Crusoe's Island: A Ramble in the Footsteps of Alexander Selkirk

Set against the chaotic backdrop of the 1849 rush to the West, the story opens with the ill‑fated voyage of the sailing ship Anteus. Passengers—respectable, educated Americans—find themselves shackled by a captain whose cruelty drives them to near‑starvation. As tensions reach a breaking point, the crew’s discipline collapses into mutiny, and the ship’s arrival in Rio ignites a bewildering legal clash over the captain’s sanity and the passengers’ alleged perjury.

The narrative then leaps to the desolate Juan Fernández archipelago, where the castaways carve out a fragile existence on a landscape that feels both familiar and mythic. Interwoven sketches of California’s gold‑filled valleys, Washoe’s bustling camps, and the raw, often brutal, frontier life give the tale a vivid, almost travel‑journal quality. Listeners will be drawn into a world of high seas drama, rugged survival, and the restless ambition that defined a restless age.