In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  My intention, already faint, to try to find an official and have my entry in Nicaragua formalized, vanished entirely when we reached Puerto Cabezas. There was no sign whatever of any official presence in its grim streets. It was the administrative capital of the region, yet even the government party headquarters had its windows boarded up. The municipal water supply had broken down, the electricity was erratic. Grass grew in cracks along the pavement, and plaster had fallen in great chunks from the facades of buildings. The Forgotten Indian War had ended in a stalemate, the Sandinistas were no longer in power, and the debt-ridden central government of Nicaragua had problems closer to home. Puerto Cabezas and the province had been left in limbo. Barbed-wire entanglements and privately hired armed guards surrounded the town’s only two factories, a small sawmill and a fish freezing plant. The region had become, as one observer put it, tierra sin lei, land without law.

  Safel took me to the so-called port, created by a single venerable wooden jetty built out into the sea. Several of the heavy planks of its deck were missing. There was not one crane, nor a merchant ship. The only vessels tied up to it were a dozen rusty fishing boats. Safel pointed to one of them and proudly told me that it was owned by his brother-in-law. To me they looked like death traps.

  After some inquiries at the foot of the pier, Safel produced a man who owned a boat for hire. It was, he said, a “speed boat.” The owner could have been first cousin to the villain who had brought us down the Rio Coco. He was another “Spanish” with the same cutthroat look, the same baggy trousers tucked into his boots, and this time he took care to let me see that he had a gun tucked in his belt, inside his shirt. By now I had concluded that the only people who owned “speedboats” with powerful outboard engines were the contrabandistas. And in Puerto Cabezas the smugglers made their money transporting and trading drugs. It was little wonder that their hire rates were so high.

  Safel explained to the smuggler that I needed to rent a boat for a journey along the coast. Clearly it was not an unusual request, and the boat owner looked me up and down, judging my potential as a client. When would I like to travel? As soon as possible, I answered. A satisfied look. A client in a hurry was a client who would pay handsomely. Yes, he was willing to take me. He could be ready that same afternoon and would load enough fuel if I would tell him where I wanted to go. To Sandy Bay, I replied (locally, “Sandy Bay” by itself means Big Sandy Bay). It was as if the pier had tilted beneath his feet. His expression changed. “No!” he muttered. “Not Sandy Bay.” He turned on his heel and walked off.

  I wondered what was so horrible in Sandy Bay that it would deter an armed narco-trafficker.

  It took another twenty-four hours for Safel finally to locate someone willing to take me on the journey. Significantly, he had a skin so black that no one could have mistaken him for a “Spanish.” He imposed a condition for taking Safel and me to Sandy Bay: we would not stay there overnight. Two weeks earlier a narco-trafficker had taken his boat into Sandy Bay. He had been shot and his body dumped on the beach. No one could say exactly why. One story was that he had tried to sell “at too low a price”; another was that he was working for a drug cartel that did not have a trading agreement with the Miskitos of Sandy Bay. But both stories agreed that the dead man’s disadvantage was that he was a “Spanish”—pale-skinned and associated with the detested Spanish speakers who came from the towns.

  The ride to Sandy Bay was purgatory. First we had to wade in water chest deep out into the sea to reach a small, open boat that was kept on a mooring well away from the town jetty. A drum of fuel was floated out and hoisted aboard. Then “Shine,” our boatman, produced a bottle of rum and it was passed around until it was empty and rolling, clinking in the scuppers as we hammered against the brisk breeze and chop for three comfortless hours. Out to sea, there was nothing to be seen except a pair of slovenly shrimp boats—“poachers from Honduras” explained Shine, who had worked in the Cayman Islands and spoke excellent English. The shrimp boats were surrounded with a hover of terns and other gulls waiting for scraps, and above them were the sharp black outlines of the frigate birds, the food stealers waiting to rob the gulls. On the landward side, the Moskito Coast had the same “dreary aspect of an endless white stretch of surf with an even line of green behind” that Charles Bell, a timber trader, had described to the Royal Geographical Society in 1862. He had lived on the Moskito Coast for eighteen years, and said that the only way the Indians could identify any location along the coast was “by certain odd shaped trees. Or patches of tall cabbage palms which grow at the rivers’ mouths.”

  Then came the first encouraging sight: well out to sea appeared a small triangular sail. A boat was heading toward us, sailing downwind, and she was so small that the hull was lost among the waves. Her skipper must have seen our speeding motorboat because the distant sail swung across as the little craft changed course to steer closer. Five minutes later the boat was passing no more than half a mile a way, and I could see she was crammed with passengers, mostly women and children, all seated low in the hull and well wrapped in plastic sheeting to keep off the spray. A couple of young men, naked to the waist, stood clinging to the mast and balanced lithely as they returned my curious inspection. They were aboard a true sailing vessel, about 30 feet long and six feet in the beam, fine at bow and stern, and with no place whatever for any engine. “Miskito from Sandy Bay” said Shine. They were on a shopping trip to Puerto Cabezas, swaying to the motion of the sea, often hidden by the wave crests, and totally unconcerned and as casual as if they had been on a bus. It brought to mind a comment by a French buccaneer, Ravenau de Lussan, a contemporary of Will the Moskito’s. De Lussan had come down the Rio Coco and met the Miskitos off Sandy Bay. They are, he wrote, “the most courageous in the world at braving the perils of the sea. . . . They go out to sea in small boats that the average sailor would scorn, in these they remain three or four days at a stretch as unconcerned, despite the weather, as if they were part of the boat.”

  An hour later Shine was looking tense. He had turned the bow of the launch toward the shoreline and we were rapidly approaching the broad line of surf that lay between us and the land. Clearly this was our run-in for Sandy Bay. Safel, who had spent the journey drinking rum and smoking cigarettes, now took over. He stood up in the bow, his back toward Shine, and carefully watched the waves. Shine did not take his eyes off him. Casually Safel flicked his hand to the left. Shine turned the boat that way. Immediately Safel held up his hand in a gesture calling for delay. Shine straightened the boat and cut back the engine speed. We were on the outer edge of the whitewater. The sea foamed ahead of us, the waves breaking right under our bows. With the wind and more waves pushing from behind, we were drifting inevitably down on the bar. I could not see a gap or passage. The bar was broader than I had expected. Safel dropped his hand. Shine opened the throttle and the boat shot forward. Even at that speed we had to ride the backs of five rollers, lurching forward then sagging back as the waves rolled under us, and the crests reached up and slopped into the boat. In the trough of the second wave I felt the engine propeller guard thump on the sand. A little more than halfway across the bar Safel gestured urgently to the right, and Shine steered the boat into the dog leg of the channel. Safel sat down. As far as he was concerned, the danger was past.

  We had gone from one watery world to another. One moment there was jolt and hiss of the cresting waves under us and the deeper rumble of the sea. Now we were gliding along on a still, flat surface. We had entered the short, broad river that links the lagoon system of Sandy Bay to the Caribbean Sea. The water on which we floated, I learned later, was ambivalent. At some seasons of the year it was the sea, salty and full of marine creatures. At other times it was a freshwater lake, dependent on the rains, and home to a entirely different group of fish and birds. On this shifting boundary between salt and fresh water and at home on both, lived the Miskitos of Sandy Bay.

  There was no landing place as yet. On each side a thick tangle
of mangrove roots was the advance footing for a great green and black wall of forest. Shine opened the throttle of the outboard engine and we raced up the channel between the mangrove forests. He intended our visit to Sandy Bay to be as brief as possible; he wanted to be gone by nightfall.

  We emerged in a mile-wide lagoon. On the far bank stood a line of a dozen houses, the first of the nine villages that make up the community of Big Sandy Bay. After the squalor and neglect of Puerto Cabezas, the buildings were a happy surprise. They were substantial bungalows, standing high off the ground on pillars. Some of them were made of concrete and had corrugated iron roofs, but many were built of more traditional wooden boards standing on timber posts. They were well cared for and neat. Several houses were positively immaculate with bright new paint and hanging potted plants. Others were double-fronted and boasted porticoes. Each house stood in a generous open space of luxuriant green sward, on which grazed sleek ponies. Behind the houses extended a handsome parkland of mature palm, mango, cashew, lime, orange, and breadfruit trees. Along the waterfront coconut palms leaned forward in graceful curves. There were no advertising hoardings with peeling posters, no unsightly wires strung from house to house, no television aerials, nor rusting abandoned vehicles, because no road reached Sandy Bay. Instead, neat dugout canoes were drawn up in a line at the water’s edge, and three sailing boats—sisters to the crowded sailboat I had seen at sea—were moored picturesquely off the waterfront. The only noise was the shouts of the children. The place was neat and clean and swept. This place, the object of the narco-traffickers’ phobia, looked like a hideaway tourist resort.

  Safel told Shine to take us straight to the village and to wait in the boat, while he and I splashed ashore through the tea-colored water of the lagoon. On closer inspection the impression of a neat, calm prosperous community was enhanced. Even the dead leaves from the fruit trees had been swept up into neat piles, ready for burning. We found two men near one of the houses and Safel explained that I had come only for a brief visit, and was interested in the survival of Miskito traditions, particularly concerning boats and the techniques of hunting fish. All the fishermen were away on the sea, we were told, but there was a brand-new sailboat in the next creek. It was not yet launched. We were welcome to go and look at it.

  For a couple of hours I photographed the boat and chatted with the builder, who seemed puzzled that anyone should be interested in his work. Meanwhile, Shine refueled and fidgeted. He was so keen to be leaving Sandy Bay that he offered to take Safel and me back into Honduras by boat. It was, he said, only a few miles to the border.

  This was too good a chance to miss—even though we risked being intercepted by a coast guard patrol, for this route is forbidden—and Shine set out at high speed. Instead of taking the river back to the sea, he swerved into the maze of channels that braided through the mangrove swamps. For the next hour we did not see another boat, a single house, or a human. The only sign that anyone had passed that way before us was a fresh scar where a chainsaw had cut back an overhanging branch that threatened to block the channel. Occasionally we had to crouch down when branches brushed across the top of our boat, threatening to sweep us into the water. I was treated to what anywhere else would have been a private water-borne tour of a carefully guarded wildlife preserve. Everywhere we saw herons, fish eagles, cormorants, ibis, alligators, egrets, pelicans, and huge butterflies. How Shine picked the correct channels was impossible to guess, but clearly he had been here before, and it was equally clear that no one used these channels except as smuggling routes.

  Finally we burst out of the forest and were on the edge of the sea again and crossing back into the salt water. Then we ran up the coast toward Cabo Gracias a Dios and the Honduran border. Here Safel and Shine quarreled as they tried to pick out the entrance to the next lagoon. Eventually Safel won the argument, and again we bumped in over a shoal marked by the bleached skeletons of great trees locked in the sand. Now that we were in Honduras Shine wanted us off the boat as fast as possible. If the Honduran authorities caught him, he said, they would steal his precious outboard motor. For the second time on our trip Safel and I were dumped on a muddy and uninhabited shore. Shine gave us a wave, and then gunned his motor as he sped back into Nicaragua.

  It took two more days to get back to Safel’s home in Puerto Lempira. Much of the time we were wading up to our thighs in swamp water, or squelching through mud, as we followed a footpath that led from one Miskito village to the next. The people gave us food and hammocks for the night. Back in Puerto Lempira Safel casually strolled off, and I went again to the police to have my passport stamped to show that I had reentered Honduras. No one questioned why there was nothing in my passport to show where I had been in the meantime. Apparently I had vanished into thin air.

  Captain Nathaniel Uring was shipwrecked on the treacherous shoals of Cabo Gracias a Dios in early November 1711, within a month of Alexander Selkirk’s return to London. The story of the mishaps and survival of the English sea captain, cast away among Man Friday’s people, is a match for the fictional adventures of Robinson Crusoe. A merchant seaman since the age of fourteen, when his father, a sailor-turned-shopkeeper, sent him to London to learn the rudiments of practical navigation, Uring was immensely experienced in the ways of the sea and the sudden turns of fortune in maritime commerce. When he came to grief on the Moskito Coast, Uring was only twenty-nine years old, yet he had already been captured on three occasions by French privateers, ransomed or released, survived a bout of smallpox and a shipboard fire, made two trips to the Guinea coast in the slave trade, been impressed into the Royal Navy for wartime duty, and worked for five years as the skipper of packet ships carrying mail across the Atlantic between England and the West Indies. The voyage previous to the one on which he was wrecked bore a strange likeness to the smuggling venture that Defoe imagined as the prelude to Crusoe’s misfortune. Crusoe is on a trip to bring slaves illegally into Brazil when he is shipwrecked. Nathaniel Uring successfully carried out a similar plan early in 1711 when he smuggled 150 slaves from Jamaica to an out-of-the-way anchorage at Monkey Cay, close to Portobello, on the Caribbean coast of the isthmus. There he met merchants from Panama who had ridden across the isthmus disguised as peasants and carrying their money hidden in jars of cornmeal loaded on mules.

  That same year Uring was hired as the captain of a small sloop sailing to the Moskito Coast on a slightly less dubious venture. This time his clients were the roughnecks who went to the Caribbean coast of Central America to make a quick profit by cutting down logwood. The Spanish authorities regarded them as thieves and poachers, but had no means of policing the creeks and backwaters of the Bay of Honduras and Bay of Campeche, west of the Yucatan, where logwood, Haematoxylon campechianum, grows wild. The tree itself is unspectacular. It has crooked branches, a straggly appearance, and a contorted trunk that looks as if it is twisted and fused together from several stems. But cut a large splinter of the heartwood and steep it in water, and the water turns a deep crimson, the color of blood. The red tint from logwood was so valuable to the textile industry that the dyers in London paid as much as one hundred pounds a ton for “bloodwood.” The owner of Uring’s sloop could make as much profit from a single shipment of logwood as from a year of hauling general cargo.

  The logwood cutters had a brutish reputation. Many were fugitives from the law. They lived singly or in small groups widely scattered along the coast or on the banks of the rivers and lagoons. Their homes were small shacks thatched with palm leaves and furnished, like Will the Moskito’s hut on Juan Fernandez, with nothing more than a “barbecu” sleeping frame. Over this they erected a crude wooden scaffold from which they hung sheets of a coarse linen known as ozinbrigs. It was their primitive mosquito net. Without these “pavilions,” as they called them, the clouds of insects would have made their lives unbearable. In the rainy season, according to Dampier, who had spent time as a logwood cutter himself, the cabins flooded, and the men “step from their beds into the water
perhaps two foot deep, and continue standing in the wet all day, till they go to bed again.” For one day each week they would hunt wild cattle in the savannas to stock the larder. Dampier describes how the custom was to hack the dead cow into quarters, remove all the bones, and then “each Man makes a hole in the middle of his Quarter, just big enough for his head to go thro,” then puts it on like a Frock and trudgeth home.” If the burden was too heavy and “he chances to tire, he cuts off some of it, and flings it away.”

  In the dry season the cutters worked in small teams, felling the logwood trees, chipping off the outer skin, and sawing the heartwood into billets small enough to be carried on their backs to the collection points. It was appallingly hard work in the muggy heat, but “the Logwood cutters are generally sturdy strong fellows and will carry Burthens of three or four hundred weight.” When a tree trunk was too big to be cut up easily, “we blew it up with gun powder.” Getting the trimmed logs to the beach in the rainy season was easier. The small back channels filled, and the tree trunks could be floated.

  The lives of the logwood cutters were so isolated and lonely that they too were dubbed “marooners.” The high point of their forsaken and sodden year was the arrival of someone like Uring to collect their valuable timber crop. The visiting ship anchored offshore and waited for the half-savage logwood cutters to paddle out in their canoes in search of the cargo they most craved—rum. This was a crucial moment in the negotiations. The visitor should be generous, Dampier advised, and hand out rum punch freely to everyone who arrived. Then the logwood cutters would pay for their own drinks on the following days and ask a fair price for their timber. But if the visiting trader was stingy, he would be sold the junk from the stockpile. The logwood cutters kept a store of substandard logs ready to sell to such skinflints. They “cheat them with hollow Wood filled with dirt in the middle and both ends plugged up with a piece of the same drove in hard, and then sawed off so neatly that it’s hard to find out the Deceit.”