Important Quotes Explained. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Characters Character List. The Portuguese captain The sea captain who picks up Crusoe and the slave boy Xury from their boat after they escape from their Moorish captors and float down the African coast. Next section Robinson Crusoe. Popular pages: Robinson Crusoe. Take a Study Break. By then, he must have been quite a sight.
The captain of that ship described him as "a man Cloth'd in Goat-Skins, who look'd wilder than the first Owners of them". Selkirk hitched a lift back to London, where he became something of a celebrity. Defoe heard of his story and apparently used it at least in part as the basis for Robinson Crusoe, published in Defoe made lots of changes to Selkirk's tale.
He moved the island to the Caribbean and peopled it with cannibals, one of whom becomes Crusoe's faithful servant Friday. While Selkirk was stranded for a mere four years, the fictional Crusoe spends 28 years, two months and 19 days as a castaway, as he meticulously notes in his journal. Defoe clearly took much of his inspiration from the Caribbean, not the southern Pacific. Crusoe's island is covered in tobacco plants, cocoa trees and tropical hardwoods that would never grow here.
But at times when reading the book, you get a sense of the Chilean Robinson Crusoe Island. Crusoe finds grapes, hares, foxes and even penguins on the island, suggesting a temperate rather than a tropical climate. He describes his island as a "dreadful place, out of the reach of humane kind, out of all hope of relief or prospect of redemption".
It is a "dismal unfortunate island, which I call'd the Island of Despair". Thankfully, things have improved since then. These days, around people live here, surviving on lobster fishing and tourism. It is a stunningly beautiful place of dramatic cliffs and soaring mountains.
There is only one village, San Juan Bautista. Above it, a path winds steeply upwards to "Selkirk's look-out", a vantage point where, according to locals, the lone Scotsman would sit for hours, scouring the horizon for ships. 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.
In time, he was able to domesticate some feral cats, who served as companions and exterminators. Finding shelter and food on the verdant island was less of a problem than keeping his sanity. What he missed most was bread and salt. Eventually he grew so nimble running barefoot on the steep hills above the bay that he could chase down any goat he wanted.
Selkirk was able to start a fire with pimento wood and his musket flints, and tried to keep it going night and day, but he was careful to hide the flames from Spanish ships; the Spanish were known for torturing their prisoners or turning them into slaves in South American gold mines. He once narrowly escaped a Spanish search party by climbing a tree.
To maintain his spirits, the Scottish navigator sang hymns and prayed. At some point, Selkirk apparently embraced life again, and like Thoreau, saw deep new truths about himself revealed through the cleansing simplicity of the demands of survival.
We munched on the same tart red berries that probably sustained Selkirk, waiting for the sky to clear. When the sun broke through, I understood why Selkirk had chosen this spot.
He could not only see for miles in every direction, thereby giving himself an hour or two headstart if he needed to evade the Spanish—who tortured and enslaved captives—but he could also sustain his spirits. George - Cinque Ports voyage. Dampier likely told Selkirk the bittersweet news that he had been all too right about the decrepit Cinque Ports.
Soon after abandoning the Scotsman in the ship sank off the coast of Peru, killing all but Stradling and a dozen or so men, who wound up in Spanish prisons. Rogers helped Selkirk shave and gave him clothes. His rock-hard feet swelled in the constraint of shoes. In recognition of not only his past skill but also perhaps his ordeal, Rogers made him a navigator once again.
Finally, he was headed home.
0コメント