THE REAL ROBINSON CRUSOE

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 69, 15 December 1931, Page 12 (Supplement)

THE REAL ROBINSON CRUSOE

By

WALTER DE LA MARE

(Mr. de la Marc’s new book, “Desert Islands,” from which this excerpt is taken, was published last year.')

r Pirn HE Island of Mas-a-tierra is one 1 || of a group of three called Juan Fernandez after the Spanish navl- ■ gator—Juan Fernandez —who chanced ! upon them in the year 1570. Craggy • and wooded (twelve and a-half miles ■ long by three and two-thirds across at • its widest), it lies under the Southern ! Cross, 110 leagues from Valparaiso on the main. Its highest hill, El Yunque, • rears itself 3005 feet above the sea. . 1 On the last day of January, 1709, ■ Captain Woodes Rogers, then commander of two privateers of Bristol, and himself in the Duke, sighted Juan Fernandez. The next evening lights were seen on shore and surmised to be those of French ships lying at anchor. As a matter of fact, they were the watch fires of a sailor named Alexander Selcraig, or Selkirk, who on the following morning was brought off in the ship’s pinnace amid a cargo of shellfish. He was clothed in goatskins, and "looking wilder than the first owners of them." It is our first glimpse of one who was destined to become the prince and prototype of all castaways. Like Hans' 1 Andersen and so many

folk-tale heroes, he was the son—and the seventh son—of a cobbler. He was born at Largo, a sea-village in Fife. There to-day stands his effigy in stone, gazing on the haunts of his youth. iVhen he was 19 he was .cited for misbehaviour in the kirk and ran away to sea. Six years afterwards he came home again, but quarrelled with his brothers, once more decamped, and in the spring of 1703 shipped as sailing master of the galley, the Cinque Ports. Having arrived, in a leaky ship, at Juan Fernandez, after a bitter altercation with his commander, and at his own suggestion—of which he speedily repented—Selkirk was marooned on Mas-a-tierra in September, 1704. He had a sea-chest, clothes, bedding, a firelock, a pound of gunpowder, a bag of bullets, flint and steel, some tobacco.

a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, mathematical instruments and some books of devotion. Yet in spite of these luxuries, after four years and four months’ solitude, Selkirk told Rogers his story in a Scots English so broken and rusty for want of use as to be hardly intelligible. “We could scarce understand him ... he seemed to speak his words by halves.” For eight long months Selkirk had lived in melancholy and horror, "scarce able to refrain from doing himself violence.” Day after day he had sat in watch, his face toward the sea, until his eyes and the light failed him and he could watch no more. By night he had lain shivering with terror at the bowlings of sea-monsters on the shore. As time went on, however, Selkirk’s spirits began to revive, as human

spirits, please Heaven, are apt to revive even in the most adverse circumstances. He fed plentifully on turtle until he could no more stomach it except in jellies. He built himself two huts, thatched them with grass and lined them with goatskins; the one for a kitchen, the other wherein to sleep, to read, to sing Scots psalms and to pray. Thus he became, he confessed, a better Christian than he had ever been before. For warmth, cheer, and candle he burned the fragrant allspice wood. He had no grain, physic, salt, ink, paper, or even rum. He fed on crawfish, goats’ flesh, turnips, and a small black plum, difficult of access on the island’s rocky heights. Of Hving things, apart from goats, he had the company only of seals, which in November came ashore to “whelp and engender,” their bleating and howling so loud that the noise of them could be heard inland a mile from the shore. So life went on. When his ammunition failed him, he came to run, barefoot, with such celerity that he had chased down and killed, he said, no less than 500 goats. After ear-marking and

laming their young . kids, he had set free as many more—beasts which Lord Anson was thus able to Identify thirty years afterward. When his clothes fell off his back, Selkirk took to himself hairy breeches, and, unravelling the worsted of his worn-out stockings, hemmed himself shirts out of his scanty stock of linen, by means of a shred of goat sinew threaded through a nail. When his knife was worn to the back, he made substitutes out of hoop-iron, beaten thin and ground on the rocks.

Twice he narrowly escaped death, the first time by a fall of 100 feet —he lay unconscious for three days and nights, a period which he afterward computed by the appearance of the moon; and the second time from voyaging Spaniards, who, sighting his fire at sea, landed and pursued him. He hid himself in a treetop and listened to them talking beneath. But rats were his worst enemy ; they gnawed his calloused feet and his clothes, until he had bred up cats to teach them manners. These would "lie about him in hundreds.” Thus best we picture him, praying aloud, singing and dancing with his kids and cats in the flames and smoke of his allspice wood, the whole world’s moon taunting and enchanting him. His feet restored to shoes, and his tongue to its original English, Alexander Selkirk sailed away in the Duke He reached England, safe but weary, in October, 1711, and after the publication of Captain Woodes Rogers’s book "A Cruising Voyage Round the World,” in the following year, seems to have enjoyed, or at any rate to have endured.

a passing notoriety. He was interviewed by Prue’s wayward and enchanting husband Richard Steele, and was made the subject of a paper in the "Englishman.” Better still, but less certainly, Selkirk is said to have actually met in Bristol yet another and a more notorious journalist, Daniel Defoe. Aud rather more than two centuries ago—on April 25, 1719—appeared “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, written by himself.” [Daniel Defoe, it should be remembered, lived in the days when modern journalism was first coming into being, and pulled many a stunt of which a modern tabloid would have been proud. For example, when Jack Sheppard, the most notorious highwayman of the opening 18th Century, was finally arrested and condemned, Defoe visited him at Newgate prison, wrote his life, and then persuaded Sheppard, standing under the gallows, to call for a copy and deUver it as his “Last Speech and Full Confession.” Defoe’s physical appearance is described— by his contemporary enemies—as follows: “a man middle-sized and spare ... of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” In his wellknown portrait, however, his chin Is almost femininely rounded, and the mole appears to be missing.]