The past four years have seen the publication of three distinct and well-researched books. Virtually all of these accounts lean heavily on one source, the records of the church or kirk elders at the Largo Kirk, known as the Kirk Session Minutes, which I found at the St. Andrews University Library. On a spitting gray day, I went to the basement of the library, where two very proper women in the special collections department had me stow my bags, briefcases and ballpoint pens, and issued me a No.
I sat at a blond wood table with gooseneck reading lamps as a librarian placed before my incredulous eyes not rolls of microfilm, but the actual Kirk Session Minutes, marked , in a rebound brown cover about 13 inches long and 8 inches wide. The unlined pages were like beige parchment, stiff though hardly brittle, with slight water damage that had darkened and frayed the edges.
Amazingly, I was allowed to handle them without gloves, which, the librarian explained, actually tend to make readers more clumsy and more likely to tear delicate pages. By November 7, , he was in trouble again. His kid brother, Andrew, made the mistake of laughing at him when he accidentally took a drink of salt water out of a can.
Did he deliberately change his name at sea to distance himself from his past, or did someone misunderstand him? Or, as some researchers say, did consistent spelling of names simply not matter much back then?
Some saw him as a cruel, indecisive and incompetent sailor who once narrowly escaped being eaten by his own men in the Pacific and who was court-martialed after losing the British warship HMS Roebuck off the coast of Australia. He was often drunk on duty and would infuriate his crews by letting captured ships go free without distributing loot to his men.
Consequently, when commercial shipowners or governments captured pirates, they were rarely shown mercy. The ships were small by Royal Navy standards and full of desperate men who perhaps noticed that even the staffing of the ships foretold the danger they faced. The St. George , Souhami writes, was supplied for eight months of travel and carried five anchors, two sets of sails, 22 cannons, small arms, 30 barrels of gunpowder and five times more men than it could comfortably accommodate—a testament to the numbers needed to crew captured ships, but also a morbid acknowledgment that dozens would be lost to disease, battle and desertion.
But literally on the first night, while still in Ireland, a drunken Dampier had a violent argument with one officer, and dissension quickly spread. By October the men were sick of brick-hard sea biscuits, dried peas and salt meat.
They longed for fresh meat and vegetables, but settled for an occasional shark, dolphin or weary bird. As on most ships of the day, the men often slept in wet clothes and mildewed bedding.
The ships were incubators for typhus, dysentery and cholera. Amonth later, 15 men had fever, and others were wracked by scurvy, caused by a vitamin C deficiency, which Souhami says claimed more lives than contagious disease, gunfire or shipwreck.
Things got only worse when Capt. Charles Pickering died of a fever in late November and command of the Cinque Ports was given to his lieutenant, Thomas Stradling, a young upperclass seaman the crew disliked. There were fights and nearmutinies as the ship cruised the coast of Brazil. The meat and grain were filled with roaches and rat droppings. The Cinque Ports holed up at a rendezvous point on one of the islands in the archipelago west of Valparaiso, but the crew was threatening mutiny against Stradling.
Dampier showed up just in time to put down the rebellion by promising a tighter rein on cocky Stradling. But shortly he, too, faced dissent among his sailors, who wanted him to attack more ships. George and Cinque Ports left the island in March to continue their plundering along the coasts of Peru and Mexico, where tempers continued to flare.
In May the Cinque Ports split off from the St. George and spent the summer pirating on its own. By September the ship was so leaky that men were pumping out water day and night; Selkirk believed that it was so riddled with worms that its masts and flooring needed immediate repair. That month the ship returned to the relative safety of the island, a secluded and uninhabited place where the men could regain their health and sanity.
Soon Selkirk would look at the island and see salvation. At a small suburban airport outside crowded Santiago, Chile, six of us stand anxiously beside a drafty hangar staring at an eight-passenger Piper Navajo prop plane.
Mechanics are crawling over its dismantled left engine. A councilman from the island waits with me, joined by a history teacher, a young mother, and two Santiago policemen on a cushy work assignment. Thus assured, I put my trust in a craft whose outer skin seems no thicker than a beer can.
With surprisingly little turbulence, we finally climb over the city of six million humming past the jagged Andes and across the ocean at 6, feet, just above foamy white clouds. When the captain heard Robinson Crusoe's story, he felt strongly that it was the "hand of Providence" instructing Robinson Crusoe never to go to sea any more.
He told the young man: "You ought to take this for a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man. The impetus for the idea for Robinson Crusoe came to Defoe from his reading of the account of a man named Alexander Selkirk who, in a fit of anger, had himself put ashore on a deserted island.
Earlier, Selkirk had gotten into a fight with a fellow crewman and had himself and his effects put ashore on an island outside of Chili. When he realized the effect of his actions, he pleaded with his shipmates to come back for him, but it was too late. He was marooned on the island for four and a half years. When he was later rescued, the report states that he could hardly speak any more, but he did apparently quickly regain his speech.
The account of Alexander Selkirk was published widely throughout England; he was the subject of an article by Richard Steele in the Englishman, and an account of his adventures appeared in many other papers.
Consequently, Defoe was quite familiar with Selkirk's adventures, and some biographers maintain that Defoe interviewed Selkirk personally, but this is debatable.
Many of Selkirk's activities on his island are paralleled by Robinson Crusoe on his island; for example, Selkirk fed on turnips, fish, and goat's meat; he became overrun with cats, and he had to use his ingenuity to survive, all reflected in Defoe's novel. A clue to one of the basic ideas of the novel is given in the first chapter, when Crusoe's father admonished his son to stay "in the middle station" of life — this station being the one which "had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.
Often during his confinement on the island, Crusoe is reminded of his father's advice and rues his own impulsiveness. Furthermore, the father's pronouncement that his "boy might be happy if he would stay at home, but if he goes abroad, he will be the most miserable wretch that was ever born" becomes a prophetic statement which foreshadows Crusoe's later predicament. He appealed to powerful politician Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, who had him freed from Newgate prison and who hired him as a political writer and spy to support his own views.
To this end, Defoe set up the Review, which he edited and wrote from to His other works include Moll Flanders and Roxana But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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