Marooned(10)

The crews of the two ships considered him a fine seaman and a fair and proper master. He also maintained strict discipline over his sometimes unruly men. One seaman who uttered mutinous remarks was bent over the capstan and whipped. Salt was then rubbed into the open wounds.

The two raiders had left Bristol, England, on August 2, 1708. In January 1709, after surviving high winds and towering waves around Cape Horn, they arrived at Juan Fernández battered and leaking. The Duke was Rogers's ship—80 feet long, 25 feet at the beam, with 30 five-inch guns and a crew of 117. The Duchess was slightly smaller: 26 guns, a crew of 108.

Twenty men could have sailed either ship, but extra hands were needed to take over captured ships and to replace those who died in battle or from disease.

Rogers intended to attack Spanish ships along the coast of South America. His plan was much like Stradling's nearly four and a half years earlier: to sail north so that, by November, his ships would be positioned off Mexico to intercept the grandest prize of all, the Manila galleon, the Spanish empire's treasure ship bound on its annual journey to Acapulco.

Before that battle could take place, though, the Duke and Duchess had to be repaired. While the sick men recovered in tents on the beach, Rogers ordered the heavy guns hoisted out of the hold, taken ashore, and pointed toward the bay entrance. There they would discourage patrolling Spanish warships from entering the bay.

The lightened ships were then towed into shallow water. Lines and pulleys strung between masts and trees on shore tipped the ships on their sides.

The bottoms were crusted with barnacles, which work parties burned off with torches. Carpenters replaced hull planks rotten with holes bored by teredo worms, then smeared on an oily mix of tar, tallow, and sulfur. The slick coating would keep the destructive worms and barnacles from attaching to the hull for a time and add speed in a sea chase after slower merchant ships.

While men labored on the hull, others mended torn sails and scrubbed slime from water casks. Carpenters' mates cut trees for new yardarms to replace those cracked and split in the stormy passage around Cape Horn.

Another work party on shore caught seals and skinned and boiled them to extract eighty tons of oil "for the use of our lamps and to save our candles," Rogers said. The crew enjoyed baby seal. They agreed with Selkirk that the tender meat tasted like "English lamb" back home.

Selkirk helped supply the ships with fresh food. He led a work party to gather turnips, radishes, cabbages, and plums, and he pointed out the best places for fishing. Rogers noted that the men caught "several sorts, all very good: as silverfish, rockfish, pollock, oldwives, and crawfish in such abundance that in a few hours we could take as many as would serve some hundreds of men."

Each day the castaway captured two or three goats so their meat could be salted and stored in casks.

Watching Selkirk catch goats, Rogers suggested a contest. Who could capture a goat first? The crew's "nimblest runners"; the Duke's mascot, an English bulldog called Lord Harry; or Selkirk?

He watched amazed as the marooned mariner ran into the trees and dashed up slopes. "He distanc'd and tir'd both the dog and the men, catch'd the goats and brought 'em to us on his back."

Selkirk's victory, Rogers believed, was due to his "plain and temperate way of living on the island"—fresh air, daily exercise, a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, and no tobacco or "strong liquor."

As the repaired hulls were towed into deep water, pans of burning pitch were placed belowdecks. The fumes seeped into every corner, ridding the damp hulls of fleas, beetles, cockroaches, and rats—for a few weeks at least.

Repairs and restocking food, water, and woodbins took eleven days. Heavy cannons were hoisted over the rail from the ship's boats and placed behind closed gun ports.

As a final detail, Rogers may have ordered the deck painted red, a customary practice in those days of sailing ships armed with cannons. The paint would have been carried all the way from Bristol. In battle, blood spilled on the deck would not be so visible.

***

Learning that Selkirk had been sailing master of the Cinque Ports and a veteran seaman "of great skill and conduct who, having had his books with him, had improv'd himself much in navigation during his solitude," Rogers appointed him second mate of the Duke.

"Febr. 12," Rogers wrote in his journal. "This morning we ... got the last wood and water aboard, brought off our men, and got everything ready to depart."

Raising anchor and setting sail two days later, the Duke and Duchess eased out of Great Bay.

As he went about his new duties that afternoon, the former castaway looked back on his island home. Four years and four months he had survived alone. He could point out the beach and cave where he had spent his nights, the lookout spot above the trees—so many days watching for a sail—the grove of trees concealing his two huts.