In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Why Yanche’s men were so insistent can be guessed at—they did not want news leaking out that there was a pirate force camped on Salt Tortuga. The pirates depended on surprise. Yanche’s men were operating in small vulnerable piraguas, and to be successful they had to take their victims unawares, ambushing them as they sailed past. If Pitman and his colleagues reached Curaçao, it would not be long before the Dutch authorities heard about the pirates. The Dutch themselves would probably take no direct action, but all merchant shipping would delay sailing or avoid the danger zone.

  The “privateers” succeeded in putting their argument so enticingly that several of the runaways from Barbados were willing to join them. Then Pitman, as he self-righteously put it, “persuaded them to the contrary.” At that juncture Yanche’s men dropped any pretense of friendliness and revealed their truly piratical nature. To stop the runaways from attempting to sail to Curaçao, the pirates removed the sail from the skiff for their own use, then set fire to the runaways’ boat, and burned it to cinders.

  There was nothing that Pitman and his seven colleagues could do to prevent them. They were heavily outnumbered by Yanche’s men, twenty-eight to eight. They watched helplessly as the pirates then picked out the nails from the ashes of the conflagration and used them to fasten extra side planks to their piraguas. At that stage it was obvious that the pirates themselves were getting ready to leave the island.

  Pitman, to his credit, kept his wits about him. He offered to buy the Indian whom the pirates had captured earlier on the mainland and never set free. He paid “30 pieces of eight” for the man, who, he expected, “would be serviceable unto us in catching fish etc.”

  On 25 May 1687 all but four of the pirates pushed off to sea in their piraguas to resume their raiding. The four who stayed behind had elected to take their chances on Salt Tortuga with Pitman and his colleagues, including Jeremiah Atkins and the newly bought Indian. The maroons were left with the rough huts the pirates had formerly occupied, a few swords and muskets, and the hulk of a small Spanish boat Yanche’s men had rejected as it lacked either a sail or a rudder. The next salt-collecting ships were not due to visit Salt Tortuga for another eight or nine months. Until then the maroons would have to learn to survive, or “GOD, by a particular Providence should direct some vessel or other to touch here.”

  Ziska caught the eye. Ash had recently painted her hull a jaunty sky blue, and scraped and oiled the mast and bowsprit to a healthy glow. Swinging on her anchor in the lagoon at St. George’s among modern fiber-glass yachts and chromium-trimmed motor cruisers, she looked picturesque, shipshape, and rather small. She was only thirty-eight feet long but was surprisingly broad in the beam. She seemed to squat down into the water with her nose in the air. Ziska’s sister ships had been designed to trawl for shrimp on the shallow fishing banks off the northwest coast of England, and the low stern had made it easier to hoist nets and trawls out of the sea. Technically known as cutter-rigged fishing smacks, they sailed from port at dawn and, if possible, returned the same evening. They had been built for speed, to be nimble in narrow muddy channels when the tide was out, and easily handled by a small crew, often no more than a man and a boy. Sometimes the fishing smacks stayed out overnight or they might cross the Irish Sea, so they could survive moderately heavy weather. But her builder could never have imagined, ninety-nine years earlier when he built Ziska for a private owner who wanted the fishing-boat design used as a private yacht, that she would be sailing the Caribbean. He would probably have been amazed that she was still afloat.

  Ash looked after his treasure fastidiously and on very slender means. Every rope seemed to have had a former life on another vessel; the sails had been acquired at second or third hand, as had the anchor, the anchor chain, the winch, any item of gear one cared to mention. The compass was so venerable that the marks on the compass card were faded to the point of obscurity, and the card itself floated beneath a large bubble trapped under scratched glass. Below deck it was even more obvious that external elegance had an internal price to pay. The entire stern section of the vessel was given over to a ragtag store of bits and pieces of salvaged and battered gear that might one day prove useful. There were half-used cans of paint, rags, shackles, lengths of wire, scraps of timber. Here Ash had his work bench. It was fitted with a rack of secondhand but carefully honed tools and dominated by a massive iron bench vice bolted in the center. The workbench was, I discovered, designated as my bunk. I had eighteen inches of head room, and if I wished to lie flat I had to open the jaws of the vice to full width.

  Ziska’s stark fishing boat ancestry was equally apparent in the main cabin. You could not stand upright except in one small area just below the hatch leading down into the cabin. The accommodation was spartan, cluttered, and—in Grenada’s heat—exceedingly stuffy. The absence of any engine was caused by lack of space as much as by Ash’s limited budget. There was hardly any place to put a motor. No engine meant no electric power, no radio, no electronic navigation aids. Lighting, above and below deck, was accomplished with paraffin lamps. They too were past their prime. Cleaning soot from the lamp glasses, trimming the wicks, refilling the little brass tanks, was a smelly, messy, and ultimately futile chore: the red and green navigation lamps on deck usually sputtered and died, or were so dim that you had to peer closely to see whether they were lit. Apart from an equally fickle stern light hanging near the helmsman, Ziska crept along at night as a dark shadow. Remembering Pitman and his troubles with the “bruised mass of tallow” for his candles, I purchased a hand torch so we could at least flash an occasional light on the faded compass card.

  Lamp cleaning duties fell to Tristan, whom Ash had enlisted the previous week as a volunteer deck hand. A year or so older than Ash, Tristan was a member of that nomadic band of young men and women with an aura of perpetual bronzed good health who migrate with the boats of the wealthy yacht-racing and yacht-chartering community. They provide the deck hands, boatmen, cooks, and working crew. He had joined Ash now that the sailing season in the West Indies was drawing to a close and the expensive boats were leaving the area before the hurricane season. Tristan bore an astonishing resemblance to Henry VIII in Holbein’s portrait of the king standing bulkily, hands on hips, sturdy legs apart, glaring at the artist. Tristan even had the same ruddy complexion. On Ziska he was to have a difficult role. It was clear that Ash really preferred to sail on Ziska single-handed. He had a close relationship with his beloved boat, and though Ash was prepared to tolerate my presence in my quest for Robinson Crusoe, Tristan risked being seen as an intruder.

  If Ash had any such doubts about the fourth member of our team, they soon vanished. Trondur Patursson looks, acts, and is the supreme sailor of traditional boats. Raised on the Faeroe Islands in the North Atlantic, he had first gone to sea in his early teens, working on the ferry to Denmark. “Four hours every day cleaning brass in the ship” was how he remembered it. He subsequently worked as a deck hand on fishing boats off Greenland and Newfoundland, and long-lined for shark in the Gulf of Mexico, and he owned his own small wooden sailboat almost as venerable as Ziska. Now one of Scandinavia’s leading maritime artists, he had accompanied me on transoceanic voyages aboard replica vessels as varied as a medieval skin boat and a bamboo raft. With his shaggy hair and beard shot with gray, he obviously impressed a slightly worriedlooking Ash. As Trondur came aboard Ziska he had a cardboard tube under his arm. It contained an item he had forged at my request just before he left his northern workshop—the head for a light harpoon. I had a notion that if anyone could show me how castaways had managed to survive, it would be Trondur.

  We sailed Ziska from the lagoon at St. George’s on the morning of May 4. The timing was apt. We left the anchorage in the same month, almost the same week, that Pitman and his seven companions slunk past Grenada to avoid detection as they headed for Curaçao in their little boat. Ziska was more seaworthy than their open skiff, but I wanted to sample the sailing conditions the refugees encountered. The benign repu
tation of West Indian weather is of constant gentle zephyrs, bright sunshine, and blue skies. The reality is different. . . .The previous week had seen a brisk gale that bottled up the charter boats in harbor, several downpours, and a near calm. All that could be said was that none of these weather conditions had lasted for long. Sooner or later the northeast trade winds return.

  When Ziska cleared St. George’s, bound for Margarita, the weather was what Pitman had described as “indifferent good”—a few clouds, spells of warm sunshine, and a moderate breeze. Ash used a long stern oar to spin his yacht deftly through 180 degrees in the crowded anchorage. Trondur and Tristan set the jib, and a breath of wind gave enough steerage way as we threaded a path out from the mass of boats and into the channel. For the first few miles we were in Grenada’s lee and in smooth water. The mainsail rose. After the near silence of the engineless departure the outbreak of clattering and groaning and slatting was an assault on the ears. I recalled how Pitman and his colleagues had rowed softly away from the wharf in Barbados, not daring to bail the water for fear the sentries would hear the splashes. Only later, when well clear of the harbor, had they hoisted sail. Aboard Ziska the din of setting the heavy gaff sail would have been heard half a mile away on a quiet night. There was the piercing high-pitched squeak of the wooden jaws of the gaff, the spar at the top of the sail sliding ponderously up the wooden mast, the erratic flap and clatter of the heavy canvas following it, the grumbling run of heavy rope through the blocks, and, above all, the sound of Ziska’s hull adapting noisily to the strain. When the sheets were hauled in and the mainsail exerted pressure, Ziska groaned with effort, then groaned again. Ten minutes later, as we cleared the wind shadow and the full strength of the breeze filled the sails, the backstay, a rope supporting the mast, gave several sharp cracking sounds as it tensed rigid, and the boat talked once more, a deep moan running right down through her frames to her keel. Within moments she was heeling to the wind, and the first of the wave tops skipped from the sea, broke on to the deck and came swirling down to wet the helmsman’s feet. Ziska’s class of fishing smacks, I had read, were notoriously wet on deck. Luckily the water was warm as Ziska ran purposefully to intercept the wake of the surgeon Pitman and seven desperate runaways.

  Pitman did not write of a magnificent sunset, the brilliance of the starry night sky, or the splendid sleek, black vision and plosive breath as a minke whale surfaced within fifty yards—all of which we witnessed in the next twenty-four hours. The men in Pitman’s boat were scared of bad weather, of being carried off course by the currents, of the skiff filling through her leaky seams and sinking. Had a whale surfaced alongside, they would have feared a capsize.

  The next entry in the log—“Trondur landed 2 baracooda just befor dinner one with fresh gashes in side from a shark . . . we ate the 2 for dinner and were apsolutely stuft”—confirmed Trondur’s role as the onboard hunter-gatherer. He had trailed a line overboard as soon as we cleared the land, and the two barracuda were in the frying pan before dark. Trondur made much of his living from the sea as he had done when a young man. But now it was by drawing, painting, sculpting, or creating evocative stained-glass images of the ocean and its creatures, whether fish or whales or birds. Yet he never ceased to regard the ocean as a primary resource for food if you had the skill to harvest it.

  That evening the wind died away, and Ziska lolled, nearly motionless, through the night and most of the following day. Ash spent the long hours prettifying his little dinghy, its hull upturned on the cabin roof. Lost to the world, his nose pressed almost to the work, he scraped away minor imperfections with the edge of a chisel and smoothed the slightest scratch with fine sandpaper. Trondur fished, the line weighted with a link of anchor chain to sink it down into the still water. Tristan read the stock of yachting magazines that formed Ash’s library. I watched the sea birds to identify the species that had kept mariners and castaways alive.

  I saw boobies and noddies and tropicbirds. They flew past in small groups, seldom more than three or four together. Dampier described the brown booby (Sula leucogaster), as “a very simple creature.” A member of the gannet family, it would “hardly go out of a man’s way.” The booby received its mocking name, so it was said, from the English sailors who thought it so stupid that they could stand on the deck and extend their arms as perches and the boobies would alight. The sailors wrung their necks. “Their flesh,” said Dampier, “is black and eats fishy, but are often eaten by the privateers.” The brown noddy (Anous stolidus), was more of a disappointment in size and taste. A dingy grayish-brown seabird, it was only “about the bigness of an English black bird, and indifferent good meat.” The best catch, according to Dampier, was the red-billed tropicbird (Phaeton aethereus). The sailors cared less for its deft aerobatics or the elegance of the trailing tail feathers than for its flavor. It was “as big as a pigeon, but round and plump like a partridge. . . . They are very good food.”

  Astern, small patrols of pelicans flapped sedately past in line. They tucked their heads back against their bodies as they flew only a few yards above the calm sea. Their slow wing beats and sense of heavy purpose made them look like flying stomachs or aldermen on their way to a civic banquet. One solitary pelican, a large brown specimen, landed ponderously on the sea fifty yards away and, bobbing there, regarded our motionless vessel with a beady eye, a white feathered cheek above the massive beak. Pelicans, too, provided food for seventeenth-century mariners, though the bird’s flesh is so tough that they recommended first burying the carcass in hot sand for a couple of days to tenderize the meat. The sack, the membrane below the bill, made a handy tobacco pouch when stretched with a musket ball.

  Everything that swam in the sea or flew above it was potential food for hungry sailors. Dolphins and porpoises were sought after. Porpoise meat, or “sea pig,” was said to taste like pork. Others, more accurately, compared the taste of dolphin steak to the finest beef. A single mediumsize dolphin provides forty pounds of rich dark-red meat. There were still plenty of dolphins in the Caribbean. In midafternoon a patch of the calm sea suddenly broke into a profusion of wavelets as if a rip tide were running. The wavelets proved to be the sleek shiny backs and dorsal fins of one to two hundred dolphins coming to the surface, then rising and falling rapidly. They were hunting as a group, lunging at the small fish they had herded into a tightly packed shoal. Above them the seabirds clustered excitedly to hover and dive, then snatch at the sprats.

  Later, at two in the morning, when I was on watch, there was a sudden plunge close by, a puffing exhalation of breath, and a dolphin, a much larger one, made its presence known. Within minutes the animal had returned with its companions to use Ziska as the focal point for some complicated underwater maneuvers. Between eight and ten dolphins rushed back and forth just below keel depth for half an hour, leaving fizzing bubble trails as they thrust along, the side-to-side undulations of their bodies clearly visible. They ran under the boat in pairs, raced off to one side, then turned and raced back, then vanished until I thought they had gone away, only to come suddenly barreling in from another angle. They formed into teams of four and two, divided again into pairs, changed partners, surfaced in unison so their snorts were almost simultaneous. The white curves and streaming trails they left in the dark sea were like the sinuous white banners waved by bamboo-wielding Chinese acrobats. At the end of the display there was nothing for perhaps five minutes, and I was sure the dolphins had moved elsewhere. Under Ziska the sea was a dark indigo barely illuminated by a sliver of moon and the stars. Abruptly and silently—and I had no idea how the dolphins achieved the effect—a great mass of small white bubbles silently arose from directly beneath the boat. The white incandescent glow spread upward and outward, radiating out from the hull until for a moment the boat was floating on a foaming orb of luminescence.

  For twenty-four hours Ziska made little progress through the water. Yet we had not been motionless. The current had been silently taking us along. The dominant current in the straits b
etween the Windward Islands and South America flows west, with the trade winds. Pitman had found himself swept too far toward the Grenadines. Now, unknown to us, Ziska was also being carried forward at between one and two knots. Like Pitman we were relying on line-of-sight navigation, and in the wake of his little skiff we kept a lookout for “the Witnesses,” the islands of Los Testigos, which had been his signpost. We saw them at eight in the morning, peaks of land fine off the port bow. When a light breeze came up, we altered course toward them. Six hours later the peaks had reared higher from the sea, and through the haze more high ground appeared on either hand. It was much too substantial to be the Testigos. I checked the chart. We were twenty miles off course. The Testigos were north, not south, of us, and we were heading directly for the mainland coast of Venezuela. We adjusted the helm, and Ziska veered toward Margarita.

  Without modern navigation aids, we had been as much at the mercy of the currents as Pitman’s little skiff, and almost as vague about where we were. When we arrived at Margarita in the early hours of the following morning, it had taken thirty-six hours to travel from Grenada, the same length of time that Pitman and his little overloaded skiff took to reach the “cannibal” island.

  In Margarita the advice was to stock up with food and water if we planned to continue on to Salt Tortuga. An occasional weekend yachtsmen visits Salt Tortuga, and commercial fishermen have built a couple of camps there. But it has no permanent population. The fishermen go home to their families on Margarita every few weeks and pick up supplies, or light aircraft bring out fresh food. Ominously, we were told that it was easy to identify the best anchorage on the island: we had to look for two prominent wrecks lying on the shoreline, a rusty fishing boat hull and a beached and broken yacht.

  The yacht, it turned out, was easy to spot. It lay cast up on the shore, tilted over on its side and was carmine red. We could see the wreck almost from the moment we began to distinguish the low, blue-gray profile of Salt Tortuga at midmorning on May 10. We had hove to the previous night during the passage from Margarita so that we would approach with the sun high enough to reveal the coral reef outliers. Fortunately the water was as transparent as the most blatant travel poster, and it was easy to skirt the dark arm of reef that protects the anchorage. The spectacular aquamarine of the shallows and the strip of dazzling white sand were the only concessions to the image of a lush tropical island. Tortuga was low and flat. Behind the beach dune we could see only a thin edge of sage green. Apart from the corrugated metal roofs of the fishermen’s sheds shimmering in the heat, nothing broke the horizon. There was no hill, nothing to relieve the flat landscape, not a single tree. Salt Tortuga was a flat, bleak, hot prospect.