Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag and introduced himself as Robinson. Ten minutes later, I found a room to rent. The homeowner’s first name was Crusoe. Get the idea? Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth of the Orinoco, Juan Fernández was where the real Crusoe, the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, spent four years and four months in the company only of goats.
Andrew Lambert has had the very good idea of writing a kind of historical biography of the 15×5-mile lump of volcanic rock 415 miles off the coast of Chile (he includes the other two smaller islands in the archipelago). A distinguished naval historian — the author among other books of Nelson: Britannia’s God of War — Lambert is an excellent researcher who has excavated many sources. He takes the reader on a steady voyage, from the moment the uninhabited islands emerged from the gloom of geographical ignorance after the Spaniard Fernández discovered them in the 16th century.
The tale involves piracy, the South Sea Bubble, fish ‘so plentiful that in less than one hour’s time two men caught enough for our whole company’ (this in the 1680s), whaling, sealing, shifts in imperial ambition following Britain’s loss of America, evolving global trade patterns and the fashion for oceanic travel books.
Crusoe’s Island is a serious work that will remain the standard history for some time. Lambert’s avowed main interest is ‘the long, curious relationship between English identity and an island on the other side of the world’. Britain never owned the archipelago, but flirted with occupation: before the age of steam, the islands provided a crucial victualling station en route to all points west.
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