The Real Robinson Crusoe

Alexander Selkirk was born in 1676 in Lower Largo, a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland, the son of a shoemaker. He was, by every account, a difficult man — quick-tempered, stubborn, forever in trouble. The sea was the natural escape for a young man like that, and Selkirk turned out to be good at it: by his late twenties he was a skilled navigator, and in 1703 he joined a privateering expedition to the Pacific, licensed to raid Spanish ships and ports. He served as sailing master of a small vessel called the Cinque Ports.

The voyage went badly. Storms, sickness and skirmishes wore the crews down, and the Cinque Ports itself was in a frightening state — its hull eaten by shipworm, its timbers leaking. In September 1704, the ship stopped for water at Más a Tierra, an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernández group, more than 600 kilometres off the coast of Chile. There, Selkirk and his young captain, Thomas Stradling, had a furious argument. The ship, Selkirk insisted, was no longer seaworthy; to sail on in her was suicide. He declared that he would rather stay on the island than sail another mile — and Stradling, who loathed him, took him at his word.

Selkirk was rowed ashore with his bedding, a musket, gunpowder, a hatchet, a knife, a cooking pot, some provisions, and his Bible. As the boat pulled away, the enormity of what he had done crashed over him. He waded into the surf, begging to be taken back. Stradling refused — and the Cinque Ports sailed away. Selkirk was alone. He could not have known it yet, but his stubbornness had just saved his life: within weeks the rotten ship went down off the coast of what is now Colombia. Most of the crew drowned; the survivors, including Stradling, spent years in Spanish prisons.

The first months were the worst — and not because of hunger. Selkirk stayed on the beach, scanning the horizon from dawn to dusk, eating shellfish and feeding on the hope of a sail that never came. Later he admitted that in those early days he was close to despair, and that only reading aloud from his Bible kept his mind — and his English — from unravelling. What finally drove him inland was nothing spiritual: hundreds of roaring sea lions took over the beach for their breeding season, and he retreated to the island's green interior.

It was the best thing that could have happened. The island, though uninhabited, was rich: earlier sailors had left goats, and there were wild turnips, cabbage palms and pepper berries. Selkirk built two huts of pimento wood — a bedroom and a kitchen — and settled into a routine. He would hunt the goats, first with his musket and then, when his gunpowder ran low, on foot: he grew so fast and so hardened that he could chase down a goat barefoot across the mountainsides. Rats crept into his hut and gnawed at his feet while he slept, so he tamed some of the island's feral cats with scraps of goat meat, and they slept in a ring around him — a resourceful man's makeshift alarm system. Once, chasing a goat in the fog, he ran straight over the edge of a cliff and fell; he later reckoned that landing on the goat itself was all that saved him. He lay there, senseless, for the better part of a day.

Twice, ships did anchor in his bay — but they were Spanish, and for a Scottish privateer capture meant a Spanish prison or worse. Once, spotted, he was actually shot at and hunted through the trees; he climbed into the crown of a great tree and held his breath while the hunters relieved themselves at its foot, then gave up and sailed away. So the castaway hid from his only visitors, sang psalms to the cats and the goats, and marked the days. He used to say afterwards that he had never lived better; but he watched the sea, always.

On 2 February 1709 — four years and four months after the Cinque Ports sailed away — two English privateer ships, the Duke and the Duchess, anchored off the island. The landing party was met by a figure they could barely recognise as European: a wild-haired man dressed entirely in goatskins, who ran like an animal and could hardly get his words out, his speech rusty from disuse. The Duke's captain, Woodes Rogers, was astonished by his condition — lean, hard, and healthier than any man in the crew — and drily described him as "the governor" of the island. By extraordinary chance, one of the expedition's officers was William Dampier, who had been on the original 1703 voyage and could vouch for him. Selkirk was taken aboard and, within weeks, given charge of one of the ships' prize vessels.

He returned to Britain in 1711, moderately rich from the expedition's plunder, and found himself a celebrity. Essays were written about the man who had lived alone and come back stronger; in taverns he told his story for drinks. But the return was harder than it looked. He struck people as restless and out of place, a man who found rooms too small and company too loud. He is said to have remarked that for all his money, he had been happier when he had nothing at all — and, according to one story, he built himself a cave-like shelter in his father's garden, where he could sit alone.

In 1719, the writer Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe — the tale of a castaway who survives alone on an island, keeps goats, reads his Bible and is finally rescued. It became one of the most successful books ever printed, and generations of readers have seen Selkirk's shadow behind it. Selkirk himself never settled. He went back to sea, this time in the Royal Navy, and died of fever off the coast of West Africa in 1721, aged forty-five. He was buried at sea. The island where he lived alone was officially renamed in 1966: it is called Robinson Crusoe Island to this day.