Alexander Selkirk - the Real Robinson Crusoe
Update: 2025-03-17
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In 1719, Daniel Defoe published the book, “The LIfe and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.” The story is about a sailor who is stranded on an island for more than 20 years. It has gone on to be one of the most popular novels in western literature. In this episode, we tell the story of Alexander Selkirk, the man many believe to be the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Sources
"The Real Robinson Crusoe" - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-robinson-crusoe-74877644/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Selkirk_reading_his_Bible.png
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Transcript
00:00:00
In 1719, Daniel DeFoe published the book "The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Caruso."
00:00:09
The story is about a sailor who is stranded on an island for more than 20 years, and it's going on to be one of the most popular novels in Western literature.
00:00:17
Today we are going to tell the story of Alexander Selkirk, the man who many believe is the inspiration for DeFoe's Robinson Caruso.
00:00:25
Hello and welcome to History Dispatches.
00:00:36
I'm McKinley, here with my dad Matt, Dad, how you doing?
00:00:39
I'm good.
00:00:40
How are you doing, McKinley?
00:00:41
I'm great.
00:00:42
Learning about Alexander Selkirk today.
00:00:44
Here on History Dispatches, we're a daily show where we bring you the weird, the interesting, the wonderful, the sometimes sad, sometimes cool, little stories from history.
00:00:54
Today we're going to learn about the real-life Robinson Caruso, as it were.
00:00:58
Alrighty.
00:00:59
So today's story is about that, and that is actually a man named Alexander Selkirk.
00:01:04
He is believed to be the basis for the famous Robinson Caruso, one of the great stories that have thrilled people for centuries.
00:01:16
And I think we talked, we were talking a little bit before we recorded about your connection with Robinson Caruso.
00:01:22
I've ever read the book, the original, or I don't think I've seen the movie, any of the famous movies, but you bought a children's version of it, like an illustrative version of it.
00:01:33
And you read it to me, I don't know how many times, but I remember, I have very clear images of it in my brain, so this will be fun to hear that story.
00:01:41
Awesome.
00:01:42
Selkirk's name has popped up actually for me with my other podcast, the Explorers podcast.
00:01:48
And that is because we'll have Explorers go by the island off of Chile, where he actually ended up living for four years.
00:01:57
And they'll be like, there's the Juan Fernandez Archipelago, which was the home of Alexander Selkirk, who was based, so I hear that pop up multiple times.
00:02:06
And so when we were doing the show, I had to do one on Selkirk because I literally wanted to know more about him.
00:02:12
And that's what I'm going to do.
00:02:14
So we'll start with a little bit about Selkirk.
00:02:17
He was born in Lower Largo, 5th Scotland in 1676, the son of a shoemaker in Tanner.
00:02:24
He reportedly had a trouble with he would get in the fights and he was just kind of a troublemaker.
00:02:29
In 1693, at the age of 17, he was called before the Kirk Session.
00:02:34
Now the Kirk Session is basically what would be called the governing body of the church at this time.
00:02:40
And what I like was, they don't say exactly what this means, but he was brought before them for, quote, "indecent conduct in church," end quote.
00:02:49
Now I would love to know with that man because there just seems something really naughty there.
00:02:53
But we don't know.
00:02:54
Now he was scheduled for an inquiry and he just didn't show up.
00:02:59
And it turns out he went and skipped town by signing on to a ship and gone to sea, which is how lots of people ended up going to sea.
00:03:07
Anyways, he would spend the next eight years at sea and end up back in Largo in 1701.
00:03:13
And we know that because there's a record of him assaulting a church official, which I want to point out gives you a little bit of an insight into Selkirk's character.
00:03:22
He was known to be kind of a hothead.
00:03:24
He was a god in the fights.
00:03:27
He just wasn't a, seemed like a content person.
00:03:31
So that takes us up to 1703 where Selkirk joined William Dampier, a explorer and private here, a pirate, for the war of Spanish Session.
00:03:42
And here this was basically where the English were acting as private tears.
00:03:46
This war was a continental war.
00:03:48
Basically what the English were doing was they'd sail around as state-sponsored pirates.
00:03:55
The war would last for 13 years.
00:03:58
And people changed sides and it's really not important to our story.
00:04:02
The big thing is that Dampier had two ships.
00:04:04
One he was the commander of and the other was with a man named Thomas Straddling.
00:04:09
And Selkirk would sail with him on his ship, which was called sink ports.
00:04:15
Now it's a weird name.
00:04:16
It's actually spelled C-I-N-Q-U-E, which is like French or Latin, there's the roots of it, meaning five.
00:04:24
So it means five ports, referring to a group of coastal towns in Southeast England, including Kent and Sussex.
00:04:30
But it's a weird name for a ship.
00:04:32
So I wanted to explain it.
00:04:33
Because when I say sink ports, you know, sink ports, sounds like a pirate ship.
00:04:37
Yeah.
00:04:38
It just seems weird, but anyway, so the sink ports.
00:04:41
So with Dampier and Straddling, Selkirk became a seasoned sailor.
00:04:45
He had adventures, this included like raiding a Panamanian gold mining town in 1704.
00:04:51
And there is all sorts of other stuff too.
00:04:53
They thought enough about Selkirk that when they captured a merchant ship once they gave him the command of it until they were able to ransom it off or sell it or whatever.
00:05:03
Anyhow, in September of 1704, Straddling decided to go off on his own, basically, Dampier one way Straddling went his other.
00:05:12
He went around Cape Horn and into the Pacific Ocean.
00:05:16
Now the ship ended up at the Juan Fernandez archipelago, which is about 400 miles or 650 kilometers off the Chilean coast to the west of Valparaiso.
00:05:28
And what they did is they anchored at a place called Masatiara.
00:05:32
Now this was an uninhabited island and they had gone there for water and food and so forth.
00:05:38
Now Selkirk had serious problems with the sink ports.
00:05:43
And that is because he felt that it wasn't sea worthy.
00:05:47
And he felt that the captain was not addressing these things and he told him so.
00:05:51
He said you need to refit and repair the ship.
00:05:53
Well Straddling, the captain basically said, you know, pound sand.
00:05:58
He just got a little heated and as we talked about, Selkirk was known to have a bit of a temper.
00:06:03
And he said he would rather stay on the island than sell with the sink ports.
00:06:08
Straddling's response was okay.
00:06:10
Yeah.
00:06:11
So it's like, oh, you prefer.
00:06:14
So he gave him a musket, some powder ammunition, a hatchet, a knife, a cooking pot, a bible, some bedding, and clothing and dropped them on the beach.
00:06:24
Now Selkirk tried to walk back his comments.
00:06:26
I mean, you know, people say things and heated the moment and they go, I didn't really mean that.
00:06:30
But he must have done something bad that got Straddling really upset because he said, no, he was stranded on Masatiara and he would be there for more than four years.
00:06:41
Okay, so Alexander Selkirk is stranded on Masatiara.
00:06:47
He basically hung out on the beach for a while, hoping that he would be rescued.
00:06:51
But this is not a place that many people come to, very, very rarely.
00:06:56
I find it was funny.
00:06:57
He said he got driven inland by the sea lions on the beaches because those things are huge and brutal.
00:07:04
Yeah.
00:07:05
They are.
00:07:06
They're really nasty.
00:07:07
But anyways, he had to survive.
00:07:08
And at first, he could get like some crabs and things like that on the beach, but he needed more.
00:07:13
So he went about surviving on the island.
00:07:16
He first used his musket to hunt and there were wild goats on the island and he limited a lot of his use of his musket to hunting because he knew he had a limited amount of shots going on.
00:07:31
He used the goats for meat and for milk, but also later for clothing.
00:07:37
He also then found things like turnips and some greens and some fruits on the island.
00:07:41
He then built himself two different huts.
00:07:45
Another place that he built one was up on this lookout on a mountain, which gave him a good view of the area.
00:07:51
He would go up there and watch for ships because he wanted to be rescued.
00:07:56
But he built two different huts and he proved to be a pretty resourceful guy.
00:07:59
And I love this story.
00:08:01
So one of the problems he ran into when he first arrived was he would try to go to sleep and rats.
00:08:06
They were rats all over the island.
00:08:08
They would start crawling all over the house.
00:08:11
Yeah.
00:08:12
So there were also feral cats on the island.
00:08:14
So what he did was he befriended them, some of the cats and the cats would then stay with them all the time.
00:08:20
And of course the cats.
00:08:21
The rats at base.
00:08:22
The rats at base.
00:08:23
So again, again, he was a smart guy.
00:08:24
And I think this, some of the others comes from growing up as a, you know, he was not from a particularly wealthy family or anything like that.
00:08:32
And he lived like all people had to do to survive.
00:08:37
And he learned how to get by.
00:08:39
So like, example, his dad was a Tanner.
00:08:42
So he had learned that.
00:08:43
So what he, he knew how to take the goats, skin them and turn the skins into clothing.
00:08:49
There you go.
00:08:50
Because remember, we are in an area that isn't like tropical, where we're quite a bit way south.
00:08:56
So it's not like we're in the Caribbean sort of thing all the time.
00:08:59
So he did need to stay warm.
00:09:01
Anyways, so he would hunt when he needed to.
00:09:05
He read his Bible.
00:09:07
He knew how to read and write, by the way, obviously.
00:09:09
So he read his Bible.
00:09:10
But there were no real physical threats to him on the island.
00:09:15
There were no like big cats or anything like that.
00:09:17
Just sea lions.
00:09:18
Yeah, just sea lions.
00:09:19
Yeah, but they, they had a tough time getting up the mountains.
00:09:23
There were dangers.
00:09:24
Because first of all, if you get sick or something goes wrong, you know, you have no one help you.
00:09:29
And one time he was chasing after a goat and fell off of a cliff.
00:09:34
And basically, he said he laid there for like a day.
00:09:38
He couldn't move for an entire day.
00:09:40
And he was lucky to survive.
00:09:42
So now I told you he had his little lookout spot.
00:09:44
He would go up there and watch for ships because, of course, you want to be rescued.
00:09:48
Now the only problem is that he is an English pirate in Spanish waters.
00:09:54
Because remember, the entire western side of South America and Central America is controlled by Spain.
00:10:01
So who are you likely to run into here?
00:10:04
That is Spanish ships.
00:10:06
And so he did sight two different ships over the next few years, but each time they were Spanish.
00:10:12
And he knew that if he gave himself up, there's a good chance he would just be executed.
00:10:16
So he would hide each time.
00:10:17
And thus he waited years, four years, four months, February 2nd, 1709, and he sees a pair of ships out in the water, English ships.
00:10:28
These are English privateers commanded by a man named Captain Woods Rogers, which is a great name, Woods Rogers.
00:10:35
But what's interesting is the pilot for the command ship, which is called the Duke, was a William Dampier.
00:10:41
A small world.
00:10:42
Yeah, it's a small world of pirates, but privateers, privateers, respectful.
00:10:48
But they were here doing exactly what the Selkirk had been.
00:10:52
They were privateers.
00:10:53
They were out probably on Spanish shipping.
00:10:56
So Selkirk would of course run down to the beach, signal them, and they would come ashore.
00:11:01
Now what I find kind of funny is Selkirk then immediately helped the English who were suffering from scurvy.
00:11:07
So he showed them where like they could get greens and they could get fruits, and he helped them hunt some goats, so they got fresh meat.
00:11:14
Because very important, I talk about this in my other show a lot too, scurvy, scurvy is the lack of vitamin C, and we kind of make jokes about it nowadays.
00:11:23
But you don't need a lot of vitamin C just to keep scurvy at bay.
00:11:27
And fresh meat will contain trace amounts of vitamin C enough to keep scurvy at bay.
00:11:33
So when he's doing this, he's really doing a huge service to these people because especially if they go west across the Pacific, there's not something there.
00:11:41
You can go for months and months and not see land.
00:11:44
And so having fresh food and stuff like that is important anyhow.
00:11:49
Captain Rogers couldn't really believe what he saw in Selkirk because I mean, here's a guy had been here for four years and he was expecting to have this emaciated and weak guy.
00:12:00
But he said he was vigorous and he was physically fit.
00:12:03
Also, and this is interesting, he mentioned that Selkirk had a peace of mind that he had attained while living on the island.
00:12:10
And here's a quote from Rogers who later wrote a book about this by the way, he said, one may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine,
00:12:22
especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably as this man was.
00:12:29
Again, he was he was kind of impressed by Selkirk, so impressed that he made him the second mate of his own ship, the dude.
00:12:37
And later on, he would be given a command of one of the prize ships until it was then ransom back to Spanish.
00:12:44
So they would continue privateering around the world and they literally would go around the world.
00:12:49
Well, privateer up the coast of the Americas and then head west and go to the far east, then go back around Africa and up to England.
00:12:58
And in doing so, it would take eight years, but Alexander Selkirk would circumnavigate the world.
00:13:06
He would sail around the world and he got returned to England in 1711.
00:13:10
Now before I tell you about what happened to Selkirk because it is a pretty good story, I do want to make a quick note, remember his sink part ship he said was in bad shape.
00:13:21
Well, it wasn't long before it ran into problems and sank off the coast of Colombia.
00:13:26
Only six or seven men survived and they were all captured by the Spanish.
00:13:29
And then those that survived, including Stradling, the captain, by the way, a few of them survived in prison for four years before they were let go and set back to England,
00:13:40
but he was actually right.
00:13:42
He got home just as quick as the rest of them, and they spent their time in the Spanish prison.
00:13:47
Yeah, which would have been yucky.
00:13:48
So Selkirk was back.
00:13:50
What I love to is all the dreams of being a pirate privateer came in the fruition here because he received 800 pounds as his share.
00:14:00
Now he was a first mate, so he was like considered an officer.
00:14:03
So he was getting good money here.
00:14:05
I was trying to figure out exactly how much that was and so I looked at converting money to American dollars and it's basically be like $3 million today.
00:14:14
So he came back rich and he was famous.
00:14:18
Within a year, one of the other crewman, a guy named Edwin Cook, would write a book titled A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World.
00:14:25
And that would be published and he would tell the story of Selkirk.
00:14:28
Also Captain Rogers would follow with a story himself.
00:14:31
And the newspapers ran stories on Selkirk and he was a local celebrity.
00:14:37
But what's interesting is that Selkirk seems to have, I don't want to say regretted, but he missed some of his life on the island.
00:14:44
And they have a quote from him where he says this, he goes, "I am now worth 800 pounds, but I shall never be as happy as when I was not worth a farthing."
00:14:52
End quote.
00:14:53
So again, there was something that says that he missed a little bit about that.
00:14:56
And so he was back in England.
00:14:58
He had a lot of money, but things kind of seemed to be mixed for him over the next few years or the next decade, basically.
00:15:05
He would get in the fights, he was known to be temperamental.
00:15:08
He got married twice.
00:15:09
I don't know if he ever divorced the first lady, I kind of figured that one out.
00:15:14
And eventually he ended up joining the English Navy.
00:15:17
So I don't know if I would have been a land lover of the rest of my life after that.
00:15:20
And I don't know if he'd like, blew his money or what, possibly, anyways.
00:15:24
He joined the Navy.
00:15:26
And then in 70-21, he was on the west coast of Africa with an anti-piracy patrol, which I find someone ironic.
00:15:34
And there he caught yellow fever or perhaps typhoid, we don't know for sure.
00:15:38
He would die on December 13th, 1721 and was buried at sea.
00:15:43
So he was dead later on.
00:15:46
He would become famous as we'll talk about in a minute.
00:15:49
And there is now, you can go to a memorial at his birthplace in Largo, Scotland.
00:15:54
And there's a statue there of him.
00:15:57
And he's wearing his goat skin.
00:15:59
And he's wearing his goat skin clothing in the statue and carrying a musket and holding a musket.
00:16:06
Also a ship and I think 1869 stopped at Masatiara, the island he'd been on.
00:16:12
And they went up to the lookout and they put a plaque there to commemorate the spot.
00:16:16
So that's still there from, if I'm correct.
00:16:19
And I do want to mention that Masatiara, the island he was on, was renamed in 1966 to Robinson Caruso Island.
00:16:26
Oh, that kind of hurts.
00:16:27
Yeah.
00:16:28
And that was done totally for tours.
00:16:29
Okay.
00:16:30
I mean, there's less than 1,000 people that live there today, but it is a tourist spot.
00:16:35
But they're also in the same archipelago there.
00:16:37
They did name and a Hondral Selkirk Island.
00:16:41
So he gets his due name.
00:16:42
He's got his due.
00:16:44
So that's sort of the story there.
00:16:46
But we can't tell the story without telling the story of the book, even before his death, which was again in 1721 and 1719, a writer named Daniel Defoe,
00:16:56
who wrote tons of stuff, a lot of political types of decided to write a novel.
00:17:00
And he called it the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Caruso.
00:17:05
And he never acknowledged that his story is about Selkirk.
00:17:09
He modeled it after him, but just rough outlines.
00:17:12
And I don't think anyone would say he totally took a story because the stories are very different.
00:17:17
Caruso, the story of Robinson Caruso takes place in the Caribbean.
00:17:21
There are people on the island.
00:17:22
There are cannibals.
00:17:23
There's Friday, which we talked about, the native friend of his.
00:17:27
But then there's things like he's described as wearing hairy goat skins, which would have been stupid in the Caribbean.
00:17:33
Too hot.
00:17:34
Too hot.
00:17:35
Yeah.
00:17:36
But again, they use that same imagery that had been described about Selkirk for his story.
00:17:41
So again, there's other lost stories and things like that that I think Defoe just kind of wrapped in all into one story.
00:17:48
But it is a great story.
00:17:50
It was incredibly successful.
00:17:52
Four editions would be put out in the first year.
00:17:55
And it is one of the most popular English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries.
00:18:01
Now some would argue that it was the first English novel.
00:18:04
And they also say that it really started in genre, the survival tale.
00:18:08
And you'll see this treasure island and Gulliver's travels, things like that.
00:18:12
So they became really, really popular.
00:18:14
In fact, they were so popular that Defoe would write two sequels.
00:18:18
As we talked about early on, the story is still really popular today.
00:18:22
I mean, it's hard not to just the human drama of being stranded and being forced to survive.
00:18:29
And it's been taken on by lots of other stories, Lord of the Flies, things like that.
00:18:33
People stranded and they have to survive some way.
00:18:36
There's been stage adaptations, comic books, at least five to ten movies and TV series, all sorts of things.
00:18:44
It is amazing that that story lives on.
00:18:48
But that is made Alexander Selkirk live on as well.
00:18:51
And like I said, you can see his memorial at his home in Largo, Scotland, or even better, go down to Robins and Crucial Island and go up to the lookout and see and check out his little plaque.
00:19:04
That would be cool.
00:19:06
That's really cool.
00:19:07
I kind of feel bad for the guy in that he got rescued.
00:19:10
It sounds like he would have lived very happily by himself.
00:19:14
I wonder if he just sounds like one of those kind of people that he didn't like people.
00:19:19
And that's why he was such a hot head.
00:19:21
And so being alone was actually just really good for him.
00:19:24
I know what you mean, though, he just, I mean, he literally says how he was, he was less rich once he was back in civilization.
00:19:31
The other thing he might have been is he might have just, he needed to be out at sea.
00:19:34
He's one of those restless souls and stuff like that.
00:19:37
So maybe just finding a place to settle down would have been.
00:19:40
And maybe having that the worst thing for him.
00:19:42
Yeah.
00:19:45
And maybe having that edge of mortality might have been really good for him and that he has to fight for every meal and that might have been good for his spirit kind of.
00:19:52
Yeah.
00:19:53
But it's really cool though.
00:19:54
Yeah.
00:19:55
And he did survive.
00:19:56
And it's a, it's a great story.
00:19:57
Absolutely.
00:19:58
Dad, thank you very much for telling the story of Alexander Selkirk, the real life Robins in Caruso.
00:20:05
That's really cool.
00:20:06
Yeah.
00:20:07
And the man who spawned a whole genre.
00:20:08
That's really cool.
00:20:09
Yeah.
00:20:10
Give you some unique childhood memories.
00:20:12
Absolutely.
00:20:13
No, thank you.
00:20:14
Thank you for listening everyone.
00:20:15
Please check out our website, historydispatches.com.
00:20:18
And there you can find all the sources and links for the show.
00:20:22
And please sign up for our email list.
00:20:24
We would appreciate it.
00:20:25
Alrighty.
00:20:26
Thanks a lot.
00:20:27
Have a good one, everyone.
00:20:28
Thanks for watching.
00:20:30
Thank you.
00:20:31
(electronic beeping)
00:20:34
