Alexander Selkirk rescued after years marooned
On this day · 2 February 1709
A Scottish sailor who'd asked to be left ashore was found four years later, half-wild in goatskins.
On February 2, 1709, a passing privateer plucked the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk from an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernández group, off the coast of Chile. He had been alone there for four years and four months.
Selkirk had marooned himself by choice in 1704, doubting his leaky ship’s seaworthiness and demanding to be set ashore. He survived on goats, wild turnips, and crawfish, taming feral cats to fend off the rats that gnawed at him in his sleep.
The rescuers found “a Man cloth’d in Goat-skin, who looked wilder than the first Owners of them.”
The ship was the Duke, captained by Woodes Rogers and piloted by William Dampier. Selkirk’s ordeal, later recounted in print, is widely seen as a key inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.
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