The voices belong to three Aboriginal men. They stand on the escarpment, spears in hand, possum skins covering their shoulders. Your first instinct is to creep into a crevice and try to hide, but they have already seen you and are now shouting. You can only assume they are asking you to surrender and, with nowhere to go, you step out and approach them.
Well, at least what happens next takes you into familiar territory. ‘They gazed on me with wonder: my size probably attracting their attention,’ you will later recall.
Not just your size, although that has been enough to surprise strangers for years. It’s your skin. Despite the tan from months in the sun it’s unlikely they have seen anyone like you before. They seize your hands and then strike their breasts and begin singing and wailing. And then they begin to inspect this hut of yours, this ragged shanty of old limbs and seaweed. One of the men dives into the sea and comes out shortly after with a crayfish that is thrown on to a hastily made fire. Once cooked it is shared equally.
You remain cautious. Nothing in life has prepared you for something like this. When this cordial greeting and sharing of food is over the three beckon you to follow them and you do, leaving the beach and moving inland where you finally arrive at two small huts and spend the night. After a sleepless evening the three men indicate they want to continue moving inland but now the stubbornness in you – or is it fear? – returns. You refuse. One of them points to your worn-out stockings, stained and ridden with holes and loose threads. He wants them, forcing another refusal.
‘After sundry striking of the breasts and stamping with the feet they were content to leave me unmolested,’ is how you will later put it. But that man is fixated with those stockings. He returns shortly with a woven basket filled with wild berries and tries to exchange it for them and once again you refuse to hand them over. Isn’t this how so many first encounters between different cultures begin badly? Not with the rattling of sabres and firing of guns, but over the small things – a misinterpreted wave of the hand or a well-meant offering that instead causes offence. Or a pair of lousy, worn-out, stinking stockings you should have discarded weeks ago …
When the man departs again and disappears, you decide to leave, too. Not a good decision, not one of your finest moments. For the next few days you wander through the bush, hopelessly lost among those gnarled eucalypts shedding layers of bark like flayed skin. It’s cold and begins to rain and the only shelter to be found is inside a hollow tree. You can light a fire here, keep warm and stay hidden. Now you’re starting to think straight …
‘My fire attracted the notice of wild dogs and oposums, whose horrid howls and noises were such as to render sleep impossible. The cries of the latter were like the shrieks of children, appearing to be at times over me and at others close to my ear.’
This is where all notion of time stops. How many days pass before we find you back in your glorious seaweed hut on the beach? How many weeks watching your clothes fray, the holes in those stockings growing larger? Even worse, as you sit there on that rock looking out over the ocean, searching for the hint of a calico sail on the horizon, the loneliness and despair returns.
Perhaps there is time to make it back to Sullivan Bay – wherever it might be, given your sense of direction has been turned upside down. Perhaps that morose David Collins will still be there, still waiting for you and damned if you wouldn’t sink to your knees at the very sight of him and kiss the ground and tear off your shirt and enjoy every bloody lash they unleashed on you.
Off you go then. Broken and beaten, still clinging to that fantasy of staging a miraculous return. You can only manage short distances at a time before exhaustion sets in. You reach a stream you will one day call Dooangawn. Near it is a mound of earth and embedded in it, a spear. You pull it from the ground and use it as a walking stick. But it can barely hold you up; starvation has weakened you to the point where even walking exhausts you and, trying to cross a river spilling into the sea, the high tide almost washes you away.
Crawl into the bush. That’s it. Sleep the night. Next morning you must find food. Anything will do – a handful of berries, the root of a small plant. And while you are foraging in vain, two women will see you. This is it.
‘These women went in search of their husbands with the intelligence that they had seen a very tall white man. Presently they all came upon me unawares and, seizing me by the arms and hands began beating their breasts, and mine … the women assisted me to walk, the men shouting hideous noises and tearing their hair.’
Who can blame them? They have seen a ghost.
There was a stubborn bastard on the Calcutta with you who you never knew – Teredo navalis. It’s a bivalve mollusc but don’t be fooled by that. It looks like a worm. It has a thin reddish body with two small chalky plates at its front end that grind away at anything in its path, tenaciously forming a burrow, never stopping in its quest to probe deeper.
Damn thing is almost indestructible. If anything deserves the Latin for stubborn bastard – pertinax bastardis – surely it is this little wriggler. It can survive for six weeks without oxygen as it bores its way through every obstacle, a very handy attribute given that hundreds of them are now chewing their way through the hull of the Cinque Ports, an old pirate ship that has seen better days and will not be seeing many more.
It is the Year of Our Lord, 1704 – exactly a century before a starving convict on the run begins to realise he may shortly die because of his stubbornness. The master of the Cinque Ports is Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman as headstrong as the worms burrowing below him – creatures that have been the bane of wooden ships for centuries. Selkirk has been complaining to his skipper, an arrogant, 21-year-old upper-class twit by the name of Thomas Stradling, that the ship is riddled with the things and needs to undergo immediate repair. The crew has been pumping out water from the holds day and night and they are exhausted. Scurvy and fever have claimed the lives of a dozen men, including the previous captain. Supplies of meat and grain are now infested with cockroaches and rat droppings.
Say what you like about pirates, but don’t say they are indecisive. Stradling has had enough of Selkirk’s complaints and when the Scotsman refuses to quieten down, Stradling abandons him on Más a Tierra, a small, uninhabited island in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago off the coast of Chile. Left with a musket that will soon run out of gunpowder, a cooking pot, a Bible and some bedclothes, Selkirk’s first few months alone are the hardest. More than once he will glance at his gun thinking it might quickly end his misery. At night rats chew on his clothes and nibble his feet. He will catch fish but because they ‘occasion’d a Looseness’ in his bowels, prefers to stick with the local crayfish and the wild goats. You know that feeling from those damned shellfish.
Time passes and Selkirk changes. His spirits soar. Years of hunting make him lean and fast – so quick he can pursue those goats and run them down through the jagged crags that hug the island’s mountainside. The soles of his feet harden. He tames a herd of cats to keep the rats at bay. But it is his mind that begins to run free, taking delight in the simple pleasures of reading his Bible, humming songs to himself, observing the wildlife and climbing to his ‘lookout’, a point 1800 feet above the island.
When Selkirk is rescued almost four and a half years later he has been transformed. Not only does the scurvy-afflicted crew of the Duke discover a man of outstanding physical prowess but they are also captivated by his tranquil nature. He had not surrendered to the scurrying of the rats, the cries of other beasts in the night, even the voices in his own head. The man had triumphed and overcome everyone’s fear – loneliness – because he was headstrong and uncompromising and unwilling to surrender.
The skipper of the Duke, Woodes Rogers, is astounded and moved to write that: ‘One may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably, as this man was.’
A heavily bearded Selkirk, clad in skins roughly sewn together, welcomes his rescuers with a hearty goat soup. At first he finds it hard to relate his story, having ‘so much forgot his language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seemed to speak his words by halves’. But it soon tumbles out and Rogers is so impressed he immediately appoints Selkirk his second mate.
A decade later the English writer and satirist, Daniel Defoe, is said to be so inspired by Selkirk’s experiences he uses them to form the basis of a novel about a man shipwrecked for 28 years on an isolated island, constantly under siege from cannibals and mutineers. Robinson Crusoe will become the biggest selling and most famous novel in the world.
Defoe’s novel will be read by tens of millions of people who will see all sorts of parables in its pages. Even those poor, illiterate people on the streets of London and in the rural towns will have heard about its hero, a man who overcomes enormous obstacles with self-belief and tenacity.
These are the qualities that have really shaped history, from primitive man to castaways and even tiny sea worms with a voracious appetite for wood.
Stubborn bastards. Where would we be without them? And in time, a writer will look at you and think he has found his own Robinson Crusoe.