Table Of ContentCrusoe, Castaways
and Shipwrecks
in the Perilous Age of Sail
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Dedicated to Heather Williams and Karyn Burnham
at Pen & Sword Books for their incredible patience and help
in getting my books into print.
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Crusoe, Castaways
and Shipwrecks
in the Perilous Age of Sail
Mike Rendell
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
Pen & Sword History
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire - Philadelphia
Copyright © Mike Rendell, 2019
ISBN 978 1 52674 747 1
The right of Mike Rendell to be identified as Author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the
Publisher in writing.
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Printed and bound in England By TJ International Ltd.
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Contents
Preface vi
Part One The Book that Started it All…
Chapter 1: Daniel Defoe 2
Chapter 2: Robinson Crusoe 9
Part Two Inspirations for Robinson Crusoe
Chapter 3: Alexander Selkirk 16
Chapter 4: Henry Pitman 24
Chapter 5: Robert Knox 31
Chapter 6: William Dampier 38
Part Three Shipwrecked!
By Way of Background 50
Chapter 7: The Great Storm of 1703 52
Chapter 8: The Scillies Storm of 1707 61
Chapter 9: The Loss of HMS Victory in 1744 68
Chapter 10: The Hurricanes of 1780 and 1782 74
Chapter 11: Human Error: Fire and Water 82
Part Four Other Castaways
Chapter 12: The Wreck of the Batavia 92
Chapter 13: Philip Ashton 104
Chapter 14: Leendert Hasenbosch 110
Chapter 15: The Forgotten Slaves of Tromelin 116
Chapter 16: Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian 125
Chapter 17: Charles Barnard 134
Chapter 18: Conclusion 141
Bibliography 143
Image Accreditation 146
Index 150
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Preface vii
Preface
We live in an age which seems to like romanticising the whole idea of being cast
away in a distant land, stripped of all the trappings of modern civilisation. We are
fascinated with the castaway theme. Think of Desert Island Discs – running on BBC
radio for well over seventy-five years (it was first broadcast in January 1942). On
the silver screen, think of Swiss Family Robinson, a Walt Disney film made on the
Caribbean island of Tobago. It was based on a novel published in 1812, entitled Der
Schweizerische Robinson and tells the story of a Swiss family shipwrecked in the East
Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia. Apart from this 1960 film, there have
been at least five other mainstream films of the same name, half a dozen TV series,
and six made-for-TV movies. And in all these versions the ‘Robinson’ in the title
shows that the story is part of the genre inspired by Robinson Crusoe.
Think of the various film versions of Mutiny on the Bounty – most famous,
perhaps, is the 1962 version starring Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. There
have been other versions, one in 1935 with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable,
which slightly over-shadowed In the Wake of the Bounty, made in Australia three
years earlier, and which marked the screen debut of a young Errol Flynn. There was
also a remake in 1984 starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. All tell the true
tale of Captain Bligh, cast adrift by Fletcher Christian in 1789. A TV mini-series in
2017 tried to recreate the voyage, examining the tensions between the re-enactors
as they followed in the footsteps of Bligh and his eighteen fellow castaways. The
original journey, travelling over 3500 nautical miles to East Timor in just forty-
seven days in an open boat, stands out as one of the most remarkable examples of
seamanship and survival ever told – whereas the re-creation could not avoid the
fact that the ‘castaways’ had a support vessel (complete with radios, charts, food
and emergency medical back-up and supplies) trundling on behind them, just out
of sight of the TV cameras. Surely the whole essence of Bligh’s courageous voyage
was that he never knew he would succeed? He was likely to succumb to starvation,
dehydration, storm, shipwreck – or further mutiny – at any moment. Live with
that for nearly seven weeks, and you begin to appreciate the single-minded – even
bloody-minded – determination so lacking in the follow-up.
TV producers like castaways. Remember the programme Castaway 2000, in
which the BBC followed some three dozen men, women and children as they
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Preface vii
struggled to build a community on the remote Scottish island of Taransay? Survival
expert Ray Mears has made series after series based on bushcraft and survival
techniques, backed up with books and public appearances. Chief Scout Bear Grylls
has made numerous films and TV programmes on wilderness survival – including
a handful of series of The Island with Bear Grylls, featuring groups of adventurers
cast away on a Pacific Island.
And then there are the celebrity indulgences – famous faces abandoned on
remote islands, while waiting TV cameras note how they cope with ‘hardship’ –
imagined or real. Way back in 1971, model and actress Julie Ege did what was little
more than a series of photo-shoots, wearing a bikini, while supposedly stranded on
the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. Then we had a television programme featuring
the delectable Joanna Lumley, cast adrift on an island off Madagascar in 1994, in
which she bravely made a pair of cave shoes out of her bra. More recently we had
Robson Greene in In search of Robinson Crusoe stranded on North Guntao Island in
the South China Seas – even if the idea of being ‘left alone’ was slightly ruined by
the obvious presence of a TV crew, a resident doctor and emergency supplies. From
memory he lasted less than three hours before he had to be rescued….
Even I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! pays lip service to the idea of
survival, although the worst thing that usually happens is a few broken finger nails
and bruised egos, offset by a much hoped-for boost to a flagging TV career.
Nevertheless, it reflects the public fascination with ‘going without’ – going without
comfort, going without food, going without all the things that we take for granted in
modern society. The more we become dependent on technology, the more we distance
ourselves from basics: a whole generation equates micorowaving pre-prepared foods
with real culinary skills, and is accustomed to thinking that using an app on a mobile
phone is a substitute for actual knowledge and ability. Remove the technology - will
we cope? Perhaps these programmes are an attempt to peel back some of the veneer
and to show how we might cope in a post-apocalypse world – or perhaps it is just
cheap, mindless entertainment. Whatever; it is an enduring genre. And all of it derives
from the original story of Robinson Crusoe, written three centuries ago.
The theme lives on as science fiction in the 2015 Ridley Scott film The Martian
starring Matt Damon and underlies the film Castaway (2000). It starred Tom Hanks
as a FedEx employee stranded on a Pacific Island after a plane crash which kills all
his companions. In practice it was filmed on the Fijian island of Mamanuca and
Tom Hanks commented that he ‘wanted to examine the concept of four years of
hopelessness, in which you have none of the requirements for living — food, water,
shelter, fire and company’. Many assume that it was based on real events – it was
not, and has a screenplay written by William Broyles Jnr. The film does not have
a Man Friday – but it does have a Wilson volleyball, which becomes a personified
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viii Crusoe, Castaways and Shipwrecks in the Perilous Age of Sail
companion during the four years in which the Hanks character is stranded and
alone. It also goes rather further than most in the genre to examine the mental as
well as the physical problems faced by castaways. How does hope survive, often
against all reason? What happens when all hope is gone? How do people survive
with nothing but their own company? And if they survive, how do they cope with
returning to the modern world?
These themes inspire this book, which examines some of the real-life incidents
which occurred two, three, four centuries ago, at a time before radios shrank our
world, before weather forecasts gave us advance warning of storms, tsunamis and
natural disasters, and before the oceans of the world were mapped in minute detail.
Sat nav tells us where we are within a few millimetres – two centuries ago you could
still run aground on an island which no one had ever detected. Before longitude
could be measured, before accurate charts had been prepared, sailors could find
themselves hundreds of miles off course. The book is intended as a tribute to the
bravery of those explorers, many of whom paid with their lives, and to the men
and women who refused to give up when they found themselves lost, abandoned,
stranded and alone. Robinson Crusoe may have been a novel – some would say the
first true novel in the English language – but it reflects real events, real people and
real hardship.
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viii Crusoe, Castaways and Shipwrecks in the Perilous Age of Sail
Part One
T B S
he ook ThaT TarTed
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