Everyone knows the outline of Robinson Crusoe: a shipwrecked man alone on an island, living on goats and his own wits. The real man usually offered as the model for him was a Scottish sailor who was not shipwrecked at all. Alexander Selkirk asked to be left on a Pacific island, changed his mind as the boat pulled away, and was refused. The link between his story and Daniel Defoe’s novel is popular but disputed, and the account below keeps the two apart.
The Horror
Selkirk was born in 1676 at Lower Largo, a fishing village in Fife, the son of a shoemaker and tanner. He had a reputation for a quick temper. He was summoned before the Kirk Session in 1693 for indecent conduct in church and did not appear, having gone to sea, and he was in trouble with the church authorities again in 1701.
In 1703 he sailed with William Dampier’s privateering expedition, which was licensed to prey on Spanish shipping in the Pacific. He was sailing master of the Cinque Ports under Captain Thomas Stradling. In September 1704, off the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández group, Selkirk said he would rather stay than sail in a ship he thought was leaking and unsafe. Stradling put him ashore with a musket, a hatchet, a knife, a cooking pot, a Bible, bedding and clothes. Selkirk is reported to have regretted it at once, but Stradling would not take him back. He was right about the ship: the Cinque Ports later foundered off the coast of present-day Colombia, and Stradling and the survivors were imprisoned in Lima.
He then lived alone for four years and four months. He moved inland after sea lions crowded the beach and built two huts, one for cooking and one for sleeping. Feral goats left by earlier sailors gave him meat and milk. He hunted them with his musket and, when the powder ran low, on foot, and he was once badly hurt in a fall from a cliff while chasing one. Rats came ashore from ships and gnawed at him at night, and he is said to have tamed feral cats to sleep around him and keep the rats off. His clothes were made of goatskin. Many of these details come from Woodes Rogers’s published account of 1712, so they are a published narrative as much as verified record.
On February 2, 1709, the ships Duke and Duchess, under Rogers, with Dampier as pilot, anchored off the island and found him. Rogers described him as wild-looking and clothed in goatskins and was struck by his vigour and calm. Rogers is reported to have called him the governor of the island, said wryly. Selkirk joined the expedition as a mate on the Duke, took part in the later raiding, and reached England on October 1, 1711.
The Legend
The claim that Selkirk “was” Robinson Crusoe is the most repeated part of his story and the least secure. Defoe’s novel appeared in 1719 and is set in the Caribbean, not the Pacific, and most literary scholars now treat Selkirk as one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew. Rogers and Edward Cooke published accounts in 1712 and Richard Steele wrote about him in 1713, so his story was in print before the novel, but the direct line from Selkirk to Crusoe is unconfirmed.
His later life was restless. He was charged with assaulting a shipwright in Bristol in 1713, married twice, in 1717 and 1720, and joined the Royal Navy. He died of a fever contracted off West Africa on December 13, 1721, probably yellow fever or typhoid, and was buried at sea. The plaque at Lower Largo gives 1723 as the year, which the better sources do not support.
The Modern Relic
In Lower Largo a life-sized figure of Selkirk in his goatskins stands on the house built on the site of his birthplace. It was unveiled in 1885 and shows him scanning the horizon. A signpost on the harbour points to the Juan Fernández Islands, about 7,500 miles away.
The island has taken his book-world name. In 1966 the Chilean government renamed Más a Tierra Robinson Crusoe Island, to reflect the literary lore and attract tourists. Another island in the group is named after Selkirk, though he probably never visited it. Today the main village, San Juan Bautista, sits on Cumberland Bay, and visitors number in the hundreds a year.
The captain who found him, Woodes Rogers, became governor of the Bahamas in 1718 and hanged pirates at Nassau. The footprint in the sand belongs to the novel. The island, and the years alone on it, belong to a quarrelsome sailing master from Fife.
