Crusoe's Island by Andrew Lambert

Author:Andrew Lambert [Andrew Lambert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571330256
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

After their strange encounter Douglas and Scouler left the sailors to fill the water butts and wandered into the ruined village. ‘Here a few years ago the Spaniards formed a colony; but it is now abandoned, all the houses are destroyed, and the fort, on which were some very large guns. Twenty-six cannons lay on the shore just below.’ Amid the general air of decay he was struck by the remains of a church consecrated in 1811, and ‘a circular oven of brick, seven feet within, marked on it 1741; probably built by Anson during his residence, it is now occupied by a small species of blue pigeon as their cote’. Abandoned, overrun gardens rich with peaches, quinces, apples, berries and vines were harvested. The only edible vegetable on offer was the radish, which grew to a large size.17 The sight of a garden, however ruinous, prompted Douglas to sow some of the seeds he had brought, and give some to Clark. In exchange for a tot of rum and few old clothes his Robinsonian friend handed over a young goat. After a second day botanising Douglas had hardly regained the deck when a storm blew up and the ship stood out of the bay.

Like most educated British visitors in the romantic era Douglas knew Anson, Cowper and Crusoe, he was equally certain of his fellow Scot Selkirk. That an itinerant sailor, working on the other side of the world, had Cowper’s lines by heart, and a copy of Crusoe, demonstrates just how deeply this curious place had penetrated into the fluid core of Britishness. As Douglas, Scouler and Clark discussed the various texts that imposed Britishness on Juan Fernández the mythic and the romantic collided. Ruined houses, a fort, a church and even an old oven heightened Douglas’s sense of wonder, while the feral gardens of long departed Spanish soldiers, and an unfortunate descendant of Juan Fernández’s goats, provided material comforts for scorbutic scientists. Douglas and Scouler even settled on a location for Crusoe’s cave. When he came to compile his impressions, Douglas melded the sickly obsessions of Richard Walter with the precise terminology demanded by his patrons, using the Latin taxonomy acquired in William Hooker’s botanical lectures at Glasgow University:

No pen can correctly depict the rural enchanting appearance of this island, and the numerous rills descending through the valleys shaded by rich luxuriant verdure emanating in the dark recesses of rocky dells, while the feathery fronds of Lomaria, Aspidium and Polypodium several species of which are new and truly princely – form a denseness to the forests.18

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