ROBINSON CRUSOE'S ISLAND.
The island of Juan Fernandez has always been said to be the island on which Robinson Crusoe was cast away. Nothing can be further from the truth. Crusoe never saw Juan Fernandez, and, so far as we know, never once so much as thought of casting himself away there.
No man has ever charged Robinson Crusoe with not telling the truth. He may have had his faults—and he certainly did show very little judgment when he built his first boat so far from the shore that he could not possibly launch it—but he always told the truth. We ought therefore to believe what he says about the situation of his island. He informs me that, having sailed from Brazil on a voyage to the coast of Guinea, he was driven northward by stormy weather, and was finally wrecked somewhere between the mouth of the river Orinoco and the Caribbean or West India islands. Now the island of Juan Fernandez is in the Pacific Ocean, about three hundred and sixty miles southwest of Valparaiso. To suppose that Crusoe was wrecked on Juan Fernandez, while on his way from Brazil to Guinea, is like saying that a ship on her way from New York to Liverpool was wrecked on one of the Sandwich Islands. Such a story would be perfectly absurd. However, when we have Crusoe's word that he was cast away near the mouth of the Orinoco, there is an end of the matter. He probably could not have told a lie if he had tried to.
In the year 1704 an English vessel called the Cinque Ports came to Juan Fernandez. One of her officers, Alexander Selkirk by name, had quarrelled with the Captain, and he said he would much rather stay on this island than sail any longer on board the Cinque Ports. The Captain was glad to get rid of him, and therefore sailed away, and left him behind. What Selkirk and the Captain had quarrelled about has never been certainly known, but when we reflect that Selkirk was a Scotchman, we can understand that very likely he was unwilling to practice piracy on Sunday, while the captain insisted that any day was a fit day on which to rob a Spanish ship. This would have led to a quarrel, and very possibly was the precise cause of the quarrel which resulted in Selkirk leaving the ship at Juan Fernandez. It is true that the Cinque Ports was called a buccaneer, instead of a pirate, but no man can see the difference between buccaneering and piracy without the help of a large-sized compound microscope.
Selkirk remained all alone on the island for four years and four months, when another English vessel took him off. When he reached home, he wrote an account of his adventures, and very stupid people have since claimed that Daniel Defoe, the author of the story of Crusoe's adventures, had read Selkirk's book, and that it suggested to him the idea of inventing Robinson Crusoe. To suppose that so great a man as Defoe could not write a book without stealing his ideas from Alexander Selkirk is ridiculous. Selkirk and Crusoe were as unlike as two men could well be. The only resemblance between them was that both had lived alone on unfrequented islands, as many other unfortunate men have done before and since.
We thus see how it came to pass that people have mixed up Selkirk's island with Crusoe's island, and have finally convinced themselves that Crusoe was wrecked on Juan Fernandez. Selkirk's island is firmly believed by nearly everybody to have been Crusoe's island, though we might just as well call it Smith's or Jones's island.
It must be admitted that Juan Fernandez is a beautiful island, with every convenience that Crusoe could have wished for, except cannibals. Selkirk, however, could do nothing with it. He did contrive to catch goats by running after them until they were tired out, but he never thought of taming them—fattening them on tomato cans—as Crusoe did. Of course he never had a Man Friday, and he never built himself a canoe, or periagua. In fact, he did very little that was creditable to him, and there is only too much reason to believe that if he had seen a foot-step on the sand, he would not have known that it was his duty to be terribly frightened.
Juan Fernandez is about sixteen miles long and five and a half miles wide. The shore, especially on the northern side, is steep and rocky. The interior is very picturesque, and contains several beautiful valleys separated by high ridges. On the north side of the island is a very steep mountain of lava, which is eight thousand feet high, the top of which is said to be inaccessible. Part way up this mountain is the place where Selkirk used to watch for passing vessels. In one of the valleys there is a cave where Selkirk lived. It is thirty feet in length and about twenty feet in breadth, with a ceiling of nearly twenty feet in height. While it is a fair substantial cave, it can not be compared for a moment with the cave which Crusoe had on his own island, and which he enlarged with so much perseverance.
