It is the bloodcurdling journal of a sailor shipwrecked on a tropical desert island among tribal warriors who slaughtered the rest of the crew and enslaved him for 15 years.
It is the story of a cockney youth forced to herd livestock and fight battles with spears and muskets. It is the ripping yarn of being marooned in Madagascar and escaping back to Britain, which became a publishing sensation.
It is also, new research has revealed, a piece of 18th century spin. Robert Drury’s Journal, published in 1729, was an early example of commercial publishing hype, according to archaelogists who have been digging on Madagascar.
The descriptions of vast palaces, citadels and towns which fascinated readers have turned out to be gross exaggerations. What was described as a mile-wide capital city with four layers of fortifications was nothing more than a collection of ramshackle huts built beside a forest for protection.
The essence of Drury’s story is thought to be true, but excavations on Madagascar have cut some of his taller tales down to size.
He magnified the scale and grandeur of human settlements under pressure from an editor who is suspected of being Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe.
”It seems Drury was being coached by his editor,” said Mike Parker Pearson, of Sheffield University, who led a team of archaeologists on a recent field trip to southern Madagascar.
Their digs confirmed some elements of the journal and debunked others. ”Drury writes about very grand settlements with three or four lines of palisades so close that even a small dog could not get through them. But what we have seen is very flimsy. They tended to use the forest as natural cover,” said Parker Pearson.
However, the team did discover 59 gun-flints and several musket balls, including one marked ”Brandon” which was made in Suffolk, suggesting the island’s tribes were indeed warlike and keen on weapons.
Drury, born in London in 1687, was 13 when he sailed to India on the East India company ship Degrave. On the way back it sprang a leak and had to be abandoned off the southern tip of Madagascar.
About 160 of the crew made it to shore. Local warriors marched them across burning sands to detention in Fenoarivo, which is described in the journal as 20 hectares in size, but was nearer six according to the excavations.
The crew seized the king and tried to flee to the town of Fort Dauphin, where they hoped the ruler would be more sympathetic, but they were captured and killed. Drury, perhaps because of his youth, was spared but spent the next 15 years as a slave, looking after animals and fighting inter-tribal wars for his masters.
”He plays himself up as an incompetent nerd who is a complete softy,” said Parker Pearson. Drury complained that he had to march in front of the troops and hurl reptile juice — concocted by the medicine man and known as ”the dangerous thing” — over the enemy’s front line.
At another time he tells of finishing off a wounded enemy fighter with a spear.
Drury took a wife and for a time was a royal favourite, but he eventually escaped back to London on a passing ship.
Barely educated, he acknowledged the help of an unnamed editor in writing the ”plain, honest” journal of his adventures.
Parker Pearson suspects the editor was Defoe, who 10 years earlier had published Robinson Crusoe, the fictionalised account of another shipwrecked sailor, Alexander Selkirk. The author of hundreds of pamphlets and books, Defoe knew the reading public’s taste and how to market a tale. In the 19th century scholars suspected Drury’s tale was a Defoe hoax.
Then an American academic found proof that Robert Drury had existed and archaelogists from Sheffield University discovered that much of the detail in the journal, such as the names of tribal leaders and the names and locations of settlements, was accurate. But not entirely accurate.
Parker Pearson suspects Drury’s youth partly explains the exaggeration. ”When you’re a kid everything seems bigger.” Defoe’s penchant for what today’s spin doctors might call ”sexing up” seems to have done the rest.
”I don’t think Drury is lying, it is more a matter of dressing things up to be more grand,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â