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

Selkirk in 1711. From Selkirk’s demeanour Steele claimed to discern that ‘he had been much separated from Company’. Selkirk, he wrote, had ‘a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in Thought’.*

Solitude on Juan Fernandez had been sheer romance. The Island Steele would never glimpse was ‘the most delicious Bower, fann’d with continual Breezes and gentle Aspirations of Wind’. Selkirk’s ‘Repose after the Chase’ in the hut he had made, was ‘equal to the most sensual Pleasures’ of town life.

He never had a Moment heavy upon his Hands; his Nights were untroubled, and his Days joyous, from the Practice of Temperance and Exercise.

Abandonment enriched him. From it, he learned the value of simplicity. He listened to barking seals with pleasure and danced with goats and kittens. Return to the World, Steele said, with all its joys, could not compensate Selkirk for his loss. And there was a moral to this adventure for readers of the Englishman to observe:

This plain Man’s Story is a memorable Example, that he is happiest who confines his Wants to natural Necessities; and he that goes further in his Desires, increases his Wants in Proportion to his Acquisitions; or to use his own Expression, I am now worth 800 Pounds, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a Farthing.

The virtue of poverty was a Christian ideal often not espoused by its advocates. Steele did not confine his Wants to natural Necessities. He had a family house at Hampton Wick and a chariot with four horses. He employed Richard the footman, a gardener, a boy called Will, a woman called Watts, and a boy who spoke Welsh. He liked his coffee hot, his armchairs deep and his wines of the vintage sort.

Some months after their conversations together in 1711, Selkirk met Steele by chance in the street. He greeted him expecting an exchange of conversation. Steele could not recollect having seen him before. He had to be reminded who Selkirk was. He had remembered the story, but not the man.

1712 Gold Ingots and 2 Casks of Decay’d Tea Bisquetts

SELKIRK HAD a battle to get his share of the plunder – the eight hundred pounds derided by Steele. On its arrival in London, the cargo from the treasure galleon was swarmed over by owners and officers, officials and lawyers. There were accusations of embezzlement, cheating and lies.

He had hoped to go to Largo to visit his family. But he would not leave London until the auctions were over and the courts had ruled on who should get what. If he left town, or signed on for another voyage, he feared he would get nothing.

Storing and sorting the cargo began on 11 December 1712 under the supervision of Robert Patterson. His bill came to £311 10s for 623 days work at 10 shillings a day. It was one of a plethora of expenses, all extravagantly deducted. There were charges for making boxes and barrels, bagging raw and thrown silk, for sorting lace, boxing pepper, renting warehouses and sale rooms, for printing and advertising, for packers’ fees, for coffees and teas at Wills Coffee House and wine at the Dolphin Tavern.

The waterman who guided the ships up the Thames put in a bill for £34 16s. Mr Montague wanted £107 10s for sorting silk. £300 went in ‘tavern expenses and treats’. Henry Coleman charged £54 8s for clothes for Negro slaves so that they might look respectable at the point of sale. Samuel Smith fitted them with shoes for £3 15s.

There were eight auctions of plunder ‘by the candle’ in 1712 and 1713 at the Marine Coffee House in Cornhill and at Edmund Crisp’s Coffee House. Bids were received for as long as a small piece of candle burned. The last bid before the candle went out secured each lot.

Gold ingots, pieces of eight and pearls fetched four thousand pounds. But much of the valuable stuff had disappeared. Members of the crew reiterated that Woodes Rogers had hidden away treasure at Batavia so that he might secretly collect it later.

Merchants from all over the country gathered for these auctions. They bid for china, bales of silk, silk stockings, linens, towels, calicos, spices, cast iron, bees wax, ribbons and taffetas, a chest of priests’ vestments, six dozen handbells, twenty-four pictures painted on copper in oils, a ‘great bewgle’, cocoa, yarn, flowered muslin, chintzes, quilts, shirts, smocks, drawers, petticoats and forty-five counterpanes stitched with silk.*

The total raised for the plunder was £147,975 12s 4d, a sum far below the expectation of the men. The Lord Chancellor ruled that two thirds of this should go to the owners, and one third to the crew, according to the original terms of agreement. But before any payments were made the Chancery Courts had to judge and rule on the depositions, submissions, grievances and pleas that came from all involved.

Bribes were paid. The East India Company, persistent in their accusation that their trading rights had been infringed, was bought off for £6000 plus £161 5s to an unnamed official.† Payment was also made to The Company of Silk Throwers, who controlled the import of silk from Persia, China and the East Indies. One hundred and forty-nine pounds went in bribes to Custom House Officers.

Predictably the crew fared worst. Three years went by before they got anything. They claimed they should receive £1000 a share, not the £42 6s eventually authorised by the Master in Chancery. In signed petitions they accused the owners and ships’ officers of ‘vile and clandestine practices’ such as destroying the Bills of Lading, of selling off prize vessels and of sending home silver plate in East India Company ships.

It was, the crewmen said, by the ‘Courage and Hazzard of their lives’ that the treasure galleon had been taken. Seventy of them had died on the voyage. Those that survived, and their families, were ‘perishing from Want of Bread and