There was an element of Robinson Crusoe when a man named as Daniel Defoe was rescued by the coastguard after becoming stranded at Cramond Island with his female partner.
A crew from RNLI at Queensferry sailed out to help the couple at 3.10pm on Sunday.
A spokesman for the coastguard said, “We received the call at 3.10pm when we were told that a man and his female partner had been cut off by the tide at Cramond Island.”
He confirmed the man was named Daniel Defoe, the same name as the author of Robinson Crusoe.
Defoe’s novel tells of a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering native Americans, captives and mutineers before being rescued.
The story was believed to be based on Alexander Selkirk, a sailor from Lower Largo in Fife, who was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers’ expedition after four years on the uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra in the Juan Fernandez Islands off the Chilean coast.
The RNLI station at Queensferry was this week named the busiest in Scotland, with 74 launches, including one where they were assisted by their colleagues from Kinghorn in rescuing more than 60 people who had attended an all-night music festival at Cramond Island.
Picture used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user nyer82.