by Dean King
As they crawled out of the crevice, Riley made a dire mistake. The passage was slim, and the men were forced to rub against the cliff. As he moved forward, he suddenly felt liquid wet his side. He knew without looking that he had broken his water bottle.
Riley was already exhibiting symptoms of McGee’s fourth and penultimate stage of dehydration, in which saliva stops flowing altogether, the pulse slows, and breathing becomes labored. As mucous membranes dry out, the lips and gums tighten and the tongue “hardens into a senseless weight.” Eyelids and nostrils retract. Deprived of moisture, the eyes and nose burn with grit. Riley was not yet suffering from every symptom of the stage. He did not have pounding headaches and hallucinations. Though his tongue had become as “useless as a dry stick,” he managed to speak and be understood. But there could be no doubt: without his water, he was in deep trouble.
In the late afternoon, they waded around another precipitous rock. The sight of dead locusts on some rocks gave them hope that if they made it to the top, they would find vegetation to eat.4 In reality, the surface above was so barren that the Sahrawis considered the arrival of a cloud of locusts—one of the biblical plagues—a gift from Allah: they harvested the bugs for food. But even if the sailors had been inclined to do the same, they would not have been able to—these bugs, Riley observed, “crumbled to dust on the slightest touch.”
By nightfall, they had covered only about four miles and saw no break in the bluffs. “A harder day’s travel was never made by man,” Robbins wrote, though the next day’s would rival it, producing an impediment that would stop them in their tracks.
With great relief, according to Riley, they found a stretch of beach to spend the night on. In the shelter of the cliffs about a hundred feet from the surf, they greased their mouths with salt pork fat and ate small pieces of it. Everyone but Riley washed this down with drops from their bottles. With the end approaching for all, he had no right to ask anyone to share, nor could he rightfully expect them to. Nonetheless, two of the men offered him their bottles. Riley gratefully wet his mouth.
They prayed together and then lay down in their wet clothes and slept. As the cold, moist sea air settled over them, Riley meditated on Horace’s suffering. He had assured the boy’s mother that he would take care of him, and he now vowed to himself to adopt him if they made it back home, to “watch over his ripening years” and share with him any fortune he and his family might be favored with. His mind wandered to his own children, to whom Horace would be a fine brother. Before dozing off, Riley wrapped his arms around the boy in a reassuring embrace.
On September 9, the sailors woke up stiff and numb, trembling from the cold in their sweaty clothes, which had not dried in the damp ocean air. They had no way to make a fire and only salt pork to eat, but the second night of sleep on land had helped them recover from the lack of it at sea. The wounds on their feet had healed enough so that they could walk again. Continuing along the coast would at least encourage blood flow.
They had not gone far when they caught a distant glimpse of a wide beach beneath a sloping bluff. As the crow flies, it was not far, but they had to stick to the contours of the coast, and here it was very rough, the cliff top having collapsed into the surf. As they picked their way forward, Riley studied the beach, searching for a spot near the bluffs where they might be able to dig a well, and recollecting one he had once dug successfully on a Bahaman key. It had produced drinkable water that he mistakenly believed was seawater filtered fresh by the sand.
The broken rocks reopened the wounds in the sailors’ feet, and they moved slowly. Before long, they encountered a massive promontory undercut by the sea and looming over a half mile of surf thundering on boulders fallen from above. To reach the beach, they would have to somehow cross this chasm without being washed into the turbulence beneath the cliff. It was a deflating sight. Riley sized up their situation: “To advance by what appeared to be the only possible way seemed like seeking instant death; to remain in our present situation was merely to die a lingering one; and to return was still worse.”
The sailors searched desperately for a solution. Then one of them spotted a large boulder about midway across the chasm, a boulder that revealed itself only momentarily as the surf washed out. It gave them a chance, anyway.
It was about nine in the morning, and Riley figured it was the depth of low tide. He told the men he would try to reach the boulder. A wave broke. The sea inhaled a giant’s breath, and Riley plunged through the water. He reached the slick rock and grabbed onto its rilled surface. The next wave buried him and churned in the teeth of the cave, but the captain hung on. As soon as he could, Riley rose up again and dived in on the other side. He reached the far embankment just as the next breaker caught him. He desperately clung onto the steep rock face. When the wave receded, he scrambled up the face, exhausted but safe.
The rest of the crew followed. Riley had thought the tide was all the way out, but it continued to recede for another half hour, making each successive wave a little less violent. As the men reached the far side, they helped hoist up their soaked and battered shipmates.
Once recovered, they explored the beach. The continental wall looked more irregular here and the slope less severe, but first they would search for water. With their bare hands, they dug a well, eventually filling their hats and tossing the sand up. They found water, but it was salty. They moved back toward the cliff but had the same result. This disheartening process was repeated at several spots until near the cliff they dug down to solid stone.
Riley chose one more site for digging and set the men to work, but he had no hope for water now. “I will go and see if I can get up the bank,” he told them. He promised to return soon with news.
Searching the bluff, Riley found a fault line. Though it was a long way up, the wall sloped enough to give him a chance. He used all his strength and clawed his way up. Though he had seen the tabletop horizon from the boat and feared that they were headed back to the desert, he was not prepared for what he discovered at the top. Then he had only had time to worry about getting the boat to shore. Now he gazed out on “a barren plain, extending as far as the eye could reach each way, without a tree, shrub, or spear of grass that might give the smallest relief to expiring nature.” The tableau of emptiness rocked his soul: it was the earth before Eden; it was bones without flesh; it was nature that had gone mad and devoured itself. Riley dropped to the ground in shock and grief.
After a while—he did not know how long—he rose again, confused and nearly delirious. He cupped his hands, caught his urine, and soothed his burning throat with it. He felt an impulse to jump to his death in the sea, but it vanished as the faces of his men and of his wife and children flashed in his mind. He recalled what he had already survived and tried to find strength in it. He wandered east along the ledge, on a tightwire between the flashing waves and the sand. When a descent to the sea offered itself, he took it. At the bottom between two rocks he found a clear pool. He stripped off his salty clothes and bathed in the sun-heated seawater for half an hour, scrubbing at his defiled skin, but the desert ghost that had slipped inside could not be washed away.
When Riley finally returned to his men, he sat down on the sand. “We can go another two miles on the beach before we come to a wall,” he told them. “On the way, you will find a pool for bathing and an easier route to the top than this one.” He quickly changed the subject to avoid talking about what lay above: “Did you find any fresh water where you were digging?” he asked. But he already knew the answer.
The crew gathered up their bottles and satchels and headed down the beach, arriving around noon at the rise Riley intended to ascend. He now warned the men of the desolation at the top. Tired, hot, and discouraged, they decided to rest on a patch of sand in the shade under a ledge. The tide was out, and the air so still and humid that they had trouble catching their breath. They sank into a comalike sleep for two hours.
Robbins opened his eyes to deep despondency. “I had b
ecome so inured to misery that she had adopted me as her child,” he later reflected, “and I felt no dispositions to avoid her embrace.” He felt they had run out of options, and he sensed this to be the general belief among the rest. Nevertheless, they crawled up the craggy slope, pulling themselves up with anything they could grab. Robbins described the climb as “next to dragging ourselves to the scaffold—it was becoming our own executioner.”
When they reached the top, they gazed out slack-jawed on the dead landscape that Riley had warned them of. The ghost too slipped inside them, as tenacious as nausea. Like their captain, they experienced panic, confusion, and visceral, uncontrollable grief. Some collapsed on the hardpan, crying for the loss of hope, for their families, for the indignity of death so far from home. They always knew that something like this might occur. Now they wondered why they had not prepared for it better. They caught their tears with their fingers and guided them to their leathery tongues. “ ’Tis enough,” one man muttered in disgust. “Here we must breathe our last.” Another groaned, “We have no hope of finding either water or provisions, or human beings, or even wild beasts. Nothing can live here.”
What they looked out on, in 1815, had never been scientifically explored and was almost too mind-boggling to imagine. They faced the western edge of the world’s largest desert. Occupying a third of Africa, it stretches more than three thousand miles east to the Red Sea and twelve hundred miles from the Sahel—the fringe of savanna in the south—to the Atlas Mountains in the north, mountains that snare almost all the moisture traveling down on the northeast winds. Relative-humidity levels, rarely above an abrasive 30 percent, are often as low as a lethal 5 percent, dry enough to kill bacteria and mummify corpses. On the coast, the heat of the Sahara clashes with the cold waters of the Atlantic, often creating heavy fogbanks that envelop the shore, and on many days the irifi, a powerful, searing wind, shrouds the region in a melancholy ocher veil of dust.
The Sahara was not always like this. From 5500 to 2500 B.C., it was relatively fertile, wet and inviting. Up until Roman times, antelope, elephants, rhinoceroses, and giraffes roamed a savanna densely studded with acacia, while crocodiles and hippopotamuses wallowed in lush rivers. Ostriches, gazelles, and antelope still persisted in 1815, but by then the Saharan climate was arguably the most extreme on earth. Its temperature could sizzle at more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, the ground temperature soaring 50 degrees higher in the sun; at night, the thermometer could plunge as much as 85 degrees. These conditions, combined with frequent windstorms and less than five inches of average annual rainfall, made sustained life virtually impossible in many parts. As flora and fauna died off or adapted, the land itself deteriorated. While only about a tenth of the Sahara is covered in barren sand dunes, or erg, almost equally formidable are its stepped plains of wind-stripped rock covered in boulders, stones, and dust—the lower elevations generally known as reg and higher ones as hammada.
To the sailors—to the outside world—it was all a vast unknown. Period maps show the Sahara, then often spelled “Zahara” or “Zahahrah” but better known as the Great Desert, as only a large empty space with a few tribal names scrawled on it. The sailors of the Commerce had landed in what would become in 1884 the Spanish protectorate Rio de Oro. In 1958, the Spaniards would combine this district with the Saguia el-Hamra district to the north to form Spanish Sahara; this in turn would become the disputed region of Western Sahara after the Spaniards left under duress in 1976.
In 1789, Brisson of the Ste. Catherine described the western Sahara in stark terms:
These regions afford no variety, the country being entirely flat, and not producing any plant whatever. The horizon is there obscured by a reddish vapour. It looks as if there were burning volcanoes on every side. . . . Neither bird, nor insect, is seen in the air: a profound silence, that has something dreadful in it, prevails. If now and then a small breeze arise, the traveller immediately feels extreme lassitude; his lips crack, his skin is parched up, and little pimples, that occasion a very painful smarting, cover his body (pp. 381-82).
According to Robbins, when the sailors reached the hammada, their minds played tricks on them. Training their professional eyes on the horizon, searching for a reprieve from the void, they thought they saw a lake to the south. They briefly discussed going to it, before realizing that it was nothing but “the striking of the rays of the sun upon the dried sand.” Some of the men were for stopping. Riley, Williams, and Savage urged them to get up, but the officers’ exhortations rang hollow. When asked what he thought they should do, Hogan, the ordinary seaman from Massachusetts, replied, “I don’t know—but what’s the use of lying down to die as long as we can stand up and walk?” It was not what he said so much as how he said it: “with perfect apathy,” Robbins recalled.
Paradoxically, Hogan’s utter absence of enthusiasm motivated the men. No tinseled hope would spur them now, only the dispassionate notion that they might as well walk on simply because they could. They picked themselves up and trudged over the flint-hard red earth, marine sediment dating back 60 million years, which spawned dunes in only its most recent 2 million years: some live dunes, granular and yellow, unstable; and some dead in hard brown swells thirty feet high, covered in travertine and undercut by the wind. The sailors stuck to the familiar coast, where the desert ended abruptly, its broken surface having been tossed to the sea below, the dissolution of dead land.
Though it looked devoid of life, the desert around them was home to more creatures than they could have imagined. While the larger mammals had long since fled south, the hyenas and jackals, the wildcats, the reptiles and scorpions had adapted, often with exquisite efficiency. The Saharan cheetah can prowl fifty miles and needs only the blood and urine of its prey to slake its thirst. The horned viper, the Sahara’s most feared snake, hunts with its body buried in the cool sand and its wedge-shaped head resting on the surface like a stone. When hungry enough, the ferocious gray monitor will attack a camel, and the foot-long lizard sometimes wins.
The Sahara yielded the sailors a few cryptic signs of accommodation. At first they ignored them: brittle shells of dead locusts and low, dry stalks that resembled wild parsnip. But they soon learned to adjust their sights. Toward sunset, they noticed small holes on the hard surface, according to Robbins, and decided they had been dug by some animal to get to the root of a weedy plant.
They found more of the plants and clawed in the hardpan with sharp stones.5 The effort produced finger-length pieces of a root that tasted like celery, but the plants were too scarce and too dry, and the digging too difficult, to give them much hope.
Robbins later recalled seeing “large heaps of muscle [sic] shells, and the appearance of a former fire where they probably had been roasted by the natives.” They thought they saw human tracks. In a haze of starvation, exhaustion, and thirst, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the men’s brains to focus and analyze.
They next spotted in the distance a break in the cliffs and a gradual descent to a swath of beach. It was more of the same, but different, enticing now that they were treading over the bed-of-nails surface, bruising and puncturing their feet. It gave them a reason to keep going, and as night fell upon them, they marched forward. They had been reduced to finding hope and incentive in sand, enough inspiration to carry them another three miles to a place where they could at least lie down in relative comfort and die.
As they walked and the evening wind cooled them, the desert turned black. In the darkness, James Clark, whose keen eyes had served Ketchum before Riley, saw it first. In a hoarse croak, he called out to the others, “I think I see a light!”
chapter 7
Captured
The men agreed that the faint light they saw flickering in the distance was a campfire. A simultaneous rush of joy and fear brought them back to life. At last there was a possibility of relieving the thirst and hunger that burned in their guts like fever. The fear, Robbins said, was that the medicine would be worse—i
f possible—than the malady. Though miserable, they were still free, and it was known that captives generally did not fare well among the coastal Sahrawis. Caravan merchants from the north were robbed and murdered. Spaniards whose Canary-based fishing vessels ran aground here were routinely slaughtered, and other Westerners endured brutal captivity. The band of Sahrawis that had captured Pierre de Brisson had amused themselves by watching hungry ravens pick at one of his shipmates, who was unconscious but still alive. Later Brisson discovered his enslaved captain’s emaciated corpse, teeth sunk into hand: his master had stopped feeding him when he became too ill to work.
Though Riley felt his hopes revive at the sight of the campfire, he remained cautious. He recommended that they rest that night, so as not to surprise the men camped around the fire and send them into a murderous frenzy. The crew agreed.
At the break in the cliffs, they slowly picked their way down a maze of tumbled, broken rocks to the sand they had seen, still well above the sea on an awkward slope. The hardpan they had crossed had cooled rapidly as the sun set, but the sand retained its heat. According to Riley, it was still hot enough “to have roasted eggs” on, but they were too exhausted to go any farther. The Commerces dug down to the cool sand below the surface, making shallow pits for their bodies and shoving the hot sand down the bank. They shared a bit of their remaining water, prayed, and then wordlessly fell asleep, all except for Riley, whose mind whorled. Despite his weariness, he lay awake mulling over their future and suffering from thirst. He bore the responsibility for his men heavily, especially the young ones: Savage and Robbins, whose families had such close ties to his own, and Horace, whose dead father he had loved and whose mother would now in all likelihood lose a son. The next day the Sahrawis would either kill them or enslave them. The best they could hope for was to eventually be ransomed. It was almost too much for him to bear.
