Marooned Part 4

SEVEN.

Largo and Beyond.

In the spring of 1714 Selkirk left London for Largo. He hadn't seen his mother and father in ten, almost eleven years. Were they still alive?

The trip in a rattling coach was about 400 miles over rutted roads, so he most likely took pa.s.sage on a coastal trader. At Edinburgh he would have changed to a ferry to cross the fifteen-mile-wide mouth of the Firth of Forth.

Herring boats bobbing in the quiet water of Largo Bay, same as when he was a boy, was probably his first sight of home. The seaside village on that Sunday morning had not changed. The same stone houses with thatched roofs; stairways to second floors on outside walls; iron weathervanes, mostly fish, pointing nowhere. Behind the houses, sheep grazed on sloping hills.

For his homecoming, Selkirk wore a new coat with gold trim. He was barbered and groomed. He walked up the path to the family cottage. The longed-for moment was finally here. He opened the door, stepped into the kitchen, ready to hug his old mother, give his dad a manly embrace.

But the kitchen was empty. A low fire probably flickered in the hearth and fresh bread and cake waited on the table. But the house was still. Then he remembered: The day was Sunday.

Up the path he strode past the churchyard, where stood headstones of departed grandparents, aunts, and cousins. He stepped into the Presbyterian church, still stone cool. The congregation was singing a hymn. He knew the words. He had sung the same in this church as a boy and on a far-off island as a man.

What happened next became part of the family legend. It was retold years later by his cousin John Howell.

"As soon as he sat down, all eyes were upon him, for such a personage perhaps had seldom been seen within the church at Largo. He was elegantly dressed in gold-laced clothes. Besides, he was a stranger, which in a country church is a matter of attention at all times.

"After remaining some time engaged in devotion, his eyes were ever turning to where his parents and brothers sat, while theirs as often met his gaze. Still, they did not know him.

"At length, his mother recognized him and, uttering a cry of joy, could contain herself no longer. Even in the house of G.o.d she rushed to his arms, unconscious of the impropriety of her conduct and the interruption of the service.

"Alexander and the family's friends immediately retired to his father's house to give free scope to their joy and congratulations."

The gathering must have been typical of the day: aunts, uncles, cousins crowding the door; neighbors who remembered Alexander as a wee lad peering through windows; fishermen he had gone sailing with stopping by; boys he had played with, now men, sitting with wives, sipping tea, eating b.u.t.tered bread. His old teacher, bent with age, who remembered him as a bright but at times unruly pupil, telling all who would listen that Alexander had shown little interest in his books except for mathematics and geometry. The rooms loud with the babble of talk and sudden whoops of laughter.

There were brother John and his wife, Margaret, and brother David. There was also Andrew, his feeble-minded brother, now a grown man.

Euphan, his mother, lingered nearby. For the celebration she most likely served haggis, a special pudding for holidays, made from the heart, liver, and other organs of a sheep.

But for Alexander the joy of homecoming lasted only a few days. The questions, the stares, the hearty slaps on the back soon began to get on his nerves. He became uncomfortable with hovering cousins, aunts, old school chums, well-meaning neighbors.

He tried to be polite, to listen. In all likelihood his family and friends talked about matters of little interest to him-the herring catch, the church's need for a new roof, squabbles with the next village over gra.s.s for the sheep. This was their world, the world of Largo.

To escape the press of company, he spent days along Largo Bay talking with fishermen. He bought a boat and went sailing. On the open water he was alone. At Kingscraig Point, under the cliff at low tide, he caught lobsters and brought them home for the evening meal.

Worried about his moody son, his father probed gently. Was he ready to settle down, join him in the shop-leather tanning and shoemaking-perhaps take a village girl to wife?

It was his father's old wish, his heartfelt plea. But Alexander didn't fit in Largo. He was a stranger here. The village was too small-about 1,200 lived in the cl.u.s.ter of houses. The people, his parents included, were too narrow, too set in their ways, for a traveled man who had seen a larger world.

He moved out of his parents' house and took an upstairs room in the home of his brother John and his wife, Margaret. Perhaps a change of living arrangements would help.

For breakfast, Margaret usually served porridge, a tattie-potato-and a mug of tea with milk and sugar. Alexander likely stood while eating his porridge, following a belief of the time: standing aided digestion.

After breakfast, probably carrying a wrapping of bread and dried fish for a noon meal, he took long walks in the wooded hills and to Keil's Den, where the ruins of Pitcruvie Castle stood. Returning at dark, he took the outside steps to his second-floor room and avoided neighbors and cousins waiting on the first floor.

Margaret kept two cats. She watched while Alexander held the forelegs of one, hummed a tune, and tried to teach it to dance. This-way, that-way, take-a-step, take-a-step. When the animal tripped over its hind feet, Alexander became annoyed. Margaret told her husband about his brother's strange behavior.

Then Alexander did something that astonished everyone.

With a spade he began enlarging a cave on the side of a hill in Keil's Den. He installed boards to support the roof. In front he sc.r.a.ped a flat place and cobbled together a bench. Villagers pa.s.sing on the lane below saw him sitting on the bench, chin on hands, staring across the bay.

His worried parents trudged up the slope. The found their son weeping. "Oh, my beloved island!" he blubbered helplessly. "I wish I had never left thee. I never was before the man I was on thee. And I fear never can be again."

A grown man crying! John and Euphan didn't know what to make of it. Such sadness in his eyes. They may have tried to console him, a.s.suring him he had aunts and uncles and cousins who loved him, brothers and friends, too.

Likely his father urged him again to come work in the shop, anytime, even tomorrow! A place would be made for him.

Euphan may have tried reaching out to her son but saw he was beyond comforting.

Soon came the day when Alexander left. He gave a boy a penny to follow with his sea chest on a cart. John and Euphan watched as he walked down the hill. Father and mother may have felt a sense of farewell, something telling them they would never see their son again.

At the bay he boarded the ferry to Edinburgh. There he would find a s.h.i.+p to London.

In late 1716 or early 1717 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. He was a.s.signed to H.M.S. Enterprise, a supply s.h.i.+p.

By November 1720 Selkirk had been promoted to master's mate, second in command. The rank just below captain, master's mate, or lieutenant, was the highest rank someone not of the upper cla.s.s could attain.

Wearing a handsome blue waistcoat with white cuffs and lapels and a c.o.c.ked hat, the new lieutenant boarded his s.h.i.+p, H.M.S. Weymouth, at Plymouth. Together with H.M.S. Swallow, the wars.h.i.+p headed for West Africa to hunt pirates and slave traders. The sun off the coast was intense, nights humid without a breeze.

In June 1721 Selkirk sent a boat up the Gambia River to find fresh water and cut wood for the cook stove. The crew was captured by natives. Boats filled with musket-carrying seamen from the Weymouth went to find the missing men in the mosquito-infested jungle. The rescued crew members returned to the s.h.i.+p bringing with them a deadly sickness, most likely malaria or yellow fever.

Disease swept through the Weymouth. Each day fewer crew answered morning roll call. Men began dying.

Sometime in November or December, Selkirk became ill. The s.h.i.+p's doctor placed him in a hammock slung from beams in the captain's cabin, which had been turned into a hospital ward.

Medicine at the time knew little about treating tropical diseases. The doctor did what he could to ease the men's suffering-cooling their flushed faces with water-soaked cloths, offering a thin soup to settle nausea, ma.s.saging aching limbs, placing blankets on feverish bodies s.h.i.+vering with cold, wiping away vomited blood, pouring cups of water between trembling lips that still left thirst unsatisfied.

On December 13, 1721, the Weymouth's captain entered a new name in the s.h.i.+p's log: Alexr. Selkirk, DD ... P.M.

"DD" stood for "today's date" written at the top of the page. "RM." meant death occurred some hour between noon and midnight.

As was the practice, Selkirk's body was enclosed in a sack made from an old sail. The sack was weighted with two cannonb.a.l.l.s, one at the head and one at the feet. Then it was placed on a plank and lifted onto the s.h.i.+p's rail.

The captain read the old words of the burial service from The Book of Common Prayer. "Deliver your servant, Alexander ... from all evil, and set him free from every bond...."

The plank was tilted, and Selkirk's body slid into the gray waves somewhere off the coast of Africa.

H.M.S. Weymouth returned to England in 1722. Lieutenant Selkirk's sea chest was sent to Largo. There it joined the few belongings he had left behind at his brother's house-a gold-laced coat, a brown stoneware flip jar, a clam sh.e.l.l he had once used to dip cool water from a turtle sh.e.l.l in a hut on an island some ten thousand miles away, and a musket.

The stock of the musket was carved with a picture and a rhyme. During an idle afternoon the marooned mariner had engraved his name, a seal on a rock, and these words: With 3 drams powder.

3 ounce hail.

Ram me well & prime me.

To kill I will not fail.

"Hail" referred to a hail of bullets. On a high hill on Juan Fernandez today stands a bronze tablet. The spot is called Selkirk's Lookout. There the lonely castaway stacked dry gra.s.s and firewood and watched with his bra.s.s spygla.s.s for a rescue s.h.i.+p. The tablet was placed by the officers of a British wars.h.i.+p, H.M.S. Topaze, in 1863 and reads: In memory of Alexander Selkirk, mariner, a native of Largo, in the county of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude for four years and four months. He was landed from the Cinque Ports galley, 96 tons, A.D. 1704, was taken off in the Duke, privateer, 12th Feb., 1709. He died Lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth A.D. 1728, aged 47 years.

The last date was incorrect. The Weymouth's logbook in the Public Records Office in London gives 1721 as the year of his pa.s.sing. He was 41.

Still, the tablet, erected nearly a century and a half after Selkirk's death, recognized the Scottish mariner's magnificent adventure-a salute to a fellow seaman who had survived four years alone on a remote island in the broad ocean sea.

"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."

EIGHT.

The Real Robinson Crusoe.

There was a man in London who had read Woodes Rogers's Cruising Voyage Around the World and Richard Steele's account of Selkirk's years on Juan Fernandez in The Englishman.

Daniel Defoe was a failed businessman. At the time Rogers's and Steele's accounts of Selkirk's adventures came out in 1712 and 1713, he was in his early fifties. Short of money, he was trying to pay off debts, support a wife and children, and maintain a big house by writing books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles.

Defoe had a sharp tongue. His political stories annoyed men in high positions in the church and government. He was a gadfly, constantly nagging them with criticism. One of his pamphlets, published around 1700, charged some members of Parliament with disrespect for the rights of Englishmen. The powerful men he named did not appreciate his views. A 50 reward was offered for his capture.

The London Gazette described the fugitive-the only description we have of Defoe. "He is middle aged, a spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-colored hair, but wears a wig. A hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, a large mole near his mouth."

An informer turned him in for the reward. The government charged him with sedition-urging people to resist new laws. Defoe spent the next six months in Newgate Prison and was fined 135.

As much as he wrote through the years, by his sixtieth year Defoe was tired and broke, partly because he made unwise investments in business ventures that didn't turn profits.

Creditors badgered him for money he had borrowed. What he needed was a big score, a moneymaker. He remembered Rogers's book and Steele's account of Selkirk's marooning. Here was the story he was looking for, a man surviving alone on an uninhabited island.

But there was a flaw in the idea. In the early eighteenth century almost all books published were nonfiction. Histories, biographies, and travel books were popular subjects. Novels rarely appeared.

Defoe, though, did not want to let the idea go. He spoke with his printer, W. T. Taylor in Pater Noster Row. They agreed that a book about a marooned seaman on a tropical island might sell, but only if it read like nonfiction, if it seemed factual, not a story.

How to do this? A clever idea presented itself. The hero should write the book himself, make the story appear as though it had really happened.

In April 1719 the new book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. Defoe's name did not appear as author. The t.i.tle page read: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself.

"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."

These opening lines begin what is probably the most famous adventure story ever told, the tale of the s.h.i.+pwrecked mariner who survived twenty-eight years on an island off Brazil. The book is still available today in bookstores and libraries almost three hundred years after it was first published.

Readers believed Crusoe's story was true. In the Preface, Defoe noted that the book was "a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it."

W. T. Taylor printed 1,500 copies of Robinson Crusoe. So popular was the new book that it was reprinted a month later, again in June, and twice more by the end of the year. In October the story was serialized in The Original London Post for sixty-five weeks, an astonis.h.i.+ng run.

Defoe never named Selkirk as the model for his hero. But in a new edition of his novel he wrote: There is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are [my] subject, and to whom all or most part of the story alludes: this may be depended upon for the truth, and to this I set my name.

Defoe's notes for his story, still preserved in the Guildhall Library in London, read in part: "Goats plenty. Fish: abundance, split and salt.... The fat of young seals good as olive oil."

There is also mention of a visit with a Captain Thomas Bowry of the East India Company, a s.h.i.+pping firm. Bowry showed Defoe maps of Juan Fernandez.

Ten years after it was published, Defoe's story appeared in French, and by 1760 in German, Dutch, and Russian. Translations appear today in nearly all the world's languages.

After the success of the first Crusoe story, Defoe wrote two more: Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe the next year. These books, however, never attracted readers of the original story and have been largely forgotten.

In his lifetime, Defoe turned out an awesome amount of writing, possibly as many as 566 separate works-novels, long poems, political pamphlets, articles for 27 newspapers and magazines, and between 250 and 300 books. Besides Crusoe, his Moll Flanders (1722) remains in print today.

Despite his outpouring of words, Defoe never seemed to earn enough money to support his wife and seven children in their big house in Stoke Newington. In April 1731 he was hiding from people he owed money to in a shabby rooming house in Ropemaker's Alley in London. There he died, some twelve years after his famous novel first appeared.

In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe created one of the most enduring characters in all fiction.

Did Selkirk ever read the story? Possibly. In April 1719, when the novel appeared, he was on leave from H.M.S. Enterprise and in London. On daily walks about the city he sometimes visited bookstores. We can only wonder if he picked up the book, paged through it, and recalled once more the island paradise he had known.

At the end of his famous story, Defoe arranged for Crusoe to return to the island on which he had lived for twenty-eight years. But we know that was only fiction. Alexander Selkirk, the real-life Robinson Crusoe, never found his island home again.