What Crusoe really got up to

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If you happened to share an island with Alexander Selkirk between 1704-09, the one creature you did not want to be was a goat.

During his four-and-a-half-year abandonment on the South Sea island of Juan Fernandez, 360 miles from the coast of Chile, the Scottish privateer killed 500 of the hapless animals for his pot.

Some were cudgelled on the head, others had their back legs broken when kids to stop them wandering. Seals and sea lions fared little better. Countless numbers fell victim to Selkirk's hatchet as they lazed on the shore. At least they were spared the indignity suffered by the goats of being, in polite parlance, interfered with.

Diana Souhami is not polite. "His exercise and lust of the day was fucking goats," she writes of Selkirk's island routine. "Fucking goats was perhaps less satisfying than the buggery and prostitution of shipboard life, the black misses of heathen ports. It lacked fraternal exchange. But Selkirk was an abandoned man."

And there are only so many things an abandoned man can do on an island measuring 12 miles by four. Every day, Selkirk trudged up to the highest point on the island to watch out for passing ships. He built huts of pimento wood, fashioned clothes from goatskin, cooking pots fro m rocks, and axes, hooks and knife blades from a rusty anchor. At night he lay on a platform bed as rats gnaw ed at his clothes and feet.

His epic survival story inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a romanticised adventure classic devoid of goat-buggering and Selkirk's other less wholesome habits.For Selkirk, as Souhami is at pains to point out, was a nasty piece of work. Rebuked for "undecent beaiviar" in church, he left home at the age of 15 to find his fortune at sea. For six years he plied the oceans,but treasure proved elusive. He returned home, was predictably underwhelmed by small-town life in Nether Largo, Fife, and, after a punch-up with his family,left for the seas once more.

Such was his capacity for falling out with his fellow privateers that an exasperated Captain Stradling finally abandoned him on Juan Fernandez during an ill-fated hunt for a Spanish treasure galleon. Selkirk's dreams of riches had come to nothing. "He was marooned and penniless and resembled a goat." Even after his rescue and the measure of fame and fortune his enforced island sojourn had brought him, he returned to the high seas again (after marrying two women) and died ignominiously of malaria on the Gold Coast.

Souhami is a wonderful storyteller with a predatory eye for detail as she directs her alternately engaging and repulsive cast of seafaring rogues and villains. With an admirable lightness of touch she moves comfortably from hilarious one-liners to more thoughtful reflections on the nature of island solitude, which is at once liberation and terrifying imprisonment.

This is just one of the themes which emerges from Searching for Crusoe, in which Thurston Clarke attempts to understand mankind's enduring fascination with islands. What is it about them that has exercised such a powerful hold over our imagination? This sounds like the perfect excuse for a long jaunt, of course.

But Clarke is no amateur when it comes to exploration. His journey makes the average Greek-island-hopper look puny by comparison. Among others he takes in Banda Neira in the Spice Islands, the cannibal island of Malekula in Vanuatu, Jura in Scotland, the Vietnamese prison island Phu Quoc, the Arctic and the Maldives. His literary and cultural references are equally wide-ranging, from Homer's Odyssey to the BBC's television series, Castaway.