Seeking “Robinson Crusoe”

Who was the real Robinson Crusoe? In search of the world’s most famous castaway, Tim Severin travels where men were shipwrecked or abandoned in the days of the pirates and buccaneers…and lived to tell their tales of survival. A Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, has long been considered as the real life inspiration for Crusoe. So Severin begins his quest on the islands of Juan Fernandez 400 miles off the coast of Chile where Selkirk was marooned for four years. Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe”, also knew the extraordinary survival tale of an English buccaneer surgeon, Lionel Wafer, wounded in a pirate raid and abandoned in the jungle of Panama. So Severin goes to meet the Indian tribe, the Kuna, who rescued him. Carrying on his journey he finally takes a 100 year old sailing boat to Salt Tortuga, a small uninhabited island off the coast of Venezuela. There he establishes the truth about a runaway ‘white slave’, Henry Pitman, marooned by pirates thirty years before Defoe created Crusoe…