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Category: History
The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe
A Personal View of Alexander Selkirk
By Rick WilsonFebruary 2009 marked the 300th anniversary of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk, the Fife mariner who became the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
The story is told not only by the author but also through the words of those who knew Selkirk with three colourful contemporary accounts of Selkirk’s island experiences on Juan Fernandez – two by the sailors who rescued him from the island, 400 miles off the coast of Chile (Capt Edward Cooke and Capt Woodes Rogers) and one by Sir Richard Steele, who talked with Selkirk after his homecoming. Selkirk had spent four and a half years on the island. Wilson also delves into Defoe's construction of Crusoe from Selkirk's experiences and his youth in Fife. He also covers the dramatic circumstances of his abandonment on the island when he asked to be stranded rather than risk drowning in the unseaworthy Cinque Ports. Selkirk was right, the ship floundered and the crew was lost.
Having been adopted as master of the ship that rescued him, Selkirk got his privateering career immediately back on track and, thanks to the success of this expedition, became a rich man. When he returned as such to Lower Largo – entering the church in all his new finery – his family and the common people almost fell at his feet. But this triumphant moment did not last. He became bored and nostalgic for his island (often sitting at a point overlooking the Forth to try to conjure it up) and, after starting a relationship with a local girl, he – and she – went back down to London.
The story does not have a particularly happy ending. While his Fife lass felt uncomfortable in London society, Selkirk abandoned her in two ways – he took another woman as a wife and went off to sea again, as lieutenant aboard HMS Weymouth. While the ship was sailing off the west coast of Africa in December 1721, it was struck by yellow fever and Alexander Selkirk was among the many crew members who died. He was aged 47 and the 'new' woman finally won the long and ugly tussle over his remaining fortune.
Key Features
Timely insight into Alexander Selkirk's life on the 300th anniversary of his rescue by the man who traced and returned what may well have been Selkirk's musket to Lower Largo in Fife.
Reviews
HE HAS become the defining image of the desert-island castaway: baggy fur claddings and musket, his hand shielding his eyes from the less-than-tropical sunlight as he scans the Firth of Forth over the rooftops of Lower Largo. This 1885 statue of Alexander Selkirk, the Fife village's prodigal son who was the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, might easily be Crusoe himself, as less informed visitors presume him to be.
Alexander Selkirk – or Selcraig, as his family styled their name – was born in Lower Largo in 1676. It was 300 years ago next Monday that he was picked up by the British privateering vessel Duke, commanded by Captain Woodes Rogers, after spending four and a half years alone on Mas a Tierra, an island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 400 miles off Chile. Three centuries on, Rogers's account still makes riveting reading, describing his ship's pinnace, having landed on the island, returning "with a Man cloth'd in Goat-Skins, who looked wilder than the first owners of them".
Now Rick Wilson, an Edinburgh-based author and journalist (and former editor of the Scotsman Magazine), who believes that Selkirk's story has been obscured by the Daniel Defoe classic he inspired, has marked the anniversary with a book, The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe. However, the character he evokes is no romantic hero, but a man described by his 1829 biographer John Howell as "soiled and wayward". Even today, Lower Largo may acknowledge its famous son, but it doesn't necessarily like him: "a rogue and a philanderer" is how one local describes him in Wilson's book.
Having inspected the statue, built into a house on the village's Main Street where the Selcraig family cottage once stood, Wilson and I wander into a nearby café and craft shop, where we ask one of its owners, Tessa Young, for a second opinion on the village's errant son. "Well, he wasn't a very nice man, was he?" she whispers conspiratorially. "He was cruel to his ladies." Selkirk seems to have been a disputatious character from the outset, and was indeed duplicitous when it came to relationships, leaving two widows fighting over two wills. In his book, Wilson, while commending his abilities as a navigator and a survivor, describes him as "selfish, egotistical, self-opinionated and ever-ready to pick a fight".
It was these characteristics that had got him landed on Juan Fernandez in 1704, after he'd fallen out with the captain of the English privateering vessel Cinque Ports (on which he was sailing master), pointing out forcibly, if justifiably, that the vessel's timbers were riddled with marine worm and she was leaking badly. The vessel, part of a privateering expedition led by the buccaneer and explorer William Dampier, dropped anchor off Mas a Tierra, where she underwent repairs. Selkirk considered these inadequate and told the captain so. The outcome saw him marooned on the island, accompanied by his seaman's chest.
He would stay there for four and a half lonely years, living off goats that had been introduced by earlier Spanish visitors. It would have been little consolation to him, even if he could have known, that the Cinque Ports indeed succumbed to its riddled timbers and sank, with the loss of most hands, a few weeks after its masts vanished from his horizon.
It was Selkirk's temper that caused him to quit his home village in the first place, at the age of 19, Wilson recounts. "It was the maledictions of the kirk, basically, but he wasn't getting on with his family either."
Parish records from 1695 record "Alexr. Selchraige" being summoned before the kirk session for "his undecent beaiviar in ye church". After being chastised he vanished off to sea, becoming an able-enough seaman to go privateering – which was effectively officially sanctioned piracy, as long as you confined your attentions to the enemy, at that time France and Spain.
Selkirk returned in 1701, only to land himself in further trouble after a violent family quarrel. Duly censured by the kirk session, he vanished back to sea and it would be 13 years before his return. Captain Rogers's ship, which rescued him, was part of another privateering expedition and soon Selkirk was proving his mettle to such an extent that he was given command over a captured Spanish vessel. Selkirk sailed it round the north of Scotland and down the east coast, past his native Fife, to London, as French naval activity made it too risky to take it through the English channel.
One Sabbath morning in 1714, the congregation in the parish kirk, a mile inland at Upper Largo, were taken aback by the arrival of an elegantly dressed stranger. According to Wilson, it wasn't until his mother gave a cry of recognition and rushed over to hug her long-lost son that the locals realised just who the dandy was. Selkirk's privateering had brought him an £800 share of booty – a small fortune in those days.
Standing outside Largo and Newburn Parish church today, glimpsing silver swathes of the Firth beyond the neighbouring cottages, you can still contemplate the gravestone of Selkirk's parents, its angel's wings almost weathered away.
But if Selkirk returned to Lower Largo a rich man, it didn't necessarily make him a contented one. He seems to have missed the solitude of his island, making fishing trips along the coast to the headland of Kincraig Point, which reminded him of Juan Fernandez, while in his parents' garden he constructed a cave for himself to which he frequently retired.
What he did like about the village, however, was a young milkmaid, Sophia Bruce, whom he took off to London, probably as his common-law wife. However, he abandoned her when he signed as a lieutenant with HMS Weymouth, becoming enamoured of Frances Candis, the landlady of a pub in Devon, and whom he married in St Andrews Parish Church in Plymouth. He made out one will in favour of Sophie, addressed to "my loveing and well-beloved friend" and another in favour of Frances, whom he decribed as "my welbeloved wife". After a legal wrangle, the Devon barmaid claimed all Selkirk's wealth and property after he died of yellow fever off West Africa in 1721. The hapless Fife dairymaid vanishes from our ken.
A leading question is whether Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, ever actually met the man who inspired what remains one of the world's most widely read books. Defoe consistently denied this, but Wilson reckons that circumstantial evidence points to an encounter between the celebrated Scots mariner and the English novelist, pamphleteer and journalist in Bristol, after Rogers brought Selkirk back there. One famous Bristol pub, the Llandoger Trow, claims the pair met there, though Wilson reckons a stronger case lies with two long-gone inns, both in Castle Street, the Cock and Bottle, where Selkirk lodged, and the Star, in which Defoe took lodgings around the same time. "The Star was where all the witty banter was, and people like Selkirk and Defoe would surely have gone there," he argues, "and they were living in the same street." Also, he adds, Defoe was a friend of the essayist Richard Steele, who did interview Selkirk.
Selkirk's papers or journal are much referred to in 19th-century accounts, but have never been traced. One theory is that they passed into the hands of the then Duke of Hamilton – whom Defoe would almost certainly have known from his time as an English government agent in Scotland during the run-up to the Union of Parliaments. Someone who certainly believed this was Selkirk's mercenary widow, Frances, who petitioned the duke for the journal's return. There is no record of an answer.
"I think it's possible that he was given the papers by Selkirk for research," Wilson speculates. "(He] didn't want to admit he was getting this help, but perhaps just wanted to keep them and, being broke, as he generally was, perhaps wondered who might be interested in buying them, such as the Duke of Hamilton. That's maybe an unfair charge, but it's also a theory that seems to stick quite well."
Today in Lower Largo, the Crusoe Hotel makes the most of both literary and factual connections, with its Alexander Selkirk room hung with informative panels about the village's famous son and a solitary concrete footprint covered by a glass panel nodding to the Crusoe tale. In real life, however, Selkirk never had the luxury of a Man Friday.
Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman, 27th Jan 2009
EXTRACT
Captain Woodes Rogers describes rescuing Selkirk in 1709, in his book A Cruising Voyage Round the World, as reproduced in The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe:
"Feb 2… Immediately our Pinnace return'd from the shore, and brought abundance of Craw-fish, with a Man cloth'd in Goat-Skins, who look'd wilder than the first Owners of them. He had been on the Island four Years and four Months, being left there by Capt Stradling in the Cinque-Ports; his Name was Alexander Selkirk a Scotch Man, who had been Master of the Cinque-Ports, a Ship that came here last with Capt Dampier, who told me that this was the best Man in her; so I immediately agreed with him to be a Mate on board our Ship. 'Twas he that made the Fire last night when he saw our Ships, which he judg'd to be English…
He had with him his Clothes and Bedding, with a Firelock, some Powder, Bullets, and Tobacco, a Hatchet, a Knife, a Kettle, a Bible, some practical Pieces, and his Mathematical Instruments and Books. He diverted and provided for himself as well as he could; but for the first eight months had much ado to bear up against Melancholy, and the Terror of being left alone in such a desolate place. He built two Hutts with Piemento Trees, cover'd them with long Grass, and lin'd them with the Skins of Goats, which he kill'd with his Gun as he wanted, so long as his Powder lasted, which was but a pound; and that being near spent, he got fire by rubbing two sticks of Piemento Wood together upon his knee. In the lesser Hutt, at some distance from the other, he dress'd his Victuals, and in the larger he slept, and employ'd himself in reading, singing Psalms, and praying; so that he said he was a better Christian while in this Solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again."
» MORE at thescotsman.scotsman.com/features/Lost-in-the-myth-The.4914817.jp
WHERE FACT MEETS FICTION
Anthony Troon, Dundee Courier, February 5th, 2009
ALEXANDER SELKIRK is one of Fife's best known sons: Robinson Crusoe is Daniel Defoe's best known novel. Yet while the book was based on the adventures of the castaway mariner, Selkirk and Crusoe turn out to be two very different characters indeed.
This conundrum has haunted Scottish journalist Rick Wilson for a good 30 years and at last – after considerable research – he has put his findings into a riveting book entitled The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe. The title reveals his objective, which was to separate the facts of Selkirk's real existence from the fiction of Crusoe's.
I asked the author if this project had been something of an albatross round his neck, as with the ancient mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem? "In a way," he said, "because the idea had been in my mind for such a long time.
"About 15 years ago, I seemed to be the only writer interested in Selkirk's story. But since then there have been several books, even one by Japanese explorer Daisuke Takahashi. But none was written by a Scot and I determined that as Selkirk's Scottish qualities and faults were central to the ups and downs of his life, I should reclaim this fascinating story for his ain folk and seek the truth."
Surely we are all familiar with Defoe's Crusoe. After all, this wonderful piece of adventure fiction has been almost constantly in print since 1719. It deals with the sailor's survival for many years on an uninhabited Atlantic island. In fact, Selkirk's island called Mas a Tierra in the small archipelago of Juan Fernandez was in the Pacific Ocean, 400 miles off Chile. He was rescued from there in February 1709, making this month the 300th anniversary of his salvation, a significance not lost upon author and publisher.
However, unless we are seduced by Defoe's novel into thinking that it gave a true picture of Selkirk's character, Rick Wilson separates these two individuals with forensic patience. We can begin by reflecting that while Crusoe was a rather polite Englishman cast ashore by shipwreck on an Atlantic island, Selkirk was a very obstreperous Scot, a Fifer from Lower Largo who had run off to sea after serious differences with his family and the all-powerful 18th century kirk.
Far from being shipwrecked, Selkirk opted to be put ashore on his island and was left· there after an argument with his ship's captain about their vessel's seaworthiness. He turned out to be right. Her timbers riddled by worms, the ship later foundered. Many of the crew drowned, and Selkirk might have been among them. But alone on his island, he survived.
According to Defoe, his Crusoe existed in such extreme circumstances for more than 28 years, but at least he had human company in the invention of "Man Friday". There was also a dog and a parrot. But while Selkirk's lonely existence lasted for the comparatively shorter period of four years and four months, who is to say it was less gruelling?
For while the fictional Crusoe was able to salvage massive amounts of useful gear from his wrecked ship offshore, Selkirk had only the meagre possessions his captain was prepared to allow him. These, of course, included a musket. And the story of how Wilson sought inconclusively to trace the "authentic" Selkirk firearm is another indication of his mild obsession with the life of his hero.
Sorry, anti-hero. Selkirk (who spelled his surname in several slightly differing ways, according to the habit of his times) was, as the book says, "an often-moody and pugnacious character who cannot be considered a conventional hero". He was the product of a tough, 17th century upbringing in the Fife fishing village of Lower Largo, or Seatoun of Largo as it was then known.
Author Rick Wilson went there on his researches. It seems that the only real trace of Selkirk that remains is that familiar Scottish trait known as "Ah kent yer faither": in other words, the tendency to ding doon a countryman who has done well for himself. And Selkirk had done well. After his rescue and further ventures in privateering, he came home with a small fortune amounting to £100,000 in today's money.
Yet local folk memory, says Wilson, tended to dismiss Alexander Selkirk as "a rogue and a philanderer". While this overlooks his undoubted and single-minded survival skills, it's hardly an inaccurate assessment. Selkirk was nobody's sweetie.
Perhaps village lore will be influenced by the fact that, as a returnee with fame and modest fortune, Alexander went off south with a naive local lass to whom he became "married by habit and repute" (an ancient Scots legal ruling). But some time later, he went through a conventional, if lust-fuelled, marriage with a busty English barmaid, or publican if you like.
The awful thing was that Selkirk left two wills, one in favour of his Fifeshire lassie and the other favouring his southern wife. Clearly, this was not the way a gentleman should behave and, I venture to suggest, it sets the final seal upon the huge gulf that separates the characters of Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk.
Inevitably perhaps, Selkirk went to sea again and died aboard his naval vessel in 1721, of what might have been yellow fever. Two "wives" were left to contest his will, and it seems his Largo lass lost out. So she disappeared from view.
But among the mysteries that remain is this: did Alexander Selkirk write a log of his survival on the island? Some suggest this is more than likely, and believe that the "Selkirk papers" were eventually handed to Daniel Defoe. Or perhaps passed to a Scottish nobleman for safekeeping, if you can imagine that these days.
There is no real evidence either way. So here we have a fascinating piece of research that still leaves much to be resolved. But as a character-analysis of the real Crusoe, I think this book gives us little room for doubt.
About the Author
About Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson has been a magazine editor in London, Brussels, Amsterdam and Edinburgh, where he now lives with his wife Alison. He has three grown-up children and five grandchildren. This is his eighth book. He is a former editor of The Scotsman Magazine who searched for and rediscovered Alexander Selkirk's musket, returning it to his family in Fife, an episode which featured in his book, The Man Who Was Robinson Crusoe.All Titles by Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson has also written: