"Her sides are made of iron!" a sailor shouted as British cannonballs bounced off the USS Constitution in 1812. They weren't. They were made of Georgia live oak, and getting that wood nearly killed the men who cut it.

When Congress ordered six new frigates built in 1794, designer Joshua Humphreys wanted them bigger and tougher than any frigate in the world. That meant one tree: the southern live oak.

Live oak is a strange tree. It doesn't grow tall and straight. It grows low and wide, with massive limbs that twist out sideways. That's exactly what shipbuilders wanted. A warship's skeleton is full of curves, the ribs and the braces that hold the decks to the hull. Cut those curves from straight lumber and you slice across the grain and weaken the wood. With live oak, you could find a limb that had already grown into the shape you needed, grain and all. It's also one of the densest, hardest, most rot-resistant woods in North America.

The best stands were on the Georgia coast. So starting in 1794, ...

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 ...