Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Before Murdo and I left Kalidonia, Leonidas made mementoes for us. Using a borrowed pencil, he drew two pictures on a scrap of cardboard: for Murdo a three-masted ship flying the cross of St Andrew and the rising sun – the emblem of the Scots Darién Company; for me a profile of ‘painted rabbit island’ and a hat-wearing Kuna paddling a canoe. His daughters, Leonilla and Rosie, took the sketches and stitched the pictures as molas for us. They also, with many giggles, split the fruit of a chi chi tree to extract the sticky juice, pounded charcoal from the hearth, and made a batch of their cosmetic ink. Using a thin stick they drew a black line down Murdo’s nose.

  Leonidas, as our mentor, also asked a favour. When we came to our homes, he would like us to send him videotapes of all the conversations when he had told us about life on Kalidonia and Kuna lore. One day, he said, there would be electricity on Kalidonia, and television and a machine to play the videotapes. Perhaps he would be dead by then, but if his people could watch the tapes, he would still be their teacher.

  As for Murdo the teacher, I wondered how his pupils in the Outer Hebrides would react if he came back from Kalidonia with a black Kuna paint stripe still running down his nose.

  Chapter Five

  SALT TORTUGA

  F. Mutineers set ashore their prisoners.

  ‘WAYED ANKOR . . . from the lagoon at St. Georges – beutifal sailing day’.

  The sentence, with its pleasingly idiosyncratic spelling, could have come from the era of Robinson Crusoe. The penmanship was suitably antique. The letters were rounded and erratic. They rambled this way, then that, and paid little attention to the ruled lines on the page. They looked as if they had been scratched with a quill pen on a rumpled sheet of parchment. I found myself thinking that this was how maroons and castaways of the late seventeenth century could have begun their journals. Yet the words were fresh on the page. They were the first entry in the logbook of the vessel carrying me on the final phase of my quest for Robinson Crusoe. The skipper had written them. Far from being a seventeenth-century mariner, he had just celebrated his twenty-third birthday.

  Ashley – known, of course, as Ash – was the proud owner of the only boat I could find to satisfy the requirements I set: I wanted to sail to three small Caribbean islands marked on the map which apparently led Defoe to locate ‘Crusoe’s island’ off the mouth of the Orinoco River. This map, it will be remembered, is printed in the book by William Dampier, the buccaneer captain published in 1697, A New Voyage Round the World. His descriptions of the Caribbean were a source for many of Defoe’s ideas about the geography of the place where Robinson Crusoe is cast away. Now I intended to check these three islands to see if one of them might fit the description of ‘Crusoe’s island’ better than the nonexistent island off the Orinoco. The three genuine islands – all clearly located by Herman Moll, Dampier’s map-maker – had each witnessed a dramatic shipwreck or a marooning which Defoe could have known about when he came to write his novel. Visiting these islands I hoped to discover what conditions these castaways and maroons really had to face, and if their adventures matched the ‘Crusoe experience’. It was also my chance to sample the sailing conditions faced by mariners in the days of Robinson Crusoe. I planned to make the 1,400-mile journey in a small old wooden sailing boat without an engine. I would arrive on the islands like the men whose stories I was investigating, with the help of only the wind and current.

  The vessel for the voyage was lying at St George’s Harbour in the West Indian island of Grenada. She was ninety-nine years old, had never been fitted with an engine, and was built to an English fishing boat design that dated back at least to the mid-1800s. She had kept her original sail plan – including the obsolete and heavy gaff rig – had no electrics, and there was very little in the way of modern gear. She was called Ziska after a Bohemian folk hero, a warlord in the days of religious strife in Central Europe. The fact that her owner wrote in a late seventeenth-century hand and with a complete disregard for modern rules of spelling and grammar had nothing to do with nostalgia for the past. It was because Ash was so dyslexic that he had virtually given up formal schooling when he was fourteen years old. At that same time he had discovered a passion – and a talent – for the restoration of wooden boats. His family lived near the coast in south-east England, and Ash had hung about boatyards and scrimped and saved until he could salvage and restore Ziska. Then he sailed away to sea, across the Atlantic to the sunlit lure of the Caribbean. Three centuries earlier, I imagined, he would have gone wandering like young Lionel Wafer, and perhaps finished up as a buccaneer. He would have been made welcome because Ash was a meticulous shipwright. Coltishly thin, blond, and with bright blue eyes made all the more startling by his deep tan, Ash looked even younger than he was. Ziska was his home, his joy, and his obsession. Around his upper left bicep was tattooed a blue band which depicted dolphins, waves, and a gaff-rigged sailing boat.

  *

  IT WAS CONVENIENT that Ziska was lying in St George’s Harbour. The first maroon on my list to investigate had started his adventure close by on the island of Barbados. Henry Pitman was another surgeon, like Wafer, and an unlucky one. He had arrived in Barbados as a felon. In 1685 he had taken part in the unsuccessful rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth against the King, James II. Arrested while fleeing from the defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor, Pitman claimed that he had been a noncombatant. He told his captors that he had merely served in his capacity as a doctor, and tended the injuries of soldiers whether they were rebels or loyal to the crown. His excuses were rejected. The arresting officers stripped him of his clothes, rifled his pockets and threw him in jail pending trial on a charge of treason. After a preliminary interrogation, he appeared at the assizes in the town of Wells. There he faced a panel of judges headed by the soon-to-be-notorious Lord Chief Justice of England, ‘Hanging’ Jeffreys.

  This was the era when Judge George Jeffreys was gaining his odious nickname. He and his panel of fellow judges devised a method of dealing rapidly with the hundreds of suspected rebels. The court offered the prisoners a choice: they could either plead guilty and throw themselves on the mercy of the court, or claim that they were innocent and be subjected to a full cross-examination. But in the latter case, if they were found guilty the latter, the sentence was automatic – execution. To make his point, Judge Jeffreys deliberately selected for his first batch of cases some twenty-eight prisoners against whom there was strong evidence. When they pleaded not guilty, he heard their cases, pronounced them guilty, and the same afternoon signed warrants for their execution. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the remaining prisoners preferred to enter a guilty plea and await a lesser sentence. Some were even expecting pardons. To their dismay Jeffreys ordered the execution of 230 prisoners – the bitter catchphrase now became ‘Confess and be Hanged!’ – and shipped most of the rest off to the ‘Caribbee Islands’ as convicts. There they were to serve ten years’ forced labour.

  The mass transportation swept away Pitman and his brother, also implicated in the rebellion, while their family tried to reduce the impact of the sentence. They paid a bribe to the businessman who had been given charge of the convicts’ transportation. In return, he promised that the two brothers would not be sold on arrival in Barbados like the other prisoners. Instead they would be handed over to a sympathetic master who would pay them wages and treat them fairly.

  It was hardly surprising that in the unscrupulous world of ‘the Caribbees’ this promise was promptly broken. In Barbados Henry Pitman and his brother found themselves sold off like cattle. They read with outrage the Lieutenant Governor’s proclamation which detailed the conditions of their employment. As punishment for their ‘late wicked inhuman and damnable Rebellion’ they were to serve the full ten years with no possibility whatsoever of remission. They were obliged to carry out ‘all such labour or services as they shall be commanded to perform and do by their Owners, Masters or Mistresses, or their Overseers’. The Secretary to the Governor would keep an up-to-date list o
f all the felons on the island, and no one would be allowed to leave Barbados without a ‘Ticket’ or passport which could only be issued after the list had been checked. If any ‘convict rebel’ was caught trying to escape secretly from the island, he would be given ‘thirty nine lashes on his bare body’, set in the pillory, and branded on the forehead with a hot iron with the letters F.T. for ‘Fugitive Traitor’.

  The proclamation also attempted to close down any practical means of escape. It ordered ‘Every Owner or Keeper’ of ‘any small vessel, sloop, shallop, wherry, fishing boat or any other sort of boat belonging in the island’ to register his boat with the local magistrates and lodge a bond of £200. He would forfeit this bond if any ‘servant’ used his vessel to get away from Barbados, with or without the owner’s knowledge. When a shipwright made a new boat, he too had to add it to the boat register or risk confiscation. No ‘servant’, of course, would be allowed to keep a boat.

  Even a shrewd marriage would not help a ‘convict rebel’ shorten his punishment. Should he try to obtain remission by marrying a local woman and changing his status from rebel to citizen, his ownership would be shifted to a new master forthwith. The woman who had married him would be fined £200 and ‘suffer Six Month’s imprisonment for such her intermarrying with any of the said rebels convict’. A similar penalty would be inflicted on anyone so rash as to ‘suffer or consent to the marriage of their daughters or other near relations’.

  In short, Pitman and hundreds of condemned rebels like him were confined to Barbados for ten full years in conditions of legalized slavery.

  It was fifteen months before Henry Pitman came to the conclusion that he had to escape. He had been abominably treated. His master, a planter, refused to give him decent clothing and fed him so poorly on a unvarying diet of ‘salt Irish beef’, salt fish and maize dumplings that he suffered from frequent bouts of diarrhoea. At the same time the planter expected him to continue his work as a surgeon, and pocketed any fees that he earned from his clients. When he complained about his food and the quality of his lodgings, he was brusquely warned that they could be made even worse. Stubbornly he asked to be transferred to do manual work alongside the slaves in the field. His planter-master thrashed him with a cane and put him in the stocks. Only the pity of the planter’s wife obtained his release after twelve hours in the blazing sunshine. Pitman’s sole satisfaction was that his owner eventually slid into such heavy debt that he could not keep up his payments on the original purchase of his servant. He was obliged to return Pitman and his brother to the businessman who had imported him from the assizes in England. At this stage Pitman’s brother died, and Pitman was left with the bitter feeling that he himself was reduced to nothing more than the status of ‘unsold goods’.

  He began to lay plans to acquire a boat.

  Henry Pitman began by contacting John Nuthall, an impoverished woodcarver working on Barbados. Nuthall was not a ‘convict rebel’ so he was allowed to own a small boat on condition that he registered it with the island secretariat. However, Pitman knew that Nuthall wanted to get off Barbados; he was an undischarged debtor. If he absconded from the island and disappeared, he would leave his creditors behind. In a series of secretive meetings Pitman offered to organize and pay all the expenses of an escape. Nuthall quickly fell in with the scheme, and Pitman handed him £12 to buy a ship’s boat. The money, Pitman mentions in his account of his adventures, came from the sale of goods which Pitman’s family in England had been smuggling out to him. Using the £12, Nuthall acquired the ship’s tender from a visiting merchant ship, a slaver arrived from West Africa, though the boat was very small. A skiff is how Pitman describes it.

  The local magistrates were suspicious when Nuthall went to register the little boat, as the proclamation insisted: they demanded to know how, as a bankrupt, he had obtained the money to buy the boat. Nervously Nuthall reported back to Pitman. He advised that the best way to lull suspicions was to sink the boat deliberately. Once the skiff was underwater, officialdom would lose interest. The policy of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ seemed to work, and Pitman began putting together, in secret, the necessary supplies for their departure.

  Pitman and Nuthall had decided their best course was to try to reach the Dutch-owned island of Curaçao. There they would be beyond the reach of English law. From Barbados to Curaçao is a distance of 600 miles. For food the surgeon calculated that the fugitives would be able to manage with a hundredweight of bread, a cask of fresh water, and a few bottles of Madeira wine and beer and a quantity of cheese. Pitman also laid in a stock of boatbuilding material in case they had to make repairs at sea. He describes how he obtained nails, some spare planks, and a large canvas tarpaulin. Included on his list of necessities were a hatchet, a saw, and a hammer. Pitman also obtained a stock of ready-made candles for his trip. In the hurly-burly of the departure they became ‘bruised into one mass of tallow’.

  6. The South-east Caribbean

  Buying all these items meant that Pitman was running short on cash, so he drew in two more accomplices. Thomas Austin and John Whicker were both ‘convict rebels’ and keen to escape. Between them they were able to find the extra money for the supplies and to help Nuthall fend off his most immediate creditors. The plotters knew they would be foolish to stop at any islands en route where they might be recognized and arrested. So Pitman got his hands on a basic set of navigational equipment – compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, half-minute glass, and a log and line for measuring speed and calculating distance. As it turned out, he was the only member of the crew who knew how to use them.

  Locating and hiding all these items widened the circle of Pitman’s accomplices even further. More and more partners were added to the plot until there were nine in total. This was too many for the little boat to carry safely or comfortably. But Pitman pressed ahead. He concealed the food and other stores in the house of a friend who lived near the harbour, and for security reasons kept most of the members of the team ignorant as to when or how the escape would take place. John Whicker was his go-between. Fortunately Whicker had a job at a little-used warehouse near the wharf which Pitman planned to use as the embarkation point. Whicker informed the conspirators that when Pitman gave the word they should assemble at this warehouse, bringing side arms with them if possible.

  Pitman saw his chance when the governor of the island of Nevis paid a visit to Barbados. Naturally the Governor of Barbados announced that he would honour his distinguished guest with a ceremony of welcome. The Barbados militia received orders to dress in their uniforms and parade. Pitman anticipated that after the parade the tired, hot and sweaty soldiers would go off to the taverns to carouse and get drunk, and their guard would be slack. He sent word to Nuthall to have the little boat raised from her watery hiding place, bale her out, and bring her to the wharf. Meanwhile Pitman arranged for the stores to be carried down to the harbour from his friend’s house, and told Whicker to inform the conspirators that they were to assemble at the warehouse after dark.

  At one hour before midnight on 9 May 1687 the escapees quietly made their way to the rendezvous. They stationed one man at the root of the pier to give warning if the militia approached, then began loading the stores into their tiny boat. To their alarm they had not finished the task when the lookout alerted them that a militia patrol was heading towards the wharf. The conspirators scattered and ran away in the dark. Pitman scuttled off to his friend’s house and hid. He was convinced that the plot had been discovered and he risked, as he put it, ‘a burnt forehead and sore back’. He was wondering whether or not he should make a run for the mountains when there was a low call at the window. Pitman recognized the voice of one of his accomplices. Apparently the arrival of the militia had been a false alarm. The soldiers had come only to look for one of their comrades and ask him to join their revels. Not finding him, they had wandered away from the wharf without paying any attention to the escape boat tied up against the quay. Pitman was now so close to losing his nerve that h
e was only persuaded to go back to the wharf after his colleagues pointed out that he was the only navigator among them. Thomas Austin, one of the original conspirators, took a different view. The prospect of setting out in such a small, open boat overwhelmed him at the last moment. He ‘was so possessed with fear of being cast away, that he would not go with us’.

  In the warm darkness of a Caribbean night, eight frightened and desperate men climbed down from the wharf into their little boat, and cast off. Besides John Nuthall the woodcarver, there was another debtor, Thomas Walker. All the rest were ‘rebel convicts’, former supporters of the Duke of Monmouth, and Pitman lists their names. They were John Whicker, Peter Bagwell, William Woodcock, John Cooke, and a man called Jeremiah Atkins.