A quiz question · medium
How did Alexander Selkirk come to be alone on a Pacific island from 1704 to 1709?
The Cinque Ports foundered soon after leaving him. Selkirk survived four years and four months; his rescue account fed Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Read the full story →From the story
Alexander Selkirk, the Sailor Who Asked to Be Marooned in 1704 and Became Robinson Crusoe In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Related questions
- What was the last major habitable landmass on Earth to be settled by humans?
- What animal did Zheng He's fleet famously bring back to the Ming court in 1414, received as the mythical qilin?
- How many years after Andrée's hydrogen balloon disappeared toward the North Pole were the three Swedish bodies finally found?
- The Antikythera mechanism — the corroded bronze object that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old planetary computer — was recovered in 1900 from where?