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Alexander Selkirk:
Alexander Selkirk was born Alexander Seleraig in 1676, the son of a Scottish shoemaker in Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland. Although he possessed a sharp intellect, he also had a remarkable temper that often got the best of him. On 27 August 1695, Alexander was reprimanded for "undecent carriage" in church and, rather than appear before the council, ran away to sea.
In September 1703, Selkirk joined with William Dampier's expedition to the South Seas (Pacific Ocean), becoming the sailing master about the Cinque Ports, under the command of Captain Thomas Stradling. While refitting the careening in the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile, Selkirk protested to Stradling that the vessel was not fit to sail and asked to be left behind rather than to risk perishing at sea. Stradling gladly accommodated his request. In early October 1704, Alexander Selkirk regretfully watched as the Cinque Ports sailed away, although his intuition served him well, for the vessel later sank.
Alexander Selkirk remained in isolation until the privateer ship Duke, under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers and with William Dampier as pilot, dropped anchor at Juan Fernandez Island early in February 1708. Dampier, who immediately recognized Selkirk as his marooned shipmate, convinced the captain that he was a good man and that he should be brought aboard. Rogers consented, and in 1712 published an account of the story in his volume "A Cruising Voyage Round the World: First to the South Seas, Thence to the East Indies, and Homeward by the Cape of Good Hope... Containing a Journal of All the Remarkable Transactions... An Account of Alexander Selkirk's Living Alone Four Years and Four Months on an Island." So ended Alexander Selkirk's four years of self-imposed isolation, a story that would later be known around the world through Daniel Defoe's semi-fictional work, "Robinson Crusoe," published in 1719.
Selkirk reached London on 14 October 1711, three-and-a-half years after leaving Juan Fernandez, and having spent more than 8 years away from home. He returned to Fife and married sixteen-year old Sophia Bruce, but went to sea within a year. He would marry again, the second time to a widowed innkeeper in Plymouth.
What we know of Selkirk's death comes from the log of the Royal Ship Weymouth, which tells us that Alexander Selkirk, lieutenant, died at eight o'clock in the evening on 13 December 1721, and was buried at sea somewhere off the coast of western Africa. |