Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [82]
A FABLED ISLAND
The empty sea surrounds our ship for as far as the eye can see, nearly 500 miles off the coast of Chile. Our ship gently rolls in the swell as we drive west at 16 knots. The Armada de Chile (Chilean Navy) ship Valdivia, an amphibious landing ship, is a day out from Valparaiso, en route to the Archipelago de Juan Fernandez and an island with a romantic name and a famous history, Isla Robinson Crusoe (also known as Mas a Tierra). The island is one of the world’s most inaccessible and remote places, home to some five hundred people and host to only a few hundred more each year. The tourists are mainly Chileans who come to visit the island’s unique ecosystem or who are drawn, like others before them, by one of literature’s most famous castaways, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
In addition to her other duties, Valdivia makes two trips to Isla Robinson Crusoe each year. The ship carries 177 passengers, as well as their baggage and other items and equipment that have no other way of reaching this isolated Chilean colony. Our Sea Hunters crew of eleven hauls tons of dive equipment, cameras and other gear into the large tank bay below the main deck and into our berths. Our team has come to dive and film an episode about the Imperial German Navy’s small cruiser Dresden, eighty-eight years after she sank. We will be the first to dive down and return with detailed images and extensive footage of the wrecked warship in her grave 180 feet below the surface.
Our team includes Dr. Willi Kramer, the first German official to visit the wreck and the graves of some of Dresden’s sailors, who are buried ashore. Willi’s professional expertise is Viking and medieval sites, but he now finds himself drawn around the world to document the legacy of the First World War.
After twenty-eight hours at sea, we catch our first glimpse of Isla Robinson Crusoe, rising faintly out of the mist on the horizon. As we approach the island, the ship rolling in the swell, we’re struck by how small it is. Only 36 square miles in area and 2,800 feet above sea level at its highest peak, this island has, for all its isolation, long been a part of the world’s consciousness. It is a storied island that features in tales of explorers, pirates and privateers, buried treasure, shipwrecks, castaways and sea battles. One nineteenth-century visitor, the writer Richard Henry Dana, called it “the most romantic spot of earth” because of its unique history and its association with the fabled Crusoe.
If this is an island of dreams and romance, it is because of the three-hundred-year-old tale of Robinson Crusoe and his real-life inspiration, Alexander Selkirk. A native of Largo, which is north of Edinburgh on the rugged Fife coast, Selkirk was a troubled lad who ran away from the censure of his village and found a haven in a life at sea. He fared well, advancing in rank from ship’s boy to officer over the next several years. The lure of adventure and riches led him in 1703 to join a privateering venture into the Pacific led by William Dampier.
One man’s privateer is another man’s pirate, and Dampier’s ships and crews faced the wrath of Spain, which controlled the Pacific to the extent that the ocean was known as a “Spanish lake.” Thanks to Dampier’s incompetence, the venture ended badly, with very little gained and a number of men lost. One of Dampier’s ships, the privateer Cinque Ports, anchored at Mas a Tierra in October 1704, leaking and in bad condition. Her captain, Thomas Stradling, wanted to repro-vision before heading south and trying for home. Selkirk, his sailing master (mate), was convinced that the ship would never reach a safe port and decided that he would rather stay on the island than take his chances at sea.
The captain was more than happy to leave the quarrelsome, headstrong Selkirk behind