accompanied them.

On their return to their companions, the sailors related what they had
seen; Dower did not fail to do the same among the officers; and this
evening, at the encampment on the shore, in the forecastle as well as
on the quarter-deck, there were narratives and suppositions that would
'amuse an assembly of Puritans through the whole of Lent,' says the
account from which we borrow a part of our information.

At this period, tales of the marvellous gained great credence among
sailors. Not long before, the Spaniards had discovered giants in
Patagonia; the Portuguese, sirens in the seas of Brazil; the French,
tritons and satyrs at Martinique; the Dutch, black men, with feet like
lobsters, beyond Paramaribo.

The strange individual under discussion was unquestionably a satyr, or
at least one of those four-footed, hairy men, such as the authentic
James Carter declared he had met with in the northern part of America.

Some, thinking this conclusion too simple, adroitly insinuated that no
one among the sailors who had met this monster, had noticed in him so
great a number of paws. Why four paws?--why should he not be a
monopedous man, a man whose body, terminated by a single leg, cleared,
with this support alone, considerable distances? Was not the existence
of the monopedous man attested by modern travellers, and even in
antiquity and the middle ages, by Pliny and St. Augustine?

Others preferred to imagine in this singular personage the acephalous
man, the man without a head, named by the grave Baumgarthen as
existing on the new continent. They had not discovered many legs, but
neither had they discovered a head; why should he have one?

And the discussion continued, and not a voice was raised to risk this
judicious observation; if neither head nor limbs have been
distinguished, it may perhaps be because he has been seen only in the
dark.

The next day, each wished to be satisfied; a regular hunt was
organized against this phenomenon; they set out, invaded his retreat,
pursued him, surrounded him, at last seized him, and the brave sailors
of Great Britain discovered with stupefaction, in this monopedous,
acephalous man, in this satyr, this cercopithecus, what? A countryman,
a Scotchman, a subject of Queen Anne!

It was Selkirk; Selkirk, his hair long and in disorder, his limbs
encased in fragments of skins, and half deprived of his reason.

His island was Juan Fernandez, so called by the first navigato