Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  That evening we clambered on the rocks of Los Palanquinos. With Trondur’s guidance it was easy to understand how maroons and castaways could survive in that location, even though there are no turtles now on Salt Tortuga’s magnificent sweep of beach. Pitman had written of catching crayfish and how ‘for change of diet we sometimes ate a small sort of shellfish that live on the rocks, and are like snails, but much larger, called Wilks [whelks]’. We caught no crayfish but many crabs. Trondur dropped a rag over them as they scuttled clear of their hiding places under rocks, and he and Ash collected half a bucket of crabs in half an hour. For variety they then gathered a selection of the ‘wilks’, some of them three inches across, and sea urchins. Trondur, shaggy as a musk ox, and up to his shins in the sea water, stooping to turn over rocks, then pouncing on his prey, made the perfect Crusoe image.

  Tristan and I spent the next day ashore, investigating the natural campsite. Just behind the dune ridge we found the skeleton of a slightly more substantial hut, a couple of vertical wooden posts bleached grey by the sun, and a couple of slumped rails. Rooting around in the scrub and rubbish, Tristan came across the desiccated leg of a small goat, the hair still on it. Clearly this spot was still used by whoever came to the island, though it was deserted now. We could find no trace of a well so either the visitor brought water for the stock or, more likely, dug a shallow well which was now dry. A modern castaway need no longer trudge across the island to find salt. On the edge of the sea and fifty yards away from the abandoned hut, Tristan found a bowl-shaped hollow in the rocks which the storm spray had filled with sea water. Now it contained a soft layer of pure salt, white above and pink below.

  After the scenes of other shipwrecks and maroonings in Nicaragua, Honduras and Juan Fernández I could see why Pitman and his companions had chosen to remain at Los Palanquinos. Here was a ready supply of food on the shoreline, a well dug by Yanche’s pirates, and a broad expanse of turtle-nesting beach to the east. Less obvious was the source of firewood and building materials on an island devoid of large trees. The patterns of tides and currents had not changed still deposited all manner of offerings – lengths of timber, old ropes and scraps of fishing nets, and the battered plastic detritus of a modern age. The sandspit at Los Palanquinos was littered with beached flotsam. To the maroons it was the vital bounty of the sea.

  Our search of the natural campsite done, Tristan and I sat on the slope of the beach dune, facing out towards Ziska anchored in the lee of the reef. In the foreground, stark on the white expanse of the sand spit, was the bamboo tepee. A line of pelicans stood gravely at the water’s edge, making a brown frieze against the blue-green of the Caribbean. It was a stage setting for a castaway story even if the spot had not matched Pitman’s detailed description so exactly. I brought out my camera and held it to my eye. As I looked through the lens, a blurred shadow passed across the image. Thinking it was the camera strap blown by the wind, I brushed my hand across the lens. There was a light tickling sensation. Puzzled, I held the camera to one side and turned my hand. Clinging to it, and staring at me with bright eyes, was a small emerald green and grey lizard. I put my hand to the ground, and the little creature scuttled off. We had seen these little lizards on our walk across the island. But they had always flickered off as we approached, darting away and hiding in the rock crevices. At Los Palanquinos the lizards reacted very differently. As Tristan and I sat there, more and more lizards appeared, creeping and darting and dodging among the matted stalks and fleshy rice-grain leaves of the pink and yellow sea samphire which covered the dune face. What attracted the lizards, I could not tell. Normally so shy, here these creatures were friendly and curious. Soon they were hopping up onto our feet, running up our legs, scuttling along our arms, climbing into our hair.

  ‘Another little insect is worthy to be mentioned, called Lizards’, Pitman wrote: ‘they were so familiar and friendly that they would come boldly among us and do us no harm.’ Their bodies were ‘adorned with divers delightsome colours’ and they pleased the maroons by feeding on flies and ‘for that reason they were serviceable to us’. The lizards were ‘so very tame that, when we were eating, they would come on our meat and hands to catch flies’.

  With lizards climbing through my hair and resting on my shirt collar, it was easy to sense the maroons’ pleasure in the society of these tiny iridescent companions. For me it was the final clinching detail: unless Henry Pitman, maroon and surgeon to the Duke of Monmouth, had himself lived on that beach, there was no way he could have known about the friendly lizards of Salt Tortuga.

  *

  MY VISIT to Salt Tortuga had established the veracity of Henry Pitman’s claim that he had lived as a maroon on Salt Tortuga. But I still had two more islands to investigate.

  Aves, ‘The Island of Birds’, was directly on Henry Pitman’s intended route to refuge in Dutch-held Curaçao. The island lies 160 miles north-west of Salt Tortuga and is correctly shown on the map in Dampier’s book from which Defoe seems to have quarried much of his Caribbean geography. Dampier also provides a graphic account of the greatest maritime disaster of the age, a catastrophe which made Aves temporary home to more than 1,500 castaways.

  About midnight on 11 May 1678, a French invasion fleet crashed headlong into the six-mile-long reef which reaches out in a great hook to the north and then west of Aves. Vice Admiral the Comte d’Estrées had been steering for an attack on Dutch-held Curaçao. Close behind his imposing flagship, Le Terrible, came the most powerful naval force in the West Indies. There were thirty-five vessels including the royal warships Le Tormant, Le Belliqueux, Le Bourbon, Le Prince, and L’Hercule. They were on night passage and with a ‘soldier’s wind’ – a following wind – from the east they should have had no difficulty in bringing the troop transports to their target. Accounts differ as to why eighteen of the ships piled up so tragically on the coral but the most common explanation is that a privateer ship acting as scout led Le Terrible to her destruction. About half the French fleet were mercenaries – ships hired for the campaign or privateers who had joined up in hopes of plunder. The identity of the fatal bellwether is unknown but she crossed the reef, struck, and was rapidly followed by Le Terrible. According to Dampier, the Vice Admiral fired guns to warn the rest of the fleet of the danger and to tell them to stand clear. But the ships following mistook the sound of the guns to mean that their leader had engaged the enemy. Instead they ‘hoised up their Topsails, and crouded all sails they could make, and ran full sail ashore after him’.

  Le Terrible had a light burning at the masthead as she lay shattered on the Aves reef, and her consorts mistook the light as a beacon. In rapid succession they crunched into the coral ‘all within half a mile of each other.’ Some accounts say 300 men and others 500 died in the havoc. Slower and less disciplined vessels bringing up the rear had enough sea room to turn round and save themselves. Many of the hired ships made little effort to help the castaways and left the scene of the disaster.

  There was so much wreckage on Aves that for years afterwards pirate vessels came to the reef for their refit. They anchored nearby and sent men on to the coral to salvage ‘masts, yards, timbers’. Dampier’s own captain, Peter Wright, helped himself to two cannon from the wrecks.

  For the castaways, the weather was calm enough for the impaled vessels to stay intact for most of the following day. Sailors and soldiers swam or waded ashore. Some were collected by ships that had lingered safely in deeper water, but many of the other castaways had to wait up to three weeks for rescue. The landsmen and navy personnel were not ‘accustomed to such hardships’, wrote Dampier, and they ‘died like rotten sheep’. By contrast those privateers who had been shipwrecked thrived. Dampier talked with some of them and they told him they ‘could not have enjoyed themselves more’. Being wrecked on the reef was better than going to Jamaica ‘with 30 pounds a man in their pockets’. These privateers watched the doomed ships break up and spill their cargo, and they calculated where the flotsam would come on land. Then
they moved in a ‘Gang’ and stationed themselves so that they were at just the right place, like vultures. ‘Though much was staved against the Rocks’, Dampier reported, ‘yet abundance of Wine and Brandy floated over the reef, where the Privateers waited to take it up’. In the three weeks before the privateers were evacuated, ‘they were never without 2 or 3 hogsheads of Wine and Brandy in their tents, and barrels of Beef and Pork’. Forty Frenchmen stayed on one of the wrecked ships, broke into the ‘store of liquor’, and got completely drunk, though whether in celebration or to drown their fears was not clear. They were so intoxicated that they did not stir when the wreck began to break apart. The section of the ship on which they were carousing floated over the reef and out to sea ‘with all the Men drinking and singing, who being in drink did not mind the danger, but were never heard of afterwards.’

  In 1998 a diving team found traces of nine vessels from d’Estrées’ lost fleet in less than thirty feet of water, though now it is birdwatchers rather than wreck-hunters who now visit Aves. The island has regained its more auspicious reputation as a roost for vast numbers of seabirds.

  Ziska took only twenty-four hours to sail from Salt Tortuga to Aves, more properly called Aves de Barlovento or Windward Aves to distinguish from its smaller neighbour, Aves de Sotavento or Leeward Aves. With her own ‘soldier’s wind’ the little yacht covered the distance so briskly that we had to reduce sail and slow her down to reduce the risk of repeating d’Estrées’ misadventure and colliding with ‘the back of the Riff’ in the dark. The dawn showed a low green island that was clearly a place for good fishing, both for birds and for men. Two small Venezuelan motor fishing vessels lay at anchor in the lee of the island, and as I clambered high into Ziska’s rigging to peer down at the coral patches and wave directions to Ash at the helm, a succession of shrieking gulls darted round my head, irritated by our intrusion.

  With the yacht neatly anchored on a patch of sand between the coral ledges, we took the little dinghy to investigate whether the Island of Birds could have provided a home for Crusoe in Defoe’s imagined Caribbean world.

  It was an eerie place. The island is very small, barely two miles long and 200 yards wide. The western end is, as Dampier said, ‘plain even savannah land without any trees’. Here the privateers-men dug two or three wells to supply them while they careened the ships in an anchorage on the northern side. The remainder of the island is now covered with dense thickets of mangrove, some of it growing thirty or forty feet high, above which rise the tops of a few larger trees. Small and shallow backwaters penetrate the mangrove; the water is the colour of pale whisky and the bottom a sickly yellow that at first sight looks like fine sand, but step on it and the foot sinks slickly up to the knee. It is a slime of bird dung.

  Guano blotches the mangrove foliage, in places only a few droplets, elsewhere broad splatters and splashes streak wide swathes of leaves. Sitting in the bushes are the seabirds. They roost in their hundreds upon hundreds until it seems that the mangroves are some bizarre kind of mythical tree that grows avian fruit. The vast majority of the birds are red-footed boobies, and we found them in every stage of growth. There were fat chicks covered in pure white fluffy down, larger than a rugby ball but with the slumped profile of a badly filled bean bag. They squatted on untidy piles of faeces-whitened sticks and waited to be fed. Mistaking the movement of our dinghy for the return of their parents, the black eyes would register our presence, a head swivelled, and the beak, black against white, gaped expectantly. Mixed among the chicks were moulting fledgelings showing two black diagonals of their future wing feathers. They were even bigger and plumper than their siblings. Then came the juvenile birds. They were slim and glossy, with ash-grey beaks and bright shoe-button eyes. They seemed athletic and debonair, until they attempted to fly. Launching themselves from the branches, their svelte elegance turned to desperation as they flapped urgently to gain speed and avoid striking the tepid water. Like novice ice skaters pushing off from the side of the rink and taking unsteady strides before gliding away, the young birds beat their wings in panic, often tipping the water before gaining a few feet of altitude and heading out to sea to learn to fish for themselves. All of the creatures, whether babies, fledgelings, or adults, scarcely stirred on their branches as we gently glided among the mangroves. Most striking of all were the boobies’ feet. They were broad and webbed and, at first sight, not designed for gripping a roosting branch. Yet they curled around their roosts, and the array of prehensile booby feet looked remarkably like a line of coral-pink rubber kitchen gloves.

  Trondur had harpooned a medium-sized shark on our passage from Salt Tortuga, so we had plenty of food aboard and no need of ‘castaway’s supplies’. But as we passed row upon row of fat and succulent booby chicks, each butterball waiting in arm’s reach, Trondur must have felt he was in Nature’s supermarket checking out the shelves. No castaway could have gone hungry with such a ready source of seabird flesh and eggs, but it would have been a fetid and eerie existence. The air had the smell of guano, a slightly metallic tang, and there was a creepy lack of sound. Apart from the occasional raucous bird call, some chattering and clacking, the vast assembly of seabirds just sat and stared.

  There had been even more boobies roosting on the island before the French fleet was wrecked. D’Estrées’ men had eaten so many of them that ‘their numbers have been much lessened’. Yet it is calculated that more than 1,000 of the castaways died of exposure, starvation and injuries sustained while clawing their way across the coral heads. Aves, I concluded, was as Dampier had described – a place where an abysmal maritime catastrophe had created a freak situation. The Island of Birds was not a location to inspire the idea of Robinson Crusoe the survivor.

  *

  THE THIRD ISLAND on my list provided its surprise. I had imagined a low, whale-backed sandbank, barely rising above water level, littered with shells, waterless and grim in the vast expanse of sea. Instead I found a pocket Shangri-La.

  The Serrana Bank, a formation of shoals and low cays 250 miles out in the western Caribbean off the north-east coast of Nicaragua, is named after its own castaway. Pedro Serrano was shipwrecked there in the first half of the sixteenth century (the date is uncertain), and his survival story is so extreme as to beggar belief. He maintained that he lived for seven years on an island that had no fresh water. It was ‘a historic feat worthy of the greatest admiration’, observed the historian who recorded the story. Garcilaso de la Vega, the often-reliable historian of early Spanish America, had heard the castaway’s tale from a colleague who had met Pedro Serrano in person and said it was true. Garcilaso checked the map of the Caribbean, located the island, and saw no reason to doubt the castaway’s claim.

  Serrano said that he survived for the first few days by drinking the blood of turtles. Sole survivor of a shipwreck, he swam ashore to find that the island was totally barren. It had neither water nor wood for fuel nor ‘even grass he could graze upon’. It was entirely ‘covered with bare sand’. On foot, he circled the island, which he said was about ‘two leagues’ (about five to seven miles) in circumference, and came across enough crabs and shellfish to provide him with food. That evening the sea turtles crawled up to lay their eggs. He caught one ‘and drawing a knife he used to wear in his belt, and which saved his life, he drank its blood instead of water’. He then caught and killed as many turtles as possible, opened their shells for the meat, and laid the turtle shells out on the ground, facing the sky to collect the rain. Some of the turtles were so huge that he could not turn them over. When he tried jumping on their backs they simply carried him into the sea. He managed to capture others, whose shells could hold as much as six and a half gallons of collected rainwater.

  Pedro Serrano then turned his attention to making fire. He had his knife blade to use as a steel, so searched around for a stone to use as a flint. But there were no stones on his sandy refuge and he had to swim around the fringe of his island, diving down to the sea floor and collecting up all the pebbles
he could find. These he brought ashore and tested until he found one that struck sparks. Ripping up his shirt to provide tinder, he succeeded in making a fire which he carefully sheltered from the frequent rains by building over it a structure of turtle shells. For fuel he collected everything that washed up – ‘weeds called sea pods, timber from ships lost at sea, shells, fish bones, and other material to feed his fire’. When he could no longer endure the scorching sun on an island that offered no shade, he waded into the sea and submerged himself. Within two months the castaway ‘was as naked as he was born, for the great rain, the heat, and the humidity of the region rotted the few clothes he had’. From time to time he saw passing ships and lit a signal fire, but they either ignored the plume of smoke or failed to see it, and passed on. Slowly the naked castaway changed into a wild man. His body adapted to the constant exposure by growing extra hair. His beard and hair grew immensely long, and his body hair sprouted until it covered him in a thick pelt.

  After three years of this strange existence, Serrano had a unsettling shock. ‘One afternoon when he was not expecting anything, he saw a man on the island’, wrote Garcilaso. The stranger ran away in terror, he was so aghast at Serrano’s shaggy appearance. Serrano, thinking that the stranger was the Devil come to tempt him, also ran off – shouting, ‘Jesus! Jesus! O Lord, deliver me from the demon.’ When the stranger heard this, he turned back and shouted out the Credo to prove that he too was a Christian. The two men approached one another, and Serrano learned that the stranger was another castaway. He had been wrecked the previous night and saved himself by floating on a plank. When he saw the smoke from Serrano’s fire, he paddled ashore.

  Serrano gave food and water to the newcomer, and they agreed to take it in turns to do the tasks of collecting flotsam, gathering shellfish and guarding the precious fire. ‘They lived in this way for some days’, Garcilaso continues, ‘but it was not long before they quarrelled and so violently that they lived apart and nearly came to blows.’ The reason for the altercation was that each accused the other of not doing his chores properly. In the end, however, the two castaways made up their differences and shared their small domain amicably for another four years. Finally a passing vessel did spot their signal smoke, and sent a small boat to collect them. By then both the castaways had grown their extraordinary body fur, and Serrano’s beard had reached a spectacular length. Remembering the alarm that his appearance had already caused, Serrano and his companion stood on the beach calling out the Credo and shouting out Christ’s name as their rescuers approached.