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Big Windies

The lady at the Aerolineas Isla Robinson Crusoe desk greeted me by name, though we’d never met. Her passenger list comprised three words: Señor John Harrison. The six-seater Cessna was piloted by a handsome 30-year-old trying to look like an extra for Top Gun, and doing rather well. We left the heat of Chile’s vineyards behind us, arrowing over the Pacific, aiming at a myth. Conditions were calm, despite the receptionist’s warning: ‘There is a lot more weather on the island than here: big windies.’

The Juan Fernández Islands, 400 miles offshore, were discovered in 1572 by a Spanish priest and navigator who modestly named them after himself. Failing to make a go of a settlement, he left only goats as a memorial. The main island became a mid-oceanic convalescent stop, providing wood, fresh water, fruit, turnips planted by mariners, and the tasty descendants of Father Juan’s goats. It’s not so welcoming for aircraft; when I saw the landing strip, I had big windies myself. We shot down a dirt runway that began at the cliff edge, ran across a narrow neck of land, and squealed into a U-turn yards from the opposing cliff top. Top Gun grinned. ‘Madness!’

I first met Robinson Crusoe when I was 8, in a hardback children’s edition with a red cloth cover whose edges I stroked as I read, curled up in an armchair. It had footnotes (so grown up) to explain delicious antique words like pannikin, pipkin and calenture (a tropical delirium in which the sailor believes the sea to be green fields, and tries to leap into it). Before starting to read, I looked at the frontispiece, showing a man in a goatskin suit with matching umbrella, then at each illustration in turn, imagining how the plot would stitch them together, writing my own story. When I finished the book, my mother helped me place the kitchen table upside-down on the l

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The lady at the Aerolineas Isla Robinson Crusoe desk greeted me by name, though we’d never met. Her passenger list comprised three words: Señor John Harrison. The six-seater Cessna was piloted by a handsome 30-year-old trying to look like an extra for Top Gun, and doing rather well. We left the heat of Chile’s vineyards behind us, arrowing over the Pacific, aiming at a myth. Conditions were calm, despite the receptionist’s warning: ‘There is a lot more weather on the island than here: big windies.’

The Juan Fernández Islands, 400 miles offshore, were discovered in 1572 by a Spanish priest and navigator who modestly named them after himself. Failing to make a go of a settlement, he left only goats as a memorial. The main island became a mid-oceanic convalescent stop, providing wood, fresh water, fruit, turnips planted by mariners, and the tasty descendants of Father Juan’s goats. It’s not so welcoming for aircraft; when I saw the landing strip, I had big windies myself. We shot down a dirt runway that began at the cliff edge, ran across a narrow neck of land, and squealed into a U-turn yards from the opposing cliff top. Top Gun grinned. ‘Madness!’ I first met Robinson Crusoe when I was 8, in a hardback children’s edition with a red cloth cover whose edges I stroked as I read, curled up in an armchair. It had footnotes (so grown up) to explain delicious antique words like pannikin, pipkin and calenture (a tropical delirium in which the sailor believes the sea to be green fields, and tries to leap into it). Before starting to read, I looked at the frontispiece, showing a man in a goatskin suit with matching umbrella, then at each illustration in turn, imagining how the plot would stitch them together, writing my own story. When I finished the book, my mother helped me place the kitchen table upside-down on the lawn. Each heavy round leg was held in place by a single wing-nut. I removed two and propped them over the side: my cannons. A Union Jack, tied to a third, marked the stern. Brothers and friends were press-ganged as crew, though they soon died in a shipwreck and were told to wait on one side until required for the cannibal feast. Robinson Crusoe is a simple stereotype; he is you and me forced back on to our own resources. He was inspired by the true adventures of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, an able but short-fused officer on the privateer Cinque Ports, who was left in the Juan Fernández Islands on Más a Tierra, now renamed Isla Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk had demanded to be marooned after he had pronounced the Cinque Ports unseaworthy, and Captain Thomas Stradling, just 21, had refused to tarry for repairs. Selkirk’s chest was fetched, and a few other items, including a musket, powder and shot. Only as the ship’s boat began to pull away did Selkirk realize the enormity of what he was doing and beg them to return. Stradling said, ‘Stay where you are, and may you starve.’ Thankfully for Defoe and us, he didn’t. At Cumberland Bay, the only settlement on Isla Robinson Crusoe, I was met by a porter with a wheelbarrow. ‘Come this way, Señor Harrison, I’m Robinson Green.’ After finding a room in a modest guesthouse, it took me over an hour to climb 1,700 feet, through lush vegetation jewelled with flowers and hummingbirds, to the summit which provided Selkirk’s view over the anchorage. The whole island is a volcano lying on one of the most dangerous fault lines in the world. It is a place which makes you feel the land is only borrowed from the sea. In one earthquake, the sea receded until it was scarcely visible, before returning to crash a hundred feet up the hillside, destroying everything in its path. But however carefully you have read the book, the island will not seem familiar. Defoe moved the whole adventure 3,000 miles across the South American land mass to an imaginary island near Trinidad. Perhaps details of the Caribbean were easier to come by, for Defoe, a pamphleteer and reporter, loved detail. And though Crusoe is inspired by Selkirk, it is not Selkirk’s story. There is evidence that Selkirk later gave his papers to Daniel Defoe, but none that they ever met. Defoe’s own life was as interesting as Selkirk’s; he had been a spy, had suffered the pillory, had been condemned for treason then reprieved, had gone bankrupt, and, in a fury of creativity, wrote four novels in two years, including Crusoe. The haste shows in the writing: Crusoe strips to swim out to a ship wrecked on the reef but he is mysteriously able to stuff salvaged goods into his trouser pockets. His ink runs out, but he continues to write. Even so, the novel makes us imagine how we would cope in similar circumstances. In fact, Crusoe is unrealistically rational, doing the things a writer safe in a study thinks he’d do: salvage tools and provisions from the ship. In reality, new castaways are numb with shock: they lie helpless, or wander without purpose, or immerse themselves in trivial tasks. Selkirk, although set ashore in good health, lay all night in a stupor, terrified by strange roars that daylight revealed to be fur seals. Only when parched with thirst did he take command of himself and get organized. He’d chosen a good spot. I have sailed all along the west coast of South America, and I can think of nowhere safer or more congenial to live off the land than Juan Fernández: the climate is kind and food abounds. At different times, others were also marooned here; all lived comfortably. Selkirk himself was fitter than the scurvy-ridden sailors who tottered ashore to rescue him four years and four months later. The book is also a moral allegory. Before Crusoe ran away to sea, his father gave him very English advice about ambition: have some, but not too much; the middle class enjoys the virtues of the other two classes and the vices of neither. But Crusoe is ‘born to be my own destroyer’. After a good start in trade, he leaves his sugar plantation in Brazil to undertake a slaving voyage. Deserting the cultivation of the land for a quick doubloon, he is punished by shipwreck. He now slaves himself, to plant corn and bake bread. He bodges together an oven, and eventually produces a loaf. As a child, I asked ‘Why bother, when there was so much else to eat?’ But Defoe knew his readers could not consider Crusoe happy until he had bread and butter, earned by the sweat of his brow. In an age of expansion and change, Defoe reminded the English of where they sprang from. For the mass of ordinary people, life was a little more comfortable than that on a desert island, but prosperity was fickle, as they and Defoe knew first-hand. Crusoe showed them that whatever fate had in store, an industrious Protestant Englishman could overcome it. Defoe is very good on anxiety. I’ve often travelled rough in South America and fretted over food supplies, though, unlike him, I’ve seldom had to worry about becoming someone else’s dinner. But, like Crusoe, I know that it is not fear of wild animals that keeps you awake at night, it’s fear of people. Defoe presents Crusoe with the famous single footprint in the sand, then shows him no more for two years: that is very refined torture. There’s soon more to worry about, when his corn is stolen: the thieving crows he shoots are exhibited in chains, like criminals. You can imagine him muttering ‘Hangin’s too good for ’em.’ Pilgrim Crusoe gradually rediscovers God and the unique satisfaction of being an English yeoman farmer. However, solitary reflection does not make him a radical; when he finally gains his famous companion, a local Indian (not the Negro of my old edition), Man Friday is taken on as a servant, not a partner. Crusoe also renames him, that most potent form of possession. How did Selkirk survive? He was picked up by a Bristol privateer, and his share in the prize money made him a wealthy man. He never blamed himself for abandoning the Cinque Ports; it broke up in a storm with the loss of nearly all hands. Returning to Fife, he briefly became a celebrity before shunning society. Pining for his lost kingdom, he dug a cave behind his parents’ home and moved in. He later returned to sea, dying in a fever epidemic off Africa. Crusoe was equally restless, living on through two pale sequels. Doctor Johnson said that Don Quixote, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe were the only three books anyone ever wished were longer. The list hasn’t grown much since then. Robinson Crusoe is still an escape for me. When it all seems too much, I don’t dig a cave, I have a calenture and leap overboard into its perennially green pages. I picture Isla Robinson Crusoe and walk, in memory, the beach where locals have recreated a shelter and propped two salvaged cannons on its ramparts. They look rather like my old table legs.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © John Harrison 2006


About the contributor

As John Harrison posted the manuscript for his travel book, Where the Earth Ends, about South America and its islands, he realized every influential text behind it had been read before he was 12 years old, including Robinson Crusoe.

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