Alexandre Selkirk

Alexandre Selkirk (or Alexander Selcraig ) (1676 - 1721) is a Scottish sailor whose adventure inspires the novel Robinson Crusoé.

Selkirk begins its career from sailor in 1695. In 1703, it joined a forwarding Corsaire in the Pacific Ocean under the command of the Captain William Dampier. The ship of Selkirk is directed by the captain Thomas Stradling.

After a disappointing campaign on the boats and the cities of the Spanish , the sailors separate in several groups. The Stradling captain makes stopover in the Juan Fernandez islands, with broad of Valparaiso, to supply the boat out of wooden and water before setting out again in England. The boat having suffered damage in the battles and being half eaten by the worms, Selkirk wants to repair it before crossing the Cape Horn. In front of the stubborn refusal of the captain, Selkirk, under the blow of anger, refuses to continue the road and requires that one leave it on the island Farmhouse-have-Tierra , in the Archipel Juan Fernández, with some 400 miles of the coasts Chile ennes. The captain was only too happy of this occasion of débarasser of a sailor who had been in the center of all the attempts at mutiny upon the departure of England. It is only when it is only found on the island that Selkirk carries out the hugeness of what it had done. There tries without success to convince the captain to re-embark it, and must remain alone on the island. Actually it had been right to require to be unloaded, because the boat runs thereafter, drowning the majority of the crew, but it did not know it then.

After two years of loneliness on the island, surrounded only of the cat S and the Goat S which he tames, he sees a ship and “calls it”. However, this ship is Spanish and far from saving it, the crew would have cut down it if he had not fled and had hidden in time.

He must still have patience nearly two years and half additional before William Dampier did not help it, during a forwarding carried out by the Captain Woodes Rogers. This one gives him the command of a captured ship, and Selkirk takes again with them the raids on the coasts Peruvian Chile ennes and .

When it finally returns to London in 1711, it is rich. It meets the writer Richard Steele, who writes his history and publishes it in the newspaper The Englishman the same year. Thereafter, it returns at his place in Scotland, where he becomes a local celebrity. However, it never recovers perfectly from its solitary stay on the island: it spends much time alone and is badly at ease inside. It builds a kind of box on the property of his father. Lastly, it takes again the broad one on board a slave trader and perishes of the fever in 1721 off the coasts of Africa.

In 1966, the island Chile enne Farmhouse-have-Tierra , in homage united to Alexandre Selkirk and with the novel Robinson Crusoé inspired by its adventure, was renamed island Robinson-Crusoé.

A case of survival in a deserted island even more extraordinary than that of selkirk was that of Pedro Serrano.

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