Tim Severin's new book will explode many of the myths surrounding the principal character of Daniel Defoe's classic tale, writes Arminta Wallace
Slight, immaculately dressed and softly spoken, Tim Severin doesn't look like a man who has sailed the seven seas in just about anything that would float. Nor - thankfully - does he bear the slightest resemblance to the armed and extremely dangerous "har, har, me hearties" types who people his latest book. But Seeking Robinson Crusoe promises to make waves on several continents; and will almost certainly blow a number of long-cherished assumptions about Daniel Defoe's hairy hero right out of the water. It may not - to put it mildly - endear its author to the numerous academics who have devoted years of their lives to the study of Defoe's life and work. It will go down like a lead balloon with the Chilean Tourist Board.
And if any of the lobster exporters of the Caribbean happen to read it, they'll probably want to put him in a pot. None of which, needless to say, disturbs Tim Severin in the slightest. "Oh, well." He chuckles unrepentantly. "Maybe I'll be popular in Venezuela." Since his first book, The Brendan Voyage, floated the idea that Irish monks crossed the Atlantic in open boats in the sixth century, Severin has chased a number of shadowy cultural icons - Sinbad, Jason, Ulysses, Genghis Khan, Moby Dick - with entertaining and often surprising results. Like its predecessors, Seeking Robinson Crusoe covers vast swathes of time and space. It begins on the Chilean island of Juan Fernández, where the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned in 1704; but Severin swiftly rejects not only Selkirk as a real-life model for Robinson Crusoe, but Juan Fernández - optimistically renamed "Robinson Crusoe Island" by the Chileans in 1966 - as a suitable location for Crusoe's adventures. He then shifts the whole shebang to the other side of South America. Off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, a runaway "white slave" by the name of Henry Pitman was marooned on a very different island in very different circumstances - and this energetic, charming surgeon-explorer was a far more likely real-life model for Crusoe, suggests Severin, than the dour, taciturn Selkirk.
It may not cause the Nasdaq index to plummet or Afghan warlords to shudder in their sheepskins, but Severin is quietly satisfied that the research which took him to some extraordinarily obscure corners of the 21st-century world will make a difference, however minuscule, to literary - and, perhaps, maritime - history. The book is a compelling mix of historical research and first-hand observation. It recalls the 17th-century attempt to establish Scotland as a colonial power by sending settlers to the isthmus of Panama; a tragic debacle which ended with the deaths of nearly 3,000 Scottish men, women and children, some of whom were buried at sea, some in unmarked graves at the edge of the Central American rain forest. It casts a cold eye on the lives of generations of lobster fishermen on the Mosquito Coast, forced - despite appalling physical risks - to dive deeper and deeper in pursuit of dwindling stocks of the tasty crustacean. And it celebrates the cultures of the Kuna and Miskito Indians, central American tribes whose ancestors provided the prototype for Defoe's Man Friday figure.
The Kuna, in particular, seem to have impressed Severin deeply. "They have pretty much turned themselves into latter-day Robinson Crusoes," he says. "They've chosen to live on islands and ignore the whole mainland situation. Not all, of course.
"Some still go to Panama city to find work. But many of the island Kuna now reject education on the grounds that if it only qualifies them to be street sweepers and such-like, what's the point? Which strikes me as pretty advanced thinking, I must say. On the most northern of their islands, quite a number of cruise ships have begun calling regularly. They're not allowed to stay the night, they just come in, buy these lovely embroidered panels which the Kuna women make, and leave again.
"And the village councils there have apparently said: 'We don't need education. All we need to do is learn how to work swipe cards. Then we get a couple of people to take the slips to the bank and cash them.' That really is post-modern thinking, isn't it? Skip straight to the swipe card: meanwhile, teach your children tribal history, stuff about the spirits which surround them and so on. And they're right - the spirits must be looking after them. I mean, here are these big ships suddenly arriving out of nowhere. Swipe the card, and the money appears."
Nowadays, Crusoe's corner of Caribbean is as dusty and neglected a part of the globe as a travel writer could wish for. Severin describes the Mosquito coast, on the border between Nicaragua and Honduras, as a place totally devoid of tourists; but if you're thinking unspoiled paradise, forget it. It's more like a haven for drug dealers. As he stepped off a small plane on to the gravel airstrip of Puerto Lempira - once famous as the base of the CIA instructors who trained Contra troops against the Marxist Sandinistas - Severin found the air hostess waiting at the bottom of the aircraft ladder, holding out a large brown paper bag. "As the passengers filed past, they reached in and retrieved the items they had given to her when boarding the plane. At least five took out handguns."
Not so different, perhaps, to the days when a motley band of privateers, buccaneers and outright pirates roamed the southern seas in search of easy money and being "cast away" was an occupational hazard.
When they returned to civilisation, many of the most dubious characters proceeded to publish their memoirs - forerunners, perhaps, of today's travel writing. "Oh, yes, there was a whole genre of these things," says Severin, who has retold some of the most vivid episodes in Seeking Robinson Crusoe. "But it wasn't travel writing à la Bill Bryson - nor was it, really, akin to the 'I climbed Everest and survived' story. In a funny way, it was more an interest in geography, and in how people lived - because life was pretty miserable and uncomfortable even if you weren't on a desert island. Even if you were living in London you were trudging around in excrement in the streets, and food wasn't preserved, so things rotted. So actually, being on board a ship sailing to the East Indies was not that much different to being stuck on an island where you had to look after yourself."
In our less challenging social environment, the romantic image of a lone figure on a sun-drenched beach appears to exert an almost mesmeric fascination. It is constantly regurgitated, whether in the form of a sedate radio programme (Desert Island Discs), a big-budget movie (Cast Away), or one of those TV series in which a group of teenagers is "abandoned" in the Pacific, accompanied only by a TV crew, cooks, dressers, scriptwriters and make-up artists. But our identification with the lonely castaway springs almost totally, says Severin, from the influence of Daniel Defoe and the fictional Crusoe.
"Even Big Brother," he says, "is basically about dumping a bunch of people on an island to see how they get off, isn't it? But that's not the way it was, really. You got left behind by accident - or, like Alexander Selkirk, you chose to be left behind. Having fought with the guy in charge of his ship, he opted to be left on Juan Fernández. It was a bit like a bus stop; if you couldn't stand the bus driver, you could get out and wait for the next one, since privateer ships called there to make repairs and stock up with fresh fruit and water all the time. Selkirk expected to be picked up in a matter of months. He miscalculated - badly. But until Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, people's fascination was with the physical side of it; how the castaway survived, how he managed to get water, light a fire and all that. The emotional side, the isolation, how you felt - that was Defoe's contribution, and that's what we respond to."
When it was published in 1719, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. . .etc, etc. . .Written by Himself sold out within a fortnight and has been in print ever since. "If you talk to serious literary historians, they'll say the earliest English novel is some very obscure book which hasn't been read for the past 280 years," says Severin. "But even if Robinson Crusoe isn't the very first English novel, it's certainly the first to have survived in the culture."
Defoe wrote the book to make money and, when it became a bestseller, hopped gleefully on his own bandwagon. "He was a great advocate of colonialism," says Severin, "and wrote a sequel, Robinson Crusoe Two, which develops the happy ever after theme of everybody doing jolly well in the colonies. Nobody ever reads that, of course. And as for Robinson Crusoe Three, you can just see the publisher saying 'let's have another Crusoe book', and Defoe churning out this moralising rubbish in a couple of weeks flat. It's absolutely awful."
Despite the accolades he has earned as a geographer and a film-maker - a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society - Severin says he thinks of himself primarily as a writer. He is now seeking another project but will only take it on if it promises to add something to the sum total of human knowledge. After all his research into Robinson Crusoe and remote islands and marooned pirates, has he himself ever experienced the long-distance loneliess of the castaway?
"Yes," comes the prompt reply. "At Stansted airport, when they tell you the trains aren't running."
Seeking Robinson Crusoe, by Tim Severin, is published by Macmillan (£18.99 sterling). A documentary, Seeking Tim Severin, will be shown on Network 2 at 8.05 p.m. next Saturday, followed on consecutive Saturday nights by Severin's films: The Sinbad Voyage, The Jason Voyage, Crusade, In Search of Genghis Khan and The China Voyage