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

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.