Fifth Issue: Castaways

I found Wikipedia’s list of castaways and phantom islands and spent a good couple of hours browsing through them. The idea of a phantom island is much cooler than what it actually is, but castaways are fascinating. The fact that they could survive on their own after being left alone is pretty amazing, though in some cases they definitely had help. Nowadays you probably couldn’t be a castaway as easily, though you could be lost at sea.  I’m getting off track. Here we go, let’s start with Ada Blackjack.

Ada Blackjack was born Ada Delutuk, in Alaska. She got married and had a son, but her husband died and she ended up poor. She had to put her son in an orphanage for a time, which must have been so hard. In 1921, she joined an expedition to Wrangel Island in Russia across the sea. Basically, this guy named Vilhjalmur Stefansson wanted to claim the island for Canada, so he sent five settlers to go do that. There was one Inupiat (Ada), one Canadian, and three Americans. Ada was hired to be the cook and seamstress, and she was the only woman on the trip. That's Ada in the middle right in the below picture. I hope the men were nice to her. I'd be kind of worried to travel alone with four random men.

The journey went fine, but on the island the conditions were bad, and after rations ran out they had trouble killing and hunting enough animals for food to survive. Three of them men went off to cross the frozen sea to Siberia to get help, but they were never seen again. It was a 700-mile journey, so that makes sense. Ada was left behind to care for one of the men who was sick with Scurvy, but he died in 1923 and then it was just Ada and the cat, Vic.

Ada was rescued six months later, after surviving all on her own in the extreme freezing conditions. She became famous as the “female Robinson Crusoe”. Ada was able to get her son back from the orphanage and take him to Seattle where she cured his tuberculosis. Then she remarried and had another son.

Ada was a quiet and reserved person and didn’t want Stefansson to tell her story or try to make money off of it. There were some books and articles published about her voyage, but she didn’t benefit from them. All the money she had was the salary from the trip, and the money from the sale of some of the furs she’d trapped on the island. Eventually, she moved back to Alaska from Seattle, and died at the age of 85 in a retirement facility in Palmer, Alaska.

Next up is a French noblewoman, Marguerite de La Rocque. I’m going to call her Marg because I have a Twitter friend called Marg and I like the name and also her. Anyway, Marg lived in the 16^th century, and she was fancy and rich. Here's a picture of her. Sorry it's blurry, it's hard to find a good illustration.
Marg headed out with her cousin for the New World, with a chaperone, her cousin, a guy called Roberval. She started dating a young man on the journey with them and Roberval got mad at her because she was young and unmarried. He dumped her on the “Isle of Demons” because he was a dick. They say it’s because he had Calvinist morals but he also gained some money if she died, and he had debts.

Anyway, he didn’t dump Marg alone, he left her lover and her servant Damienne with them. Some people said that Marg was dumped first and her lover swam to join her, and some said her lover was dumped but Marg refused to leave him alone. In the stories told about this, they said that her lover was just a random unskilled laborer but really it was to protect his family’s reputation since he was actually from a rich family just like her. While on the island, Marg had a baby. The baby died, so did Marg’s maid and her lover, but she survived by hunting. Eventually Basque fishermen found her and rescued her, and she went home. The Island of Demons is now called the Isles de la Demoiselle, called that after Marg, and the cave that was her home is still there.

Anyway, she went back home, and stories were written about her, so Marg became kind of famous. She became a school teacher and settled into her life. No charges were brought against her by Roberval, and she didn’t bring any charges against him. She’s got a lot of stories and poems written about her in Canada.

Third up is a guy! Not stranded in Canada either, though he lived around the same time Marg did. Fernao Lopes was a Portuguese soldier in India. He went to Goa, where he was in charge of a garrison to keep peace and rule over the locals. His boss, the general Afonso de Albuquerque, went back to Portugal for a while, but when he came back, he found that the garrison wasn’t Portuguese anymore. The men married local women, converted to Islam, and sided with the Muslim resistance against Portugal. Albuquerque promised if the locals gave his men back to him their lives would be spared, but he was a liar (as so many of these jerk Europeans were), and he tortured some of the men so bad that half of them died within three days. Lopes was the leader so they treated him the worst. DON’T READ THIS PART IF YOU’VE GOT A WEAK STOMACH He was tied to a post and his nose, ears, right arm, and some of his fingers were cut off. OK YOU CAN READ NOW. The few men who survived were released, and fled to the jungle.

Albuquerque died finally, so Lopes hopped on a ship to Lisbon. The ship stopped at Saint Helena, and Lopes snuck out on land and they left without him. They gave him some food and supplies, so maybe they kicked him out once they realized he wasn’t supposed to be there. Anyway, he was on the island for almost a year on his own. It was a nice place to be, and there were lots of goats, so he had food. After a year, the first ship that came to the island was amazed to see Lopes’ house and supplies. He hid, but they left him a note saying that they wouldn’t hurt him. They left him some food too, biscuits and cheeses. As they were leaving, a rooster fell off the ship and Lopes caught it and raised it as his friend. Below is a nice picture of Fernao and his rooster buddy.
Lopes and his rooster were very happy together. He became less reclusive and happily greeted sailors who came by the island sometimes. People kind of thought of him as a saint after a while because he had a lot of deformities and he wouldn’t leave the island. People gave him food and supplies and he planted a garden and had a livestock collection after a while.

After a decade on the island, Lopes finally went back to Portugal, where he visited the king and his family. He went to Rome where the Pope absolved him of his ‘sin’ of converting to Islam, at Easter, and Lopes went back to the island after that, where he lived for 20 more years happily until his death.

So those are my three favorite castaways!! I like fictional stories about castaways too. I like Swiss Family Robinson, despite it’s weird racism (maybe that was just in the movie? I haven’t read the book in forever), because I like treehouses, and I liked Love Wrecked which is a romantic comedy with Amanda Bynes. The TV show LOST is a classic of course, and I adore the book Dr. Franklin’s Island, which is about a mad scientist doing genetic experiments on animals and humans on a deserted island. There’s also that one scene in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie (the first three are the only good ones and the first one of those three is the best, hands down) where Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann are cast away on a deserted island with nothing but some rum that I really like. 
I never actually saw the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, nor have I ever managed to completely read Robinson Crusoe. I might be more into it if Mr. Crusoe and Mr. Hanks were women instead, but if you have any recommendations about fictional or real life castaways let me know, and next week’s issue’s going to be about Japanese castaways so I’ll be keeping the theme going as a two-parter!