Castaways 6

Robyn and I climbed higher, into brushwood forest, past waterfalls, tumbling down the mountain. In heavy storms, they would take the surrounding rocks and trees back down the way we had come, in raging torrents. We emerged onto an exposed escarpment, rigid palms waving their ballerina arms above the audience of hanging myrtle. A golden mirror of ocean sheen hugged the wild coast, under cloud shadows traveling rapidly over the mountainous desolation far below. We could hear the boom of it hurtling into the land, several miles away. And the wind that funneled down into Cumberland Bay. It had had taken us an hour and a half to climb to the lookout. Beside us was the plaque we had come to see.


   ‘In memory of Alexander Selkirk, Mariner, a native of Largo, in the  
    county of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude,
    for four years and four months. He was landed from the Cinque Ports
    galley, 96 tons, 16 guns, A.D. 1704, and was taken off in the Duke,
    privateer, 12th Feb, 1709. He died lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth,
    A.D. 1728, aged 47 years. This tablet is erected near Selkirk’s
    Lookout, by Commodore Powell and the officers of H.M.S. Topaz, A.D.
    1868.’


“He did this every day, for over four years?” Robyn asked.
“Never get out of the boat.” I said. “Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin' all the way.”



  “I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and  
   looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship: then fancy that, at a vast
   distance, I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and, after
   looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and
   weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.”
                                                                       Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe





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