Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The Miskito barely knew what cocaine was when the lucky strikes first began to appear on the beaches. They sampled the drug, and a number of Miskito became addicts. Eight of them, including young women, had died since then. Others had moved to live in Bilwi where narcotics were bought and sold commercially. Now only a few of the Sandy Bay Miskito used cocaine regularly, and there was a clinic for drug treatment and anti-drug education. But nearly everyone smoked marijuana quite openly. Alcohol, by contrast, was permitted only for discreet private use. Its public sale in Sandy Bay was prohibited.

  Drug traffickers came to Sandy Bay to purchase in bulk when they heard there had been a large ‘lucky strike’. But the Miskitos soon learned that they got a better price if they took the cocaine to Bilwi and sold it there. There was always the possibility that the men, suddenly rich in town, would squander their cash on drink and gambling and prostitutes, or be robbed. If the women acted as the couriers, they drove a shrewder bargain and then spent the cash more wisely on their families. This was how the children got their gold necklaces and teeth or an education. Siriaku had been canny. He had invested his share from a twenty-five-kilo ‘lucky strike’ – five kilos of cocaine – in a fine forty-horsepower outboard motor and new boat. The substantial family house in which we were staying had been built from the proceeds of three different strikes. Unlucky Marco had only made one tiny ‘lucky strike’ in all his life – a kilo of marijuana floating in the sea.

  Occasionally the Miskito smuggled the drugs onward themselves, usually into Honduras. There was little risk if the proper procedures were observed in the ‘land without law’. The basic precaution was to advise the police and militia when and where the drug run would be made – and arrange from them to get their share. But the system was not foolproof. A young Miskito had lost his life when the smugglers ran into a police boat. The smugglers had already paid a bribe of six kilos of cocaine, but there was confusion in the darkness. They were not recognized. Shots were fired on both sides, and the Miskito was killed. After this tragedy many favoured the tried-and-tested scam of arranging for the police to make a raid and recover a quantity of drugs. The raid was greeted with great fanfare. But in fact the drugs haul was only a small part of the original ‘lucky strike’.

  Kendra was receiving only puzzled glances when she asked whether any Miskito of Sandy Bay had been wrecked or cast away, perhaps on the Cays, and had to fend for himself. No Miskito could disappear for long in that predicament, she was told. His family and colleagues would notice his absence and go looking for him. He would very soon be found. Boats were rarely wrecked while working on the Cays. They were dismasted or capsized, but the crew scrambled back aboard, baled out the water, and came home under jury rig. ‘If the mast snaps, you take a machete, cut the pole short, and stick it back in its hole,’ was how one veteran skipper put it. The danger zone was the bar at the river mouth. Celtan Lopez, fifty-three years old now, had lost two boats there. Starting at the age of thirteen he had worked his way up from boat cook and baler to weatherboard man, to jib handler, and finally to skipper. Yet even the most experienced helmsman sometimes misjudged the wild ride through the waves in heavy weather. The north wind had destroyed him on both occasions. Fifteen-foot-high waves tumbled his boat coming back from the Cays with a big load of turtle. It was smashed to splinters, and the cargo of turtle disappeared. Both times the crew had swum ashore and no lives were lost. He built a replacement boat, and went back to fishing. ‘I do not learn,’ he commented ruefully.

  Serenio, Celtan’s eighty-three-year-old father, had his own version of how Miskitos could survive. The entire community of Sandy Bay had been marooned for four years. A great hurricane had raged in from the sea in 1935, and destroyed everything – the houses, the crops, the coconut and mango trees, the cassava fields. The land was flooded, and nothing would grow in the soil. ‘It was as though everything had burned.’ Worse, all the large seagoing dories had been wrecked or blown away. The community was left with two small dugouts, and no means of reaching the outside world. For those four years they saw no one, no outsiders. Many Miskitos died. Sandy Bay dwindled to less than 200 inhabitants. They survived by gathering shellfish along the shoreline, plucking mussels from the mangrove roots, digging into the estuary mud for edible crustaceans, and waiting for the crops of yucca and the newly planted coconuts to begin to bear fruit again. Even after they carved replacement dories large enough to be paddled down the coast to Bilwi they had nothing to take with them to sell or barter so that they could bring back flour and salt and cloth. They had to make their own salt by boiling seawater over fires of driftwood. ‘Wood, there was always plenty of that,’ said Serenio. ‘It was cooking pots that we lacked.’

  Serenio and Celtan remembered ‘striking’ turtles, before the Caymaners showed them how to use nets. The ‘strikers’ hunted in pairs from a small cayuco, a dugout. One paddled very, very quietly and the other stood, watching the surface of the sea, ready to throw the lance. Iron was too costly so the striker whittled the peg, its three-inch point, from supa wood. It was as heavy as metal and pierced a turtle shell as cleanly. With a peg made from any other wood, the lance was likely to slide off the carapace harmlessly even if it hit fair and square, and you heard the quick slithering screech as the throw was wasted. Striking turtle by daylight was possible for one month during the year, March. That was the time when the turtle were so gorged on sea grass that they came to the surface and rested on the waves with ‘their eyes closed as if they were sort of drunk or crazy’. Only then could the striker get close enough. Otherwise the strikers hunted at night, paddling slowly near the underwater sleeping places and listening for the ‘phooo, phoooo’ of a turtle breathing. Then the striker had to be lightning-fast. Once struck, even the biggest turtles, females over 140 pounds in weight, tired in less than ten minutes. The hunter hauled the turtle into the cayuco, pulled out the peg, and plugged the hole in the shell with a twist of cloth or tree bark or soft wood. If he closed the hole properly and kept out the air, the turtle would survive in the klar as if nothing had happened.

  Serenio was adamant that he was never afraid of the spectral liwamair. Other sailors had seen her. She had long blonde hair and her eyes blinked rapidly as if weak in the light. But he was a Christian, and evil spirits never bothered Christians. He admitted that when he reached his fishing spot and after he rolled up the canoe sail, he stood up with a machete in his hand and whirled it around his head in the air. That kept the evil spirits away. The mermaid liwamair was not the cause of the sickness of the air-bottle divers. It was the liwa of the lobsters, their guardian spirit, punishing them for taking too many lobsters.

  Marco produced an old turtle harpoon. It had a rusty ‘fish peg’ on the end, with small barbs, and was made from a triangular metal file sharpened to a point. He took it with us as we paddled through the backwaters and showed how to spear crabs among the tangle of mangrove roots. He made demonstration lobs, tossing the harpoon into the waves as we walked the beaches where the ‘lucky strikes’ were made. But he could think of nobody in Sandy Bay who was still an active striker in the old style. He had heard that there was at least one striker further south along the coast, working out of Tasbapauni, the village of the Red Earth. But maybe he had retired, or it was just a rumour.

  Kendra and I set out for Tasbapauni and on the way stayed overnight at the village of Pearl Lagoon. The village was an interchange for pangas, the motorboats that use the maze of waterways to link the southern Miskito villages. Waiting for a panga, we went for a stroll and I spotted a nine-foot-long fish harpoon propped against a fisherman’s hut. Its peg was honed and bright. But the owner had the bloodshot eyes and greyish skin tone of a confirmed drunk, and he was settling down on his porch with a bottle of Ron Plata, the cheapest grade of rum. Kendra asked if he would be going out fishing next morning, and he mumbled that he did not know. It depended on the weather, how well he slept, and how much food was in the house. He was already too deep in drink to be coherent. We
walked on, disappointed. Fifty yards further on, the village butcher was out in the street, standing under a broad mango tree, cutting up a turtle on a chopping board. A line of women waited patiently with metal bowls. Dogs circled for scraps, and the butcher’s assistant was knee-deep in the lagoon, wading out to the klar, where twenty captive turtles bumped against one another for space, like exhibits in an overcrowded aquarium. We were watching the butcher when there was a discreet cough behind us, and a burly, thickset man enquired, in richly accented Caribbean English, if we were looking for a striker. He had a netting sack of yellow peppers on his shoulder, and he was going from door to door ‘peddling peppers’, as he put it. He had heard we wanted to know about ‘strikin’.

  Charles Archibald had learned strikin’ when he was seventeen years old. His grandfather had taught him in the days before there were nets. That was forty-seven years ago. The two of them would go out in a small canoe, first with Charles as the skipper, paddling and steering, and his grandfather with the staff. Later it was Charles who made the strikes. Between 7 and 10 a.m. they could strike enough fish – tarpon, jackfish, mullet, jewfish – to fill the canoe. ‘You have to know what you is about.’ A single mero fish could weigh upwards of 300 pounds, and every fish required its own technique – the high-angle throw dropping down on flat fish, the low throw with an almost flat trajectory for narrow fish like mullet, which were the most difficult of all to strike. In April they would go out on ‘the blue sea’ to strike turtle during ‘pair-up time’, the mating season. Then the male and female were so busy with each other that they failed to see the approaching canoe. Between June and August, the rainy season, the hunters prowled the mouths of the swollen rivers which flooded into Pearl Lagoon. If they were lucky they met manatee – ‘manantee’ as Charles called them – which had come into the lagoon to feed on the sea grass beds. Manatee were hard to spot. They barely put their nostrils above the water to breathe, hardly made a sound, and in the murky flood water you could not see the body. You had to guess where to throw the staff with its especially stout peg. If you made the mistake of using the thin fish peg, it would bend and break in the manatee’s thick hide. The biggest manatee that Charles had ever struck was 320 pounds, and the last one he had taken was back in 1958. Now it was forbidden to hunt manatee, as he was aware, because they were protected. Similarly there was a close season, the veda, when hunting turtle was banned. That was not why there were so few strikers left. The reason was the gill net. The netsmen had stripped Pearl Lagoon of prey. Yet given clear water and a high sun Charles still went out to gather food for his family. He could see into the depths. ‘I like to strike. I love to strike!’ he said.

  Charles was a darker, heavier-set version of Marco, our guide to Sandy Bay. He projected the same air of long-acquired competence, and there was no mistaking that he was a boatman. He had the massive, work-worn hands, heavily muscled forearms, and the rolling gait of the seaman. He would have made an ideal foretopman or boatswain on a square-rigger. His laugh was deep and throaty, and when he spoke the wrinkles around his deep-set eyes and broad mouth were always on the point of formulating a good-humoured smile. Even when his face was relaxed, his expression was that of a man who relished life.

  Charles shows up next morning in a dugout canoe paddled by his teenage nephew, another Marco. He has come to give us a demonstration of strikin’ and carries his nine-foot harpoon – his ‘staff’ as he calls it, tipped with the same style of barbed fish peg that we had seen in Sandy Bay. He suggests that we go for stingray in the lagoon. Marco will handle the dugout, and Kendra and I can ride alongside in a small panga belonging to Charles Archibald’s friend, Joe, and watch.

  The little dugout makes a slightly bizarre picture with a great rip in its lurid yellow sail stitched from plastic sheet, Marco in a green T-shirt printed with an Adidas advertising slogan, and Charles Archibald dressed in a moth-eaten sweat-stained shirt and trousers rolled up to the knees. The day is bright and sunny with patches of cumulus cloud, giving Charles enough visibility to see the fish. When they reach a patch of shallow water about three feet deep, our striker rolls up the sail and places it in the bilge. He hands Marco a bamboo pole and indicates that he should punt. Charles then hops up on the thwart of the canoe. It is like a circus trick. Marco is already standing up in order to punt; the slim canoe is as tippy as a floating log, and there is sixty-four-year-old Charles balancing like an acrobat on the canoe seat to gain a few more inches of height as he peers down into the water. As Dampier had said, the Miskito strikers were reluctant to allow any of the buccaneers to go spear fishing with them in such an wobbly contraption.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a black shadow whizz past. It is a stingray racing across the shallows. Its shape flickers hazily against the yellow sand. Startled by the approaching canoe, it has leapt up from the lagoon floor and is rippling away at maximum speed, hugging the sand in a panicky zigzag. Charles Archibald has seen it too. He points urgently in the direction it has disappeared. Marco obediently punts the dugout in that direction. The stingray must have doubled back, for a moment later Charles makes his strike. He has been standing in the classic stance of the javelin thrower, the leading arm outstretched and pointing at his target, the right arm holding the harpoon cocked back over his shoulder. Whale harpoons have a line attached back to the boat, and this line uncoils as the harpoon flies through the air, but the Miskito fishgig designed differently; it is self-contained. A wooden reel stuck on the back end of the shaft holds the retrieval line and also acts like a floating marker. Now Charles flings the weapon, and the shaft, peg, reel, and line all hurtle through the air. The harpoon strikes the water, disappears, and then the wooden reel comes surging back to the surface, twirling. It is a successful strike. The unseen fish is ripping off the line as it tries to escape, and the floating reel spins. Charles helps Marcus punt the dugout canoe rapidly to where he can lean over and grab the floating reel and line. Marcus picks up the harpoon shaft, which has also floated to the surface. Muscles bulging on his forearms, Charles hauls steadily on the harpoon line, gathering in the catch. As the fish comes closer to the canoe, the angle of the line grows steeper. It is vertical in the water, and taut as wire. Charles pulls in another two feet of line, then pauses carefully. Out of the water suddenly springs an evil-looking snake. It is thin as a lash, and dances back and forth maniacally. It whips in every direction, deliberately seeking a target. Occasionally it slaps into the side of the canoe, only an inch or two from Charles’s body. It is the stinging whiptail of the ray. Carefully Charles leans aside, never taking his eye from the poisonous tail as he reaches down into the canoe, and picks up a cutlass. He waits his moment, and with a backhanded chop slices off the deadly tail. He lifts the now-harmless fish into the canoe. From the moment he first saw the stingray in the lagoon until it is flopping in the bilge of the canoe is less than three minutes. The fish is three feet across, and could feed a family for two days. Charles pulls out the harpoon peg, picks up the ray, and tosses it back into the water to swim away. ‘The tail will grow again,’ he says.

  I wonder if this was a fluke, a lucky strike. So when Charles asks if I would like to see it again, I say yes. In the next twenty minutes he spots, stalks and boats four more stingrays. He has achieved five hits out of six throws. He hits the final ray clear through the eye.

  My quest for a Miskito ‘striker’ is over. It is time for Kendra and me to leave. As we arrive at Bilwi’s airport to catch our flight, Marco, our guide from Sandy Bay, staggers into view. He is hugely and harmlessly drunk. Every pore of his body reeks of rum and beer. He had found his way from town, where he has been carousing away his wages, and out to the airport to say goodbye. He brushes unsteadily past the security guards and bears down on us. Then he throws his arms around each one of us in turn, buries his head in the curve between neck and shoulder, and gives a long, deep, shuddering, sniffing snuffle. It is the kia walaia, the traditional Miskito sign of greeting, affection and farewell. Kia walaia, Kend
ra later tells me, translates as ‘to smell, to understand’. I imagine that it was the embrace which the two Miskito, Will and Robin, exchanged on the island of Juan Fernández on the day when the Batchelor’s Delight brought ‘Man Friday’s’ long solitude to an end.

  Chapter Four

  PAINTED MAN

  E. Crusoe spends the night in a tree.

  IF A FOREST IS THE BEST PLACE to hide a leaf, a library is the easiest place to mislay a book, and the worst place to try to find it again. As a result the ‘lost list’ tantalized Defoe experts for a quarter of a century.

  The ‘lost list’ was a catalogue. The only clue to its existence was an advertisement which appeared in the London press six months after Defoe’s death in 1731. A London bookseller, Olive Payne, placed the advertisement to announce that he would be selling off Defoe’s personal collection of books. In his advertisement Olive Payne informed the public that they could pick up a free copy of his auction catalogue at any one of eight booksellers’ shops prior to the auction and see exactly what was in the ‘curious Collection of Books’ going on sale.