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

In November 1720 he was at the port of Plymouth. He did not find his way home to his ‘loveing friend’ Sophia Bruce. He signed on as First Mate of a naval warship HMS Weymouth which was to make a ‘Voyage to Guinea’. For some weeks it was fitted and revictualled: ‘Rum and Biskett (20 Baggs)’, salt beef, pork, dried peas, oatmeal, butter and fifteen cheeses.

Selkirk drank his flip in a public house in Oarston, a haunt of sailors. Frances Candis, its owner, was as tough a booty seeker as any privateer. He flirted with her, urged on by other drinkers. He told her of the Manila Galleon and that he was worth a thousand pounds.†

She would not have sex with him unless they married. He would marry her, he said, before the Weymouth sailed. She called him ‘very importunate’. He was also very drunk. Asked if he had a wife he ‘Solemnly declared he was a Single and an unmarryed Person’. She voiced her doubts, a man of his age and fortune … His drinking friends swore he was free. She knew that drunken sailors were not to be believed.

She claimed she was averse to marrying him but that he insisted. She protested that she could have no life with a man such as he. His ship was leaving within a month. There were the perils and dangers of the seas. She would be a widow before the year was out. She wanted security, so if they married, they must go from the church to her lawyer. Selkirk must make a Will leaving his wages, estate and all he had to her.

The wedding she arranged was on 12 December 1720 in St Andrew’s Parish Church in Plymouth. It was a Church of England ceremony. Curate Robert Forster granted the licence. Frances Candis claimed her husband was sober at the time. Her acquaintances – William Warren, John Kimber and Samuel Rhodes witnessed the ceremony.

She took him from the Church to a Plymouth notary. Mr Samuel Bury expressed what he gathered to be Selkirk’s intentions in a Will. It was a simpler document than the one lodged with Sophia three years previously. A brief document of betrayal. It made no mention of Katherine Mason, Largo, his family, or Sophia. It simply revoked all former Wills, commended his ‘Soul to God that gave it’, committed his body to the earth or sea, and bequeathed all his worldly Estate – his Wages due, money, Lands, Tenements, and Estate to his ‘wellbeloved wife Frances Selkirk of Oarston & her assignes for ever’.†

In the island of his mind it was only a piece of paper, the price of sex. This woman was no more his wife than Sophia Bruce. He lived for the opportunism of the moment, without regard for society’s rules. Had his ship docked at Wapping he might have found his way to Sophia. But it went to Plymouth.

Within days he was heading for the West Coast of Africa, the chase over, the notch made. Again the wind and the sea were his rescue. The sea got him away. The Weymouth’s task was to protect merchant ships and rout pirates from the Gulf of Guinea. Across the familiar ocean was a manly battle to fight, a journey to be made.†

1721 Small Breeze and Fair

IT WAS a doomed voyage. It took him far from The Island’s heart and to the sea’s bed. He went to search out pirates who preyed on English ships and all he found was death. It did not matter to him to be a turncoat, fighting his own kind. There was the familiar ghetto of the ship: sparse rations, mutiny and violence.†

The Weymouth reached the mouth of the river Gambia in March 1721. There were gales, haze and great waves. It seemed an omen of disaster when Alexander Clark wrestling to reef the sails ‘was struck overboard with the saile from the topsl. yd. and was drowned’. In wind and rain the ship then grounded in sand. An anchor broke, a cable was damaged. At high tide there was only fifteen feet of water, at low tide, seven. For four days the crew heaved and hauled before the ship was free.

Villagers who lived along this Gold Coast had no reason to be accommodating to these colonising Whites. Messengers from the ship who requested water were taken hostage. The ransom demanded for them was of gold and food.

At the rivers and fresh water places, in the dark forests where the men went to cut wood, the dank air was thick with mosquitoes. They were seen as pests and an irritation not as creatures that might kill with a deadly bite. But in June the men of the Weymouth began to die: Mr White, Purser, deceased. Mr Peine, Schoolemaster, deceased. Charles Fanshaw, departed this life. John Pritchard, died this day.

The sick could not know their mortal illness was caused by a virus, transmitted by mosquitoes that fed on infected monkeys and then on them. The surgeons blamed the foetid air, the proximity to Negroes. They plied their hopeless craft: phlebotomy and mulled spices.

By late September so many men were dying a makeshift hospital was erected on shore. Twenty Negroes were commandeered without whose help the ship could not be crewed. On 23 October the Governor of Cape Coast Castle informed the Weymouth’s Captain, Mungo Herdman, of pirates who had done much damage and taken a Royal African Company ship. The Governor asked for a Muster to be called of men on board who were fit for service. The call was seventy-two: ‘Officers, Seamen and Learners, all included’. The following day it was fifty-seven.

Deaths were entered in a daily log, along with laconic comment on the weather, the fixing of a halter around a mutineer’s neck and putting him under the Boatswain’s command as a Swabber, the taking of men and stores from other ships, the employment of Negroes as a last resort.

In late