CRUSOE’S ISLE

Evening Star, Issue 20117, 6 March 1929, Page 7

CRUSOE’S ISLE

WHAT IT IS LIKE NSW The best. boy's story ever written was written by Daniel Defoe about the lonely life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, on the island of .Tuan Fernandez. What do we know of Juan Fernandez now-? asks an English writer. The answer, for most people, is that, they know very little of it. But quite recently one of the export scientists of the fine American Smithsonian Institution, Dr Waldo Schmitt, has been living for some' weeks on the island, studying its almost innumerable marine invertebrates, and ho has brought back into the world at large its latest news. Defoe placed his Crusoe’s island on the northern shore of South America, in the mouth of Orinoco Eivcr, but nobody is deceived by that. Alexander Selkirk was the man he had in his mind, and Juan Fernandez, named after the Spanish captain who first discovered it, some 400 miles off the coast of Chile, was the island of Crusoe. The island has had “ a strange, eventful history,” both before and after Alexander "Selkirk was longing for years, according to Cowper’s poem, to hear " the sound of the church-going bell” of civilisation. It was Fernandez who stocked it with the goats Crusoe found there, which still abound. Seamen who deserted from ships which called there for water had lived on the island .before Selkirk was left on its shore by his captain, till ho was taken _ off by Rogers, captain of a privateer, in 1709. The Spaniards annexed the island in 1750 and put a garrison on it, and Chile took it over at the beginning of the last century and made it a' prison for criminals. A century later this use of it had ceased, and it was said to have about twenty inhabitants. What of it now ? Dr Schmitt brings the news that Crusoe’s island is naturally one of the easiest places to exist in that can be found on the earth, a paradise for anyone who is content with an aimless life. .About thirteen miles long and four miles wide, arising ruggedly to over 13,000 feet, with deep waters round it, it lias green and wooded vallfeys, fresh streams, abundant vegetation-fantastic in its exuberant growth—almost every vegetable*-either of native growth or intTpduced as the years have gone on—a fertile soil, all useful animals, but none wild except a remnant of the goats which Crusoe knew; and such an abundance of fish that fishing is its chief industry, lobsters being exported in ex-

change for the tinned salmon and meats and baked beans of America. And what of its inhabitants? Where Crusoe once reigned alone are now somewhat fewer than 300 people, Spanish speakers from the South American coast, with some French and German families, several of whom were shipwrecked there, and are content to stay. A simple, hospitable people they are. All live on the eastern, rainy, and fertile side of the island. The island is extremely ■healthy, and has no doctor, but a_ wireless call 'can be made to the mainland in an emergency. It lias a church to which a priest comes once a year for a service, and to conduct baptismal and wedding ceremonies. 'Twice a month a vessel calls 'with supplies from Chile, and occasionally a passing vessel puts in for water. _ But, in strangest contrast with the silence and loneliness of Crusoe, a daily programme is broadcast to the island _ fvom the city of Valparaiso. If an aimless life of ease were all that man needs it could be found in this island pi romance.