Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

The men were exposed to drenching rains, the air was humid, there were violent gales and tornadoes. Here in this mangrove swamp those who had survived the seas were supposed to build New Edinburgh and Fort St Andrew. But scrimp rations and disease had left them weak. ‘Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such hard work that we were like so many skeletons.’

The settlers lost all interest in their home from home, their squalid New Caledonia where they had come to die. After two months they managed to build rudimentary huts and dig graves for two hundred dead. They ate lizards and pelicans and food scrounged from the Cuna Indians who were hostile to them. They were desperate to leave but had nowhere to go. Ten men who stole weapons from the Unicorn and deserted, were caught and put in irons. A plot to sail on a buccaneering cruise in the St Andrew was also foiled. There was an epidemic of tropical fever, its symptoms spots, sore eyes and joints, and vomiting bile.

Then the Spaniards, who had garrisons, forts and infantrymen at Carthagena, Santa Maria and Panama, attacked. They sent eight hundred infantrymen to destroy what there was of Fort St Andrew and to burn the huts of New Edinburgh. A northerly wind made it hard for the Scots to flee.

It was near impossible to send letters home for help. When two relief ships the Olive Branch and Hopeful Binning reached Darien in August 1699 they found ruins and graves. Only one ship, the Caledonia, returned to Scotland of the five that had left the Firth of Forth fifteen months previously. It carried no more than three hundred men, many of whom died before it reached the river Clyde.

1701 A Combate of Neiffells

THOSE WHO survived such rigours were strong and lucky. Selkirk’s behaviour, ‘undecent’ at fifteen, was violent by the time he was twenty-one. The predicted fortune had not appeared, nor the hardship of ye seas reconciled him to family life in Nether Largo. Back home in November 1701 a ‘tumult’ in his father’s house provoked complaints by neighbours. Selkirk, his father, mother, brother Andrew, eldest brother John and John’s wife Margaret Bell, were summoned to a disciplinary session of the Church Elders. Largo parish records give detail of the tumult:† Andrew took a can of sea water into the house. Selkirk unwittingly drank from it then spat the salt water out. Andrew laughed at him. Selkirk perceived this as an insult, beat him with a cudgel, swore at him, threatened to kill him and tried to go upstairs to get their father’s pistol. To block his way, their father sat on the floor with his back to the door. Selkirk hit him. Andrew ran for help to John and Margaret who lived nearby.

Their mother, expecting an all-out fight, left the house. John tried to get their father up off the floor and to the fireside. Selkirk ‘caste off his Coate’ and challenged John to a ‘combate of Neiffells’.* Their father intervened to separate them. Selkirk got them both into a neck lock and twisted them to the ground. Margaret tried to drag him off. John ran out of doors. She followed calling back at Selkirk, ‘You Fals Loun, will you murder your Father and my Husband both?’ Selkirk attacked her too. She was not sure how he beat her, but ‘ever since she hath a sore pain in her head’.

He was summoned to appear before the church elders on 25 November. Instead, he went to the nearby town of Cupar. Two days later he was again ordered to attend church, stand in the pulpit and ‘be rebuked in face of the Congregation for his scandalous Carriage’. This he did. He confessed he had sinned by attacking his brothers, ‘promised amendment in the strength of the Lord and so was dismissed’.

Such was Selkirk’s temper, and violence and retribution in Nether Largo. He wanted again to be at sea with its wider dangers and rewards. He was twenty-three, a navigator, fighter and survivor. Largo held nothing for him. It was intolerable to be laughed at and made to seem foolish by his weakling brother, and to be judged and found wanting by small-town churchgoers who knew nothing of the force of the ocean, the curse of scurvy or the heat of the sun in a Southern sky.

1703 Fair Speed

THE St George and the Cinque Ports left Kinsale on 11 September 1703. That night Dampier, drunk, had ‘high words’ in his cabin with his First Lieutenant, Samuel Huxford. He summoned the Master, James Hill, and ordered him to turn the ship round, go back to Kinsale and put Huxford ashore. Hill refused to obey this command.

It was not a propitious start or one to inspire confidence in the crew. Dampier took no notice of the Articles of Agreement he had helped formulate and had readily signed. ‘Disagreements and Mismanagements defeated our most promising Hopes’ the Mate of the St George, William Funnell, wrote.†

They headed south toward the island of Madeira off the coast of north Africa. Selkirk, as Master, navigated. Dampier praised him as ‘the best man on the Cinque Ports’. Captain Pickering, ‘a main Pillar of the Voyage’, was impressed with his skills. On the wide Ocean, in this wooden vessel with canvas sails, Selkirk struggled with time and gravity, the force of winds, the movement of the planets and the turning tides.

Lookout was constant. From the moment he saw Kinsale recede he logged the ship’s course and speed by ‘dead reckoning’, hour by hour, watch by watch, day by day. He referred to uncertain nautical charts and to almanacs of tide tables and the waxing and waning moon.† He used a lead plumb line to measure the depth of the sea, a wooden quadrant to measure altitude, a cross-staff to find latitude (the distance north or south of the equator) by the Pole Star, a back-staff to find latitude