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

belong to the fur seals ‘the like of which I have not taken notice of anywhere but in these seas’ Dampier wrote. There were thousands of them

I might say possibly Millions, either sitting on the Bays, or coming and going in the Sea round The Island… They lie at the Top of the Water, Playing and Sunning themselves for a Mile or Two from the Shore. When they come out of the Sea they bleat like Sheep for their Young; and though they pass through Hundreds of other Young Ones before they come to their own, yet they will not suffer any of them to suck. The Young Ones are like Puppies and lie much Ashore, but when Beaten by any of us, they, as well as the Old Ones will make towards the Sea and swim very swiftly and nimbly. On Shore, however, they lie very sluggishly and will not go out of our ways unless we Beat them but Snap at us. A Blow on the Nose soon Kills them.†

There were plenty of Blows on the Noses. Such blows were sport and afforded pleasure. These creatures were there to be killed. Fur skins were wearable, seal meat edible, blubber was suitable for frying food and for lantern oil. Once there was nemesis. As a sailor skinned a young sea lion he had clubbed to death its mother came up unperceived:

getting his head in her mouth she with her teeth scored his skull in notches in many places, and thereby wounded him so desperately that, though all possible care was taken of him, he died in a few days.*

Christmas on The Island in 1680 was not tranquil for the buccaneers. It was summer but the weather was stormy and the men mutinous. They had gambled away their plunder, now ‘scarce worth a groat’. They blamed their captains for the failure of the voyage. They turned out Sharp, elected John Watling an ‘old privateer and stout seaman’, to replace him, and put Edmund Cook in leg irons when his servant, William, ‘confessed that his master had often buggered him’.†

A fortnight later three Spanish warships headed in to The Island. In their haste to be gone the buccaneers abandoned a Miskito Indian*, a slave, a man of no consequence to them named Will. Will was in the mountains hunting goats. From high above the Great Bay he saw the Trinity departing and the Spaniards approaching.

Will was one of any number of the marooned, but he fared better than Watling who within a month was killed in a sea skirmish. He went high into the mountains to evade capture by the Spaniards. He had with him a gun and a knife. When his powder ran out he notched the knife blade and sawed the iron gun barrel into pieces. Using his gun flint to spark fire, he hammered and bent the molten iron with stones to forge harpoons, lances, fishing hooks and a blade. ‘By long labour’ he ground these tools into shape.

Out of stone he honed a ten-inch double-bladed hatchet and bored a hole in the middle for a wooden handle. Among the trees, by a stream near the sea he built a wooden hut. He spread his bed with goatskins and cut sealskin into fishing lines.

For three years Will survived alone. In 1684 Dampier was again cruising in the South Sea. On 22 March from high in the forest, Will watched Dampier’s ship, the Batchelor’s Delight approach The Island. Knowing the crew would crave fresh food he cudgelled three goats and roasted them on stones with cabbages and herbs. He waited on the rocks as the men came ashore by canoe. Dampier described the encounter:

When we landed a Meskito Indian named Robin, first leap’d ashore and running to his Brother Meskito Man, threw himself flat on his face at his feet, who helping him up, and embracing him, fell flat with his face on the Ground at Robin’s feet, and was by him taken up also.

We stood with pleasure to behold the surprize and tenderness and solemnity of this Interview, which was exceedingly affectionate on both sides; and when their Ceremonies of Civility were over, we also that stood gazing at them drew near, each of us embracing him we had found here, who was overjoyed to see so many of his old Friends come hither, as he thought purposely to fetch him.

He was named Will, as the other was Robin. These were names given them by the English, for they had no Names among themselves; and they take it as a great favour to be named by any of us; and will complain for want of it, if we do not appoint them some name when they are with us: saying of themselves they are poor Men, and have no Name.†

1574–91 Juan Fernandez

A MERCHANT SEAMAN gave The Island a name. Don Juan Fernandez sailed from Peru to Chile in October 1574 in his ship Nuestra Senora de los Remedios.* The accepted route down the coast from Callao to Valparaiso was unpredictable. It could take three months or a year. Strong currents and headwinds made the going hard and slow.

Juan Fernandez sailed west to the open sea to try for better speed. After twenty-six days he chanced on The Island. It was one of two, a little archipelago. At its southern tip across a strait of turbulent water, was a satellite islet, a bare rock, five and a half miles in circumference. Ninety miles west its sister island rose from the sea to a height of five thousand feet. He glimpsed its gorge, its canyon walls, its waterfalls.

He called the bigger island Mas a Tiera (Nearer Land), its satellite Santa Clara, the western island Mas a Fuera (Further Away). Collectively he called them the islands of Santa Cecilia for the 22 November, when he first saw them, was her feast day.** Others called them the islands of Juan Fernandez for it was he who had been blown near to