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Selkirk   /sˈɛlkərk/   Listen
Selkirk

noun
1.
Scottish sailor who was put ashore on a deserted island off the coast of Chile for five years (providing the basis for Daniel Defoe's novel about Robinson Crusoe) (1676-1721).  Synonyms: Alexander Selcraig, Alexander Selkirk, Selcraig.



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"Selkirk" Quotes from Famous Books



... disclaim him for ever: So his father carried him home, and put him to the college, and there he became a diligent student, of great expectation, and shewed himself a sincere convert; and so he proceeded to the ministry. His first settlement was at Selkirk, while he was yet very young, and the country rude. While he was there, his ministry was rather admired by some, than received by many; for he was always attended by the prophet's shadow, the hatred of the wicked; yea, even the ministers ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... found a Man clothed in Goatskins, who looked wilder than they who had been the first owners of 'em. He had been on the Island four years and four months, being left there by Captain Stradling in the "Cinque Ports;" his name was ALEXANDER SELKIRK, a Scottish man, who had been Sailing Master to the "Cinque Ports;" but quarrelling with the Commander, was by him accused of Mutiny, and so Abandoned on this Uninhabited Island. During his stay he saw several ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... that portion of Paul Jones' adventurous life when he was hovering off the British coast, watching for an opportunity to strike the enemy a blow. It deals more particularly with his descent upon Whitehaven, the seizure of Lady Selkirk's plate, and the famous battle with the Drake. The boy who figures in the tale is one who was taken from a derelict by Paul Jones shortly after this ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger

... at the assembly of the states-general, and given audience to divers ambassadors at the Hague, he repaired to his house at Loo, attended by the earls of Essex, Portland, and Selkirk. There he was visited by count Tallard the French minister, who had instructions to negotiate the treaty concerning the Spanish succession. The earl of Portland, by his majesty's order, had communicated to Secretary Vernon the principal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... at the foot of a mountain, according to tradition, lived Robinson Crusoe, and from a saddle in the crest he threw longing, eager glances over the great ocean. A memorial tablet in the cave relates that the real Crusoe, a Scotch sailor named Selkirk, lived alone on the island for four years and four months in the years 1704-1709. He went on shore of his own accord, being dissatisfied with the officers of the ship to which he belonged. The climate was mild, the rainfall moderate, and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... This threatens absolutely Syrian drought. As the Selkirk election comes on Monday, I go out to-day to Abbotsford, and carry young Davidoff and his tutor with me, to see our quiet way of managing the choice of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... the other tales in this part of our book is the story of Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe about two hundred years ago and here condensed for your enjoyment. There was, in Defoe's time, a sailor, Alexander Selkirk by name, who was left by his shipmates on an island and who lived by himself for four years before he attracted the attention of a passing ship. This suggested the idea of Robinson Crusoe to Defoe, but he has greatly expanded the story. Crusoe lived on his lonely island for twenty-seven years. ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... remarkable room; it is the collection of the author of Waverly; and to enumerate all the articles which are here assembled, would require a volume. Take a few particulars. The old wooden lock of the Tolbooth of Selkirk; Queen Mary's offering-box, a small iron ark or coffer, with a circular lid, found in Holyrood-house. Then Hofer's rifle—a short, stout gun, given him by Sir Humphry Davy, or rather by Hofer's widow to Sir Humphry for Sir Walter. The housekeeper said, that Sir Humphry ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... articles are conveyed in boats up the rivers, carried past the waterfalls and rapids overland on the shoulders of stalwart voyageurs, and finally landed at Red River, after a rough trip of many weeks' duration. The colony was founded in 1811, by the Earl of Selkirk, previously to which it had been a trading-post of the Fur Company. At the time of which we write, it contained about five thousand souls, and extended upwards of fifty miles along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, which streams supplied the settlers with a variety ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... her son dead on that hearth than hear that he had been a horse's length behind his companions," was his paternal great-grandmother, Mrs. John Lang. Her husband, who died shortly afterwards, so that she was a widow when Scott conversed with her, chanced to be chief magistrate of Selkirk. His family was aroused late one night by the sound of a carriage hurrying down the steep and narrow street. Lord Napier was bringing, probably from Hawick, the tidings that the beacons were ablaze. The town-bell was instantly rung, the inhabitants ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... the Pembina Chippewas and half breeds under the auspices of the Baptist Missionary Society. Terry was very slight and youthful in appearance, quiet and retiring in disposition and was long spoken of, by the half-breeds, as "Tanner's Boy." They visited the Red River (Selkirk) settlement (now Winnipeg). While there, Terry wooed and won one of the daughters of the Selkirk settlers, a dark-eyed handsome Scotch lass, to whom he expected to be married in a few months. But, alas, ere the close of summer, he was waylaid, by a savage Sioux, shot full of arrows, his arm broken ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell

... brother-bard with the homely fare of cakes and milk, in his father's cottage at Ettrick. Wordsworth afterwards made the journey memorable in his poem of "Yarrow Visited." The poets temporarily separated at Selkirk,—Wordsworth having secured the promise of a visit from his friend, at Mount Ryedale, prior to his return to Edinburgh. The promise was duly fulfilled; and the Shepherd had the pleasure of meeting, during his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... to you that journey across a continent I had never before seen. It was endless and hopeless. I only know that we crawled up the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirk Range, over spider-like viaducts, with interminable effort, and that the prairies were just the broad Pacific over again. They rolled on for ever. But we did reach Quebec—in time we reached it; and we caught by an hour ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... down to the level of the Columbia River, some 1,500 feet lower, through magnificent stretches of mountain panorama, and through breathless gorges like the Palliser, before climbing again steeply to the highest point of the Selkirk Range. Here the train seemed to charge straight at the towering wall of Mount MacDonald, but only because there is a miracle of a tunnel—Connaught Tunnel—which coaxes the line down by easy grades to Rogers Pass, the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... Then we lose sight of the Sound until within a few miles of Bellingham. The next reach of intervening waterway is termed Bellingham Bay, and it furnishes a setting for a city situated both on hills and lowland, withal very picturesque, Mt. Baker near in view and the Selkirk range dimly visible. Bellingham is really a combination of four towns, Whatcom, Fair Haven, Sea Home, and South Bellingham; it is a city of about thirty-seven thousand inhabitants. The unifying process is going on, and in a ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... and Brady with the long brogue, and Paddy with the short, and Terry with the butcher's-blue coat, and Dennis with no coat at all, and Eneas Hosey's widow, and all the Devines, pleading and quarrelling about boundaries and bits of bog. I wish Lord Selkirk was in the midst of them, with his hands crossed before him; I should like to know if he could make them understand his ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... story of a man who was cast upon this island, the only one saved from a large ship, and who lived five years there before any one came to carry him off. This was probably Alexander Selkirk, from whose adventures on the island Defoe wrote his Robinson Crusoe. Ringrose tells us that he on a trip into the island one day found cut in the bark of a tree a cross with several letters beside it, and that on the same tree he cut his own name with a cross above it. On the twelfth ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... there are but some fifty thousand scattered over the whole central portion of it, it must be acknowledged that they do not make the best possible use of the territory they inhabit. A glance at the map of North America will show you where the Red River is, with its settlement founded by Lord Selkirk. I was very young when I went there with my father, my elder brother Malcolm, and John Dawes, a faithful servant who had been brought up in the family from childhood. John was a great sportsman, a most kind-hearted fellow, and could turn his hand to anything. We went through Canada ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... wellspring of motive? Why should he still cling to a place of endless tribulation? It could not be because he knew no other country, for the region is limitless, food is everywhere, and he was known at least as far as Selkirk. Nor could his motive be revenge. No animal will give up its whole life to seeking revenge; that evil kind of mind is found in man alone. The brute creation seeks ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton

... in 1719, when Defoe was nearly or quite sixty years of age. The book, which must have been somewhat influenced by 'Pilgrim's Progress,' was more directly suggested by a passage in William Dampier's 'Voyage Round the World,' and also, as every one knows, by the experience of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who, set ashore on the island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, had lived there alone from 1709 to 1713. Selkirk's story had been briefly told in the year of his return in a newspaper of Steele, 'The Englishman'; it was ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... come and live with us. I used to ask White Antelope every question I could think of, but all he knew was that after they'd sold their furs to the Hudson Bay Company, they sometimes went to a lodge in Canada called Selkirk, where almost everybody there was named MacDonald or MacDougal or Mackenzie or Mac something. Lots of his friends there married Sioux and went to the Walla Walla valley, and maybe I'll have to go there to find somebody who knew him; but first I'll ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart

... the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a Scotch sailor, who in 1704 was left by Captain Stradding on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez. Here he remained for four years and four months, when he was rescued by Captain Woods Rogers ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... elder brother, William Scott of Raeburn, my great-grand-uncle, was killed about the age of twenty-one, in a duel with Pringle of Crichton, grandfather of the present Mark Pringle of Clifton. They fought with swords, as was the fashion of the time, in a field near Selkirk, called from the catastrophe the Raeburn Meadow-spot. Pringle fled from Scotland to Spain, and was long a captive and slave in Barbary. Beardie became, of course, Tutor of Raeburn, as the old Scottish phrase called him—that is, guardian to his infant nephew, father ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... Winnipegoos and Manitoba Lake to the west of it. Into the southern end of Lake Winnipeg flows the Red River, which rises far-away in the south in the United States, taking an almost direct northerly course. Towards the north, about twenty miles from the lake, is situated the well-known Selkirk settlement. To the west of the Red River commences a broad belt of prairie land which extends here and there, rising into wooded heights and swelling hills, with several large rivers flowing through it, to the very base of the Rocky Mountains. As we advance westward we find it extending considerably ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... Scottish army in England. He crossed the Tweed,[a] proceeded northward, as if he meant to interpose himself between the enemy and the Highlands; and then returned suddenly to surprise them in their encampment at Philiphaugh. Montrose spent the night at Selkirk in preparing despatches for the king; Leslie, who was concealed at no great distance, crossing the Etrick at dawn, under cover of a dense fog, charged[b] unexpectedly into the camp of the royalists, who lay in heedless security ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... is still in the doldrums. He is uncommunicative and moody and goes about his work with a listlessness which is more and more disturbing to me. He surprised his wife the other day by addressing her as "Lady Selkirk," for the simple reason, he later explained, that I propose to be monarch of all I survey, with none to dispute my domain. And a little later he further intimated that I was like a miser with a pot of gold, satisfied to live anywhere so long ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so, "through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown, and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was happy and ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... the care of the Postmaster at Glasgow; and may call for the same in Edinburgh at John Seton, Merchant, his shop in the Parliament Close, where they will be served either in Wholesale or Retail, and will be served in the same manner at Glasgow, by William Selkirk, Merchant, in Trongate." ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... glen 18 m. SW. of Selkirk, with a stronghold of the Scott family, giving the head the title of earl ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... was at," thought Judith before she fell asleep, "and the very nicest people. Jack is a brick—he's been awfully kind to me. I wish I was half as pretty as Lois Selkirk. What would it feel like to be engaged?—I guess it would be exciting! However, then I wouldn't be going back to York Hill—and that will be exciting next term and no mistake. Oh, how glad I am ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett

... not know who wrote Quarll. I never thought of Quarll as having an author. It is a poor imitation; the monkey is the best in it, and his pretty dishes made of shells. Do you know the Paper in the Englishman by Sir Rd. Steele, giving an account of Selkirk? It is admirable, and has all the germs of Crusoe. You must quote it entire. Captain G. Carleton wrote his own Memoirs; they are about Lord Peterborough's campaign in Spain, & a good Book. Puzzelli puzzles me, and I am in a cloud about Donald M'Leod. I never heard of them; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... of their clinging to a mast, Upon a desert island were eventually cast. They hunted for their meals, as ALEXANDER SELKIRK used, But they couldn't chat together—they had ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert

... since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's time, The political and economical effects of these changes have been traced by Lord Selkirk with great precision and accuracy. But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and, like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... to Washington Irving's description, pointed out to me Netherby Hall, the mansion of the Grahams, on "Cannobie lea," over which the young Lochinvar bore away his stolen bride. We passed also Branksome Tower, the scene of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," and reached Selkirk in the early evening. The next day I spent at Abbotsford. The Great Magician had been dead only ten years, and his family still occupied the house with some of his old employees who figure in Lockhart's biography. I sat in the great arm-chair where Sir Walter Scott ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... deputy-sheriff of Selkirk, had a female cur big with pups, which on one occasion, when out in the fields attending the cattle, was taken in travail, and pupped on the moor. She concealed her litter in a whin-bush, brought the cattle home at the usual time with the utmost ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... picturesque huts of Mr. Pearce and his associates stood in a romantic valley, where the American told him had stood the "castle" of the Crusoe inhabitant of the island, Alexander Selkirk, whose strange story has been read the ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood

... Sept. 3. At Selkirk. At Mitchell's Inn, where I was introduced to the celebrated Jamie Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He had come, I think, from a fair held at the Eildons. We got over a jug of toddy. Our conversation turned on the church service of the kirk ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various



Words linked to "Selkirk" :   Alexander Selkirk, crewman, Selkirk Mountains, Selcraig, sailor



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