Richard Castelman (d. 1746) was an English trader who in 1705 survived a shipwreck on a voyage from Bermuda to America. The ship carrying Castelman's cargo of cotton, indigo and straw-ware ran aground on the Roanoke sandbanks, and broke into pieces. Of the forty-one passengers and crew, only eight survived. The next morning “the whole strand was cover'd with Bermuda Hats” (the remains of Castelman's cargo), as well as the broken pieces of his travelling harpsichord. The survivors were discovered by a local plantation owner. From the site of the wreck in North Carolina, Castelman travelled by land and river to Philadelphia, encountering fierce snakes and pits of quicksand along the way. He stayed in Philadelphia for four months, and explored the Pennsylvania countryside, waiting for the next fleet to sail for England. On arrival back in London he vowed to remain on land, and abandoned the life of a transatlantic trader to become the treasurer of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Castelman's adventures are documented in The Voyage, Shipwreck, and Miraculous Escape of Richard Castelman (1726). In a Dutch translation he was dubbed “De Nieuwe Engelsche Robinson”, and his short and entertaining narrative has long been dismissed as one of many contemporary attempts to recapture the success of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with a fabricated seafaring yarn. However, my recent research in the colonial archives has shown that Castelman was a genuine shipwreck survivor, though his visit to Bermuda was not an innocent mission to supply the want of straw hats back home: he was embroiled in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow Bermuda's Governor. This might have explained why he waited over two decades to publish an account of his wreck, but in the narrative he makes no secret of his loyalty to the leaders of the failed coup. Moreover, Castelman writes with extraordinary frankness about his own cowardice and instinct for self-preservation during the wreck, confessing to rushing to save his money-box, and to making only a cursory attempt to rescue the Captain's children before escaping. Clearly it was not regard for his image that caused Castelman to wait two decades to publish his story. What finally prompted him?
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