Where Crusoe gets his name

The Water Horse is a castaway - that is, ‘one cast adrift at sea’ - because the found egg was washed up on a Scottish beach.

Another castaway was a man named Alexander Selkirk. After you read his story, you’ll see why the Water Horse is given the name Crusoe.

Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish sailor born in 1676 in Lower Largo in Fife. At the age of 19 Alexander went to sea to make his fortune. Alexander was made a Sailing Master a few years later. He joined a buccaneering expedition in the South Seas, sailing on a galleon named Cinque Ports. The ship was damaged during sea battles and Alexander argued with the ship’s captain, Thomas Stradling, saying that the galleon was no longer seaworthy.

In September 1704, Alexander Selkirk was abandoned (or marooned) by Stradling on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Alexander took with him some clothes and bedding, a musket with gunpowder, some tools, and a Bible. He soon realised that he would be alone on the island for a long time. He read his Bible, made friends with cats and wild goats, and waited for a passing ship to rescue him.

Four years passed before two British ships appeared offshore. On 1 February 1709, Selkirk saw the ships, lit a torch and waved it wildly from the beach. A landing party rowed ashore and discovered a ‘wildman’ dressed in goatskins.

Woodes Rogers, the captain of the ship that rescued Selkirk, later described his first sighting of the castaway.

'A man cloth'd in goat-skins, who look'd wilder than the first owners of them, had so much forgot his language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seem'd to speak his words by halves.'

Six years later, Alexander Selkirk’s experiences inspired a hugely successful novel by an author named Daniel Defoe. Defoe called the main character of his fictional story Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s novel pretends to tell the true story of an English castaway who spends 28 years on a deserted island.

The full title of Defoe’s novel is 'The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pirates. Written by Himself.'

Today the island where Alexander Selkirk spent four years as a castaway is called Robinson Crusoe Island.

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