CHAPTER VII JUAN FERNANDEZ Juan Fernandez was discovered by the navigator of that name on a voyage from Peru to Chile in 1512. He rightly judged that the southerly wind, which impeded all navigation in that direction, might be adjacent only to the mainland; he therefore stood out to the west in the hope of avoiding it, and so came across the island. His voyage was so short that he was accused of witchcraft, and suffered accordingly at the hands of the Inquisition; he was rescued from its power by the Jesuits, to whom he ceded his rights in the newly discovered land. The Order founded a colony there, but it proved a failure. The abandoned island then became the resort of the buccaneers, who preyed on Spanish commerce, and who used it to refit their vessels, so that Spanish merchantmen had special orders to avoid it. The privateers turned down goats to provide meat, on which the Spaniards imported dogs to kill the goats; these achieved their purpose on the low ground, but in the hills the goats held their own, and the battle was therefore a drawn one. It was from an English privateer that the Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk, was landed in 1704; while some of the incidents in the life of Robinson Crusoe, such as those connected with the goats, rats, and cats, were taken by Defoe from the experiences of Selkirk, he is, if looked upon as the prototype of the immortal hero, somewhat of a fraud. Not only is the scene of Crusoe’s adventures laid in the West Indies, but Selkirk was put on shore at his own request, with such stores as he required, because he had an objection to the captain. He knew that sooner or later the place would be visited by some ship coming to refit, and he was only there altogether four years and four months. Selkirk reported that he had slit the ears of some of the goats and let them go; a number of these animals so marked and of “venerable aspect” were found in 1741 by Anson’s sailors when they arrived on the island after their passage of the Horn.