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

which gnawed his clothes and feet when sleeping’. Their forebears had jumped from European ships. Pregnant at four weeks, they gave birth after three weeks gestation, had litters of eighteen, became pregnant again immediately, and lived for two years. They ate bulbs, shoots, carcasses, bones, wood and each other. They left spraints of urine wherever they went and their fur was infested with lice and fleas. Their appetites were voracious and their most active time, the pitch of night. The Island housed them in millions, white, grey, black and brown. As he slept they gnawed his clothes and the bone-hard skin of his feet. He would wake to hissing fights. He slung pebbles at them, but in seconds they resumed.

Equally fecund were the feral cats. They too came from Spanish, French and English ships. He enticed them with goats’ meat wanting them to defend him against the rats. Kittens in particular within days were tame. ‘They lay upon his bed and upon the floor in great numbers.’ They purred to see him, settled in shafts of sunlight, curled round his legs. To them he was a gentle provider, a home maker.

In the face of this feline army the rats kept away. Instead he endured the cats’ territorial yowls, their mating calls and acrid smells. He talked to them, they made him feel less alone. ‘But these very protectors became a source of great uneasiness to him.’

For the idea haunted his mind and made him at times melancholy, that, after his death, as there would be no one to bury his remains, or to supply the cats with food, his body must be devoured by the very animals which he at present nourished for his convenience.†

To ensure his meat supply, he lamed kids by breaking their back legs with a stick. He then fed them oats gathered from the valley. They did not equate their pain and curtailment with him and were tame when he approached them with food.

So he became The Island’s man. Monarch of all he surveyed.† He swam in the sea, washed in the streams, rubbed charcoal on his stained teeth. His beard that was never cut merged with the tawny hair of his head. His shoes wore out but he did not try to repair them. The soles of his feet became as hard as hooves. He ran barefoot over rocks. ‘He could bound from crag to crag and slip down the precipices with confidence.’†

The seals and sea lions ceased to be a threat:

merely from being unruffled in himself he killed them with the greatest ease imaginable, for observing that though their Jaws and Tails were so terrible, yet the Animals being mighty slow in working themselves round, he had nothing to do but place himself exactly opposite to their middle, and as close to them as possible, and he despatched them with his Hatchet at will.†

Their fat was cooking oil, their fur his bedding, shared with pale fleas and ticks that burrowed and blistered under his skin. He gouged these out with a wooden pin.

As time passed he ceased to imagine threat from monsters or cannibals. Nor was he troubled by the moan of the wind, the calling seals, the chirps and screechings of The Island. His hut, cats and goats created a semblance of home. He adapted to The Island’s ways.

1704 Hard labour

HE WAS RIGHT about worms eating the Cinque Ports. In his view ‘The Mexican Worm was larger, and eats the Bottoms of the Ships more on its Sea-Coasts, than any other place’.† After a month the ship sank near Malpelo, a small barren island off the Peruvian coast. Most of the crew drowned. Stradling and thirty-one others got to the shore on two rafts.

This island offered none of the abundance of Juan Fernandez. They existed at the brink of life on chance catches of fish and birds and drank the blood of tortoises because there was no water. Eighteen survived, then surrendered to the guarda-costa as an alternative to starvation. They were fed, shackled and marched overland via Quito and Cisco to prison in Lima. ‘The Spaniards put them in a close Dungeon and used them very barbarously.’†

As prisoners they were left to rot, or used in the gold and silver mines and workhouses. ‘Those that are put in Workhouses are chain’d and imploy’d in carding Wool, rasping Logwood etc.’ They were in the company of ‘Mullattoes and Indians, but no Spaniards, except for the worst of Crimes’.

A sort of freedom could be bought if the bribe was high. ‘Turning Papist’ was another way. True Englishmen thought this the surrender of their souls and worse than death. Converts were baptised, then employed as servants to men of note, or used as money-making curiosities. One privateer who ostensibly converted, was baptised in the Cathedral of Mexico City, then displayed in markets. The ritual was to sprinkle oil on his tongue and pour oil on his head. The ‘small parcels of Cotton’ used to rub these off were then sold to Penitents for an ungodly fee, with a claim to their divine properties ‘because taken off the Head of a converted Heretic’.

Stradling spent four years in prison in Lima. He escaped twice. The first time he made toward Panama in a stolen canoe. He hoped to cross the Isthmus then get to Jamaica with an English trading sloop. He paddled twelve hundred miles, was recaptured, thrown back into gaol and warned that if he tried it again he would be sent to the mines. He tried it again and was taken prisoner by a French ship bound for Europe. From there he made his way home to Britain, penniless and ill.

1704 Rogue, Rascal, Son of a Bitch

NOR DID Dampier’s fortunes improve. The worms were at it in the St George too. Funnell said its timbers were so badly eaten they were as thin as a sixpence. ‘We could thrust our thumbs quite through with ease’.

Yet still Dampier aimed for ‘the chiefest end of the expedition’,