'Solitude and the care of providing for his subsistence,' says Paw, 'had so occupied his mind, that all rational ideas were effaced from it. As savage as the animals, and perhaps more so, he had almost entirely forgotten the secret of articulating intelligible sounds.'
Captain Rogers having asked him how long he had been secluded in this island, Selkirk remained silent; he nevertheless understood the question, for his eyes immediately opened with terror, as if he had just measured the long space of time which his exile had lasted. He was far from having an exact idea of it; he appreciated it only by the sufferings he had endured there, and, looking fixedly at his hands, he opened and shut them several times.
Reckoning by the number of his fingers, it was twenty or thirty years, and every one at first believed in the accuracy of his calculation, so completely did his forehead, furrowed with wrinkles, his skin blackened, withered by the sun, his hair whitened at the roots, his gray beard, give him the aspect of an old man.
Selkirk was born in 1680; he was then only twenty-nine.
After having replied thus, he turned his head, cast a troubled look on the objects which surrounded him; a remembrance seemed to awaken, and, uttering a cry, stepping forward, he pointed with his finger to a cedar on his left. It was the tree on which, when he left the Swordfish, he had inscribed the date of his arrival in the island. The officer Dower approached, and, notwithstanding the crumbling of the decayed bark, could still read there this inscription:
'Alexander Selkirk—from Largo, Scotland, Oct. 27, 1704.'
His exile from the world had therefore lasted four years and three months.
Notwithstanding the interest excited by his misfortunes, by his name, his accent, more than by his language, Captain Rogers, an honorable and humane man, but of extreme severity on all that appertained to discipline, recognized him as a British subject, suspected him to be a deserter from the English navy, and gave orders that he should be put under guard, pending a definitive decision.
The sailors commissioned to this office did not find it an easy thing to guard a prisoner who could climb the trees like a squirrel, and outstrip them all in a race. As a precaution, they commenced by binding him firmly to the same cedar on which his name was engraved. There the unfortunate Selkirk figured as a curious animal, ornamented with a label.
Afterwards, more for pastime than through mischief, they tormented him with questions, to obtain from him hesitating or almost senseless replies, which bewildered him much; then they began to examine, with childish surprise, the length of his beard, of his hair and nails; the prodigious development of his muscles; his bare feet, so hardened by travel, that they seemed to be covered with horn moccasins. Having found beneath his goat-skin rags, a knife, whose blade, by dint of use and sharpening, was almost reduced to the proportions of that of a penknife, they took it away to examine it; but on seeing himself deprived of this single weapon, the only relic of his shipwreck, the prisoner struggled, uttering wild howls; they restored it to him.