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

a Scotchman who was left there by Capt Stradling Capt Dampier’s consort the last Voyage and survived four Years and four Months without conversing with any creature, having no Company but wild Goats and his Catt, there being no European in all that Time, and he was resolvd to die alone rather than submitt to ye South Sea Spaniards.†

Selkirk displayed his strength. He showed he was not a victim, of Time, or The Island, or of Men. He impressed Rogers with his agility:

He ran with wonderful Swiftness thro the Woods and up the Rocks and Hills. As we perceiv’d when we employ’d him to catch Goats for us. We had a Bull-Dog, which we sent with several of our nimblest Runners, to help him in catching Goats; but he distanc’d and tir’d both the Dog and the Men, catch’d the Goats, and brought ’em to us on his back.†

Spare sails, secured to pimento trees, served as tents for the sick. Selkirk fed the ill men with broth of goats’ meat, greens and herbs – parsley, purslain, mint and sithes. He strewed their tents with sweet-smelling sandalwood. He gathered plums, boiled and broiled lobsters. Edward Wilts and Christopher Williams died of scurvy, others recovered fast.

The men needed to refit their ships within a fortnight. They had heard that ‘five stout French ships were coming together to these Seas’. The peaceful bay became a town. Smiths and coopers worked by the shore. A group of men slew seals and boiled up eighty tons of oil ‘for the use of our Lamps and to save our Candles’. They cooked baby seal while they worked and likened it to the roast lamb of home.

On the ships the decks were cleaned of shit and filth, smoked to choke out rats and scrubbed with vinegar. Wood was loaded and water hosed into casks. Turnip tops, herbs and greens were stored and two hundred large fish salted ‘for future spending’.

Rogers wanted a supply of live meat. Selkirk told him that from his lookout he had seen herds of large goats grazing in the south-west lowlands. He could not get to them on foot across the jagged mountains. Rogers sent him in the Duke’s pinnace with Dampier and twelve other men.

They were gone twenty-four hours. It was Selkirk’s first night away from the Great Bay in four years. He was in the company of men. They camped on scrubland and got drunk. They tried to snare a herd of one hundred goats, but most ‘escap’d over the Cliff’. They caught sixteen and took them from the quiet of the hills to the terror of the sea.

The sea beckoned, the desire to snare great fortune. Council Meetings were held about pursuit of prizes and signals for rendezvous. Detailed codes of communication between the ships were agreed: the meaning of lights and flags shown, sails hauled up and down, crosses left at landing places pointing to messages in glass bottles.

But the issue that rankled was as ever how to share the booty. It was this, in Rogers’ view, that had ‘prov’d too hard a Task for all others in our Time that have gone out on the same account, so far from Great Britain’. Managers of Plunder were elected, with representatives from officers and men. Transparency was assured. Inventories would be kept to include every item seized. All men would be searched as they came from a prize. The focus was again on Gold, Conquest and the Manila Galleon.

1709 Barnacles off her Bottom

THEY MOVED from the Great Bay at three in the afternoon on 14 February 1709. A fair wind blew, south, south-east. Selkirk turned between tasks to watch The Island recede. He saw the same as other men: mountains and gorges, sheer cliffs washed by surf, a silhouette of land, a shape, a form.

He had lived in that place for 52 months, or 38,000 hours, or 2,280,000 minutes, or for no time at all. He had left only traces, notches on trees, lamed goats, the embers of a fire, the soul of a marooned man. He took with him a cat, a few stones and images of splendour he could not convey. Soon ferns would cover the huts he had built, his shards of crockery and improvised knives. The seals would grieve their culling then breed again. The fish, goats, trees, all would regenerate as the sun rose over the mountains, as the rains came and the earth turned.

But now there was work to be done of a manly sort. The plan was to voyage north along the coast of Peru, to seize merchant vessels, ransack the port of Guayaquil, then lie in wait near Acapulco until the great prize, the Manila galleon sailed into view.

From the chaos of the Cinque Ports and abandonment on The Island, Selkirk was now in the company of strategic thieves. On this voyage men were accountable to officers and disciplined if they broke rules. But still discontent festered, aggravated by boredom, deprivation and inaction: ‘Our Men begin to repine that tho come so far we have met with no Prize in these Seas’ Woodes Rogers wrote.

After a month of uneventful cruising, they took a small Spanish merchant ship. It was heading toward Cheripe in Peru to buy flour. They used its provisions, held its passengers prisoner and at the Island of Lobos de la Mar, ‘a small barren Place having neither wood nor water’, refitted it and relaunched it as the Beginning. Edward Cooke was appointed its captain. At Lobos too the Dutchess was cleaned of ‘Barnacles off her Bottom, almost as large as Muscles. A Ship grows foul very fast in these Seas.’† A Dutchman working at this was pulled into the water by a seal and bitten to the bone in several places.

Ten days later, on 26 March, the crew of the Dutchess captured another prize, the Santa Josepha. It weighed fifty tons and had a cargo of timber, cocoa, coconut and tobacco. It was renamed the