Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  After about half an hour Marco muttered, then pointed off the port bow. Far, far in the distance a tiny spike broke the horizon. The mast of a small sailing boat. Siriaku said nothing. He had spotted it some time earlier.

  Marco asked if I would like to go closer. He said the boat would be fishing for turtle.

  Ten minutes later we hove to about thirty feet from a small open sailing boat that swooped and pitched in the waves. It was exactly the same sort of craft we had seen used as a sailing ferry. Her sail was lying in a heap along the boom. Two young men pulled raggedly at long oars to keep the boat head to wind so she did not drift. In the narrow bow stood the captain. He was a thin, wiry Miskito dressed in tattered trousers and a singlet. He was hauling in a wide-meshed net, hand over hand, straining against the weight. White polystyrene floats, slightly smaller than footballs, came in with the net. They were tangled and trapped in the mesh. Whatever had been caught had been twisting and turning and wrapping the net into a spiral. A pale patch began to show just beneath the waves. It was the belly shell of a turtle, the colour of Jersey cream. Then the head and front flippers of a turtle broke suddenly into view. The great oval eyes were open, their large pupils clearly visible. The crooked flippers waved upward, like the last gesture of a drowning man. The hooked mouth opened and closed as the animal gulped for air.

  The Miskito captain manoeuvred the heavy animal, still in the water, aft along the boat until it was amidships. The two young men dropped the oars and left their benches to lean far over the side, arms in the water up to the elbows, and grab hold of the net. It took the strength of all three men to heave the creature up out of the sea. It offered no resistance except for one brief lunging flurry as it first broke the surface. Then it was balanced on the edge of the boat, lying on its back with its four flippers waving and the short stubby tail, the shape of a wasp’s sting, curling in spasms. With a final heave they slid the animal into the boat and down into the bilges.

  The fishermen would have set a turtle net on the previous afternoon, Marco explained. They place it beside the hole in the rock where the turtle sleeps. During the night the turtle has to emerge from the hole every three or four hours and come to the surface to breathe. On the way up or back down to the sleeping hole, there is a chance that the creature will become entangled in the net, particularly when there is little moonlight and the animal fails to see the waiting mesh. In the morning the fishermen sail out from their houses on the cays and check to see if they have caught anything.

  To Marco there was nothing to it. This was humdrum fishing. A good turtleman had to judge which was the most likely sleeping hole, that was all. Whether or not a turtle actually swam into the net was a matter of chance. Neither Marco nor Siriaku gave a thought to the extraordinary knowledge that was implied. The shoals around the Miskito Cays extend across an area of 400 square miles, the size of Hong Kong. Occasionally the edge of a reef emerges at low tide, but it is lost again from view within hours. Otherwise there are no buoys, no shore marks nor visible signs of any description to indicate to a sailor where he is. Yet in this area, as featureless as the flattest and emptiest desert, the Miskito turtlemen know the underwater terrain precisely. They have names for zones, for banks, and for particular rocks and coral heads. They know, often to within a yard, the location of an individual rock and on which side of the rock there is a hole or an overhang where a turtle would spend the night asleep. How the Miskito’s are able to navigate to these spots under sail, allowing for current and drift and leeway, and still arrive with pinpoint accuracy, and without using a plumb line or an echo sounder, and then drop their nets in the place is an astonishing feat of seamanship. They take it for granted.

  We left the turtle fishermen to their work, and Siriaku chose his new direction without a moment’s hesitation. Fifteen minutes later we could see two or three small shacks on the horizon. They stood three feet above the surface of the sea on thick mangrove branches driven as pilings into the ridge of a hidden sandbank, and they might as well have been houseboats. Marco had brought us there because he thought I might want to meet ‘the American’.

  The American turned out to be English. His speech retained a soft Oxfordshire burr. Norman was in his late fifties or early sixties, and wore only long, loose shorts and red flipflop sandals. With his paunch, short straw-yellow beard, spectacles, and a skin sunburned to a pinkish shade, he could have been an English tourist on a Mediterranean beach. He was not. William Dampier would have called him a ‘marooner’ – someone living and working in self-exile among the Indians of the Moskito Coast. Norman had spent years in the employment of the Export Division of the Ford Motor Company in England and California until the moment came, as he put it, ‘to make a change of life’. He became a buyer of lobster tails from the Miskito. Now he lived for up to six months a year on an isolated wooden platform on top of a sandbank, fifteen miles from the mainland. In the hurricane season or when the isolation became too overbearing, he returned to his girlfriend in Puerto Cabezas. He made an occasional trip to Managua to renew his British passport. His lobster station was three platforms linked side by side. On them stood three open-sided shacks. Two served as dormitories for the Miskito lobster men, and the third was his home. It was a tin-roofed shed, with a length of cotton sheeting hanging as a screen to divide his iron sleeping cot and lumpy mattress from his desk. There he lived with two young Miskito assistants and – a cautionary sign – two guard dogs. During our visit the two dogs leaped into the sea to cool off. They paddled round and round until they were exhausted and Norman gave a nod and one of the Miskito lads hoisted them back aboard the platform.

  A venerable air compressor, a pile of air bottles, and four drums of fuel were the working gear. The Miskito divers came in their canoes to the cay to refill their air bottles. This was a free service and Norman’s lure. The Miskito found it convenient to sell their catch to Norman and he would stow it in a large storage container filled with ice brought weekly from the mainland, until there was enough lobster catch to take to the freezer plant in Puerto Cabezas. On the day of our visit Norman could not have left the platform if he had wanted to. The Miskito divers had all left. They had gone to watch a baseball match on the mainland. The only boats moored to the platform were a swamped dugout and a damaged fibreglass bean-pod boat which looked as if it was salvage. Norman knew little about the Miskito divers who came to his platform, except that most of them were from one particular village, Dakura, on the coast. They came and went according to their own whims. They brought turtle meat to his platform, and he enjoyed eating turtle for breakfast. He did not speak Miskitu, and he had never enquired into Miskito culture. It did not interest him. He was concerned more with the price of lobster tails, the cost of ice, the price of fuel, the price the freezer plant would pay him, and the slowness of renewing his passport. Norman was undemanding, sedentary, and thankful to have escaped the business treadmill when his life had been so stressful, he said, that he had smoked four or five packets of cigarettes a day. Now he suffered from emphysema but still smoked at least a pack a day, though he stuck to using tobacco and not the marijuana the Miskito divers smoked ‘until you could scarcely enter the room for the smoke’. He communicated with the Miskito with signs, basic Spanish, and goodwill. Only five miles away, to the west, was one of the above-water Cays. Its mangroves were clearly visible. But he hardly ever went there – his marooner’s world was a forty foot by ninety rectangle of wooden boards.

  Siriaku took us on to where the Sandy Bay men had built their stilt homes. A dozen sheds stood in the lee of the largest Miskito Cay. Most were roofed with palm fronds, and their decks all stood a few feet above the surface of the sea on the usual arrangement of mangrove posts. Several of the structures were deserted and empty, the thatch in tatters. The Miskito came and went in nomadic style, occupying the houses when they wanted, returning to the mainland as they wished. Every hut that was occupied had at least one boat tied up to the platform. The majority were fibreglass skiffs li
ke the one Siriaku owned. The others were single-masted sailing boats, all of identical design. These were for shallow-water lobster diving, for fishing and for turtling. Marco now brought us to the hut of the two turtle captains.

  The most northerly of the stilt huts, it was the best maintained. It had a corrugated-iron roof, wooden walls bleached to a pockmarked grey, and was open-fronted. It could have been a suburban two-car garage standing on legs in the ocean. A huge woman, who must have weighed 180 pounds, ruled the hut. The deck quivered when Jemina walked across the boards. She organized the supplies of food which arrived, prepared meals on a charcoal hearth on the apron where the boats tied up, and made sure that the plastic barrels held enough fresh water. The fresh water and firewood came from the mosquito-infested Cays. Jemina also supervised the weighing of lobster tails. During the afternoon small motor skiffs arrived, moored to the platform, and the young Miskitos handed in their catch. The lobster tails were meticulously weighed, one at a time. First in grams on a table scales, and then in ounces on a hanging scale. The fishermen looked on attentively. They were paid in cash, then diplomatically huddled in the tiny ‘office’ partitioned off in plywood to share a marijuana cigarette. The lobster tails waited in a tub of ‘soda salt’, a solution of sodium bisulphate which prevented the flesh from turning soft, until a middleman in a larger motor skiff appeared. It was fitted with a fibreglass holding box, and the middleman bought all the lobster tails, then headed off to make his rounds of the other huts.

  In the midafternoon, too, a string of bean-pod boats came past. A small motorboat was towing them home to their shacks. Nine little bean pods were strung out in a line, each with a young Miskito lad in it, lying back as if relaxing in his bath. They were coming back from diving in the shallows for lobsters. They looked like a class of junior dinghy sailors being towed back to the yacht club at the end of a lesson.

  The turtlemen arrived last. Their two sailing boats came racing in from the north-west as if this were the main regatta. The afternoon had turned bright and sunny, and the water sparkled with tropical intensity. The two boats swept along, their sails set to taut perfection. They were using weatherboards. A long plank projected out from the side of each boat. Right at the end of the plank sat a crewman, his weight counterbalancing the press of the sails. As the boat tacked through the wind, the weatherboard man skipped back aboard, the plank was pulled inboard, and then – as the boat heeled on the opposite tack – the plank shot out like a thin tongue to the other side, and the weatherboard man was nonchalantly scrambling out to this new position. The two boats came bustling up to the platform, and the sails came flapping down as their momentum carried them to the precise mooring spot. Their crews, four men to each boat, were as tattered as corsairs. They were dressed in a multicoloured selection of cut-off trousers, T-shirts, bandannas, caps, and turbans. One young man wore a flapping grey cloak knotted over his shoulders to keep off the sun. With scarcely a glance at the visitors, they stepped nimbly on to the platform, and handed to Jemina two splendid fish they had caught for supper. Their main catch stayed in their boats. Lying in the bilges like lumps of ballast were half a dozen large green turtles.

  There was light-hearted camaraderie on the platform. With turtlemen, lobster divers, and visitors, we were now fifteen people on a small space. Yet no one jostled. However hungry, people waited their turn for food as it was prepared on the tiny hearth, or took it in turns to take a glass of water from the freshwater butts. There was a leak in one of the sailing boats, and its weatherboard was slid into position so that the captain could stand on it, heeling the boat far over, while a crewman stood in the sea and pounded strips of cloth into the crack to seal the hull. The conversation, Kendra told me, was mostly professional, interspersed with banter and teasing over minor incidents in their day’s work. One boat had gone to this place and checked their net but there had been no turtle. Another had been to such-and-such a coral head, and it was the same. But the net had shifted a little, so perhaps it should have been more heavily weighted. Someone else had seen a turtle swimming in this place. One skipper thought he would change his nets to a different sector the following day. Listening, I could pick out the English words in their vocabularies – ‘jib’, ‘gill net’, ‘fishpot’, ‘saila’, and ‘wederbord’.

  That night we all lay down on the planks to sleep. There were so many of us in the small space that we lay in a tangle, legs crisscrossed. Under us the wavelets muttered against the mangrove pilings, and the entire platform quivered gently.

  The turtlemen left for work while the stars were still visible. There was the rattle and slap of canvas, and the sails rose against the night sky. The boats unhitched their mooring lines and dropped back into the darkness. No one spoke. There was the creak of timber, the rub of a rope running as the sails were sheeted home, and the clatter of canvas abruptly quieted as the boats gathered way and vanished. It would take them two hours to sail to the precise locations where they had set their nets the previous day.

  The two captains had informed Siriaku where they would be headed, and after breakfast he took us directly to the place – on a featureless open sea – where the two sail boats were hunting from net to net. Again, their boat handling was wholly adroit. Each sailing boat was tacking and spinning and coming up on a net. There it came to a halt as simply as a driver parks a car and sets the hand brake. The skipper left the helm and strolled casually the length of the boat. If the polystyrene buoys were submerged, it was a good sign. Maybe a turtle was trapped. Standing in the bow he cast a small hook on a line and snagged the net, then pulled it aboard. If the net was empty, the crew reset it or stacked it in the bilge ready to set again at another spot. The two sailing boats darted back and forth across the surface of the sea like eager gun dogs. It was no more than thirty seconds from the standing start when the boat was hove to under slack sails and the men were checking the net, to the moment when the sails were hauled in tight and the boat was moving at full speed. Three more turtle were collected that morning.

  They brought the turtles to the klar. This was a small stockade made of mangrove branches hammered into the crest of the sandbar fifty-five feet from the ‘workplace’, as they called their stilt house. The klar served as a corral where they could keep the turtles in a couple of feet of water until they were ready to be taken to market. If the turtles needed feeding, someone could cut a branch of mangrove and throw it over the fence. The turtles grazed on the leaves like cattle. A generation earlier turtlemen came regularly from the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to catch turtle on the Miskito Cays. They took them by the thousands upon thousands, and hauled them off to the canning plants in Bluefields and Florida. The Cays are the largest pastures of underwater sea grass in the western hemisphere, and the flocks of turtles feeding on the weed seemed limitless as the herds of buffalo on the Great Plains. But the international demand for tinned turtle and turtle soup eventually demolished the population until the trade was banned, and the factory in Bluefields closed in 1977. Then the Forgotten Indian War helped restore the balance. The Miskito stayed away from the Cays because the Sandinista air force strafed their boats from the air, and the numbers of turtle increased. Now the Miskito men were catching turtle only for themselves, as their traditional food, and the numbers of turtle caught every year was fairly constant.

  Lunch was a turtle feast. A 120-pound turtle was hoisted from the bilge of the boat and dragged upside down to the edge of the apron. Siriaku took a machete and with the point of the blade tickled the animal under the chin so that it stretched its neck. A swipe as fast as an eyeblink, and the reptilian head flew off to one side, its jaws still snapping. Siriaku inserted the machete’s blade into the joint between upper and lower shells, and sawed around the full circumference as if opening a giant can. He levered up the belly shell, turned it over, and laid it on one side. It became an oval serving dish.

  The turtle was clearly a herbivore. Large loops of dark grey gut were similar to a cow’s main intestine. The sho
ulder blades, curiously, were like those of a sheep. The animal produced almost two-thirds of its weight in firm dark red meat after Siriaku had carefully cut out the ‘rank’, two patches of meat on the flanks, which he said would taint the flesh if they were not removed. He methodically carved the muscle tissue into pieces, put the flippers aside for making soup, and saved every edible morsel in the upturned belly shell. The windpipe and guts went for fish bait, and finally he tossed the offal to the spiral of men-of-war birds and red boobies which had taken up their station downwind of the platform. The gelatinous lining of the upper and lower shells, greenish above, yellowish below, would be scraped off and eaten later. This was calipash and calipee, the main ingredient of turtle soup which had sustained the foreign trade in turtle.

  Jemina produced ‘ballmeat’ of turtle. It looked, cooked, and tasted like the finest beef.

  Dampier and Captain Uring would have not have recognized the handy sailing boats which I so admired and which the Miskito handled so well. The Miskito had copied them from the Cayman Islanders; in fact, the most prolific boatbuilder was a Cayman Islander long settled in Sandy Bay. The Cayman islanders called them ‘catboats’, though they did not resemble their North American cousins, and the Miskito insisted on calling them dories, the same word that Uring had heard when he was shipwrecked on the coast. But the true Miskito dory was a large dugout canoe. When Kendra asked why the Miskito had given up using their sea-going dugouts in favour of catboats, she was informed that the dugouts were too big and clumsy, their carving wasted a vast amount of wood, and they required enormous strength to paddle. Compared to catboats, they were ‘krap’.