Searching for Crusoe: A Journey among the Last Real Islands

CRUSOE'S ISLAND--MAS A TIERRA The modern obsession with islands starts with Robinson Crusoe, so I started with his island, Mas a Tierra, the Pacific Island four hundred miles off the coast of Chile in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, where a Scottish seaman named Alexander Selkirk was marooned for four and a half years between 1704 and 1709. After his rescue by the privateer Captain Woodes Rogers, Selkirk recounted his story to the journalist Richard Steele. It is believed that Daniel Defoe read both Steele's resulting article and Woodes Rogers's book, A Cruising Voyage round the World, and incorporated Selkirk's experiences into his novel Robinson Crusoe. Some scholars suspect Defoe met and interviewed Selkirk, and when a Selkirk descendant recently sold his birthplace to settle inheritance taxes, she lambasted Defoe as "a man of no scruples" who had stolen and distorted her ancestor's story. I first encountered Mas a Tierra in Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana's account of his 1834 voyage from Boston to California. Dana called it a classic island, the most romantic on earth, and praised its rushing streams, lofty mountains, rich soil, plentiful fruit, and aromatic trees. It had a "peculiar charm," he wrote, perhaps because of its solitary position in the vast expanse of the South Pacific, and "the associations which everyone has connected with it in their childhood from reading Robinson Crusoe," ones that gave it "the sacredness of an early home." To reach this sacred home, which Chile has renamed Isla Robinson Crusoe, I traveled to Santiago, telephoned the offices of Transportes Aereos Robinson Crusoe (TARC), and was instructed to be in my hotel lobby at 3:00 p.m. with $420 in cash. The TARC agent was a stone-faced lady in rhinestone glasses who counted my money twice before parting with a ticket. After snapping her purse shut on my dollars she warned that the rains had started early this year and we had already entered the season of autumn storms, when flights could be delayed for days or weeks. But I was just happy to be buying a plane ticket to Isla Crusoe. An island of two hundred people four hundred miles from the Chilean mainland would not have had air service at all without the highly prized lobsters that were shipped to Santiago on return flights. TARC was one of several small companies using the antique Ce- rillos airport. When I arrived at midmorning, the tarmac was shrouded in fog and the terminal deserted. A little girl unlocked a kiosk selling newspapers and snacks, then curled up on the counter and fell asleep. An old crone cleaned the bathrooms, then locked them. A pay telephone rang and rang, echoing through the empty hall. There were three other passengers. Carlos was a burly young man with a face lost in whiskers and the loping gait of a yeti. He said he had taken a leave of absence from the school where he taught and was going to Isla Crusoe for a week "to forget certain things." But he carried a polar anorak, his luggage exceeded the ten-kilogram allowance, and I suspected he had suffered some crushing tragedy and planned on marooning himself for much longer. Irene was a parakeet-sized woman in her sixties who had brought along a friend, the plump and timid Alicia, as her silent caboose. Thirty years in the Atacama Desert had sun-blasted her face into a dalmatian pattern and left her straw-colored hair brittle and spontaneous- combustion dry. She made a theatrical meal of every sentence and introduced herself by excoriating everything that had ruined Chile: the corrupt politicians, the McDonald's hamburgers, and owning more things instead of touching more people. Whenever her family or the Atacama became too much, she said, "I threaten to move to thisClarke, Thurston is the author of 'Searching for Crusoe: A Journey among the Last Real Islands' with ISBN 9780345411433 and ISBN 0345411439.