The man Robinson Crusoe was based on spent four years alone on an island in the Pacific, lived almost entirely on goat, and ran so fast by the end that the crew who rescued him could not keep up with him across the hills.

Alexander Selkirk was a shoemaker's son from Fife with a temper, sailing with privateers off Chile in 1704 when he decided the ship was rotten and demanded to be put ashore. The captain obliged. The ship sank a few weeks later. Selkirk was twenty-eight, on an island four hundred miles from land, with a musket, a knife, a pound of powder and a Bible.

The island had goats, left by Spanish sailors a century before. When the powder ran out he learned to run them down barefoot on the mountainsides, catching them by the horns and killing them with the knife. He counted five hundred. He ate their meat, drank their milk, made his clothes from their skins, and when he was lame he had already crippled a few kids so he would always have one he could catch.

When Captain Woodes Rogers found him in February 1709 the castaway was dressed in goatskin and had half forgotten English. Rogers wrote that he was in rude health, and watched him go up the slopes after goats faster than the ship's dog. Rogers' crew were rotten with scurvy after months at sea on salt beef and biscuit. Selkirk brought them two or three goats a day until they were well, and the captain made him second mate.

Four years of goat and seal. No bread, no grain, no fruit to speak of. The man came off the island fitter than any sailor in a navy that was losing more men to scurvy than to the Spanish.

Defoe gave the fictional version a parrot and a man Friday. The real one had a knife and a hillside full of meat, and that was enough.

Credit @SamaHoole X Social