Alasdair McPherson

Job Hartop Alasdair McPherson

Job Hartop was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, in about 1544. He worked as a gunsmith in London before becoming Gunner's Mate on a privateer carrying slaves from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. After a sea battle he was abandoned by Sir John Hawkins, father of the English Navy, with a hundred others on a deserted Mexican beach. Twenty-three years later he stepped ashore from a galleon, probably a frigate of the Channel Squadron, onto English soil. He wrote an account of his adventures which was not published until sixty years later, outlining the hardships he endured. There is no hint about how he survived: what resources of mind and body enable a man to carry on through deadly adventures, including flogging by the Spanish Inquisition and a term at the oars of a naval galley? I think Daniel Defoe had the same problem when he read the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish mariner stranded alone on a desert island. Defoe speculated on how a man can endure in such conditions in the novel Robinson Crusoe. I may lack the style of Defoe, whose story hasn't been out of print since it was first published in 1719, but he's no longer around to steal my thunder. In this book I offer a fictional account of what might have happened to Job Hartop while he was absent from England. Many of the men stranded with him died before they reached a remote Mexican settlement. Many others died at the hands of the Inquisition, who imprisoned and flogged Job. A majority of those condemned to slavery in a galley failed to survive for a single year, although Job reportedly endured twelve. Starting from the premise that he was not super-human, I have invented an account of how he might have survived, virtually unscathed. I hope you enjoy reading Job's history as much as I enjoyed re-inventing it.