In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  He made no mention of the loose spines from the Turk’s heads (Melocactus caesius). They lay strewn across the ground like caltrops, the spikes scattered on the ground to lame cavalry horses. Each spine was as long and thin and piercing as a hypodermic needle. Every few paces, one of us came to a sudden halt, usually with a grunt of pain, and stooped down to remove a spine that had driven clean through half an inch of a sandal’s hardened rubber sole and into the foot, drawing blood. The sources of these barbs were everywhere. The Turk’s heads sat on the ground like bloated pineapples, topped with a fuzzy crown like a turban.

  The bulbous main body of the plant bristled with spikes. When it grew old and collapsed, yet more spikes could be seen, pointing inward into the rotted heart. Some of the healthy ones, however, were in fruit. Buried deep within the pale mauve turban was a pinpoint of red, the gleam of the berry. With the blade of a penknife we prized out the fruits, the size of a small hawthorn hip, and ate them. The taste was blackberry crossed with strawberry. Once again, Pitman’s description was correct.

  We came across another species of cactus, Agave cocui, a plant Pitman said he had used for medicine. He described it as having “an oval body or stump . . . [and] out this grew long thick leaves whose edges were prickly and its juice so exceeding sharp and pungent that it was not easily suffered on the bare skin.” Pitman boiled up the leaves with turtle fat, added beeswax to the mix, and used the mush as a “most excellent balsom [poultice] for wounds.” The maroons showed great ingenuity. Fibers from the leaves provided thread for stitching, the astringent juice became a soap for washing their clothes, and by burying the body of the cactus in hot sand for five or six days they managed to get the juice to ferment, so it could be used as alcohol. It tasted “like the syrup of baked pears,” and they ate “the innermost part of the body or stump. . . like bread.” The maroons had displayed an adaptability worthy of Robinson Crusoe, though when we tasted the cactus flesh, it was like munching tough cotton wool. Perhaps we should have cooked it first.

  We found no other food in the wasteland except for some bright-scarlet pods on a low bush. They hung in spirals and when the pods split open revealed a row of black seeds surrounded by a soft sweet white pith that tasted like lichee. We nibbled on the seeds while the small birds, resembling larks and finches, who had been feeding on the seeds sat in the shrubs and scolded us.

  It took two hours to walk across the island and reach the salt pans, in a small valley crusted with a gray, cracked soft sand, where you had to tread carefully to avoid breaking through the soft surface. This was not the season for salt gathering, and the salinas were mixed with mud and roots of mangroves. Here the southern half of the island had risen to a slight elevation, never more than 120 feet, so there were gullies and an occasional rock slope, but it was still a very bare terrain. Salt Tortuga has been racked by earthquakes and battered by hurricanes in the last century, so the present topography is not identical to its contours in the days when foreign ships came to load salt from this corner of the island. But the long and shallow inlet adjacent to the salinas and now called Laguna el Carenero—Careenage Lagoon—was the obvious shelter for the visitors.

  We did not linger among the salinas. The soggy ground with its mangrove swamp was mosquito territory, and we wanted to be well clear before the insects emerged at dusk. Our return route took us in a loop along the eastern rim of the island. Here a spectacular reef guarded the shore, white surf spilling over into a shallow lagoon. It was noticeable that the wildlife of the island preferred the coastal zone. Small flocks of green parakeets burst shrieking from the scanty bushes. Pelicans wheeled and crash-dived just beyond the reef and then returned to rest on land. Terns spiraled delicately off the ground ahead of us as we approached, using the steady wind to gain altitude, hovering delicately over our heads, then settling down on the rocks behind us after we had passed, rearranging their wing feathers with little flicks of irritation. They were in no hurry. Clearly they did not encounter humans often enough to be made wary of them.

  By the time we regained Ziska’s anchorage, we were hot, tired, and thirsty.

  We had been walking for four hours in the hot sun, and had drunk the last of our water when the needle of Ziska’s mast came in view. There was no mistaking it in that flat and featureless landscape. “Faced with this place,” Tristan commented as we crossed one particularly bleak patch, “I think I would have joined the pirates rather than be left marooned here. It is a hopeless place.”

  The maroons had been on Salt Tortuga for three months when a heavily armed ship and an attendant small sloop were seen approaching. The four pirates who had stayed behind from Yanche’s raiding party recognized the newcomers as fellow pirates; they identified the vessels and stood on the beach and signaled. The larger vessel, it turned out, had come to pick them up after meeting the rest of their group. The captain of the pirate ship asked Pitman to come on board. As a surgeon, he would be a valuable addition to the crew, and the captain offered him a berth. Naturally Pitman requested that the captain also take along his seven fellow refugees from Barbados. But this could only be decided by a vote of the entire pirate crew. They “were called together, and after some debates they voted they would take me with them, but none of my companions.” The reason for this flint-hearted decision was that the pirates had recently taken part in the capture of a large, well-laden Portuguese ship, and any additional crew members would share in the final division of the booty. Pitman’s seven luckless companions were therefore left on the beach, though the pirates “were so kind that they sent them a cask of wine, some bread and cheese, a gammon of bacon,” and also “some linen cloth, thread and needles to make them shirts etc.” The maroons had been reduced to repairing their clothing with thread made from cactus fiber and needles made of fishbones. The pirate ship then “set sail,” wrote Pitman, “leaving my companions on the island, not a little grieved at my departure.”

  If this colorful episode caught Defoe’s attention by appealing to his love for tales of pirate skulduggery, the letter Pitman received some time later would have made an even more powerful impression. The letter reached Pitman when he was back in London and compiling the narrative of his adventures. He had tried to find out what happened to his former colleagues left behind on the island, and received an answer from Whicker. “Dear Doctor,” the note began, “In answer to your request, I have given you the following account.”

  The story that Whicker narrated was so remarkable that Pitman reprinted it in full.

  “About a fortnight after you left us,” Whicker wrote, “two of our companions, John Nuthall and Thomas Walker left us.” These two were the undischarged debtors, and they had never managed to get along with the “convict rebels.” The two of them “made sails of the cloth that the privateers left us.” They also refurbished the hulk of the Spanish boat that had been lying on the beach ever since they first arrived, made it seaworthy, and set sail from the beach, “designing for Curaçao.” They were never heard from again. Whicker suspected that “the boat was so large and unruly and they so unskilful in navigation that I fear they either perished at sea or were driven ashore on the Main.”

  Now just five of the original maroons remained on the island: Whicker, Bagwell, Woodcock, Cooke, and Jeremiah Atkins.

  The very next day, unknown to them, a small vessel dropped anchor in a bay seven miles to the east of their camp. On board were eight white men and a negro—yet more pirates—who had been heading for Tobago, missed their course, and finished up on Salt Tortuga. Now, short of food and water, they came ashore to recuperate. On the beach some days later, they came across a cache of salted turtle meat. It had been left by Whicker and the other maroons from Barbados to keep dry under a turtle shell. The new arrivals thought nothing more about it at the time. The cache of food could have been left by a crew who had already left the island, and there was no one in sight.

  Three of the newly arrived pirates were “very unprincipled and loose kind of fellows.” They
hatched a plot to rob their shipmates of their plunder, steal the boat, and make off, leaving their colleagues marooned. The plotters were in a minority, so they waited until three of their colleagues were away for the day, exploring inland. Then the three conspirators quietly went out to their vessel, collected up all the weapons, and returning ashore came “to the hut where the other two were, and presented a pistol to each of their breasts and swore, “If they would not carry everything aboard, they were dead men!”

  The two men, “being surprised” as well as unarmed, “were forced to comply and carry all aboard.”

  The three men who had gone off to explore had been suspicious enough to take the precaution of hiding their plunder by burying it in the sand. The plotters waited for their return so they could find out where their loot was hidden. The plotters held all the firearms, so they expected little trouble. They warned the two men they had already robbed that “they would make them examples” if they did not inform them when the three missing crew members returned. Then they went back aboard their ship, taking all the food and water containers with them.

  In the evening the three men who had been exploring the island came back to their hut. They had failed to find anything to eat or drink during their walk, and were hungry and very thirsty. They found their hut had been ransacked and stripped bare. Their two distraught colleagues told them that they had been betrayed.

  Desperate for something to drink, one of the men went down to the beach and called out to the plotters on the boat, begging for some water. His companions hid.

  The plotters called back that they would bring some water and came ashore, but then they seized the man, tied his hands with a length of line, and went looking for the other two.

  While they were searching, their prisoner managed to extricate a knife from his pocket, cut the cord binding his wrists, and ran off.

  It was at this stage that he remembered the cache of dried turtle. In the faint hope that this might indicate there were other men somewhere on Salt Tortuga, the runaway set out to look for them. “Having travelled about the island until almost ready to faint,” Whicker wrote, “he came near our huts.” There he saw the five maroons from Barbados. They were busy preparing turtle meat, each man with “nothing on but a pair of drawers.” For a moment the runaway came to a halt and stood there fearfully. He thought the maroons were Indians because after three months in the sunshine “we were tanned with the sun almost as yellow.”

  “At length, he advanced,” continues Whicker, “and enquired if we were Englishmen, [which] We told him We were. Then he begged for a little water, which we gave him and some of our turtle.”

  The runaway now explained his plight and pleaded for help. Whicker and the others readily agreed to assist. They gathered up their muskets and blunderbusses, and walked through the night to the place where the pirate vessel was anchored. There they spread out and hid among the bushes and waited for dawn.

  The runaway had told them that early each morning the plotters came ashore to fetch water, presumably from a well or soak they had dug above the high-tide mark. “Morning being come,” wrote Whicker, he and his companions saw two of the pirates get ready to leave the ship. They were carrying guns and were accompanied by the negro with the water container.

  Whicker and the others waited in ambush until the watering party were ashore, then they showed themselves “with our arms ready cocked.” The pirates were taken completely off-guard and were captured without a fight.

  Whicker and his colleagues then marched their two prisoners down to the water’s edge and showed them to the third of the plotters, who had been left aboard with twelve muskets ready loaded. They called out to him not to fire, but to “jump overboard and swim ashore to us, which he immediately did.”

  Whicker ends his story briskly. “So taking them all three prisoners, we put them ashore, leaving them some of our provisions. The rest we put aboard in order to prosecute our voyage for New England. So victualling and watering our small frigate in the best manner we could, we left them upon the island, and on the 24th of August [1687] we took our departure from Saltatudos.”

  Whicker’s adventurous escape from Salt Tortuga and Pitman’s life as a maroon on a desert island vanished into obscurity for the next two centuries. Then in the 1870s a literary sleuth trawled up Pitman’s little book. Edward Arber, a devoted bibliophile, cast his net widely. He abandoned a career as a civil servant at the Admiralty so as to devote his time promoting the merits of English literature of the seventeenth century. He took a job as a university lecturer and began to track down and reissue “at as cheap a price as can be, exact texts, sometimes of books already famous, sometimes of those quite forgotten.” When he came across Pitman’s slim volume and read how Whicker managed to leave the island, Arber was immediately reminded of Defoe’s account of Robinson Crusoe’s escape from his island.

  In Defoe’s tale, Crusoe gets his chance to leave his island when a merchant ship drops anchor near the shore. A small boat heads for the beach. From hiding, Robinson sees that there are eleven men in the boat, and three of them are prisoners. The landing party walks inland, leaving their captives unguarded, and Robinson approaches the three prisoners. He learns that they are the captain of the ship, the mate, and a passenger. The rest of the crew, led by the bosun, have mutinied and seized the ship and are about to maroon their prisoners. Crusoe frees the captain and his men, defeats the landing party with Friday’s help, and by series of ruses deals with rest of the mutineers when they come ashore looking for their missing companions. The episode ends with the captain restored to command of his ship, and Crusoe and Friday taking passage for England with their souvenirs, including a goatskin umbrella and a parrot. They leave the bamboozled mutineers marooned on the beach, led by the chief ruffian, Will Atkins.

  Arber reprinted the text of A Relation of the great suffering and strange adventures of Henry Pitman, Chirurgeon, and inserted a personal note into the text. In it he drew attention to the striking similarity between Crusoe’s fictional escape from his island and Whicker’s real departure from Salt Tortuga. He also noted the coincidence that the leading villain among Crusoe’s mutineers was named Will Atkins, and there was a Jeremiah Atkins among the maroons on Salt Tortuga. At the point in the text of Pitman’s book where Whicker and his fellow maroons turn the tables on the pirates and then sail away from Tortuga leaving them ashore with some provisions, Arber—by then Professor Arber—placed a question in brackets:

  [? Did DEFOE get his idea of WILL. ATKINS etc from this ]

  For me the walk across Salt Tortuga succeeded in defining and validating Pitman’s geography. I now knew exactly where Whicker and his colleagues ambushed the pirates and seized their ship. It was at the same anchorage where Ziska now awaited us, the spot on the beach, Playa Caldera, where we had eaten Trondur’s roast booby. Playa Caldera was where Whicker and his four colleagues hid behind the dunes until the pirates came ashore, then took them by surprise. It was the first anchorage on Salt Tortuga when one approached from the east, and this fitted with Whicker’s assertion in his letter that the pirate ship had been bound for Tobago but missed its course. More important, Playa Caldera was correctly placed in relation to the place where Pitman and his colleagues must have first come ashore, lured by Yanche’s men.

  Pitman’s original camp was seven miles farther east. He described how his little skiff arrived close off Salt Tortuga in the dawn, and then “we steered down the north side of it,” looking for a place to land until “we came to the leeward of a small island hard by the other.” Here the exhausted crew “stood in directly for the shore, thinking it a convenient place to land,” only to find the spot already occupied by a camp of Yanche’s men.

  The modern chart confirms Pitman’s description so exactly that I guessed he had been keeping a logbook of his journey.

  Halfway along the north shore of Tortuga is “the small island.” The Palanquinos Reef shows above water as two or three small islets, Los Palanquinos,
that create a protected anchorage in their lee. Directly opposite Los Palanquinos, on Salt Tortuga itself, is a wide sand promontory, a low dune ridge, and an ideal campsite. From here Whicker and his comrades marched through the night carrying their blunderbusses and muskets to lay their ambush at Playa Caldera.

  Late that afternoon Ziska sailed to Los Palanquinos, directly in the wake of Pitman’s leaky skiff. With a following wind we glided along the coast of Salt Tortuga until we came into the shelter of the islets, and there dropped anchor. As if we had been expected, someone—passing fishermen, probably—had lashed together a temporary hut on the sand spit. It was a simple shelter of bamboo poles in the classic cone shape of a tepee. The cloth covering had long since gone, and the structure stood there like modern icon for “campsite.”

  That evening we clambered on the rocks of Los Palanquinos. With Trondur’s guidance it was easy to understand how maroons and castaways could survive in that location, even though there are no turtles now on Salt Tortuga’s magnificent sweep of beach. Pitman wrote of catching crawfish and described how “for change of diet we sometimes ate a small sort of shellfish that live on the rocks, and are like snails, but much larger, called Wilks”—whelks. We caught no crawfish but many crabs. Trondur dropped a rag over them as they scuttled clear of their hiding places, and he and Ash collected half a bucket of crabs in half an hour. For variety they then gathered a selection of the “wilks,” some of them three inches across, and sea urchins. Trondur, shaggy as a musk ox and up to his shins in the seawater, stooping to turn over rocks, then pouncing on his prey, made the perfect Crusoe image.