Selkirk is rescued from desert island isolation
A lucky escape for the marooned privateer who inspired Robinson Crusoe
The first decade of the 1700s was not a barrel of laughs for Alexander Selkirk. The unruly son of a Scottish tanner, he ran away to sea and became a privateer. Putting in for repairs on a deserted Pacific island in September 1704, he became seriously worried about the state of his ship and told the captain he would rather be left behind than continue on board. The captain promptly set off without him, leaving Selkirk on Más a Tierra, some 420 miles off the coast of Chile. And for the next four and a half years, there he stayed.
Selkirk’s life was far from luxurious. He dined on goats, turnips and cabbage leaves, and had to sleep near some feral cats to keep the rats away. He dressed in goatskins, abandoned his shoes and entertained himself by singing psalms. And then, on 2 February 1709, Selkirk had an incredible stroke of luck.
An English privateer, Woodes Rogers, was sailing nearby when his men spotted smoke from one of the islands. Worried that it might be a Spanish shore party, Rogers sent some men to investigate, and they discovered a “man cloth’d in goat skins, who look’d wilder than the first owners of them”. It was Selkirk. “He had so much forgot his Language for want of Use,” wrote Rogers, “that we could scarce understand him, for he seem’d to speak his words by halves.” Still, he got the hang of it eventually.
The news of Selkirk’s ordeal fascinated Britain. And 10 years later, the writer Daniel Defoe turned it into one of the most influential adventure stories of all time: the tale of Robinson Crusoe.