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

and twenty years after the Duke and Dutchess, a young British naturalist, Charles Darwin, went with HMS Beagle on a surveying voyage round the world. He collected, observed and tried to interpret the flora, fauna and rocks that he found. His expedition took five years and covered 40,000 miles.

The Galapagos Islands, with their endemic species, held for him quintessential proof of evolution. He observed the giant tortoises, the thirteen kinds of finches, the hawks, owls, flycatchers, lizards and guanos. Why, he wondered, did finches and tortoises show variation from island to island, so that it was possible to tell which particular island a tortoise came from. It seemed to him that species might share a common ancestor. He saw each island as ‘a little world within itself where we are brought near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.’

‘We may be all netted together’ he wrote. Common to all living things was the struggle to survive. Nature was mutable and the past and present interdependent:

This wonderful relationship between the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth and their disappearance from it than any other class of facts.†

No such sense of affinity to the past or present afflicted the privateers. Their guiding creed was plunder. They ate the alien hares, turtle doves, guanos, parrots and pigeons. They tormented the tortoises and complained of their taste. ‘These Creatures are the ugliest in Nature’ Rogers wrote. But with rough curiosity, he too wondered how they had arrived on the Islands: ‘because they can’t come of themselves, and none of that sort are to be found in the Main’. The trumpeter of the Dutchess and another man rode around on the back of a particularly large one, for a bit of fun.

1709 Crack a Commandment

WOODES ROGERS did not want to fight the Manila galleon with ‘crowded and pestered’ ships. He had too many ‘Useless Negroes’ on board. They ate food and took up space. Those useful as slaves or drudges, or desirable for sex, were kept. Others were herded together to be traded for provisions. Edward Cooke and Edward Frye, who with Woodes Rogers’ brother John had fought the Marquess ‘when in the Hands of the Spaniards’, were as their reward given ‘the Black Boy Dublin and the Black Boy Emmanuel’ to use as they liked.†

‘Mr Selkirk’s Bark was cleared to carry our Prisoners to the Main, who, being 72 in Number, were very chargeable to maintain.’† Selkirk took them in the Increase to Tacames, a remote bay with a tiny village. Two pinnaces with armed men escorted him. The useless Negroes were sold. It was Selkirk’s task to discard them on yet another unfamiliar shore. He returned with payment of black cattle, hogs, goats, limes and plantains.

The Padre of the Marquess was also put ashore and given

as he desir’d, the prettiest young Female Negro we had in the Prize with some Bays, Linnen and other thing. He parted with us extremely pleas’d and leering under his Hood upon his black Female Angel. We doubt he will crack a Commandment with her, and wipe off the Sin with the Church’s Indulgence.

Many commandments were cracked on this voyage round the world. Piety was not at its core.

The little squadron sailed north for Cape St Lucas, at the southern tip of California. There the privateers were to watch and wait for the Manila ship ‘whose wealth on board her we hope will prompt every Man to use his utmost Conduct and Bravery to conquer’. It was at St Lucas that Thomas Cavendish in November 1587 had captured the Santa Ana, loaded with silks and damasks and gold.

November passed and most of December. The ships cruised the coast without a glimpse of the longed-for prize. The men became ‘melancholy and dispirited’. The boredom was terrible. Day after day of the waste of the ocean. No comfort on the ships. No point to this life. For Selkirk it was a familiar theme: ‘The scarlet shafts of sunrise but no sail.’ He was inured to empty time passing. To the elusiveness of the imagined ship. But the less hardened men measured the days by their impatience. They gave up hope and were eager to head home:

Computing our poor stock of Provisions left, we found there was no possibillity of continuing the Cruise any longer, but an absolute Necessity of getting into a Harbour to Refitt, and be gone for the Indies with all Expedition imaginable. Wch being agreed upon, we began to reflect heavily on our Misfortunes.†

At a Council Meeting on 20 December the men voted to sail east, without delay, to the Island of Guam and then to the Indies and home. Their fear was that if they could not reach Guam in good time, or if they lost their way, or met with danger or hostility, with such scant supplies as they had, they could not survive. Morale was at its lowest ebb. This voyage was another failure. The best that could be hoped for was to return home alive and defeated, a mission unaccomplished, devoid of glory, with nothing to show for hardship endured.

And then at about nine in the morning on 21 December, amid preparations for the voyage home, ‘to our great and joyful Surprize’, the man at the masthead cried out that he saw a sail. It was the Manila galleon, the treasure ship they had all ‘so impatiently waited for and despair’d of seeing’.

1709 Tanbes, Sannoes and Charroadorees

THE SHIP of their desperation was called Nuestra Senora de la Encarnacion Disengano. Dampier put its value at a million pounds sterling. It was a frigate of 400 tons with 20 cannon, 20 small guns, and 193 men on board. Its commander, Jean Pichberty, was brother-in-law of the French Governor in Spain. Its crew thought themselves near the end of a gruelling eight-month journey. To avoid devastating easterly winds they