This is one of those books that I’ve been thinking about reading for absolutely years but I still haven’t got around to it. But I do wish that I had made a note of every book which I’ve ever read which mentions Robinson Crusoe in it. I’m sure it’s been name-checked in at least 5 of the books which I’ve read recently, it just keeps cropping up. Has anyone else noticed this? The detective in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was obsessed by Crusoe.

Anyway, Alexander Selkirk was the real life man whom Daniel Defoe based the story on and he came from the nearby fishing village of Lower Largo in Fife. This is the statue which they have of him as a memorial.

In the Wikipedia article it states that Selkirk asked to be put onto the island because he had doubts about the sea-worthiness of the ship that he was on, but the local version is somewhat different.

Apparently Alexander was a ‘greetin-faced nyaff’, in English that is a moaning, annoying, contemptible person. So the whole ship’s company couldn’t stand listening to him any longer and decided that they had to get rid of him, and deposited him on the uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra/Juan Fernandez, which is 400 miles west of Chile. This seems much more likely to me, especially since he ran off to sea in the first place because his unruly behaviour had got him into trouble locally when he was a youngster. A career as a privateer was obviously preferable to having to go before the kirk session and be punished. Nowadays the island is known as Robinson Crusoe’s Island.

As it happens, Selkirk was lucky not to be on his ship as it actually did sink with the loss of most of the crew and those who survived were thrown into a Chilean jail and left to rot there. You can read more about Selkirk’s life here.

I quite like the fact that it’s all very low key. No museum or anything, I don’t suppose there’s much that they could have in one anyway. It would amount to a map and a goat skin!