Three centuries ago an impetuous Scottish sailor known as Alexander Selkirk—though this wasn’t his real name—was languishing off the coast of Chile in a battlescarred, worm-eaten British ship called the Cinque Ports when he began to argue with the captain that the leaky, disease- ridden vessel was a deathtrap.
Selkirk, a skilled navigator, and the ship’s sickened crew were privateers—in effect, legalized pirates for the British Crown—who had spent a year at sea off South America robbing Spanish ships and coastal villages. Selkirk had already been on a similar voyage. He knew all the risks. But by October 1704, as the Cinque Ports anchored off a deserted archipelago 418 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile, he had made a lifechanging decision.
Selkirk demanded that his 21-year-old captain, Lt. Thomas Stradling, whom he regarded as arrogant, leave him on the largest island, a wish that Stradling was only too happy to oblige. By all accounts the 28-year-old Selkirk was a hothead. Back home in Scotland he had beaten up his father and two brothers over a harmless prank and would later leave both the women who claimed to be his wife.
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