In Cast Away, award-winning author Francesca de Tores boldly reimagines the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for the classic novel Robinson Crusoe. The world knows Crusoe’s story – yet what unfolds on Selkirk’s island is stranger by far. In this excerpt, we see what may happen if Alexander tries to on in the water…

Cast Away
By Francesca de Tores
Published by Bloomsbury Circus

It is cold, but a bright clear day, and I decide to swim, for I have not washed for several weeks. I say to the old goat who hangs about the camp, ‘It would not do for rescuers to come ashore, and refuse to take me on account of my unwholesome stench.’ I leave my clothes on a rock at the shore, which is no longer so crowded with seals. Last season’s pups have grown so large that they begin to essay the waters themselves, their mothers returning less and less often to suckle them. 

The water is fierce cold but bracing, and I give little whoops and gasps of shock with each new step, and most particularly when the water reaches my balls. It is a still day – I should not have chanced it otherwise, for even in the bay a strong wind can raise vicious waves – and when I turn my back to the sea and face the island, I can grudgingly acknowledge that it has a certain stark beauty to it. The things that make it foreign and unwelcoming – its sheer rock faces; the mountains, cruelly jagged – make it spectacular from the waterline. 

A seal surfaces not twenty yards from me. This I am quite used to, for at times the water fair roils with the creatures. I pull further from the beach; many sailors cannot swim, but most lads of Nether Largo are fine swimmers. And it gives me some satisfaction to draw away from the island. Sometimes I fancy swimming onwards and never stopping, letting the island grow small behind me, and swimming towards my own death, rather than dying of old age alone on that forsaken shore. 

Another seal breaks the water, this time closer – but this is bigger, too big for a seal, and for an instant I think perhaps it is just kelp, for there are great thickets of kelp all about here, a slick and tangled forest that shifts with the tide. But this thing is too fast for kelp, and does not move with the sea, which is glassy and calm. I turn, treading water, and although I am fervently wishing to see a sea lion, I already know that it is not, for this beast is pale grey, nearly white, and its fin is a blade that slices the water. A seal at leisure will circle and roll about, very playful – but the shark moves with a terrible purpose, nothing wasted. 

He is right at the surface, so close that I could almost reach and touch him. I can see everything: the neat angle of the gills, a row of slashes such as a razor would make. His tiny eyes, all blackness, revealing nothing. He moves tremendous slow now, but I do not mistake him, for to see him is to know that the whole of him is a machine for speed, the angles of his tall fin perfectly calculated, and the lazy switching of his tail which drives him with so little sign of effort. His mouth is open – perhaps that fearsome armoury of teeth does not even permit him to close it all the way. And as he passes me, I get a true sense of his size – twice my length, he is as thick as a forty-two-pound cannon, and looks about as solid. 

I have drawn my feet up tight to my chest, my arms floundering to keep me afloat. He is circling me, for with his eyes set deep in the side of that great slab of face, he must turn to examine me. Having passed me, he turns once more, to come again, and I hear my own breath – little rough gasps – and know that there is no point in screaming. This time he passes so close that his broad flank would have brushed my arm, had I not snatched it away. 

Before he can turn again I flail for the shore, trusting if he is to charge me, his huge length will take a few moments to come about. But I know this hope to be vain, even as I thrash through the water. My only chance is that seal I saw just before the shark came upon me, and I most fervently pray that a shark finds a plump seal more tempting than a man. Yet a seal is swifter by far than I, and though I do not cease my swimming, I know full well that my fate is entirely in the black eyes of that shark. 

I swim, not daring to look back, and expect with each stroke to feel his teeth in my flesh. I am so far from shore that the nearest land is not the sloping pebbled beach where I waded in, but a mass of rocks at the bay’s eastern side, and this is what I make for, eyes clenched as though that could keep a shark’s teeth at bay. I swim and I swim until the only thought I have room for is breathe, breathe, breathe.

Cast Away by Francesca de Toresis published by Bloomsbury Circus, priced £18.99.