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

Hungerford Market in the Strand, he met with Richard Steele, pamphleteer, playwright, essayist and author of the daily paper the Spectator and with the equally prolific Daniel Defoe who wrote and published the Review.

Cooke had for a short time been captain of the worm-eaten prize the Marquess, sold at Batavia, for scrap. He had no influential friends. To get ahead of Rogers, he brought out his book in two parts. The first volume was on sale by March 1712, four months after the ships were home. He called it A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World Perform ’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711 by the Ships Duke and Dutchess of Bristol.

To imply high patronage he dedicated it to Sir Robert Harley. On the title page he was advised by his publisher to advertise ‘an Account of Mr Alexander Selkirk, his Manner of living and taming some wild Beasts during the four Years and four Months he liv’d upon the uninhabited Island of Juan Fernandes’.

But the ‘Account’ Cooke gave his readers was confined to one meagre paragraph. Selkirk, he told them, had been Master of the Cinque Ports Galley. He had had some unspecified disagreement with his captain and ‘the ship being leaky he had gone ashore’. He had survived on goat meat, cabbages that grow on trees, on turnips and parsnips. He tamed wild goats and cats. When rescued, he was wearing a goatskin jacket, breeches and cap, all ‘sewed with thongs of the same’. And that was the sum of it. What more was there to say? Cooke turned his attention to storms, gunboats, plunder, and disputes among the crew.

Readers felt cheated. This story of abandonment whetted curiosity. They wanted more of it. Who was Selkirk? What had he felt? How, in detail, had he survived?

Cooke was encouraged by his publisher to fill the gap with his second volume. In an irascible preface to it he promised ‘a fuller Account of the Man found on the Island’. He complained he had been rushed into print for the first part of his book with insufficient time to research details.

That short Hint rais’d the Curiosity of some Persons to expect a more particular Relation of the Man’s manner of living in that tedious Solitude. We are naturally fond of Novelty and this Propension inclines us to look for something very extraordinary in any Accident that happens out of the common Course. To hear of a Man’s living so long alone in a desert Island, seems to some very surprizing and they presently conclude he may afford a very agreeable Relation of his Life when in Reality it is the most barren Subject that Nature can afford.

Cooke met with Selkirk and questioned him, but saw no scope to his story. It was, in his view, dull and inconsequential to be interminably alone, without company or comfort, on a bit of land he described as an ‘entire Heap of Rocks’, so steep as to look ‘almost perpendicular’. He was not, he wrote, going to pander to romanticism or invent. The discerning reader would, he felt sure, want truth not fiction. Not many people wanted to read about ‘ancient Authorities’, in the Egyptian desert, who eked out solitary lives of austerity and devotion.

What then can it be that flatters our Curiosity? Is Selkirk a natural Philosopher, who, by such an undisturb’d Retirement could make any surprizing Discoveries? Nothing less, we have a downright Sailor, whose only Study was how to support himself, during his Confinement and all his Conversation with Goats.

So Cooke gave again the bones of Selkirk’s adventure. The frigates of the Duke and Dutchess had sailed into the Great Bay of The Island. Their crew saw a man waving a white flag. They called to him to show them a good place to land. He gave directions, then ‘ran along the Shore in Sight of the Boat so swiftly that the native Goats could not have outstripp’d him’. When invited to the ship, ‘he first enquir’d whether a certain Officer he knew was Aboard’. If so, he would remain in solitude, rather than sail with him.

He had an axe and other tools, a pot to boil meat. He had made a spit and a bedstead and ‘tam’d a Parcel of Goats’. He ‘knew all the by Ways and Paths on the Mountains, could trip from one Crag to another, and let himself down the dreadful Precipices’. He had kept an exact account of the day of the month and the week. He had taken Captain Frye into the mountains to ‘a pleasant spot full of Grass and furnish’d with Trees’ where he had built his lodging place and a kitchen.

His greatest disaster was when he fell down a precipice and lay for dead. Somehow he crawled to his hut and survived. He survived, too, when Spaniards landed on The Island, by hiding from them. They pursued him but he was to them ‘a Prize being so inconsiderable, it is likely they thought it not worth while to be at any great Trouble to find it’.

Cooke supposed the Spaniards were as uninterested as he was in Selkirk. There was no cause for wonder in this story, no pause for thought. A man marooned was another happening. It merited no more than a paragraph or two. It was hard to spin it out. It was an incident of personal misfortune, irrelevant to the true purpose of the voyage, an ‘Accident out of the Common Cause’, no more significant than Icarus falling from the sky.

1712 A Plain and Temperate Way of Living

WOODES ROGERS needed his book to be a commercial success.† His unease and desperation were not mitigated by his return to England. Half his face had been shot away, he walked with a limp, he was accused of embezzlement and his share of the treasure was contested. At home in Bristol he had debts which he could not pay. His father-in-law, Admiral Whetstone, was dead, his wife had