Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #26 - Castaway! Stranded on an Island...

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Can you imagine being stranded for years on a remote uninhabited island with almost nothing but a few simple tools and the clothes on your back? Some people haven't had to imagine this scenario, like Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, and Fernão Lopes, who would actually live alone for a total of several decades on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena. Could you survive like they did? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today we will be diving into the exciting world of castaways. People who wash up or are marooned on desert or tropical uninhabited islands and have to use their wits to survive. It's such a thrilling genre of story, right? The castaway washes up on some remote shore, half dead and delirious, only to realize that somehow, miraculously, they've survived a shipwreck.

But now they have to come to terms with being abandoned at sea. They have to figure out how to survive until rescue comes, if rescue will ever come. One of the texts that some historians consider to be the first English language novel deals with being stranded on an island. Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719. Robinson Crusoe would set the main themes for many subsequent versions of the castaway narrative. Rather than starving or dying of exposure, going slowly insane from being alone all the time, Crusoe actually becomes a better person.

A more hard-working, self-sufficient, and curious version of the man who washed up on the island. He hunts animals, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make raisins, learns to make pottery, traps and raises goats, and thanks God for helping him realize how much he has to be grateful for despite being so alone. Many of the themes of Robinson Crusoe have been brought up again and again in other castaway narratives like Tom Hanks' castaway, fictional shows like Lost, and reality TV like the massively successful Survivor franchise. But would the actual experience be as enlightening? Would we actually be able to make a shelter, gather food, raise livestock, form our own little version of society, or would we spend a lot more time huddling scared and cold in a damp cave dreaming of being at home or just wanting to die?

Would we fall prey to exposure, starvation, disease, any number of things that could kill us when we're deprived of the materials we rely on to live? Could we become a real-life Robinson Crusoe, or is he based in nothing more than fantasy? He is not based in nothing more than fantasy. He's thought to be based on a real man. A Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk, who set out with a group of privateers in 1703, and he would end up alone on a remote Pacific island off the coast of Chile, where he would remain alone for over four long years. where he would remain alone for over four long years. Alexander Selkirk, while perhaps being the most famous example of a castaway was far from the first castaway. We don't know who that was. Whole bunch of poor bastards almost certainly ended up stranded on

this or that island long before the written word in the earliest years after the first boats were constructed between 8200 and 7600 BCE. I imagine hundreds if not thousands of people found themselves abandoned on islands between then and the 18th century when Selkirk was born. Some of humanity's oldest writings feature castaways like Homer's Odyssey written sometime around the 8th century BCE which describes the fictional Odysseus trying to return home from the Trojan War and being held up on various Greek islands over a period of about 10 years. While there are many legends of castaways handed down over the ages, one of the first real castaways that we know about is for now Lopez.

This poor bastard. In 1512, for now a Portuguese soldier turned against, and a minor noble, turned against his homeland and sided with Muslim natives during a conflict in Goa, India. And he wasn't the only one. Several Portuguese noblemen, who'd been left in charge of the area by Afonso de Albuquerque, had converted to Islam and changed sides. Afonso didn't like this. And though he'd lost a number of his ships in a storm along with slaves and goods, he

still had enough fleet power to force a negotiation. Rasul Khan, the commander at Goa, accepted Afonso's demands and surrendered. But he was concerned about what fate would come to those Portuguese who would now be at Afonso's mercy. Rasul Khan managed to get a promise from Afonso to spare the lives of his countrymen. Afonso begrudgingly agreed to this, but only on his terms, and oh, what rough terms they were. For three whole days the traders suffered the most gruesome torture. Their right hands were

cut off as were the thumbs of their left hands. Their ears and noses were also cut off and it's still not done. Their hair all the hair in their head and their beards literally ripped out. My god. Talk about a really shitty day. So glad I have never had a bad day anywhere near that bad. Hey buddy, how have you been? Uh, okay. Okay. Uh, I've been better. You know, slipped a disc in my back and sciatica, you know, it's acting up, hurts like hell. My left leg either feels like it's numb or like it's on fire. How about you? I've been a little better myself. Got my right hand left thumb, both ears and nose cut off and my beard and all the hair on my head ripped out. Not gonna lie, feeling pretty fucking sore today. More than half of the victims of this outrageous torture perished from it. Yeah, I bet.

One of the few survivors was Fernal Lopez, the leader of the group of noblemen who had betrayed Alfonso. For three years he remained in Goa as a miserable, noseless, earless, couldn't twist the lid off a jar even if someone held a gun to his head beggar. But after Alfonso died in 1515 and contrary to his wishes, was buried in Goa in the spring of 1516. While the town was still in a state of commotion following the death of Afonso, for now Lopez managed to sneak on board a ship bound for Lisbon, Portugal.

The stowaway was quickly discovered and rather than toss him overboard, the captain chose to take him to Portugal where Lopez still had a wife and family and perhaps a forgiving king. And hopefully, really good blacksmith who could I don't know give him a hook for his missing right hand and like a little tiny hook for his missing left thumb or something. On the voyage home to Portugal however for now Lopez began to doubt his

chances in the old country. Would his wife truly accept a dishonored crippled man? Physical disabilities not quite as accepted back then in society. Would the king have him punished even worse than he'd already been punished? He was very worried that he would be punished further and that his family would not accept him. So when the ship he had snuck onto reached St. Helena, a very remote volcanic, uninhabited and tropical island in the middle of South Atlantic, far below the equator between South America and Africa, a place where the Portuguese had docked for years on their way to and from the Indies, Lopez hid in the forest.

A group of men were sent out to search for him, and when they couldn't find him, they left him. The ship set sail for Lisbon, leaving Lopez alone on St. Helena, with no thumbs and just four fingers. With his chances for long-term survival looking pretty slim, Lopez became the first resident of what is now the British island of St. Helena. The island would later become famous for being the place where Napoleon would be imprisoned for the final years of his life.

Survival on the uninhabited island wouldn't be easy for now, despite the abundance of water, edible plants, fruits, goats left by the Portuguese there previously. Luckily there were valuable goods left on the island, you know, a barrel of biscuits, pieces of dried meat, salted fish, salt and cloves, and most importantly fire. For over a decade the Portuguese have been stopping at the island to get clean water, food and supplies. Sometimes their ships would leave behind some supplies. Other times another one of those ships would then gather those needed supplies.

They planned lots of fruit trees, left a bunch of goats, all kinds of good stuff. Lopez knew that fire was the key to his survival and he dared not leave his seashore camp until he had found some rocks with which he was able to make his own fire, which he did. With his mutilated arm he also dug out a cave in some soft volcanic rock, which is insane to me. And then he began to explore his new island home. Lopez would live on this island in a self-imposed exile for the next several years, hiding from visitors like one ship he spotted on the horizon that he recognized as being Portuguese. Wary of the ship, he hid until it left a week later.

As it departed, he ventured down to the water's edge to watch the ship leave in full sail. Then he saw something moving in the water. Turned out to be a half-drowned rooster that had fallen overboard, struggling to stay alive in the stormy seas. Considering Lopez's physical condition, it was a kind of a crazy idea to try and rescue that rooster. But he did it. He brought the half-dead bird to his cave where he would not eat it. This rooster wasn't food. It was a companion. For now, looked after it carefully and it would become as tame as a dog and it would follow him everywhere. Soon Lopez claimed he preferred the bird's company to that of humans. I love it. Yeah, he never had to worry about that rooster

pulling his fucking hair out again, cutting off his remaining hand. Life on the island became easier for for now as time went on, especially since the previous ship's crew left more gifts for him. Biscuits, cheeses, seeds, as well as a letter asking him to not hide from visitors in the future, as no one had any intention of harming him. And that is kind of adorable. But Lopez still had no desire to see other people. For a full decade, numerous ships came and went, and Lopez always hid. Portuguese mariners, meanwhile, continued to leave offerings of food and clothing for the man who had become known as the Hermit of St. Helena whenever they dropped anchor at his island. And thanks to these mariners, legend of the Hermit of St. Helena reached Portugal, where

eventually King John III heard about it, became keen to meet the extraordinary man who had beaten such long odds against his survival. Finally a young Javanese slave who'd washed up on the island, now there were two dudes living on Saint Helena, he waved down a passing ship and then offered to show the captain where Lopez lived. Even though these guys were both stranded there they did not not you know really live with each other. And that was how Captain Pedro Gomez de Chara became the first person to meet Lopez in a decade. He had this other guy that was stranded there, they didn't even talk to each other with Lopez. The captain told Lopez, who began crying and pleading

when he approached him, that no one was going to hurt him. No No one was gonna force him to leave St. Helena either. He simply requested that for now come meet and greet the crews of the ships when they docked there. And eventually Lopez agreed. And then later he even warmed up to the idea of going back to Portugal where he would go and when he would meet King John the third and receive an official pardon. The monarch offered Lopez refuge in a monastery and then Lopez would go on to seek absolution from the pope for what he himself perceived to be his crimes against Christianity. And with his absolution granted, feeling that his soul was no longer in

peril, he requested to return to St. Helena. And his request was granted. I think this is my favorite Castaway story actually this guy. He would live alone on the island now for another 20 years until his death around 1545. He would tend goats, plant more fruit trees, tend to his fruit trees, grow other vegetables, you know, manage his garden, fish, live a pretty peaceful existence. No word on how long that first rooster lived or if he got another one. Not sure if he had any more pets or not. I bet he did. St. Helena, by the way, beautiful island. About 4,500 people live there now. For a small island, geography is very diverse. Beautiful beaches, mountains, dense tropical forests, grassy plains, etc. Big rocky cliffs.

As far as remote islands go, not a bad place to get stranded if you're going to get stranded. Not too much rain. Weather rarely reaches above 80 degrees Fahrenheit on the beaches or below 65 degrees in the mountains, the temperature about 10 degrees lower than it is along the coast. While most castaways have been men, since it was mostly men taken to the sea as sailors, pirates or soldiers, not all castaways were men centuries ago. Marguerite de la Roque, a 16th century French noblewoman, spent two years marooned on an island off the coast of modern-day Quebec.

Between 1541 and 1543, France attempted, unsuccessfully, to colonize Canada. The commander of the colonizing expedition was a noble by the name of Jean-Francois Robreval, and one of his relatives was The commander of the colonizing expedition was a noble by the name of Jean Francois Robertval and one of his relatives was Marguerite de la Roque, who decided to accompany him on his journey across the Atlantic. Some sources say that they were cousins, some sources say that they were uncle and aunt, nobody's quite sure. But we do know that she undertook the journey along with her elderly nurse, a peasant woman by the name of Damien. Unbeknownst to Robertval, however, the two of them were hiding another person as well, an unnamed young lover of Marguerite's.

Ooh la la! Some sources say that Marguerite's struck up an affair with a passenger already on the boat. Somebody that she met on the boat. Either way, she was getting down and dirty with someone she was definitely not supposed to be getting down and dirty with by the social conventions of the day. And since there's only so much privacy on a cramped ship and possibly because Marguerite became pregnant, the affair was discovered on the voyage. As a stern Calvinist, Robert Vaughn, despite being Marguerite's close relative, was outraged by the tryst. How dare an unmarried woman

get some deep dick in at sea! In his punishment, he abandoned Marguerite and her nurse on a remote island they literally called the Isle of Demons in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, an island that many people at the time believed was riddled with demons and monsters. Her lover was supposed to be kept in confinement, punished appropriately in the New World, but he jumped overboard, swam to shore, and stayed with the women on the island. The trio then built a small hut to protect against the blistering cold, used muskets and rocks to scare off bears and wolves, but the winter chill soon deepened. When their food ran out, the three castaways subsisted on roots, herbs, brackish water, no bueno. Then in the words of another Marguerite, the queen of Navarre, a kingdom that existed where France and Spain meet in the Basque region today, quote, in the long run, the husband could not

resist the effects of such diet. Besides, they drank such unwholesome water that he became greatly swollen and died in a short while. Poor Marguerite did what she could for her gallant lover, tried to bury his body after he was gone. However, the ground was frozen too solid, so she had to leave his corpse in her cabin until the spring thaw, using her gun to protect her lover's dead slowly rotting body that she just slept next to basically from the wild animals that roamed inside or outside. That spring she gave birth to his child and while she managed to survive her baby sadly would not. When the next winter arrived Damien, the elderly nurse, also now died, leaving Marguerite completely on her own. By the spring of 1544 Marguerite was more dead than alive,

famished, exhausted, emaciated. She barely had the strength to drag herself out of her cabin to look for food. Fortunately for her a passing French fishing ship saw the smoke rising from her fire, sent to party ashore. The fishermen discovered Marguerite huddled in her tattered rags and offered her safe passage back to France. When Marguerite returned to France, she became an instant celebrity. Her story, combining both romance and survival, excuse me, probably the two most popular storytelling genres, the story would make its way to that other Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, who loved it so much that she included it in her Heptameron,

an extremely popular collection of short stories she authored. Both of these early castaway examples were some of the first real-life castaway tales to gain popularity. To make it to the written word. You know, stories that made their central characters into celebrities. But they aren't really the castaway narrative we're familiar with today. Lopez, for starters, was both severely disfigured and kind of fucking crazy. His best friend was a rooster. And that kind of weirded people out.

You know, weirded people out enough for them to not really take his story as they would take to the story of Robinson Crusoe. I mean, I would rather, let's say, watch a movie based on him than based on, you know, like the Robinson Crusoe story. And you might as well, but we are fucking weirdos. And Marguerite's story became more of a 16th century

romantic drama material than a story of survival against the odds and there was the fact that at first there were multiple people on the island making it a bit less of a of a lone survivor narrative. Indeed in recent decades when we think of the archetypal survivor we generally think of a man, a youngish man, someone physically fit enough to construct huts and farm and gather food, someone who wants to be rescued eventually, unlike Lopez, but knows that he has to rely on himself until or if that time comes. Someone like Tom Hanks in Castaway. And that archetypal survivor can be traced directly back

to Alexander Selkirk. So now I will tell his story. Right after today's mid-show sponsor break. And I am back and now I will share Alexander Selkirk's crazy story. When Alexander Selkirk was born in Lower Largo, Scotland in 1676, it was a fishing village in the historic county of Fife, often referred to as the Kingdom of Fife, even today. Fewer than a thousand souls lived there back then. The village sits 40 miles from the bustling city of Edinburgh, which was then home to close to 30,000. Alexander was a seventh son of John Selkirk, a shoemaker and a tanner, and he was apparently a bit of a handful. One of the oldest accounts of his life, 1829's The Life and Adventures of

Alexander Selkirk by John Howell, describes young Alexander as a spoiled and wayward man made only worse by the, I guess boy, by the indulgences of his mother who concealed as much as she could his faults from his father. Selkirk's mother, Euphan Mackie, apparently believed that Alex, as the seventh son, was blessed with luck and should be encouraged in his dreams of going out to sea. His father John, however, wanted the lad to stay home and help him with his tannery and shoemaking business. And Alexander, not wanting to work for his father, led the constant fighting that caused so much quote domestic strife and bickering, Howell writes, that John threatened to disinherit Alex. But that didn't seem to bother Alex too much. He held fast to his dreams of heading out to sea.

Also with his remaining time on land ticking away by the hour, maybe he figured he might as well misbehave a little. Some of his youthful transgressions will be written into history, recorded in the records of the church or Kirk elders at the Largo Kirk, in a document known as the Kirk Session Minutes. On August 25th, 1695, for example, a passage recorded that 19 year old Alexander Selkirk son to John Selkirk was summoned to appear before church elders for an indecent carriage in Yee Church. No real idea what the fuck that means. Was his horse drawn

carriage covered in hail Satan graffiti or something? Looking into the etymology of the word carriage that's probably referred to referring here to his body or the way he moved his body about. Basically, he probably didn't dress appropriately, or he was moving around too much during the sermon. Something like that. But it didn't matter what the church elders thought about him, about his behavior, because he was fucking out of there. Two days later, the record states that Alex did not compare being going away to Yee-See. This business is continued till his return.

Aka he'd fucking bounced. It's unclear exactly where Alex sailed off to for his first voyage or precisely when he returned but London-based biographer Diana Suhami suggests that he left with a Scottish colonizing expedition to what is now Panama. That's a big trip. By November 7th, 1701, he was both back in Largo and back in trouble. His kid brother Andrew made the mistake of laughing at him when he accidentally took a drink of salt water out of a cup. In response, Alex beat Andrew with a wooden stick. Says staff actually. Beating with a stick though, which ignited a big family fight that led to Alex assaulting his father, his brother brother John and even John's wife Margaret Bell

Beating baby bro was a stick and all hell breaks out beats his fucking dad beats another brother beats the other brother's wife Everyone can smacks days later according to church records Alex compared before the pulpit and made acknowledgement of his sin and was rebuked in face of the congregation for it, and promised amendment in the strength of the Lord and so was dismissed. Not long after that, it seems Alex was done with Lower Largo. In 1703 he decided it was time to leave for good. He was able to convince a buccaneer, William Dampier,

that he was the man to navigate Dampier's next privateering expedition to South America. It's at this point, however, for reasons that remain unclear that Selkirk, the name Selkirk, was changed to Selkirk. Did Alex deliberately change his name at sea to distance himself a bit from his past or does someone just misunderstand him? Or as some researchers have said, did consistent spelling of names just not matter much to a lot of people back then. Or did he need a new pirate-ier identity to match his new bosses? William Dampier was one of history's most complex and perhaps reluctant pirates. Orphaned at an early age, Dampier started his days at sea

early. As a young man he moved from England to Jamaica to help manage a sugar plantation, but that didn't work out. So then he went off to Mexico, where he took up a logging venture, began documenting local wildlife as well. When a hurricane destroyed his logging camp, Dampier joined a band of buccaneers, aka privateers, aka fucking pirates, working for some crown, people who were authorized by their own government to conduct raids against ships belonging to enemy nations. His new pirate life provided Dampier with a steady source of income and it also presented him with the opportunity to visit and explore far-flung little-known parts of the world. His first stops were in Central and South America including the Galapagos Islands in between pillaging and plundering and saying,

Hey matey! Dampier sometimes referred to as the pirate scientist, spent every spare moment exploring the natural environment and meticulously documenting everything in sight. He was charmed by all the new animals and plants he was coming across. He described the hummingbird, for example, as a pretty little feathered creature, no bigger than a great overgrown wasp. Encountering an armadillo for the first time, he wrote, what the fuck! Now he wrote, the head is small with the nose like a pig. On any danger she lies

stock still like a land turtle. And though you toss her about, she will not move herself. How fucking cool would it have been to be amongst the first people from your culture, from your continent, to lay eyes on so many new lands and new creatures. Back in the days before photos and Instagram and YouTube existed. Back when no one you had ever known had ever seen even a painting of these places or creatures. Back when no one you had ever known even knew such creatures and places even existed. I wouldn't want to live back then, you know, thanks to how comparatively primitive medical care and creature comforts were and how backwards people were comparatively when it came to scientific understanding, secular

government, etc. etc. But holy shit it would have been so cool at some points to have been an explorer doing shit like discovering uninhabited islands full of creatures literally no human had ever seen before. In 1679 just a few months after getting married to a woman named Judith Dampierre signed up with a group of buccaneers who planned a trip to the South Seas. They ended up sailing completely around the world. One of the places they stopped was Australia, making Dampierre one of the first Englishmen to ever visit the continent. He wrote,

It is not yet determined whether it is an island or a main continent, but I am certain that it joins neither Asia, Africa, nor America." All in all, his journey lasted more than 12 years. Man, poor Judith! She gets married, then her husband leaves a few months later on a dozen-year work trip. Dampierre stored his extensive notes in bamboo tubes sealed with wax. When he returned to Europe, he wrote his first book, A New Voyage Around the World. It became the 17th century equivalent of a New York Times bestseller and Dampierre became something of a celebrity. After the success of that first voyage, Dampierre was made captain of his own ship. He was invited to lead the first scientific expedition to Australia, which was then known as New Holland.

Dampierre carefully collected and preserved plant specimens to accompany his notes. Many of these can still be seen today, studied at the Oxford Herbarium in England. Unfortunately, Dampierre's rickety ship sank on the way home, resulting in a court-martial and fine, but not an end to Dampierre's career. He wrote a second book, A Voyage to New Holland, which also became a bestseller. He has only gone two years and eight months on that second big trip, after staying home with Judith for over seven years. But then he decides time to return to the sea again two years later with Alexander Selkirk in his service on September 11th 1703. Selkirk must have been excited to be

heading out to sea with such a famous explorer. However not everyone thought that Selkirk's new boss, Dampierre, was amazing. Some saw him as cruel, indecisive, an incompetent sailor who once narrowly escaped being eaten by his own men out in the Pacific. He was allegedly often drunk on duty and would infuriate his crews by letting captured ships go free without taking and distributing their loot to his men. Pirated loot was the main reason most of them had set sail with him in the first place. So Selkirk may have been a little nervous as well, and maybe a little bit scared.

His new profession certainly wasn't for the faint of heart. There was danger all around in the form of disease, shipwreck, and especially other buccaneers or pirates. There wasn't much of a difference in practice between buccaneers or pirates. Both looted ships and were capable of cruelty, but pirates were more universally feared and condemned. If you got captured by some pirates, things usually didn't end well at all for you. Pirate prisoners would most likely have chosen to walk the plank, but not actually a super common practice, rather than be suggested to sadists like Edward Ned Lowe, who in the 1720s once cut off a prisoner's lips and then

broiled those lips in front of that dude. On another occasion, Lowe, or on other occasions, plural, Lowe chained mutilated burned men and he once reportedly forced some captives to eat the heart of their own captain. There were also those who practice wulding in which slender cords would be twisted tightly around a man's head in the hope of seeing his eyes burst from their sockets. Fuck! What a world! Fun times.

Deaths like these could have easily been Selkirk's fate, especially since Dampier's two ships, the 330-ton St. George and the 120-ton Sink Ports ports were actually small by Royal Navy standards. The St. George was supplied for eight months of travel and carried five anchors, two sets of sails, 22 cannons, 100 small arms, 30 barrels of gunpowder and five times more men, 120 than it could comfortably accommodate. Why take so many extra men? Well, you needed more than your enemies if you wanted to capture their ships successfully, and you expected dozens would likely be lost to disease, battle, and desertion.

Those captured ships, by the way, would ideally be Spanish, as the ships carried letters of marque, a sort of government license, from the Lord High Admiral authorizing their merchant ships to attack foreign enemies, especially the Spanish, against whom the British were fighting in the War of Spanish Succession. Selkirk served on Sink Ports, St. George's companionship, especially the Spanish, against whom the British were fighting in the War of Spanish Succession. Selkirk served on Sink Ports, St. George's companionship, as a sailing master under Captain Charles Pickering. And things didn't start off well. On the first night, while still in Ireland, they departed from the port of Kinsale in County Cork. A drunken and 52-year-old dampier had a violent argument with an officer and dissension quickly spread.

Still, after two weeks, the ships had reached the Portuguese island of Madeira, sometimes now called the Hawaii of Europe, 350 miles west of Morocco, and then the beautiful Cape Verde Islands, and then on across the Atlantic to Brazil. By mid-October, around a month into their journey, the men were sick of brick-hard sea biscuits, dried peas, and salted meat. They longed for fresh meat and vegetables, but settled for the occasional shark. Dolphin? Yes, they ate dolphins! Or a weary bird. The meat and grain they brought were filled with roaches and rat shit. And 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. By November, only two months into their journey, 15 men had bad fevers. Others were already wracked with scurvy caused by a vitamin C deficiency. Things got only worse when Captain Charles Pickering died of a fever in late November and command of the sink ports was now given to his lieutenant, Thomas Stradling, a young upper-class seaman the crew in general didn't care for. There were multiple fights near mutinies as the ships cruised along the coast of Brazil. By February of 1704, five months into the voyage, both ships were finally west of Cape Horn's foul storms and heading north along the coast of Chile on the western side of

South America. But their mission not going well at all. That month the privateers fought a long battle with a well-armed French vessel St. Joseph only to have that vessel escape and then warn its Spanish allies of their arrival in the Pacific. Following that a raid on the Panamanian gold mining town of Santa Maria failed when the landing party was ambushed. Thankfully after that loss they did easily capture

Assunchon, a heavily laden merchant ship, and this revived the men's hopes of plunder. And Alex Selkirk, clearly doing well at sea, is now put in charge of that prize of the prize ship. But then Dampierre, after taking some much-needed provisions of wine, brandy, sugar, and flour, abruptly sets Selkirk's ship free, arguing that it wasn't worth the effort to keep. So now Selkirk is back on sink ports and when sink ports hold up at a rendezvous point on one of the islands in the archipelago west of what is now the Chilean seaport of Valparaiso its crew was threatening mutiny against his captain, that young lieutenant Thomas Stradling. Dampierre showed up just in time to put down the rebellion by promising a tighter reign on his young cocky captain, but nobody liked Dampierre that much either.

He didn't seem terribly interested in attacking more ships. He wanted to like fucking draw birds more than he wanted to attack ships, which meant the crew wasn't making that much money. The mood on both ships was dour, tense, disgruntled. In March of 1704, when both ships continued their attempts at plundering along the coasts of modern-day Peru and Mexico. In particular, Stradlin and Dampierre were going at it as well. Stradlin called Dampierre a drunk who marooned his officers, stole treasure, hid behind blankets and beds when it came time to fight, took bribes, boasted of impossible

prizes but delivered none, and then things really got to a head. In May the sink port split off from the St. George and would spend the rest of the summer pirating on its own. But the crew neglected to maintain the ship and by September the ship was so leaky that men were pumping out water day and night around the clock just to keep it afloat. Selkirk believed that it was so riddled with worms that its masts and flooring needed immediate repair or they'd all soon sink. Later that month the ship returned to the relative safety of an island known to the Spanish as Masatierra in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, an island now known as

Robinson Crusoe Island, over 400 miles from the coast of Chile and over 100 miles from the next island in the then completely uninhabited Juan Fernandez Archipelago. An island that will later be named Alejandro Selkirk Island, an island Alex likely never saw though. Robinson Crusoe Island is a 29 square mile tract of land, a reddish moonscape full of mostly volcanic rock and grim sheer-faced coves rising 80 feet up. There weren't any sandy beaches, but on the lush northeast tip in Cumberland Bay there were forests and native animals, like thousands of seals sunning themselves on the smooth island rocks, or smooth inland rocks. After a month on the island, the sink ports

were stocked with turnips, goats, crawfish, but also still heavily damaged. Nonetheless, Stradlin ordered the men to set sail and leave Cumberland Bay. But Alexander Selkirk, who had been acting as the ship's navigator, refused and told the rest of the men to do the same, believing that the ship could never withstand the open sea or the battles the men planned on undertaking unless it was properly repaired. Stradlin mocked Selkirk's concerns, and that pissed Selkirk off. After bitter arguments, Stradlin, trying to save face in front of his crew

and prevent a mutiny, made the decision now to get rid of the arrogant, but ultimately correct, Scotsman. And that was how Selkirk ended up being put ashore with his bedding, a musket, a pistol, some gunpowder, a hatchet, a knife, his navigation tools, a pot for boiling food, two pounds of tobacco to take the fucking edge off, some cheese, some jam, flask of rum, and his Bible. Suddenly, Volover Moore Selkirk pleaded

with Strathland to please be allowed back on board, but the captain wouldn't budge. Maybe he knew he felt, or maybe he realized this was a useful teaching moment for the rest of his crew. Maybe he wanted to show them that if they disobeyed him he would strand their ass on an island just like that without hesitation. As Sinkport sailed away Selkirk turned his back on the ship resigned himself to waiting for what he thought would be probably a few days until another friendly ship happened by. But it would be quite a bit more than a few days before anyone stopped by. It would be four years and four months. So what would he do? There's no evidence that Selkirk ever kept a diary. He actually may have been illiterate. Historians disagree on that

point. So what we know of his time on the island comes primarily from two sources. The first was written by his eventual rescuer, Captain Woods Rogers, a distinguished English privateer who wrote A Cruising Voyage Round the World about his 1708 to 1711 expedition, which included Selkirk's rescue. The second was English essayist and playwright Richard Steele, who interviewed Selkirk in 1711 for the magazine The Englishman. According to these two men, Selkirk was so despondent for the first several months

that he regularly contemplated suicide and almost welcomed the gnawing hunger he felt each day, because at the very least it distracted him from feelings of impending doom. But he knew there was a chance that he could eventually make it off the island. He'd heard stories from William Dampierre about a unnamed man who had allegedly survived on this same island for five years. We don't have any record of who this guy was other than this anecdotal, you know, comment. As well as stories about a mosquito indigenous man named Will who survived alone for three years. For Alex, finding food and shelter was not his primary concern when he, or not

his main concern I guess, when he or not his not his main concern I guess when he was first stranded the island there were a lot of seals and edible vegetation maintaining his sanity was his biggest problem initially. Bellowing sea lions actually the southern elephant seal with males as large as 19 feet long they can weigh up to almost 9,000 pounds. Wailed at night unlike any animal Selkirk had ever heard, making it difficult to ever get a good night's sleep. There were so many fur seals on the island that a buccaneer had written 20 years earlier, we were forced

to kill them to set our feet to shore. Also strong, strong winds capable of snapping trees whipped across the island and hordes of rats that had arrived on European ships and had no natural predators native to the island tore at Silker's clothing and feet. In time he was able to domesticate some feral cats though, cats that had also arrived via European ships, and these cats would serve as companions and exterminators, some of the rats. For food he managed to catch fish, they were plentiful, but they occasioned a looseness in his bowels, aka they gave him the shits if he ate too much of them. So he stuck with mainly eating huge island lobsters,

which were actually clawless crawfish for his primary source of protein. Those seals, just too big to fuck with. Soon those massive seals drove him inland, which was actually a good thing. He found colonies of feral goats. Europeans, they loved to drop off some goats on these islands for future expeditions to find them, some fresh meat and these goats would provide Alex with both meat and milk. At first he used his musket to hunt the goats but as his gunpowder dwindled he had to go after them on foot. Chased him down with a

knife which is a pretty badass way to hunt. We should legalize knife hunting. Did you know it's illegal to run down a deer with a knife and stab it? You can shoot a deer from a tree stand, but you can't legally jump out of that tree, you know, onto its back while biting down onto the knife blade, wrestle the deer to the ground, and then stab it a couple times. That'd be a pretty legendary way to fill your deep freeze full of meat. Eventually Alex grew so nimble running barefoot on the steep hills above the bay that he could chase down any goat he wanted. He ran with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the rocks and hills, Captain

Rogers would later observe. We had a bulldog, which we sent with several of our nimblest runners to help him in catching goats, but he distanced and tired both the dog and the man. During one such chase he was badly injured when he tumbled off of a cliff, ended up lying helpless unable to move for about a day, but luckily he had landed on a goat, like he seriously did. His prey cushioned his fall that probably spared him from a broken back, which probably would have led to his death. Simply getting the meat was challenging enough for Alex but then once he had it he still needed to cook it and that was also difficult. Selkirk was able to start a fire with some pimento wood in his musket flints

and tried to keep going night and day while also being careful to hide the flames from any Spanish ships sailing by. Sailors, you know, full of sailors who might not be too merciful towards an English pirate. Spanish at the time were known for torturing their prisoners or turning them into slaves and sending them to work in brutal South American gold mines. When the fire was going he was able to prepare a hearty goat broth with turnips, watercress, cabbage palm, seasoned with pimento pepper. Man, so resourceful. But food was only part of his survival equation. It was still a matter of shelter and tools. Selkirk must have known that his few supplies weren't gonna last long.

So he forged a new knife out of some barrel hoops left on the beach and he built two huts out of pepper trees, one of which he used for cooking and the other he used for sleeping. Childhood lessons learned from his father, a tanner would now serve him well. For example, when his clothes wore out, he made new clothes from hair covered goatskin, I guess fur covered goatskin, using a nail for sewing. And I wish I could see like, I wish there was like a photo of him back. Obviously there wasn't because there weren't photos.

But it would have been great to see some photos of what he was wearing. God, I bet he, I like, you know what? I like to imagine him wearing like a dope goatskin fur vest. And some sweet goatskin pants as well. And I hope he shaved, you know what? In my mind he did. In my mind he shaved the fur off of the goatskin for his pants, and they were so fucking tight.

It's really funny to me. I like this outfit I put together in my mind. Super dope fur goat vest. Tight goatskin pants. Just smashing, flattening his cock and balls. And also some fingerless fur goat gloves. And I want him to have a... he's killed one seal. So we can have seal skin slides on his feet for shoes. He's wearing some seal skin underwear. And a super fucking tight, like a second skin tight, seal skin long sleeve turtleneck. Under his furry goat vest. Still not done.

I want him to have a... I want him to have a... he had to have killed a few cats. Sorry cat lovers. Let's just pretend that they were super mean cats always trying to kill his pet cats And he and he took their hides and he made himself a dope cat hide cap kind of like a davy crocket style hat With three cat tails braided together hanging off the back That's an outfit And he's spaniard seeing him wearing that. Oh, they probably would just kept on sailing. Who's gonna fuck with that guy? And he's Spaniard seeing him wearing that. Oh, they probably would just kept on sailing. Who's gonna fuck with that guy? Back to reality now, unfortunately. Alex actually didn't need to replace his shoes

Since his tough and calloused feet and the island's relatively mild weather, the temperature never reaches freezing. Made protection unnecessary Keeping himself alive took up a good chunk of Alex's days But there were you know still a bunch of hours for him to fill completely alone. So what did he do to keep himself entertained? Beat off a lot, I imagine. Even though he never fessed up to that shit, but I bet it happened. Just beating off, coming wherever, you know, on the dirt, on some goats, on some cats, maybe on the occasional gigantic seal, you know, just for a story. But what about, you know, when he wasn't beaten off? To maintain his spirits, the Scottish navigator said he sang a lot of hymns and prayed a bunch. Probably prayed about all the crazy shit he was thinking about while he's beating off.

But again, he never admitted that. I don't think people back then were nearly as forthcoming and brutally candid as a lot of us are now. What did he say he did? He said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before. His eventual rescuer, Captain Woods Rogers, later wrote, thoroughly reconciled to his condition, wrote Dick hard as steel, his other biographer. His life became one continual feast and his being much more joyful than it had before been irksome. He learned to live without his vices, alcohol and tobacco, even salt, found new fascination in creatures like hummingbirds and turtles. Many though Selkirk said he spent hour after hour scanning the horizon,

hoping to see a ship that would rescue him. Two ships did come to anchor during his time on the island before he was rescued. Unfortunately for Selkirk, they were both Spanish. And like I mentioned, being British and a privateerer Selkirk would have faced a terrible fate if captured so he did his best to hide from them. Once he was spotted by a group of Spanish sailors from one of the ships and they actually chased him. Almost got caught but that speedy goat chaser didn't get caught. Not quite. He climbed a tree, hid in it and some of his pursuers actually took a piss beneath that tree but they didn't see him.

And then they gave up and sailed away. Finally, after that rescue would come, on February 2nd, 1709, Captain Woods Rogers' majestic ship, the Duke, appeared in the bay. By then Selkirk looked more like an animal than a man. Ducked out in goat skins with a big-ass fucking wizard beard. Since he hadn't spoken to another person in over four years, his language abilities had softened. Rogers wrote, So much forgot his language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him,

for he seemed to speak his words by halves. Thomas Dover, an English physician, sometimes referred to as Dr. Quicksilver, that's a badass name, led the landing party that met Selkirk, who was almost incoherent with Joy when they encountered him. In a subsequent meeting with Woods Rogers, Rogers rightly referred to Selkirk as the governor of the island. Selkirk told him his story of survival as best he could. He might not have been believed or they might have assumed that he was marooned as punishment and didn't deserve to be rescued, but guess who Roger's navigator was? William fucking Dampier.

He's back in the story. Dampier, sailing again, recognized Selkirk as a comrade from the St. George and the St. Port's trip. Dampier actually would be the first guy to circumnavigate the globe on a ship three separate times. Actually, why am I qualifying that with ships? Not like they had planes back then. He was the first guy to travel around the world three times by any by any means. Dampier was probably the one to inform Selkirk of his old ship's ultimate fate. Soon after abandoning the Scotsman in 1704, the ship sank off the coast of Peru killing all but Stradley and a dozen or so men, but then those dudes wound up in Spanish prisons in Lima, Peru. Had Selkirk not been marooned on an island, he would have either died or been in prison just a Lima, Peru. Had Selkirk not been marooned on an island,

he would have either died or been in prison just a few weeks later. So pretty lucky he ended up getting kicked off the ship. And he was right about it. It wasn't ready for to be, you know, doing some pirating. Rogers helped Selkirk shave, gave him clothes. The crew offered Selkirk food, but his diet of fresh fish, goat, and vegetables made the Duke's stale and over-salted rations hard for him to digest. In fact, his entire body was unaccustomed to normal life. His rock-hard feet became swollen when he tried to wear shoes again. Selkirk was actually able to help the men who saved him. Many of the men had developed scurvy, and with his comparatively healthier food supplies, he restored them back to health. And by doing so, he earned the respect and gratitude of the crew. Captain Rogers was impressed by Selkirk's physical vigor,

also by the peace of mind he'd attained while living on the island, observing, quote, One may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it, unavoidably, as this man was. In recognition of not only his past skill set, but also perhaps his ordeal, Rogers named Selkirk, second mate of the ship. Finally, he was headed home. But not immediately.

Unlike Selkirk's previous expedition, Rogers would have so much success off of the coast of Peru and Ecuador robbing Spanish galleons that the duke stayed at sea another two full years. At Guayaquil in present-day Ecuador, Selkirk led a boat crew up the Guayas River where several wealthy Spanish ladies had fled, looted the gold and jewels they hid inside their clothes. His part in the hunt for treasure galleons along the coast of Mexico resulted in the capture of a Spanish ship they renamed the Bachelor on which he served as sailing master

under Captain Dover to the Dutch East Indies. Finally, the crew returned to London's River Thames in October of 1711, eight long years after Selkirk had left Ireland. And now Selkirk had quite the tale to tell. Woods Rogers and Richard Dick Steele both wrote their accounts of Selkirk's life on Robinson Crusoe Island

in 1712 and 1713 respectively, giving Selkirk and his family a fame they could have never imagined. In the years that followed Selkirk became a somewhat eccentric celebrity. Enriched by his share of the duke's plundered riches, he got 800 pounds, and he profited from his fame as well. For the better part of two years he dined out on his adventures wandering from pub to pub in Bristol and London telling tales of the South Seas for free meals and pints. Love it. However, some months after first meeting Selkirk, Steele noticed that the cheerful man he had first encountered now seemed burdened by the world again.

Maybe life really had been better for him on the island. He wrote, This plain man's story is a memorable example. That he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities, or to use Selkirk's own expression, I am now worth eight hundred pounds, but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing. In September of 1713, two years after returning to England, he was charged with assaulting a shipwright in Bristol and faced being imprisoned for two years. Instead, he returned home to Lower Largo in Scotland where he now met Sophia Bruce, a young shy dairymaid we know very little about. He apparently wanted

little to do with his family there though. Some biographers say, though others doubt, that he began trying to replicate the best of his life on the island down to a cave-like shelter he built behind his father's house from which he could gaze out upon the Largo Harbor. He evidently became a loner, resumed his drinking and fighting. About this time Daniel Defoe, well-known British political activist and author, grew intrigued by Selkirk's story. Historians have debated whether he and Selkirk actually met. Defoe would have had everything to gain by saying they had, which he never said. But Defoe did meet with Woods Rogers and feud dispute that the sailor from Fife inspired what would become Defoe's literary sensation, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures

of Robinson Crusoe. Actually the full title was, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Merriner, who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oranoke, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself, in account how he was at last as strangely delivered by pirates, written by himself." That is quite the title. Titles have gotten much more succinct in recent years.

Published in April of 1719 when Defoe was 59 and Selkirk was 43, Crusoe captivated readers unlike anything in its time and is now considered by many to be the first true English novel. Laced with politics and social theory was part adventure, part Christian allegory, part attack on British society that suggested that consumerism of the new global economy was harming people's souls more than it was helping them. The first printing of a thousand copies quickly went to a second and a third and a fourth etc. Now let's back up a little to reconnect with the real Robinson Crusoe. Alexander Selkirk and Sophia moved to London on March 4th 1717. It's unclear if they married there it's also unclear

if something may have happened to her or not, because after enlisting in the Royal Navy, he married a widowed innkeeper named Francis Candice while on a visit to Plymouth, England in 1720. In November of 1720, the age of 44, he signed on as the first mate of a naval warship, the HMS Weymouth, bound for Guinea and the Gold Coast of Africa in search of pirates. As the ship sailed down the coast of West Africa, men began to contract yellow fever from the swarms of mosquitoes that were following them. The ship's log would record dozens of deaths within a year's time, sometimes three or four in a single day. And on December 13, 1721, it was written in the ship's log, North to Northwest, small breeze and fair, took three Englishmen out of a Dutch ship and at 8 p.m.

Alexander Selkirk died. And as they had done with the other sick crew members who had died before him, his body was then unceremoniously thrown overboard. And that is the anticlimactic end of the life of Alexander Selkirk. But he continues to be a subject of fascination to this day. An archaeological expedition to the Juan Fernandez Islands in February of 2005 found part of a nautical instrument that likely belonged to Selkirk. It was, quote, a fragment of copper alloy identified as being from a pair of navigational dividers, aka calipers dating from the early 18th or late 17th century. Other investigations have found the places where they think Selkirk built his huts and the cliff he must have hiked up

in order to observe the high seas for some incoming ship that would hopefully save him. So what do you think? Would you do as well as Selkirk did on a remote, uninhabited island? Would you do as well as, for now, Lopez did nearly two centuries before him, down a hand and a thumb on the remaining hand?

Could you survive alone on a remote island, with only a rooster, maybe some cats for company, for years, provided you had a couple of simple tools and a lush island full of edible plants and animals? Could you not only survive but thrive? Could you make peace with that kind of solitude? not only survive but thrive? Could you make peace with that kind of solitude? Maybe even come to love it? Or are you too spoiled by modern conveniences? Would life without Instagram or Snapchat or Netflix or gaming consoles, smartphones, concerts, dating apps, air conditioning, showers, your skincare routine, your gym, doctor, car, etc. etc. etc. simply not be worth living? Do any of us have the same heartiness that was

required of men to go to sea in the 18th to the 16th centuries to brave the dangers of pirates and disease and shipwrecks and all the things that could go wrong when it was just you and the vast horizon? And that's it for this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story and I hope you did, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Be for your episodes of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story and I hope you did, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Beefier episodes of Time Suck every Monday at noon, Pacific time. New episodes of the now long running paranormal podcast,

Scared to Death every Tuesday at midnight, with two episodes of Nightmare Fuel. Some fictional horror written by myself, thrown into the mix each month. Thank you to Sophie Evans for the initial research here today and thank you Logan Keith, recording, uploading, editing today's episode. Please go to BadMagicProductions.com for all your bad magic needs and have yourself a great

weekend. Add Magic Productions