I first learned about the Juan Fernández Islands from a documentary so spectacularly awful that it almost looped back around to brilliance. It was called Apocalypse Island, a kind of budget fever dream that promised ancient secrets, apocalyptic codes, and a stone monument that was supposed to point to the end of the world or something equally profound. The “history” in it was a wreck. The claims were laughable, the scholarship was nonexistent, and the tone landed somewhere between late night infomercial and campfire ghost story. As a historian it made my teeth hurt. But here is the problem. It was gorgeous. The cameras lingered on steep green mountains that rose straight out of the ocean, sea mist curling around basalt cliffs, clouds dragged low across knife edged ridges, and tiny boats nosing into emerald coves that looked like they had never heard of the twenty first century. For all the nonsense, the setting got under my skin. I walked away from that ridiculous program not convinced that the islands held prophetic secrets, but absolutely convinced that I wanted to go there one day. I wanted to see the real place, not the fantasy version. The Juan Fernández Islands do not need invented mysteries. Their actual history, and their fragile present, are more than enough.
Far out in the South Pacific, roughly four hundred miles west of Valparaíso, three volcanic stumps mark the remains of an old seamount chain that never quite found its way into popular geography. Officially they are the Archipiélago Juan Fernández, a Special Territory of Chile. Politically they are as Chilean as Santiago. Geographically they feel like a separate thought. The main inhabited island is today called Robinson Crusoe. To its west lies Alejandro Selkirk, taller, rougher, more isolated still. Between them sits the small, uninhabited Santa Clara. The Chilean government leaned into the literary association in the 1960s and renamed the islands to hitch their wagon to an English novel written two and a half centuries earlier. It worked. Most of the world knows them, if it knows them at all, as the Robinson Crusoe Islands. For a place that barely registers in global consciousness, they carry a heavy load of stories. Discovery, piracy, marooning, penal colonies, shipwrecks, war, tsunami, and now a constant tug-of-war between human survival and ecological repair.
The European story starts on November 22, 1574 with a frustrated navigator named Juan Fernández. At the time, voyages from Callao in Peru down to central Chile followed the coast and fought the Humboldt Current the whole way. It could take three months or more for a ship to claw its way south against that cold, north flowing stream of water. Fernández suspected that if he sailed west into the open ocean, then turned south and finally back east, he could dodge the current and let the prevailing winds do some of the work. To his peers it sounded like madness. Sane people hugged coasts. Empty ocean was where ships went to disappear. Fernández tried it anyway. Somewhere along that wide western leg he sighted land where no one expected it. A cluster of steep islands, green and wild, rising out of the blue. He noted them, took on supplies, and completed his journey to Chile in about thirty days. People who had never done the run in less than ninety did what suspicious people in the sixteenth century often did. They accused him of sorcery. His speed was explained not by improved navigation, but by witchcraft. The Inquisition hauled him in. At the end of it he kept his life, his discovery, and a backhanded nickname. The witch of the Pacific. It is a revealing moment. Even when the Juan Fernández Islands first appeared on European charts, they were already challenging assumptions and frustrating established powers.
Before that Spanish sail cut across the horizon, the islands were probably empty of people. There is no convincing evidence that Polynesian navigators ever reached them, and no sign that American indigenous groups did, either. Archaeology, geography, and the sheer isolation all point to the same conclusion. For thousands of years the Juan Fernández Islands lived without human footprints. Birds nested on the ground without fear of mammals. Plants evolved without grazing hoofstock. Life there followed its own rules. The arrival of Fernández changed that, slowly at first, then sharply.
The Spanish Crown was never entirely sure what to do with its new offshore possession. On paper the islands belonged to the empire. In practice they sat ignored for long stretches. There were attempts at settlement, beginning in the late sixteenth century. Explorers like Juan Jufre reconnoitered the main anchorage and named it Todos Santos. Later it would be known as Cumberland Bay. A captain named Sebastián García Carreto attempted colonization in 1591 and left goats behind as living food stores, a choice that would echo across centuries of ecological trouble. Jesuit efforts in the mid seventeenth century tried to plant a more stable colony. French entrepreneurs even ran a cod fishery under Spanish sanction in the early eighteenth century. Yet these initiatives were fragile. Storms, distance, poor support from the mainland, and the simple fact that there were easier places to live meant that none of these early colonies took deep root. The islands remained loosely claimed but poorly held.
Meanwhile, other powers found their own uses for the archipelago. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as European rivals harassed Spanish commerce along the Pacific coast, the Juan Fernández Islands became the equivalent of an offshore truck stop for privateers. After a brutal passage around Cape Horn, seafarers from England, France, and The Netherlands could turn north and aim for these lonely rocks. There they found fresh water, timber, and food. The goats left by earlier visitors multiplied into large feral herds. Sea lions and fur seals crowded the beaches. Birds nested in abundance. A crew that had been wrung out by storms, scurvy, and cold could step ashore into a sheltered bay and, for a while, live well.
This infuriated the Spanish, who were increasingly aware that they were subsidizing the rest and recovery of men who would then sail off and rob their treasure fleets. Their solution was to attack the problem at its most obvious point. Around 1676, authorities introduced packs of large dogs to the islands in an effort to exterminate the goats. For a brief time the tactic worked. Then the goats retreated to the steepest cliffs and adapted. The dogs multiplied and became wild. Predator and prey carved out new niches in the harsh landscape, and the Spanish achieved only a partial and messy victory. The islands had already begun the long process of being reshaped by human decisions made from far away.
The remoteness that attracted privateers also fed a quieter, harsher tradition. The islands became convenient places to abandon men. Sometimes this happened as punishment, sometimes by accident. Records mention three Dutch gunners marooned there in 1624. One account refers to an unnamed sailor who allegedly survived alone for five years. Then there is Will, a Moskito Native, a skilled diver and hunter from Central America, left behind around 1681. When the English privateer William Dampier returned in 1684, he found Will alive and flourishing. With nothing more than his wits and a gun, he had transformed the weapon into a complete toolkit by sawing the barrel into knives and tools. When historians talk about ingenuity in isolation, we usually jump straight to the Scottish sailor who came later and captured London’s imagination. Will had already demonstrated what real survival looks like. No publishers lined up to turn his life into a novel.
In 1741, the islands intersected with a different kind of imperial drama. Commodore George Anson, commanding a British squadron tasked with harassing Spanish possessions in the Pacific, barely made it around Cape Horn. Storms mauled his ships. Scurvy killed his men in horrifying numbers. Out of the nearly one thousand sailors who set out, only a fraction reached the Juan Fernández Islands alive. Anson anchored in the sheltered bay of Más a Tierra and turned the place into a floating hospital and repair dock. His crews spent more than three months there, recovering on fresh meat, vegetables, and water. Many still died. Enough survived to carry on. Anson then went on to capture rich Spanish prizes, striking at the empire’s wealth in the Pacific. The message to Madrid was clear. Leaving the islands underused and lightly guarded was an invitation to disaster. From this point forward, the Spanish crown regarded permanent occupation as a strategic necessity.
The episode that holds most of the world’s attention, however, unfolded a few decades earlier. In 1704, the privateer ship Cinque Ports lay off Más a Tierra as part of the buccaneering circuit in the South Pacific. On board was a Scottish sailing master, Alexander Selkirk, a man with strong opinions about ship maintenance and a weak tolerance for his captain’s decisions. Convinced that the vessel was not seaworthy, Selkirk loudly demanded to be left ashore rather than risk his life in rotten planking. Captain Thomas Stradling obliged with more enthusiasm than sympathy. He dumped Selkirk on the island with a musket, powder, a knife, a hatchet, a cooking pot, a Bible, some clothing, and a few basic provisions. Then he sailed away.
Selkirk’s solitude lasted four years and four months. At first he nearly broke under the weight of his choice. He contemplated suicide, wandered the shoreline, and watched in despair as ship after ship passed without noticing him. Gradually he stitched together a harsh new life. He hunted the feral goats left by earlier visitors for meat and skins. He fashioned crude garments from their hides. He built huts from wood and branches of the native trees. Rats attacked his food at night and tormented his sleep until he tamed feral cats to clear them out. He read his Bible, sang psalms, and wrestled with the kind of silence that sinks deep into a man’s mind. Some accounts say he became so unused to speech that when rescuers finally appeared, he struggled to speak clearly.
Those rescuers arrived in February 1709, when the privateer Woodes Rogers anchored off the island. Rogers and his officers found a muscular, sun burnt, barefoot man who could run down goats on foot and whose sense of time had come loose from the calendar. Selkirk joined Rogers’s crew, returned to England, and slid into a strange sort of fame. London readers devoured printed accounts of his ordeal. He became a living curiosity, proof of how far a man could go when stripped of society.
Daniel Defoe was paying attention. In 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe, the story of a castaway who spends twenty eight years on a lonely island. Defoe moved the setting to the Caribbean, added cannibals, a companion named Friday, and a heavy dose of spiritual introspection. He created a character who embodied the ideal of the industrious, self reliant Protestant striver who shapes his environment and his soul through hard work. Selkirk’s harsher, messier reality was flattened into something more reassuring. People remembered the fiction and gradually forgot the man. Later, when Chile decided to lean into the association for tourism, it was Defoe’s Crusoe who provided the brand, not Selkirk. In the 1960s, Más a Tierra became Robinson Crusoe Island, and the more distant Más Afuera was christened Alejandro Selkirk Island. The names honored the myth and the man in a kind of uneasy balance.
While literature turned the archipelago into a symbol of castaway virtue, imperial administrators were turning it into something more prosaic and more brutal. In 1750 the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru dispatched a colonizing force to Robinson Crusoe Island. Soldiers, convicts, and civilian settlers established San Juan Bautista near Cumberland Bay. They constructed homes, storehouses, chapels, and, crucially, fortifications. The Spanish could no longer tolerate the islands serving as a rest camp for foreign predators. Within a year, however, nature reminded everyone who truly ruled the place. On May 25, 1751, a strong earthquake on the mainland generated a tidal wave that slammed into the island, destroying much of the young settlement. The survivors rebuilt and strengthened the defenses. The fortress of Santa Bárbara rose above the bay, bristling with cannon aimed at any hostile ship that might poke its bow around the headland.
The archipelago evolved into a penal colony, a convenient dumping ground for men the empire regarded as dangerous and disposable. Prisoners carved caves into cliffs to fashion crude shelters. They labored under isolation, hunger, and the constant awareness that escape was all but impossible. When Chile moved toward independence in the early nineteenth century, the islands became a place of internal exile as well. Royalist forces shipped patriots there in 1814, confining them among the old convict works. After independence, Bernardo O’Higgins sought to maintain Chilean control. Yet the pattern of struggle and abandonment continued. Supplying a colony hundreds of miles out in the Pacific, hammered by earthquakes and tsunamis, was not simple work. In the 1840s a major convict uprising killed the Governor and briefly forced the evacuation of the island. The place seemed almost cursed, not in the mystical way that bad documentaries like to whisper about, but in the practical, grinding way that comes from mixing geological violence, imperial neglect, and human desperation.
The sea and the earth kept battering away. The massive 1835 earthquake that devastated Concepción on the mainland also sent waves into the Juan Fernández Islands. In the confusion that followed, some observers concluded that the island itself had erupted. Reports of an undersea volcanic explosion made their way into the writings of figures like Charles Darwin. Later analysis suggests that people were misreading what they saw. A tsunami ripping across a confined bay, kicking up plumes of spray and debris, can look like the world itself is being torn open. The real cause did not need lava to be terrifying.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a different kind of extraction swept through the region. Fur seals and sea lions, which had once crowded the beaches in vast numbers, became targets for hunters supplying skins to global markets. Crews like those led by Amasa Delano killed staggering numbers of animals. Estimates from that period suggest millions of fur seal skins taken from the Juan Fernández and surrounding islands in only a few years of furious exploitation. By the time the frenzy burned out, the Juan Fernández fur seal was almost gone. For decades people believed it might be extinct. Small remnant populations later proved that the species had endured, but only barely. It is a pattern that repeats in island history. Isolation creates unique life. Contact makes that life vulnerable. Commerce pushes that vulnerability to the breaking point.
In the twentieth century, the islands briefly took center stage in a global conflict. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the German East Asia Squadron under Admiral von Spee inflicted a sharp defeat on British forces at the Battle of Coronel, then sailed across the Pacific. At the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December, the British crushed the German ships. Almost all were sunk. One light cruiser, SMS Dresden, escaped and vanished into the South Atlantic and then the Pacific. For months she played a tense game of hide and seek with superior British forces, raiding commerce and dodging capture. By March 1915 her engines were worn out and her coal bunkers nearly empty. Dresden limped into Cumberland Bay at Más a Tierra and requested internment in neutral Chilean waters. The British found her anyway. On March 14 they steamed into the bay and opened fire, disregarding Chilean neutrality in their eagerness to finish what the Falklands had started. Realizing that he could not fight or flee, Captain Fritz Emil von Lüdecke ordered his crew to scuttle the ship. Dresden settled on the bottom, where her wreck still rests about seventy meters down. Divers who visit her today swim through a relic of an imperial world that thought nothing of dragging a remote Chilean island into its quarrels.
While navies and sealers and penal administrators came and went, the islands themselves were quietly being recognized for something else. Their ecological uniqueness forced its way into the conversation. Scientists documented extraordinary levels of endemism. Plants that grow nowhere else on Earth cling to slopes shaped by wind and mist. Birds like the Juan Fernández firecrown, a hummingbird with flaming plumage and a temperament that does not match its size, hang on in shrinking pockets of habitat. The Masafuera rayadito, another island specialist, faces similar pressure. In 1935, Chile declared the archipelago a National Park. In 1977, UNESCO designated it a Biosphere Reserve. These labels are not magic shields. They do, however, acknowledge that the world has a stake in what happens on these remote ridges.
The problem is that the same human history that makes the islands interesting is also the reason their ecology is in trouble. Those goats that conveniently kept early mariners alive tore into native vegetation. Dogs, cats, and rats smashed into ground nesting bird populations. Rabbits, blackberries, and various invasive plants and animals continued the assault. When you load a small island with a full cast of Old World mammals and opportunistic weeds, the local flora and fauna pay the price. Conservation work in the islands today is a full time war of attrition against these long standing mistakes.
On February 27, 2010, nature reminded everyone again just how precarious life there can be. An 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck offshore of central Chile, one of the most powerful quakes ever recorded. The shock sent tsunamis racing across the Pacific. On Robinson Crusoe Island, a wave roughly three meters high crashed through San Juan Bautista in the early morning darkness. It pushed water and debris tens of meters inland, smashing homes, sweeping away people, and erasing much of the village. Seventeen residents died or vanished. For a community of fewer than a thousand people, it was a blow that touched nearly every family. Once again the islanders picked through rubble, buried their dead, and rebuilt in the same place. There are only so many flat spots in a volcanic bay, and the sea, for all its danger, is still the reason the village exists at all.
Modern life in the Juan Fernández Islands is a constant negotiation between remoteness and connection. San Juan Bautista is the only permanent settlement. Its population hovers around nine hundred souls. The island has a small airstrip carved out of a narrow bit of flat land, served by small propeller aircraft that make the couple hour hop from the mainland when weather allows. Boats take longer, two days or more depending on conditions, but they bring bulk supplies and tie the islands into the larger flow of Chilean commerce. Satellite dishes sprout from roofs. Children watch the same cartoons that kids in Santiago watch. Islanders connect with relatives on the mainland through phones and the internet. Yet at the same time, everything tangible, from fuel to flour, has to cross hundreds of miles of ocean. That reality shapes daily life more than any signal bouncing down from space.
Economically, lobsters keep the islands alive. The Juan Fernández spiny lobster is prized for its flavor and commanded high prices long before sustainability became a buzzword. Over generations, island families evolved a tenure system for the fishery known as marcas. Individual fishermen or clans hold customary rights to specific patches of sea. They set and tend their wooden traps in these waters, passing down knowledge of currents, bottom structure, and lobster behavior. The system restrains competition and provides a measure of stability. Modern regulations now overlay that older pattern, restricting catch sizes and seasons to protect the stock. In an odd twist of history, the same isolation that once made the islands a penal backwater now helps preserve a relatively healthy fishery by limiting the number of boats and outsiders who can exploit it.
Tourism is the other major economic pillar. People make the long journey to hike the rugged trails, dive on the Dresden, visit the cliffs and caves associated, rightly or wrongly, with Alexander Selkirk, and experience a kind of quiet that is getting hard to find. Guides lead visitors up to scenic viewpoints, where you can stand with the wind in your face and understand why a bad television program could still make a historian like me want to stand there in person. Tourism is a fragile friend. It brings money and outside attention, but it also brings pressure on infrastructure and temptation to cut corners on conservation. Balancing those forces is now part of the islanders’ daily work.
Environmental groups and Chilean agencies cooperate on projects to remove invasive species, restore native plants, and secure habitat for endangered birds. These efforts are slow, expensive, and sometimes controversial. A goat that wrecks a hillside is still protein to a struggling family. A feral cat that slaughters firecrowns is also, at times, a child’s pet. Yet the people who live there know better than anyone that if they lose the very uniqueness that drew the designations and interest, they risk becoming just another struggling coastal village without the one thing that makes them stand out.
When you step back from the details, the history of the Juan Fernández Islands reads like a compact version of the larger human story. Unknown and untouched for ages, they were pulled into the orbit of global empires by a navigator looking for a better route. They were used in turn as a sanctuary, a prison, a naval base, a slaughterhouse for wildlife, and a backdrop for literary imagination. They were bathed in bloodless ink by Defoe and in more literal salt water by tsunamis. They carried the weight of a German cruiser taking one last stand against its pursuers. Now they carry the weight of expectations laid on a tiny community trying to keep their home both economically viable and ecologically alive.
That, more than anything, is why the island does not need mystical nonsense. The real story is stronger. Juan Fernández’s gamble with the winds. Selkirk’s stubborn solitude. The scuttling of the Dresden in a Chilean bay while the world tore itself apart. The firecrown hummingbird clinging to existence in shrinking pockets of forest. The fishermen of San Juan Bautista hauling traps in heavy weather because their families need food and fuel. The tsunami sirens that did not sound in time in 2010. The rebuilding that followed anyway. These are human and natural dramas that require no invented prophecy to be compelling.
One day I would like to stand on the cliffs myself, not to look for secret codes in a rock formation, but to look out at the empty horizon and think about how many lives have passed through that narrow notch in the Pacific. To imagine Fernández’s ship ghosting into view, or Selkirk squinting at the masts of Rogers’s rescue, or German sailors watching their cruiser sink as British shells slashed the water. To listen for the wings of a hummingbird and know that if we are not careful, that sound will fall silent forever. The Juan Fernández Islands are isolated, yes. But their story is not. It radiates outward, touching the history of navigation, empire, literature, war, and conservation. Their next chapter depends on whether we treat that story as something sacred and worth protecting, or just as another pretty backdrop for bad television.
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Fasce, Cristina, et al. “Endemic Flora of the Juan Fernández Archipelago.” Biodiversity and Conservation 16, no. 11 (2007): 3103–3114.
González, Javier A., and Michael R. Willson. “Habitat Use and Conservation of the Juan Fernández Firecrown.” The Condor 96, no. 2 (1994): 335–348.
Rogers, Woodes. A Cruising Voyage Round the World. London: Andrew Bell and Bernard Lintott, 1712.
Skottsberg, Carl. The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island. Vols. 1–3. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1920–1956.
Villalobos, Sergio, et al. Historia de Chile, Tomo I: La Era Colonial. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1974.
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