Hasenbosch Had 1 Month of Water. The Island Had More.

On 5 May 1725 a Dutch East India Company ship called the Prattenburg put one of its own bookkeepers ashore on Ascension Island and sailed. The salary ledger records the sentence in one line: set ashore, being a villain. Ascension has no river and no lake. It has two small sources of fresh water — and both of them had already been found, named and written down twenty-four years earlier by the survivors of William Dampier's shipwreck. He found one of them at the end of June. It dried up before the month was out. He never found the other. His diary runs to 14 October. The last entry says he lived as before. On 19 January 1726 two English ships found the tent, the prayer books and the papers — and no body. If you have heard that they found his skeleton beside a journal ending mid-sentence: that was invented by a London publisher in 1740, to make the ending fit the title. All sources linked below. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES ▸ Alex Ritsema, A Dutch Castaway on Ascension Island in 1725 ▸ Michiel Koolbergen, Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoë (2002) — the archival work that recovered his name ▸ Sodomy Punish'd (London, 1726) — the earliest printed version https://publicdomainreview.org/collec... ▸ Early Modern Scribbling — comparison of the 1726, 1728 and 1740 editions ▸ Ascension Island Government, History of Ascension Island — Dampier's Drip, Breakneck Valley, and the 1830s water system ▸ Ascension Island Heritage Society Note on the record: the original Dutch diary is lost. Every surviving version is a translation, and the 1740 edition is demonstrably padded. Dates differ between sources; this video follows Ritsema and Koolbergen.