In any case, Selkirk was left ashore, but when he realized that none of the crew was joining him in the mutiny, he frantically waded back into the ocean and begged forgiveness from Stradling, a tyrant who delighted in saying no.įortunately, for Selkirk’s sake and world literature’s, he accepted his fate, survived, and upon his return to England, inspired one of the world’s great tales of self-reliance and courage, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Back home in Scotland he had beaten up his father and two brothers over a harmless prank and would later leave both the women who claimed to be his wife. By all accounts the 28-year-old Selkirk was a hothead. Thomas Stradling, whom he regarded as arrogant, leave him on the largest island, a wish that Stradling was only too happy to oblige. Selkirk demanded that his 21-year-old captain, Lt. But by October 1704, as the Cinque Ports anchored off a deserted archipelago 418 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile, he had made a lifechanging decision. Selkirk had already been on a similar voyage. Selkirk, a skilled navigator, and the ship’s sickened crew were privateers-in effect, legalized pirates for the British Crown-who had spent a year at sea off South America robbing Spanish ships and coastal villages. Three centuries ago an impetuous Scottish sailor known as Alexander Selkirk-though this wasn’t his real name-was languishing off the coast of Chile in a battlescarred, worm-eaten British ship called the Cinque Ports when he began to argue with the captain that the leaky, disease- ridden vessel was a deathtrap.
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