Marooned(5)

Late one night he was startled awake by savage sounds—growls, snorts, barks, bellows—coming from the beach. He threw sticks on the fire, grabbed the musket, and crouched against the cave wall. Night magnified his terror—he could barely see over the flames into the darkness. An onshore breeze carried a sickening stench, like dead fish rotting in the sun.

Daylight revealed the source of the awful sounds. During the night hundreds of seals had invaded the beach. In the bay he could see more heads swimming toward shore. Juan Fernández was the island the animals returned to each year to breed and give birth to their young.

Their "dreadful howlings," he would later recall, were too terrible for human ears.

***

With the beach occupied for weeks by the seals—"they lin'd the shore very thick for above half a mile"—he could no longer gather seafood. Still, hunger drove him daily from the cave. He had seen goats on the island—small, dark brown, with curled horns.

Accounts differ as to how Selkirk slew the first goat. One says he came unexpectedly upon the animal. It didn't move but stood still studying him. He picked up a downed tree limb and clubbed its head until it dropped.

Another account says he waited behind a tree near a stream, musket ready. When a goat, followed by three or four others, stepped toward the stream, he fired the musket's single shot. The wounded animal hobbled into the underbrush, and he scrambled after it. Grabbing it by the neck and a leg, he slammed the bleating animal to the ground, then carried the dead goat back to the cave.

In all likelihood hunger drove him to hurry his preparations—skinning the animal, plunging his hand into the warm carcass, pulling out the innards, hacking away the limbs, roasting the meat over a pimento-wood fire, prodding with a sharp stick to make it cook faster.

Gorging on the hot flesh, he could have been mistaken for the most primitive savage, squatting before the fire, tearing at the meat, chewing down to the white slick bones.



It was possible that he would stay here for years,

perhaps for the rest of his days.





THREE


Prisoner and Master


Sometime in May or June of 1705, after eight or nine months on the beach and in the cave, Selkirk admitted a hard truth. Stradling and the Cinque Ports would not be returning to the island. It was possible that he would stay here for years, perhaps for the rest of his days.

He made the decision, then, to build a shelter, a hut of some kind, warm and dry, and move out of the cave.

A site on the far side of the valley in a grove of trees near a stream, "fanned with continual breezes and gentle aspirations of wind," appealed to him.

He chopped down young trees. The poles became frames for two huts. Goatskins, dried, scraped, and cleaned, formed the walls. Grass seven feet long from a nearby field, cut and tied with strips of goatskin and overlaid in bundles, provided a rainproof roof.

The largest hut was used for living. He built a fire pit from rocks and, from saplings, a crude chair, table, and bed frame. He hunted seals. Their soft fur provided his bedding.

The smaller hut became his smokehouse and kitchen. Here he circled stones for another fire pit and built rude boxes. He covered the boxes with goatskins weighted with rocks to protect food from rats, the offspring of rats from ships wrecked on the island's rocky shores.

***

Shelter taken care of, he began to explore the island. With a walking staff he hiked through groves of mountain ash and towering cottonwood trees with trunks twenty feet around. He discovered waterfalls and streams running down long slopes to the sea. The trees ended high on the slopes. He watched clouds butt and burst into shreds against the mountain peaks.

In humid valleys he found enormous ferns with leaves six to ten feet across. Spiders' webs hung round as wagon wheels between trees. He marveled at the island birds—hawks, owls, petrels, puffins, blackbirds, and two species of hummingbirds, "no bigger than a large humble bee [bumblebee]," one cinnamon color and the other bright green.

In one valley he came upon a field of turnips and stands of fig trees. He found patches of oats, pumpkins, radishes, parsnips, and parsley growing wild. Selkirk gathered the crops gratefully, but how they came to grow there he didn't know. (In 1591 Spanish settlers from the South American mainland had planted crops and grazed goats during a brief but unsuccessful attempt to farm and build homes on the island.)

Looking through his spyglass, he saw black-plum trees on high rocky slopes. But getting to the trees proved dangerous. The volcanic rock crumbled under his feet. When he grasped a young tree to haul himself up a steep slope, he pulled it out, roots and all.



"The soil is a loose black earth," he later noted, "the rocks very rotten, so that, without great care, it is dangerous to climb the hills."