by Dean King
Riley and Hogan tried to sleep on the hardpan, but the stones poked into their wounds, and the cold, damp night air—“as salt as the ocean,” Riley said—made them burn. They shivered and shifted until midnight, when Mohammed brought them each a pint of milk and then retired to his tent. After drinking the milk, which Riley averred was “pure and warm from the camels,” he and Hogan crept over to the sand and slept soundly.
From dawn to dark, Robbins had ridden on the back of his master’s camel. Because he had chosen to ease the pounding by sitting on his animal skin rather than wearing it, the tropical sun had ravaged his torso. After traveling sixty miles to the east, even the nomads were too exhausted to bother pitching the tent. Instead, they loafed and visited other campfires nearby. When Ganus’s sister Muckwoola returned to the tent and told Robbins that she knew where two of his shipmates were, he rose again. Babbling incomprehensibly to him all the way, she led him to a campsite by a patch of dry thornbushes.
There he found Williams and Barrett squatting by a low fire, cooking the remnants of a piece of salt pork that their master had retrieved from the beach where the longboat crashed. They rose and shook hands with Robbins, whose joy quickly turned to disgust as he got a close look at his comrades. “Did you see the long-legged deer they call gazelles today?” he asked, making conversation to cover his shock. “They came right up to us, as tame as sheep, but my master would not shoot any. He said it’s not the season to take their skins.” In the crimson firelight, Williams looked like a leprous demon, both gaunt and bloated. The sun, starvation, thirst, and the pounding of the camels had produced in him a look of dissipation. His dead skin hung in sheets, the new layer beneath already covered in red blisters. His face was pinched.
Focused on what he was doing, Williams did not speak at first. He knew he looked hideous, and he seemed resigned to his own death. At forty-eight, he had already lost his parents and several siblings. When he had signed on to the Commerce, he had left behind in Wethersfield not only his wife but two orphaned nieces, Almira, age twelve, and Elizabeth, six, the daughters of his younger brother Richard and his wife, Hannah, who had both died during the recent war. Williams spoke lovingly of the two girls and with great concern for their future. By the flickering campfire, he rambled on until grief stopped him.
At daybreak on September 13, Riley and Hogan gingerly brushed the sand from their wounds and set off in a southeasterly direction behind Deslisle and the camels. They were so stiff from dehydration and the hard night that they could barely keep from wailing with every step. As the morning advanced, the blistering Saharan sun lashed their backs.
Three hours after they set out, Riley spotted one of his men in the distance, mounted on a large camel so that he floated queerly above the drove and the dust. Riley veered in his direction. Something was not right, he realized as he hobbled nearer on his bruised feet. The rider moved without purpose, like the boom of a drifting boat. Head and arms flopped about in response to the camel. Riley limped faster, catching up when the camel stopped to chew on a bush. The rider sat propped on the beast like a swollen corpse. His skin had burned off, and the sun glistened bizarrely from his body as if he were lit from within. Aghast, Riley examined an unrecognizable face. The man, entirely naked, muttered in a barely audible voice about his woes. It was Williams. That morning his master’s wife had greased his body with animal fat to try to save him, but now it cooked his skin. “I cannot live another day,” he gasped to Riley, who gently held his trembling hand. “Should you ever get clear from this dreadful place and return to our country, tell my dear wife that with my last breath I prayed for her happiness.” He began to sob.
Riley searched for words to console his first mate, but before he could produce any, inadequate though they necessarily would have been, Williams’s master suddenly appeared, scolded them vehemently, and lashed the camel. As it wheeled around, Riley saw ruby streaks on its coat where the inside of Williams’s leg “hung in strings of torn and chafed flesh.”
“God Almighty bless you,” he called to the dying man. In an instant, the first mate was gone. Riley was left alone to contemplate the gruesome sight and his inability to help.
His reflections were brought up short by his own trouble. The encounter had lasted no more than a quarter of an hour, but during that time the desert had swallowed his master’s drove without a trace. In his sudden isolation, he hit a wall of hopelessness. “My God,” he cried, looking around, “suffer us not to live longer in such tortures!”
Lurching forward, he ran, grimacing, in the direction in which his master’s camels had been heading. With each strike of his feet on the stones, he shouted in anguish, but he did not slow down. Having witnessed the agony of the first mate, he was almost indifferent to his own physical pain. Mohammed saw him coming and stopped the drove. As Riley neared, staggering like a madman, the Arab raised his cane to strike him. Then, almost as if it were not worth the effort, he changed his mind. Instead, he lit into him for thinking he could do whatever he pleased. He ordered Riley and Hogan to drive the camels on as fast as they could, and he rode off in a huff.
When Mohammed returned about an hour later, he was accompanied by a tall, fearsome-looking old man, whom Riley described as being as “black as a negro.” The old man was with his two sons and a number of heavily armed men on foot. The dark Arab, who was Clark’s master and whose features Riley thought “showed every sign of the deepest rooted malignity,” looked him over and made an offer to Mohammed. The two quickly came to terms. Riley never mentioned what he was traded for, but Mohammed probably recouped his investment—a blanket—and was satisfied at being rid of a nuisance. He still had Hogan and Deslisle.
Riley’s new master, whose name was Sideullah, and his entourage walked even faster than the camels, and Riley could not keep up.2 Sideullah snarled at him to move faster and struck his back with a cane. Riley staggered, but his animal instinct for survival kicked in, and he kept pace until one of Sideullah’s sons saddled him with his musket and powder horn. Beneath the weight, exaggerated by his fatigue, he lagged again, hating the young man and waiting for Sideullah to come beat him once more. The old man, however, was preoccupied with other matters. He strode on, leaving the others to make their own way to camp.
Haunted by the lingering image of the dying Williams but compelled by it too, Riley kept his feet moving. How could he pity himself with the chief mate in such a state? He could see the far-off horizon in every direction, broken only by camels, which rose above the skyline like distant ships. All around him, they were hull up or hull down. To keep his bearings, he needed only to follow them. He had to keep his feet moving. He prayed for Williams, willing him on and himself too.
It was late afternoon when he reached Sideullah’s camp. The nomads relieved him of his burden and told him to lie down in the shade in the tent. He begged for water, to no avail. Sideullah and his son prayed and then left to visit other tents. “I tried to soften the hearts of the women to get me a little water,” he said, “but they only laughed and spit at me.” Mercilessly, they drove him away from the tent. Riley sat on the smoldering hardpan, absorbing the last rays of the sun. He could think of nothing but his thirst.
At sunset, Riley’s new master returned with his sons and two dozen men and led them in prayer. He seemed to be their spiritual leader. For all their piety—they prayed regularly and devoutly, as their religion required—Riley wondered how the Arabs could ignore the fact that under their care he and his men lacked the most basic necessities of life and suffered inhumanly.
Riley was distracted from his brooding when James Clark arrived with Sideullah’s camels. These meetings had become what the men looked forward to and what kept them going, but here was another shipmate whose condition was not just deplorable but heartbreaking. Clark had two youngsters at home. “He was nearly without a skin,” Riley later recalled. “Every part of his body exposed; his flesh excessively mangled, burnt and inflamed.” He looked almost as bad as Williams. “I a
m glad to see you, sir,” Clark told Riley, “for I am afraid I cannot live through this night. If you get to our country again, please tell my wife, my brothers and sisters how I perished.”
“You’re not going to die now,” the captain assured him matter-of-factly. “The food we have, though meager, is enough to keep us alive, and the desert, while it is roasting us, is preserving us at the same time. Look at our wounds. To be sure, they hurt like the dickens, but even in the worst of them there are no signs of putrefaction. We are being saved for some other fate.”
Clark looked scared. Riley searched for other encouraging words, words that he himself did not believe, anything to convince Clark to hang on for another day. He told him truthfully that one old man had said that when it rained, they would all go northeast to sell the sailors. “I assured him,” Riley told Clark, “that a great ransom would reward them for delivering the entire crew to the land of the Moors.”
Riley begged Sideullah to let them sleep in a corner of the tent, as his two black slaves, who attended the herd, did. The Bou Sbaa agreed, pointing to a place for them to lie down, but again the women objected and drove them off. Sideullah did not countermand the women, but in the night he and his sons brought Riley and Clark warm milk, a quart each, and after the women were asleep, Omar, the son who had foisted his gun on Riley, came to them and led them inside the tent to sleep on soft sand. He did so in such a manner that Riley decided he had misread Omar, that he had made him carry the gun not out of laziness or cruelty but to give Riley an excuse to lag behind so that he could walk in peace. Omar was, at least in part, kind.
The group stayed put the next day. In the morning, the women in the tent chided and jabbed at Riley and Clark, who played possum until the blows became too painful. Although Arab women hold authority inside the tent, Sideullah, who wanted the sailors to regain their strength, scolded them. Riley and Clark remained under the tent all day, sharing a pint of camel’s milk in the morning and each having a pint of water at noon. By the afternoon, Riley could feel the swelling in his body subside, especially in his pulverized feet.
While the sailors lay in the tent, Sideullah’s powerfully built black slave, Boireck, and two Arab boys had spent the day driving the camels off to find shrubs. In the evening, Boireck seated himself at the fire, stretching out his long, tired legs on either side of it. Seeing Riley and Clark inside the tent and resenting the fact that they had rested all day, he got up to run them out. When Sideullah stopped him, Boireck became even more riled.
That evening he amused the family and some visitors by taunting the Christians. He pointed at their slack genitals and laughingly compared them with his own. His sneering references to the gaunt Riley as “el rais” brought howls of laughter. He poked their wounds with a sharp stick and made fun of their skin, which died and turned foul beneath the very image of Allah, the sun. What further proof was needed that these miserable white heathens were worthy only of slavery and scorn?
Clark fumed. “It’s bad enough to be stripped, skinned alive, and mangled,” he whispered to Riley, “without being obliged to bear the scoffs of a damned negro slave.”
“It’s good to know you’re still alive, Jim,” Riley responded with a nod. The milk and water they had consumed that day, the rest, the shade had boosted his spirits. He would not let Boireck’s buffoonery beat him down just now. “You feel the need to revenge an insult, but let the poor negro laugh if he can take pleasure in it,” he told Clark. “God knows there’s little enough here to provide that. He’s only trying to gain favor with his masters and mistresses. I’m willing he should have it, even at our expense.”
Over the next three days they pushed southeast, deeper into the desert, at a rate of about thirty miles a day. The terrain became flatter, with shallower depressions and fewer thornbushes, mostly dead and dried up. The camels’ powerful molars ground the wooden stalks with the strength of mill wheels, but still they could not fill their stomachs. The plants the nomads used to supplement their own diet also became scarcer. “In every valley we came to,” Riley wrote, “the natives would run about and search under every thorn bush, in hopes to find some herb, for they were nearly as hungry as ourselves.” A small plant resembling shepherd’s purse Riley found disappointingly bitter and salty. The pleasant-tasting, onion-shaped root of a plant the Bou Sbaa called taloe was scant. Underneath its single grasslike blade, about a hand high, hid a walnut-size root, which they dug up with a stick; a good day produced no more than half a dozen, their benefit negligible. Riley and Clark continued to lose strength. Indeed, Riley had eaten so little that nothing solid had passed through his bowels since their capture.
Lack of food was not the only problem. The stores of water were nearly finished, and the milk had begun to fail. The sailors, naturally, were the first to suffer. Their ration was reduced to a cup of milk a day, with no water. Even the nomads seemed enervated, stopping earlier, pitching their tents for the night in the midafternoon, and paying little heed to the sailors as long as they gathered sticks for the fire. Riley and Clark spent afternoons and nights in a corner of the tent.
Ironically, the lack of sustenance made walking easier in one way: they could endure the stones better as they became lighter. But as chronic dehydration intensified, their joints stiffened, and they found it exceedingly difficult to stand. Riley observed that he was literally shriveling up. Every day that he had been on the desert, he had relieved his thirst in part by continuing to catch and drink his own urine. “But that resource,” he wrote, “now failed me for the want of moisture.”
Robbins’s situation was no better. Ganus’s water supply was also running out, and his slave’s begging now elicited only harsh rebukes. Each step, Robbins was convinced, was another away from civilization. He had encountered none of his shipmates for days, and he had decided he never would again.
When Savage suddenly appeared behind him in the company of two Arabs, Robbins was incredulous. He had not seen the second mate since the well; he lagged behind his master’s drove to speak to him. Savage was skeletal. He said that he had eaten nothing solid since being captured. Robbins regretted that he had no means of helping him. “I’d share the small remains of my pork with you,” Robbins said, “but my master never lets me carry it myself.” They could talk no more. Robbins had to catch up to Ganus again.
Two days later, Ganus scouted ahead, leaving Robbins waiting near a bush. For the previous four nights, the nomads had not bothered to pitch a tent, and exposure had taken its toll. Each morning, Robbins had woken up wet from dew and stiff in his joints. The cold, moisture, and sand irritated his blistered body. He now collapsed in unconsciousness.
Midway through the afternoon, he was awakened—not by the threatening command of an Arab but by Savage. Robbins was glad to see the second mate again and to have the opportunity to spend some time together and talk. Savage was in a better frame of mind now, but he told Robbins bluntly that he was nearing “absolute starvation” and bitterly cursed his cruel master. The two wandered off in search of the snails that nestled their round, trumpet-mouthed shells in the dome-shaped euphorbia plants and thornbushes. These shells—about an inch in diameter, thick to keep the elements out, and bleached white by the sun—each yielded a chewy, coiled morsel that tasted like dirt. Savage gobbled down a few, but neither of the sailors had the stamina to continue the hunt. They were quickly exhausted, and the heat drove them in search of shade, where they sat with little to do but disparage the nomads. Before returning to their tents, they offered up a terse prayer to God.
Neither group moved the following day. Robbins visited Savage’s tent, where the two stole some water from a goatskin. Savage told Robbins that his master had removed a wen from a camel that morning, and he knew where it was. They went and found it lying on the sand, already in two pieces, looking, according to Robbins, “not unlike a shad-spawn.” They started to cook it furtively in the sand under coals from the fire, but when they saw Savage’s mistress approaching, they dug it up
and gobbled it down.
On the night of September 18, the Bou Sbaa assembled for another yemma. As a full moon illuminated the sand around them, they decided to return full circle to the well by the sea. Riley was devastated by this news, which confirmed that the nomads could not find water where they were. By his estimation, it was three hundred miles back, seven and a half days’ hard traveling. “As the camels were almost dry,” he reasoned, “I much feared that myself and my companions must perish before we could reach it.”
In the morning before they turned back, Sideullah watered the four mares. Every other day, a family in the tribe, each in its turn, gave them as much water as they could drink. Sideullah emptied his last goatskin into a bowl. When they finished, Riley, who had not drunk water for days, begged his master to allow him to lap up what was left, but Sideullah refused. Instead, he sprinkled this dross on the ground as a sacrifice to Allah while the Arabs prayed for rain.
Over the next few days, they walked and foraged. Riley could not understand how the Arabs kept up such a pace on what little the desert yielded for them to consume. He and Clark had even less. In one sandy depression overlooked by the camels, they found snails on squat thornbushes. Most came off with a crisp snap, indicating they were long dead, dry, inedible, but then came a clinger and another. They hid the live snails in their clothing until dark, when they discreetly roasted them in the fire, but they found they could barely eat them. The body needs fluid to digest food, and they had drunk no more than a gill of milk that day. Burning with thirst, Riley and Clark sought out a staling camel, caught its amber stream in their hands, and drank. “Its taste was bitter, but not salt,” Riley said, “and it relieved our fainting spirits.”
