Marooned

ONE


Selkirk's Choice


September 1704



Dark peaks rising from the sea. That was the first view of Juan Fernandez. As the Cinque Ports entered Great Bay, the island appeared more welcoming—a half-moon beach, grassy valleys, wooded foothills, waterfalls plunging from high mountains. At the foot of cliffs, fur seals sunned on rocks and played in the surf.

The island was a welcome landfall, but the crew was watchful, uneasy. Juan Fernández was a Spanish island, and the Cinque Ports flew an English flag. Because England and Spain were at war, the island was not a safe place for an English ship. Spanish warships from the mainland sometimes stopped at the island. The Cinque Ports, needing to refill water casks and woodbins, risked being the target of a patrolling Spanish man-of-war.

At this remote island in the South Pacific, the conflict in Europe seemed far away. A quarrel among the ruling powers about who should sit on the Spanish throne had erupted into the War of the Spanish Succession. England and Holland, on one side, and Spain and France, on the other, were the major combatants.

Spain immediately banned English ships from its ports in Europe and South America. England's Queen Anne quickly struck back, declaring that English merchant ships could attack Spanish and French ships at sea and carry their valuable cargos back to England.

These English merchant ships were called privateers. They were armed vessels, privately owned, and licensed by the English government. Spain and France called them pirates. If captured, the crews would hang.

One of many privateers that set out from England was the Cinque Ports. For years it had carried cotton, sugar, and timber between English ports.

When the war began in 1701, the owners hired carpenters to convert the Cinque Ports from a cargo carrier to a privateer. Gun ports were sawed into its sides. Racks were built to hold cutlasses, daggers, and boarding axes. Deep in the hull a tin-lined room was constructed to store gunpowder. Finally, twenty cannons and cases of muskets were hoisted on board.

Few of the Cinque Ports's crew—former bakers, barbers, cobblers, tinsmiths, tailors, fiddlers, haymakers, peddlers, thieves, and more—had ever been to sea before. All were eager to escape the poverty of their lives ashore. Adventure lured them, the chance to get rich on Spanish gold.

Among the few trained seamen on board were Captain Thomas Stradling and the sailing master, Alexander Selkirk.

Little is known about Stradling. He was twenty-one years of age and thought to be a gentleman of the upper class, but this was not known for sure. What the crew did know was that he was aloof, unfair, a bully. Once, during the voyage, they revolted against him. Whatever the cause, the matter was settled and the crew resumed its duties. Stradling liked to walk the deck with the ship's mascot, a monkey, on his shoulder.

Unlike the captain, Selkirk, the second in command, mixed easily with the men. On calm evenings he often joined them for a pint of flip—beer mixed with rum, sweetened with sugar, best served hot. Often he quarreled with Stradling about running the ship. After one heated argument, Stradling ordered him locked in a storeroom. It was Selkirk who had led the crew in the revolt.

Selkirk was a veteran seaman. At fifteen years of age, he had run away from home, the seaside village of Largo, Scotland. He sailed on merchant ships between the West Indies and England and learned navigation, which enabled him to become a ship's officer.

It was Selkirk who, as sailing master in 1703, had piloted the Cinque Ports from England south through the Atlantic Ocean, around stormy Cape



Horn, into the Pacific Ocean, north along the South American coast as far as Panama, and finally south again to Juan Fernández. The island lies 360 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile, on the South American coast.

Primitive instruments were used at the time to guide a ship across the seas. Maps were unreliable. Some placed islands three hundred miles from their true position. Selkirk's ability to guide the Cinque Ports to a remote island in the broad Pacific demonstrated his skilled seamanship. (On another voyage, England's foremost navigator had missed the island by miles.)

He was twenty-seven years old and strongly built—"husky, a sturdy physique," allowed one writer. He also possessed a quick temper.

***

So far, the hunt for Spanish and French merchant ships along the South American coast had not gone well for the Cinque Ports. Only three small traders had been captured. They carried tobacco, timber, rope, and turtle shell. From one a small chest of gold coins was recovered. Then a French merchant ship gave up sacks of flour and sugar, a few casks of wine and brandy, and thirty tons of quince marmalade.

The crew grumbled. Halfway around the world to capture marmalade for their biscuits! More than that, they complained about water running low and the galley stove needing firewood. Hot food kept up spirits and courage.