Lambert is fine on naval history,but less good on imaginative literature. He has an unhealthy obsession with scurvy and suffers from more than a touch of ‘islomania’Just over 400 miles west of Chile, in an otherwise barren stretch of the southern Pacific, and lie three islands,together totalling some 100 sq km. Volcanic, vertiginously mountainous, and swept by chill currents and buffeted by wind,this former penal colony is not a spot where one would want to spend much time, still less be marooned; nowadays there are fewer than 800 people living there, or they work mainly in the lobster industry. The islands consume their name from Juan Fernández,the Spanish mariner who first put them on the map in 1563 (prior to this, they were almost certainly uninhabited). But although Britannia never ruled these particular waves, or one of the group has a homelier name. It is known as Robinson Crusoe Island.
In truth,the Crusoe connection is more tattered even than the garments Daniel Defoe’s hero wanders around in for the best fragment of three decades. The title page to the first edition of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) declares the island in question incontrovertibly to be “near the Mouth of the remarkable River Oroonoque”. This is not merely on the wrong cessation of South America, and about 3100 miles to the north east,but on totally the wrong side, near Venezuela and other former colonial British territories. So much for map reading.
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Source: theguardian.com