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Book shines light on the real Robinson Crusoe

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO, (Reuters) The real Robinson Crusoe loved rum more than truth, took to bestiality with the goats on the island where he was stranded, and died at sea, his untamed search for easy money halted finally by tropical fever.

This is not Daniel Defoe's mythic man from the novel of 1719, but Diana Souhami's story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scots seaman who inspired it.

In the end, Defoe's character may be far more civilized.

"He was kind of a football hooligan, a bit of a thug really," Souhami says of Selkirk. "He was the sort of guy who sorts out a problem with his fists."

Her finitely researched book, "Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe" (Harcourt, $24 hardcover) won this year's Whitbread Award for biography. The award's judges called her work "a great adventure, a great read and a real advance for the art of biography."

On a recent research trip to libraries in the United States, the London-based writer told Reuters she was drawn to Selkirk because not much had been written about him. And despite the raw truth that marks her 222 pages she is not without some admiration for him.

"He must have been so incredibly strong. Who could chase up mountains and just survive for four years? He must have been so strong and so fit -- and to not kind of go catatonically depressed and sit in a heap and die," she said.

NOT UNUSUAL

Nor was he atypical. In the early 18th century it was the seamen who survived, relying on their wiles at a time when the ocean was a battleground where the Spanish and British empires collided. Government-warranted privateers lured by stories of treasure-laden galleons willingly traded land for peril under sail.

"The lure was gold and alcohol and very often they were just kind of rather desperate people," Souhami says.

Selkirk's desperation drove him from Nether Largo in Fife, eastern Scotland, where he was born in 1680, to seek fortune on the seas rather than be chained to his father's trade as a hide tanner and shoe maker.

And in a fight with equally desperate men, it landed him alone in 1704 on the island of Juan Fernandez, 360 miles (579 km) off the coast of Chile, left behind by double-dealing superiors who accused him of inciting treason for questioning the safety of their rotting vessel.

The island where he would spend 52 months alone was known to those who traversed the south seas, and his rescue came from a ship in search of the very food and water that kept him alive while alone.

Souhami's meticulous mining of ancient journals and records yields a story that pairs research-paper precision with bursts of poetry. She details every aspect of Selkirk's life on the island -- his clothes, food, shelter and even his sexual conquests in the local goat herd, animals whose ears he notched after satisfying his needs.

THE ISLAND

In the end the island -- today a Chilean territory inhabited by about 500 people -- takes as memorable a place in the book as Selkirk.

"I was amazed when I went there. It's not the stereotype of a desert island -- it's a volcanic island of mountains and valleys and gorges," she said. "It just doesn't lend itself to settlement. The people who live there are very cut off."

Before his death on an ill-fated voyage off the West Coast of Africa in 1721, Selkirk had amassed property and a bit of wealth by the standards of the day and married two women -- the second wife, Souhami's says, simply for a tryst in the port from which he left on his final voyage.

The idea of one man surviving alone (there was no "Man Friday" on Selkirk's island -- has as much appeal today, Souhami said, as it did when Defoe put the story into what many regard as the first English novel, a story that has never been out of print since then.

Is there anyone today with the physical and mental mettle to do what Selkirk did?

"The one person I've thought of is a Devon farmer," she said. "He would manage all the practicalities, husband the creatures and know what to do and how to build things."

In the meantime Souhami -- whose earlier works include "The Trials of Radclyffe Hall" -- is busy at work on a new subject far removed from the Alexander Selkirk she came to know so well.

"I'm back to Paris in the early 1900s, and a more civilized subject," she said. 

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