So Selkirk, understanding the hard discipline of shipboard life, may have accepted his difficult situation. "[My] heart yearned within [me]," he would later reveal, "and melted at parting with [my] comrades and all human society at once."
But this was uttered in years to come, in the warmth and comfort of a London coffeehouse. As the night came on, it's unlikely that he was deeply distressed. He believed that the whole episode, the dispute with Stradling, had been an unfortunate fit of temper on both their parts. His marooning on the island would be temporary—a day, a week, and the Cinque Ports would come back. Stradling needed him to help run the ship. Besides, he was the sailing master, the navigator, the one man able to sail the poorly charted ocean and find the way back to England. He would just have to make the best of it until the ship returned.
Still, he was alone, and he had to think of his safety. He considered building a fire but decided against it. Savages might see the flames. Old seafarers told of flesh eaters on South Pacific islands. An eyewitness to the practice was the famous Sir Francis Drake, one of the first to sail around the world. At one island he had watched helplessly from his ship offshore while natives roasted and ate captured crewmen.
Selkirk rammed a charge of powder and a bullet into the barrel of his flintlock musket. On guard, he waited, fighting off sleep.
Morning sun advancing across the bay awakened him. He grabbed the musket. But there was no alarm. The sun lighted the green slopes behind him. Trails of fog filled wooded ridges leading to the high mountains.
He looked across the bay. No white sails, no ship working around the headland into the bay. Stradling, taking out his revenge, would delay returning. Selkirk decided to wait, not move from the beach, not risk missing the ship.
He was hungry and looked at the biscuits and chunks of salt beef brought yesterday from the ship. Beef kept in casks for weeks often became so hard that the crew carved it into tobacco boxes. But this chunk might be edible. By habit he probably tapped a biscuit on a rock. There were those who said it was best to discard any biscuit from which tiny beetles failed to emerge: Not fit for a weevil, not fit for a man.
His sea chest held a few linen shirts and wool stockings, flint and steel for making fire, cooking pot, brass spyglass, hatchet, knife, a flask of rum, and a leather sack of gold coins—what good were they now? There were the Bible and books of devotion given to him by his mother back in Largo, and his books on navigation and geometry.
He also found his pint jar for taking his daily ration of flip. The words on its brown stone surface read:
Alexander Selkirk, this is my [own].
When you me take on board of ship
Pray fill me with punch or flip.
His musket and leather bags of powder and bullets made up the rest of his worldly goods.
He spent the day on the beach, spyglass in hand. He knew from charts that the island was about twelve miles long and four wide. Sheer cliffs ringed most of the bay.
His spyglass picked out fur seals floating on the water or sunning themselves on rocks on the far shore. He could hear their faint barks. The adult seals were brown; the younger ones had black fur.
He ate another meal of biscuit and beef, washed down with water from a stream running from the forest into the sea. The light across the bay changed as the sun settled behind the high mountains. By the morrow the ship would surely return. All differences would be forgotten in the common goal of capturing Spanish gold.
***
The last biscuits and beef eaten, Selkirk walked the beach hunting for something edible. In the shallows he found crabs, mussels, and clams. Prying the shells open with his knife, he ate the soft flesh raw and sucked the juice.
He spotted lobsters crawling among the rocks. They were much larger than the lobsters he had caught as a boy in Largo. Some were three feet long. He reached into knee-deep water, grabbed one by its hard shell, and flipped it onto the shore. He bashed it with a rock, then tore the critter leg from body and chewed the stringy flesh.
By afternoon, however, he felt the effects of the uncooked meat. He barely pulled down his breeches before his bowels loosened.
In the morning he felt better, but again hungry. No white sails had appeared in the bay. He decided to prepare a proper meal.
He placed rocks in a circle and shaved kindling from dry sticks. Sparks from striking steel and flint drew a wisp of smoke. Gently he blew into the smoke until a tiny flame appeared. He filled the kettle with water from the stream, gathered clams and mussels, and caught another lobster. Tossing the fresh meat into the boiling water, he made a thick soup.
His stomach took more kindly to the hot, cooked food, although he lacked salt and pepper to season it.
With little else to do, he sat on his sea chest or in the shade of trees bordering the beach to watch the broad entrance to the bay. The cold Peru Current, flowing north, kept the island free of tropical heat.