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

by the Sun at noon, an azimuth compass to read the magnetic bearings of stars, a steering compass, a nocturnal to gauge the time by night, a sundial to gauge it by day.†

He logged the course steered by the compass, the speed of the ship through the water, the magnetic variation of the stars, the drift of the ship away from the wind, the state of the currents and tides, the vagaries of the weather. Errors were cumulative and hunches frequently wrong.

Fifty miles was fair speed in a day. At noon if the sky was clear he checked his dead reckoning latitude against meridian altitude – the angular distance between the horizon and the Sun. But he could not measure longitude – his distance east or west on the earth’s surface. The theory of longitude had been understood since classical times. Selkirk knew that relative time and place were determined by the orbiting of the earth on its axis: one revolution of three hundred and sixty degrees in a day, fifteen degrees in an hour. To measure the difference of longitude between the meridian where he was, and some fixed meridian, like perhaps Greenwich, he needed to know at the same moment his own local time and local time on the prime meridian. The difference between these, one hour or fifteen degrees, was the difference of longitude. No timepiece had been invented to gauge it. Such a timepiece would have to be accurate for months on end, in a bucketing ship, in every climate.

In 1703 this was a distant dream. The watchmaker who was to ‘Find the Longitude’ and devise such a timepiece, John Harrison, was a ten-year-old boy.† Selkirk, and navigators of his day, tried to find it by calculating the movement of the moon in relation to the sun and the brightest stars. ‘Diligent searchers of the heavens’ compiled tables of lunar distances. But they did not know what laws controlled the movement of the moon, nor the relative positions of the stars, as time markers, one with another.

Reading the Longitude was a frustrating puzzle and navigation was as much luck as science. It was easy to get grandly lost, to be all at sea, a prey to hostile ships, storms, dwindling rations and the ravages of disease. With the technology of wood, glass and string, with crude magnets, wits and vigilance, Selkirk and his ship tried to be in rhythm with the cool grace of the turning world. There was much to divert him and the crew from such pure pursuit: quarrels, drunkenness, mutiny, weevils in the biscuits and no lemons or limes.

1703 A Parcel of Heathens

THE PRIVATEERS reached the island of Madeira after fourteen days. It was of interest to them only for its liquor. William Funnell described it as a pleasant place, but inhabited by Portuguese. A stone wall, cannons and a castle defended its coast. Vineyards covered its southern slopes. Dampier sent boats ashore to load up with casks of wine.

The men sailed on to the Cape Verde Islands. As they anchored at St Jago,* local people clamoured to barter hogs, hens, watermelons, bananas and coconuts, for shirts, breeches and bales of linen. Funnell described them as Murderers, Thieves and Villains: ‘They will take your Hat off your Head at Noon-day although you be in the midst of Company and if you let them have your Goods, before you have theirs, you will be sure to lose them.’†

The privateers considered themselves English, civilised and entitled. They casked fresh water, cut timber for fuel, captured a monkey as a talisman and took Negro men and women as slaves. They gave them meagre food rations and hard lessons in obedience.

They stayed at St Jago for five fraught days. The rows between Dampier and Samuel Huxford became violent. According to Funnell, at midnight on 12 October, Dampier put ashore Huxford with his servant, chest and clothes, then sailed off at four in the morning. Dampier denied this, but others embellished the story. John Welbe, Midshipman on the St George, said Dampier pushed Huxford into a boat, threw his sea chest and clothes after him and ordered a Portuguese officer on St Jago, ‘a sort of corregidor’, to lock him up. Huxford managed to get back to the ship, but Dampier ordered him off.

Mr Huxford begg’d of him not to be so barbarous as to turn him Ashore amongst a Parcel of Banditries and Negro’s; but desired him to let him lye in the Long-boat; or he would be contented to go before the Mast, rather than go ashore amongst a Parcel of Heathens.†

Dampier despised this pleading. He connived with Thomas Stradling to pretend to Huxford that he would be allowed to sail in the Cinque Ports. Huxford, suspicious, refused to leave the St George. Dampier ‘with his own Hands took hold of him and thrust him out of the Ship into Lieut. Stradling’s Boat’. Stradling bundled him on board a Portuguese merchant ship and the St George and Cinque Ports sailed off without him.

Huxford was then marooned on St Jago where he died three months later, ‘partly with Hunger’. Welbe said he would not have blamed Dampier had he put Huxford ashore in Ireland, but to leave him to die in St Jago was a ‘monstrous Barbarity’. He was, he said, unsurprised by his Captain, ‘knowing the like Scene of Cruelty was acted by him, when Commander of the Roebuck.’ Then, too, Dampier had marooned his First Lieutenant, the officer with whom he should have worked in closest accord.

1703 The Scourge of the Sea

THE SHIPS cruised south down the coast of Brazil ‘not fully resolved what Place to touch at next’. Provisions were low. The men craved fresh meat and vegetables and were sullen when ‘great heaps of Stuff not unlike Men’s Guts appeared at the bottom of the Beer Butts’.†

They caught whatever food they could. On 22 October in deep Atlantic waters they caught a shark, a dolphin and two unfamiliar creatures, a ‘Jelly-fish’, gelatinous, slimy