Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  4. The Moskito Coast

  Gracias a Dios, seen from the sea, is no cape at all. There are merely a few bushes and a clump of trees on the low, flat horizon where the turbid sea meets a thin slope of sandy shore. Here lies the boundary between Nicaragua and Honduras, but there is no one living in the district to respect the claim, and no border post. At night there are no shore lights, only darkness. There is not even a coastal highway. The only figure to be seen here is the occasional pedestrian, walking along the shoreline from one invisible hamlet to the next.

  The final section of the Coast is the Department of Gracias a Dios within Honduras, but everyone calls it La Mosquitia. Here I went to begin my search for Man Friday’s heritage. It was a mistake. A string of Miskito villages occupies the soggy spit of land between the sea and the coastal lagoons, and the people speak the Miskito language. But they do not regard themselves as true keepers of Miskito culture. If I wanted to find Miskito living in their traditional manner, they told me, I would have to go deeper into the bayou lands, to Big Sandy Bay, and that was down the coast in Nicaragua. I had come to the wrong country.

  This was not a problem, at least for the Miskito. A guide was found to escort me to Big Sandy Bay. Safel was tall, gaunt, and utterly casual, and a vagabond. He lived and worked in Puerto Lempira, the scruffy Honduran port town nearest to the border. For a fee, he was ready to take me to Nicaragua if I would just wait half an hour. He had been sanding down the fibreglass hull of a boat, and his clothes were a mess. We walked through the muddy, unpaved streets of Puerto Lempira to the little wooden two-room shack on stilts on the outskirts of town that was his home. He went inside for no more than five minutes, and reappeared. He had changed his shirt for a slightly cleaner one, his jeans were less torn, and he carried a cheap sports bag. His boots, I noticed, were still powdered with fibreglass dust.

  Safel claimed to speak English, but his command of the language was more halting than my knowledge of Spanish. I had brought no map of the area as I had not expected to enter Nicaragua. So for the next seven days I was never quite sure of what would happen, nor where exactly we were going. Neither, as it turned out, was Safel.

  I was certain of one thing: I did not want to waste any time loitering in Puerto Lempira. The town is notorious as the former base of the CIA-funded instructors who trained Contra troops during the protracted and vicious guerrilla war against the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua. The instructors had long since gone, but the place still teetered on the brink of being a sad no-man’s-land. The streets were empty. The low, jerry-built houses were forlorn and neglected. It is the sort of place where when you arrive, your first thought is how soon you can leave. The only interesting moment was the lucky dip when disembarking from the small plane that brought me and a score of passengers to the gravel airstrip. Our air hostess was waiting at the bottom of the aircraft ladder, holding out a large brown paper bag like a supermarket paper sack. As the passengers filed past, they reached in and retrieved the items they had given to her when boarding the plane. At least five of the passengers took out handguns.

  Safel assured me that we could cross into Nicaragua at Leimus, a border post on the Río Coco which is also the border with Honduras. Unfortunately there was no regular transport to get to Leimus, but we could hire a pick-up truck. The price for the journey was exorbitant but there was only one vehicle and driver willing to make the run. Before we set out, I took the precaution of tracking down an official at the Customs office and had my passport stamped to show that I had left Honduras. Safel and I then crammed into the pick-up’s cab and were rattled and shaken for three hours along an insubstantial road that led inland. The land sloped upward very slightly, as we drove across low, rolling barrens of sand, then ridges and flats of gravel where the rainwater in the puddles in the track ruts was rust-red. Seen from only a few yards away, the country seemed like ideal pastureland. But it was an illusion. As you drew level, the blades of grass turned into a thin ground cover of weeds. There was no livestock. Eventually we came into a wide, open area where pitch pines grew at random. The trunk of each tree was charred with the marks of a dozen brush fires as if a serial pyromaniac had been at work. The entire countryside was scorched raw and devoid of human life except when we came across an ancient timber lorry, mired down to its axles in the track, its gearbox broken. We gave the driver a lift to the log huts of a small timber camp, surrounded by barbed wire and tucked away among the trees. By then we were on the outskirts of Leimus.

  A crooked wooden pole, hung across the track on two forked sticks, was the only sign that we had arrived. Our driver swerved around the barrier, took us another quarter mile and stopped the vehicle. Fifty yards away across a ditch was a small shack with a metal bed frame on the porch. On the bed frame sat two men, watching us with complete uninterest. They were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and army boots. Their caps were marked ‘Policia’ so I went across and arranged to have our names written in their logbook. I then returned to the pick-up truck, and Safel and I were carried past four or five more shacks to the point where the road suddenly dropped down a steep mud slide to the edge of a broad, khaki-coloured river. It dawned on me that this must be the frontier. The Río Coco was at least eighty yards wide. I stood in the mud of the foreshore and looked across the water expecting to see a ferry. There was nothing. Puzzled, I looked up- and downstream. There was still nothing. I had low expectations of the place, but this was even less than I had anticipated. On the far bank there was not a shack, nor a jetty, nor even a dugout canoe hauled up in the ooze. The Nicaraguan side of the river was abandoned and utterly deserted.

  A Category Five hurricane – the most severe classification – had destroyed the road on the Nicaraguan side eight months earlier. No one had bothered to repair it. But that was not the underlying reason for the emptiness and desolation. Unwittingly, I had blundered into my first reminder of Man Friday’s heritage.

  The Forgotten Indian War sounds as though it happened in the seventeenth or perhaps eighteenth century. In fact it took place between 1980 and 1990, and was a subset of a proxy war between superpowers. The main combatants were Sandinista troops of the Marxist revolution which overthrew the corrupt regime of General Anastasiō Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua, supported by the Soviet Union, and opposing them former members of the right-wing National Guard, 15,000 Contras. Most withdrew into Honduras where they were secretly armed and trained by the United States. Caught in the middle, but increasingly associated with the Contras, were Miskito warbands. The Miskitos and the Sandinistas fought the Forgotten Indian War for the control of what had once been a Miskito Reserve, the territory stretching inland from the Miskito Coast with its strategic northern frontier on the Río Coco. The Sandinistas forcibly relocated those Miskito who lived along the river. Many chose to flee into Honduras. Eight years after the war ended, very few had returned. Those who did come back had every reason to loathe ‘the Spanish’, as they called the Spanish-speaking Hondurans who had dispossessed them.

  Obviously Safel had not visited the river crossing at Leimus since the hurricane. There was no border crossing there. The pick-up had already turned round and departed, so there was no way for us to return to Puerto Lempira. But Safel was unruffled. A single building overlooked the river from the Honduran bank. It was the old ferry café. Built on a bluff, it was constructed around a rickety skeleton of heavy timber posts. The sides and floors were massive timber boards, warped in the sun and rain. A balcony overlooked the river, and here Safel and I waited. Below us clouds of beautiful yellow butterflies circled and settled on the mud at the water’s edge. Then they rose again, circled, and settled once more. They always settled among the dead leaves washed down by the current. When the butterflies closed their wings, they vanished in perfect mimicry of the dead vegetation.

  A woman walked down the river bank and washed some garments. Her washbasin was a fragment of a broken and swamped dugout. A smart jeep appeared, with three young Hondurans. Each wore a cris
p white T-shirt, emblazoned with the insignia of a medical charity. They looked around, stayed five minutes, then drove away. A banner hung from a huge mango tree. It announced a mass inoculation programme, but clearly there were no children to inoculate. My hopes rose when I heard the sound of an outboard engine. It was driving a massive dugout, whose hull must have been at least 40 feet long, which was proceeding downstream. But it was fully loaded with several passengers and a large heap of cargo hidden under a tarpaulin. The steersman did not even look up at Safel and me. He passed like he was a truck driver on a motorway and we were idle onlookers. Half an hour later two more dugouts appeared, coming upriver. These were much, much smaller and had no engines. Two men were paddling and a third stood in the bows and punted with a bamboo pole. They kept to the far bank, tucked under the bushes, to take advantage of the back eddies. Occasionally the standing man would haul on the fronds to help their progress. It took them forty-five minutes to labour past us and vanish upstream, still toiling slowly along against the current.

  Finally, after a two-hour wait, a tiny canoe put out from the other bank. It contained a very small boy. He must have seen us waiting, and was coming across to negotiate the fare with Safel. The canoe was leaky and half full of water, and the boy did not look as if he had the strength to paddle back across the rapid current with two men on board. Clambering into his shabby canoe, Safel and I sat in three inches of bilge water – there were no thwarts – and it was a slow and wobbly journey to travel with him to the Nicaraguan shore, and I was glad that my rucksack was waterproof.

  We scrambled out on the far bank, and the boy disappeared with his money. Safel claimed that if we walked along the riverbank we would soon come to a road which would take us inland. There was no road, only a one-room open-front store run by ‘Spanish’. The woman behind the counter was a sullen beauty, dressed in purple slacks and a loose blouse. Seeing potential customers, she gave a welcoming smile. Her husband continued languidly pouring kerosene on a column of ants which was threatening to invade his premises. His stock hung from nails in the ceiling – children’s cheap party clothes, camouflage hats, plastic hammocks. On the earth floor were tubs of onions and cardboard boxes of six-inch nails. A gorgeous tame macaw on a tree stump added a wanton touch of colour.

  Once again Safel began to negotiate, and once again I had the feeling that I had no real idea what was happening. It turned out that there was only one outboard engine in the area, and it belonged to the shopkeeper. He demanded a huge fee to take us to the only place where a road met the river three hours downriver. Fuel would be expensive, he said meaningfully. I was coming to appreciate that if you had the chance to exploit another person’s need on the Río Coco, you did so.

  The wife closed the shutters of the shop, and disappeared. Her husband summoned a young lad to produce the dugout and the essential outboard motor. When the wife reappeared, it was clear that she was not going to miss the chance to visit town. She had changed into a frilled blouse, tight jeans, and new shoes. She had also done her hair, and put on make-up and she held a parasol. The effect was to obliterate any vestige of her natural attractiveness, and for the entire journey she sat in the centre of the canoe, under her parasol and facing forward, her back turned towards her husband and rigid with disdain. The only time she turned around to face us was when we pulled over to the bank to drop off a Miskito family who had appeared at the last minute. A young man had come with his wife, a babe in arms, two small children, and several bundles. I was pleased to give them what I thought would be a free ride in the canoe I had hired for the journey. But when the family disembarked, halfway along our route, the shopkeeper wife held out her hand. The tape was pressed into the outstretched palm from a very slender roll of crumpled, torn banknotes.

  Her husband sat glowering in the stern. He had not dressed up for the trip to town, and looked like a stage villain. He was stockily built, with a pockmarked complexion and long greasy hair curling down over the collar of a very dirty shirt. His baggy trousers were tucked into the top of short rubber boots, and his paunch oozed out over the belt, showing a deep belly button. He wore a permanent scowl between his heavy beard and a thick black moustache, and his cap was pulled low over his forehead. Only his pocket knife in its leather belt case was out of character. It should, at least, have been a machete.

  The river journey was eerily detached and forlorn. We floated in the middle of the broad, ochre-brown flood, riding the powerful current and enveloped in the noise of the outboard engine. We saw no houses on either bank. The edge of the river was a line of reeds, a steep bush-covered bank, and then a glimpse of the upper branches of the forest trees. Above us the sky was overcast, dull and oppressive. For long stretches the rainforest came right to the water’s edge, and the branches of the massive trees overhung the racing water. Once, there was a heavy splash after the brief glimpse of an iguana tumbling through the air, as it lost its grip on a branch and fell.

  Twice the engine was shut off, so the lad could clamber to the stem of the canoe, balancing fresh cans of petrol, and refuel. The second’s worth of merciful silence was swiftly filled by a new wave of sound rolling in. There were whistles, sudden shrieks, echoes, and gurgles. They were the noises of the river and rainforest, and they lasted just as long as we sat in the silent canoe, still whirling rapidly downriver in the grip of the current. A massive tree had tumbled into the river and floated downstream until its roots caught in a submerged shoal. Now the forest giant lay at angle, downstream to the current, with its trunk beneath the water. The array of upper branches desperately waved up and down in the rush of water. The brown current boiled around the twigs, and the press of water raised a distinct surging hiss.

  The overwhelming impression was of emptiness, and of isolation. Very occasionally, in the distance, there appeared the small black silhouette of an Indian canoe, its occupant standing as he paddled from one bank to the other. It was like a Chinese ink drawing in slow motion. Always, by the time we reached the spot, the canoe had vanished into the greenery of the riverbank, as though the sight had been a mirage. Once a mirage proved to be reality. Round a wide bend in the river appeared two inflatable boats, travelling towards us at speed. The rubber boats were brand-new, very smart and very expensive. The cowlings of their large outboard engines sparkled. On the black side of each dinghy a bright white patch was painted, and in the centre of the patch was the insignia of the Red Cross. Sitting in each dinghy were three men. Each wore some sort of dark uniform and a bright orange life jacket, also new. The men had Red Cross insignias on their caps. They returned my curious gaze, passed us, continued upriver, and dwindled into the distance. Where were they going? Who had funded this incongruous exercise in philanthropy? Would they find anybody to help? It remained a complete mystery. Their crisp dress, the magnificent machinery, the shiny newness of all their kit made it look as if they had landed from another planet.

  It was half an hour before dusk when our dugout reached its destination – a cluster of wooden shacks on the Nicaraguan riverbank. They extended out into the river on pilings and provided landing stages for a dozen or so dugouts parked there. One shack had ‘Sandinistas Always!’ painted defiantly on its boards. We had arrived at Waspam, the roadhead. For forty miles behind us upriver lay only desolation, as far as I was aware. Until the Sandinistas had razed their villages, more than sixty Miskito communities had lived along the river. In Dampier’s time, this had been ‘the River of Gold’ and explorers grew excited at the glitter of golden spangles suspended in its waters. The spangles were delusory specks of shining mica, and brought disappointment. Now the Río Coco had become a river of bitter ghosts.

  Waspam was a single, sandy main street, half a dozen small shops, a couple of cantinas, and four churches. They stood in the irregular scatter of small houses which made up the residential suburb. The Catholic church was large, handsome and gaily painted. The Moravian church was almost as large but very plain. The buildings for the Church of Christ and the Church
of the Seventh Day Adventists were mere shacks. They were recognizable by the slogans crudely painted on their walls and – from the Adventists – a continuous blare of prayer, hymns and shouted exhortations relayed by a loudspeaker wired to the roof, which lasted far into the night.

  Safel and I spent the night in Waspam’s ‘hotel’, well within earshot of the Adventists. Our rooms were unpainted plywood stalls erected on a half-finished rear extension to the building. In the night, when anyone walked past our doors, the entire structure shook. As part of our bargain I had promised Safel as a bonus, to keep him in cigarettes during our trip. Now I discovered that each evening I was also expected to pay an advance on wages so he could seek the services of a prostitute.

  Water for an early morning wash was from a rusty sixty-gallon drum. Then we took our place in the queue on the main street for the daily bus to Puerto Cabezas. Safel assured me that to get to Big Sandy Bay we must go first to Puerto Cabezas and from there ‘plenty of boats’ went along the coast to Big Sandy Bay. The bus was the result of more charity – a cast-off school bus from some far-distant high school in the United States, with its yellow paint still and without subsequent mechanical maintenance. We staked our claim to seats and sat waiting in the crush for nearly two hours before the bus lumbered off on a five-hour journey to Puerto Cabezas. En route we saw no other vehicle traffic and stopped four times. Once was to pick up a passenger at the only settlement along the entire route, a village with perhaps thirty houses. The other three halts were where a heavy wire cable had been cranked up and stretched across the road to stop the bus. Each time a squad of four or five soldiers emerged from their primitive bivouac beside the road. They were living under a sheet of tarpaulin stretched over sticks, and their jungle battle dress was shabby and unkempt. They looked seedy but also vaguely menacing as they demanded that everyone get out while they searched the vehicle. I was concerned that I had no stamp in my passport to show that I had entered Nicaragua legally. To my surprise they ignored me and Safel. Instead, there was some incomprehensible exchange of cash between the bus driver and the soldiers, and more money was extorted from a couple of passengers. Then we proceeded on our way.