• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 794 0

and so set him ashore with a few tools, his gun and bedding, and his Bible. As the ship’s boat pulled away from the island, Selkirk regretted his decision and dashed into the surf, begging them to return. Stradling reportedly yelled back, “Stay where you are and may you starve!” Thus began a lonely exile that lasted four years and four months, until another English privateer, Woodes Rogers, landed for provisions. Rogers reported that “Immediately our pinnace return’d from the shore, and brought abundance of Craw-fish, with a man Cloth’d in Goat Skins, who look’d wilder than the first owners of them.”

Selkirk sailed with Rogers and returned to a life of privateering in the Pacific before reaching London in 1711, eight years after he left England. He also brought home a small fortune from his years with Rogers. Selkirk’s adventures were first recounted in Rogers’s account of A Cruzing Voyage Round the World in 1712, and then again in 1713 in a short article by journalist Richard Steele in a magazine called The Englishman. But the story took on even greater fame in 1719, when author Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, based in part on Selkirk’s adventures. The book was an immediate success; three hundred years later, it remains the second-most published book in the world, next only to the Bible, translated into most languages and available in nearly every country. Robinson Crusoe and the real-life Selkirk have also been the inspiration for other literary endeavors, paintings and movies— and, in time, for the decision by the Chilean government, in the 1960s, to change the name Mas a Tierra to Isla Robinson Crusoe.

DIVING DRESDEN

Dresden rests beneath the waters of Cumberland Bay off Isla Robinson Crusoe. Every day, we load up one of Valdivia’s launches with dive gear and position ourselves over the wreck. Working with Willi Kramer and me, master diver Mike Fletcher breathes a complex mix of gases and descends to make the first survey the warship, relaying what he sees by video camera to the surface as we guide him through the ruined ship in the deep blue twilight below. It is far more difficult than this simple explanation—Mike is working hard, pulling 330 feet of heavy hose and electrical lines, clearing himself when they snag or catch on wreckage, and all the while using his eyes and experience along with ours to find and identify important areas of the ship, searching for clues about what happened in the final hours.

The dives are limited to 30 minutes, and then Mike has to decompress for more than twice that time to eliminate the deadly gas bubbles in his blood caused by the depth. In a series of later dives, Willi and I join Mike in surveying the wreck, slowly investigating the cruiser from bow to stern. Mike’s son Warren is also diving, filming the scene from a distance to capture as much of the wreck and the survey action as he can. Dresden lies as she sank, pointing almost due north and towards the beach, resting on the starboard (right) side. The funnels and masts have fallen away and lie on the seabed. Some of the guns have ripped free of the deck and also lie on the bottom.

The bow is heavily damaged, and the severed end of it rests upright on the seabed. One of our first conclusions is that Dresden sank heavily by the bow, hitting the bottom of the bay with enough force to break off the huge steel ram at the bow. As the ship twisted and sank, the hull cracked and the decks opened up. But the damage is so severe that we wonder if hitting the bottom was responsible for all of it. Gradually, it becomes clear that the split decks and the ripped-out hull near the bow are the result of the massive internal explosions when the Germans’ scuttling charges detonated. Despite the damage, one anchor remains on the deck, at the ready. A long string of anchor chain trails off the bow and heads off into the gloom of deeper water, where the anchor that held Dresden in place when the cruiser sank remains set in the sand.

The bridge is gone but the wood decking remains in place under the debris of broken steel, torn wiring,