Discovering the real Robinson Crusoe - Excavations on a Pacific Island

On the 10th September the fourth lecture in the 2009 series was given by Dr. David Caldwell, Keeper of Scotland and Europe at National Museums Scotland.  His talk was entitled Discovering the Real Robinson Crusoe - Excavations on a Pacific Island.

The subject had an archaeological flavour but had nothing to do with the Picts. Caldwell took a team on an expedition to Mas a Tierra, (“closer to land”) the island in a small archipelago 400 miles into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile.  Mas a Tierra was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island by the Chilean Government in 1966, in recognition of the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, describing the experiences of the man (based on the true story of the Scotsman Alexander Selkirk) who was abandoned there in 1705 for four-and-half years.

The team failed to find much by way of hard, incontrovertible evidence of Selkirk’s years isolated on the island, although the remains of a nautical instrument almost certainly belonging to Selkirk was found during archaeological sieving. There was abundant circumstantial evidence inasmuch as the physical and biological geography fitted exactly with the historical record and with Defoe’s novel. Caldwell’s team went on to find extraordinary archaeological evidence of the occupation of the island in the 16th century by explorers from Spain.

The lecture was well-received and elicited from a member in the audience comments on known ancestral relationships from Selkirk through to individuals of the present day.