the anomalies in the first edition, Crusoe’s wrecked ship was carried out of sight by the storm, but was visible a few pages later. He stripped off his clothes to swim to the wreck, then filled his pockets with biscuits from it.

  *The quantity of scholarship about Robinson Crusoe is truly extraordinary. A Concordance (1998), more than a thousand pages long, lists the number of times Defoe uses words in the book: Providence (55 times), Island (183), Time (294), Earthquake (8).

  *See Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925). This essay was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 24 April 1919.

  *Defoe had a brick factory in Tilbury in 1694. He knew about firing clay.

  *A maker and seller of candles.

  *A Prerogative Court was the court of an archbishop for the probate of wills. In 1857 this jurisdiction was transferred to the Court of Probate.

  *Paid as compensation for disablement or injury while on duty.

  7

  THE ISLAND

  THE ISLAND

  1896 A Magnificent Wilderness

  THE ISLAND changed, yet stayed the same. Unfelled sandalwood trees (Santalum Fernandezianum) laid down their annular rings. Palms and ferns tangled more densely in valleys and gulches. Clumps of Dendroseris micratha spread tapering leaves over eroded rocks.

  Year on year plunderers thrived. The Island’s fur seals (Arctocephalus philippii) were killed for their pelts, massacred almost to extinction. In 1801 a single ship carried a million skins to the London market. Only seals
on remote rocks and in hidden bays, survived to regenerate. The huge sea lions (Otaria jubata) were all slaughtered, the sandalwood was felled, the lobsters were trapped and the whales harpooned.

  Visitors to The Island came and went. They praised its ‘savage irregular beauty’, its woods and verdant valleys and life saving streams. The last English privateers wrecked to its shores were from the Speedwell in 1719.* For six months The Island was their host.

  To spoil The Island as a larder for such men, the Spaniards set loose mastiffs into the valleys. Some goats survived by moving high into the mountain peaks. Most were killed. In a later change of mind, the Spaniards shot the dogs, reintroduced goats, then killed them for their hides.

  In 1740 Lord Anson took a naval fleet of English warships to the South Sea. In a voyage of despair men lost their fingers, limbs and lives in freezing gales. Covered in lice ‘a peck on each man’, they endured starvation, dysentery and scurvy. Out of a crew of two thousand, a third survived to The Island. Their joy was great:

  it is scarcely credible with what eagerness and transport we viewed the shore, and with how much impatience we longed for the greens and other refreshments which were then in sight, and particularly for the water … Those only who have endured a long series of thirst can judge of the emotion with which we eyed a large cascade of the most transparent water, which poured itself from a rock near a hundred feet high into the sea, at a small distance from the ship…†

  The Spaniards did not want the enemy to view The Island with transport and emotion. They built a deterring fort with stone dungeons and armed with soldiers. A kind of village grew: a dozen huts, a few women and children, eighty cows, pigs and sheep. The fort served too as a prison beyond escape.

  War with England ended in 1748. The fort fell to disuse, villagers returned to the mainland, the perception of enemy shifted. The Chilean people sought freedom from Spanish colonial rule. Chilean patriots were exiled by the Spaniards to The Island. Consigned to damp caves, they knew nothing of its beneficence.

  Castaways, mariners, soldiers, prisoners, hunters, all passed. Waves washed the seals’ blood from The Island’s bays. In 1823 a British traveller, Maria Graham, walked among the ruins of the fort and dungeons, the abandoned huts, the rusting harpoons and cannon by the shore.* She called The Island a ‘magnificent wilderness’ and was ‘enraptured with the wild beauty of the scenery’. Three herdsmen tending cattle were the only people there. She saw a discarded horse, neglected fields, charred wood from an old fire. She rested among myrtle trees, the mountains rose around her, she felt a shadow of the ‘utter loneliness’ Selkirk must have known.

  A recurring theme of visitors was how The Island might be colonised. A Swiss émigré, Alfred de Rodt, in 1877 put his plans to the Chilean authorities. He would transport sixty people and a thousand cattle to The Island, produce charcoal and export the native palms. He would farm and fish, trap lobsters, kill whales and what were left of the seals.

  He was appointed Inspector of Colonisation. Families came from Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland. Their names were Gonzalez, Chamorro, Charpentier, Camacho, Recabarren, Lopez, Schiller. Like other unendangered species they multiplied. When de Rodt died in 1905 The Island had a settlement of 122 human inhabitants. They viewed The Island as theirs.

  2000 Isla Robinson Crusoe

  THE ISLAND is now in Chilean territory. De Rodt’s colony has grown, but only to 500 people. Their settlement is called San Juan Bautista (St John the Baptist). Wooden huts and houses straddle the Great Bay where Selkirk scavenged alone.

  The islanders keep Selkirk’s memory. In 1966 Blanca Luz Brum, painter, and owner of the Hostelria Daniel Defoe, a cluster of shacks by the shore, petitioned the Chilean authorities to change The Island’s name from Mas A Tiera to Isla Robinson Crusoe. She had the tourist trade in mind. The other island in the archipelago, Mas A Fuera, was renamed Isla Alexander Selkirk, though he never set foot on that unaccommodating rock, which was a danger to avoid.

  On Isla Robinson Crusoe, in the huts that pass as shops, Crusoe t-shirts and Selkirk wall hangings are sold. A wooden sign directs travellers up a mountain trail to the Mirador Del Selkirk, the lonely peak where he searched for a sail.* The cave by the projecting rock in the north-west bay at Puerto Inglés, where he never stayed, is known as Selkirk’s cave.

  The Island’s savage terrain and the wide encircling sea, deter Homo sapiens. It is possible to link to the World Wide Web, though phone lines are often down. An electricity generator works, on and off. There are one or two cars, no road, newspapers, postman or bank. Credit cards and cheques are not used, or taxes collected. There is a doctor, a dentist, a midwife, but no pharmacy, hospital or vet. Six uniformed carabinieros play soccer and collect little children from school on rainy days. Older children go to boarding school in Valparaiso, ferried over in a naval ship in March, then back to The Island in summer for Christmas.

  The islanders have a few civic rules. The Municipality, created in 1980, levies rates for water piped from the mountain streams and for maintenance of the pier – on the opposite side of the bay from where Selkirk urged his rescuers to land. A notice in the Correos, the post office, by Order of the Municipality, strictly forbids the tethering of animals to the football goalposts. Those who disobey are threatened with a fine.

  Islanders refer to mainland Chile as ‘the continent’. It seems a world away. In turbulent weather marooned visitors watch the sky. If clear, a small plane flies (courtesy of ‘Robinson Crusoe Airlines’) to a domestic airport in Chile’s capital city, Santiago.* It carries a few people, post, and in season, boxes of lobsters. Its runway is a dirt strip at El Puente (the bridge), the only flat bit on The Island, at the low western end where Selkirk went by boat with Dampier to snare goats. Travellers take the same bucketing boat trip from the Great Bay to Bahia del Padre, past awesome cliffs, and rocks where fur seals bask and bottle in the sea’s spray. There is transit in a decrepit jeep to the airstrip, then a three-hour flight across the ocean.

  The islanders live from the sea. Lobsters are their trade. The same endemic creatures (Jasus frontalis) Selkirk saw, but then they swarmed the shore and were three feet long. Now they are a dying breed, an endangered species. Year on year the size of the catch and of the lobsters, gets smaller. There is a rule that those caught must measure eleven and a half centimetres, tail to thorax. Smaller creatures must be returned to the sea. But trade in undersize lobsters remains.* They find their way into empanadas and on to the islanders’ tables.**

  Once a month a supply ship, the Navarino, comes from ‘the continent’ with drums of petrol for the fishing boats, cylinders of gas, fresh vegetables, provisions, building materials and children’s toys. In summer it sails on to the other island where, for eight months of the year thirty lobster fishers live. They look as wild as Selkirk. They come out by boat to meet the ship. It is their lifeline. It takes them letters, cigarettes and pisco – a brandy made from grapes. They send gifts home to Isla Robinson Crusoe: a box of fish, a blackcurrant bush, a terrified goat.

  The lobster factory is in Valparaiso. The Navarino returns with its cargo of lobsters. They scrabble and claw in seawater containers nailed with net. A factory official counts them in. Fishermen receive a few hundred pesos for each creature. Smaller lobsters, flung back to the sea, lurch, gulp and head for the life they need. The others, within a day, are taken live by plane to Europe or to the smart restaurants of Santiago.

  To save the remaining fur seals, in 1978 they were declared a protected species. Man forbade himself to kill more of them. Some thousands survive around the archipelago. Their voices echo in the bays. Marine biologists observe their feeding patterns, rookeries and hauling grounds and how they treat their young.

  Away from protecting eyes there is the same indifference to animal suffering as in Selkirk’s day. For meat, a bull is lassoed then dragged down from the hills. It bellows and is beaten with sticks on its long reluctant journey. The men’s hands bleed as they pull it by a ro
pe from its horns. Dogs yelp and snap at its legs. It arrives defeated at the crude abattoir. It is tethered to the gnarled root of a tree for its last night. In its eyes are depression, or perhaps rage.

  Next morning the smell of rendered fat comes from the abattoir. Lumps of hacked meat are pushed from it in a barrow. Notices are soon scrawled on cardboard in windows: Hoy. Empanadas con carne.*

  Away from such activity are the still mountains and fissured cliffs, the deep forests, dense luma and chonta, the tree ferns and grasses. The Island has its unobserved life, its own laws. The fire that formed it four million years past still burns. The wind curls through the valleys. Seisms and tsunamis warn. Waves hurl high from a calm sea catching rainbows of sunlight in their spray.

  2000 A Worldwide Reserve of the Biosphere

  THE ISLAND’S mountains, valleys and gulches are now measured and mapped. With the same passion for inventory shown by the privateers, its birds, snails, lichens, algae, psocoptera, palms and peperomias, bryophytes and gymnospheres, are counted, classified, named and sorted. Sixty per cent of its plants are unique to it. There are 131 kinds of moss and 20 sorts of fern.

  In 1935 it was declared a national park. This was in large part a response to the work of a Swedish botanist, Carl Skottsberg.† It intrigued him that life forms that would die at the touch of seawater, that preceded man by a million years, had their home on it, that their ancestors passed uninjured over vast stretches of ocean, or survived on this leftover fragment of unsubmerged land. He saw The Island as a unique ecosystem, a world in microcosm, to be protected and preserved.

  But the islanders, like Crusoe, saw it as their estate. For decades they lived without rules or prohibitions. They felled the endemic palms to build their boats and houses, planted blackberry which spread like fire and choked the native plants, and they imported sheep, cattle and goats, which grazed the vegetation and eroded the soil.