r who
discovered it; this was Selkirk Island.

When he was conducted before Captain Woodes Rogers, commander of the
expedition, to the interrogations of the latter, the unfortunate man,
with downcast look, and agitated with a nervous trembling, replied
only by repeating mechanically the last syllables of the phrases which
were addressed to him by the captain.

A little recovered from his agitation, discovering that he had
Englishmen to deal with, he attempted to pronounce some words; he
could only mutter a few incoherent and disconnected sentences.

'Solitude and the care of providing for his subsistence,' says Paw,
'had so occupied his mind, that all rational ideas were effaced from
it. As savage as the animals, and perhaps more so, he had almost
entirely forgotten the secret of articulating intelligible sounds.'

Captain Rogers having asked him how long he had been secluded in this
island, Selkirk remained silent; he nevertheless understood the
question, for his eyes immediately opened with terror, as if he had
just measured the long space of time which his exile had lasted. He
was far from having an exact idea of it; he appreciated it only by the
sufferings he had endured there, and, looking fixedly at his hands, he
opened and shut them several times.

Reckoning by the number of his fingers, it was twenty or thirty years,
and every one at first believed in the accuracy of his calculation, so
completely did his forehead, furrowed with wrinkles, his skin
blackened, withered by the sun, his hair whitened at the roots, his
gray beard, give him the aspect of an old man.

Selkirk was born in 1680; he was then only twenty-nine.

After having replied thus, he turned his head, cast a troubled look on
the objects which surrounded him; a remembrance seemed to awaken, and,
uttering a cry, stepping forward, he pointed with his finger to a
cedar on his left. It was the tree on which, when he left the
Swordfish, he had inscribed the date of his arrival in the island. The
officer Dower approached, and, notwithstanding the crumbling of the
decayed bark, could still read there this inscription:

'Alexander Selkirk--from Largo, Scotland, Oct. 27, 1704.'

His exile from the world had therefore lasted four years and three
months.

Notwithstanding the interest excited by his misfortunes, by his name,
his accent, more than by his language, Captain Rogers, an honorable
and humane man, but of extreme severity on all that appertai