WHAT’S THE STORY?

ARGUABLY the most famous novel ever written about a Scot was published 300 years ago today. Unfortunately, the book’s main character was the decidedly un-Scottish Robinson Crusoe although there is little doubt that Daniel Defoe’s great masterpiece was based at least in part on the life and adventures of Alexander Selkirk from Fife.

WHO WAS SELKIRK?

ALEXANDER Selkirk – his surname sometimes appears as Selchcraig or Selcraig – was a shoemaker’s son from Lower Largo. He was a born in 1676 and grew up an unruly youth who ran away to sea to escape his family’s strict religious discipline. By 1703, he was an experienced mariner and gained a master’s position aboard the ships of Captain William Dampier, a licensed privateer who was set to sail to the Pacific and plunder Spanish ships.

Suspecting that the ship he was aboard, the Cinque Ports, was not seaworthy, Selkirk asked to be put ashore on the island of Mas a Tierra in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago some 400 miles off the coast of Chile. The ship duly sank, it should be said.

Selkirk soon realised he was marooned. Only two Spanish ships visited the island in the time Selkirk was there and he memorably related the story of how he hid up a tree while the Spaniards urinated against it, not knowing he was there. It was four years and four months before he was rescued, and a further four years before he returned to the UK. His remarkable accounts of how he survived alone on the island circulated around Britain from 1711 onwards.

Maddeningly for all who love the book, Defoe never once gave definite conformation that Selkirk was the man on whom he based both The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and its sequels The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World.

HOW DID DEFOE KNOW THE SELKIRK STORY?

LARGELY because the writer was the chief spy in Scotland of the Kingdom of England both prior to and after the Act of Union in 1707. Defoe made several trips to Scotland, the most important of which were in 1706 and 1725. On the first journey he was able to work for the Kirk and pass on to the English government huge amounts of information as to how Scottish society was viewing the proposed Treaty of Union.

Interestingly, he had previously worked as a pamphlet writer trying to encourage the English to accept the Union, and after it happened he wrote his own History of the Union which was, some would say, more fiction than fact. After his second major trip to Scotland, which he memorably recounted in his History of Great Britain, Defoe concluded that the Union had not led to as much prosperity for Scotland as he had supposed.

It is likely that Defoe read at least two published newspaper accounts of Selkirk’s adventures before he wrote Crusoe in six months in 1718-19.

Writers and historians have researched many other possible “Crusoes” but the similarities of Selkirk’s adventures to those of the character – apart from there being no Man Friday – tend to suggest that Defoe really was inspired to write his novel by the Scot.

WAS THE BOOK POPULAR FROM THE START?

FROM the moment it appeared, it was a runaway hit, and was into its fourth edition by the end of 1719. It has never been out of print since, and is credited with being the first adventure novel in English that inspired generations of writers. The story has also been told over and over again in books, plays, films and television series.

WHAT HAPPENED TO SELKIRK?

THE unruly youth never really grew up. He went home to Lower Largo but then eloped to London with a dairymaid, Sophia Bruce. He joined the Royal Navy and married, possibly bigamously, a widowed innkeeper. He was aboard HMS Weymouth when he contracted yellow fever and died and was buried at sea on December 13, 1721.

The Chilean Government had no doubt that Selkirk was Crusoe – it gave Mas a Tierra the new name of Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.