Marooned(17)
It was his father's old wish, his heartfelt plea. But Alexander didn't fit in Largo. He was a stranger here. The village was too small—about 1,200 lived in the cluster of houses. The people, his parents included, were too narrow, too set in their ways, for a traveled man who had seen a larger world.
***
He moved out of his parents' house and took an upstairs room in the home of his brother John and his wife, Margaret. Perhaps a change of living arrangements would help.
For breakfast, Margaret usually served porridge, a tattie—potato—and a mug of tea with milk and sugar. Alexander likely stood while eating his porridge, following a belief of the time: standing aided digestion.
After breakfast, probably carrying a wrapping of bread and dried fish for a noon meal, he took long walks in the wooded hills and to Keil's Den, where the ruins of Pitcruvie Castle stood. Returning at dark, he took the outside steps to his second-floor room and avoided neighbors and cousins waiting on the first floor.
Margaret kept two cats. She watched while Alexander held the forelegs of one, hummed a tune, and tried to teach it to dance. This-way, that-way, take-a-step, take-a-step. When the animal tripped over its hind feet, Alexander became annoyed. Margaret told her husband about his brother's strange behavior.
Then Alexander did something that astonished everyone.
With a spade he began enlarging a cave on the side of a hill in Keil's Den. He installed boards to support the roof. In front he scraped a flat place and cobbled together a bench. Villagers passing on the lane below saw him sitting on the bench, chin on hands, staring across the bay.
His worried parents trudged up the slope. The found their son weeping. "Oh, my beloved island!" he blubbered helplessly. "I wish I had never left thee. I never was before the man I was on thee. And I fear never can be again."
A grown man crying! John and Euphan didn't know what to make of it. Such sadness in his eyes. They may have tried to console him, assuring him he had aunts and uncles and cousins who loved him, brothers and friends, too.
Likely his father urged him again to come work in the shop, anytime, even tomorrow! A place would be made for him.
Euphan may have tried reaching out to her son but saw he was beyond comforting.
***
Soon came the day when Alexander left. He gave a boy a penny to follow with his sea chest on a cart. John and Euphan watched as he walked down the hill. Father and mother may have felt a sense of farewell, something telling them they would never see their son again.
At the bay he boarded the ferry to Edinburgh. There he would find a ship to London.
In late 1716 or early 1717 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. He was assigned to H.M.S. Enterprise, a supply ship.
***
By November 1720 Selkirk had been promoted to master's mate, second in command. The rank just below captain, master's mate, or lieutenant, was the highest rank someone not of the upper class could attain.
Wearing a handsome blue waistcoat with white cuffs and lapels and a cocked hat, the new lieutenant boarded his ship, H.M.S. Weymouth, at Plymouth. Together with H.M.S. Swallow, the warship headed for West Africa to hunt pirates and slave traders. The sun off the coast was intense, nights humid without a breeze.
In June 1721 Selkirk sent a boat up the Gambia River to find fresh water and cut wood for the cook stove. The crew was captured by natives. Boats filled with musket-carrying seamen from the Weymouth went to find the missing men in the mosquito-infested jungle. The rescued crew members returned to the ship bringing with them a deadly sickness, most likely malaria or yellow fever.
Disease swept through the Weymouth. Each day fewer crew answered morning roll call. Men began dying.
Sometime in November or December, Selkirk became ill. The ship's doctor placed him in a hammock slung from beams in the captain's cabin, which had been turned into a hospital ward.
Medicine at the time knew little about treating tropical diseases. The doctor did what he could to ease the men's suffering—cooling their flushed faces with water-soaked cloths, offering a thin soup to settle nausea, massaging aching limbs, placing blankets on feverish bodies shivering with cold, wiping away vomited blood, pouring cups of water between trembling lips that still left thirst unsatisfied.
On December 13, 1721, the Weymouth's captain entered a new name in the ship's log:
Alexr. Selkirk, DD ... P.M.
"DD" stood for "today's date" written at the top of the page. "RM." meant death occurred some hour between noon and midnight.
As was the practice, Selkirk's body was enclosed in a sack made from an old sail. The sack was weighted with two cannonballs, one at the head and one at the feet. Then it was placed on a plank and lifted onto the ship's rail.
The captain read the old words of the burial service from The Book of Common Prayer. "Deliver your servant, Alexander ... from all evil, and set him free from every bond...."