In Selkirk's Steps

In the Juan Fernandez Islands, 300 miles off the Chilean coast, the lobster season was in full swing. From now until August, the goletas (sloops) would bring into Valparaiso some 150,000 lobsters--the island's one cash crop. Shipped to Santiago or flown over the Andes to Buenos Aires, the langostas (unlike the Maine lobster, they are clawless) would bring fancy prices ($2 to $3) in the toniest restaurants of the Chilean and Argentine capitals.

Practically the only other island income comes from an occasional hardy tourist who makes the five-to-six-day trip from Valparaiso to see where Robinson Crusoe (who ate goat meat, turtle eggs, but no lobsters) was famously marooned.

Literary Material. It was on Mas-a-Tierra (Landward), largest (58 square miles) of the Juan Fernandez Islands, that a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk was put ashore in 1704 after a row with his captain. There he lived in rugged solitude for four years. When he got back to England, Selkirk published a personal journal of his adventures, and from his account Daniel Defoe wrote The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.*

Today, on the side of the hill that was Selkirk's lookout is a bronze tablet, put up in his memory by the captain and officers of a British ship which visited the island in 1868. Hard by the beach where Crusoe found Friday is now a fishing village, San Juan Bautista. In it live most of the 560 Juan Fernandians. Sixty live on the smaller island of Mas-a-Fuera, 90 miles farther out. Santa Clara, third of the group, is uninhabited.

San Juan Bautista has no movies, only three stores. Streets are mud lanes, and there are no hotels. The single school-house takes pupils only through the third grade. The islands have no doctor.

Cash Crop. The town centers around the wharf and the offices of the three lobster companies that hold lobstering concessions from the government. All the dories on the beach are owned by the companies, which supply gear and gasoline for boats with outboard motors. Each dawn the lobstermen go out to set and pull their pots, returning at dusk to sell their lobsters to the companies for ten pesos (30-c-) apiece. For the fishermen and their families, life in the Juan Fernandez is monotonous and lonely, and the sea is full of danger. Even so, they say, they prefer it to the unknown risks of life "on the continent."

* Robinson Crusoe is not the only literary offspring of the Juan Fernandez. In 1719, a mariner aboard the English privateer Speedwell shot a black albatross. Seven months later, the Speedwell was wrecked on Mas-a-Tierra's rocky shore. On that episode Samuel Taylor Coleridge based the shooting of the albatross in The Rime oj the Ancient Mariner.

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