Real stories of people stranded on a desert island. The real story of robinson crusoe

Daniel Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe", or rather its first part, was based on real events.
Robinson's prototype was the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, a 27-year-old boatswain of the ship "Sank Port", which was part of the flotilla under the command of William Dampier, who went to the shores in 1704 South America. Hot-tempered and capricious, he constantly came into conflict with the ship's captain, Stradling. After another quarrel, which occurred near the island of Mas a Tierra, Selkirk demanded to be dropped off; the captain immediately granted his request. True, later the sailor asked the captain to cancel his order, but he was relentless, and Selkirk was able to leave the island only after more than four years.

Alexander Selkirk had some things necessary for survival: an axe, a gun, a supply of gunpowder, etc. Suffering from loneliness, Selkirk got used to the island and gradually acquired the necessary survival skills. At first, his diet was meager - he ate shellfish, but over time he got used to it and discovered feral domestic goats on the island. Once upon a time, people lived here and brought these animals with them, but after they left the island, the goats went wild. He hunted them, thereby adding much-needed meat to his diet. Soon Selkirk tamed them and received milk from them. Among plant crops, he discovered wild turnips, cabbage and black pepper, as well as some berries.

Rats posed a danger to him, but fortunately for him, wild cats, previously brought by people, also lived on the island. In their company he could sleep peacefully, without fear of rodents. Selkirk built himself two huts from Pimento officinalis wood. His supply of gunpowder ran low and he was forced to hunt goats without a gun. While chasing them, he once became so carried away by his pursuit that he did not notice the cliff from which he fell and lay there for some time, miraculously surviving.

In order not to forget the English speech, he constantly read the Bible aloud. Not to say that he was a pious person - that’s how he heard a human voice. When his clothes began to wear out, he began to use goat skins for them. Being the son of a tanner, Selkirk knew well how to tan hides. After his boots wore out, he did not bother to make new ones for himself, because his feet, hardened by calluses, allowed him to walk without shoes. He also found old hoops from barrels and was able to make something like a knife out of them.

One day, two ships arrived on the island, which turned out to be Spanish, and England and Spain were enemies at that time. Selkirk could have been arrested or even killed, since he was a privateer, and he made the difficult decision for himself to hide from the Spaniards.
Salvation came to him on February 1, 1709. It was the English ship "Duke", with captain Woods Rogers, who named Selkirk governor of the island.

The exciting adventures of the protagonist of Daniel Dafoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" have long become a classic. But history knows many cases when people found themselves alone on uninhabited islands, and everything turned out to be much more prosaic than in an adventure novel. How did you manage to survive in extreme conditions real “Robinsons” – later in the review.

Alexander Selkirk

In 1703, a British expedition was sent to South America. On one of the ships there was a Scottish boatswain Alexander Selkirk. This man had such a quarrelsome character that in a very short time he managed to quarrel with the entire team.

One day, after another skirmish, the boatswain began to exclaim that he should be dropped off on the nearest island, because... he can't stand the whole crew. The captain did with great satisfaction what the sailor so quickly asked for. When Selkirk was sent ashore on the island of Mas a Tierra, he would have been glad to apologize, but it was already too late.

Fortunately for Selkirk, colonists once lived on the island. When leaving, they abandoned the cats and goats, which had already gone wild. The boatswain managed to re-domesticate the animals, thereby providing himself with food.

After 4 years and 4 months, a ship flying the British flag “Duke” landed on the shores of the island. Selkirk was taken back to Scotland. There, the former sailor became a real celebrity. Reporters vying with each other to interview him, ordinary onlookers over a mug of alcohol with open mouths listened to the miraculous story of salvation. One of these listeners was the writer Daniel Defoe, who based his novel about Robinson Crusoe on the adventures of the sailor Selkirk.

Pavel Vavilov

In August 1942, in the Kara Sea, the Soviet icebreaker Alexander Sibiryakov was defeated in a battle with the German cruiser Admiral Scheer. The ship sank, and only the fireman was able to escape Pavel Vavilov. The boat in which he found himself contained an emergency supply, including matches, biscuits and fresh water. Vavilov was lucky enough to find warm clothes and a supply of bran among the floating wreckage of the ship. The sailor decided to sail towards the lighthouse. So he ended up on an island inhabited only by polar bears.

Vavilov’s survival in the Arctic on an uninhabited island lasted a month and three days. When food supplies were already running low, Vavilov managed to attract the attention of the Sacco ship passing by. The fireman was saved.

Sergei Lisitsyn

The Russian Robinson Crusoe is called a nobleman and a hussar Sergei Petrovich Lisitsyn, who, due to his tough temperament, ended up on the shore Sea of ​​Okhotsk. In 1847, Lisitsyn was on a ship heading for Alaska. The nobleman quarreled with the captain, and he put him ashore, giving him in addition clothes, matches, writing materials, food and a couple of pistols.

If in the famous novel about Robinson Crusoe the main character finds himself on a tropical island, then in the case of Lisitsyn, it happened in a much colder climate.

The unfortunate hussar spent seven months alone. Then, after another storm, he discovered a man lying on the shore. The rescued man introduced himself as Vasily and said that the ship he was on had developed a leak. Everyone sailed away, but he was forgotten. To Lisitsyn’s joy, there were large and small livestock on the ship.

At the same time, the Chinese began to more actively raid the Amur region, so Russian warships began to arrive there. One of them discovered “Russian Robinsons”. The isolation lasted 7 months.

Gerald Kingsland and Lucy Irvine

Sometimes it happens that people consciously refuse the benefits of civilization and go to desert island. That's exactly what journalist Gerald Kingsland did in the early 1980s. It was a kind of social experiment in which it was necessary to survive for a whole year. Kingsland advertised for a partner. Lucy Irwin agreed to go with him. The experiment took place in 1982. The couple arranged a fictitious marriage in order to travel to the island, which was located between Australia and New Guinea, without delays at the border.

As it turned out, the newly-made spouses had little in common. Moreover, they constantly quarreled on domestic grounds. A few months later, a severe drought led to the fact that the voluntary hermits found themselves without fresh water. They were rescued by aborigines from a neighboring island.

Upon arrival in the UK, Kingsland and Irwin immediately filed for divorce. Each of them wrote a book, outlining personal experience stay on a desert island. Literary works became bestsellers, and films were made based on them.

Englishman Brendon Grimshaw has earned the nickname of a modern-day Robinson because

I am sure many of you know about the life of Robinson Crusoe. But few people know that Daniel Defoe described a story that is actually real...

When the sailor from Scotland Alexander Selkirk turned 19 years old, he left his family and joined the crew of the ship "Cinque Ports", which Pacific Ocean in 1703 he took part in the corsair raid of the pirate Dampier's squadron. Alexander was treated well, so he was appointed assistant captain. And after the death of the first captain, Thomas Stradling took leadership of the ship. He was a rather tough man and treated everyone badly, including Selkirk.

It was too difficult for Alexander to be on the ship, which went closer to Chile, to the Juan Fernandez archipelago. At this time, he made a conscious decision to leave the ship and remain on one of the islands. Alexander hoped that the British or French would take him away sooner or later, so he took with him only what he considered necessary: ​​a knife, an ax, bullets, gunpowder, navigation instruments and a blanket.

Loneliness on the island did not break Selkirk. And his analytical mind helped him survive among wildlife. He built a home for himself, learned to get his own food (hunted sea creatures, ate plants), and tamed wild goats. This went on for a long time. While waiting for at least some ship, he had to live alone, making various things necessary for existence (clothes, a calendar, for example). One day he saw a Spanish ship sailing near the shore. But, remembering that England and Spain had become rivals, Selkirk decided to hide.

So four years passed. The expedition of Woods Rogers, passing near the island, kindly took Alexander. He looked, of course, wild: long hair, a fairly grown beard, clothes made of goat skins, and had forgotten human speech, which was restored after some time. Defoe, based on the stories of eyewitness Rogers, wrote a novel that is still known today. The island where Selkeers lived until today is called Robinson Crusoe Island, which attracts many curious tourists.

Who among us did not read in childhood, either voluntarily or “under pressure” (as required by the school curriculum), Daniel Defoe’s adventure novel about Robinson Crusoe? The novel is written in the relatively rare genre of “fictional autobiography” or “Robinzoad”, so it is not surprising that the name of the main character became a household name two hundred years ago. Defoe himself wrote not one novel, but four. Moreover, the latter tells about the adventures of the already elderly Robinson in Siberia... However, the last novels of the series were never fully translated into Russian.

The adventures of Robinson and his faithful companion Friday are written so realistically that no one doubts the reality of the “autobiography”. However, alas, the real Robinson Crusoe never existed.

“Robinson” is a collective image from many stories about sailors surviving on uninhabited islands, of which there were many in that era.

Pirates in Her Majesty's Service

The fact is that, although Defoe avoids this topic in his novel, all (or almost all) real prototypes of his novel were pirates. As a last resort - privateers, i.e. the same pirates, only working under a contract for one of the warring countries (most often they were used by Great Britain to rob Spanish “golden caravans”).

Since pirate ships were not equipped with guardhouses, such sailors were either killed for their misdeeds or left on a desert island “to be judged by God.” In the latter case, the islands were used as "natural prisons". Indeed, you can’t escape from such an island, and it’s not easy to survive there. This was the “divine judgment”: if after a year or a couple of years the sailor remained alive, then he was again taken away by his own “colleagues” in the pirate “workshop”, but if not... No, as they say, there is no trial.

Alexander Selkirk

It is believed that Defoe's greatest influence was the story of the Scot's survival. Alexandra Selkirk. It was a sailor who served on a galley (small warship) " Sanc Por", where he was a boatswain. In 1704, as part of a small privateer flotilla under the leadership of the famous captain Dampier, he was supposed to rob Spanish ships off the coast of South America. However, like a true Scottish privateer, Selkirk had a very bad character and violent disposition, which is why he constantly quarreled with other sailors and superiors (and arguing with pirate captain- more expensive for yourself). Because of one of these quarrels, he was demoted in rank, after which he “in his hearts” declared that he now had no place on this ship. The captain took his words literally and ordered him to land on the nearest uninhabited island...

Despite the fact that the unlucky boatswain repented and asked to cancel the order, the captain equipped the sailor with everything necessary and landed him on small island Mas a Tierra is 600 km from the coast of Chile.

A good start to Robinson's story

It must be said that Selkirk received excellent equipment for those times. He was given spare clothes and underwear (a luxury for those times), tobacco, a cauldron for cooking, a knife and an axe. And most importantly, our hero was provided with a flintlock rifle, quite modern at that time, with a pound of gunpowder, bullets and flint. They also included the Bible, without which the “divine judgment” would not have been a trial. 300 years later, archaeologists at the site of his camp in the tropics also found navigational instruments, thanks to which Selkirk probably observed the stars, thus determining the day and month.

Let us note that the boatswain himself was an experienced man, although he was only 27 years old at the time of disembarkation. Alexander, the son of a shoemaker, ran away to a ship as a sailor at the age of 18. However, his ship was almost immediately captured by French pirates, who sold Selkirk into slavery. However, the brave young man escaped, joined the pirates himself and returned home as an experienced sailor with a large wallet full of ill-gotten gold coins...

Finding himself on a desert island, our sailor began a storm of activity. He built an observation post and two huts: an “office” and a “kitchen”. At first he ate local fruits and roots (he found, for example, a local variety of turnip), but then he discovered a small population of goats, which he hunted with his gun. Then, when gunpowder began to run out, he tamed goats and began to receive milk, meat and skins from them. The latter came in handy when, a couple of years later, his clothes became unusable. Using a nail he found, he sewed himself simple clothes from goat skins. The experience of working in my father's shoe shop came in handy. From half a coconut I made myself a “cup” on a leg, “furniture”, etc. That is, Selkirk has settled down quite thoroughly on the island.

Preserve humanity in solitude

Alexander Selkirk never met his “Friday”, so he suffered most from loneliness. The main tests, by his own admission, were loneliness and the fight against the rats that flooded this island. The rats ate food supplies and spoiled all his other property. Selkirk even made his own chest (which he decorated with carvings) to protect things from the weather and rats.

However, the boatswain found wild cats on the island, which he tamed, and thus protected himself from tailed pests. The presence of goats, rats and feral cats indicated that the island was once inhabited, but Selkirk never found traces of other people. In order not to forget human speech, he talked to himself and read the Bible aloud. Despite the fact that the boatswain was not the most righteous person, it was the Bible, as he himself later admitted, that helped him remain human in a wild environment.

One day, two Spanish ships arrived on the island, probably in search of fresh water, but Selkirk, who was a British privateer, was afraid to go out to them because... The Spaniards would probably have hanged him on the yards for piracy. The ships left, and the boatswain was again left alone with the goats and cats.

Robinson's rescue and the end of the story

But he was still saved. Four years after he arrived on the island, on February 1, 1709, his own flotilla under the leadership of Dampier returned for Selkirk. However, its composition was already different, and the ship "Saint Port" was not there. It is noteworthy that Woods Rogers, the captain of the Duke, which was directly involved in the evacuation of the Robinson, indicated in his logbook that he was rescuing the “governor of the island.”

Once on civilized land, Alexander Selkirk became a regular at taverns, where he told stories of his adventures on a desert island over a glass of beer. Probably one of the witnesses to his drunken performances was Daniel Defoe. The Scot himself did not stay on land for long. After some time, he returned to privateering again, but ten years later, off the coast West Africa, died of yellow fever and was “buried at sea” (i.e. thrown overboard with full honors). Thus ended the story of the real Robinson.

By the way, the island where Alexander Selkirk lived was named “ Robinson Crusoe", and the neighboring one - " Alexander Selkirk" But this happened after the inglorious death of the brave Scottish boatswain with a bad character, who died without knowing that he had become a legend.

The brave Scottish boatswain, who spent 4 years and 4 months on a desert island, managed not only to survive, but also to become the prototype of the legendary Robinson Crusoe.

In April 1703, Alexander Selkirk became a member of the British expedition to the coast of South America. In just one year, the Scot, who had an extremely scandalous character, managed to infuriate the entire crew of the Cinque Ports vessel. That is why, when Selkirk, during another quarrel, demanded to be dropped off, Captain Charles Pickering breathed a sigh of relief and immediately granted this desire. Of course, realizing his prospects, Selkirk still tried to take back his words, but it was too late: the team left him in the Pacific Ocean on the uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra (it is now called - long live recursion! - Robinson Crusoe Island).

Before Selkirk, settlers had already lived on the island, leaving behind goats and cats, which, however, had become wild over the years. The Scot had plenty of free time, so he managed to tame goats and get a constant source of fresh meat and milk, as well as skins from which he could make some kind of clothing. Selkirk used cats as protection from rats (and probably for mental relaxation). Among other things, thickets of wild turnips and edible berries were found on the island.

At the beginning of 1709, the British ship Duke anchored off the coast of Mas a Tierra, whose crew discovered and rescued Selkirk, who had already settled on the island. Returning to his homeland, the Scot became a celebrity: articles were written about him in newspapers, and people lined up in pubs to buy him a drink and listen to stories from the hermit’s life. A few years later, Alexander Selkirk joined the Royal Navy and sailed to the shores of West Africa, where he died during a yellow fever epidemic.

Pavel Vavilov, 34 days

On August 25, 1942, the crew of the famous icebreaker Alexander Sibiryakov entered into an unequal battle with the fascist cruiser Admiral Scheer in the area of ​​Domashny Island in the Kara Sea. Almost all crew members and passengers died during a fire on board or were captured. Only the fireman Pavel Vavilov managed to avoid the same fate, who ended up in the water and later managed to climb onto the surviving rescue whaleboat. Having found an emergency supply in the boat, consisting of matches, biscuits and a barrel of water, and also having caught a bag of bran and a set of warm clothes from the water, Vavilov went towards the lighthouse that was sending signals and found himself on the uninhabited island of Belukha.

For 34 days, the fireman survived on an island inhabited exclusively by polar bears. Having settled down on the upper platform of the lighthouse, in relative safety, he ate bran stew and drank melt water, fortunately in September it had already snowed in those parts.

By the time the food supplies were almost gone, Vavilova was noticed by the crew of the Sacco steamship sailing past. A seaplane was sent to pick up the survivors, flown by the famous polar pilot Ivan Cherevichny.

After being rescued, Pavel Vavilov, as befits a Soviet man, did not rest on his laurels, but quickly returned to ordinary life. Until the end of his life, he managed to work on the icebreakers Georgy Sedov and Lenin.

Ada Blackjack, 2 years old

The life of a simple Inuit girl, Ada Blackjack (nee Dalutuk), was not very joyful: two of her three children died in infancy, and her young husband also died a little later. Due to the difficult financial situation, Ada had to temporarily give her only son to an orphanage and go to work. Work was found quickly: Canadian Alan Crawford invited Ada to join the Arctic expedition as a cook and seamstress.

On September 16, 1921, five people - Ada, Alan and American polar explorers Milton Halle, Fred Maurer and Lorne Knight - set off towards Wrangel Island in order to get ahead of the Japanese expedition, who were going to claim ownership of the island. The first winter was too difficult for the team: food supplies quickly depleted, and the hunt, on which great hopes were pinned, did not bring results. In January, Halle, Crawford and Maurer decided to head back home. Ada refused to return and remained on the island with Knight, who was seriously ill and could not move, and an expedition cat named Vitz.

Since the polar explorers heading back disappeared on the way, and Knight died suddenly, Ada and the cat were left alone for a whole year and a half. In August 1923, the girl, who had learned to hunt and survive in extreme cold, was taken from the island by Harold Noyce's rescue expedition. Returning home with the money she earned, Ada took her son from the orphanage and moved with him to Seattle.

Lucy Irwin and Gerald Kingsland, 1 year old

Once on Taina, the couple realized that they had nothing in common, but since there were not only people on the island, but also a registry office where they could file a divorce, they had to learn to get along and endure the hardships of tropical life together. According to Irwin and Kingsland, the lack of mutual understanding was more difficult for them than everyday discomfort.

In 1983, the island was struck by drought, leaving the couple without fresh water supplies. They were rescued by aborigines from the nearby Badu Island. Returning to Britain, Gerald and Lucy finally divorced and wrote books that became bestsellers: Cast Away (the novel was made into a film in 1986) and The Islander.