Selkirk's Island, Diana Souhami [the best books to read TXT] 📗

it was the same ship. He saw its sails. Each time he ran to the bay. He dragged a burning branch to the shore and stoked a fire until it blazed. The ship sailed by.

Then one dawn he went to the shore’s edge and a ship was there. Flying the red and yellow flag of Spain. Anchored in the bay with boats heading in. There were men like him on the shore. For a moment he stared, then turned and ran for the protecting trees.

His retreat was an admission. They pursued him, firing pistols and shouting in Spanish. Salvaje he heard, and perro. Had they been French he would have surrendered and hoped as a prisoner for transport to Europe. But he would rather die alone on The Island than fall into the hands of the Spaniards. They would murder him or use him as a slave in the silver mines.

Fit as he was, and sure of the terrain, escape was hard. There were many of these men, all armed. They pursued him, shooting, yodelling, as if he were indeed a goat.

He made for thick woodland at the eastern mountain, where he had fashioned a hideout, high in a tree. ‘At the foot of the tree they made water, and kill’d several Goats just by, but went off again without discovering him’. He feared they would smell him, sense his presence, flush him out. But they gave up. He was not big game. He was of no more consequence than a wolf or deer that got away.

Again The Island protected him. Its darkness and concealing woodland. At night he drank water, ate birds’ eggs and plums, saw other creatures that like himself searched cautiously for sustenance, scrabbled for cover and sniffed at the air.

His enemy stayed two days. Their sounds of departure reached him, then a palpable silence. When he returned to his glade his lamed kids were dead, the fire out, his hut burned to the ground. But again he had kept his life and again The Island, the shimmering sea and the hills.

1707 The Wheeling Terns, the Lumbering Seals

THEY HAD destroyed his sea chest, kettle, bedding, bible and books, the tools he had forged and nails he had whittled. He had few possessions when he arrived. They left him with even fewer.

It was a clear day. Hummingbirds fed on purple flowers (Rhaphithamnus venustus). Shearwater skimmed the sea, on which for once he was glad that no ship sailed. Cats came out of the undergrowth mewling. A kitten chased a leaf.

His visitors had left traces: picked bones and footprints in the sand. He scoured the shore for their debris: a gold coin, three arak bottles, a rusty anchor, a broken cask, a piece of sailcloth, a short length of chain, a coil of worn rope, discarded lumber. Their garbage became tools and materials with which to refurbish his home.

Once again he lit a fire, the long friction of wood on wood. He improvised a forge. Over days and weeks he hammered iron, hacked timber, rebuilt his huts, caught goats, herded kids into a walled enclosure, stored food, rendered seal fat into tallow, ground ears of corn, wove a basket from twigs, made string from rope, moulded pots from mud and burned them hard in the fire. With patience he restored what had been destroyed.

His new bed was an improvement, raised higher from the ground. The stone pots he used to cook his food were still intact, so was the raft from which he sometimes liked to fish, his knife he kept strapped to his side. As a precaution he built another tree house in the mountains, high in the forest on the southern side. An enemy might again arrive.

And so his life resumed, the habits of the day, the intelligence of survival. It occurred to him that there were worse scenarios than rescue. The Island calmed his mind. He had no bible now, but he thanked some notional God who might have brought him to this special place.

*It occurred to me, when I read of it in Woodes Rogers’ journal, that Selkirk’s ear notching had a sexual reference. An Islander, Jaimie Sidirie, told me in 1999 that ‘Selkirk cut the goat because he had used it.’ It still went on, he said. It was a mark of conquest. ‘It’s the same story round the world when a man is alone.’ Jaimie also told me of his own ways of catching and slaying goats when unarmed.

Chroniclers of Lord Anson’s expedition to the South Sea, in 1741, wrote of venerable slit-eared goats on The Island. They supposed this ear-piercing to be Selkirk’s work. But he had left The Island thirty-three years previously, and goats live about eighteen years.

*A small vessel equipped for both sailing and rowing.

*Batavia is now Jakarta.

*Amboyna is now Ambon in Indonesia.

4

THE RESCUE

The journey home, west across the Great South Sea and through the East Indies

THE RESCUE

Fig: 10. The Island of Juan Ferdenandos

1708 God Send them Well

THE FIASCO of Dampier’s expedition was a ‘great Discouragement’ to him. But still the prize glistered, the dream of riches – Diamonds and Gold, the Carpets of Persia, the Silk of China.

He was fifty-six.† Affidavits and bitter talk confirmed his ineptitude as a commander. But he could still woo venture capitalists with talk of the Acapulco galleon. He had the credibility of experience. He remained the only living Englishman to have sailed twice round the World. His published journals proved his knowledge of the South Sea.

The ambition of his plan had not been at fault, he said. It was the worm-infested ships, the quarrelsome and incompetent officers, the undisciplined men. There were lessons to heed, but the Spanish treasure galleons still plied the South Sea. Fortune, as ever, was there to be seized.

A syndicate of Bristol councillors financed a new expedition. Three of the backers were erstwhile Mayors. The Sheriff and Aldermen all had a stake. Christopher Shuter put in