Marooned Part 1

Marooned.

Robert Kraske.

ONE.

Selkirk's Choice.

September 1704.

Dark peaks rising from the sea. That was the first view of Juan Fernandez. As the Cinque Ports entered Great Bay, the island appeared more welcoming-a half-moon beach, gra.s.sy valleys, wooded foothills, waterfalls plunging from high mountains. At the foot of cliffs, fur seals sunned on rocks and played in the surf.

The island was a welcome landfall, but the crew was watchful, uneasy. Juan Fernandez was a Spanish island, and the Cinque Ports flew an English flag. Because England and Spain were at war, the island was not a safe place for an English ship. Spanish warships from the mainland sometimes stopped at the island. The Cinque Ports, needing to refill water casks and woodbins, risked being the target of a patrolling Spanish man-of-war.

At this remote island in the South Pacific, the conflict in Europe seemed far away. A quarrel among the ruling powers about who should sit on the Spanish throne had erupted into the War of the Spanish Succession. England and Holland, on one side, and Spain and France, on the other, were the major combatants.

Spain immediately banned English ships from its ports in Europe and South America. England's Queen Anne quickly struck back, declaring that English merchant ships could attack Spanish and French ships at sea and carry their valuable cargos back to England.

These English merchant ships were called privateers. They were armed vessels, privately owned, and licensed by the English government. Spain and France called them pirates. If captured, the crews would hang.

One of many privateers that set out from England was the Cinque Ports. For years it had carried cotton, sugar, and timber between English ports.

When the war began in 1701, the owners hired carpenters to convert the Cinque Ports from a cargo carrier to a privateer. Gun ports were sawed into its sides. Racks were built to hold cutla.s.ses, daggers, and boarding axes. Deep in the hull a tin-lined room was constructed to store gunpowder. Finally, twenty cannons and cases of muskets were hoisted on board.

Few of the Cinque Ports's crew-former bakers, barbers, cobblers, tinsmiths, tailors, fiddlers, haymakers, peddlers, thieves, and more-had ever been to sea before. All were eager to escape the poverty of their lives ash.o.r.e. Adventure lured them, the chance to get rich on Spanish gold.

Among the few trained seamen on board were Captain Thomas Stradling and the sailing master, Alexander Selkirk.

Little is known about Stradling. He was twenty-one years of age and thought to be a gentleman of the upper cla.s.s, but this was not known for sure. What the crew did know was that he was aloof, unfair, a bully. Once, during the voyage, they revolted against him. Whatever the cause, the matter was settled and the crew resumed its duties. Stradling liked to walk the deck with the ship's mascot, a monkey, on his shoulder.

Unlike the captain, Selkirk, the second in command, mixed easily with the men. On calm evenings he often joined them for a pint of flip-beer mixed with rum, sweetened with sugar, best served hot. Often he quarreled with Stradling about running the ship. After one heated argument, Stradling ordered him locked in a storeroom. It was Selkirk who had led the crew in the revolt.

Selkirk was a veteran seaman. At fifteen years of age, he had run away from home, the seaside village of Largo, Scotland. He sailed on merchant ships between the West Indies and England and learned navigation, which enabled him to become a ship's officer.

It was Selkirk who, as sailing master in 1703, had piloted the Cinque Ports from England south through the Atlantic Ocean, around stormy Cape Horn, into the Pacific Ocean, north along the South American coast as far as Panama, and finally south again to Juan Fernandez. The island lies 360 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile, on the South American coast.

Primitive instruments were used at the time to guide a ship across the seas. Maps were unreliable. Some placed islands three hundred miles from their true position. Selkirk's ability to guide the Cinque Ports to a remote island in the broad Pacific demonstrated his skilled seamanship. (On another voyage, England's foremost navigator had missed the island by miles.) He was twenty-seven years old and strongly built-"husky, a st.u.r.dy physique," allowed one writer. He also possessed a quick temper.

So far, the hunt for Spanish and French merchant ships along the South American coast had not gone well for the Cinque Ports. Only three small traders had been captured. They carried tobacco, timber, rope, and turtle sh.e.l.l. From one a small chest of gold coins was recovered. Then a French merchant ship gave up sacks of flour and sugar, a few casks of wine and brandy, and thirty tons of quince marmalade.

The crew grumbled. Halfway around the world to capture marmalade for their biscuits! More than that, they complained about water running low and the galley stove needing firewood. Hot food kept up spirits and courage.

The Cinque Ports headed for Juan Fernandez, the only anchorage and watering place that could be chanced along the Spanish-held South American coast.

While water casks were being refilled from freshwater streams on sh.o.r.e and trees cut for the woodbin, Selkirk inspected the ship. After its long pa.s.sage from England to Juan Fernandez, many repairs were needed.

Careening a ship was the usual thing to do: towing it to sh.o.r.e, running lines from the masts to trees, hauling it over on its side. Timbers in the hull, holed and weakened by the woodboring teredo worm, could then be replaced.

There were cracks in masts and spars to brace, tears in sails to mend, gaps between deck planks to stuff with oak.u.m and seal with pitch, fresh leather suction heads to replace those on the pumps worn from flushing water from the bilge.

Stradling, though, would hear none of it. Repairs could take days; a careened ship was helpless. Spanish warships could appear any day, any hour. As soon as water casks and wood for the galley stove came aboard, they would raise anchor and leave the sheltered bay.

Selkirk argued that Stradling was overly cautious. The risk had to be accepted. Patrolling warships were few and far between, and the ship was unfit to sail. A storm could swamp them, sending the ship to the bottom. His life, Stradling's life, the lives of the crew were at risk.

Stradling refused to yield. He intended to sail north along the South American coast, hunt merchant ships, then ambush the Manila galleon off Mexico. This Spanish treasure ship, heavily loaded with gold and silver and precious jewels, traveled only once each year from the Philippines to Acapulco. Time was running short. They had to be on station by December to wait for the galleon to appear.

There would be no change of plan. His order stood.

Selkirk stubbornly refused to accept the decision. Now his well-known temper began to rise. He turned to the crew, his mates. They had stood together once before against the captain. The time had come again. He would choose the island-"to take [my] fate in this place [rather] than in a crazy vessel, under a disagreeable commander!"

Who among them would join him?

The men hesitated. Trade the ship for an island? Not one stepped forward.

Stradling may have seen an opportunity in Selkirk's reckless boast, a way to get rid of his troublesome sailing master. He decided to call Selkirk's bluff. He ordered Selkirk's sea chest brought on deck, along with a musket from the arms locker and meat and biscuits from the galley.

Lower the longboat, he commanded. Mr. Selkirk would be going ash.o.r.e-alone.

Selkirk sits in the bow of the longboat. Two crewmen haul on the oars. Stradling, at the stern, hands on the tiller, steers.

The longboat grinds on the beach. Selkirk steps onto the island. The oarsmen lift the sea chest and place it on the stones. Carefully they set a bag of bullets and a bag of powder on top, along with a kerchief tied up with food, and lean the musket against the chest.

The boat shoves off.

On sh.o.r.e Selkirk waits. Perhaps he regrets his hot-tempered boast. Wading into the shallows, water to his knees, he "calls after his comrades," pleads to be taken back.

Stradling turns, shouts taunts, jeering at his difficult mate, no doubt glad to be free of him.

The oarsmen stroke the longboat toward the ship.

Hours pa.s.s. Then the Cinque Ports's anchor lifts. Sails rise and fill with an offsh.o.r.e breeze. The former sailing master watches his ship round a point of land. Then it is gone.

Waves wash the rocks. The sun sinks in the west behind the island's jagged peaks. The dark forest looms. Far across the water, fur seals howl and croak. Alexander Selkirk, mariner, is about to face surviving alone on an isolated island in the South Pacific. Yet, still mulling events that placed him on the stony beach, he is unaware of his predicament.

"[My] heart yearned within [me], and melted at parting with

[my] comrades and all human society at once."

TWO.

From the Beach to the Cave.

The crew of the Cinque Ports were tough, hard men. They had to be to survive the long pa.s.sage from England. They endured fierce storms around Cape Horn that battered the hull, opened seams between planks, and blew men tending sails into the raging sea. They suffered disease from the lack of fresh food and drank water so putrid and foul smelling that it had to be strained through kerchiefs to remove the green slime from the water casks. Holding the nose also helped. Hardships were part of the voyage.

Stradling's decision to maroon his sailing master was a harsh punishment, but not uncommon in those days. It was done to maintain discipline. Selkirk himself had witnessed a ship's officer marooned for some infraction of rules on a deserted island in the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic. And pirates were said to force an offender onto a sandbar at low tide with only a one-shot pistol. His choice: the pistol or the sharks that came with the rising tide.

So Selkirk, understanding the hard discipline of shipboard life, may have accepted his difficult situation. "[My] heart yearned within [me]," he would later reveal, "and melted at parting with [my] comrades and all human society at once."

But this was uttered in years to come, in the warmth and comfort of a London coffeehouse. As the night came on, it's unlikely that he was deeply distressed. He believed that the whole episode, the dispute with Stradling, had been an unfortunate fit of temper on both their parts. His marooning on the island would be temporary-a day, a week, and the Cinque Ports would come back. Stradling needed him to help run the ship. Besides, he was the sailing master, the navigator, the one man able to sail the poorly charted ocean and find the way back to England. He would just have to make the best of it until the ship returned.

Still, he was alone, and he had to think of his safety. He considered building a fire but decided against it. Savages might see the flames. Old seafarers told of flesh eaters on South Pacific islands. An eyewitness to the practice was the famous Sir Francis Drake, one of the first to sail around the world. At one island he had watched helplessly from his ship offsh.o.r.e while natives roasted and ate captured crewmen.

Selkirk rammed a charge of powder and a bullet into the barrel of his flintlock musket. On guard, he waited, fighting off sleep.

Morning sun advancing across the bay awakened him. He grabbed the musket. But there was no alarm. The sun lighted the green slopes behind him. Trails of fog filled wooded ridges leading to the high mountains.

He looked across the bay. No white sails, no ship working around the headland into the bay. Stradling, taking out his revenge, would delay returning. Selkirk decided to wait, not move from the beach, not risk missing the ship.

He was hungry and looked at the biscuits and chunks of salt beef brought yesterday from the ship. Beef kept in casks for weeks often became so hard that the crew carved it into tobacco boxes. But this chunk might be edible. By habit he probably tapped a biscuit on a rock. There were those who said it was best to discard any biscuit from which tiny beetles failed to emerge: Not fit for a weevil, not fit for a man.

His sea chest held a few linen shirts and wool stockings, flint and steel for making fire, cooking pot, bra.s.s spygla.s.s, hatchet, knife, a flask of rum, and a leather sack of gold coins-what good were they now? There were the Bible and books of devotion given to him by his mother back in Largo, and his books on navigation and geometry.

He also found his pint jar for taking his daily ration of flip. The words on its brown stone surface read: Alexander Selkirk, this is my [own].

When you me take on board of ship

Pray fill me with punch or flip.

His musket and leather bags of powder and bullets made up the rest of his worldly goods.

He spent the day on the beach, spygla.s.s in hand. He knew from charts that the island was about twelve miles long and four wide. Sheer cliffs ringed most of the bay.

His spygla.s.s picked out fur seals floating on the water or sunning themselves on rocks on the far sh.o.r.e. He could hear their faint barks. The adult seals were brown; the younger ones had black fur.

He ate another meal of biscuit and beef, washed down with water from a stream running from the forest into the sea. The light across the bay changed as the sun settled behind the high mountains. By the morrow the ship would surely return. All differences would be forgotten in the common goal of capturing Spanish gold.

The last biscuits and beef eaten, Selkirk walked the beach hunting for something edible. In the shallows he found crabs, mussels, and clams. Prying the sh.e.l.ls open with his knife, he ate the soft flesh raw and sucked the juice.

He spotted lobsters crawling among the rocks. They were much larger than the lobsters he had caught as a boy in Largo. Some were three feet long. He reached into knee-deep water, grabbed one by its hard sh.e.l.l, and flipped it onto the sh.o.r.e. He bashed it with a rock, then tore the critter leg from body and chewed the stringy flesh.

By afternoon, however, he felt the effects of the uncooked meat. He barely pulled down his breeches before his bowels loosened.

In the morning he felt better, but again hungry. No white sails had appeared in the bay. He decided to prepare a proper meal.

He placed rocks in a circle and shaved kindling from dry sticks. Sparks from striking steel and flint drew a wisp of smoke. Gently he blew into the smoke until a tiny flame appeared. He filled the kettle with water from the stream, gathered clams and mussels, and caught another lobster. Tossing the fresh meat into the boiling water, he made a thick soup.

His stomach took more kindly to the hot, cooked food, although he lacked salt and pepper to season it.

With little else to do, he sat on his sea chest or in the shade of trees bordering the beach to watch the broad entrance to the bay. The cold Peru Current, flowing north, kept the island free of tropical heat.

On the beach was a makeshift hut-sandalwood poles covered by sailcloth-made by firewood cutters and the watering party from the Cinque Ports as a shelter against sun and rain. He moved his sea chest into this rickety shelter.

Weeks pa.s.sed and the Cinque Ports had not appeared in the bay to rescue him.

Had Stradling marooned him? Was it possible the ship would not return to Juan Fernandez?

Selkirk's mood was dark. The island itself contributed to his low spirits. He would later reveal how "dejected, languid, and melancholy" he had begun to feel, "scarce able to refrain from doing [myself] violence."

Lonely beyond belief, he picked up his musket. It was still loaded with powder and a single shot, his defense against savages who had never appeared. One pull of the trigger would solve the problem of being alone. Was this why Stradling had ordered the musket? he must have wondered. Sweet revenge on his rebellious mate who dared question his orders?

Shaking, he thrust the musket clattering onto the rocks and made the decision to live.

After weeks on the beach, Selkirk decided he needed better shelter. The open hut of poles and sailcloth was too flimsy to protect against wind and blowing rain.

Caves above a line of trees offered a possibility. Trudging up the wooded slope, he looked into each one. The opening of the cave he chose was ten feet high. The ferns and weeds growing from the walls didn't appeal, but the hollow entrance offered a special advantage: a high lookout over the bay, a place to watch for a ship.

He carried his sea chest and few belongings up from the beach. Gathering ferns, he spread them on the rocky floor to form a mattress.

In front of the cave he piled rocks. Then he cut th.o.r.n.y branches from bushes and arranged them in front of the rocks. The rock wall, the thorns, and a bright fire at the entrance would hold wild beasts at bay. (Selkirk was as yet unaware that the most ferocious animals on the island were goats.) The cave offered shelter from wind and rain but was damp and uncomfortable. In the mornings his arms and face were often dusted with dirt that had sifted down. A rain shower during the day might cause the ferns and weeds to drip cold water at night. It's likely he was frequently chilled, thus adding to his misery.

No matter how poorly he felt, though, hunger forced him from the cave each day on a desperate search for food. Sometimes he dug roots to boil into a broth. He tasted cautiously-especially when he found wild berries or bird eggs-fearful of making himself sick or even poisoning himself.

On the beach he spotted a sea turtle crawling from the water. Flipping the creature onto its back, he quickly dispatched it with his hatchet. Cutting the tender meat into strips, he hung them in the sun to dry. The sweet meat provided a welcome relief from his diet of lobster, clams, and mussels.

Hunger was a daily problem, but so was the heavy silence of the island, especially at noon, when the sun was high. When loneliness grew too heavy, he emerged from the cave, singing hymns he had learned as a boy in the Presbyterian church in Largo. "There's an end of an auld [old] song," he shouted defiantly as a hymn ended, then beginning another.