Selkirk's Island - Hardcover

Souhami, Diana

3.49

425 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643851 ISBN 13: 9780297643852

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001

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Selkirk was a pirate and a buccaneer who sailed on the South Seas on looting expeditions for gold and treasure. In 1703 he joined an expedition whose object was to plunder French and Spanish ships. Conditions on the ship were appalling; scurvy, dysentery and typhus flourished and most of the crew died or went mad. Eventually they reached the island of Juan Fernandez 400 miles off the coast of Chile where Selkirk opted to maroon himself. Suddenly solitude and silence were imposed and his only relationship was to the island and to himself. He learnt to kill goats with cudgels and use their skins for coats and shoes. He hollowed out a canoe and circumnavigated the island. He wished there were a woman on the island, but perhaps he used the goats he had tamed for his sexual satisfaction. Gradually he found that company was not essential and that he was the Governor of this island, afraid of nothing it contained. In 1709 Selkirk spotted two ships from his cliff-top lookout. They saw his fire and the next morning had landed on Juan Fernandez to be greeted by an unrecognisable savage-looking man incoherent with emotion. Selkirk endured a painful few weeks as he watched his dominion being plundered, then sailed back with them to civilisation where he 'bewailed his return to the world'. He died in 1720 back at sea, of yellow fever.

This is an outstanding book by an extremely fine writer based on journals of those who dumped and rescued Selkirk as well as on Souhami's own adventures to his island.

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Product Description:

1st edition hardcover 1st printing unread as new condition book and fine slightly sunned spine dw ex shop stock In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Review:

Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island is not the first book about the extraordinary, real-life adventures of the Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk--that credit must go to a rather better-known book, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Nor, doubtless, will it be the last. But it might be the best. Diana Souhami's book commands superlatives for every reason. The author of previous, outstanding biographies, including the prizewinning The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, Souhami has produced a marvellous account of what life was like on the remote, rain-swept (not desert) island of Juan Fernandez. Selkirk chose to remain on the island in 1704, when he sensed that the piratical voyage he had joined himself to was sinking fast. His shipmates sailed on and left him. For four years he survived in total solitude, hunting the wild goats on the island and clubbing them to death, building a hut from the branches of sandalwood trees, and making fire with dry sticks. Souhami brings everything to life with vivid, imaginary vignettes: "A boa constrictor arrived coiled in the hollow of a cut tree. It had journeyed from Brazil for seven weeks over choppy seas. The tree washed ashore with the turning tide. It sloughed its skin and danced alone." When at last two ships sailed into Juan Fernandez's tiny harbour, quite by chance, they found a bearded, savage-looking man, who could only utter the one word: "Marooned!" Souhami is brilliant on the natural history, on the physical details, on the sheer, intractable character of the material world that Selkirk had to deal with--and all these things demand that you, the reader, ask yourself: "Could I have done this? Would I have survived?" This is what makes Selkirk's Island compelling, fascinating reading, and the three double-page colour photographs of the island are breathtaking. --Christopher Hart

Christopher Hart.

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