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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780465076994 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Basic Books |
| Publication date: | 05/22/2003 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Lexile: | 1180L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
MOSKITO
MAN
The Batchelor’s Delight found Man Friday on a Sunday.
It was 23rd March 1684.
The model for Defoe’s native hero had been on Juan Fernandez, marooned
and solitary, for more than three
years. Yet he was remarkably
nonchalant when the landing party from the Batchelor’s Delight stepped
ashore and ended his long solitude.
He greeted the piratical crew as if he had been expecting them, and he
had a meal ready - three goats
cooked with some white leaves of cabbage palm. It was as though they had come to
the island with the express intention of finding him, and he thanked them
graciously. In a sense, he was
right to do so.
Man Friday’s story is in the fourth chapter of the richly-bound volume which Dampier
holds, spine towards the artist, in his portrait by Thomas Murray. When Murray
painted the picture, the book was an obvious prop. ‘A New Voyage round the World’ had
recently been published, and so great was demand that three editions were
printed in the first year. Its far-travelled author was the talk of London
society. Dampier’s true-life mix of first-hand adventure, travel and geography
was so exotic that it was natural that Defoe, twenty two years later, would take
inspiration from Dampier’s absorbing tale.
Defoe’s concept of Man Friday was to be shaped by events that Dampier
witnessed, beginning on the shores of the Caribbean in the spring of
1680.
A flotilla of seven small ships was anchored in the lee of Golden
Island. The anchorage is a few
miles north of what is now the border between Colombia and Panama, and was a
favourite rendezvous for pirates or,
as their unofficial historian called them more genteelly,
‘buccaneers’. 331 heavily
armed men had disembarked, ready
for a route march into the rain forest. The standard equipment each man carried was a ‘fuzee, pistol
and hanger’; that is, a musket, a hand gun, and a short sword or cutlass
suspended from the belt. Many wore ‘snapsacks’ on their backs to carry their
spare clothing, gunpowder and shot.
The ships’ cooks had made three or four ‘doughboys’, small loaves of
bread, for each man as his marching rations. For water they anticipated drinking from
the numerous streams which drain the mist-covered mountains lying ahead of
them.
The intention was to launch a hit-and-run raid on the Spanish mining town
of Santa Maria. The town lay on the far slope of the continental divide which
forms the narrow waist of Central America. If they did not find enough loot in
Santa Maria, they would continue on to the Pacific shore and strike at an even
more ambitious target, the city of Panama. The raiders made little pretence of
having the correct privateering documents to legitimize such an assault. Their
‘commissions’, one of their leaders put it, would best be read by the light of
the muzzle flashes from their guns.
The raiders formed up in seven companies, each company approximating to
the crew of the ship that had brought them. In the van came Captain
Bartholomew Sharp. He had recently been ill and was still feeling very faint and
weak, and had contributed forty men to the expedition. Their marching flag was red with a
bunch of green and white ribbons. Next came Captain Richard Sawkins with thirty
men forming up behind a red pennant striped with yellow. Captain Peter Harris’
ship had the largest crew, 107 men.
Those who were picked to go on the raid, marched as two companies, each
with a green flag. Behind them came the man elected as overall commanderof the
enterprise, Captain John Coxon. His
war band was boosted with volunteers from two of the smallest ships whose
captains were staying behind to look after the invasion fleet. The seventh
company followed a red banner striped with yellow. On this background Captain Edmund Cook
had emblazoned his personal emblem - a hand and a sword.
The colourful quasi-military array masked the fact that the expedition
was little more than a smash-and-grab raid by a gang of amphibious
brigands. ‘Gold was the bait that
tempted a Merry Pack of Boys of us’ was how one ruffian jauntily described their
motives. Their rule was to be
the ‘Jamaica discipline’: All
decisions were to be made by vote of a general council; the men would elect or
dismiss their leaders; and they would divide any booty equally and
immediately.
Several members of the column had no vote nor any share in the
booty. They were the prisoners and
slaves, mostly Indian or black.
They were treated as pack animals to portage the extra munitions and
supplies. Nor did the Indian
auxiliaries have any votes. The
local Indian tribe, the Kuna, had
suggested the attack on Santa Maria and Panama, and only the Kuna were capable
of conducting the expedition through the difficult tangle of muddy
footpaths leading up over the
central cordillera and down the far slope to the South Sea. But very few of the Kuna spoke
English. This was a disadvantage
when the entire business of the expedition was conducted in English, the votes
of the general council were called in English, and the raiders themselves were
proud of their Englishness. Two more pirate captains had promised to provide men
for the project, but had backed out at the last moment because, as one of the
desperadoes scathingly wrote, their crews were ‘all French and not willing to go
to Panama.’