How long was alexander selkirk marooned

Amusement was limited to reading the Bible and singing to his horde of feral cats, which he persuaded to protect him from the rats. Salvation came at the end of January , when the English privateering frigates Duke and Duchess hove into view. Selkirk lit a bonfire to attract the sailors' attention and, on 2 February, Captain Woodes Rogers ordered a landing party. Once back in London, Selkirk became a media sensation.

And of course, Daniel Defoe wrote his famous novel, Robinson Crusoe , said to be based on Selkirk's time on the island — although the book is set in the Caribbean.

Selkirk struggled to settle back into British life and his new-found wealth was little consolation. Selkirk tired of his fortune and enlisted in the Royal Navy. He died in But Selkirk's legacy lives on.

Another island in the archipelago was renamed in honour of the real-life castaway. As for the Cinque Ports, the leaking ship sank shortly after abandoning Selkirk to his fate, and the surviving crew were captured by the Spanish.

Alexander Selkirk had been right to get off when he did. Bitcoin hits a new record — and we all know what usually comes after fresh highs. The experience had, in fact, saved his life. Selkirk re-embarked on his career as a privateer and within a year he was master of the ship that rescued him. They had long given him up for dead and were astonished that he was alive, let alone alive in his fine, gold and lace clothes.

Selkirk, however, could never really readjust to life on the land, and, in , a year after he was immortalised by Defoe, he joined the Royal Navy only to die of fever off the coast of Africa. This page has been archived and is no longer updated.

Find out more about page archiving. Explore the BBC. BBC Homepage. Scottish History. Dark Ages. Dampier showed up just in time to put down the rebellion by promising a tighter rein on cocky Stradling.

But shortly he, too, faced dissent among his sailors, who wanted him to attack more ships. George and Cinque Ports left the island in March to continue their plundering along the coasts of Peru and Mexico, where tempers continued to flare.

In May the Cinque Ports split off from the St. George and spent the summer pirating on its own. By September the ship was so leaky that men were pumping out water day and night; Selkirk believed that it was so riddled with worms that its masts and flooring needed immediate repair.

That month the ship returned to the relative safety of the island, a secluded and uninhabited place where the men could regain their health and sanity. Soon Selkirk would look at the island and see salvation. At a small suburban airport outside crowded Santiago, Chile, six of us stand anxiously beside a drafty hangar staring at an eight-passenger Piper Navajo prop plane.

Mechanics are crawling over its dismantled left engine. A councilman from the island waits with me, joined by a history teacher, a young mother, and two Santiago policemen on a cushy work assignment. Thus assured, I put my trust in a craft whose outer skin seems no thicker than a beer can. With surprisingly little turbulence, we finally climb over the city of six million humming past the jagged Andes and across the ocean at 6, feet, just above foamy white clouds. After two hours of hypnotic engine drone, Schaeffer points to a growing gray dot on the horizon.

The Chilean government renamed it RobinsonCrusoeIsland in As we bank high above the reddish moonscape on the extreme western promontory of the square-mile island, rugged volcanic mountains are visible in the distance, with seemingly great spots for hiking or diving. A sailor in the s, however, would have seen nothing but trouble— grim, sheer-faced coves rising 80 feet straight up, and not a sandy beach in sight.

San Juan Bautista John the Baptist village pop. San Juan Bautista is part sleepy South Pacific fishing village, part eco-tourism hideaway. Along deeply rutted dirt roads, there are eight or nine summer cabins and basic bed-and-breakfast operations— several hundred tourists came to the village last year—with a few in-home convenience stores, three churches Evangelical, Mormon and Catholic , a leaky gymnasium, a lively school serving first through eighth grade, a city hall, a small Crusoe museum with translations of the novel in Polish and Greek, and an adjoining library with a satellite Internet connection, thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The homes are wooden bungalows for the most part, weathered but neat, with small yards and big leafy palm or fruit trees. Nearly everyone has TV, which consists of two Santiago channels. My guide, Pedro Niada, a witty and well-read fellow who moved here with his wife from Santiago some years ago, estimates that 70 percent of the families still make their living from trapping lobster, but that number is declining.

After a month on the island, the Cinque Ports was stocked with turnips, goats and crayfish, yet no less wormeaten. Stradling ordered the men to set sail and leave CumberlandBay. Selkirk refused and told the men to do the same, believing the ship could never withstand the open sea or the battles the men so craved. Stradling mocked his navigator, and that set off Selkirk like he was back in Largo.

After a bitter argument, Stradling must have felt he could not back down. Selkirk was put ashore with his bedding, a musket, pistol, gunpowder, hatchet, knife, his navigation tools, a pot for boiling food, two pounds of tobacco, some cheese and jam, a flask of rum and his Bible. He had made the biggest decision of his life. No longer just a complainer, he had taken action. But no sooner had he waded into CumberlandBay than he was overwhelmed with regret and fear. He had badly overplayed his hand.

Not one of the men had joined him. Selkirk pleaded with Stradling to be allowed back, but the captain was quite enjoying the moment. His unruly men were certainly watching this pathetic show, this hardheaded seaman begging for his life. Stradling wanted the message to sink in deeply with the crew: leave the ship and this will be you. Perhaps feeling more stupid and angry than victimized, Selkirk finally turned his back on the Cinque Ports and resigned himself to waiting for what he thought would be a few days until another friendly ship happened by.

There is no evidence that Selkirk ever kept a diary—he may have been illiterate, though historians disagree—so what we know of his time on the island comes primarily from two sources: his eventual rescuer, Capt.

Woodes Rogers, a distinguished English privateer or despised pirate, if you were Spanish who wrote A Cruising Voyage Round the World , about his expedition, and English essayist and playwright Richard Steele, who interviewed Selkirk in for the magazine The Englishman.

According to them, Selkirk was so despondent for the first several months that he contemplated suicide—presumably with one of his few bullets—and almost welcomed the gnawing hunger each day because it at least occupied his mind.