In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  On the morning of the sixth day since leaving their companions, they came across a clearly defined path leading from the beach into the woods. The ragged and half-starved castaways followed the track and it led them to a “hutt, and soon after to our great Comfort a White Man appeared.” He was a marooner, Luke Haughton.

  The first thing Uring asked for was “a dram.” But Haughton had no alcohol left. He ordered his Indian “wife” to prepare food.

  Haughton was a typical marooner of the Moskito Coast. He had taken part in several buccaneer campaigns, including the notoriously barbaric attack on the Mexican city of Vera Cruz in 1683, when several Spanish priests had been beheaded. He had been captured and served time in Spanish prisons in both Mexico and Peru. Somehow obtaining his freedom, Haughton then got into debt while running a Jamaican sugar drogher, a small cargo vessel, carrying sugar from the plantations to the Jamaican ports. He also had an affair with a married woman. To escape his creditors he ran away with his lover to the Moskito Coast and they set up house together. But then they quarreled and the woman went off, this time with a logwood cutter from Honduras. Haughton’s current “family,” as Uring called it, consisted of “two women and an Indian boy of above fifteen years of age.” All three were slaves taken by Miskito raiding parties from neighboring tribes. One of the women belonged to Haughton, and she “used to sleep with him and dress his provisions.” The other woman was the property of Haughton’s marooner colleague, who was absent when Uring arrived. The young Indian lad did the general work around the camp, fetching and carrying and helping on hunting and fishing trips.

  For such a rough-cut character, Haughton proved to be exceptionally charitable. He gave shelter and food to the castaways for as long as they wanted. He was also an excellent raconteur and he kept Uring entertained with tales of how he had done battle with the Spaniards and gone on slave raiding expeditions with the Miskitos. The only thing Haughton refused to do was go to the rescue of Uring’s crew who had stayed behind. The journey along the coast was too hazardous, Haughton said. Later Uring learned that a lookout on a sloop passing along the coast had seen smoke from a signal fire lit by his crew. The captain of the sloop had guessed that the fire had been lit by shipwrecked sailors and he sent a boat to investigate. The rescuers brought off the emaciated survivors, all except the elderly pilot. He had been too weak to sustain the semistarvation and had died in the final camp. His death, Uring noted sourly, was “his reward for undertaking what he was incapable of,” adding that his own crew “would have shot him long before I left them, if I had not prevented them.”

  At intervals Haughton disappeared from camp, usually to pay visits to other marooners along the coast. On the first occasion Uring discovered just how difficult it was for an inexperienced stranger to survive in the swamplands and savannas. Haughton had made it look so easy to wander off casually into the woodlands, carrying a gun, and come back every time with a wild pig or a monkey or a deer for the pot. But when Uring tried hunting he got so badly lost in the woodlands that he only found his way home by climbing a tree and locating the river where he had parked his canoe. He promised himself never again to venture far from camp on his own. Next he tried fishing in the river. But even with the help of the Indian slave lad he caught only a few fish. He and his companions would have gone hungry but for a Miskito who happened to drop by. When he heard that Uring and his companions were short of food, he asked if he could borrow a musket. He disappeared, and an hour later came back with a large fawn, which he cleaned and cooked for them. The Miskito came from a small Indian camp nearby, and until Haughton returned a week later, the Miskito “were so kind as to bring us something or other to eat every day.”

  Uring was becoming more and more bored with the isolated, monotonous way of life. To keep himself busy, he asked Haughton for paper, and set about making a chart of the Moskito Coast. He mixed gunpowder and water to make ink, and cut a quill from the feathers of jungle fowl. With homemade dividers and a wooden ruler he drew the shoreline to scale, and added all the coastal features he could derive from Haughton’s extensive knowledge as well as his own travels. His own odyssey in the sloop and by canoe and on foot he marked with a dotted line. His “draught of the Bay of Honduras . . . and the coast of the Mushetos,” he observed with some pride, “is a pretty good one.”

  A day or two after Uring had finished his chart the neighboring Miskito called on Haughton and invited him and Uring to his camp. Haughton warned Uring that he would be expected to drink mishlaw, the Miskitos’ favorite alcohol. There were two types of mishlaw, Haughton explained. One was made by fermenting chunks of ripe plantain in plain water. The other was a mishlaw made with pieces of sweet cassava steeped in much the same way, except that the cassava pieces were first boiled, then “chewed by their young women that have the cleanest mouths” to speed up fermentation and then spat into the brew.

  The Miskito camp had two or three families living together, some sixteen or eighteen people in all. When their guests arrived, the Miskito men were swinging contentedly in their hammocks waiting for the women to finish broiling mullet on the campfire. Gourds of mishlaw were handed round. Uring was dismayed by the way the women dipped the gourds into the tub of fermenting alcohol stew, then picked out the lumps and “with their hands squeeze the plantains and water together, till it comes to a pulp, the liquor running between their fingers, taking out the strings and mixing it well together till it is of such a Thinness fit to drink.” He overcame his squeamishness and accepted a calabash of the thin gruel when Haughton assured him that it was only plantain mixed with water. Knowing that his hosts would be offended if he did not finish his calabash, Uring drank the entire contents. Glancing down into the dregs he saw the unmistakable strands of sweet cassava, and knew that he must have swallowed some of the saliva-fermented alcohol. When he accused Haughton of deceiving him, the ex-buccaneer burst out laughing, as did all the Miskitos who were waiting for Uring to be taken in by the joke.

  Uring learned a good deal about the Miskitos from his visit, as well as from Haughton, who had adopted many of the native customs. “They take no care for Tomorrow,” Uring observed. Like his buccaneer host, the Indians would stir themselves to go hunting only when all their food supplies had run out and they were driven by hunger. The night before a hunt the menfolk would discuss “which way they shall hunt next day.” At two or three o’clock in the morning the Miskito hunters quietly “get into their canows without saying a word to each other, and paddle so far up the river as they think proper.” There they came ashore and by daybreak would be in position in the woods. When a herd of wild pigs ran into the ambush, the Indians formed a circle around their prey, and closed in. Helped by their dogs, they blocked all attempts of the pigs to escape, and usually succeeded in spearing or shooting several animals. These they carried back to the camp and shared out equally. Even Uring and Haughton received two pigs for themselves.

  Like most foreign observers, Uring was impressed by Miskito dexterity “at throwing the Launce, Fisgig or Harpone, or any manner of Dart, and shooting exceedingly well a Bow and Arrow as well as with small Arms.” They obtained their firearms, he noted, from English traders who arrived from Jamaica. Before the arms dealers arrived, the Miskitos would go in a expedition of canoes out to the Moskito Cays. There they would catch hawksbill turtles, remove the shells, and have them ready to barter them with Jamaican men for “Guns, Powder and Shot, Hatchets, Axes and iron Pots.” The Miskito youths had their own sideline in monkeys and parrots, which they exchanged for “Beads, Knives, and other Trifles.”

  Uring met enough Miskitos to notice that they did not all look the same. The men were “generally a tall, well-shap’d, raw-bon’d strong People, nimble and active.” Most had copper-colored skin and long black straight hair. Others—like Captain Hobby—had much darker skins and “bushy curled hair.” Uring learned that Captain Hobby looked part African because he and others like him were the descendants from “a Ship with Negroes [that] by A
ccident was cast away on the Coast.” Those who escaped drowning “mixed among the Native Muscheto People who intermarried with them, and begot a race of Mulattoes.” In effect, the Miskito were a nation descended, in part, from castaways, and this may have accounted for their hospitality toward those who arrived among them in distress or weary of life at sea. Forty years before William Dampier watched two Miskitos, William and Robin, greet each other on Juan Fernandez, a Dutch buccaneer described how a Miskito host greeted guests who arrived at his hut near Sandy Bay. Walking out from his dwelling to greet his Miskito guests, the host “falls down upon the ground, lying flat on his face, in which posture he remains without any motion as if he were dead.” His guests took him up, set him on his feet and escorted him to the doorway of his hut. There too they “use the same ceremony, falling on the ground . . . but he lifts them up one by one, and giving them his hand conducts them to his cottage, where he causes them to sit.”

  Uring lost track of time during his stay with Haughton. It was “between two and three months” after he first arrived that he was startled awake by what sounded like the boom of a cannon fired from out at sea. Although it was pitch dark and only two or three o’clock in the morning, he roused Haughton and told him that it must be signal gun fired from a sloop passing along the coast. It could even be a ship searching for him. Haughton told him that the noise might equally be the sound of a large tree falling in the forest, and, anyhow, he would have to wait till daylight to investigate. Uring was by now so “heartily tired with this manner of life” that he was up before dawn, eager to hurry down to the beach. At daybreak, after packing his few possessions and his new chart and “having made my best compliments” to Haughton for his kindness, he set out with all speed. To his disappointment, there was no ship waiting in the offing.

  Undeterred, he turned eastward and began walking along the beach heading for the Plantane River. The larger marooner settlement was a more likely port of call for a visiting ship. This time his trek along the beach was less fraught. The Miskitos knew who he was, so when he came to a broad river, a young Miskito promptly ferried him across in a dugout. A Miskito woman gave him a roast plantain for his traveling supplies. After a long hot walk of twenty miles, Uring finally reached the marooner settlement on the Plantane River. To his acute disappointment there was no visiting ship there either. And the settlement was partially deserted.

  The main body of the Plantane marooners had gone off to Sandy Bay to join a Miskito slaving raid.

  “The Manner of these Expeditions are thus,” explained Uring. “When [the Miskitos] have concluded what Number of Men is proper for their Design, they furnish themselves with a sufficient number of Canows, Dories and Pitpans.” The pitpan, he said, was “something like a wort cooler”—the trough for fermenting beer mash. A pitpan drew only four inches of water and could nose into the smallest backwater, carrying the raiders far into the interior. As guides the Miskito took along trustworthy slaves captured on previous raids. They knew where to find settlements of “wild Indians.” A Miskito raiding flotilla might travel as far as two hundred miles along the coast before turning into the mouth of the river leading to their victims. Leaving behind their larger canoes, the raiders then paddled and poled the pitpans some forty or fifty miles upriver until they reached the target settlement. With the same technique they used for catching wild pig, the raiders landed from their pitpans, quietly surrounded the village in the darkness, and attacked at dawn. Sometimes they managed to capture every living soul in the community. If the alarm was raised so the surprise was spoiled, the Miskitos seized the women and children. These they took down to the coast and sold off to the visiting Jamaican traders. “I have seen many of those poor Wretches sold there [in Jamaica] which have had so pitiful a Look it would soften the most obdurate Heart.” However, he thought that the women who finished up as wives to the marooners “live tolerably well.”

  Uring noted that the Miskitos regarded the Spaniards as “their mortal enemies, and kill them wherever they meet ’em,” and he admired their warlike spirit. He calculated that the largest army the Miskitos could assemble was only eight hundred men. Yet they had defeated a large canoe—borne Spanish expedition sent against them two years earlier. Rather than wait to be attacked, the Miskitos assembled their own war fleet, and went to meet the invaders as they paddled along the coast. Hiding within a river mouth, the Miskitos sent a small fast scouting canoe to sea as a decoy. The Spaniards caught sight of the canoe, chased it, and were drawn offshore. Behind them the Miskito flotilla emerged from the river mouth and forced the Spaniards, cut off from land, to give battle. The Miskito killed every one of the invaders except for a negro who was spared when he claimed to be a prisoner of the Spaniards. Later he escaped and carried back the news of the disaster.

  Uring left the Moskito Coast ten days later. A trading sloop appeared off the Plantane River bar and hoisted an English flag. She was loaded with logwood and heading for Jamaica, but her master was such a poor navigator that he had lost his way. The crewmen who came ashore in a canoe were equally inept. They capsized on the river bar, and had to swim for their lives. The waiting marooners gathered up their oars, rescued the upturned canoe, pulled the sailors ashore, and learned that the vessel needed provisions. Uring took the chance to offer his services as an experienced navigator in return for a free passage to Jamaica.

  Uring never lost his interest in the Miskitos, though it had been such a “troublesome, fatiguing and painful voyage” which cast him away in their homeland. In four more years of plying the Caribbean as a merchant seaman, he often met individual Miskito strikers aboard English ships, and he was in Jamaica when two hundred Miskito warriors were shipped in as mercenaries to fight for the British colonial government. Their pay was forty shillings a month and a pair of shoes, and their task was to track down runaway slaves living in the interior of the island. With a touch of pride Uring reported that the Miskitos “performed the Service they were employed in very well, and were sent home again well pleased.” Later he also heard that there was a project for transporting the entire Miskito people to live in Jamaica. The idea was to give them land and offer them English citizenship. But whether the scheme was put into effect, he did not know, though he suspected that the Miskitos would not take up the offer, because they “did not like to quit their own Country” and “they have always maintained their Liberty.”

  Kendra employed an eloquent range of gestures, facial expressions, and other stratagems during her Miskitu conversations. To glean information, she might raise a quizzical eyebrow, turn the corners of her mouth up and down like a cartoon drawing to express her feelings, or put on the air of an innocent, a comedienne, or a coconspirator. She knew just when to pause, offering the interviewee a gap to fill with a reply. If a statement seemed exaggerated, Kendra tilted back her head, half-closed her eyes, and looked doubtful, and gave her informant a chance to correct what had just been said. And when an informant was in full flow, Kendra would coo encouragement with an admiring and carefully modulated “aoooaw” “aoooaw,” the sound a Miskito makes when listening with approval. After Kendra had talked with the Miskito men, she would drift away. She was en route to the cookhouse. From the women she picked up the gossip.

  We had puzzles to solve. Why were some Miskito houses so much more substantial than others, obviously having cost a lot of money? How could Siriaku afford a smart fiber-glass skiff and a brand new motor? Who paid for the expensive gold necklaces worn by many of the young Miskito girls or the dentistry that gave their elders a gleam of gold teeth? How could anyone afford such high-priced items in an economy whose cash came from the sale of lobster tails, and where most people lived on a diet of rice, cassava, yucca, and turtle meat? Very soon Kendra had found an entirely new meaning for what it now means to be a Miskito “striker”: the wealthy people were those who had made “a lucky strike.”

  A lucky strike was the accidental discovery of a bale of narcotics. These “strikes” were astonishingly
frequent. They might happen at least once a week in the right season of June and July and then again in November and December. A single really big strike might net more than forty pounds of drugs. The strikes occurred at sea or on land. The crew of a turtle boat pulled up a bale of drugs caught in their net; a ferryman spotted a bundle of drugs bobbing in the waves; a beachcomber came across a carton washed up on the strand. The packaging was usually intact. Black rubber sheeting kept out the seawater, and inside the bales, the narcotics—marijuana or cocaine—was divided into smaller plasticwrapped packets, usually of one kilo in weight. These packets often bore trade symbols. Cocaine in packs stenciled with the icon of a bicycle, for example, was of better quality than those marked with the outline of a football. Where this extraordinary manna came from was unclear. It had begun in the late 1980s. Some said that the narco-traffickers stashed the drugs on the cays to be picked up later; others that highspeed smuggling boats dumped the bundles overboard when the authorities were in hot pursuit. If a boat was caught and had no drugs aboard, there was no evidence for the prosecution. Another explanation was that the bales of drugs were simply the slops. They were failed pickups dropped by aircraft to waiting boats or bales mishandled during transfer from boat to boat out at sea. The Moskito Coast lies beside the most lucrative trade route in the modern world—the narcotics conduits from South America to the United States. The analogy with the era of Will the Moskito was clear. Formerly the galleons had sailed past the coast laden with the highest-value cargoes of that time, bullion and gems. Now the main narcotics trade followed much the same track. Across a span of three centuries the Miskito lived off the crumbs from that table.

  Making a lucky strike was winning the lottery. When the news spread, people would call at the home of the lucky striker and ask for a handout or a loan. It was like the days when the Miskitos salvaged a cargo of rum from Captain Uring’s shipwreck, and shared that lucky strike and held a party. The Miskitos in Sandy Bay still distributed the proceeds from a bo- nanza. If the haul was marijuana, it was easy for the finders to share or trade the resin and leaf. If the lucky strike was cocaine, then the division was more complex. The first cut was set aside for the police and militia. Then smaller divisions were allocated to help older people, for the sick, and for mothers with large families who had no one to support them. The finders had a portion which they divided among themselves. A part of the revenue found its way to the Church.