Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami (new books to read .txt) 📗

Shetland Isles, down the east coast of Scotland, close to Selkirk’s home town, then down the East Coast of England.

Their escort delivered them to the Texel off the northern coast of Holland on 23 July, then sailed on. Danger from the enemy abroad had passed. It seemed they were safely home. The galleon’s namesake, John Batchelor, sent his joyful congratulations at ‘such wellcome Tydins’.*

But still the owners were nervous. There were still threats to their haul. They could not trust the ships’ officers and discontented crew. Both their agents, Carleton Vanbrugh and William Bath, had died on the voyage. They sent out a replacement, James Hollidge, to supervise and report to them. He arrived in Holland on 7 August and wrote that he found Captain Dover well, Captain Courtney ‘out of Order wth ye gout’, the men mutinous, and ‘Capt. Rogers under a great deal of Uneasiness. He seems desperate.’†

There was trouble, too, from the London East India Company. Its twenty-four directors were Knights, Aldermen and Whig politicians. They accused the Bristol owners and the privateers of encroaching on their trading charter. They declared themselves ‘incensed’ at what they perceived as this infringement of their rights. They had the backing of the Bank of England. They aimed to seize the ships, confiscate the prize cargo and arrest the captains. They were doubly provoked by the new Tory administration, which had granted wide trading privileges to its own newly formed South Sea Company. This Company was the idea of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Harley. His political adviser, Daniel Defoe, in his journal Review, championed its aims to the public.†

Hollidge took back to London a signed document designed to appease and deter the directors of the East India Company. It said the Duke and Dutchess had sailed as ‘private Men of Warr’, that they ‘did not traffick in any sort or kind whatsoever’, that any cargo sold was only so as ‘to furnish themselves with Provisions’, that the worm-eaten Marquess had been sold ‘to buy Necessaries’ and that ‘not one pin’s worth’ of cargo had been sold in Amsterdam.

The East India Company directors chose not to believe a word of it. Such protestations were not proof. They sent their own agents to Holland ‘to have an eye’ on the ships, particularly the Batchelor. The crew again threatened mutiny. There were too many claims to this treasure. Too many owners, agents and toffs with their eyes on it.

At the end of September 1711 a convoy of four naval warships, the Essex, Canterbury, Medway and Dunwich, under the command of Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, arrived at the Texel to bring back ‘ye South Sea men’. There were more delays while Rogers sought permission to refit the treasure galleon. Its sails were rotten and its masts split. He wanted to return in triumph with sails of blue damask and displays of gold. Eyes would be on these ships as they sailed up the Thames. The imminent arrival of the ‘Aquapulca Prize’ was front-page news in the Daily Courant, the Post-Boy and the London Gazette.†

Late on Wednesday 3 October, the ships arrived at the Downs. It was a clear autumn night. Three of the owners were rowed out to welcome and congratulate the men. The Batchelor was then towed ahead toward the Thames. It moved up river alone. This was the ship of interest, and Selkirk was its Sailing Master. He wore a swanskin waistcoat, blue linen shirt, new breeches and shoes with scarlet laces. He had been away eight years. He had sailed round the physical world, and for four years and four months survived alone on an uninhabited island. He of all those on this voyage had a story of raw survival, of rags to riches, that men might want to hear.

*Dr Dover was given the sobriquet ‘Dr Quicksilver’ because he advocated mercury as a remedy for ailments as diverse as infertility and malaria. He claimed a cure for scurvy too – a quarter of a pint of hot milk curdled with potassium and aluminium: ‘there needs nothing more to be done for the Cure of this Disease which has hitherto puzzled Physicians of all Ages’.

*Knots are nautical miles per hour.

*Woodes Rogers bought this wig for £7.

*Hatley and his companions were captured by the Spaniards, tortured, starved, and put in the same Lima prison as Stradling. They were not freed until peace came in 1713.

*Begona was a pilgrim shrine in northern Spain.

*Captain Opey, sailing with an English East India ship, bought it then sold it to Chinese traders for breaking up.

*Batchelor died in November 1711 so never shared in the profits of the galleon named after him.

5

LONDON SCRIBBLERS

LONDON SCRIBBLERS

1712 The Most Barren Subject that Nature Can Afford

WOODES ROGERS and Edward Cooke had both kept journals of their quest for the Manila treasure ship. Back in London they hurried to outsmart each other in book form. There was a readership for first-hand accounts of plundering voyages, to exotic far-off places across dangerous seas. It was fashionable ‘to go round the globe with Dampier’ as Daniel Defoe put it.

Neither Rogers nor Cooke had Dampier’s skill for travel writing, his range, or flare for anecdote. Beyond shipboard life, their observations were more of the ‘winds south, southeast, anchored at Guam’ sort. But Dampier had no book to offer of this voyage. His days of fame were gone. He was given no praise for the Acapulco haul. Comment on him by fellow mariners was scathing. While he was away, William Funnell had published his own scornful account of the previous failed voyage.† Dampier became caught in renewed blame and litigation and his waning energy was used in trying to vindicate his reputation and clear his name.†

Edward Cooke feared that more notice would be taken of Woodes Rogers’ book than his own. Rogers had been Commander in Chief of the whole expedition and had eminent literary friends. At Bartram’s Coffee House in Church Street, opposite