Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The yacht, it turned out, was easy to spot. It lay cast up on the shore, tilted over on its side, and was carmine red. We could see the wreck almost from the moment we began to distinguish the low, blue-grey profile of Salt Tortuga at mid-morning on 10 May. We had hove-to the previous night during the passage from Margarita so that we would approach with the sun high enough to reveal the coral outliers. Fortunately the water was as transparent as the most blatant travel poster, and it was easy to skirt the dark arm of reef which protects the anchorage. The spectacular aquamarine of the shallows and the strip of dazzling white sand were the only concessions to the image of a lush tropical island. Tortuga was low and flat. Behind the beach dune we could see only a thin edge of sage green. Apart from the corrugated-metal roofs of the fishermen’s sheds shimmering in the heat, nothing broke the horizon. There was no hill, nothing to relieve the flat landscape, not a single tree. Salt Tortuga was a flat, bleak, hot prospect.

  Trondur caught a booby as we arrived. He baited a hook with a chunk of leftover barracuda, floated the lure behind the boat on light line, and waited. Soon the booby earned its reputation as ‘a very simple creature’. The size of a small and undernourished goose, the bird fluttered closer to take a look, then landed awkwardly, spreading out its ungainly webbed feet as it flopped down on to the sea. Paddling over to the bait, the booby opened its large yellow beak and gobbled down the morsel. Trondur tugged. The startled booby was hauled aboard, flapping futilely. Its neck was quickly wrung, and Trondur had provided our supper.

  We ate the booby on the beach later that same afternoon. Ziska lay before us, safely anchored in water of such clarity that she seemed to float on glass. A single fishing boat had looked into the bay and gone. There was no one else. We made a fire of driftwood and sat on sand of extraordinary fineness. It was as soft and yielding as the finest-milled white flour. Trondur skinned and disjointed the booby, and the morsels were skewered on twigs and propped over the embers. The pieces of booby took a very long time to cook, and the dark flesh did, as Dampier promised, ‘eat fishy’. Nor was there much substance to chew on. If boobies were ‘often eaten by the privateers’, they must have needed at least one bird per man or gone hungry. When we tired of gnawing on the charred flesh, we tossed the remnants to the dog the fishermen had left behind to guard their shacks. Initially the dog had done its duty and come to bark ferociously. Then, losing heart, it had crept closer, and begged for scraps. When we left the beach and rowed back to Ziska in Ash’s tiny dinghy, the dog sat down on the crest of the dune and looked bereft. Then it lifted its muzzle and began to howl and howl. His wailing made Salt Tortuga seemed an even more abandoned place.

  *

  PITMAN PUBLISHED A little book about his escape from Barbados and his adventure as a maroon on Salt Tortuga thirty years before Daniel Defoe wrote The Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Pitman’s lively account has a notably similar title. It is A Relation of the great suffering and strange adventures of Henry Pitman, Chirurgeon, and it went on public sale on 13 June 1689 ‘at the sign of the Ship in St. Paul’s Churchyard’. This was the premises of John Taylor, a London bookseller. Pitman’s booklet runs to just thirty-six pages in modern typeface. A further nine pages describe the remarkable way in which his comrade-in-adventure, John Whicker, succeeds in escaping from Salt Tortuga. This compares to over 200 pages to tell Robinson Crusoe’s story. Defoe had much more room to expand and embroider his tale of a castaway, and he introduces all sorts of additional themes and episodes not found in Pitman’s terse account. Yet so many details from Pitman’s story surface in one form or another in the tale of Robinson Crusoe that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Daniel Defoe must have got his hands on Pitman’s ‘great suffering and strange adventures’.

  Both narrators, the one real, the other fictional, begin their adventures by enduring a form of slavery and then fleeing in a small boat. Pitman suffers as a ‘convict felon’ before escaping in his small boat from Barbados; Crusoe starts his adventure by being made a slave by Barbary corsairs. He is aboard a merchant ship captured by the corsairs, and brought to the coast of North Africa where he lives the life of a slave until after two years he too begins to think how he can obtain his freedoom. His master has taken a tender from the merchant ship and is using it for day-fishing trips. Crusoe now plots to take this tender; he stocks it with a store of food and others supplies including ‘a large basket of Rusk or bisket’, three jars of water, several bottles of liquor, ‘a great lump of Bees-Wax which weighed above half a hundred weight, with a Parcel of Twine or Thread, a Hatchet, a Saw and a Hammer, all which were of great Use to us afterwards.’ The tools and supplies that Crusoe prepares bear a strong resemblance to Pitman’s real stores list as he gets ready to escape Barbados, and there is an uncanny resonance between Crusoe’s ‘great lump of Bees-Wax’ which he uses ‘to make Candles’, and Pitman’s stock of ready-made candles which become ‘bruised into one great mass of tallow’. But it is when Pitman begins to describe his island life on Salt Tortuga that the foretaste of Robinson Crusoe becomes more and more striking.

  ‘Before I proceed to give account of our manner of life in this place’, Pitman begins, ‘I think it necessary to give a short description of the island itself’. He calculates Salt Tortuga, accurately enough, as being twelve miles in length and two or three broad. The east and west end of the island were sandy ‘for the most part’. The middle consisted of ‘hard and craggy rocks that are very porous and resemble honeycombs’ so the maroons gave them a nickname, Honeycomb Rocks. There were plenty of bushes growing out of the sand, and shrubs between the rocks. But there were no trees. On the south-east corner were found the salinas, the salt pans for which the English named the island, though the Spaniards knew the place only as Tortuga ‘from the plenty of turtles that resort thither’.

  These turtles formed ‘the chiefest of our diet’, Pitman remembered. The first priority of the four pirates who had stayed behind was to show the new arrivals how to ‘turn turtle’. Every night the maroons walked quietly along the beach looking for the fresh tracks of the hen turtles. It was important for the castaways to patrol stealthily because a turtle about to emerge from the sea will turn and retreat if startled. Typically a hen turtle goes ashore to lay eggs a few weeks after mating. She hauls herself up the beach on her fore flippers, scrapes out a body pit and deposits in the hole between 50 and 200 glistening white eggs the size and shape of ping-pong balls. The female then covers the nest with sand, turns round and begins to crawl ponderously back to the sea. The whole process takes two to three hours, and leaves a distinctive groove in the sand, with a series of hollows on each side where the front flippers have served as levers to propel the animal forward. Once she is a few yards up the beach, the turtle is helpless. She is even more vulnerable when the laying process has begun and she lies there quietly dropping the egg stream. The hunter has only to turn the turtle on its back – not always an easy task with an animal weighing between 130 and 450 pounds – and the animal is immobilized. This technique works for green turtle but not for hawksbill turtle, which are more agile. If overturned, the hawksbill can lever themselves back again with their flippers and return to the sea.

  Pitman and his companions would ‘turn’ their turtle at night and leave the animals where they lay. The next morning they walked back to the spot, either to butcher the animal or, more usually, to build a sun screen over the catch. Properly shaded from the sun, the turtle is able to survive for four or five days, a great advantage to the maroons who could keep a supply of fresh food ready on demand.

  They had difficulty in opening the turtle shells at first, snapping their knife blades as they tried to prise the upper carapace from the plastron, the lower shell. They did better when they replaced the broken knives with heavier, stronger tools they fabricated from the swords they had brought with them. They broke the sword blades ‘into suitable lengths and softened them in the fire, and then rubbed them on a stone to a fit shape and thinnes
s; and after we had hardened them again, we fixed them in hafts and made them more serviceable than our former [knives]’.

  Once they had opened the shells, they roasted strips of turtle flesh ‘by the fire on wooden spits’. They found that the meat was ‘very delightsome and pleasant to the taste, much resembling the veal’. For a special treat the maroons took the opened and half-scraped shells and propped them up on forked sticks thrust into the sand, facing the embers. This grilled the edible shell lining, the succulent calipash and calipee. As this was the height of the egg-laying season, April to June, there was an ample supply of turtle. But the maroons were aware that their turtle harvest would soon dwindle and, expecting a long stay, they took the precaution of slicing the surplus turtle meat into fine strips, rubbing them with salt, and then draping the fillets on wooden racks to dry in the sunshine and turn them into biltong or jerky.

  Turtles also crawl up on Robinson Crusoe’s island as Defoe imagines it. Crusoe explores his island and arrives at a beach some distance from the point where he was wrecked ashore. There he finds ‘the shore was covered with innumerable Turtles’. Defoe then makes it clear that if Crusoe had come across the turtles sooner, his early days on the island would have been easier. Catching turtles was simpler than hunting wild goats. It is only after Crusoe tames his flock of goats and starts growing crops that he has a more reliable food source. Even then he still needs turtle eggs when he is sick. A fever-stricken Crusoe manages to choke down some goat’s meat but gets ready three turtles’ eggs by his bed so that when the fever comes back, he can eat the eggs ‘roasted in the ashes’ and washed down with diluted rum.

  Sea turtle eggs, Pitman explains to his reader, are ‘fully as large as hen’s eggs, but with this difference that these are round and covered only with a thick strong membrane or skin’. He and his colleagues collected the eggs and beat the yolks together in calabashes with some salt. Then they poured the mixture onto a shard of broken pottery they had found lying on the beach, and greased with turtle fat. Using this makeshift skillet they cooked the eggs over the campfire ‘like pancakes’, which they then ate as a substitute for bread.

  Their need for a better cook pot – and the difficulty of making it – leads Pitman to one of his most Crusoesque details. He explains how he and his companions grew weary of eating their turtle flesh always roasted. They wanted – like Crusoe in Defoe’s story – the choice of being able to cook the flesh as a stew. But they did not have a suitable stew pot. They possessed only ‘two or three earthen jars left by the privateers, some few calabashes, and shells of fish that we found by the seaside’. So the maroons carried out a number of experiments with making their own crockery. They searched for suitable clay or earth, but not finding any, they tried mixing ‘the finest sand with the yolks of turtles’ eggs’ into a thick paste. To give the paste enough substance for them to mould the pots into shape, they then added goats’ hair to the mix – this is the only time Pitman mentions goats on Salt Tortuga, though Dampier said there were goats on the island ‘but not many’. Finally they put their clumsy pots out to dry, though whether to bake in the sun or near the fire Pitman does not say. Not surprisingly Pitman admits glumly that ‘we could not possibly make them [the pots] endure the drying.’ The pots collapsed and the maroons had to revert ‘to eat our turtle roasted by the fire on wooden spits’.

  Defoe has Robinson Crusoe follow a similar routine: Crusoe decides he should try making pots, first as storage jars and later to use as a casserole to cook up goat stew. He finds some clay and begins trying to make the shapes. But he admits that ‘it would make the Reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this Paste, what odd mishapen ugly things I made, how many fell in, and how many fell out, the Clay not being stiff enough to bear its own weight’. After many trials and bungled attempts recalling Pitman’s experience, Crusoe finally succeeds in making ‘two large earthen ugly things, I cannot call them Jarrs’ by baking them in the sun. By chance a shard of this earthenware is hardened into a glaze in the embers of his fire, and he then goes on to make a fire-resistant pot to cook his stew.

  Crusoe echoes Pitman’s tale again when he uses his new pottery skills to make a clay tobacco pipe. Crusoe had ‘been used to smoke’. He finds wild tobacco growing on his island and regrets that he has not salvaged any tobacco pipes from the wreck of his ship. He turns his hand to making a crude pipe. It was ‘a very ugly clumsy thing when it was done . . . yet it was hard and firm and would draw the Smoke, I was exceedingly comforted with it.’ Thirty years earlier Pitman had reported how he and his companions discovered on Salt Tortuga a substitute for tobacco. ‘There is’, he wrote, ‘a pleasant fragrant herb [which] grows out of the sand among the rocks which we call Wild Sage whose leaves we smoked instead of tobacco.’ Lacking the clay and skill to make Crusoe’s rough clay pipe, Pitman satisfied his craving by gathering wild sage and then ‘for want of a pipe I smoked it in a crab’s claw’.

  Crusoe-style turtles, tool- and pot-making, and wild tobacco are joined on Salt Tortuga by a Man Friday figure. He is the Indian whom Pitman had ransomed from the pirates. Yanche’s men had brought the captive to Salt Tortuga from the adjacent mainland, and Pitman purchased him, thinking the Indian would have useful survival skills. Now Pitman records: ‘I went abroad with my Indian a-fishing, at which he was so dextrous that with his bow and arrow he would shoot a small fish at a great distance.’ Like Robinson Crusoe, when Pitman is not fishing or exploring the island on foot, he and his colleagues spend ‘most of our time’ in their huts ‘sometimes reading or writing’. Crusoe did likewise. They also walk inland to gather wild fruit. So did Crusoe. On Salt Tortuga the fruit came in the form of small red berries ‘about the bigness of a small nut, in taste resembling a strawberry’, which they found embedded in the body of a low cactus they called ‘Turk’s Heads’.

  *

  ZISKA’S VOYAGE had already demonstrated that Pitman’s account of how he had arrived on Salt Tortuga was credible. The track of the little skiff in which he and his colleagues had fled from Barbados was correct. The passage time to Margarita and on to Salt Tortuga matched the prevailing winds and currents. The main features he gave for the island – its size, location, and so forth – were all reasonably accurate. But these were details Pitman could have taken from a sea chart or gleaned second-hand, and then added to his yarn to make it seem more authentic. If I was to consider seriously the possibility that Pitman’s astonishing tale was a major source for the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s novel contained elements from Pitman’s true-life experience, then I had to be sure that Pitman’s story was itself genuine. The events themselves – the midnight escape in the open boat, the cruel marooning at the hands of Yanche’s men, the climactic reversal of fortune when the second set of pirates arrives – were so dramatic that they were worthy of Robinson Crusoe, but also they were so far-fetched that they could be fiction. Was Pitman’s yarn a pure fabrication like Defoe’s? Had someone invented this resourceful surgeon who escapes from slavery and lives on a desert island? If the details in Pitman’s story were pinpoint accurate, then his story was likely to be true. If, however, the reality of Tortuga did not match with Pitman’s description, then the surgeon’s adventures were no more real than the Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, written ‘by himself’. Defoe, writing in haste, famously trips up on several key details – at one stage he misplaces ‘Crusoe’s island’ by ten degrees of latitude and has to correct the error in a later edition of his book, and at another point he switches latitude with longitude and confuses the equator with the International Date Line.

  On the morning after our arrival on Salt Tortuga, Trondur, Tristan and I set out to explore the island. Ash, true to form, preferred to stay behind on his beloved Ziska and work on her upkeep.

  We began our trek at the carmine-red wreck of the yacht. The broken hull lay five minutes’ walk along the floury white sand to the west of us, where the rocks began. The v
essel had once been someone’s dream. –IBERTY Austria was written across her stern. Now she was a ruin. The waves had tossed her up on the ironbound shore. At high tide the water sluiced in and out noisily through a great hole punched in the port side. The mast had long since been plundered. Every single item of deck gear, even down to the hatch covers, had been stripped off her. She lay a bare, battered hull with the fibreglass skin starting to flake in the sun. I was reminded of the hulk the pirates left Pitman and his colleagues after they had stolen all the gear and sails. If fibreglass burned more easily, I imagined, –IBERTY would have been set on fire by her scavengers.

  We had been warned in Margarita that to go exploring on Tortuga we needed three things: a compass, a supply of drinking water, and stout footwear. Walking inland from the wrecked yacht with our bottle of water, the reasons for the advice became clear. The landscape stretched out bleak and flat before us. A few low knolls were too far away and insignificant to be much use as landmarks. The vegetation was uniform – low scrub, a few bushes, no trees. It was exactly as Pitman had described. Overhead the sky was a washed-out blue with dragged-out wisps of high cirrus, and a heat haze was beginning to develop. There was a feeling of utter emptiness as if a portion of the Australian outback had been dropped down on the rim of the Caribbean.

  Only the wind gave a general sense of direction. It came steadily from our left, the east, not strong but rustling across the scrub and providing a strangely hollow sensation with its insistent presence. Sharper sounds – the rattle of a stone underfoot, the distant twitter of an unseen bird – seemed to vanish upward into the empty sky. There was no moisture. Every plant was adapted to surviving drought. Some cut evaporation to a minimum. Their few leaves were small or shrivelled into spines. Others stored fluid in their fleshy bodies. Most hugged the ground defensively. The dominant colours were drab, the bleached greys and browns of an arid land.