The Life of Alexander Selkirk
Alexander Selkirk (1676 – 13 December 1721) was a Scottish privateer and Royal Navy officer who spent four years and four months as a castaway (1704–1709) after being marooned by his captain, initially at his request, on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean. He survived that ordeal, but died from tropical illness years later while serving as a Lieutenant aboard HMS Weymouth off West Africa.
Alexander Selkirk was the son of a shoemaker and tanner in Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland, born in 1676. In his youth he displayed a quarrelsome and unruly disposition. He was summoned before the Kirk Session in August 1693 for his "indecent conduct in church", but he "did not appear, being gone to sea". He was back at Largo in 1701 when he again came to the attention of church authorities for assaulting his brothers. Early on, he was engaged in buccaneering. In 1703, he joined an expedition of English privateer and explorer William Dampier to the South Pacific, setting sail from Kinsale in Ireland .They carried letters of marque from the Lord High Admiral authorising their armed merchant ships to attack foreign enemies as the War of the Spanish Succession was then going on between England and Spain.
Dampier was captain of St George and Selkirk served on Cinque Ports, St George's companion ship, as sailing master under Captain Thomas Stradling. By this time, Selkirk must have had considerable experience at sea. In February 1704, following a stormy passage around Cape Horn, the privateers fought a long battle with a well-armed French vessel, St Joseph, only to have it escape to warn its Spanish allies of their arrival in the Pacific. A raid on the Panamanian gold mining town of Santa María failed when their landing party was ambushed. The easy capture of Asunción, a heavily laden merchantman, revived the men's hopes of plunder, and Selkirk was put in charge of the prize ship. Dampier took off some much-needed provisions of wine, brandy, sugar and flour, then abruptly set the ship free, arguing that the gain was not worth the effort. In May 1704, Stradling decided to abandon Dampier and strike out on his own.
In September 1704, after parting ways with Dampier, Captain Stradling brought Cinque Ports to an island known to the Spanish as Más a Tierra located in the uninhabited Juan Fernández archipelago 400 miles off the coast of Chile for a mid-expedition restocking of fresh water and supplies. Selkirk had grave concerns about the seaworthiness of their vessel, and wanted to make the necessary repairs before going any farther. He declared that he would rather stay on Juan Fernández than continue in a dangerously leaky ship. Stradling took him up on the offer and landed Selkirk on the island with a musket, a hatchet, a knife, a cooking pot, a Bible, bedding and some clothes. Selkirk immediately regretted his rashness, but Stradling refused to let him back on board. Cinque Ports did indeed later founder near Malpelo Island 400 km (250 mi) from the coast of what is now Colombia. Stradling and some of his crew survived the loss of their ship but were forced to surrender to the Spanish. The survivors were taken to Lima, Peru, where they endured a harsh imprisonment.
At first, Selkirk remained along the shoreline of Más a Tierra. During this time he ate spiny lobsters and scanned the ocean daily for rescue, suffering all the while from loneliness, misery and remorse. Hordes of raucous sea lions, gathered on the beach for the mating season, eventually drove him to the island's interior. Once inland, his way of life took a turn for the better. More foods were available there: feral goats—introduced by earlier sailors—provided him with meat and milk, while wild turnips, the leaves of the indigenous cabbage tree and dried Schinus fruits (pink peppercorns) offered him variety and spice. Rats would attack him at night, but he was able to sleep soundly and in safety by domesticating and living near feral cats.
Selkirk proved resourceful in using materials that he found on the island: he forged a new knife out of barrel hoops left on the beach, he built two huts out of pepper trees, one of which he used for cooking and the other for sleeping, and he employed his musket to hunt goats and his knife to clean their carcasses. As his gunpowder dwindled, he had to chase prey on foot. During one such chase he was badly injured when he tumbled from a cliff, lying helpless and unable to move for about a day. His prey had cushioned his fall, probably sparing him a broken back. Childhood lessons learned from his father, a tanner, now served him well. For example, when his clothes wore out, he made new ones from hair-covered goatskins using a nail for sewing. As his shoes became unusable, he had no need to replace them, since his toughened, calloused feet made protection unnecessary. He sang psalms and read from the Bible, finding it a comfort in his situation and a prop for his English. During his sojourn on the island, two vessels came to anchor. Unfortunately for Selkirk, both were Spanish. As a Scotsman and a privateer, he would have faced a grim fate if captured and therefore did his best to hide himself. Once, he was spotted and chased by a group of Spanish sailors from one of the ships. His pursuers urinated beneath the tree in which he was hiding but failed to notice him. The would-be captors then gave up and sailed away.
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Selkirk's long-awaited deliverance came on 2 February 1709 by way of Duke, a privateering ship piloted by William Dampier, and its sailing companion Duchess. Thomas Dover led the landing party that met Selkirk. After four years and four months without human company, Selkirk was almost incoherent with joy. The Duke's captain and leader of the expedition was Woodes Rogers, who wryly referred to Selkirk as the governor of the island. The agile castaway caught two or three goats a day and helped restore the health of Rogers' men, who had developed scurvy. Captain Rogers was impressed by Selkirk's physical vigour, but also by the peace of mind that he had attained while living on the island. He made Selkirk Duke's second mate, later giving him command of one of their prize ships, Increase, before it was ransomed by the Spanish. Selkirk returned to privateering with a vengeance. At Guayaquil in present-day Ecuador, he led a boat crew up the Guayas River where a number of wealthy Spanish ladies had fled, and looted the gold and jewels they had hidden inside their clothing. His part in the hunt for treasure galleons along the coast of Mexico resulted in the capture of Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación y Desengaño, renamed Bachelor, on which he served as sailing master under Captain Dover to the Dutch East Indies.Selkirk completed the around-the-world voyage by the Cape of Good Hope as the sailing master of Duke, arriving at the Downs off the English coast on 1 October 1711. He had been away for eight years. His story of survival was widely publicised after his return to England, becoming one of the sources of inspiration for writer Daniel Defoe's fictional character Robinson Crusoe.
He later joined the Royal Navy and he was serving as an officer on board HMS Weymouth, engaged in an anti-piracy patrol off the west coast of Africa, when he died on 13 December 1721, succumbing to the yellow fever that plagued the voyage. He was buried at sea.
When Daniel Defoe published The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), few readers could have missed the resemblance to Selkirk. An illustration on the first page of the novel shows "a rather melancholy-looking man standing on the shore of an island, gazing inland", in the words of modern explorer Tim Severin. He is dressed in the familiar hirsute goatskins, his feet and shins bare. Yet Crusoe's island is located not in the mid-latitudes of the South Pacific but 4,300 km away in the Caribbean, where the furry attire would hardly be comfortable in the tropical heat. This incongruity supports the popular belief that Selkirk was a model for the fictional character, though most literary scholars now accept that his was "just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about".
In 2005 British, Japanese and Chilean archaeologists have discovered the spot where Alexander Selkirk, the model for the castaway Robinson Crusoe, survived in solitude for four years and four months. After a 13-year search, the team, led by Daisuke Takahashi, a Japanese explorer, believe that they have identified where the 18th-century sailor camped, cooked and kept a lonely lookout. The crucial breakthrough was the discovery of a fragment of one of Selkirk’s navigational instruments. Last January Mr Takahashi took a team of four scientists to the remote spot where he suspected Selkirk’s camp had been. There they found traces of a fire, animal bones and holes in which Selkirk appears to have placed poles to support a shelter. But the decisive evidence was a 6mm piece of copper, discovered by David Caldwell of the National Museums of Scotland, and identified by him as the point of a pair of 17th-century dividers. Dr Caldwell said: “Selkirk was a navigator, and the account of this discovery states that he had his navigational equipment with him. In archaeological terms that is as good evidence that you are going to get.” The artefact was discovered while excavating a site not far from Selkirk's Lookout where the famous castaway is believed to have lived. In 1825, during John Howell's researching of Alexander Selkirk's biography, his "flip-can" was in the possession of his great-grand-nephew John Selkirk, and Alexander's musket was "in the possession of Major Lumsden of Lathallan."