An Irishman's Diary

THREE hundred years ago this week, a ship sailed into a bay on the Juan Fernandez Islands off Chile and ended the long ordeal of a Scottish sailor called Alexander Selkirk.

At four years and four months, his exile was very similar in duration to Brian Keenan’s time as a hostage in Beirut. But what has captured the imagination about the Scotsman’s plight, then and since, is that he was completely alone. By contrast with Robinson Crusoe, whose adventures he inspired, there were no Man Fridays on Selkirk’s island.

There can be splendour in such isolation, which is the other thing about Selkirk’s story that has such popular appeal. He was “king and government and nation” of his island, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, when feeling himself similarly cut off from civilisation (at the dance in Billy Brennan’s Barn). Lonely as he must have been, Selkirk was also free – a fact he seems to have appreciated in the end.

There are conflicting accounts about how he felt when found. “A Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins,” his rescuers described him, “who looked wilder than the first owners of them.” One version has him speechless with joy. But the Dublin-born journalist Richard Steele, who interviewed Selkirk in 1711 soon after his return to England, reported him to have been indifferent about the prospect of home.

Unlike others who suffered marooning (from the French “marron”, meaning chestnut, a description of the natives’ colour on such islands, where wayward sailors were abandoned), Selkirk chose his own fate. He was cranky, by all accounts, and had fallen out with a ship’s officer. Perhaps more to the point, he had grave misgivings about their worm-eaten vessel’s seaworthiness.

On the latter score, he made a good decision: the ship sank weeks later, with most hands. His miscalculation was in thinking that another British ship would be along soon.

He was fairly well provided, having – according to Steele – “a Sea-chest, his wearing Cloaths and Bedding, a Fire-lock, a Pound of Gun-powder, a large quantity of Bullets, a Flint and Steel, a few Pounds of Tobacco, an Hatchet, a Knife, a Kettle, a Bible, and other Books of Devotion, together with Pieces that concerned Navigation, and his Mathematical Instruments”.

But his nerve faltered at the last moment, or just after it: “Resentment against his Officer, who had ill used him, made him look forward on this Change of Life. . . till the Instant in which he saw the Vessel put off; at which moment, his Heart yearned within him, and melted at the parting with his Comrades and all Human Society at once.” Among Selkirk’s practical problems on the island were rats, gnawing his clothes and feet while he slept (or tried to) at night. Here, as in other things, however, nature had provided a counterbalance, in the form of a feral cat population. He was able to train some of these to sleep on his bed at night and deter the gnawers.

He was also well served with food, eating turtle meat until it sickened him and then helping himself to the island’s wild goats. Realising he might not always be fit enough to catch his next meal, Selkirk shrewdly planned ahead. A forerunner of the slow food movement, he rendered kid goats lame when very young, “so that they might recover their health but never be capable of speed”.

When he wasn’t distracted by hunger, however, Selkirk longed for human company. At such times, says Steele, he grew “dejected, languid, and melancholy, scarce able to refrain from doing himself Violence”. He kept despair at bay by reading the Bible, or studying navigation. And eventually, the gloom lifted. After 18 months of exile, he was “thoroughly reconciled to his condition”.

After that, in Steele’s words, the adventure begins to sound idyllic: “When he had made this Conquest, the Vigour of his Health, Disengagement from the World, a constant, chearful, serene Sky, and a temperate Air, made his Life one continual Feast. . . He now taking Delight in every thing, made the Hutt in which he lay, by Ornaments which he cut down from a spacious Wood. . . the most delicious Bower, fann’d with continual Breezes, and gentle Aspirations of Wind...”

Well might he have had mixed feelings about going home. But go home he did, and he thrived for a while. By the time Steele interviewed him, Selkirk was worth “800 pounds”. A few years later, his fame inspired what is considered the first English novel, published in 1719. As a result of which, today, his place of exile is officially known as the Isla de Robinson Crusoe.

As for the real man, he tried the life of a landlubber for a period, but couldn’t settle. He was again at sea when he died in 1721, probably of yellow fever.

In his interview with Steele, Selkirk “frequently bewailed his Return to the World, which could not, he said, with all its Enjoyments, restore him to the Tranquility of his solitude”. From which reflection, the Dublin-born journalist drew a moral that has renewed relevance in these recessionary times: “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.”

fmcnally@irishtimes.com