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

Such altercations were not included in Dampier’s edited New Voyage Round the World. He admitted to receiving editorial help. It was, he said, ‘far from being a Diminution to one of my Education and Employment, to have what I write, Revised and Corrected by Friends.’ He catered to refined readers and dedicated the book to Charles Montagu, President of the Royal Society and First Lord of the Treasury. It mattered to him to be invited to dine with the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn and the satirist, Jonathan Swift, and to be on terms with the writer and political advisor, Daniel Defoe and the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Orford.

1691 Giolo of Meangis

ONE OF Dampier’s lurid business ventures concerned Giolo, a prince from the royal family of Meangis, a small fishing island off New Guinea.† Giolo was a much tattooed man. A wife had covered him with maps and patterns – all over his chest, shoulders, thighs, back, arms and legs. She had pricked his skin then rubbed in pigments from the resin of plants.

She did him a disservice in making him so conspicuous. Tattoos were uncommon in England apart from crucifixes on forearms. Giolo was captured by booty seekers and taken from his island. He was a curiosity, a marketable commodity. Dampier bought him in Madras in 1690 from a Mr Moody, then took him home, expecting to gain ‘no small Advantage to myself from my painted Prince’. He planned to exhibit Giolo for a fee to intrigued spectators and use him to impress affluent businessmen to put up cash for another venture. Giolo, he claimed, had told him

that there was much Gold on his Iland, and I know he could not be inform’d of the manner of gathering it unless he had known it himselfe besides, he knew not the value of it neither have the people of his Iland any comerce with other People but what induced me to believe that there is Gold on his Iland is because all the Ilande near doe gather gold more or less therefore why should this be without.†

Dampier knew the gold’s value. With Giolo’s guidance he would gather it. He would trade in spices too, for there were cloves and nutmegs on Meangis.

Giolo sailed for England with Dampier in the Defence. He arrived in London in September 1691 his health broken by misery and the ship’s diet of salt meat and tainted water. His dream was to return home to his small, sunny island. Dampier’s enthusiasm for him faded when he gained scant financial advantage from him. He found him a burden to feed and house, so he sold him. Giolo’s new owners advertised him in a printed broadsheet:

This admirable Person is about the Age of Thirty, graceful, and well proportioned in all his Limbs, extreamly modest and civil, neat and cleanly; but his Language is not understood, neither can he speak English.

He will be exposed to publick view every day (during his stay in Town)… at his Lodgings at the Blew Boars-head in Fleetstreet, near Water-Lane: Where he will continue for some time, if his health will permit.

But if any Persons of Quality, Gentlemen or Ladies, do desire to see this noble Person, at their own Houses, or any other convenient place, in or about this City of London, they are desired to send timely notice and he will be ready to wait upon them in a Coach or Chair, any time they please to appoint, if in the daytime.†

Captive and marooned, Giolo lost hope of rescue, of returning home. His new owners tried to make him more of a feature. They advertised that on his back, to be viewed for a fee, was ‘a lively Representation of one quarter part of the World while the Arctick and Tropick Circles center in the North Pole on his Neck’. Etched on one miserable man was the unmet world. His tattoos, they claimed, made him immune to ‘all sorts of the most venomous, pernicious Creatures …; such as Snakes, Scorpions, Vipers and Centapees &c.’†

They displayed him too, for sixpence a peek, at market sideshows along with other wonders of nature: dwarfs, giants, dancing bears, hermaphrodites from Angola, two female children joined at the crown of their heads, a child covered in fish scales, and Jane Paterson of Northumberland who gave birth to a monster with the head, mane and hooves of a horse and the body of a boy.

Giolo’s career as a freak was not happy nor his immunity to poison sure. He caught smallpox which made him tear at his tattooed skin. He scratched himself to death in Oxford.

1680–4 A Man Named Will

DAMPIER KNEW of The Island, how fecund it was and remote. It was not owned or claimed by any monarch. Booty seekers who roamed the South Sea could, if they found it, use it to careen their ships.

It was Christmas Day 1680 when he first reached it. He was with a gang of buccaneers led by Captain Bartholomew Sharp, ‘a Man of an undaunted courage not fearing in the least to look an insulting Enemy in the faceroute down the coast’.† They had been at sea the best part of a year, had endured storms and torrential rains, scurvy and fever, and seen most of their crew murdered. A prize, a ship loaded with three hundredweight of gold, had escaped them. They were bedraggled, dispirited and ill. They wanted fresh meat, greens, clean water and dry land.

A prisoner, a Spanish pilot, guided their ship, the Trinity, to the north-west bay near the hollowed rock and the cave. The bay offered no protection. They faced rocks dashed by high waves. Twice they lost their moorings in heavy swell and shifting boulders. They could see a grove of sandalwood trees, a clear stream, and goats in the mountains, but no place for a boat to land. They moved east to the Great Bay with the wide valley. The shore seemed to