The Real Robinson Crusoe

 

“Cast Away

 

By Francesca de Tores

 

Bloomsbury Circus, 336 pages, $25.30

 

In 1704, while making repairs to the worm-ridden hull of the privateering ship Cinque Ports on the remote Juan Fernandez Archipelago, some 400 miles off the Chilean coast, Alexander Selkirk lays into his captain, punctuating his tirade with a foolhardy challenge: "Then you may leave me here," he says, "for I should rather take my chances on this God-forsaken island than to trust my life to a ship full of holes and captained by a fool."

 

Thus begins the story of Alexander Selkirk -- the real Robinson Crusoe, who lived alone on an uninhabited island with nothing but rats, cats and goats to keep him company.

 

In "Cast Away," Francesca de Tores offers a fictionalized account of Selkirk's tale.

 

Growing up in a small Scottish village as the youngest of seven boys, Selkirk, Ms. de Tores imagines, must have been bullied by his older brothers, providing motive for his running away to sea at the age of 15. "Having fled from Nether Largo and the shame and chaos of my conduct," Selkirk says, "none is more surprised than I to find that I make a good sailor" and, after three years at sea, "a good navigator."

 

But Selkirk, as Ms. de Tores describes him, admits to being "a man of choleric disposition, much inclined to rage intemperate, and ashore more like to be found drunk than sober." Hence the cause of his abandonment.

 

From the onset of Selkirk's island seclusion, Ms. deTores sets the plot by posing the one question he must ultimately confront: "Who is a man, when all the things that make up his life are stripped away? No. Not just any man, but who is Alexander Selkirk, without his troublesome family nor his shipboard duties nor even a tot of rum?

 

Who remains?"

 

He takes inventory of his meager resources ("a small sack of flour and a cask of flip several yards of linen cloth musket a pound of powder and but a small quantity of bullets, a flint, knife and marlinspike; a kettle"), then considers the challenges he faces "and the very great likelihood of my death on this forsaken place." It's enough to "lead me to open the cask of flip." For the next several days he goes on a bender, finishing off the entire contents of the cask, staggering about the island in fiery recollections of his stormy childhood. By day three the flip is gone, "and there is no beseeching the island for more. It is time instead to set about the business of surviving."

 

And survive he does. In addition to his tools and supplies, his true saving graces are the abundant goats and cabbage trees that provide a steady source of food, and the cats that he befriends to control the rats that forever pester him during the night. As the son of a cobbler, he knows how to tan goat hides, which provide him with the needed coverings for both his dwelling place and his body. He even devises a way to keep the goats corralled so that he doesn't have to chase them down or use up his precious bullets and gunpowder. Seals are also seasonal visitors, providing valuable resources.

 

There is one item he didn't take stock of -- a Bible. For a creative outlet, he turns to it, altering passages with bits of charcoal to make poetry. He describes his efforts as "more akin to whittling at a piece of wood -- for I am removing word after word until what remains seems to be the truth." Here he reduces a passage of Genesis to read: "Darkness upon the deep waters / In the midst of evening / Let the Sea bring forth / the stars." Ms. de Tores makes wonderful use of this device throughout the novel, offering a poetic abstraction to codify the plot.

 

But Selkirk is not at peace. "Do not mistake me and think that I am at ease here. I wade daily through a kind of despair so vast that I cannot make out its horizon, nor fathom any way to navigate it." Mentally he is quite fragile, and when he becomes physically ill from a bacterial infection, he suffers a mental breakdown.

 

Enter Sleek, the crabby tabby cat, and the Rev. Vicarious Cronch, the biblically recondite goat: interlocutors, speaking beasts. To explain these hallucinations Selkirk offers this: "If I doubt what is happening, I deny myself the prospect of company. You may call me credulous, but if I refuse this goat and his voice, I lose his conversation and condemn myself to silence."

 

It is through his daily conversations with these two psychic apparitions that Selkirk mines the depths of himself: ||

 

"I know how a man may become lost. I was lost many years before ever I came to the island. But this I also know. I learned it under the ministry of goats, and the scorn of cats, and the kirk of salt, and the thick Bible of silence. Sun-blind, goat-mad, a tongue made dumb, walking the shores of loneliness.  Listen. This I know: I know how a man may be saved."

 

In the second week of the third month of the fourth year of his isolation, two British frigates finally appear on the horizon. Selkirk is saved. But by then he has already been saved.

 

"Cast Away" is a masterwork of creative fiction, employing historical scholarship, biblical allusions and Jungian psychology to deliver one of the most beguiling survival stories ever written.

 

---

 

Mr. Horan's books include "Seeds," "Harvest" and the novels "Goose Music" and "Life in the Rainbow."” [1]

 

1. The Real Robinson Crusoe. Horan, Richard.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 July 2026: A13.