Today, the sole occupant lives off a couple of cows and herbs, yet looks well enough to provoke admiring gazes from female passengers, perhaps dreaming of their own castaway experience.
With a respectable education and a gentle presence, he was clearly a cut above the usual rough-necked castaway, and he was put to teaching English.
Mr McCalman suggests it also suffered from earlier myth-making, particularly about the indigenous inhabitants of the reef's coasts and islands whom European explorers, scientists and beachcombers encountered.The biggest myth surrounds the story of Eliza Fraser, a shipwrecked castaway who lived among aborigines in 1836, before a white man rescued her.
Then, in 1960, a notebook was found containing another Essex narrative, parallel with Owen Chase's, written by Thomas Nickerson, cabin boy on the ship and a crew member of Chase's castaway boat.
He knows the histories of other wrecks and castaway crews, and why they fared better or worse.
When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean.To remove one possible bias that litter encourages more litter the researchers inconspicuously picked up each castaway flyer.
Hardened by his arduous experiences at sea, Van Weyden develops strength of both body and will, protecting another castaway, Maud Brewster, and facing down the increasingly deranged Larsen.
The story concerns Humphrey Van Weyden, a refined castaway who is put to work on the motley schooner Ghost.
He saw himself as someone who did not practice what he preached and lived in dread that he would be, in the words of St. Paul, a castaway.
His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem "The Castaway" (written 1799).
Once you've got the hang of it, you could try a four-hour trip (€33), heading south along the shoreline to the castaway beach at Masca, one of Tenerife's prettiest villages.
