Robinson Crusoe Island

Robinson Crusoe Island formerly known as Más a Tierra (Closer to land), or Aguas Buenas is the largest island of the Chilean Juan Fernández archipelago, situated 674 kilometres west of South America in the South Pacific Ocean.

The island has a mountainous and undulating terrain, formed by ancient lava flows which have built up from numerous volcanic episodes. The highest point on the island is 3,005 ft (916m) above sea level at El Yunque. Intense erosion has resulted in the formation of steep valleys and ridges.

In 1704, a 28-year-old Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk found himself in a fix. He had taken up privateering—piracy with an official seal, in other words—and had spent too much time cooped up on a galley with an irascible captain of the sort Geoffrey Rush so ably portrays in the Pirates of the Caribbeanfilm franchise. Grievance boards and human-resources departments being nonexistent in that line of work, Selkirk made a potentially catastrophic decision: when he was demoted after a squabble with the captain about the seaworthiness of their ship, which was apparently riddled with shipworms, he asked to be put ashore on an island (pictured here) far away from anything in particular, 400 miles west of the port of Valparaiso, Chile, in the Juan Fernandez archipelago. Though remote, the 36-square-mile island contained large stores of sweet water from which passing ships would replenish their supplies, and Selkirk apparently figured that it would not be long before another ship came along.

All he had brought with him was a musket, gunpowder, carpenter's tools, a knife, a Bible and some clothing.

Selkirk would remain on his island for five years. Then in 1709, Selkirk was rescued by a British ship commanded by Woodes Rogers, who, though himself a privateer, was busily attacking pirates wherever he traveled. Rogers described Selkirk as the “governor” of an island that, though not quite paradisiacal, did not lack for food, water, and good weather, unlike, say, the Scotland of the day.

Ten years later, in 1719, the ever-enigmatic writer Daniel Defoe, who must have recognized something of himself in Selkirk, brought forth Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe captured Selkirk’s concerns in Crusoe’s. Indeed, when archaeologist Daisuke Takahashi (not to be confused with the figure skater of the same name) explored what is now called Robinson Crusoe Island (not to be confused with the Fijian island of the same name) in 1994–95, he found that Selkirk had made a comfortable place for himself in a saddle below tall mountains about a mile from the sea, where he could keep an eye out for passing vessels and threats alike.

To reflect the literary lore associated with the island, the Chilean government named the location Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Robinson Crusoe has an estimated population for 2011 of 859 (525 men, 334 women) living in the village of San Juan Bautista.Although the community maintains a rustic serenity dependent on the spiny lobster trade, residents employ a few vehicles, a satellite internet connection, and many television sets. There is an airstrip on the island, near the tip of the island's southwestern peninsula. The flying time from Santiago de Chile is just under three hours, and there is a ferry from the airstrip to San Juan Bautista.