Castaways 8

The privateers of the time were as sadistically unsavory in reality, as portrayed in our literature and legends. The eighteenth century pirate, Edward Low, cut off his prisoners’ lips and broiled them in front of them. Others employed the practice of ‘woolding,’ tightly twisting slender cords around the necks of their prisoners until their eyes burst from their sockets. The crew was just as dispensable, and their yellow fever scurvy-afflicted bodies were routinely dumped at sea. Pirate vessels stank of animals and excrement. Buccaneers captured in British colonies received no mercy. Their bodies were displayed in steel cages suspended at port entrances ‘pour encourager les autres.’

The pirate that young Alexander Selkirk found was one of history’s most complex, and reluctant. He had been court-martialed for cruelty to a crewmember, after losing the British warship HMS Roebuck off the Australian coast. He was often drunk, and often let captured ships go free without looting them, a practice that infuriated his crew. Some thought him indecisive or incompetent, and he once narrowly escaped being eaten by his own men in the Pacific. But William Dampier was a gifted amateur naturalist and anthropologist, and had already circumnavigated the world three times, when Alexander signed up with him, and changed his last name to Selkirk. Dampier made him Master of the Galley under Captain Charles Pickering of the 120 ton Cinque Ports, while he commanded his own 320-ton flagship. The St. George was supplied for eight months of travel with two sets of sails, five anchors, 22 cannons, 100 small arms, 30 barrels of gunpowder and 120 men, five times more than it could comfortably accommodate- a morbid acknowledgment of how many would be lost to disease, battle and desertion. Both vessels were small by Royal Navy standards, and crewed by desperate men.

On April 30, 1703, the two ships embarked for the port of Kinsale, in Ireland. Dampier had a drunken violent argument with one of his officers, the first night they arrived. They left on the 11^th of September, and made Madeira two weeks later. When their original plan to attack the Spanish galleons returning from Buenos Aires fell through, Dampier decided to make for the Southern Sea by way of the Cape Verde Islands, and across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn.