In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Leonidas had been elected the chief sahila of Kalidonia four years earlier. His predecessor, an elderly man, had died in a fishing accident. While he was dropping the stone anchor from his canoe, the anchor line caught around his leg and he was pulled from the canoe and drowned. He was missing for days and no one knew what had happened until a nele, a soothsayer-shaman, was called in from a neighboring island. For three days the nele stayed in a darkened hut, communing with the spirits and burning tobacco and cacao beans. Then he emerged to tell the people of Kalidonia that they would find the body on the adjacent coast. The next day the body was found where predicted. Once the corpse was recovered, the people of Kalidonia met to elect their new chief sahila. Everyone in the community over the age of eighteen, men and women, had a vote. They selected from a panel of the five junior sahilas, and Leonidas must have been the obvious choice. He had served in all the ranks of the village hierarchy, starting as a youthful “staff holder,” whose task is to walk the lanes of the island every dusk carrying his authority stick. With an echoing cry like a London rag-and-bone man staff holders summon the people to attend the gathering house. During those gatherings the staff holders walk up and down the ranks of villagers seated on low benches, scowl at unruly children, and use their staffs to prod those who had dropped off asleep during the long chanting speeches of the sahilas. At intervals they yell “Don’t sleep! Listen well!”

  From the rank of staff holder Leonidas graduated by vote to junior sahila, and then to agar, the spokesman whose task is to interpret the opaque language of the chief sahila as he recites the foundation stories of the Kunas. Now Leonidas would hold the post of “sahila numero uno,” as Murdo put it, for the rest of his life.

  Lacenta was the name of the sahila-in-chief whom Wafer met. Lacenta was a sahila of the highest rank, a cacique, and he lived in considerable style touring the country with a retinue of attendants. When he heard about the marooned buccaneers, he had them brought to his village. There, in storybook fashion, Wafer won Lacenta’s favor by healing one of the sahila’s seven wives.

  She was suffering from fever, and the ina duleds were treating her with phlebotomy, the practice of bloodletting. Wafer, of course, was thoroughly familiar with phlebotomy. Throughout Europe it was rated as a highly effective medical procedure. In a belief not far removed from the Kuna concept that evil spirits invaded the body and caused sickness, European doctors held that many illnesses resulted from an imbalance or excess of the “humors.” The four humors were linked to the elements of earth, fire, air and water, and were represented in the body as blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. To cure a sick patient, even one with mental illness, the doctors “drew off ” the excess or imbalanced humors by cutting into veins with lancets and drawing off quantities of blood; by “cupping,” using glass suction cups stuck to the skin; or by “blistering” which involved rubbing the skin with blistering agents such as mustard and a powder made from dried beetles. Surgeons routinely prescribed bloodletting even for healthy patients who they felt would benefit from a flushing out of the bloodstream.

  Wafer, however, had never seen anything like the way the Kuna took off blood from Lacenta’s wife. The ina duled sat the feverish woman on a boulder in the river and then “with a small bow” began firing miniature arrows into her naked body, “shooting them as fast as he can, and not missing any part.” Wafer recognized the principle at once because the arrows were “gaged so they penetrate no farther . . . than our lancets.” But it seemed to him a very haphazard approach. If “by chance” the ina duled “hit a vein which is full of wind, and the blood spurts out a little, they will leap and skip about . . . by way of rejoicing and triumph.”

  After watching this excruciating target practice, Wafer suggested to Lacenta that he knew a better way to take blood. The sahila gave permission for a demonstration, and Wafer produced his little box of lancets. He tightened a strip of bark around the woman’s arm as a tourniquet, found a vein, and cut. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm he cut deep, and the blood gushed out spectacularly. Lacenta was horrified. He seized a spear and for a moment was about to stab the surgeon. But Wafer kept his nerve and asked the sahila to be patient. He then drew off twelve ounces of blood, bound up the arm, and advised that the woman should rest until the following day. Luckily for him, the fever had broken by next morning so both Wafer and Lacenta were convinced that phlebotomy had effected the cure.

  Naturally Lacenta made a great fuss of his new medicine man. The sahila “bow’d and kissed my hand,” Wafer claimed, and the young surgeon was carried in a hammock from village to village “administring both Physick and Phlebotomy to those that wanted.” Lacenta then insisted that Wafer accompany him at all times. No foreigner would be granted such a privileged insight into Kuna life for another 250 years.

  Wafer enjoyed his time with the Kunas. He attended a Kuna wedding which culminated in all the male guests rushing out of the festivities, shouting and cheering, with axes in their hands. In a group they ran to a tract of virgin forest where they began “cutting down the woods and clearing the ground as fast as they can.” For seven days they worked “with the greatest vigour imaginable” while the women and children followed behind planting “maize or whatever is agreeable.” Only when the wedding guests had built a hut for the young couple to live in as well as providing the plantation that would feed them was it time for “the Company [to] make merry.” Then the Kunas got down to serious drinking.

  Their alcohol was chicha, made from fermented maize, and “tis very intoxicating . . . and makes them belch very much.” Before the party began, the bridegroom took the precaution of collecting up all his guests’ weapons and hanging them out of reach on the ridge pole of his house because the Kunas “were very quarrelsome in the drink.” Once the visitors were disarmed, the party drank day and night until every drop of the wedding stock of chicha had been consumed. During these marathon sessions, “Some are always drinking, while others are drunk and sleeping.” After three or four days, “when all the drink is out, and they have recovered their Senses, “the Kuna men returned to their own homes. There each man was helped into his hammock by two or three women who, as “he lies snoring, . . . sprinkle water on his body to cool him, washing his hands, feet and face; stroking off that water with their hands as it grows warm, and throwing on fresh.” Ten or twelve Kuna drunkards sprawling helpless in a row of hammocks was a sight Wafer never forgot.

  The women would wait until the men had finished their drinking sessions before starting their own “dancings and merriments.” Then they, too, “drink by themselves till they are fuddled.”

  The music of the Kuna panpipes was too “whining” for Wafer’s taste, but he was entertained when thirty or forty men linked arms to form a ring and then shuffled gently to the music “with a wriggling antick gestures” in their traditional dances. From time to time an individual dancer sprang from the circle to perform feats of tumbling and juggling. When the group was exhausted, they all jumped into the river to wash off the sweat. A dance session generally began with a short drinking bout and could last all day, but, Wafer noted, “They don’t dance after they have drunk very hard.”

  Wafer was expanding his Kuna vocabulary and always asking questions. He was particularly mystified by the “milk-white” Indians. They were unlike anything he had seen or heard of in any other part of the world, In fact they were so abnormal that he feared that readers of his book might not believe that such humans existed. Their skin color was “much like that of a white horse” and covered in a fine white down. Even their hair and eyebrows were white, and the shape of their eyes was unusual. Their eyelids “bend and open in an oblong figure, pointing downward at the corners, and forming an Arch or Figure of a Crescent.” The Kunas called them “Moon-ey’d,” and Wafer said that on “Moon-shiny nights” they were “all Life and Activity, running . . . into the Woods, skipping about like Wild Bucks, and running as fast by Moon-light even in the Gloom and Shade of the Woods as the other India
ns by Day.” Wafer rejected the obvious explanation that these strangely pale Indians were the result of intermarriage between white-skinned Europeans and Kunas. He had seen a pure-white “moon-ey’d” child less than a year old whose mother and father were “copper coloured” like most Kunas. Besides, so few Europeans passed that way that it seemed highly unlikely they could have created so many white offspring. Wafer estimated that for every two or three hundred normal Kuna one was “Milk-white.”

  He asked Lacenta for an explanation. The sahila told him that “moon eyes” were born as the result of their mothers’ “looking on the Moon at the time of Conception.” But this explanation did not satisfy Wafer either. He noted that the “moon ey’d” tended to be weaker and more sickly than the average Kunas and that they died young. He suspected a physiological cause for the “white Indians” and felt sorry for them because they were uncomfortable in bright sunshine, which made their eyes water profusely. The Kunas treated them with disdain.

  There were three albinos on Kalidonia Leonidas told us—a woman, a young man, and a boy. Three albinos in an island population of a little more than a thousand was much the same ratio that Wafer had guessed, though calculations in the early twentieth century for the whole of Kuna Yalah put the ratio rather higher, with albinos forming as much as 2 or 3 percent of the total population. Until recently, the treatment of the albinos was as degrading as in Lacenta’s time. Marriages between albinos were taboo; male albinos were forbidden to marry at all; and so severe was the stigma of an albino birth that the infant might be smothered. A generation ago on Mulatupu Sasardi it was still the custom for the albinos to go on the roofs of the houses and shoot arrows at the full moon. Now, by contrast, there was an albino member of the Mulatupu council.

  The three albinos on Kalidonia were fully integrated into the community, thanks, I suspected, to Leonidas. When I told him of Lacenta’s explanation of how an albino was created by the mother gazing at the full moon, Leonidas disagreed quietly and firmly. “No.” he said, “The albinos are a special people. They are our older brothers and sisters.” Leonidas was the keeper and teacher of Kuna lore for his community, like all sahilas-in-chief. He instructed his people that albinos were the offspring of the first children born to the creator-father, Mago, and his wife, Ologwandule. Leonidas tried to explain to Murdo and me how the Great Father and Great Mother had brought into existence the ancestors of the human race and taught them how to fish and hunt and many things, including how to make chicha. But whenever he described the foundation legends of his people, Leonidas got very muddled. He would have been difficult to follow even if he had not been struggling to translate his ideas into “taxi driver Spanish” for Murdo’s benefit. The moment he began to talk of Kuna lore, Leonidas slipped into a mode of recitation. He repeated phrases and names learned by rote. They were fragments of the enormously long recitations by the most learned sahilas, which they declaimed while lying in a hammock—the posture of dignity—in the congress house. But Leonidas was not a scholarly nor a learned sahila. He had been elected to be “numero uno” in Kalidonia because he was sincere and genuine, and his people trusted him. Now, seeing that Murdo and I were looking baffled, Leonidas summarized: “The moon children are actually better than us.”

  Four days after the incident of the snakebite Leonidas judged that the forest was quiet again and the evil spirits had settled down. He invited Murdo and me to accompany him on a trip to the village plantations on the mainland. With us came twenty-three-year-old Vitello, an albino. He was also a village hero. Six months earlier he was working in the forest, clearing the undergrowth for plantains, when a “cobra” appeared on the path ahead of him. All the other Kunas working alongside Vitello fled in panic. But Vitello chopped the viper with his machete, cutting it in half so that the blood and venom sprayed his chest. “The snake was so close to me, I could do nothing else,” Vitello said modestly. “That was how it happened.”

  It was difficult to judge whether it was shyness about his strange appearance—his skin was morbid white and his hair and eyebrows a coarse yellow—or the bright light that made Vitello glance away most of the time as if embarrassed. His eyelids fluttered constantly or they were half closed to protect his eyes with their strange cloudy greenish-brown irises. He suffered terribly from sunburn. His lips were permanently cracked and raw, and his face was covered in red blisters and sores. His hands were even worse. The skin was puffed and swollen, and every cut and scratch made an angry red weal. But he was not weakly like the albinos Wafer had observed. Vitello was big and strapping, and as soon as we got into the shady jungle and out of the sunshine, Vitello kept pace with the indefatigable Leonidas. The two of them swung machetes, hacking back the undergrowth, slicing away surplus leaves from the productive plants, and chopping down the fruiting trees to get at the heavy bunches of green plantains.

  Our first trip was thwarted, like Wafer’s cross-country travels, by the rivers. We left Kalidonia in one of the dugout canoes which was usually pulled up on the beach behind Leonidas’s house. Leonidas’s son by his first marriage, Rocky, owned an outboard engine, so we set out later than the rest of the villagers, who had departed from their homes well before dawn. No one had been able to tend their plantations for three days, so now the mile-wide strait that divides Kalidonia from the mainland was already speckled with the black silhouettes of some twenty dugout canoes being paddled sturdily. The hulls of the canoes were so low in the water that they could barely be seen. Instead, the heads, torsos, and rhythmically moving arms of the paddlers crept across the slow undulations of a low swell advancing in the blue-gray light toward the fringe of white mist that hid the far shore.

  At the landing beach we put palm tree trunks as rollers under the canoes and dragged them out of reach of the tide. Then the different canoe crews walked off, machetes in hand, and disappeared into the maze of footpaths leading to their plantations. They would scatter through the secondary forest, each man to his own plantation, and return at the agreed time—usually at noon—to rejoin their canoes and return home. The vegetation was so dense that it was impossible to see more than a few yards into the greenery. So the workers left little markers, usually a twig stuck in the soft ground, at junctions along the footpaths to show which way they had gone. On their return journey they would collect up the markers so that their companions, as they were returning to the canoes, would know who had already gone back to the landing beach and, if someone failed to return, where to look for him in the jungle. It was little wonder that Wafer and his companions had gotten lost in the forest.

  Murdo and I followed Leonidas trotting along with his machete on his shoulder and looking more than ever like a woodcutter from a fairy story. The path jinked this way and that; sometimes it was covered six inches deep in fallen leaves, elsewhere it was a muddy groove leading into shallow streams laced with tangles of tree roots. Near the seaside the sandy soil was riddled with the burrow holes of crabs. Occasionally Leonidas stopped to point out a fruiting tree or a plant that was useful. It soon became clear that the Kunas had tended the area for generations. The tallest trees were called kupu and grew straight for about 60 feet. The first branches were at least 30 feet above the ground, and the clean trunks provided ideal timber for dugout canoes. The hard shells of the fig-shaped fruit were turned into toys and games for children. The fruit of the rough-barked chi chi tree, shaped like a peach, produced a sticky sap that the Kuna women mixed with charcoal to make the black stripes they painted on their noses. Chi chi leaves were burned under the hammocks of sick people to ward off evil spirits. We passed clumps of a cane with a long, green, rodlike stalk which rang like metal when tapped with the blade of machete. The cane was used in plaiting baskets—a male occupation among the Kunas—and for making fences. Occasionally a plant with a purple flower like a clematis provided groundcover, and there was a single scarlet hibiscus. But in general the color of the forest was a range of dark succulent greens, the color of constant humid growth. According to Leonida
s, the jungle plants would completely smother a plantation within five months if the encroaching vegetation was not cut back. Against the dark-green foliage fluttered orange butterflies speckled with bronze. “All butterflies are lucky,” Leonidas said to me. “An hour before you and Murdo I arrived, one of my daughters saw a butterfly in my house and announced that something very lucky would take place.” He gave a significant look.

  Our luck ran out, however, when we reached the river Acla. It crossed our path and emptied into the sea about a mile from the place where we had left the canoes. The footpath crossed the estuary by a ford which ran along the crest of the bar at the river mouth. We found three Kunas already standing on the riverbank and looking doubtful. The sea was heaping waves across the sand bar, then sucking back in a brisk undertow. The breaking surf on the ford looked too deep to be passed in safety. Nevertheless one of the Kunas decided to try. He removed his clothes and placed them in a bundle on his head, and then, dressed only in his underpants, stepped gingerly into the water. In this situation the Kunas’ small stature was a disadvantage. The scout timed his advance, hoping to scuttle across between the waves. But when a surging wave submerged him to his shoulders, then nearly pulled him out to sea, he gave up the attempt and scampered back to safety. I had wandered fifty yards up the riverbank, wondering whether it would be possible to swim across where the river current was less rapid. Trying to judge the speed of the current, I watched a log drifting slowly down toward the man on the river bar. When the log was about twenty yards short of the Kunas I realized I was watching not a log, but the snout of a cayman cruising gently downstream. I beckoned to Leonidas and pointed. There was great excitement. It seemed that a very large cayman had taken a Kuna—the uncle of Vitello, the albino—at this spot a year previously. The project of crossing the river that day was abandoned.