Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The tactic worked and they were brought aboard, but Serrano’s unnamed companion did not live to enjoy his rescue. He died at sea while returning to Spain, leaving Serrano to make his way to court to be presented to the Emperor. The fame of the shaggy castaway went before him. Nobles paid his travelling expenses and Serrano made extra money by exhibiting his hairy body to villagers along his route. He so impressed the Spanish Emperor – presumably Charles V – that he received a pension of 4,000 pesos, to be collected in Peru. But he never got to collect it. On his way back to South America, he died in Panama. By then, said Garcilaso, he had grown so irked by the length of his beard that he had cut it short, just above his waist. Otherwise, the immense beard spread over his bed and disturbed his sleep.

  In many ways Pedro Serrano sounds like a fraud. His progress as a human freak show collecting money from credulous onlookers is particularly suspicious. On the other hand there is no reason why, with weather luck, he could not have survived on rainwater collected in turtle shells. The fishermen who set up temporary camps on Salt Tortuga used to catch and store rainwater in large upturned conch shells. A single large turtle shell holds enough fresh water to last ten days, and the rainfall on the Serrana Bank is sufficiently well distributed throughout the seasons to refill the shells if the rain showers fall in the right place.

  Having given Pedro Serrano the benefit of the doubt, we had sailed 800 miles to reach his desert island. It was a direct passage from Aves de Barlovento, quick, uncomfortable and largely uneventful. At times Ziska travelled at speeds of ten knots. As usual she was ill at ease with the wind behind her, rolling so heavily from side to side that it was difficult to hoist up the boom and mainsail far enough to stop them from dipping into the sea and straining the rig. The waves climbed onto her low stern deck and squirted random invasions of sea water through various cracks and crevices. The cabin floor was often soggy. Nothing much happened apart from a near collision in the dark with a small freighter and the sudden whistling sound of engines and the black silhouette of a surveillance aircraft overflying us in the night. Twice it happened, and both times the plane circled over us, noting our position and course. It was a reminder that once again we were on the routes of the narco-traffickers.

  The Serrana Bank and its sister Serranilla or Little Serrana Bank qualify as two of the more remote specks of land in the entire Caribbean. They belong to Colombia, yet the nearest mainland is Nicaragua. They are Colombian by the same accident of history that threw Pedro Serrano ashore – they lie across the direct route of the galleons that travelled from the Spanish Main to Havana. For 400 years their lurking coral shoals and reefs have been a serious hazard. Both the Serranas and Serranillas are surrounded by the wrecks of many vessels.

  South-West Cay is the only candidate on the Serrana Bank where Pedro Serrano could have struggled ashore. Though smaller than Pedro Serrano’s island of ‘two leagues’ circumference, South West Cay is the largest above-water patch of land in twenty square miles of reefs and coral shelf. Even with its warning light on an iron-frame tower the place is insignificant. We were within six miles before we identified the cay from a vantage point in Ziska’s shrouds. The island was no more than a grey-green scratch on the horizon, no larger than a fingernail. The sighting produced a sense of excitement and caution for we were steering in towards a coral platform, without benefit of charts or written directions, and without an engine to get us out of trouble. There is no demand for a large-scale chart of Serrana. Officially it is off-limits. A visit requires official permission from the Colombian authorities, a permission we did not have. We did not even know whether the place was inhabited.

  Ash was nervous. He was finding it claustrophobic to share his boat with three other crew, and the notion of bringing Ziska so close into an unknown and exposed anchorage was unsettling. Once again he was at the helm and asked me to climb the ratlines and search out the best passage through the coral. It was early afternoon and the sun was almost directly overhead, so it was easy to see through the water. The previous day had been bleak and forbidding, with heavy cloud cover and an opaque slate-grey sea. But now the weather was magnificent, with puffs of cloud and a brilliant sun. As I hung on the shrouds and Ziska curved round to come into the lee of the island, I looked down and could see the boat’s black shadow sharp on the sea floor thirty feet below the surface of the sea.

  The island slowly revealed itself. First an expanse of white rock foreshore beneath the light tower, then a low point covered with some sort of dark green vegetation, and then as we made our final approach an astonishing sight: straight ahead was a gentle curve of white sand beach and behind it a clump of lush palm trees. Farther to the left again appeared the orange-brown roof and wooden sides of a large double-fronted cabin on stilts. It had a veranda, some wooden chairs, and a rustic archway at the end of a sandy path leading down to the beach. Some distance away, on the north-west end of the island, stood a flagpole on which hung the yellow, blue and red flag of Colombia. The place looked like a large and well-kept holiday ranch.

  Several small, lightly built seabirds were circling round me as I clung to the rigging, and reminded me of our approach to the ‘Island of Birds’. I identified them as some sort of tern, but I had never seen anything like them before. Instead of the usual white underbellies, their stomachs were the most beautiful, fluorescent sapphire blue. They gave thin, piercing cries as they dipped and banked, and I gazed at them in wonder, thinking they were some strange and glamorous tropic variant. Then I realized that they were in fact perfectly ordinary seabirds. Their extraordinary colour was nothing more than the upward reflection of light from the vivid sea, a light so pure and intense that it brushed everything with a gentle luminescence. The combination of lush dark green palm trees and a neat cabin on the island where I had expected only desolation and sand made the fluorescent seabirds seem like the final flourish of an artistic impression of a tropical paradise, drawn in poster colours.

  Apprehensive, I went ashore with Ash in the little dinghy. I had deduced from the crisply painted wooden pillars lining the path to the cabin, as well as the prominent Colombian flag, that this was a military garrison. The Colombian army had established an outpost to protect its far-flung territorial claim and deny the island to drug smugglers as a forward base. The garrison was there to stop unauthorized access.

  I need not have worried. The half-dozen young men who emerged from the shelter of the palm trees had short haircuts and were obviously soldiers, but they were not dressed in leopard camouflage nor were they even carrying weapons. They wore T-shirts and shorts, and looked more like holiday-makers. They were all barefoot. The average age seemed to be eighteen. They cheerfully hauled the dinghy up the sand and escorted Ash and me up the neat approach path and under the rustic wooden archway. ‘Bienvenidos a Serrana’ was carved into a large wooden board, the letters picked out in red and green. To complete the impression of a holiday resort, there was a wooden picnic table off to one side, a wooden sunshade, and several wooden chairs. From the sunshade hung another handpainted sign. It read ‘Mirador’ – the Lookout.

  Our youthful guides climbed the wooden steps leading to the veranda, stamping their bare feet to dislodge the sand. On the open veranda, their leader stopped and called out ‘Hola!’ casually. After a brief moment one of the doors leading onto the veranda opened and there emerged a somewhat older, heavy-set man. He was dressed only in shorts. He was much darker-skinned than the others, perhaps in his late thirties, and had the air of a regular army NCO. With a long-serving soldier’s noncommittal gaze, he gestured for me and Ash to sit down at the wooden table. I passed across passports and ship’s papers. The young soldiers clustered around behind the sergeant’s back to gaze over his shoulder and stare at the documents with open curiosity. In fractured Spanish I explained we had come to the island to investigate the story of Pedro Serrano. The sergeant looked utterly blank. It was clear that he had never heard of Pedro Serrano. I produced a bottle of whisky and slid it acr
oss the table. The young soldiers looked intrigued, the sergeant looked embarrassed. I guessed that alcohol was forbidden on the post. I left the bottle on the table where it was. The sergeant reached into his pocket, produced a key, and handed it to one of the soldiers, with instructions to fetch some coffee. The soldier unlocked another door and I had a brief glimpse into the base storeroom. It was lined with wooden shelves. There were a few bags of flour, of rice, of beans, and sugar, some dry biscuits, and some coffee. The rest of the shelves were bare. The soldier returned with the coffee beans, handed the key back to the sergeant, and he carefully replaced it in his pocket. Serrano Cay looked like a holiday camp, but the diet was spartan.

  Waiting for the coffee to be brewed, the sergeant explained that he and his men were posted to the island for thirty to thirty-five days at a time, or maybe longer. They never knew quite how long they would stay. It depended on the boat which brought them from the island of San André 160 miles away. Sometimes the boat was late. They never knew when they would be collected and the next garrison would be left ashore. In the interval, during their time as guardians of South-West Cay, almost nothing happened. The only people he had known to visit the reef were fishermen from San Andre´ or Honduras. Very occasionally they would arrive to dive for lobsters on the reef, but they never stayed for long. Otherwise there were no strangers. He had never seen a private yacht before. I asked about fresh water on the island. There were two wells, he said. Would it be all right if Ziska’s crew walked about the island? Of course, he answered, as if I had not needed to ask the question.

  Ash and I returned to the dinghy on the beach, and the same cluster of young soldiers accompanied us. By then their colleagues had lost interest and were playing dominoes at one of the wooden tables. Out of earshot of the sergeant, the boldest of the young men shyly asked if we had any cigarettes aboard. They looked resigned when we told them that none of Ziska’s crew smoked. Then they asked whether we would like to send someone ashore that evening to join their soccer match.

  Later that afternoon Trondur, Tristan and I circled the island on foot. Once again, Ash stayed on board. He worried that his yacht was in a dangerously exposed anchorage. It took only forty-five minutes to walk right around Pedro Serrano’s island, if that is what it was. The young soldiers had told us that a few turtles did still come up the beach at night, but we saw no sign of tracks. To the east, the coral platform stretched out for at least 110 yards and was exposed at low water so the animals would have had difficulty in coming ashore except at high tide. Away to the north a truly vast barrier reef extended, mile after mile of rock and surf, as far as the eye could see. Only on this northern exposure of the island was there any sense of the barrenness that greeted Serrano. The prevailing north-east wind and waves had heaped up a grey beach dune, and along its face were scraps of flotsam. Here the garrison had planted small immature palm trees to stabilize the sand. The remainder of the island they had turned into a cross between a bird sanctuary and a maze.

  A dense thicket grew ten feet high. It was a brushwood juniper, dark-leaved, close-branched and impenetrable. It lay like a living mantle across the southern half of the island. The thicket had been carefully tended. Here and there were paths, laid out and trimmed as if in a formal labyrinth. Where the paths intersected, the soldiers had placed little signs or planted a palm tree and carved an arrow on the trunk. The floor of the paths was hard-packed sand riddled with the burrow holes of red crabs. If you walked quietly and turned a corner it seemed that the floor of the path ahead was alive, covered with the crabs walking on tiptoe. Among the crabs, hopping on the ground, were immature birds, sooty black in colour. There were dozens of them. They quarrelled shrilly and fought. To add to the surreal effect was the flickering strip of sky overhead. Across the narrow space flashed a constant fly-past of adult birds, travelling at high speed, just above hedge level, and maintaining a constant demonic cackle. The air seethed with birds, wheeling and calling ceaselessly. A single bird would suddenly swoop and perch unafraid on a branch almost within touching distance. Sitting in the tangle of twigs it looked like a steel-cut Victorian engraving of a bird in a bush.

  They were noddies, a seabird smaller and swifter than the boobies on Aves. Their greatest concentration was on the south-west corner. Walking there, around the edge of the great thicket, it seemed as if a fire hose was spraying seabirds horizontally, and the natural response was to flinch as the birds came racing over the edge of the thicket, almost at head level. Adult birds which were not whizzing through the air were perched, black and white, on upper branches, gripping their perches which swayed in the wind. Below them at a safer level were their juveniles, bickering amongst themselves with shrill chirps. Here was a small patch of open ground, overgrown with tall dune grass. Walking across it was like walking across a meadow full of grasshoppers. Only the creatures leaping up and falling back among the tall stalks were not grasshoppers, but young noddies learning to fly. They leapt up, flopped, and struggled.

  The entire surface of South-West Cay was sand, and the air was as oven hot as Pedro Serrano had implied when he told of wading into the sea to seek relief. But, if his story was really true and he had lived for seven years catching rainwater in turtle shells, he did not know that there was fresh water on the island. Had he dug down in the sand, he could have made the wells that had changed life on the island so utterly. The Serrana Bank named in his memory no longer offers a desert island of the forlorn castaway. It is now an island of lotus eaters. His successors, the squad of conscripts sent here, must scarcely believe their luck when they are selected to man the garrison post. That evening from Ziska’s deck we watched the young soldiers emerge from their pleasant barracks and saunter down to the edge of the beach. They had been joined by their sergeant, and in the golden light of a flawless tropical sunset some kicked around a soccer ball on the white sand, while others splashed and cavorted in the sparkling water. I thought of the little notice that I had found inscribed at the end of one of the alleyways carved through the great thicket. The soldiers had built a token gun position at the point where the pathway emerged on to the beach. It was no more than a low breastwork of salvaged tree trunks, not even as forbidding as the palisade that Robinson Crusoe builds to protect his island home. On a low flat boulder beside the breastwork, one of the building squad had painted a list of six names in red letters, presumably the names of his patrol. Beneath the column of names he had added – Serrana.

  *

  ‘FINES ARE LEVIED in such cases,’ the sour-faced customs officer announced aggressively. We had reached the Cayman Islands and returned to the world of petty officialdom. Our misdemeanour was our failure to report Ziska’s arrival in port, twenty-four hours in advance, over the radio.

  ‘We couldn’t let you know,’ I said apologetically, ‘because we don’t have a radio.’

  ‘You should make sure your radio is working. That is no excuse.’

  ‘We don’t have a radio because we don’t have any electricity on board.’

  The customs man threw us a malevolent glance. He was thin, and blond, and had close-set eyes. As far as he was concerned, everybody had a radio. He had one, two, even three. There was a radio beside the desk, and a walkie-talkie stuck in a charger on his desk, and another marine radio set making background noises through a loudspeaker. He was on his own side of the glass window, crisply dressed in a clean white shirt and neatly pressed trousers, and in a well-appointed and air-conditioned office, surrounded by new furniture. We, the entire crew of Ziska, were on the other side of the window cooped up in a tiny, shabby anteroom furnished with cheap linoleum and no furniture. We had been standing there for ten minutes, waiting, and I was speaking through the gap of a small sliding glass panel that would have been more appropriate for a booth selling bus tickets in a Third World country. The customs man was supercilious and contemptuous. We were making a very poor impression. All four of us were dirty, scruffy and dressed in ragbag clothing. None of us had shaved in weeks. We
had just completed our 1,400-mile voyage and had come directly from the yacht to the harbour office to present ship’s papers and passports and obtain inward clearance. The customs officer lacked the imagination to deduce that if we were true suspects, we would never have come to his office to present our papers. He judged by appearances. He picked up his handset and called the Black Gang – the anti-narcotics enforcement team.

  We had brought Ziska that dawn into the harbour of Georgetown, Grand Cayman. The place was awash with cash. Three giant cruise liners the size and shape of apartment blocks loomed over the anchorage, and despatched a shuttle service of boats to bring tourists to the shops and beaches. Late models of the smartest cars crawled along the crowded roads. The place was a worthy heir to the traditions of Port Royal when Lionel Wafer set up his medical practice there. Now Cayman took money from tourists not drunken buccaneers, and nearly every corner of the downtown area was home to one of the hundreds of banks which give the Cayman Islands their questionable financial reputation.

  The Black Gang had obviously benefited from the government’s largesse. When they showed up, they were lavishly equipped. A huge brand-new four-wheel-drive vehicle appeared, so big that it had difficulty in finding space to park outside the harbour office. The crew – led by a dog-handler who must have been six foot two inches tall and weighed well over 200 pounds – was dressed in black jump boots and impressive black coveralls with huge baggy pockets and DTF, for Drugs Task Force, emblazoned across the back. They were hung with a remarkable array of equipment. Around their waists were thick webbing belts from which dangled, in a typical case, a pair of handcuffs, a heavy torch, a massive ring of at least twenty keys, two phone pagers, and a walkie-talkie. They jangled and clinked as they walked, or rather swaggered. Professional training apart, their demeanour was apparently acquired from watching slick American television programmes of cops and gangsters. Their youthful ‘plainclothes’ officer was trying to look the part in his tight T-shirt and high-fashion jeans and he too had the telltale bleeper in his waistband. He lounged stylishly in the passenger seat of the giant vehicle, eating the trademark fast food of the television character. Everyone wore suitably cool sunglasses.