Tag Archives: Robinson Crusoe

Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland

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Lower Largo

I’ve been visiting quite a few places along the Fife coast of Scotland, doing a bit of beachcombing, really looking for sculptural bits of driftwood to add some interest to the new garden. It hasn’t been as successful as I had hoped, I suppose because the weather has been so calm, recently, the sea isn’t flinging much back at us. Anyway, above is a photo of a bit of the beach at Lower Largo, it used to be a fishing village, before that industry was decimated, now the boats are just small pleasure craft.

Lower Largo

These flats are right on the edge of the beach. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t appeal to me at all. A lot of people are obsessed with having a sea view, especially if they’ve grown up near the sea. But I don’t know how they can ever sleep on stormy nights, and there are plenty of those in a year. Also the sand gets into the houses, that would drive me nuts.

Lower Largo

The photo above is of the most bustling part of the village, because that’s where THE shop is. It doesn’t look too hot in these photos but it was hot, in fact we both got ice cream cones from the shop – or as we call them in Scotland – pokey hats. As you can see there’s a viaduct there but no trains go over it nowadays. In the good old days before Dr Beeching’s savage cuts to our rail services this would have been a busy line, filled with holiday makers and tons of freshly caught fish must have been packed onto trains, heading for the big fish markets in Glasgow and London.

Lower Largo

Standing on the same spot I turned slightly to my right to take the photo above, it’s of the Robinson Crusoe Hotel, named that because the man who inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe came from Lower Largo. His name was Alexander Selkirk and you can read about him here.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

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I’ve had this Daniel Defoe book in my house for over 30 years and it’s one of those lovely wee dark blue leather bound books but luckily the print is quite good so it’s easy on the eyes. I’ve been avoiding reading it mainly because I’ve seen numerous TV adaptations but over the last couple of years I’ve been struck by how many authors have mentioned Robinson Crusoe in their own books, it must get the most name checks of any book surely. It was the detective in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone who was most keen on reading it though and he seemed to find everything he needed in Robinson C.

Anyway, first published in 1719 and as you would expect, the writing seems quite archaic at first but I got used to it and ended up quite enjoying it. Everybody knows the story probably, if Robinson had been a dutiful son he would have taken his father’s advice and lived a sedate middle-of-the-road life as his father had noticed that those were the happiest of people. Being young and looking for adventure Robinson sailed off looking for excitement and he found it. He eventually ends up being taken as a slave but after years of slavery he manages to escape on a ship only to be shipwrecked and ending up being the only survivor of it when he manages to reach a nearby island.

Luckily he was able to swim back out to the ship and rescue lots of useful things to help him to survive – tools, some seeds, rum, sailcloth, guns and gunpowder – in fact he was fairly well stocked with the necessities of life. The island had a reasonable amount of edibles so I like to think that I could have managed as well as he did in the same circumstances.

The only thing that he doesn’t have is human company although he does have a dog and some ship’s cats. Robert Louis Stevenson thinks that the part where Robinson finds a human footprint in the sand as one of the most unforgettable scenes in English literature. Even although he later discovered that the island was used as an occasional ‘picnic area’ for a tribe of cannibals it was the scenes involving wolves in snowy mountains when he gets back to Europe which I found to be the most scary.

I did find the many descriptions of how he made pallisades around his cave a wee bit tedious but I’m glad that I’ve read it at last.

Daniel Defoe was born plain Daniel Foe and he decided to stick the De on to it to make himself seem aristocratic, that’s always a sign of a ‘dodgy’ person. And indeed Defoe was actually an English spy who took up residence in Edinburgh and infiltrated Scottish society and became an adviser to committees of the Scottish Parliament and the Church of Scotland. The English government had given orders to make sure that Scotland joined itself to England, for one thing Scotland had a ‘great treasury of men’ which England wanted to use.

Afterthe deed was done Defoe had the grace to admit that he had been wrong. He had apparently thought that Scotland would become more prosperous joined to England but of course the opposite was the outcome and poverty and unemployment became much worse.

Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe whilst he was living in Edinburgh and it’s thought that he got the idea from the true story of Alexander Selkirk from Lower Largo in Fife who had been marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez near Chile which has since had a change of name to Robinson Crusoe Island.

Robinson Crusoe/Alexander Selkirk

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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!