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

Largo had stayed still. The wide bay, grey ocean and low sky, the houses huddled by the harbour, the little fishing boats. There were the same habits of survival. The slaughter of farm animals, the drying of their hides, the harvesting of crops, the same prayers on Sundays, declaring gratitude, asking for forgiveness, profit and everlasting life.

His mother, Euphan, was ill. His brother, David, now ran the tannery. He had a son named Alexander. Selkirk lodged first with his parents, then with his brother John and sister-in-law Margaret. But he was more estranged than ever from family life. He could not cope with its confinement and circumspection, the small-time conversation, the meals at table. He took no part in the daily round, was taciturn and at times in tears.

There was a rocky piece of land, high and fissured with rocks behind his father’s house. Here he built a kind of cave. His consolation in the day was to be there alone and watch the sea. He watched perhaps for a passing sail. ‘O my beloved Island!’ he was supposed to have said. ‘I wish I had never left thee.’

He tried to create the civilised life he had imagined on The Island. He bought a large house by the Craigie Well in Largo. He acquired adjacent ‘Lands, Tenements, Outhouses, Gardens, Yards and Orchards’. He found a naïve and compliant woman Sophia Bruce, the daughter of a crofter, whom he thought might be his wife. Her parents were dead and she survived on the charity of three uncles, all ministers: ‘Mr Harry Rymer, Mr James Rymer and another’.†

Selkirk liked to meet her secretly high in the woodland of Keil’s Den, or in the ruins of Pitcruvie Castle among the ferns, grasses and bluebells. She endured his drinking, his moods and violence, was moved by his story and impressed by his wealth. She pitied his abandonment for all those years in an unimaginable place. He supposed he would marry her though she was no more to him than The Island’s goats, the women of Guayaquil, or Loathsome Negroes from a stolen prize. He called her his ‘beloved friend’, but the swamps of Darien, the ferocious winds of the southern ocean, the taunts and jeers of shipboard life, scavenging for sustenance alone on an island … none of it had primed him to be a married man.

The sea was more real than a woman, the force of the tides. The Island resonated. He bought a boat and sailed the bay to the cliffs of Kingscraig Point. He lingered where the sea and land elided, observed the straddle of seaweed, the calling birds.

He left Largo in a hurry, never to return. After a drinking bout he beat a young man almost to death.† The young man’s life was despaired of. Yet again, Selkirk did not face the inquiry that followed. He abandoned his attempts at status, the house and land he had bought. He took with him his plunder and money and Sophia Bruce. He left his sea chest, clothes and flip-can.

1717 She Said He Married Her

HE RENTED a house in Pall Mall and was sheltered again by the streets of London. The adventures of the past receded. Dampier was dead, Woodes Rogers had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas and was ridding the area of ‘loose people and pirates’.† Selkirk sought a more ordinary life. Sophia Bruce asked for marriage, and he agreed.

The sea lured so he enlisted in the Navy. He joined HMS Enterprise, as Mate. It was an unremarkable job. The Enterprise was a merchant ship that plied the Channel ports taking and unloading cargo. Its destiny was not remote and far-off Isles beyond the Seas. There were no pirates or prizes, no storms or volcanoes, no chasing of goats or hiding in trees.†

While the ship was being fitted, he made a Will. He signed it in Wapping on 13 January 1717. It ‘Called to Mind the Perills and Dangers of the Seas and other uncertaintys of this transitory life’. Sophia Bruce was its main beneficiary and his executor. In it, he left ten pounds to Katherine Mason who had consoled him when he first reached London. His father who was ill and old was, while he lived, to have the Largo house. Then it was to go to Sophia. She was to manage it, levy rents, and profit from it ‘to all intents as I myself might or could do being personally present’. After her death it was to pass to his nephew Alexander.†

All his disposable wealth was for his ‘Loveing Friend’, Sophia: his lands, gardens and orchards, his wages, money, gold, silver, clothes, his ‘Linnen and Woolin’, everything owed to him as a mariner, ‘tickets, pensions, prize money, smart money, legacies and dues’.

She said he married her. She gave the wedding day as 4 March 1717 but was vague as to where the ceremony took place or who witnessed it. Perhaps a notary took a fee and gave or did not give some salient piece of paper. Woodes Rogers had observed how, at Kinsale, men were ‘continually marrying’. They soon parted for all time from their brides.

Selkirk was away at sea eight months. When he returned he and Sophia resumed a kind of married life for nine months more. He was taciturn and absent. He drank too much, was violent and unsettled, but she thought she had the status of his wife, the security of inheritance, some sort of commitment from him. When the Enterprise left again, and he with it, she took it as part of the bargain of being a mariner’s wife: to be together then apart, alone then reunited. She had reason to believe him. He had bound his intentions in the language of the law. It was written down that she was his ‘trusty and loveing friend’, his ‘full and sole executrix’. Were he to die, he had recommended his soul into the hands of Almighty God, asked for his body to be