In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  On our way back to Sandy Bay, a motor skiff painted in military camouflage pattern intercepted us. Aboard was an armed Nicaraguan army corporal. He came from the lone stilt hut that flew a Nicaraguan flag on a pole and showed a radio aerial. This was the official outpost of Nicaraguan authority on the cays, and the soldier was suspicious and aggressive. He hectored Siriaku in Spanish, while the two teenage Miskito militiamen who drove the skiff for him looked embarrassed. Marco, sitting next to me, began to get very edgy and tense. For him the presence of a Nicaraguan army man on the Miskito Cays was an outrage. The corporal wanted to know who we were. Siriaku sat passive, and answered the questions in his deep rumbling voice, speaking in Spanish. The corporal then turned on Kendra and me and truculently demanded to know our business. Kendra replied with her customary tact, also in Spanish, and we handed across our passports for inspection. The corporal leafed through them, and there was an uncomfortable moment as we sat, wondering what he would decide. Then Kendra spoke to the Miskito militia lads in Miskitu, and the corporal glanced up from his reading, obviously startled. Clearly he did not know what was being said, and suddenly he seemed very alone and isolated. He moderated his bullying tone, and told Siriaku to accompany him to the militia post. Siriaku returned after a quarter hour. The corporal had demanded a “license fee” for allowing the carriage of passengers, but nothing else. Marco told us that the Sandinista troops had landed on the cays during the Indian War and, in their ignorance, had set up camp there. “The sandflies made sure they really suffered. They were very, very sorry they came.”

  Uring and his men at Captain Hobby’s camp got little sleep. They continued to be “grievously pestered” by the biting insects, and were anxious to be on the move again. They set out with eight of the men in Uring’s canoe, and the rest of the party in a canoe lent to them by the obliging Captain Hobby.

  Uring’s plan was to backtrack on their previous route, heading for an anchorage at Trujillo. There he hoped to find a logwood trading ship that would pick them up. As they paddled past the point where they had been shipwrecked, the elderly pilot recognized his earlier error. The “remarkable tuft of trees” he had seen grew not on Cabo Gracias a Dios but on another cape twenty miles farther northwest. Its name was False Cape. Glumly Uring noted that the name indicated that “some other People had been deceived in it as well as my Pilot.”

  By day the castaways paddled and rowed along as close to the beach as possible. Each night they dropped a light grapnel to anchor themselves away from the mosquito-infested shore. Then they boiled up a pot of food on a crude hearth they rigged up in the bilges. They ate “Hasty Pudding,” balls of duff made of flour and water and flavored with shreds of beef. Afterward they lay down in the boat to rest. But Uring’s canoe was very leaky. Uring found “it was impossible for me to sleep in her bottom, where the water washed continually from side to side.” He laid one of the paddles across the canoe for his legs to rest on, repositioned a thwart under the small of his back, and then lay with his head in the stern. “I leave anyone to judge,” he added, “whether I had not a very unpleasant time of it.”

  Three or four days of this tedious progress brought the travelers to the mouth of the Plantane River. There, to the sailors’ relief, they saw the English flag flying from staff. It marked the site of a marooners’ camp. Eight or ten English marooners were living there with their women, slaves, and children. The women were Indians, some of them living as wives of the marooners, others as slaves. Uring remarked how feckless was their way of life: the marooners simply waited until their food ran out, then either went hunting or sent their negro and Indian slaves to paddle nearly fifty miles upriver against the current to a place where they could gather plantains from abandoned Indian plantations. The round trip took four or five days, depending on the force of the current, yet the marooners did not take the trouble to raise their own crops, and no one laid in any advance stock of supplies. Nevertheless they treated Uring and his sailors generously. The marooners fed the castaways and gave them powder and shot. For the first time since he was shipwrecked, Uring had a good night’s sleep. He was given a four-foot-high barbecue to sleep on, its platform covered with “a good quantity of leaves . . . and a piece of old canvas” and he lay under the first “pavilion” he had seen. The linen, he observed, “falls down on every side, which tucks in all round, and serves not only for curtains, but also keeps out the flies . . . nor is there hardly any living without it.”

  Uring was doggedly determined to find a rescue ship. The marooners on the Plantane were not expecting a vessel to call there, so he decided to push ahead to Trujillo, nearly eighty miles farther along the coast. It proved to be the wrong decision. When the little party reached the Trujillo anchorage a few days later, they found it empty. There was no choice but to return to the Plantane River encampment, where they could at least find food. But they faced a new difficulty: until now they had been traveling west, with the northeast trades in their favor. Now as they turned their canoe around and headed eastward once again, they had to paddle and row against wind, waves, and the current. The return journey became a nightmare.

  On the very first afternoon, dark clouds began to mass on the northern horizon. Fearing a storm like the one that had wrecked his sloop, Uring ran the canoe into the mouth of the nearest river to seek shelter. There was already a dangerous sea breaking on the bar, and waves swamped the canoe. Bailing furiously, the sailors succeeded in emptying out their vessel, and paddled far enough up the river to avoid the worst of the weather. There they spent that night at anchor, listening to the wind raging and the waves beating on the shore; in the morning they paddled farther upstream to find a place to make camp. They chose a spot on a small ridge where they erected a tent from the sails of the canoe. They picked the site because they thought it would be dry. But it rained again very heavily after dark, and they spent their night slapping at mosquitoes and listening to a rivulet of water running across the floor of their shelter.

  In the morning the wind was still blowing too hard for them to think of venturing out to sea again and they were faced once again with the difficulty of foraging for food. They no longer cared what they ate. Scavenging along the riverbank one of the men grabbed for a large iguana that he saw on a branch. But the animal leaped into the river and escaped. A little distance farther on they came across a troupe of large black monkeys in the trees. The sailors promptly shot several of them and brought them back to the tent. They skinned and gutted the monkey carcasses, then laid them on the fire to roast. Monkey flesh had the “taste of ill-fed Pork” and was popular with the men, but Uring found “that it was several days before I could prevail with my self to taste them, they looking so like young Children broiled.” His hunger eventually drove him to join in and he admitted that “it was not long before I got over the Prejudice and eat them as heartily as any of our Men.”

  For more than a week, the little group was bottled up in the mouth of the river, unable to go to sea. Their constant hunting rapidly depleted the food resources of the area. The troupes of black monkeys were frightened away, to be replaced by bands of white-faced monkeys who would “hang by the extreme part of their tails upon the branch of a tree, and swing themselves to reach another with their Paws, but will not quit the hold of one till they have sure hold with the other.” They chattered and grimaced at the sailors who had entered their territory. But the white-faced monkeys were too small to provide much meat, and were so nimble that it was judged a waste of ammunition to try to shoot them for the pot. The mosquitoes, however, were as voracious as ever, and as the hunting declined, the sailors decided to abandon the forest camp and move back to the beach where the wind would keep away the insects.

  They found they had exchanged one plague for another. The bites of the mosquitoes were replaced by the stings from hordes of sand flies, “which made our men grow so impatient that they raved, stormed, and swore like Bedlamites.”

  Desperate to get clear of the insects, the sailors to
ok it upon themselves to try going to sea in the canoe again. They had now been twelve days onshore, and were reduced to eating the buds of the cabbage palm, the same plant that had sustained the visitors to Juan Fernandez. Uring himself was in no fit state to travel. His right thigh was grossly swollen and red and he was only able to crawl. He diagnosed the illness as the result of eating monkey meat or prolonged exhaustion, though it was probably caused by an insect bite that had turned septic. He asked his sailors to delay their departure until he was recovered and he warned them that the sea was still too rough to attempt getting out over the bar at the river mouth. They ignored him.

  Uring knew that if he was left behind, he would die. So he dragged himself into the stern of the canoe, and devised a system of steering with the help of his bosun. The crew took their places at the oars and waited in the river mouth with the canoe pointing seaward. Judging the moment when there was a “a small intermission” between the larger waves, they began to row frantically. But the canoe was heavy and slow, and they were not clear of the breakers when the next series of cresting waves rolled down on them. Uring shouted at the men to row harder. The next incoming wave broke over the canoe and they lost their nerve. They were “frightened and confounded, and star’d like men amazed . . . crying out for the Lord to have Mercy upon them.” The hesitation was fatal. The next wave broke clear over the boat, half filling it with water. The canoe canted over and slued. To save her from being rolled, Uring and the bosun managed to turn the canoe stern-on to the breakers. The next big wave that crashed over the boat swept her from stern to stem, this time filling her with water. The crew were so terrified that they sat stock still in their seats with the oars in their hands. This saved the little vessel from capsizing, and she was swept inshore, still the right way up, as wave after wave carried her back to land. Had the canoe capsized, Uring calculated, not one of them would have survived.

  Sodden and shaken, the crew splashed ashore, hauled up the canoe, and swore that they would not try crossing the bar again. They would rather walk along the coast.

  Uring tried to change their minds. The weather would improve, the sea would calm, and a trek along the swampy shoreline was foolhardy. He reminded them that the Moskito Coast was a wilderness; they would have to swim or ford dozens of rivers and streams; and they should be mindful of “the Risque they run of the wild beasts devouring them.”

  His sailors would not listen. Uring’s earlier insistence on leaving the marooners on the Plantane River and going to Trujillo now seemed a gross error. The men had lost confidence in their captain, and they became a rabble. They were no better than “baptis’d Beasts,” Uring lamented, and their obstinacy “showed me what wretched ungovernable Creatures Men are, when there is no Power or Laws to restrain them.”

  Without forethought, the straggle of mutineers set out on foot along the beach, with Uring hobbling along behind. The impromptu saltwater bath had greatly improved the condition of his swollen leg, and he found he could just about manage to keep up with the group until they came to their first major obstacle, the Romaine River. There the mutineers came to a halt. They had not anticipated the difficulty of the crossing. The Romaine was in flood and running strongly. Anyone who ventured on it risked being swept out to sea. There was also the danger of alligators. Halfheartedly the mutineers began to hack at the trees to make a raft. But they still had only the single ax and the work went so slowly that Uring saw his opportunity to persuade them to return to where they had left the canoe, and think out a more sensible rescue plan.

  Try as he might, he still could not persuade them to risk another sally in the canoe. Even another attempt by land was now beyond the enthusiasm of most of the party. Finally Uring volunteered to make the overland journey himself if just one man volunteered to come with him. He calculated a small party stood a better chance of getting through to the marooners on the Plantane River, and bringing back help.

  Two men and the ship’s boy agreed to go with him, and they were escorted back to the bank of the Romaine. There they collected bamboos to make two small rafts, which they lashed together with fishing line. When the fishing line ran out, they used twisted strips of bark. Then the main party of castaways turned back, leaving the four travelers to paddle their improvised rafts upstream to the point where they could safely cross the river. For three hours they sat astride their little craft, legs dangling in the warm water as they paddled upriver. They stayed close to the bank, well out of the main current, and often pulled themselves along by grabbing on to overhanging branches. At times they had to dismount, then wade through the mud pushing their rafts in front of them. Toward dusk they picked “a fine green spot” on the bank and clambered out to make camp, receiving a sudden shock “when several large alligators flounced from thence into the water close by us.” They were so tired that they soon fell asleep beside the fire they lit with the help of a “pistol and a little gunpowder” they had brought along “in a calabash which was close waxed up to prevent its being damaged with Water.”

  At daybreak they were back in the water, pushing, paddling, and hauling along their bamboo rafts and “often saw large alligators leap from among the bushes into the water just by us.” When they reached the point where an island divided the main width of the river, Uring judged it was safe to attempt the crossing. It had taken six or seven hours to get that far, but their perseverance paid off. They slanted across the current on their bamboo floats, and reached the far bank in safety. Then they floated downstream to the river mouth where they could resume their coastal trek. Untying the bamboo poles, they retrieved the precious lengths of fishing line, knowing that they would need them again when they had to cross the rivers that lay ahead.

  During the twelve hours it had taken to cross the Romaine river Uring had been in and out of the water so often and “the weather being extream hot,” he had worn only a shirt. Now he learned his error. “That leaving my thighs very often bare” he wrote, “the heat of the sun scorching them made me frequently throw water on them to keep “em cool, not thinking of the consequence, but soon after we landed I found them extreamly sore, very red and blister’d in several places which grew very painful.”

  Badly sunburned, he ate his ration of “a little Morsel of Bread with an ounce of raw salt beef ” and then the four travelers filled up their canteens before setting off along the coast on foot. Their shoes were broken and loose. They floundered in the soft sand or slipped and tripped on the shingle. When they tried to walk on firmer ground on the back of the beach, the thorns and briars ripped them. At night they tried to get some rest around a campfire on the beach, only to be kept awake by the pain of their sunburn and the bites of the sand flies. On the second and third days they crossed several small rivers, either wading across “some up to knees, others to our middle, and others up to our chin.” One of the men knew how to swim, so whenever they came to what looked like a deep river, he would plunge in first, and test its depth. If he could wade safely, the others would follow. If he found it too deep to wade, the others would again begin to look for loose logs and branches and tie them together as floats. But such cooperation was rare. The two stronger men usually went ahead, and Uring and the lad limped along, struggling to keep up with them.

  Their greatest disappointment came on the third day, when their advance along the beach was blocked by a steep headland covered in thorns and jungle. They turned inland, intending to circle around the back of the obstacle. They spent hours groping through the jungle, pulling themselves forward from tree to tree, then slithering down hanging on to vines, only to misjudge their progress. When they emerged on the beach, they found themselves “to our great Mortification . . . still on the same side [of the headland] and not far from the place where we entered the woods.” They camped that night where they were, and next day tried to force their way directly through dense brush which covered the headland. But it was no use. “We retired, after tearing our cloaths, and losing some of our flesh.” Finally they took the ris
k of clambering round the cliff face, hanging on like acrobats and “stepping from one hole in the sides of the rocks to another, and from one crag to another, holding by the ragged part of it with one hand and our spare cloaths with the other, and by Providence we got all well over; but had any of us made the least false step or slip, he must have fallen forty or fifty foot down into the sea, and perished immediately.”

  On the morning of the fourth day they found a fallen coconut which they opened for the milk and flesh; and a little farther on was a single palm which had grown from a coconut washed ashore by chance. The tree had a few half-grown fruit, which the castaways knocked down and ate greedily. They had finished the last of their bread and salt beef the previous day. That afternoon they came to an area where the mangroves extended so far into the sea that the men could not wade around the barrier. Instead they were obliged to “go through the scragged trees and bushes, being obliged to creep between the branches of some, and climb over others, which tore our cloaths and even our flesh in many places.”

  What kept them moving forward was the hope that they might stumble across some of the “marooners” thought to be living near Cape Camerone, on the near side of the Plantane River. Not until late on the fifth day of their excruciating trek did they know their ordeal might be coming to an end. They had reached a coastal lagoon and were walking along the sand spit that divided the lagoon from the sea. Soon they came to the channel that joined the lagoon to the sea, and one of the men waded across the channel to reconnoiter the far bank. He returned two hours later with “joyful news.” He had found a human footprint.