Odd this day
Alexander Selkirk was rescued from Más a Tierra — now known as Robinson Crusoe Island — and later became very well known as the inspiration for the castaway in Defoe’s famous novel.
What he didn’t become famous for, though, was one of the principal uses of his time. There’s no mention of it in Robinson Crusoe, but… not to put too fine a point on it, he fucked goats.
Well, yes, I suppose I could express that more delicately. Let’s turn to a respectable literary source: Diana Souhami’s biography Selkirk’s Island:
His exercise and lust of the day was fucking goats.
Ah.
Fucking goats was perhaps less satisfying than the buggery and prostitution of shipboard life, the black misses of heathen ports. It lacked fraternal exchange. But Selkirk was an abandoned man.
By all accounts, though, he richly deserved his abandonment. Before he went to sea, he had beaten up one of his brothers, starting a family dispute in which he also assaulted his father, another brother, and a sister-in-law.
At sea, while a good navigator, he was a hot-headed shipmate, who fell out with his captain and asked to be left on the island. He didn’t think the ship was seaworthy, and expected others to join him. When they didn’t, he tried to get back on board, but the captain was having none of it and fucked sharply off. (Some time later, the ship sank, drowning many of the crew, proving Selkirk right, but affording him little opportunity to say “Nur nur na nur nur, I told you so”.)
He ate an estimated 500 goats while on his island, but I confess I haven’t read the original sources in enough detail to know whether these were the same specimens of which he had carnal knowledge, or whether he divided the goats from the goats — on the basis, perhaps, of whether he deemed them too pretty to eat.
Anyway, the captain who rescued Selkirk wrote that goats:
make excellent Broth, mix’d with Turnip-Tops and other Greens
…which cured several of his men of scurvy. Also, Selkirk, he said:
ran with wonderful Swiftness … We had a Bull-Dog, which we sent with several of our nimblest Runners, to help him in catching goats; but he distanc’d and tir’d both the Dog and the Men
Whether his rescuers were aware of the dual purpose for which he had developed this talent, we don’t know. They took his advice on seafood, though — avoiding it, because it had
occasion’d a Looseness
That is, given him the squits. Which was, frankly, the least he deserved.
Another biographer, Richard Steele, suggests that Selkirk’s lust and speed may not be directly related. Apparently, he would ‘lame’ kids when they were young, so that they would
never be capable of speed. These he had in great numbers about his hut.
I bet he bloody did.
In the course of my research into this vital matter, I came across this picture of Selkirk with some of animal companions:
This cat has seen some things.
Anyway, back in Britain, Selkirk found the zen-like state he had achieved on the island wearing off, and he started getting into scraps again. He signed back on as an officer on HMS Weymouth, caught yellow fever and was buried at sea in 1721.
