Did he deliberately change his name at sea to distance himself from his past, or did someone misunderstand him? Or, as some researchers say, did consistent spelling of names simply not matter much back then? Some saw him as a cruel, indecisive and incompetent sailor who once narrowly escaped being eaten by his own men in the Pacific and who was court-martialed after losing the British warship HMS Roebuck off the coast of Australia.
He was often drunk on duty and would infuriate his crews by letting captured ships go free without distributing loot to his men.
Consequently, when commercial shipowners or governments captured pirates, they were rarely shown mercy. The ships were small by Royal Navy standards and full of desperate men who perhaps noticed that even the staffing of the ships foretold the danger they faced.
The St. George , Souhami writes, was supplied for eight months of travel and carried five anchors, two sets of sails, 22 cannons, small arms, 30 barrels of gunpowder and five times more men than it could comfortably accommodate—a testament to the numbers needed to crew captured ships, but also a morbid acknowledgment that dozens would be lost to disease, battle and desertion.
But literally on the first night, while still in Ireland, a drunken Dampier had a violent argument with one officer, and dissension quickly spread. By October the men were sick of brick-hard sea biscuits, dried peas and salt meat. They longed for fresh meat and vegetables, but settled for an occasional shark, dolphin or weary bird.
As on most ships of the day, the men often slept in wet clothes and mildewed bedding. The ships were incubators for typhus, dysentery and cholera.
Amonth later, 15 men had fever, and others were wracked by scurvy, caused by a vitamin C deficiency, which Souhami says claimed more lives than contagious disease, gunfire or shipwreck.
Things got only worse when Capt. Charles Pickering died of a fever in late November and command of the Cinque Ports was given to his lieutenant, Thomas Stradling, a young upperclass seaman the crew disliked.
There were fights and nearmutinies as the ship cruised the coast of Brazil. The meat and grain were filled with roaches and rat droppings. The Cinque Ports holed up at a rendezvous point on one of the islands in the archipelago west of Valparaiso, but the crew was threatening mutiny against Stradling. Dampier showed up just in time to put down the rebellion by promising a tighter rein on cocky Stradling.
But shortly he, too, faced dissent among his sailors, who wanted him to attack more ships. George and Cinque Ports left the island in March to continue their plundering along the coasts of Peru and Mexico, where tempers continued to flare. In May the Cinque Ports split off from the St. George and spent the summer pirating on its own. By September the ship was so leaky that men were pumping out water day and night; Selkirk believed that it was so riddled with worms that its masts and flooring needed immediate repair.
That month the ship returned to the relative safety of the island, a secluded and uninhabited place where the men could regain their health and sanity. Soon Selkirk would look at the island and see salvation. At a small suburban airport outside crowded Santiago, Chile, six of us stand anxiously beside a drafty hangar staring at an eight-passenger Piper Navajo prop plane.
Mechanics are crawling over its dismantled left engine. A councilman from the island waits with me, joined by a history teacher, a young mother, and two Santiago policemen on a cushy work assignment. Thus assured, I put my trust in a craft whose outer skin seems no thicker than a beer can. With surprisingly little turbulence, we finally climb over the city of six million humming past the jagged Andes and across the ocean at 6, feet, just above foamy white clouds.
After two hours of hypnotic engine drone, Schaeffer points to a growing gray dot on the horizon. The Chilean government renamed it RobinsonCrusoeIsland in As we bank high above the reddish moonscape on the extreme western promontory of the square-mile island, rugged volcanic mountains are visible in the distance, with seemingly great spots for hiking or diving.
A sailor in the s, however, would have seen nothing but trouble— grim, sheer-faced coves rising 80 feet straight up, and not a sandy beach in sight. San Juan Bautista John the Baptist village pop. San Juan Bautista is part sleepy South Pacific fishing village, part eco-tourism hideaway. Along deeply rutted dirt roads, there are eight or nine summer cabins and basic bed-and-breakfast operations— several hundred tourists came to the village last year—with a few in-home convenience stores, three churches Evangelical, Mormon and Catholic , a leaky gymnasium, a lively school serving first through eighth grade, a city hall, a small Crusoe museum with translations of the novel in Polish and Greek, and an adjoining library with a satellite Internet connection, thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The homes are wooden bungalows for the most part, weathered but neat, with small yards and big leafy palm or fruit trees. Nearly everyone has TV, which consists of two Santiago channels. C T Chao Tang Author. Add to cart. Content 1. Introduction 2. Conclusion Bibliography 1. Sign in to write a comment.
Read the ebook. Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe's 'Robinson Crus The Religion in Daniel Defoe's Ro The Instrumentalization of the Cannib Inselwelten in J. Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Cru Are we all modern Robinsons? Defoe's Narrative Technique in R The Role of the Family in Robinson Cr Das Inselmotiv in Daniel Defoes Robin Odysseus - der erste Robinson? Grimmelshausens Simplicissimus und De Publish now - it's free.
Robinson Crusoe. Buy Now. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Defoe resumed these themes of isolation and endurance in his later fiction, but explored them in different worlds. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email: Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.
Recent Comments. Lisa Hill 25 th April Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website.
0コメント