Cinque Ports (1703 ship)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cinque Ports is also the name for a group of five English port towns, the namesake of this ship.

Career
Built:	—
Launched:	—
Fate:	Sank in 1704
General Characteristics
Displacement:	96 tons
Length:	172 ft (52 m)
Beam:	33 ft (10 m)
Draught:	—
Type:	Galleon
Hull:	Wood
Propulsion:	Sail
Speed:	—
Range:	—
Complement:	63

Cinque Ports is the name of an English galley (96 tons, 16 guns, 63 men) whose sailing master was Alexander Selkirk, generally accepted as the model for the fictional Robinson Crusoe. The ship was part of an 1703 expedition commanded by William Dampier who captained an accompanying ship the St George (26 guns, 120 men).

When the War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, English privateers were recruited to assist against French and Spanish interests. Despite a court-martial for cruelty to one of his crew in an earlier voyage, Dampier was granted command of the two-ship expedition which departed England on April 30, 1703 for the port of Kinsale in Ireland.

Dampier's original companions dropped out of the plan and finally a new agreement was made with Captain Pickering of the Cinq Ports Galley. The two ships left Kinsale on 11 September 1703 with the intention of attacking Spanish galleons returning from Buenos Aires. When this plan fell through the privateers decided to make for the South Seas by way of Cape Horn. While the ships were off the coast of Brazil an outbreak of scurvy on board the Cinq Ports led to the death of 48 men, including the captain who was replaced by 21-year-old lieutenant Thomas Stradling.

After rounding the Horn and cruising up the South American coast as far as Mexico, capturing several Spanish ships on the way, the two captains decided to separate. Captain Stradling stopped at one of the islands of the Juan Fernández archipelago off the Chilean coast in October 1704 to resupply. According to Selkirk there was a dispute with Stradling regarding the Cinque Ports seaworthiness, and Selkirk chose to be put ashore on an uninhabited island. He remained there in solitude for 4 years and 4 months, being finally rescued by the 1709 expedition led by Woodes Rogers. His experiences were the inspiration for the character Robinson Crusoe in the book by Daniel Defoe.

Selkirk's suspicions were soon justified, as the ship sank a month later in 1704 with the loss of most of her crew.

An eye-witness account of the 1703 expedition is given by William Funnell, an officer on board the Saint George who went on to circumnavigate the globe after abandoning Dampier.