Selkirk's Island
The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award:Diana Souhami’s gripping true story of the man and the island that inspired Robinson Crusoe
This action-filled biography follows Alexander Selkirk, an eighteenth-century Scottish buccaneer who sailed the South Seas plundering for gold. But an ill-fated expedition in 1703 led to shipwreck on remote Juan Fernández Island off the coast of Chile. Selkirk, the ship’s master, was accused of inciting mutiny and abandoned on the uninhabited island with nothing but his clothing, his pistol, a knife, and a Bible. Each day he searched the sea for a ship that would rescue him and prayed for help that seemed never to come.
In solitude and silence Selkirk gradually learned to adapt. He killed seals and goats for food and used their skin for clothing. He learned how to build a house, forage for food, create stores, plant seeds, light a fire, and tame cats. Then one day, a ship with wooden sails appeared on the horizon. The crew was greeted by a bearded savage, incoherent and fierce. Selkirk had been marooned for four years and four months. Now he was about to return to the world of men.
The story of a verdant, mysterious archipelago and its famous castaway is both a parable about nature and a remarkable account of the survival of a man cut off from civilization.
“Souhami’s account is brief yet dense with catalogued arcana. Her speculations about Selkirk’s thoughts may be her own, but she brings the man and his shipmates to life. Literary history compressed into capsule-size that goes down like a charm.” —Kirkus Reviews
Diana Souhami is the author of many highly acclaimed books: Selkirk’s Island, winner of the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award; The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and winner of the Lambda Literary Award; the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 1997; Natalie and Romaine; Gertrude and Alice; Greta and Cecil; Gluck: Her Biography; and others. She lives in London and Devon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daniel Defoe based his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe on the trials and tribulations of Scottish seaman Alexander Selkirk. Souhami (The Trials of Radclyffe Hall) draws on journals, maritime histories, and ship and parish records to detail his engrossing story. Born the seventh son of a poor cobbler, Selkirk fought violently with his brothers and dreamed about the "adventure, gold and escape" that the sea seemed to promise. In 1703, at the age of 23, he joined a looting expedition led by William Dampier, an experienced pirate who plundered the treasures of French and Spanish ships on the South Seas. But appalling conditions on the journey scurvy, hunger and a leaky ship (worms ate through its wooden hull) led to mutiny against the drunken and belligerent Dampier. After quarreling with a new captain, Selkirk (who was very belligerent himself) was put ashore on Juan Fern ndez, an uninhabited island hundreds of miles off the coast of Chile. Souhami provides arresting descriptions of the island and the life Selkirk lived on it for more than four years, when hunger and thirst were "diversions" from his solitude. He survived, in part, by eating goats (with whom he also found sexual release), fish and vegetation. Rescued by another Dampier expedition, at first Selkirk was a wild man who had almost lost the power of speech. He did, however, recover from his ordeal: he took two wives, continued to sail and died at sea in 1721. Complete with detailed comparisons between Defoe's novel and Selkirk's life, Souhami's account is a well-researched investigation of a forgotten antihero.
