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41:38 In Farrah's case, the euphemism does little to obfuscate the fact that this is meant to be her execution, whether by starvation, dehydration, or suffocation when her oxygen runs out, it is not a guaranteed execution, but the prospect of rescue seems so vanishingly faint under the circumstances as to be almost impossible. From chronicle we know that this is a standard type of punishment, perhaps not a common one, but regulated under imperial law. Is it mercy to give the exile the means to extend their life by three days? Or is it cruelty prolonging an already slow execution? These same questions can be asked of historical marooning. The practice is closely associated with the golden age of piracy, the roughly 75 year period from the end of the wars of religion around 1650 until 1725, a decade after the end of the war of the spanish succession. In fact, marooning became so closely tied to pirates and piracy that by the end of the period, the word marooner had become interchangeable with pirate. Maroon is both a verb in the sense of let's maroon that guy, and a noun, a term for those who have been marooned. Robert Louis Stevenson's massively influential treasure island calls the character Ben Gunn both the marooned man and the maroon, yet the noun form is older. There were maroons before there was marooning. The term maroon first entered English during the mid 16 hundreds, derived from the spanish cimeron. Initially, both words meant a formerly enslaved person who had escaped bondage and fled into the hinterlands to live an isolated, mostly self sufficient existence beyond the reach of the slaveholders and their enforcers. In the 15 hundreds, thousands of enslaved Africans and native South Americans escaped the barbaric tortures of spanish and portuguese colonies to eke out a desperate living in the mountains, jungles, and other inhospitable places. These cimarrons would occasionally raid the colonies from which they had escaped for the kinds of tools and supplies they could not easily make themselves. They made common cause with other enemies of the colonial authorities, including early pirates like the famous english privateer Francis Drake. Sometimes they traded food and information for tools, weapons, iron. Sometimes they collaborated, as in 1573, when a joint english cimarron expedition traveled overland by secret jungle paths to raid spanish silver caravans. To be made a maroon then, was, in a euphemistic sense, to be made free, but also to be isolated, deprived of almost every resource, and left to fend for yourself in a hostile wilderness. Marooning could be a simple expedient. Pirates capturing a ship might put her former crew or passengers ashore just to avoid having to deal with them. But, as in Zanskar, it was also a punishment, one sometimes enshrined in and regulated by the articles of agreement that governed life among the pirates. And in some cases, it was a means to get rid of someone without having to contend with the moral, legal, or political consequences of actually killing them, as in August 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan found himself having to decide what to do with a mutineer, who also happened to be the nephew of the archbishop overseeing all trade between Spain and her american colonies. The typical depiction of a pirate marooning went like the soon to be maroon, or maroons, who might be troublesome sailors, despised officers, or inconvenient prisoners would be rowed to shore in a small boat and left there with a few days worth of food and water and, very dramatically, a pistol loaded with a single shot so that the maroon might choose to end their own life, the implication being that to be marooned was often a fate worse than death. Historical novelist and pirate enthusiast Cindy Valar called it the most dreaded of all punishments, for it promised a slow, cruel death without hope of reprieve. Its hard to know how much credence to give this primary sources about piratical practices from that era are understandably scarce and highly sensational. Those who did the marooning tended to die violent deaths before getting the chance to write their memoirs. Those who were captured by government agents might claim, by way of exculpation for their crimes, to have been marooned, then rescued by a passing pirate vessel and pressed into service against their will. True or not, they had strong incentives to exaggerate the harshness of their experiences. Those who managed to slink quietly back into civilian life preferred to keep their heads down and not talk too loudly about all the crimes that they had done. Modern recountings of historical marooning as a punishment are pretty bare bones, tending to repeat the same handful of details with few, if any citations telltale signs to me that they are all drawing from the same handful of original sources, or they're just endlessly copying each other in a writer's ouroboros.
54:03 My bit fully spoiled. But Robinson Crusoe's experience learning how to survive and then thrive on a tropical island, equally dangerous and idyllic, does closely follow the experiences of several real castaways and maroons, including those of the scottish privateer Alexander Selkirk. Selkirks is one of the best documented cases of marooning, and in many ways extremely typical of the practice in its heyday, Selkirk was a privateer, sailing during the latter part of the golden age of piracy. The son of a shoemaker in Fife, Selkirk took to the sea when he was 17, very possibly to avoid prosecution for acting indecently in church. It's possible that he actually took to the sea earlier, but the best data we have for this is based on a criminal prosecution against him, where it's said that he did not appear in court because he had gone to sea. And that was around when he was 17. When the war of Spanish Succession began, England was once again eager to enlist private ships to raid spanish shipping and colony towns in the Americas. Privateering like this was dangerous business, but it had a romantic nationalist allure, and a successful voyage could make the whole crew rich beyond anything they could hope to earn on land. Huge numbers of men were needed for one of these voyages, and if most of them had never been to sea before, well, they would either learn or they would die. Certain positions did need to be filled by experienced sailors, and perhaps the most crucial was that of sailing master, responsible for navigation, setting the course, supervising the sails, rigging anchor, and the arrangement of the items in the hold. In short, if the captain decided where the ship went, the sailing master decided how it ought to get there and made sure that it did. By this point, Alexander Selkirk had been sailing for nearly a decade, and although he had not entirely shed the quarrelsome habits of his youth, he had blossomed into a skilled sailor and a more than adequate navigator. In 1701, the same year the war started, he signed on to a privateering expedition led by the famous explorer William Dampier, and he was made sailing master of the second, smaller ship under Captain Charles Pickering. They sailed in 1703, bound for South America. But Captain Pickering died of scurvy off the coast of Brazil, and he was replaced by 21 year old lieutenant Thomas Stradling. The 21 year old captain and the 27 year old sailing master clashed immediately. A year of tough sailing for the sake of a handful of raids, mostly unsuccessful, did not improve the relationship. In mid May 1704, the captains, stradling and dampir, quarreled and agreed to split up the expedition. Stradling, with Selkirk, would go his own way. By this point, their stores were running low, and the ship was in bad condition. The masts were cracked, the sails shredded, the leather on the bilge pumps was worn through, and the hull was full of wood boring worms. She needed to be careened, dragged up onto shore, turned on her side, and given a thorough going over for this purpose, Selkirk guided them to an uninhabited archipelago called the Juan Fernandez Islands, about 360 nautical miles, or 120 english leagues, due west of Santiago, Chile. It was September by the time they arrived. When they had finished collecting wood and water from the island, Stradling announced that careening the ship would be too dangerous. If a spanish naval patrol spotted them while the ship was on the beach, they would be helpless. But Selkirk insisted that the ship was in no condition to sail, much less fight. He swore hed rather stay on the island than try to sail in that leaky tub. Who can say now if Selkirk really meant it? Perhaps he expected the other sailors to support him against the captain, but they didnt. We can imagine a nasty smile spreading slowly across Stradlings face as the troublesome sailing master announced that he would rather stay behind. Stradling, called Selkirks bluff. Once they had finished collecting water, food, and firewood from the island, he and a few of the other men took Selkirk ashore in a small boat. They gave him some food and water, a musket, some shot and powder, and left his sea chest on the rocky shore. Selkirk waded out into the shallows and called after them, begging his former shipmates to come back. Straddling just jeered at him. A few hours later, the ship raised anchor and sailed out of the bay, never to return. Of course, Selkirk did not know they weren't going to return. He was the sailing master, the navigator. Surely it was only a matter of time until they realized how much they needed him. He waited on the beach in a crude hut to be sure he didn't miss their returning. He found a freshwater stream nearby, ate his biscuits, and waited. When the biscuits ran out, he got desperate, eating mussels, crabs and lobsters raw. Once the intestinal distress subsided and he was able to move around properly again, he tried cooking them. Weeks went by like this. Eventually, he moved off the beach in search of better shelter. At first, he settled in a cave with its entrance above the tree line so that he could still watch the bay for a passing ship. By this point, he had probably given up hope of straddling having a change of heart. Selkirk could not have known and would have gotten little joy from the knowledge, but in fact, he had been exactly right. The ship had not been seaworthy, and Stradling's remaining crew had not been equal to her handling. They had foundered only a little while after marooning Selkirk. Only the captain and five or six others survived out of an original crew of more than 60. The survivors fell into the hands of the spanish authorities and were dragged to Lima, where they would remain in harsh imprisonment for years. But Selkirk was doing all right. He slept a great deal. He sang to himself, explored, experimented with different kinds of sea turtles, bird eggs, wild berries and roots. In the interior of the island, he found edible plants growing in great turnips. Cabbage, oats, radishes, parsnips, pumpkins. What they had been left behind after a failed attempt to colonize the island about a century before. He made plum jam and found peppers he could use to season his food. He hunted the islands goats, first with his musket, and then, when he had exhausted his ammunition, he learned how to run them down and catch them with his bare hands. He built a pen and kept his own little herd. In the mornings and evenings. He passed the time by reading the only three books he possessed, a bible and his geometry and navigation textbooks. His health improved, and the hot temper of his youth finally cooled. He moved out of the cave and built himself a proper, comfortable hut. He even learned how to hunt the massive sea lions that came to the island to mate, but found them poor eating. He found a litter of newborn kittens in the woods and brought them back to his hut, fed them on milk from the goats, and when they were big enough, he set them loose around the hut to keep the islands rats at bay. At night, he would hold their little paws and dance with them.