He stands alone on the shoreline. He is such a savage sight that the six oarsmen in the approaching ship’s boat take quick glances over their shoulders as they row closer. His legs and callused feet are bare, and the hairy pelts of animals cover his upper thighs and body. He has stitched the skins together into an uncouth jacket, using rawhide thongs. A clumsy, rough cap of the same material protects his head. The coarse animal hair on the pelts merges with the overflow of his long beard and his wild mat of hair so that he resembles a shaggy animal, excited and reared up on two legs.
The two officers in the boat, Captain Thomas Dover and Second Mate Robert Frye, scan the stony beach, trying to judge the best place to land, and the hairy creature waves to them urgently, pointing to a suitable spot. He then rushes forward to greet them as they splash ashore. The visitors are too astonished to speak as the apparition, choking with emotion, throws his arms around the new arrivals and hugs them. The hirsute man has not been able to tan the skins he wears. They reek as when they clothed their original owners, the wild goats of the island. The man stinks.
The Duke’s yawl finds him. Three weeks earlier Captain Woodes Rogers had steered his thirty-gun “private ship of war” around Cape Horn after a difficult four-month passage from Cork in Ireland, and slipped furtively into the Pacific. He and Captain Stephen Courtney of the accompanying twenty-six-gun Duchess then lay course for an uninhabited island nearly 400 miles off the coast of Chile. This is poachers’ thinking. The remote island is well away from the usual shipping lanes and will be a temporary base where the crews, more than three hundred men packed in the two cramped, damp ships, can go ashore to stretch their legs and recuperate from their grueling voyage. Then they will launch a surprise attack on the coast of Chile.
The two captains carry licenses to justify this predatory behavior. Their “letters of marque and reprisal,” written in florid legal language by government clerks in London, give them leave to harry the enemies of the king of Great Britain. In the year 1709 the King’s enemies include all subjects and allies of the Spanish crown. In return the Spanish regard such raiders as pirates, and use that blunt word to describe them. They also suspect, rightly, that some of the sailors aboard the raiding vessels are ex-buccaneers who have conducted previous hit-and-run raids along the coast of what is modern-day Chile and Peru. If the Spanish authorities can catch them, the luckier ones may be exchanged for ransom, but most will spend the rest of their lives in prison or as slave labor. A few, positively identified for their crimes, will face execution.
So it is a shock when the ships’ lookouts spot a light burning on the heights of the island. The two vessels first glimpse the distant outline of land at seven o’clock on the morning of 31 January. The island lies to the west of their track, and they immediately turn toward it. But the new course is upwind and neither vessel is a swift sailer. They make such slow progress that by noon the following day they are wallowing through the swell and are still some four leagues from their landfall. Aboard the Duke Dr. Thomas Dover impetuously asks for the pinnace to be lowered and manned so that he can be rowed ashore. His wish is granted because he is one of the English shareholders who invested the substantial sum of fourteen thousand pounds to arm and victual the two ships, and he holds the rank of “second captain.” Later he will become famous for creating a patent medicine based on opium resin. Dover’s Powder will be a stock item of ships’ medicine chests for the next two hundred years, prescribed for colds, coughs, insomnia, rheumatism, and dysentery. But its headstrong inventor is no mariner. The distance to the island is too far to row. When darkness falls, the doctor’s boat has still some way to go and the watchers aboard the ships become alarmed. It is obvious that the pinnace will have to turn back and in the darkness may miss the ships altogether. The Duke and Duchess sling lanterns in the rigging to guide home the strays and fire off muskets and a gun on the quarterdeck to help them get their bearings. The lookouts peer into the darkness for signs of the returning boat. This is when they distinctly see a point of light. They think at first that it is a lantern aboard the pinnace, but soon realize that the flare must come from a bonfire on land.
This is very ominous. It had been presumed that there was no one living on the island. A bonfire means human presence. Dr. Dover could not have lit the fire because the pinnace reappears out of the darkness at midnight, and her crew report that they failed to set foot ashore. The obvious explanation for the light is that the Spaniards have garrisoned the island. If so, the privateers risk a fiasco. The garrison could already have sent word to the mainland, warning about the arrival of foreign vessels, and the raiders would have lost the all-important element of surprise. But the Spaniards are not the first foe who spring to mind: England is at war with France, and Woodes Rogers and his officers fear that a hostile French squadron has entered the Pacific ahead of them and taken possession of the strategic island. “We are all convinced the light is on the shore, and design to make our ships ready to engage, believing them to be French Ships at anchor,” Woodes Rogers writes in his account of the voyage published three years later.
But he also notes that his own ship and the Duchess have “a great many Men down with the Cold, and some with Scurvy,” and as overall commander of the privateering enterprise he knows that some invalids will die if they are not gotten ashore for treatment. So he has little choice but to proceed with the original plan of landing on Juan Fernandez.
He orders the two ships to prepare to fight any enemy and slowly keeps his course, timing his approach so as to arrive in full daylight. As the sun rises on the morning of February 2, the lookouts grow more puzzled by the hour. There is no sign of human activity on shore. The steep green hills of the island seem utterly deserted.
The Duke edges round the island, cautiously leading the way. Her pilot, William Dampier, is an ex-buccaneer and he was here four years earlier on a similar raid. He is aware that the best place to moor the vessels is in a shallow bay on the northeast shore. When the anchorage comes into view, there is still nothing to be seen. Not a ship in the bay, no boat drawn up on the beach, not even a hut or a wisp of smoke rising from the thick vegetation which clothes the slopes that rise in a steep bowl from the small area of flat ground close to the water’s edge. The place looks as though no living soul has set foot there since the beginning of time. The ships are still tacking slowly into the anchorage, making sluggish headway against the fluky and unpredictable wind that blows in sudden gusts from the high ground, when the impatient second captain, Dr. Dover, again decides to lead a reconnaissance. Dover takes the Duke’s yawl, six oarsmen, and the second mate, and heads off for the beach even before the ships have dropped anchor.
The man in goatskins sighted them the previous evening. Months earlier he had cut a supply of firewood and stacked it ready for use. Last night he stayed up tending the blaze so that it would serve as a beacon, unaware that the bright point of light risked scaring away his rescuers. He has also cooked some goat’s meat, knowing the sea-weary crews would relish it. Now he offers to show his visitors the secret hut where he lives. It is scarcely a mile away but the undergrowth is so thick, and the path so difficult, that only Robert Frye, the second mate, accompanies the hairy islander as he pushes his way through the brushwood, protected by his goatskin jacket. Frye arrives at a modest shelter made of branches and thatched with local grass. The interior has been lined with more goatskins. The only furnishings are a sea chest, a cooking pot, and some worn bedding, together with a musket that lacks gunpowder and a makeshift knife fashioned by rubbing down an iron hoop into a blade. Significantly, there are also some navigation instruments and a basic library comprising several books of navigational tables, as well as some devotional texts, and a Bible. Nearby is a second, smaller hut which the man uses as his kitchen. He says he has been living there for four years and four months, on his own.
Aboard the Duke, Captain Woodes Rogers is becoming anxious to know what is keeping the yawl so long. He sends the pinnace to investigate, and the boat returns almost immediately, carrying the wild-looking stranger and a scrabbling, clattering cargo of large bright pink crayfish, which the men in the yawl have found crawling in great numbers in the shallows. Rogers hospitably offers the newcomer a drink, but he declines. He has not touched a drop of alcohol since he has been on the island, he says, and he no longer has the habit. It is difficult to understand what he is saying. He speaks slowly, dragging out his words and dividing them into halves as though he has been losing the power of speech during his long period of isolation. Curiously, the same phenomenon will later be noticed of dogs abandoned on the island. It will be claimed that they temporarily lose the ability to bark, and only regain their voices when they are returned to the company of other dogs.
The newcomer identifies himself. He is Alexander Selkirk, born in Scotland and a mariner by profession. He is now thirty- three years old and last saw a friendly face when he was twenty-nine. He has kept track of his time on the island by carving marks into a tree to record the months and days. During his four years of solitary existence he has seen several ships pass by. But they were always Spanish vessels, and he was too frightened to attract their attention for fear of what might happen to him. Usually the Spanish ships maintained their course and steered past the island, but on one occasion two ships came right into the bay, dropped anchor, and put men ashore. They caught a glimpse of him, fired shots, and chased after him. Dodging back into the bushes, he ran off and scrambled up a tree to hide. His hunters paused right underneath him while one of them urinated against the tree trunk, but they did not glance above their heads and failed to notice him. The Spaniards shot several goats for their larder, then abandoned their human chase and sailed away, confident that they were leaving the fugitive to harmless solitude.
The Scotsman also volunteers the surprising information that he is not a castaway, but had chosen to be on the island by himself, at least at the beginning. He had come ashore from the privateer galley Cinque Ports, where he was sailing master, after quarreling with her captain, Thomas Stradling. The galley had been in need of an overhaul after a series of mismanaged raids on the mainland, and Stradling had decided to bring his leaky vessel to the island to make repairs. Selkirk detested his captain so heartily that when the galley was ready to leave, Selkirk refused to sail with her. The vessel was still unfit for sea, in his opinion, and he would rather stay behind on the island. Clearly, Stradling was sick of his cantankerous crewman and swiftly granted his request. He set Selkirk ashore with his personal baggage, a pound of gunpowder and some shot for his musket, a small quantity of tobacco, and a little food. It will later be claimed that Selkirk suffered a change of heart at the last minute. As the ship’s boat began to row away, he ran down into the water and shouted out to departing boat, begging to be taken back aboard. Stradling is alleged to have called back, mocking him and telling him that he was glad to be rid of him. Technically, therefore, Alexander Selkirk is a maroon, someone purposely left ashore on a deserted island or coast to fend for himself.
Unexpectedly, the Duke’s pilot vouches for Selkirk. He recognizes the Scotsman as a former shipmate and says that he was the best man aboard the Cinque Ports. Rogers realizes that finding Selkirk is a stroke of good fortune for his own enterprise. The navigation instruments kept in the Scotsman’s hut indicate that he knows how to find his way at sea, and clearly he has firsthand knowledge of the poorly charted South American coast. So Woodes Rogers loses no time in offering Selkirk a post as mate aboard the Duke; when the Scotsman accepts, Rogers dispatches him back to the beach to assist the shore parties.
Selkirk guides Dr. Dover and his assistants to the places where they can gather wild turnips, watercress, and native greenstuffs. These will help to cure the ships’ scurvy-stricken invalids, who are brought ashore and housed in tents made of sails stretched between the trees. In the following days Selkirk also leads shore parties on goat hunting expeditions and astonishes them with his technique. After years of living on the mountainous island, he is so fit and agile that he does not shoot the goats. He simply runs after them until he overtakes them, then grabs one. The only time a goat can outpace him is when it is running downhill. He catches up with a wild goat in the space of a few minutes and comes back with the bleating animal draped across his shoulders. On one occasion he returns with two goats in his clutch. When the hunters bring a dog ashore from the Duke to help them, Selkirk outruns that animal too. It is a bulldog, a breed not known for its speed, and the Scotsman leaves it far behind. Selkirk explains to his visitors that he learned to catch goats by hand after he had used up the pound of gunpowder that the begrudging Captain Stradling had allowed him. In the end he became so deft that he had turned the chase into a sport. Catching a goat, he would mark the animal by slitting its ears, and let it go. He calculates that his total catch over the years is four hundred animals. The sailors soon take to calling him the Governor in amused reference to his mastery of the little island kingdom he has made his home for so long.
Only two of the scurvy victims die—a very light toll in the opinion of Woodes Rogers—and within ten days the other convalescents have recovered their health enough for the privateers to make ready to leave the island. Barrels of fresh water are taken aboard, and eighty casks of oil the sailors have boiled down from the blubber of the sea lions and seals who breed in huge colonies along the shore. The roaring and groaning of these animals fill the air for miles around, so much so that Selkirk says that noise frightened him when he first came ashore. The sailors from the Duke and Duchess must carry sticks to beat a path through the cumbersome animals as they lounge on the beach. Their blubber oil provides fuel for lamps and grease for cooking, and some of the sailors develop a taste for seal meat, though most prefer goat flesh. Three days before departure Rogers sends two boats with Selkirk and a gang of hunters to take a batch of wild goats from the western end of the island. According to Selkirk, it is home to very large numbers of the animals, though he has never been able to get there because access is too steep and rocky. On arrival, the hunters find that once again the Governor is correct. They count more than a thousand goats, but bungle the roundup. Most of the animals escape over a cliff, and the hunters bring back only nineteen for the expedition larder.
As the two ships sail for their surprise attack on the mainland coast, Woodes Rogers observes in his journal that Selkirk needs time to adapt to normal shipboard life. His feet swell up and hurt when he tries to wear shoes, and he has difficulty eating the ship’s food. There was no salt on Selkirk’s island—a reason why he could not cure his goatskins properly—and for a long time he finds it hard to digest the ship’s rations, which are heavily salted for preservation. His diet for four years has been based on fresh goat meat, fresh vegetables, and wild plants. In the beginning he also ate many crayfish “as big as lobsters” because they were so easy to catch in the shallows. But eventually he got so tired of the taste of crayfish, whether boiled or roasted, that he could eat them only “as jellies,” a seafarer’s term for shipboard food that was neither solid nor salted. Fishing was also very easy, but for some reason the fish he caught gave him diarrhea, so he stopped catching them. Woodes Rogers notes also that Selkirk remains taciturn and withdrawn. But this may be the Scotsman’s natural character, because his restrained manner does not detract from the performance of his duties. Selkirk has now joined a much more successful enterprise than his venture with the odious Captain Stradling. Selkirk will learn, probably with grim satisfaction, that his former commander met his just deserts after the marooning. His patched-up ship foundered on the mainland coast, and several of the crew drowned. The others, including Stradling, managed to get away from the wreck on rafts. The Spaniards captured them and threw them into prison.
Woodes Rogers, by contrast, now has a run of good luck. His force intercepts one small ship after another and robs their passengers at swordpoint. The marauders hold to ransom several coastal towns, and steadily amass a treasure in pieces of eight, gold necklaces and chains, and silver sword handles and plate. The only real disappointment is their failure to capture the larger of the two Manila Galleons bringing this year’s shipment of treasure from the Philippines to Acapulco. The smaller galleon strikes her flag after a stiff sea fight, during which a bullet hits Woodes Rogers in the upper left cheek and carries away part of the jaw, so that some of his teeth drop out on deck. With one treasure ship taken, Rogers then doggedly sets off to intercept the larger, richer galleon, but she proves to be too powerful, though Rogers presses home the attack with his usual determination, lying on the deck in a pool of blood after a flying splinter strikes his heel.
Selkirk behaves admirably throughout the expedition. He leads boat crews on raids along the rivers and is appointed to command one of the prizes. By the time the Duke and Duchess eventually drop anchor in London, having sailed right round the world to get there, Selkirk’s share of the prize money is calculated to be worth £800. This is a very considerable reward at a time when a shopkeeper might expect to earn £45 a year, though just how much of the £800 he actually receives is uncertain because the division of the expedition’s spoils will be contested through the courts for years to come. Selkirk himself has been away for eight years, one month, and three days.
The successful return of the privateers in October 1711 causes a sensation. There are excited reports that the original investors will make more than 500 percent profit. Dr. Dover, for example, eventually collects £2,755, including “storm money” (£100) and “plunder money” (£24). Tavern gossips savor the tales of desperate battles and the whiff of gunpowder. Educated society picks over the descriptions of strange lands, their plants and animals, and the hitherto unknown customs of their natives. Edward Cooke, second captain of the Duchess, quickly publishes a book about his experiences on the expedition, A Voyage to the South Sea, and soon afterward Woodes Rogers does the same; his volume is titled A Cruising Voyage Round the World. Both volumes describe the bizarre episode of picking up the solitary islander dressed in his goatskins, and Selkirk becomes a celebrity. The essayist Richard Steele will claim in issue number 26 of his magazine The Englishman, published on 3 December 1713, that he met and interviewed Selkirk, though this may have been a journalistic fabrication. Steele writes that even if he had not known Selkirk’s story before he met him, there was something about the Scotsman’s demeanor that suggests that the man had been “much separated from Company.” There was a “strong but cheerful seriousness in his Look, and a certain disregard for the ordinary things about him as if he had been sunk in thought.” Steele makes the point that it must have been an extraordinary experience for a mariner like Selkirk who had spent his working life in the close company of sailors crammed aboard ship, suddenly to be left to live on his own. Steele also publishes the surprising assertion that Selkirk did not want to be rescued by the Duke and Duchess. All he wanted was to help the sailors with the gift of fresh supplies and send them on their way. According to Steele, now that the Scotsman was back in normal life, he felt he was worse off than when he was on the island. Steele quotes Selkirk as saying, “I am now worth 800 Pounds, but shall never be so happy” as when I was not worth a Farthing.”
Steele has his own reasons for portraying “the Governor” as a disillusioned man. Steele is promoting the theory that a man is most content when he lives a simple life. According to Steele, Selkirk managed to survive cheerfully on his island with only rudimentary food and shelter and therefore “this plain man’s story is a memorable example of that he is happiest who confines his Wants to natural necessities.” Steele underlines his message by claiming that when he met Selkirk in the street some time later, the process had been reversed. Selkirk had readapted to society, just as he had grown accustomed to wearing shoes again. Day-to-day contact with people had removed all trace of loneliness, and Steele scarcely recognized him.
Alexander Selkirk should now have faded into the background. He was not the only mariner to be rescued from a lonely shore and to tell of his adventures, and the remainder of his life was away from the spot- light. He went to Scotland to visit his family and stayed there for about two years, presumably living off his prize money as it was dribbled out to former crew members by the shareholder consortium. By March 1717 he moved to London, where he entered into a “marriage”—whether formal or informal is not clear—with a Scottish girl, Sophia Bruce.
So he was probably in London when advertisements began to appear in the London newspapers announcing the publication of a romantic novel. The picture on the front page of the book bears a conspicuous resemblance to Selkirk himself. The engraving is the book’s only illustration and shows a rather melancholy-looking man standing on the shore of an island, gazing inland. He is dressed in a goatskin coat belted at the waist over shaggy breeches, his feet and shins are bare, and he has a heavy beard. On his head is an odd-looking conical hat. The man carries a flintlock musket on each shoulder—one more gun than Selkirk possessed—and the barrel of a pistol can just be seen, tucked into his belt. A bowl-hilted sword hangs behind him and completes his armament. Even if Selkirk himself did not recognize the resemblance, others certainly did. As far as they were concerned, Alexander Selkirk, former sailing master of the Cinque Ports, was the true-life model for The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe . . . etc etc Written by Himself.
In a drawer in a second-floor office in the Old Customs House in Edinburgh lies a small cup. Six inches high, it is shaped like a burgundy glass. But it is not made of glass. The bowl is fashioned from the thin shell of a nut. It has a warm sheen, the color of café au lait, and resembles a small hollow Easter egg with its top neatly sliced off. Someone has scratched a simple chevron pattern around the outside of the bowl with the point of a knife. The stem and base of the cup are of fine rosewood, turned and polished, and were clearly added much later to create the resemblance to a wine goblet. Riveted around the upper rim of the cup is a silver band. It bears the inscription THE CUP OF ALEX. SELKIRK WHILST IN JUAN FERNANDEZ 1704–07.
“I think it is genuine,” said Dr. David Caulfield, curator of antiquities for the Royal Museum of Scotland. “The cup was purchased in the nineteenth century from Alexander Selkirk’s family in Fife. It was bought by a local land owner, who donated it to the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. From there it passed to us.” The Old Customs House serves as an outbuilding for the museum, and Dr. Caulfield had promptly agreed to my request to see the Selkirk relics. According to the Royal Museum’s records, the cup was sold by a “poor widow” in the village of Largo, Selkirk’s native place. She was seventy-eight years old and a direct descendant in the fourth generation of Alexander Selkirk, mariner. At the time of the sale the widow claimed that the nut-cup originally possessed a silver stem and base, but these had been removed by her father. “I believe that Sir Walter Scott paid for the silver band to be added to the rim, with its inscription,” continued the curator. “I will show you our other piece of Selkirk memorabilia—his sea chest.”
He led me down to the ground floor and into a bleak stockroom with bare walls and row upon row of what could have been bookcases. Instead of books they held anonymous packages wrapped in dusty plastic sheeting. Packages too big to find space on the shelves had been stacked on the bare cement floor. He pulled aside a plastic sheet. It covered a substantial oblong box, two feet deep, eighteen inches wide, and three feet long. It looked like a large version of the sturdy plywood boxes British children used to take to boarding school to hold their personal possessions, except that its lid was curved instead of flat, and it was made of dark red timber, perhaps mahogany or cedar. The letters A.S., about two inches high, were lightly carved on the front lefthand corner of the battered and scuffed lid. I unfastened the metal hasp and swung up the lid. The impression of a school box was reinforced by the presence of a little side compartment, the place where schoolchildren were required to stow their pens and pencils. There was a yellowing piece of notepaper stuck on the inside of the lid. Written in ink in a sloping hand were the words “The Sea Chest which belonged to Alexander Selkirk the prototype of Robinson Crusoe.”
“I think the chest could also be genuine,” said the curator. “It was acquired by the same collector, at the same time, and from the same source as the drinking cup. Somewhere—though we don’t have it in the museum—there is also a musket said to be the same one Selkirk used on Juan Fernandez. It has the date 1705 carved on the stock. But the gun appears to have been manufactured at a later date, and so it is probably a fake. I seem to recall that there are at least two other “Selkirk muskets” in circulation. Both are supposed to have been the gun he brought back from his island, but they have never been authenticated.
I wondered about the sea chest. It seemed too big and bulky to have been toted aboard Woodes Rogers’s ship when Selkirk was rescued from his island, and then to survive the round-the-world voyage. And how had it arrived in Largo intact? If the chest belonged to Selkirk, then it probably dated from his later days in the Royal Navy. There was a line of four broad arrow marks stamped along the rear edge of the lid. They could have been government stamps, or perhaps they were old museum marks. As for the curious drinking cup, I was puzzled. It was described in the catalogues as a “coconut shell.” What sort of coconut tree could have provided a nut of that size—only three and a quarter inches deep and two and a half inches in diameter. Did dwarf coconuts grow on the island where Selkirk was marooned? Or was it something he had collected at another landfall on his round-the-world voyage?
I suspected that there was much more to be learned of Selkirk’s life as a maroon than the testimony provided by one or two souvenirs he brought home with him. If I visited the island where he was stranded, would I find practical details that would throw more light on what really happened to him during those four lonely years? And if I did find those extra details, how many of them, I wondered, were really echoed in the story of Robinson Crusoe?
My visit to the Royal Museum of Scotland was the essential first step in a much larger quest. I wanted to examine the truth behind our universal image of the maroon, Robinson Crusoe. My curiosity, I knew, ought to question much more than the single tale of Alexander Selkirk. There were other maroons and castaways who lived through similar adventures at much the same time, men of Selkirk’s period who were also shipwrecked, abandoned, or accidentally stranded in remote locations. Several had written graphic accounts of their escapades. They had described how they struggled to survive, and how they tried to escape their predicament. Their stories were less well known than Selkirk’s, but they were central to my investigation because their narratives were autobiographical and not, like Selkirk’s, based on secondhand observation. Such tales were yardsticks against which to compare the imaginary world of Robinson Crusoe and, by the same measure, judge Selkirk’s particular experience. Already I had resolved to visit the scenes of their adventures and see those places in the context of being a maroon or a castaway in the early eighteenth century. A goblet made from a coconut and a mysterious dark-red sea chest were only the first clues along the trail.
Daniel Defoe neither denied nor confirmed that Selkirk was the model for his hero in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was a secretive man and was busy writing a sequel to cash in on his novel’s stunning success. Robinson Crusoe was a publishing phenomenon. Readers scrambled to buy it. A second edition appeared within two weeks, and another less than a month later in two versions from two different printers. By mid-August the authorized publisher had churned out four editions and was farming out the printing to subcontractors in order to harvest maximum sales before imitators began to issue illegal copies. The literary hyenas were quick on the scent. There were at least four bogus versions on the market at year’s end, and a popular journal brazenly began to serialize the novel for its readers in seventy-seven installments, without asking the author’s permission. Daniel Defoe was soon identified as that author, but he chose not to put his name to the sequel, the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which he dashed off in less than four months. By then the leading character has little resemblance to Selkirk. In the second volume Robinson Crusoe pays a short return visit to his island, which is now a prosperous colony, makes several trading trips in the East Indies, and—an old man—comes home by the overland route through China and Siberia. And there was no echo at all of Selkirk in the third and final volume to appear with Robinson Crusoe in its title, as Defoe wrung the last scrap of advantage from his original publishing triumph. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was a dull book of moralizing, and it sank without trace.
But The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures continued to delight its readers. They relished the practical details of how Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, manages to build himself a house, grow crops, and live quite comfortably by a mix of inventiveness and hard work. Defoe had a genius for describing his hero’s thoughts and worries, and he made Crusoe so plausible that many of his readers empathized with him in his predicament. Friday appears conveniently on the scene just when the narrative might be getting tedious, and there follows plenty of action with battles against cannibals and the arrival of a European ship in the hands of piratical mutineers whom Crusoe outwits, and thus manages his escape from the island.
The book had gone into its fifth edition when Alexander Selkirk died, at the age of forty-seven, on 13 December 1721. Ironically, his death took place while his ship was on antipirate patrol off the coast of West Africa. The best-seller’s frontispiece was still the drawing of a man in goatskins, an image that was to become the icon to represent a stranded castaway. And in Serious Reflections the printer had included a map of Crusoe’s island to show the location of the episodes which would become the stock-memory of generations of children. Here is Robinson Crusoe with Man Friday standing beside him, both dressed in goatskins. They are on the seashore, muskets on their shoulders, sternly dealing with sailors from a ship anchored in the bay. The sailors may be the mutineers who have seized the vessel, or they may be the law-abiding crew who are appealing to Crusoe for help. In the woodlands behind the two men is a glimpse of a ladder, the entry to the camouflaged stockade which Crusoe laboriously constructs as his refuge. Farther inland there is the other stockade, his “country bower,” in which reclines his talking parrot, Poll. A banner issues from its mouth with the immortal (and misspelled) line “Poor Robin Cruso.” Dotted around the perimeter of the island with its pleasant hills and dales are various bands of cannibals engaged in ghoulish activities—disemboweling a captive before eating him, dancing around their cooking fire with human limbs and scraps dotted behind them, and, in the top right-hand corner, fighting their battle when Crusoe attacks them.
The topography is a helpful fantasy. It is a diagram to assist the reader to follow Robinson on his exploratory walks around his desert island, carrying his gun, with a basket of provisions strapped to his back and sheltered by his great umbrella. It is an island terrain of the imagination. Yet Defoe was at pains to give the impression that the island itself really did exist and was to be found off the coast of South America, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea. The title of the first volume of Crusoe’s adventures brazenly states that it was the memoir of “Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island in the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account of how he was at last strangely delivered by Pyrates.” The text describes how the island is near enough to the mainland for Crusoe to see its mountains on the horizon, and the gulf that separates him from the continent is narrow enough for cannibals to paddle across in canoes and regularly hold human feasts on the strand. More precisely, the text states that the island lies at 9 degrees 22 minutes north latitude, and the island of Trinidad is visible to the west and northwest. The fourth edition, which appeared in early August 1719, even had a world map appearing in the front of the volume, on which “R. Crusoe’s I[sland]” was placed just off the delta of the Orinoco.
There is now no such solid island near the mouth of the Orinoco. Nor was there one in Defoe’s time. There are only low shoals and shifting banks laid down by silt from the river delta or heaped up by current-driven sand. Robinson Crusoe’s island off the Orinoco is an invention. It is in the same category as the specious claim that the book of his “surprizing adventures” was written “by Himself.”
Yet the island is not entirely a mirage, either. Like the Great Roc lifting the castaway Sindbad the Sailor from his shipwreck shore, Defoe plucks Robinson Crusoe from the Pacific island where the Duke found Alexander Selkirk, carries him through the air at whirlwind speed, and sets him down on an island in another ocean, far away. More precisely, he puts him 2,700 miles distant, on the opposite side of South America. This was a deliberate landing. Defoe was a good geographer. He was knowledgeable enough to write the preface for a large and authoritative maritime atlas, and he deposits Crusoe in a picturesque region which he knew would fascinate his readers—the Caribbean shore with its hurricanes and heats, its blue seas and lush jungles. Here flourish exotic plants and animals that Defoe’s contemporaries, genuine travelers, were meeting for the first time—manatees they confused with mermaids, palm trees that tasted of cabbages, howler monkeys who pelted fruit at passers-by, alligators ambushing pedestrians in the forest, bushes with sap so toxic that you broke out in a rash if you walked too close. And it was an area that Defoe knew in considerable detail, though he had never been there himself. He had already spent years lobbying for the foundation of new English colonies in Central and South America and gathering information about the best possible sites to do so.
With Robinson Crusoe’s unnamed island safely located in the Caribbean, Daniel Defoe could rapidly enhance his narrative with halfremembered and tantalizing snippets of geography and local color. Defoe wrote astonishingly fast. For nine years he had produced a newspaper single-handed, writing every article in it, and publishing as often as three times a week even when he was locked up in prison. Such a literary prodigy had neither the time nor the inclination for detailed research on background material for a quick novel about a luckless castaway. It is estimated that Defoe dashed off the Strange Surprizing Adventures in less than six months. He scattered his story with gritty details from his memory as briskly as shaking sand to dry the wet ink on a page of parchment. And placing Crusoe on the Spanish Main, the Caribbean shore of Latin America, gave Defoe a special bonus: he could write about his favorite theme—pirates. Defoe was an avid fan of pirate lore. He read everything he could about them, their deeds, their customs, their trials and escapades. He wrote books and plays about pirates, both fictional and real, and for a long time scholars believed—though this theory is now largely discarded—that the mysterious “Captain Johnson” who wrote the main source of all pirate stories, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, actually was Defoe.
In the end it is pirates who give Crusoe his chance to escape his island. So where did Defoe find the idea of an imaginary Crusoe’s island? The Duke’s ex-buccaneer pilot, William Dampier, provides a clue. He too wrote a best-selling book about his adventures. Dampier’s book has a sober map of real places in and around the Caribbean. Here are genuine islands and coastlines, instantly recognizable when compared to a modern atlas, and accurately drawn by a leading London cartographer, Herman Moll. The map of the Caribbean and Spanish Main in Dampier’s book summarizes what was publicly known about Caribbean geography when Defoe was writing The Strange Surprizing Adventures, and Dampier’s book was one of Defoe’s main sources for Caribbean geography. It locates the islands whose names turn up frequently in the pirate and adventure narratives that Defoe was also reading. Here are the locations for real maroons and castaways and the rendezvous of buccaneers—Aves, the “island of birds’ off Venezuela; Golden Island in the San Blas archipelago off Panama; the Moskito Shore of what is now Nicaragua and Honduras; and several islands named Tortuga because turtles came ashore to lay their eggs on so many Caribbean beaches that island after island was given the Spanish word for turtle. One of these Tortugas lies less than three days’ sail from the spot where Robinson Crusoe is alleged to have spent his lonely days.
And Crusoe is not just a clone of Alexander Selkirk. Crusoe, like his island, is a composite. The “surprizing adventures” of the man in goatskin garb quickly diverge from what happened to the cranky Scots sailor. Selkirk leaves the Cinque Ports of his own free will to go to live on the island, but Robinson Crusoe is a castaway, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Selkirk had only his meager supplies from Captain Stradling and nothing more, but Robinson Crusoe spends his early days shuttling on a raft between the beach and the shipwreck so he can salvage all manner of useful goods from the wreck—muskets, kegs of powder, bags of nails and spikes, hatchets, crowbars, and even a grindstone. Crusoe encounters cannibals and enlists Friday, whereas Selkirk is never visited by native peoples. Selkirk spends fifty-two months on his island; Crusoe is stranded for a nearly impossible twenty-eight years. In the end Crusoe is much more interesting and diverse than Alexander Selkirk, and more complex. To inhabit his island of magpie geography, Defoe assembles his hero from a jumble of half-remembered tales of adventures, maroonings, and shipwrecks drawn from real life. When Defoe died twelve years after writing Crusoe’s story, his private library was sold at public auction. The auctioneer’s bill of sale cites volume after volume of travel books. Some of them could well have provided events and details that Defoe included in his novel.
No one has been able to find any hard evidence that Defoe met Alexander Selkirk in person. If he had, Defoe would have realized at once that his hard-working, God-fearing Robinson Crusoe was a continent apart in character, as well as location, from the Scots maroon. Trawling court records, Selkirk’s biographers have discovered that Selkirk’s true character was appalling. He was a troublemaker, cheat, and bully. At home in Scotland he beat up his close relatives during family rows, and after his return with Woodes Rogers’s expedition was embroiled in a brawl with a shipwright in Bristol. A warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of assault. He treated his “wife,” Sophia Bruce, abominably. She came from Scotland to London, presumably to marry him, but he delayed their wedding, then neglected her. Two years later, after he joined the Navy, he probably committed bigamy by marrying another woman, his landlady in Plymouth. The result was that after Selkirk’s death at sea, two women showed up to claim his back pay from the Navy and what seems to have been the remnants of his booty from the South Sea—four gold rings, a silver tobacco box, “one gold head of a cane,” a pair of gold candlesticks, and a silver-hilted sword. Each woman produced a will made out in her favor, and Sophia claimed that her husband must have been drunk when he married his landlady. The ex-landlady countered with the claim that Selkirk had “solemnly declared . . . that he was then a Single and unmarried person, and was very importunate” in his courtship. She won her case. Selkirk, evidently, could create his own plausible fiction.