The plank was tilted, and Selkirk's body slid into the gray waves somewhere off the coast of Africa.
***
H.M.S. Weymouth returned to England in 1722. Lieutenant Selkirk's sea chest was sent to Largo. There it joined the few belongings he had left behind at his brother's house—a gold-laced coat, a brown stoneware flip jar, a clam shell he had once used to dip cool water from a turtle shell in a hut on an island some ten thousand miles away, and a musket.
The stock of the musket was carved with a picture and a rhyme. During an idle afternoon the marooned mariner had engraved his name, a seal on a rock, and these words:
With 3 drams powder
3 ounce hail
Ram me well & prime me
To kill I will not fail.
"Hail" referred to a hail of bullets. On a high hill on Juan Fernández today stands a bronze tablet. The spot is called Selkirk's Lookout. There the lonely castaway stacked dry grass and firewood and watched with his brass spyglass for a rescue ship. The tablet was placed by the officers of a British warship, H.M.S. Topaze, in 1863 and reads:
In memory of Alexander Selkirk, mariner, a native of Largo, in the county of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude for four years and four months. He was landed from the Cinque Ports galley, 96 tons, A.D. 1704, was taken off in the Duke, privateer, 12th Feb., 1709. He died Lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth A.D. 1728, aged 47 years.
The last date was incorrect. The Weymouth's logbook in the Public Records Office in London gives 1721 as the year of his passing. He was 41.
Still, the tablet, erected nearly a century and a half after Selkirk's death, recognized the Scottish mariner's magnificent adventure—a salute to a fellow seaman who had survived four years alone on a remote island in the broad ocean sea.
"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."
EIGHT
The Real Robinson Crusoe
There was a man in London who had read Woodes Rogers's Cruising Voyage Around the World and Richard Steele's account of Selkirk's years on Juan Fernández in The Englishman.
Daniel Defoe was a failed businessman. At the time Rogers's and Steele's accounts of Selkirk's adventures came out in 1712 and 1713, he was in his early fifties. Short of money, he was trying to pay off debts, support a wife and children, and maintain a big house by writing books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles.
Defoe had a sharp tongue. His political stories annoyed men in high positions in the church and government. He was a gadfly, constantly nagging them with criticism. One of his pamphlets, published around 1700, charged some members of Parliament with disrespect for the rights of Englishmen. The powerful men he named did not appreciate his views. A £50 reward was offered for his capture.
The London Gazette described the fugitive—the only description we have of Defoe. "He is middle aged, a spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-colored hair, but wears a wig. A hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, a large mole near his mouth."
An informer turned him in for the reward. The government charged him with sedition—urging people to resist new laws. Defoe spent the next six months in Newgate Prison and was fined £135.
As much as he wrote through the years, by his sixtieth year Defoe was tired and broke, partly because he made unwise investments in business ventures that didn't turn profits.
Creditors badgered him for money he had borrowed. What he needed was a big score, a moneymaker. He remembered Rogers's book and Steele's account of Selkirk's marooning. Here was the story he was looking for, a man surviving alone on an uninhabited island.
But there was a flaw in the idea. In the early eighteenth century almost all books published were nonfiction. Histories, biographies, and travel books were popular subjects. Novels rarely appeared.
Defoe, though, did not want to let the idea go. He spoke with his printer, W. T. Taylor in Pater Noster Row. They agreed that a book about a marooned seaman on a tropical island might sell, but only if it read like nonfiction, if it seemed factual, not a story.
How to do this? A clever idea presented itself. The hero should write the book himself, make the story appear as though it had really happened.
In April 1719 the new book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. Defoe's name did not appear as author. The title page read: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself.
"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family...."
These opening lines begin what is probably the most famous adventure story ever told, the tale of the shipwrecked mariner who survived twenty-eight years on an island off Brazil. The book is still available today in bookstores and libraries almost three hundred years after it was first published.