Alexander Selkirk of Lower Largo, Fife — a skilled navigator with a documented talent for brawling — was sailing master of the privateer Cinque Ports in 1704, raiding Spanish shipping in the Pacific. The expedition had already lost its famous leader; the Cinque Ports’ new captain, Thomas Stradling, was 21, and his ship was rotten, her hull worked soft by shipworm. At the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández group, 670 km off Chile, Selkirk declared he would rather stay ashore than sail in her. Stradling took him precisely at his word.
Selkirk repented as the boats pulled away, wading out and begging to be taken back. Stradling sailed. Selkirk had his bedding, a musket with a pound of powder, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, navigation instruments, tobacco, and a Bible.
He was right about the ship: the Cinque Ports foundered off Colombia soon after, her few survivors — Stradling included — rotting for years in Spanish prisons.
Four years and four months
Selkirk spent his first months in shoreline misery, sustained — he later said — mostly by reading, prayer, and spiny lobsters, tormented by rats gnawing him at night until he tamed feral cats to sleep around him. Then the island’s abundance organised him: he built two huts of pimento wood, hunted the goats left by earlier Spanish visitors — running them down barefoot on the ridges after his powder ran low, notching the ears of those he released — sewed goatskin clothing with a nail, and grew turnips and cabbage-palm. Twice Spanish ships anchored; capture meaning slavery or worse, he hid, once in a tree while sailors urinated beneath it.
On 2 February 1709 two English privateers stood in — the Duke, commanded by Woodes Rogers, piloted by William Dampier, who had been on Selkirk’s original expedition. A boat met “a man clothed in goat-skins, who looked wilder than the first owners of them,” speaking rusty halves of words. Rogers, impressed by his agility and sanity, made him a mate; Selkirk finished the voyage a privateer officer with plunder in his pocket, and Rogers’s 1712 book — with an essay by Richard Steele — made “the Governour,” as the crew called him, briefly famous.
Crusoe
Selkirk readjusted poorly — accounts have him digging a cave-like retreat in his father’s garden and lamenting lost solitude — went back to sea, and died of fever off West Africa in 1721, a Royal Navy master’s mate. Two years earlier, Daniel Defoe had published Robinson Crusoe, its castaway relocated to the Caribbean and stretched to 28 years; Defoe never named his sources, and scholars count Selkirk as the chief of several. The island settled the argument in 1966, when Chile renamed Más a Tierra Robinson Crusoe Island — and, for good measure, named a neighbouring island Selkirk never saw after Selkirk.