He was a man of no particular education, his journal entries were circumstantial, and he wanted literary polish to his seaman’s prose. It would not, he knew, woo readers to tell them, as did Cooke, that Selkirk’s story was ‘the most barren Subject that Nature can afford’.
He sought Richard Steele’s help. Steele was a fat man, fond of drink and prone to gout. He walked with a cane and on bad days with crutches.* He could not have chased goats on an uninhabited island, or survived scrimp rations in a leaky ship. But he saw in Selkirk’s story evidence of Christian piety, the vanity of riches and the indomitability of Man.
He was curious to meet this abandoned man. Rogers introduced them and they had Coffee House conversations at the end of 1711. Steele questioned Selkirk in line with his own interest: what had been his quarrel with Stradling, what possessions did he have when marooned, what creatures threatened him, what did he eat, how did he endure the isolation, what sort of dwelling had he built, what did he read, how often did he pray, how did he cope with his return to society, how had the experience of The Island changed him.
Rogers called his book A Cruising Voyage Round the World. To vie with Cooke his title page advertised ‘the Taking of the Acapulco Ship and An Account of Alexander Selkirk living alone four Years and four Months in an Island’. His version was more than a tale of derring-do, fortune hunting and of a marooned man who survived to make the journey home. Selkirk was transmuted into a Christian, a Patriot, the Governor of The Island.
Rogers gave again the facts of abandonment, the possessions Selkirk had, the huts he built, the clothes he sewed. But in the minds of those who could not know The Island, its seisms, eruptions and squalling winds, its ravines and jagged peaks, its yellow orchids, spiny bromeliae and hummingbirds, Selkirk had been alone four years and months on an indeterminate bit of land – sand, with scant palms and an encircling sea. It was not The Island that was of interest, it was Man, who in the image of God, got the better of wherever he was. ‘Nothing but the Divine Providence’ Rogers was prompted to write, ‘could have supported any Man.’
Selkirk, in his isolation, moved from piracy to piety, from rape and plunder to a state of grace. Abandoned on The Island he did not fuck goats or rail at the sky. ‘He employ’d himself in reading, singing Psalms and praying’.
Solitude and Retirement from the World is not such an unsufferable State of Life as most Men imagine, especially when People are fairly call’d or thrown into it unavoidably, as this Man was.
Selkirk was sustained not by The Island but by God. In his closeness to God he ‘found means to supply his Wants in a very natural manner’. Scavenging for food and chopping trees for shelter was inconvenient, but the results were on a par with ‘all our Arts and Society’. And there was a moral for readers, comfortable in their libraries and lounges:
how much a plain and temperate way of living conduces to the Health of the Body and the Vigour of the Mind, both of which we are apt to destroy by Excess and Plenty, especially of strong Liquor, and the Variety as well as the Nature of our Meat and Drink: for this Man when he came to our ordinary Method of Diet and Life, tho he was sober enough, lost much of his Strength and Agility. But I must quit these Reflections, which are more proper for a Philosopher and Divine than a Mariner.
Selkirk read this account of who he was and concurred. Perhaps it was like that. God determined the day. Time had passed. The experience was distanced. Memories were lost and fragmented. It was all over in a temporal way, the extravagant isolation, the ordeal of life without a human voice. On The Island waves broke loud against the ridge of the shore.
1713 When I Was Not Worth a Farthing
ONE YEAR later Richard Steele, profited on his own account from Selkirk’s adventure. Like Rogers, Steele was in debt and acquainted with creditors.† He faced repeated lawsuits for money. He owed to his tailor, goldsmith and upholsterer and for arrears in rent, and to friends. Even Joseph Addison, a literary collaborator since their schooldays, went to court to recover money from him.* Steele needed to make his pen pay.
In October 1713 he started a journal, the Englishman.* His intention with it was ‘to rouze in this divided Nation that lost Thing called Publick Spirit’. He published it until February 1714. He said that it exposed him ‘to much Hatred and Invective’. His ‘Brother Scribbler’ Jonathan Swift was rude about it and him:
Mr Steele publishes every day a penny paper, to be read in coffee-houses and get him a little money… He hath no invention, nor is master of a tolerable style… Being the most imprudent man alive, he never follows the advice of his friends, but is wholly at the mercy of fools or knaves, or hurried away by his own caprice; by which he hath committed more absurdities in economy, friendship, love, duty, good manners, politics, religion and writing, than ever fell to one man’s share.†
In the Englishman Steele wrote about Patriotism, Passive Obedience and the Protestant Succession. Occasionally he diverted to lighter things. Issue 21 was on the pleasures of a country drive in a chaise, 34 was about a visit to Oxford, and 26 was devoted to Selkirk on The Island.
With a journalist’s flam, at the start of this article Steele promised to relate ‘an Adventure so uncommon, that it’s doubtful whether the like has happen’d to any of human Race’. To give a sense of verity he told of the conversations he had held with
