Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  I had located Kendra on the Internet. A flurry of reports about La Mosquitia appeared in late 1998 when Hurricane Mitch with its 200 m.p.h. winds raked Nicaragua and Honduras. Among the volunteers organizing outside help for the indigenous people was Kendra. I contacted her by email, asked whether she spoke the Miskito language and, if so, whether she would be available to accompany me as an interpreter. She was diffident. She was not sure whether her language skills were sufficient. She had learned to speak Miskitu — she pointed out that the convention was to spell the language with a final ‘u’ instead of an ‘o’ — while doing field research among a related group of Indians, the Tawakha, in Honduras. She had lived in a remote Tawakha village for twenty-two months. The Tawakha were former victims of the Miskito slave raids, and though they spoke their own language they also spoke Miskitu and still supplied dugout canoes to their former overlords. Fortunately Kendra was curious to learn just how the Miskito lived today and she agreed to accompany me to Nicaragua.

  Kendra need not have worried about her language skills. A Miskito mother in one village we later visited ran home to fetch her two children and bring them before Kendra. ‘Listen to this pale woman!’ she admonished them. ‘You must study hard to learn our language so you can speak it one day as well as her!’

  Puerto Cabezas, I had learned by now, was notorious in the narcotics trade. The Nicaragua guidebook cautions visitors not to go alone to the beach, where drug deals are frequent. And if Puerto Cabezas was bad, then Sandy Bay was worse — ‘Sandy Bay is supposedly the drug capital of the coast and has no places to stay,’ was the warning.

  When Kendra and I returned to the pier at midnight to secure a place aboard a small motorboat due to leave for Sandy Bay at three o’clock next morning, she asked the driver of the shabby taxi if much had changed in the town since the end of the ‘Indian War’. He shrugged. The town was better now, he said. Five years ago the place was really lawless. People were being killed in the street in drunken brawls, in fights over drug deals or from drug overdoses, or from ‘crazy sickness’ when they simply ran amuck. It was quieter now — and he paused — though a woman was killed with a knife in this street two or three hours ago.

  The wind was blowing too hard from the north for the little motorboat to leave, so we spent the rest of the night in a line of Miskito sleeping on the deck boards of the pier like so many corpses. From time to time a Miskito would crawl over in the darkness and whisper to Kendra, just to make sure that the rumour was true. She really did speak their language.

  At dawn there was a sudden flurry of activity. A file of young men appeared in the half-light. With them were wives and girlfriends carrying small packages of food and bundles of spare clothing which they handed over as they embraced the menfolk and said farewell. The men were all in their teens or early twenties, and they walked along the pier with a certain swagger. Each carried a large wooden paddle and a thin iron rod, about four feet long. The point was turned over into a sharp hook. The implement reminded me immediately of the fish gig, and the men recalled the ‘strikers’ from the days of Will the Moskito.

  They passed us and began to climb aboard one of the rundown fishing boats moored at the end of the pier. The vessel was in calamitous condition. The wooden hull was scuffed and battered. The vent pipe spewed black diesel fumes when the ancient engine rattled into life. Deck gear, such as it was, was broken or jammed. The wheelhouse windows had cracks repaired with bandages of plastic tape. Nothing had been painted or greased or maintained. Stacked on deck like paper cups were small canoes, perhaps twenty of them. A few more canoes were piled up on the roof of the wheelhouse. The canoes were very crude. Most were little more than bean pods unskilfully made of fibreglass. Ranks of scuffed and dented aluminium air bottles lay stuffed into a huge metal rack, and an ancient air compressor had been bolted to the deck and was leaking dirty oil. There was no safety equipment and there was no crew accommodation either for the thirty to forty young men clambering aboard.

  They were a sad descent from the skilled Miskito strikers Dampier had so admired. The young men were embarking on a twelve-day trip to the offshore shoals and banks. The fishing company in Puerto Cabezas supplied each diver with a canoe, twelve bottles of compressed air a day, a regulator, and a face mask if he did not have one of his own. The diver had to bring along a helper, usually a younger brother or a cousin. Each day while the fishing boat was on the banks, the two-man team was dropped overboard with a canoe. They would paddle off to a likely spot, where the diver descended to the sea floor and swam from rock to rock searching for lobsters. He used the long thin hooked spike to prise the animals out from crevices and crannies. Above him, his companion followed the line of air bubbles, paddling so as to be on hand when the exhausted diver was forced back to the surface with his catch. The normal regime was to use up four bottles of compressed air, then take a fifteen-minute rest. If the mother ship was close enough, the two men paddled back to their ship, climbed aboard, and ate some food. Then it was back into the canoe, more paddling, and more diving until another four air bottles were empty. Another rest break of a quarter of an hour, and it was time to use up the last four bottles of air. The lobsters were collected at depths between 100 and 130 feet, and even taking it in turns to dive, the two men were working far beyond the accepted limits for safety and their health. Finally the team returned to deliver their catch, eat, and lie down on the open deck to rest while the air compressor shuddered and pounded through the night, recharging the air bottles for the next day of drudgery. If the weather was cold or rainy, the divers were allowed to lie on wooden pallets in the hold. Next morning they were sent overboard again.

  Acute unemployment in Puerto Cabezas drove the system. Lobster diving was the only legal way for the divers to earn cash. But the pay packets were meagre. The boat owners deducted for the air bottles, for the food, for the loan of the canoe, then paid a miserly rate for the lobsters. The owners also advanced money to the divers before a trip, and when the boat returned to port the diver often found he had not paid off the debt, and was obliged to go to sea on the next lobster run. Much of the catch was destined for ‘Surf ’n’ Turf’ platters in restaurant chains in the United States where the clientele had no idea of the true cost. Occasionally a diver drowned. His canoeman lost sight of his bubble track, or he surfaced so exhausted that his colleague failed to reach him before he slipped back under the sea. Divers were slowly poisoned by the foul air they inhaled from the bottles, toxic with exhaust fumes from compressors. The divers were not supplied with depth meters to show how deep they were diving, or gauges to show how much air was left in the bottles. They had to guess. They received no formal instruction about the need for a controlled ascent to the surface, and at the rate of twelve bottles of air per day they were already operating beyond safe physical limits. Inevitably diver after diver suffered from nitrogen sickness, ‘the bends’. Sometimes the onset was swift — a diver suddenly writhing in agony on the deck of the fishing boat as nitrogen bubbled in his blood. Much more often it was a cumulative effect with creeping joint failure leading to lower limb paralysis. There was no treatment and no cure. The nearest fully equipped compression chamber for treating the ‘bends’ was in Honduras — for the use of sports divers on sunshine holidays.

  At first some of the Miskitos believed the diving sickness was the curse of the liwamair. In Miskito lore the liwamair is a pale-skinned mermaid who lurks in the depths of the sea. To see her brings disaster. The divers began to wear good-luck charms to ward off the curse. The true reasons became better understood when the divers were obliged to dive deeper and deeper to find the dwindling lobster stock. By the time Kendra and I arrived, many of the younger Miskitos were refusing to dive. Others, the brash, the heedless, and those still forced by necessity to do so, sometimes turned to drugs to mask growing physical pain. It is a grim repetition of the days when the Spaniards first came to the Caribbean. They forced the native peoples to dive for pearls. The wretched natives would co
me to the surface with ears and noses bleeding, and be sent down again and again to gather the pearl harvest. Within fifty years, entire tribes had been wiped out, and the oysters beds were destined for terminal ruin. Nicaragua’s modern lobster harvest has been as heartless on what some might call the Cripple Coast.

  Miskito mothers tossed their babies and toddlers casually off the pier. They were caught in midair by the young man loading the little motorboat lurching in the swell far below. It was ten in the morning and the north wind had at last dropped enough for us to leave for Sandy Bay. None of the passengers was exasperated by the delay. The Miskito knew that it was foolish to challenge a headwind. The same wind had just brought another engine-less Miskito boat sailing down, not from Sandy Bay but from the Miskito Cays, the scatter of low sandbars twenty-five miles offshore. The four-man crew brought the little boat into the lee of the pier and threw us a mooring line. I peered down. Laid out in the bilges were seven large turtles, alive and lying on their backs. The sailors were bringing them to market in Bilwi, as the Miskitos call Puerto Cabezas, preferring their Indian name. Of all meat the Miskitos prefer turtle meat, and it amounts to a craving. As they furled the sails, the sailors casually walked up and down the boat, stepping on the turtles like so many boulders. The turtles lay passive, their heads scarcely moving, flippers slowly waving, as if they were puzzled. Once the boat was secure, the sailors manhandled the heavy animals, each weighing between 90 and 130 pounds, up and over the edge of the boat and tipped them into the water with a heavy splash. The turtles sank, then floated to the surface, blinking. One of the sailors jumped into a small boat, grabbed the rope which tied the turtles into a chain, and rowed for the beach towing them behind him like a line of elephants in a circus ring.

  By an hour we missed an event that entertained the whole of the dock community. Three Miskito women had gone from the beach in a dugout to collect a quantity of marijuana found floating in the sea by one of the fishing boats. They were paddling back ashore in a dugout when the waves capsized their boat. The women and their cargo were thrown into the water. Every onlooker knew exactly what was in the canoe, and there was a joyful stampede into the waves. People waded into the water to collect their share of the windfall, grabbing up the loose packets of marijuana floating on the surface. ‘Of course the policemen joined in,’ we were told. ‘They were just as happy to have their share.’ Our informant had been butchering the turtles on the beach, and traded lumps of turtle meat for his joints.

  Kendra and I were on our way to Sandy Bay by then. The motorboat journey was much more sedate than my earlier trip with Shine and Safel. The Miskito women crammed far into the stern of the open boat, with their small children, to avoid the spray. One husband sat so far in the stern, that he was perched precariously on the head of the rudder, well out over the water. In one hand he held a small infant, in the other a cigarette. For five hours he sat there, and I watched in fascination each time his arm grew so tired that he switched burdens and juggled the baby from one hand to the other over the sea.

  The helmsman of the ferry was surprisingly clumsy as we negotiated the dangers of the bar at the entrance to Sandy Bay. He failed to reduce speed on the crest of a large wave, and for a moment the motorboat surfed along on the top of the wave, out of control and yawing from side to side. The boat could have been rolled over if a grizzled Miskito man, a passenger who had been sitting quietly beside the helmsman, had not quickly stood up, stepped to the wheel, and taken control. He straightened up the boat, reduced the speed, and we surged safely into calm water.

  His name was Marco. He and Kendra chatted quietly in Miskitu, and by the time the ferry had worked its way up the mangrove channels and out on to the lagoon of Sandy Bay, we had found ourselves a guide.

  Marco was fifty years old and born in Sandy Bay. He was a veteran of the Indian War and lived in dignified poverty with wife and five children. Once his family had been prosperous, and his grandfather had run a small shop. But Marco’s father had died young, and Marco had been brought up by uncles. The arrival of Sandinista troops during the Indian War accelerated what had been a slow decline. ‘They came and burned our houses. They killed our people,’ he said simply. Marco and his family fled to Honduras with thousands of other Miskitos and had spent ten years in exile there. Ironically, these ten years were among the best of his life. For two years he had been a soldier, and was secretly taken for military training in the United States. When the war ended, he returned home to Sandy Bay and was trying to rebuild his life on a very slender foundation. He was very capable. He could hunt and fish and manage a sailing boat, but he was too old to dive for lobsters and he did not care to take the risk. Physically he was slender and wiry, with thick greying hair cut short, and his narrow face and watchful eyes made him look like a wise grey fox. He used hand gestures when he spoke, and they were fluid and elegant, and what he had to say was worth listening to. His troubles and travels had given him a great breadth of general knowledge and he exuded reliability. He was so gentle and courteous that it came as a shock whenever his quiet voice and manner sharpened to a harsh edge. This was when he talked about the ‘Spanish’, as he called the Hispanic Nicaraguans. He detested them. They had no business in the Miskito lands, and they should stay away. A ‘Spanish’ had come to Sandy Bay recently. It was not clear what the visitor wanted, but the people of Sandy Bay suspected that he was trafficking in drugs. They asked him to leave. He refused. ‘What happened?’ asked Kendra. ‘He was killed,’ Marco replied flatly.

  The boat passengers dispersed to their homes carrying the news that a white woman had arrived who spoke their language, and Kendra’s fluency in Miskitu became major gossip. Within a day the whole of Sandy Bay seemed to have heard the astonishing news. Children came running to double-check the phenomenon and report back to their parents. Marco, feeling that his home was too humble, had led us to a more prosperous household, explained who we were, and asked if we could stay. A few sentences from Kendra in Miskitu and the woman of the house opened her eyes wide with delight, and we had found a home in Sandy Bay as long as we wanted to stay.

  Up close, the legendary ‘drug capital of the coast’ was as attractive as I had remembered. The balconied and porticoed houses beside the lagoon were as handsome. Cattle and ponies still cropped the springy turf under the mango and breadfruit trees. The fallen leaves, coconut husks and household rubbish was swept into neat piles, ready for burning. There was a freshly painted church of the Moravians, a Protestant sect that had sent missionaries to the Miskitos for 150 years. Now the pastor of Sandy Bay was a Miskito, as was usually the case elsewhere on the Coast; he was dapper in white shirt and smart business suit. Sandy Bay had no road, no piped water, no drains, though it did have electricity from a generator, a very recent gift from the government of Taiwan. But Sandy Bay was out of television transmission range, so even when there was fuel for the generator, the houses on stilts did not yet pulse to a neon blue-white. More often they were lit by hurricane lamps. Seemingly scattered at random in the parkland, the houses were in fact arranged in family clusters. Night traffic was the moving beams of torches carried by children as they went from house to house. The network of footpaths crisscrossing the settlement was so well known to the children that more often they were just small shadows flitting past in the darkness.

  Activity began half an hour before dawn, as with most waterside people. There was a light tap on the window and Marco’s voice asked if we were ready to leave. He led us to a boat hidden in the reeds. It was a smart open fibreglass skiff with a brand-new engine, and Siriaku its owner was to take us to the Miskito Cays. When Siriaku appeared in the half-light, he did not reply to our greeting, but silently untied the boat, as if ignoring us. He was heavy-set, with the powerful shoulders and hands of a middleweight boxer, and a massive, big-boned face with high cheekbones and long jet-black hair. Siriaku’s ancestors must have come from the ‘wild Indian’ tribes, for he looked much more like a North American Indian than any other Mi
skito we ever met. The Miskito complexions could be anything from a dark coffee colour to Marco’s brownish-black, but Siriaku was a copper-brown. When Siriaku spoke – which he did rarely – it was in a profoundly deep bass rumble. Only when you looked at him and he glanced away did you realize that this hulking man was not malevolent. He was acutely shy.

  The Miskito Cays were the place to learn to what extent the Miskitos were still the ‘boldest people in the world for exposing themselves to the Perils of the Sea’, as the French buccaneer Ravenau de Lussan had claimed.

  To a passing mariner, the Cays are merely four small, low islands twenty-five miles out to sea from Sandy Bay. There is nothing special about them. They are clothed with the usual dark green mix of mangrove and thorny shrub. They have springs of fresh water but the sandflies are so viciously fierce that no one would live there for more than a few days at a time. Except as seamarks there is nothing remarkable about them. But the Miskitos have a mental image of a different world. To them the four islands are only the surface features of a vast submerged shelf of rocks and shoals, sandbars, coral heads, and reefs which they visualize as clearly as if they are able to see through the opaque seawater. The Miskitos carry a mental map of a submarine hunting ground where they stalk their favourite food: turtle. And it was the hunt for turtle which honed the extraordinary skill of the Miskito ‘strikers’.

  Siriaku steered his boat down the bayou from Sandy Bay, across the bar, and headed straight out to sea. Within minutes the flat Miskito shore was only a low, featureless shading on the horizon behind us. The position of the sun gave an indication of the direction we were heading, and so did the wind blowing steadily out of the north-east. But there was nothing to indicate our precise position. Siriaku did not have a compass, and there was no instrument to show how far or fast we were travelling. He sat impassively by the outboard engine. The water was a dense yellow-green. It could have been two, twenty or two hundred feet deep. Yet from time to time, Siriaku changed course. He swerved the boat from one line to another, as though he was driving down a twisting highway. Occasionally Marco stood up and scanned the water ahead. The two men were helped by the angle and pattern of the wavelets. They were tell-tales of hidden sandbars and reefs. But, in the main, we were picking our way from one safe channel to the next according to the mental chart which the two men carried in their heads.