HIS story is supposed to have given rise to one of the first and most famous novels in the English language that created two unforgettable characters in Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday.

Yet Alexander Selkirk, the Scot who supposedly inspired the English author and spy Daniel Defoe to write The Life and Strange Surprising Adventure of Robinson Crusoe, spent less than a sixth of the time that Crusoe endured on a “desert” island, and never saw another human in his time as a marooned sailor.

Not only did he not have a Man Friday, or help a ship’s captain face down a mutiny – in fact, he was the mutineer – Selkirk had no human encounters at all and, while his tale might well have inspired Defoe in some way, the story of a sailor marooned on a desert island was a recurring theme in early literature.

What’s more, his name wasn’t even Selkirk. For as the local Kirk records show, Alexander was born in Lower Largo in Fife in 1676, the seventh child of John Selchcraig. It’s a name that was more normally rendered as Selcraig, a surname that does derive from Selkirk, so we will stick with Alexander Selkirk to avoid confusion.

There is no doubt that Defoe, who also changed his real name as he was born a simple Foe, knew of Selkirk’s story because he had been in Scotland on numerous occasions before and after the Act of Union spying for the Government of Queen Anne, and he kept in touch with Scottish affairs for the rest of his life. The pamphleteer and spy was both an ex-convict and former bankrupt who somehow ended up in the employ of King George I’s government and also managed to write The Family Instructor, published in 1715, an early self-help book on raising children that proved highly popular, not least because it was entertaining in parts.The National:

By 1717, Defoe was still keeping an eye on things in Scotland and preparing to compile his Memoirs of the Church of Scotland. After more than a year of writing, in 1719 he published his first novel Robinson Crusoe. Quite remarkably, he never credited Selkirk with being the inspiration for Crusoe, but Selkirk’s tale was very widely known, and had been ever since he returned home safe and well in 1711, when Defoe was definitely in touch with Scotland as his History of the Union of Great Britain had been published in the capital two years previously.

At the very least, Defoe should at least have said ‘yes, this Scottish sailor is my source’ or dispelled the legend altogether. He never did either.

What’s more, as a pioneer of journalism of sorts – he could not do objectivity and was the monarch’s man – Defoe should have realised that Selkirk’s life story was in itself a major tale, one that should have been told factually. For some of the details of Selkirk’s adventures are quite remarkable and we modern Scots really should know more about this engaging though sometimes irritating character.

Not the least of the strange things about Selkirk was the fact that he was the seventh son of a seventh son, and his mother Euphan, née Mackie, said he was “special” and had to be treated as such. No wonder he became something of an opinionated spoilt brat.

In the 1829 work The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, The Real Robinson Crusoe – sub-titled A Narrative Founded on Facts – by John Howell, which is one of several books about Selkirk, we learn that Mrs Selcraig “apparently believed that Alex, as the seventh son, was blessed with luck and should be encouraged in his dreams of going to sea. His father, John, wanted the lad to stay home and help with his tannery and shoemaking business, creating a simmering dispute that caused so much “domestic strife and bickering,” Howell writes, that John threatened “to disinherit Alex,” as Bruce Selcraig, descendant of that family, put it in his excellent article on Selkirk in the Smithsonian Magazine a few years ago.

We know from Kirk records that Selkirk certainly thought he was a bit of a Jack the Lad. He was hauled before the Kirk Session for offences ranging from the carnal to the brutal, on one occasion being reprimanded for beating up his father and brother.

He was due another appearance before the Session in 1695 but skipped away two days prior to that appointment. He was just 19, and did not fancy a career in his father’s business, so ran away to sea. There is some suggestion that the family were not too upset to be rid of the hot-headed and arrogant youth.

Selkirk may or may not have taken part in the ill-fated Darien Expedition that collapsed into ignominy and left a lot of Scots in debt, but he was back in Lower Largo as an experienced mariner – there is some evidence that he had learned navigation – in 1701, only to attract more Kirk justice.

He left Fife in 1703, to take a position aboard the ships of Captain William Dampier, a licensed privateer who was intending to sail to the Pacific and basically capture and plunder any Spanish ship he fancied, England and Spain being at war at the time. In other words, Selkirk became a pirate.

The raid did not go well at first, but Dampier headed into the Pacific, intent on making his way to the Juan Fernandez archipelago some 400 miles off the coast of Chile. He had been there more than 20 years before and knew it would make a good base for piracy. On the way, Dampier fell out with his fellow commander, Captain Thomas Stradling, on whose ship, Cinque Ports, Selkirk served. Stradling only got the job because the original Captain, Charles Pickering, died of a fever which claimed up to 15 of the crew.

Selkirk was becoming more and more concerned about the state of their ship, and now sailing alone, the waterlogged Cinque Ports made a sorry sight as she approached Juan Fernandez and tied up in a bay on the second largest island of the archipelago, Mas a Tierra, so called because it was “more to the land”. It was officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Forever blunt, the hot-headed Selkirk told Stradling exactly what he thought of the ship, and Stradling replied by “inviting” him to go ashore and stay there. Off went Selkirk in high dudgeon but with the sense to take his musket, pistol, tobacco and the other accoutrements that would save his life.

Selkirk expected the rest of the crew to see sense and join his mutiny. Instead he had to beg Stradling to let him back on board, only for Cinque Ports to sail away and leave the Scotsman marooned. He would stay on the island on his own for the next four years and four months – Stradling and his ship made it to Colombia where Cinque Ports went down and the survivors were captured by the Spanish.

The crew endured hellish conditions in Lima’s jail, while by his own account, Selkirk soon came to enjoy his “desert” island. For it was no desert but actually a fertile place with an abundance of goats that became his meat and his clothing, his short experience as a tanner coming into play.

ANOTHER Scot, this time Maria Graham, wrote about Juan Fernandez a century later in one of her many popular books on travel. She wrote: “Having completed our water we sailed from Juan Fernandez highly pleased with our visit. Cattle and wine and vegetables could be produced here to a great extent but any nation that takes possession of it as a harbour would have to import corn.

“The island might maintain easily 2000 persons exchanging the surplus beef wines and brandy for bread and clothing and its wood and its water besides its other conveniences would render it valuable as a port in the Pacific. As it is our whalers resort thither continually. The three bays called the East the West and the Middle Roads are all under the lee of the island so that the water is always smooth they are all well watered and very beautiful.”

Allowing for improvements made by the Spanish occupants, it is clear Juan Fernandez and Mas a Tierra were no deserts. They were unoccupied, however, and realising he was a hermit, Selkirk set about making his life as comfortable as possible.

The only human life he saw in his time were the crews of two Spanish vessels who would have killed him had they found him. Selkirk memorably told the story of climbing high into a tree while the Spaniards urinated against it, not knowing he was there.

On February 2, 1709, Captain Woodes Rogers of the privateer Duke landed on Mas a Tierra and found Selkirk in great good health and mentally strong. Captain Rogers wrote: “One may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably, as this man was.”

Selkirk had also grown incredibly fit as Rogers observed: “He ran with wonderful Swiftness thro the Woods and up the Rocks and Hills. We had a Bull-Dog, which we sent with several of our nimblest Runners, to help him in catching goats; but he distanc’d and tir’d both the Dog and the Men.”

As soon as Selkirk got home, having completed a round-the-world trip during which he assisted in several piratical adventures, the story of his extraordinary survival spread far and wide, and despite his earlier travails with the Kirk, he was hailed as a good Christian hero.

That didn’t last long, as he was soon in trouble with the law and was jailed in Bristol for assault. Freed, he returned to Lower Largo, and for a time lived in a cave, but not for long as he eloped to London with a dairymaid, Sophia Bruce.

He then joined the Royal Navy and may have committed bigamy as he married a widowed innkeeper in Plymouth. Sadly his first major voyage as a master’s mate aboard HMS Weymouth ended in tragedy as Selkirk contracted yellow fever and died aged 46 on December 13, 1721. He was buried at sea off the west coast of Africa.

Selkirk’s story was too close to that of Crusoe for there not to have been a connection in the mind of Defoe, and researchers have discovered that Defoe did meet with Captain Rogers, so in all probability Alexander Selkirk was indeed Robinson Crusoe, even if the tale is set in the Caribbean and Crusoe is marooned for 28 years.

Such was the immense popularity of the novel that the story of the marooned sailor conquering all his travails is a recurring theme in literature and culture – Tom Hanks played just such a character in the 2000 movie Cast Away.

Selkirk was also named as such by writers as different as Charles Dickens and WS Gilbert, while the poet William Cowper wrote The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk which contains the famous line “the monarch of all I survey”.

In Lower Largo, there is a statue of Alexander Selkirk and a room dedicated to his memory. Fife really should do more with the legacy of this remarkable Scotsman.