Lost Robinsons: Desert Island Survival

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

According to the novel by Daniel Defoe, on June 10, Robinson Crusoe returned to England after 28 years on a desert island. Columnist of m24.ru Alexey Baikov tells stories of real Robinsonades.

Robinson Crusoe, aka Captain Blood

It is believed that the prototype of the protagonist of the novel Defoe was precisely Alexander Selkirk. This fact now seems to be generally known and indisputable. Right now, wake up any high school student who has read at least something, and ask - "what was the name of Robinson Crusoe?" and he, without hesitation, will answer - "Selkirk!". Because that's what it says in the preface to the book.

Only when comparing the adventures of the book Robinson with the history of the real Selkirk's Robinson, a number of inconsistencies are immediately revealed. We will talk about them a little later, but for now it is worth immediately dispelling any theories and saying that for fiction this is in the order of things. Especially for the adventure, written in the centuries before last, when it was impossible to say a lot directly. And without any politics, many authors were simply not interested in turning the life of a real person into an entertaining reading, and in some especially difficult cases it was fraught with legal action.

It was much easier to "collect" your character from several real-life people and spice up the fictitious circumstances with hints that allowed an understanding public to guess what this was really about. For example, Dumas hid in the story about Milady and diamond pendants a hint of the famous "necklace scam", which, according to Mirabeau, became a prologue to the French Revolution. And many authors of fiction did the same thing before and after him.

So, as of today, at least three are claiming the place of the Robinson Crusoe prototype: Alexander Selkirk itself, Henry Pitman and the Portuguese Fernao Lopez. Let's start with the second, in order to at the same time explain where in this story Captain Blood suddenly came from from a completely different book.

An unremarkable English doctor, Henry Pitman, once went to visit his mother in the small town of Sanford, in South Lancashire. It happened just in 1685, when James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and part-time bastard of Charles II, landed in the port of Lyme in Dorset to lead all those dissatisfied with the accession to the English throne of "papist" Jacob Stewart. Pitman joined the rebels not because he was an adherent of the idea of "good old England", but rather out of curiosity and assuming that someone "might need his services." The services were really required - the young doctor was quickly noticed by Monmouth himself and appointed his personal surgeon.

The uprising did not last even a year. On July 4, at Sedzhmoor, the royal forces utterly defeated the army of Monmouth, which consisted mainly of farmers and burghers, armed with scythes, sickles and other pickaxes. Disguised in a peasant dress, the duke tried to hide in a roadside ditch, but was pulled out and hanged. And while they were getting him out of there, the royal troops carefully combed the surroundings in search of not only the scattered rebels, but also those who could provide them at least some help. Pitman was still lucky - he was captured and tried, and many others, less fortunate, were killed on the spot on the mere suspicion that they had shared at least a piece of bread with one of Monmouth's supporters.

From this moment, in fact, the story of Peter Blood, known to us, begins. According to one of the points adopted after the defeat of the "Bloody Assiz" uprising, the healing of the rebels was equated with participation in the uprising. And all the participants, in fact, were supposed to have one and a half meters of official rope on their brother. But here, again, fortunately for the real Pitman and the fictional Blood, a small financial hole was discovered at the crown, so they decided to sell everyone who had not yet been hanged into slavery in the West Indies. At that time, it was a quite widespread practice, similar to Stalin's sentence "10 years without the right to correspond."

Then everything again matches up to the letter. A batch of "convict slaves" was taken to Barbados, where Pitman was bought by the planter Robert Bishop (those who read Sabatini sigh again at the abundance of coincidences). The former doctor categorically did not like chopping and carrying sugar cane. He tried to protest, for which he was mercilessly whipped, and then subjected to the most terrible punishment for tropical latitudes - put up for a day in stocks under the scorching sun. After lying down, Pitman firmly decided - it was time to run. He secretly bought a boat from a local carpenter and together with nine companions, choosing a darker night, sailed away to nowhere.

Here the life of Peter Blood ends, and the story of Robinson Crusoe of interest to us begins. Finally, you can recall that the navigator on the "Arabella" was called Jeremy Peet. The hint is pretty obvious.

Well, in reality, Pitman's boat got into a storm. It is not clear what they were counting on at all - apparently that they would be picked up rather quickly by a French, Dutch or pirate ship. But the sea judged differently. All the passengers on the boat died, except for Pitman, who was thrown onto the uninhabited island of Salt Tortuga off the coast of Venezuela. There he settled down, and even found his Friday - an Indian, recaptured by him from the Spanish corsairs who accidentally swam to the island. In 1689 he nevertheless returned to England, was amnestied and published the book "The Tale of the Great Suffering and Wonderful Adventures of the Surgeon Henry Pitman". It came out 30 years before the first publication of Daniel Defoe's novel. Most likely, they were old friends, considering that the author of "Robinson Crusoe" also took part in the Monmouth rebellion, but somehow escaped punishment.

Alexander Selkirk in person

With "Robinson No. 2" sorted out, it's time to say a few words about No. 1. Alexander Selkirk was a pirate, that is, excuse me, a corsair or privateer, as you like. The only difference was that while some were robbing in the Caribbean at their own peril and risk, while others were doing the same, having an official patent on their pockets, and even the crowned persons invested in organizing their expeditions. It was on such a ship that 19-year-old Alexander Selkreg was hired by a certain captain Thomas Streidling.

Yes, yes, no typo, that's exactly what his real name sounded like. Just before boarding the ship, he changed her because of a quarrel with his father and brother. The Selkregs seem to have had an unbearable temperament that was inherited through the male line. In the sea, this feature of him manifested itself in full breadth, and over the year the new ship's carpenter got so bad for Captain Streidling and the whole crew that, while staying on the island of Mas a Tierra off the coast of Chile, they decided to get rid of him.

In fact, the pirate landing on a desert island was considered a more brutal alternative to the famous "boardwalk". As a rule, such a punishment was assigned to the members of the team guilty of the mutiny, or to the captain in the event that the mutiny was successful. The island was selected as far as possible from busy sea routes and, preferably, without sources of fresh water. Those sentenced to disembark on the road were given a gentleman's kit: some food, a flask of water, and a pistol with one bullet in the barrel. The hint is more than transparent - you could drink and eat everything, and then carry out the death sentence yourself, or die painfully from hunger and thirst. Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard, treated the characters of the famous song "Fifteen Men for a Dead Man's Chest" even more fun, giving them a bottle of rum instead of water. Strong alcohol in the heat makes you thirsty, and the Dead Man's Chest is the name of a small rock in the British Virgin Islands group, completely devoid of all vegetation. So the song, in general, is not far from the truth.

But Selkirk was not a rebel, and his only fault was that he did not know how to get along with people. Apparently, therefore, he was not given a "suicide bomber set" with him, but everything necessary for survival: a musket with a supply of gunpowder and bullets, a blanket, a knife, an ax, a telescope, tobacco and a Bible.

Having all this, a hereditary carpenter could easily arrange his Robinson life. Walking around the island, he discovered an abandoned Spanish fort, where he found a small supply of gunpowder hidden just in case. In the surrounding forests, wild goats, imported by the same Spaniards, peacefully grazed. It became clear that death by starvation certainly did not threaten him. Selkirk's problems were of a completely different kind.

Since Mas a Tierra was first discovered by the Spaniards, it was their ships that most often passed by the island, stopping here to replenish fresh water supplies. Meeting with them did not bode well for the sailor who was expelled from the British corsair ship. With a high degree of probability, Selkirk could immediately, without unnecessary ceremony, be hanged on the yard, or they could have been "thrown" to the nearest colony to be tried there and sold into slavery. That is why the real Robinson, unlike the book one, was not happy with every potential savior, and when he saw a sail on the horizon, he did not make a fire to the skies, but, on the contrary, tried to hide in the jungle as best as possible.

After 4 years and 4 months, luck finally smiled at him in the face of the British privateer Duke, who accidentally stuck to the island, commanded by Woods Rogers - the prototype of the governor of the same name from the Black Sails TV series. He kindly treated Selkirk, tonsured, changed, fed and returned to England, where he suddenly became a national celebrity and also published a book about his adventures. True, he did not manage to sit at home - as a true sailor, he died on board the ship, and his body rested somewhere off the coast of West Africa. The island of Mas a Tierra in 1966 was renamed by the Chilean authorities to the island of Robinson Crusoe.

Poor unfortunate Lopez

The Robinsons # 3 candidate was discovered relatively recently by the Portuguese explorer Fernanda Durao Ferreira. In her opinion, Defoe was inspired by the adventures of Fernao Lopez, set out in the marine chronicles of the 16th century. Like Selkirk, Lopez became a reluctant Robinson - he was a soldier in the Portuguese colonial contingent in India and defected to the enemy during the siege of Goa. When military luck once again changed and the troops of Admiral Albuquerque still recaptured the city from Yusuf Adil-Shah, the defector was taken prisoner, his right hand, ears and nose were cut off, and on the way back they landed St. Helena, where Napoleon ended his days 300 years later.

There he spent the next few years, settled down and even got himself Friday - a Javanese thrown out by a storm. And as a pet he had a trained rooster who followed him everywhere like a dog. During this time, St. Elena was repeatedly molested by ships, but Lopez categorically did not want to go out to people. When they did find him, for a long time he refused to even talk to his saviors, and instead muttered "O poor poor Lopez." So there are still parallels with the hero Defoe - he, too, constantly kept repeating to himself under his breath, "I am poor, unfortunate Robinson."

In the end, Lopez was persuaded to board the ship. There he was put in order, fed and taken to Portugal, where he had already become something of a legend. He was offered pardon from the king and complete indulgence from the Pope, as well as life support in any of the monasteries, but he chose to return to the island, where he died in 1545.

Robinsons and Robinsons

If one day someone rallies his strength and writes a complete history of survivors on uninhabited islands, then her reader may get the impression that there were no uninhabited islands in the oceans at all. On every piece of land the size of a football field, at least someone once lived, And these are only the famous Robinsons, that is, those lucky few who, in the end, were found and rescued. Much more of those who remained on their island, they will be lucky to return to history unless by sheer coincidence, if tourists or archaeologists suddenly stumble upon their remains. But the list of survivors and rescued in itself is impressive - how amazing they were and how nontrivial were the circumstances, thanks to which they ended up on a desert island. An ordinary person could not always find the strength in himself so that, finding himself in a practically hopeless situation, not to break down and literally force himself to survive, in spite of everything. We can say that these people "prepared" to become Robinsons from childhood, without knowing about it.

Margarita de la Roque - Robinson for love

A young and inexperienced girl just wanted to see the world - women from the noble class in those days rarely had such happiness. When in 1542 her either her own or her cousin Jean-François de la Roque de Roberval was appointed governor of New France (Canada), Marguerite begged him to take her with him. Well, on the way, it turned out that absolute power and going beyond the framework of civilization can corrupt a person beyond recognition and turn him into a real monster.

On board the ship, Margarita began an affair with one of the crew members. When everything was revealed, Jean-François was furious at such an attempt on the family honor and ordered to drop his sister on the deserted island of Demons off the coast of Quebec. According to other sources, her lover was ordered to disembark, and she followed him voluntarily along with her maid.

As soon as they managed to somehow rebuild and, with the help of muskets, explain to the wolves and bears that they were no longer welcome in this part of the island, it turned out that Margarita was pregnant. Her child died almost immediately after birth, then a servant and, finally, her lover followed him into another world. Margarita de la Roque was left alone on the Demon Island. Since practically nothing edible grew there, she had to learn to shoot and hunt in order to feed herself. In 1544, Basque fishermen accidentally brought there by a storm discovered Margarita and brought home. She was immediately given an audience with Queen Margaret of Navarre, who recorded her story for her collection Heptameron, thanks to which this story has survived to this day.

Pomeranian Robinsons

In 1743, the merchant Yeremey Okladnikov from the city of Mezen, Arkhangelsk province, equipped a koch at his own expense, hired a team and sent it to hunt whales off the island of Spitsbergen. The base for the expedition was to serve as the Starotinskoe encampment located on the coast, which consisted of three huts and a bathhouse - hunters from all over the Russian North stayed there. At the moment of leaving the mouth of the White Sea, a strong north-west that swooped in knocked the koch off course and carried it to the coast of Maly Island. Brown to the east of Svalbard, where the ship is frozen solid in the ice. This land was well known to the Pomors, and the feeder Aleksey Khimkov knew that not so long ago the hunters from Arkhangelsk had visited here, who seemed to be going to winter and cut down a hut for this. Four people were sent in search of her: the helmsman himself, the sailors Fyodor Verigin and Stepan Sharapov, and a 15-year-old boy named Ivan. The exploration was successful - the hut was in its place and its previous inhabitants even managed to fold the stove. There they spent the night, and in the morning, returning to the shore, the scouts found that all the ice around the island had disappeared, and with it the ship. I had to do something.

In principle, they had everything for a successful Robinsonade: going in search of a hut, the party took with them guns and a supply of gunpowder, some food, an ax and a kettle. The island was full of deer and polar foxes, so at first they were not threatened with starvation, but gunpowder tends to run out. In addition, Little Brown was by no means in the Caribbean, winter was just approaching, and there was practically no vegetation above the bootleg on the island. They were saved by the "fin" - in this place the sea regularly washed ashore a wide variety of pieces of wood, from the wreckage of dead ships to trees that fell somewhere in the water. Some of the wreckage had nails and hooks sticking out. Having exhausted their reserves of gunpowder, the Pomors made bows and arrows for themselves, and during their Robinsonade they killed with them some unimaginable amount of local fauna: about 300 deer and about 570 Arctic foxes. From the clay found on the island, they made dishes and oil lamps-smokehouses for themselves. From animal skins they learned to sew clothes, in a word they repeated Defoe's novel practically word for word. They even managed to avoid the scourge of all polar explorers - scurvy, thanks to the decoctions of herbs that Aleksey Khimkov cooked.

Six years and three months later, they were discovered and picked up by one of Count Shuvalov's ships. All four returned to Arkhangelsk, successfully sold the fox skins collected during their imprisonment on Maly Brown, and became very rich on that. But the fate of their boat and the remaining crew members is still unknown.

Leendert Hasenbosch is a loser Dutchman

In 1748, British captain Mawson discovered sun-bleached bones and the diary of a Dutch sailor sentenced to maroning (as the punishment for disembarking on a desert island was officially called) on one of the islands of the Ascension archipelago for homosexual cohabitation with another member of the crew. They even left him some utensils, a tent, a Bible and writing materials, but they forgot about gunpowder, so his musket turned out to be a useless piece of iron.

At first, the Dutchman ate seabirds, which he knocked down with stones, and turtles. The worst thing was with water - its source was located a few kilometers from the coast, where he got his food. As a result, the poor fellow had to carry water in bowlers for almost half a day. Six months later, the source dried up and the Dutchman began to drink his own urine. And then he slowly and in terrible agony died of thirst.

Juana Maria - the sad maiden of the island of San Nicolas

Initially, this island off the coast of California was quite inhabited - a tiny Indian tribe settled there, living in its own isolated world and gradually hunting sea animals. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was completely exterminated by a party of Russian sea otter hunters who accidentally swam to the island. Only a couple of dozen people survived, whose salvation was taken up by the holy fathers from the Catholic mission of Santa Barbrara. In 1835, they sent a ship for the surviving Indians, but right during the landing a storm broke out, forcing the captain to give an urgent order to sail. As it turned out later, in the confusion, one of the women was forgotten on the island.

There she spent the next 18 years. And by the way, thanks to the skills learned from childhood to turn the gifts of nature into things useful for the household, I got a good job. From the bones of whales that were washed ashore, she built herself a hut, from the skin of fur seals and seagull feathers she sewed clothes for herself, and from the bush and seaweed growing on the island, she wove baskets, bowls and other utensils.

In 1853 she was found by the captain of the hunting ship George Naidwer. He took a 50-year-old woman with him to Santa Barbara, but there it turned out that no one was even able to understand what she was saying, since by that time those who remained from her tribe had died for various reasons and their language was completely forgotten. She was baptized and named Juana Maria, but she was not destined to start a new life under this name - two months later, she burned out from amoebic dysentery.

Ada Blackjack is a fearless innuit

In search of adventure, need drove her - her husband and older brother died, and her only son fell ill with tuberculosis. To earn a little money, she hired a cook and seamstress on the ship of the Canadian polar explorer Williamur Stefansson, who intended to establish a permanent settlement on Wrangel Island. On September 16, 1921, the ship landed the first batch of five winterers, including Ada, on the island. And the next summer they were promised to send them a shift. At first, everything went well - the settlers killed a dozen polar bears, several dozen seals and without counting birds, which allowed them to create very good reserves of meat and fat. Winter passed, summer came, and the ship he had promised did not appear. The next winter, they began to starve. Three wintering participants decided to get to the mainland on the ice of the Chukchi Sea, went into impenetrable ice hell and disappeared without a trace. Ada, the sick Lorne Knight and the ship's cat Vic remained on the island. In April 1923, Knight died and Ada was left alone. With a cat, of course.

She spent the next five months hunting Arctic foxes, ducks and seals in conditions that would have made the adventures of the 18th-century Pomor Robinsons an easy picnic. In the end, she was taken off the island by another member of Stefansson's expedition, Harold Noyce. Ada took with her a good supply of Arctic fox pelts obtained during the Robinsonade, which she sold, finally, was able to pay for her son's treatment.

Pavel Vavilov - wartime robinson

On August 22, 1942, the Soviet icebreaker "Alexander Sibiryakov" took an unequal battle with the German cruiser "Admiral Scheer" off the coast of about. Homemade in the Kara Sea. During these events, the first class fireman Pavel Vavilov found himself in the part of the ship cut off by fire, and therefore he simply did not hear the command to open the kingstones and leave the ship. The explosion threw him into the water, torn off lifeboats floated nearby, in one of which Vavilov found three boxes with biscuits, matches, axes, a supply of fresh water and a revolver with a supply of cartridges for two drums. On the way, he rescued a sleeping bag with warm clothes folded inside and a burnt dog from the water. Armed with such a set, he sailed to Belukha Island.

There he found a small gas beacon built of wood, in which he settled. It was impossible to hunt - a family of polar bears settled on the island interfered, so Vavilov had to interrupt himself with a brew of biscuits and bran and wait for at least someone to notice and save him.

But the lighthouse and the fire lit on the shore passing by the court seemed to be deliberately ignored. Finally, 30 days later, a seaplane flew over the island and dropped a bag of chocolate, condensed milk and cigarettes, in which there was a note "We see you, but we cannot land, a very big wave. Tomorrow we will fly again." But storms raged such that the famous polar pilot Ivan Cherevichny was able to break through to Belukha Island only after 4 days. The plane landed on the water and the rubber boat that approached the shore finally completed Vavilov's 35-day robinsonade.

The Kennedy Coconut Diet

The future president of the United States also had a chance to play the game - in 1943, the PT-109 torpedo boat, which he commanded, was attacked by a Japanese destroyer. Two crew members were killed and two more were injured. Eight sailors, along with their captain, were in the water. From the wreckage floating around, they hastily built a raft, loaded the wounded into it, and in a few hours reached a tiny piece of land that bore the name of Raisin Pudding Island.

There were no edible animals or water on the island, but coconut trees grew in abundance, which provided them with food and drink for several days. Kennedy thought of scratching messages on the coconut shells asking for help and indicating the coordinates. Soon one of these messages was nailed to the board of a New Zealand torpedo boat, which took the Americans off the island. For saving the lives of his subordinates, the future president received from the command the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and from grateful compatriots - the nickname "the red prince of America", with whom he will enter politics after the war

Williams Haas - Get The Savior In The Face

In 1980, a yacht, driven by athlete Williams Haas, was blown to pieces by a storm in the Bahamas. Without any problems, Haas managed to swim to the tiny island of Mira Por Vos.

The problems started further. In this area, shipping was quite busy, but as Haas did not try, not a single ship reacted to the fire he set. The poor fellow had to build a hut for himself, make a desalination plant for drinking water and learn to catch lizards. As it turned out later, the sailors of Mira who went in this area considered Vos a cursed place and they feared to stick to its shores. Because of this superstition, Haas stayed on his island for three whole months and managed to become a complete misanthrope. His hatred of humanity took on such an aggressive form that he met the helicopter pilot who had flown in after him not with shouts of joy, but with a direct hook to the jaw.