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OW-014 Castaway · Juan Fernández, Chile 1709

Alexander Selkirk — He chose the island and outlived the ship he refused

isolationmaroonedsurvivedpre-1800
Lost
0 (alone, 4 yr 4 mo)
Voyage
South Sea privateering
Ended
Rescued off Chile, Feb 1709
Status
Survived

Summary

In September 1704 Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailing master from Lower Largo in Fife, asked to be put ashore on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández group, roughly 400 nautical miles west of Valparaíso, Chile. He was not abandoned against his will; he chose the island over his ship. Selkirk had quarrelled with his captain, Thomas Stradling, insisting that the privateer Cinque Ports was so worm-eaten and ill-caulked that she would founder before the voyage was done. When Stradling refused to refit, Selkirk demanded to be set down on the nearest land. He survived there alone for four years and four months until a passing English privateer took him off on 2 February 1709. He was, when found, clothed in goatskins and barely able to speak.

Selkirk's judgement of the ship proved exactly right, which is the dark irony at the centre of his story. The Cinque Ports did founder, off the coast of what is now Colombia; Stradling and the handful of men who survived were captured by the Spanish and held prisoner in Lima for years. The man who refused to sail in her lived. Selkirk's ordeal was therefore not a disaster in the usual sense of this catalogue but a survival earned by a correct technical assessment, a strong constitution, and the accident of an island stocked with feral goats. He endured loneliness, near-capture by Spanish landing parties, and the slow erosion of his own speech and clothing, and he came home.

He is remembered chiefly because Daniel Defoe, writing fifteen years later, drew on accounts of his solitude for Robinson Crusoe (1719). Selkirk was not Crusoe — there was no shipwreck on his beach, no Friday, no decades of isolation — but his real, documented four years alone gave the fiction its spine. The man himself returned to the sea, served in the Royal Navy, and died of fever off West Africa in 1721, the survivor of the island consumed at last by the ordinary hazards of the trade he never left.

Timeline

1676
Born in Fife
Alexander Selcraig (later Selkirk) was born in Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland, a shoemaker's son with a reputation for a hot temper.
1703
Joins Dampier's expedition
Selkirk shipped as sailing master of the galley Cinque Ports, one of two privateers in an expedition led by William Dampier against Spanish targets in the South Sea.
May 1704
The ships part
After raids along the Pacific coast, the Cinque Ports, now under the young Captain Thomas Stradling, separated from Dampier's St George.
Sep 1704
Put ashore at his own request
At Juan Fernández, Selkirk argued the leaking ship was unseaworthy and asked to be left on Más a Tierra; Stradling granted it and sailed on.
Sep 1704
His outfit
He was landed with a musket, powder and shot, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, navigation instruments, bedding and some clothes.
late 1704
Despair, then adaptation
Selkirk later said he spent his first months in misery by the shore before moving inland and learning to live off the island's goats and plants.
1705
The Cinque Ports founders
Selkirk's prediction came true: the ship sank off the South American coast; Stradling and a few survivors were captured and imprisoned by the Spanish.
c. 1705–08
Spanish landings
Spanish ships called at the island more than once; on at least one occasion Selkirk hid in the canopy of a tree while a landing party passed beneath.
2 Feb 1709
Rescue
The privateer Duke, under Woodes Rogers with William Dampier as pilot, anchored off the island and took Selkirk aboard, "clothed in goat-skins."
Feb 1709
Restored aboard
Rogers made Selkirk a mate; his fresh goat meat helped revive crewmen sick with scurvy.
1 Oct 1711
Home to England
After completing Rogers's circumnavigation, Selkirk reached England with prize money and a measure of fame.
1719
Crusoe in print
Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, whose castaway drew on Selkirk's solitude among other sources.
13 Dec 1721
Death at sea
Serving aboard HMS Weymouth on anti-piracy patrol, Selkirk died of fever off West Africa and was buried at sea.

A quarrel over a rotting hull

The expedition that left Selkirk on the island was a private war. In 1703 the English privateer William Dampier sailed for the Pacific with two ships, the St George and the Cinque Ports, licensed to prey on Spanish shipping during the War of the Spanish Succession. Selkirk, an experienced navigator, signed on as sailing master of the Cinque Ports — effectively the senior officer of the watch under the captain. He was a capable seaman and a difficult man, already known at home for quarrels, and the cramped, plunder-driven world of a privateer gave his temper ample fuel.

By 1704 the Cinque Ports had passed to Thomas Stradling, a young and inexperienced captain, and relations aboard had soured. The dispute that decided Selkirk's fate was not a matter of pride but of carpentry. He judged that the ship's hull was riddled with shipworm and that her caulking had not been properly renewed, and he said plainly that she would sink. He wanted her careened and repaired before going on. Stradling overruled him. When the ship paused at the Juan Fernández Islands to take on water, Selkirk announced that he would rather stay on the deserted island than drown in a ship he did not trust. Stradling, glad to be rid of a quarrelsome officer, took him at his word and put him ashore. Selkirk's nerve reportedly failed at the last moment and he begged to be taken back, but the boat had already pulled away.

Four years of goats and silence

The island that received him was not barren. Earlier Spanish ships had stocked Más a Tierra with goats, and these had gone feral and multiplied; there were also wild turnips, cabbage-tree leaves, and the fruit of pimento trees. Selkirk's first months, by his own later account, were the worst — he stayed near the shore in dread and grief, scanning the horizon for a sail. Then he moved inland and made the island serve him. He hunted goats for meat and milk, at first with his musket and, when his powder ran low, by running them down on foot, growing so fast and sure-footed that he could catch them by hand. He built two huts of branches and grass, lined them with goatskins, and used pimento wood both for fire and for light.

His practical problems were solved one by one. When his clothes rotted away in the climate he made new ones from goatskins, stitching them with a nail for a needle. Rats gnawed at him in the night, so he tamed the island's feral cats by feeding them goat meat until they slept around him and kept the rats off. The harder enemies were loneliness and fear. He read his Bible aloud to keep the use of his voice, and sang psalms; even so, by the time of his rescue his speech had decayed into something his rescuers could barely follow. Twice his solitude was broken by danger rather than relief: Spanish ships landed, and Selkirk — an enemy privateer who would have been killed or imprisoned — fled inland and once hid silently in a tree while the search party passed below.

The sail that finally came

On 2 February 1709 two English privateers, the Duke and the Duchess under Woodes Rogers, anchored off Más a Tierra to take on water and fresh food. Their pilot was William Dampier, the same commander whose expedition had left Selkirk in the Pacific years before, and it was Dampier who vouched for the wild figure they found: the best man of the Cinque Ports, marooned at his own request more than four years earlier. Rogers recorded that Selkirk was dressed in goatskins and "looked wilder than the first owners of them," and that he had at first lost much of his power of speech. He could, however, run down goats faster than the ship's dogs, and his store of fresh meat helped restore Rogers's scurvy-ridden crews.

Selkirk's vindication was total and bitter. The Cinque Ports he had refused to sail in had indeed foundered, off the coast near present-day Colombia, and Stradling and the few who lived through it had spent years in a Spanish prison in Lima. The officer who had been called a coward or a malcontent for leaving the ship had simply been right. Rogers signed Selkirk on as a mate, and he completed the privateering circumnavigation, sharing in the prize money when the expedition reached England on 1 October 1711. After eight years away, the marooned man came home modestly wealthy and briefly celebrated, his strange interlude on the island already passing into print.

The Five Factors

01
A correct technical judgement, ignored
Selkirk's core assessment — that the Cinque Ports was unseaworthy — was vindicated when she sank. The disaster here was the captain's, not the castaway's; Stradling overruled an expert and lost his ship and his freedom. The lesson generalizes: the specialist who warns of a structural flaw should be answered with inspection and repair, not with authority.
02
Choosing the survivable hazard over the fatal one
Where the men of the Essex fled a phantom danger into a real one, Selkirk did the reverse: he traded the near-certain death of a foundering ship for the hard but survivable hazard of a stocked island. Weighing a concrete, present risk against a slower, manageable one, and choosing the manageable one, is the discipline that kept him alive.
03
Adaptation over despair
Selkirk's first months of grief by the shore would have killed a passive man; his survival began when he moved inland and made the island work for him. The turn from waiting for rescue to building a life — huts, fire, clothing, a food supply — is the psychological pivot on which most long-survival cases hinge.
04
Living off the land's existing margin
He survived because the island already held feral goats, edible plants and fresh water — a margin of resources left, by accident, by earlier ships. His ingenuity exploited that margin rather than creating food from nothing. Survival in isolation depends on reading and using what the terrain actually provides.
05
The long rescue gap, closed by chance
Más a Tierra lay off the main shipping lanes, and no one was searching for a man who had marooned himself; his rescue after more than four years was the chance arrival of a privateer needing water. Where no one is looking, survival is a matter of endurance until coincidence intervenes — a margin no one should rely on by design.

Aftermath

Selkirk returned to Largo a local curiosity, reportedly restless and ill at ease among people after his years of silence. He married, served again at sea, and re-entered the Royal Navy, dying of fever — most likely yellow fever — on 13 December 1721 aboard HMS Weymouth off the coast of West Africa, and was buried at sea. He left behind not a fortune but a story.

That story outgrew the man. Woodes Rogers printed an account of the rescue in A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712), and the essayist Richard Steele published an interview with Selkirk; from these and other castaway narratives Daniel Defoe shaped Robinson Crusoe (1719). Defoe changed almost everything on the surface — a shipwreck instead of a marooning, a Caribbean island, a companion named Friday, decades instead of years — but the core of a solitary man wresting a life from an empty island was Selkirk's. Más a Tierra was officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island by Chile in 1966, and a neighbouring island named for Selkirk, fixing in geography a man who is remembered mostly through the fiction he inspired.

Lessons

  1. Treat a specialist's structural warning as a reason to inspect, not as insubordination to be overruled; the Cinque Ports sank because the warning was dismissed.
  2. When a present danger is near-certain and a hard alternative is merely difficult, choose the difficult alternative; survivability beats familiarity.
  3. In isolation, the decisive act is to stop waiting and start building — shelter, fire, a reliable food supply — before despair sets the terms.
  4. Survival off the land means using the margin the terrain already holds; read what is actually there rather than what you wish were there.
  5. Do not stake a life on rescue where no one is searching; endurance, not the horizon, is what carries the isolated through.

References