Alexander Selkirk

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robinson Crusoe isn’t entirely fiction — it’s based on the story of a real Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years marooned on an uninhabited island.

Selkirk was sailing with privateer William Dampier in 1703 when he began to doubt the seaworthiness of their galleon, the Cinque Ports. Finally he decided to stay ashore voluntarily on the Juan Fernández islands in the South Pacific with only a musket, gunpowder, carpenter’s tools, a knife, a Bible, and his clothing.

At first Selkirk was wracked with loneliness and regret, but he soon acclimated to island life. He domesticated wild cats to keep rats at bay, grew turnips, cabbage and pepper berries, and built two huts of pimento trees. He hunted wild goats and made clothing of their skins and forged a knife from cast-off barrel rings.

There’s a telling postscript to the story. After four years and four months, Selkirk was rescued by William Dampier, the same man who had left him ashore — but Selkirk was surprised to see he was sailing a different ship. The Cinque Ports had sunk, losing most hands. Selkirk, it seems, had been right to stay on the island.

| History · Literature

United Nations

Excerpts from 112 Gripes About the French, a handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French after the Liberation:

  • The French are too damned independent. The French are independent. They are proud. They are individualists. So are we. That’s one reason there is friction between us.
  • I never heard people gab so much. Gab, gab, gab. If you understood the language it might be interesting and not just “gab.” An American writer, Ambrose Bierce, said, “A bore is a person who talks — when you want him to listen.”
  • The French are not as clean as the Germans. Perhaps not. If the Germans had had no soap for five years they wouldn’t be as clean as they might like to be. A learned man once said, “An untidy friend is better than an immaculate enemy.”
  • The French can’t drive a car. They can’t keep it up. They ruin vehicles. The French, on the whole, certainly do not drive as well, keep a car up as well, or protect their vehicles as well as we do. Neither do women, compared to men. We have had more mechanical training, more technical experience. And at the present time we have incomparably better maintenance facilities.
| History · Society

A Double Mystery

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A Navy collier during World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 16, 1918, touched at Barbados on March 3 and 4, and was never heard from again. She took 306 crew and passengers with her.

In 1968, a diver off Norfolk, Va., reported finding the wreck of an old ship in about 300 feet of water. When shown a picture of the Cyclops he said he was convinced it was the same ship. But, strangely, even that wreck disappeared — further expeditions failed to find anything.

| History · Oddities

The Foarest City

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Cleveland is misspelled. The Ohio city was named for Gen. Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the crew that surveyed the local territory. But when the town’s first newspaper, The Cleaveland Advertiser, was established in 1831, the editor found that its title was too long by one letter — so he unceremoniously dropped an A.

| History · Trivia

Bright Idea

When Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was caught in a test tube by his son Charles.

He was convinced to do it by Henry Ford, who believed that a person’s dying breath contained his soul.

You can see it for yourself — the test tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

| History · Oddities

The Cuckoo’s Nest

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“I must write something of myself today. I can look back and see plainly all my journey here. The day may come when I shall be laid away in the grave, and my boys — the dear boys I have loved so well — will look over my trunk and find this manuscript; they will then perhaps believe I am not crazy. I know Dr. Steeves tells them I am a lunatic yet. They will weep over this, as they think of the mother they have left here to die among strangers.”

— Mary Huestis Pengilly, Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1885

| History

Brontides

In July 1808, 100 kilometers east of the Montana Rockies, Lewis and Clark wrote, “We have repeatedly heard a strange noise coming from the mountains. … It is heard at different periods of the day and night … and consists of one stroke only, or of five or six discharges in quick succession. It is loud and resembles precisely the sound of a six-pound piece of ordnance.”

They were leading the first overland expedition of the United States territory, so it wasn’t a cannon. The sounds have never been explained.

| History · Oddities

Tretretretre

In 1658, French admiral Etienne de Flacourt reported a curious legend among the natives of Madagascar. They described a creature, called tretretretre, that was as big as a 2-year-old calf, with a round head, a human face and ears, an ape’s feet, a short tail, and frizzy fur.

That description matched nothing on the island, so the Europeans dismissed it. But since then, fossils have been unearthed of a giant lemur, Megaladapis, that may explain the myth. It had been thought to become extinct thousands of years ago, but now zoologists think it may have survived into the sixth century, when humans came to the island, and entered their folklore.

A few Megaladapis may even have survived into the 16th or 17th century, so perhaps Flacourt was witnessing the birth of a legend.

| History · Oddities