Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

by Dean King

  3. The entrances and clearances records for the Port of New Orleans at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington show that the Commerce, Master Riley of Middletown, entered the port on June 1, 1815. No reference to the Commerce’s departure can be found. Both Riley and Robbins, who in 1817 published separate accounts of their journey, agree on the June 24 departure date. Curiously, the thrice-weekly Louisiana Gazette carried advertisements for the Commerce through the July 28 issue, at the rate of a dollar for the first day and fifty cents for each additional appearance. The “ship news” list in the June 29, 1815, issue, does not list the Commerce under its heading “cleared, June 24.”

  4. The August 12 Gibraltar Chronicle notes the arrival of the Commerce, “40 days from New Orleans,” in its list for August 5 to 11.

  5. Riley wrote that Clark, Porter, Barrett, and Hogan were in the boat, but Robbins’s narrative contradicts this, saying that it was he and three others who crewed the craft. I have placed Robbins in the boat, and as Clark and Porter were of equal rank to Robbins, I have removed Clark, reasoning that Porter seemed to be of a willing nature and a good friend of Robbins’s and that the two might have chosen to do the duty together. The material point here is that Robbins was indeed in the craft and provided some of the details of this description of the incident.

  Robbins’s account also contradicts Riley’s in another way. He says Captain Price’s schooner was embayed and that they had assisted the schooner in beating out of the bay.

  Chapter 3: Shipwreck on Cape Bojador

  1. The English and Americans called the peso, or Spanish piece of eight (eight reales), which was widely circulated in Africa and the Mediterranean, the “Spanish dollar.” It was roughly equivalent in value to the American dollar. Depending on location, the value of the Spanish dollar and the American dollar ranged from four to five to the pound sterling.

  Chapter 4: A Hostile Welcome

  1. Under attack from skeptics who doubted the veracity of his own book, Riley published Paddock’s memoir, A Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Ship Oswego, on the Coast of South Barbary, in 1818. Paddock’s account corroborates many of Riley’s observations regarding the desert and the Arabs of the western Sahara. The passage quoted from is found on page 176.

  2. “Sahrawi” is the collective name of the inhabitants of Western Sahara regardless of race or tribe. Although it was not coined until 1976, when Spanish Sahara became Western Sahara, I have used it as the most succinct way to identify the people of the region at the time of this story.

  3. Riley certainly exaggerates when he says he “could not but imagine that those well set teeth were sharpened for the purpose of devouring human flesh!!!” A little more subdued, Robbins writes that the man had “gnashing” teeth. Both were playing to their audience’s fear of cannibals.

  4. The passage criticizing the avarice of Americans appears only in Riley’s manuscript, which is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. It was removed by his editor. Riley was presumably aware of the change.

  5. In his Narrative, Riley writes it “Allah K. Beer,” explaining that he knew “Allah” was the Arabic name for the “Supreme Being” and that he guessed “K. Beer” meant “our friend or father.”

  Chapter 5: Misery in an Open Boat

  1. Oddly, neither Riley nor Robbins mentions the subsequent actions of the tribe that attacked them. Since the captain ordered a single unarmed man—Porter—ashore, he must have felt certain they were not hiding nearby. That the Sahrawis would have simply abandoned eleven potential Christian slaves, who represented a small fortune to them, is hard to explain. The news of a shipwreck on the Sahara usually attracted tribes from hundreds of miles away, and fighting over the spoils often resulted: perhaps this band felt it more important to secure the silver they had already taken than to wait around and risk a fight over the unsubmissive sailors.

  2. Writing in the October 1817 Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (and unaware of the contradiction between Riley’s letter and memoir), one London critic dodges the question of Riley’s moral culpability, noting of the incident that he “attempts to justify it on more pleas than one, the strength of which we leave to be decided by the learned in moral casuistry.”

  3. This sailor’s oath is found in Noah Jones’s Journals. Early European and American mariners usually practiced hazing inspired by ancient pagan seafaring rites when crossing the Tropic of Cancer. In modern times, sailors often perform similar ceremonies when crossing the equator.

  4. Riley’s and Robbins’s chronologies do not coincide exactly, which is not surprising given that neither was able to keep a written account at the time and both recorded the events after considerable and eventful delays. Their calendars of the boat voyage differ by two days. Both say it began on August 29, and both say they turned back to the coast on September 2. Robbins believed they reached land on September 5, while Riley says September 7. To complicate matters, in an open letter published in the March 26, 1816, Connecticut Courant, just after his return to New York, Riley said they returned to the ship on August 30 and reached land again on September 8. Riley’s chronology contains other inconsistencies, which I have tried to reconcile. When his and Robbins’s accounts differ, I generally deem his to be more accurate, given that as captain he was used to keeping a detailed log and that he recollected the events a good year in advance of Robbins.

  Chapter 6: Purgatory

  1. In his manuscript, Riley originally recorded that the urine had passed through their bodies twenty times. Upon reflection, he reduced it to twelve.

  2. We seem to remain as conflicted as McGee was in assessing the value of drinking urine. Opinions vary so widely that while a U.S. Marine Corps desert operations manual advises Marines never to drink urine even in survival circumstances, some natural health faddists recommend a daily regimen of urine consumption for nutritional and medicinal purposes.

  3. Robbins gives the date as September 6.

  4. Although Riley mentions finding only locusts, Robbins reports that while they were traveling below the cliff that day, they came across the tracks and dung of wild animals; that night, they heard howling in the dark. He also writes that the next day they saw a leopard, which was actually probably a wildcat or a cheetah.

  5. Riley says they also had sticks they had carried with them from the boat, but he does not mention these sticks earlier when he describes the digging of wells. These inconsistencies are typical of his account. It and Robbins’s differ in minor ways. The sailors discovered the tracks of a camel and the footprint of a man, and Riley says they determined them to be “old”; Robbins maintains that they were “recently made,” adding, “indeed they must have been, as the blowing of the dry sand would soon have filled them up.”

  Chapter 7: Captured

  1. Was the fact that Riley stole from the cook, the only black man, an act of racism, happenstance, or something else? In survival situations, people tend to cluster around, protect, and seek protection from those most like them, whether by family relation, race, religion, or nationality. This was perhaps most profoundly demonstrated in the wreck of the Méduse in 1816, when the 150 men, women, and children set adrift on a makeshift raft factionalized by race, nationality, and even profession as they murdered one another in a desperate struggle to survive. Théodore Géricault portrayed the tragic scene in his epic 1819 painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, now hanging in the Louvre. Riley might have picked Deslisle because he was most conveniently located, or perhaps because Deslisle, being a black man and one of the lowest-ranking in the crew, was the most different from him. Nevertheless, as events progressed, Riley showed that he was above many of the baser instincts, in a way that seemed to transcend both his religious upbringing and his role as captain. He showed moral strength based on common sense and his own fortitude, and for a man of his day, he seemed remarkably free of bigotry.

  2. While it is common knowledge that a severely malnourished stomach should be filled slowly, it takes mo
re than common restraint for the owner of that stomach to do so. Rescued from a gale-wrecked schooner in the Gulf Stream off Virginia in 1830, Captain Charles Tyng warned his crew that drinking too fast would make them sick. In the cabin of his rescuer, he found a pitcher of water. “I thought I would just take one swallow,” he related, “but when I put it to my mouth I could not take it away until I had nearly emptied it of its contents.” Tyng paid for it with racking pain and vomiting.

  3. For further reading on rehydration, see E. F. Adolph and associates’ landmark 1947 work, Physiology of Man in the Desert, incorporating much research on the subject from World War II.

  4. In various parts of the world, the saddle on a dromedary, or one-humped camel, sits in front of, on top of, or behind the hump, each position having its advantages. In front of the hump, the rider has the most control over the camel and can reach farther forward when fighting. Behind the hump, he has more freedom of movement, and the pounding is less severe. On top of the hump, on a platform or raised saddle, the ride is smoother, but the rider has the least control of the camel.

  Chapter 8: Thirst

  1. Lempriere, p. 725. Nigritia, also then known as Soudan, was a large region of sub-Saharan central Africa.

  2. My experience riding camels while tracing parts of Riley’s route and attempting to cover more than twenty miles a day corroborates the sailors’ pain. On the first day I rubbed a hole bigger than a plum through the flesh of my backside. At the end of that day, even our guide, a camel-racing instructor, fell off his mount and writhed on the ground with leg cramps. Later in the journey, another guide became so sore while riding that he strapped a Land Rover cushion on top of his saddle and blankets. Fast speeds were untenable for long distances while riding in front of the hump. Behind the hump was only slightly better and required us to cram shoes and empty water bottles beneath the backs of our saddles to keep from being bounced off the camel’s rear end.

  3. In his memoir, Robbins rarely approaches Riley’s objectivity. His account is largely bitter and lacks empathy for the Sahrawis, though he does acknowledge Ganus’s kindness to him.

  4. According to The U.S. Army Survival Manual, a man working moderately in the desert in ninety-five-degree heat needs to drink about two and a half gallons a day.

  5. Robbins’s account of this meeting is, as usual, less detailed than Riley’s. Among the contradictory details they give, Riley places the meeting on the evening of the second day of their captivity, but according to Robbins, Ganus led him out of camp and on a five-mile march to the council on the morning of the third day, and then they left it around three in the afternoon. They do not agree on which sailors were there, Riley pointing out only that Porter and Burns were not there, while Robbins remembers seeing Burns. Neither mentions Savage by name. Robbins recollects that there were about twenty nomads present, typical of the many tribal gatherings he saw during his captivity, while Riley describes a much larger group.

  6. Although, like many Westerners of his day, Riley uses the terms Arab and Moor interchangeably, the Moors are generally considered to be specifically the descendants of the Arabs who occupied Spain for eight centuries, beginning in 711, and who then inhabited the cities of the Empire of Morocco.

  7. Robbins believed that Riley was using the stones to negotiate a ransom price, an easy mistake on his part since neither he nor the other men understood Riley’s conversation with the Arabs.

  Chapter 9: The Sons of the Father of Lions

  1. The tribe’s name has appeared in numerous forms in the West. Brisson calls them the Labdesseba, placing them on a 1792 map of his and Saugnier’s routes to the southeast of Cape Blanco and dubbing them “a ferocious nation.” Mungo Park’s 1798 map also places the Labdessebas in this vicinity. Riley does not name them, but the map of his route published with his Narrative indicates regions belonging to the “Labdessebahs,” near Cape Blanco, and the “Abdoussebahs,” to the north, which he apparently did not realize were branches of the same tribe. Robbins calls his captors “Wiled Lebdessebah” and places them near Cape Blanco on his map. He marks an area to the north as belonging to the “Wiled Aboussebah.” Joseph Dupuis, who annotated The Narrative of Robert Adams (1817), calls them the “Woled Aboussebah” and notes that “there are various branches of it, who consider themselves wholly independent of each other, yet all calling themselves the ‘Woled Aboussebah.’ ” Some of these names may actually be variations of the more generic term for the peoples of these regions, l’Abd al-Siba, or “those in dissidence.” Adding to the confusion are twentieth-century renditions of the tribe’s name. In his book Spanish Sahara (1976), John Mercer calls them simply “Sba.” One of the most detailed descriptions of the tribe is in Pazzanita and Hodges’s Historical Dictionary of Western Sahara (1994). They use the modern French transliteration “Oulad Bou Sbaa,” which I have adopted and often shortened to “Bou Sbaa,” as is common.

  2. Riley never actually gives the name of his third master, instead calling him “my old master” to distinguish him from his sons, Riley’s “young masters.” From Riley’s references to Arab names, I have taken “Sideullah,” one of the few that did not belong to any of the other sailors’ owners, as the name for this third master.

  Chapter 10: Sidi Hamet’s Feast

  1. When Muslims accept a gift or a serving of food or drink, they often say “Besmillah”—In the name of Allah. Riley would have picked up on this often-repeated Arabic word and used it as an American would use “Thank you.”

  2. In his seminal 1928 book Le Sahara, the French anthropologist E.-F. Gautier observes that among the Tuareg tribe, bathing in water was almost taboo. He theorizes that it was not due just to the scarcity of water but also for fear of adversely affecting the sweat glands and causing overheating. But, he adds, rather poetically, that for a human chap_ “exposed almost naked to the desert wind for an entire lifetime, the rites of cleanliness are superfluous; the eternal wind, charged with sand, scours the human skin and keeps it as clean as it does the slabs of naked rock on the tops of the plateaus” (p. 16).

  3. Today a standard English translation of the Shahadah is “I bear witness that there is no God except God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

  4. According to Knut Schmidt-Nielsen et al., in “The Question of Water Storage in the Stomach of the Camel” (1956), “the fluid that can be drained from the rumen contents is like a green soup and it seems rather repulsive to the normal person. However, to the desert traveler who is out of water, any fluid is attractive, and he will even drink his own urine. In this situation the rumen fluid would be quite helpful because of its relatively low salt content” (p. 10).

  5. The details of this argument over Hogan come primarily from an account by Robbins, who heard about it from Hogan. Robbins calls Hogan’s master “Mahomet” and does not point out that he was also Riley’s first master, who claimed Dick Deslisle and the captain at the outset. Riley calls him “Hamet.” To avoid confusion with Hamet, the Bou Sbaa trader from the north, I have used the full name and more standard spelling “Mohammed.”

  6. Robbins actually writes “kellup en-sahrau” (more properly, kelb es-sahrawi), which means “desert dogs.” It is used as an insult because the dog is considered one of the lowest forms of animal on the desert. Here and later, he translates it, however, as “Christian dogs”—kelb en-Nasrani—which makes more sense in context.

  7. Riley recalls in his memoir that they were in the process of departing, already walking up the dune, when Robbins appeared. If the fire was still burning, then Robbins probably smelled either the lingering scent of camel grease, which had saturated the area, or some vestige of a meal the tribesmen were trying to concoct from the stripped carcass.

  Chapter 11: Is It Sweet?

  1. Riley repeats the date September 28, thus throwing his chronology off by a day. He does it again on October 2, putting him two days behind in his account.

  2. Robbins writes that the Arabs prayed four times a day, but the Quran actuall
y prescribes five daily prayers: at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and twilight (bedtime).

  3. Riley’s water calculations show that he was not very precise in his math. He guessed that the big pool had “not more than fifty gallons” and that the smaller pool held much less. Yet the large camel alone drank sixty gallons all at once. Three other camels and all the men also drank, and they filled up two skins. Even if the smaller camels drank half as much as the large one, they still would have consumed more than Riley estimated was there, and it is unlikely that the spring would have replenished itself so quickly.

  Chapter 12: Honor Among Thieves

  1. In the manuscript of Riley’s narrative, unlike the published book, the word savage is capitalized and underlined, further suggesting that the culprit was the second mate.

  2. I tried to identify this herb root while I was in Western Sahara. As I described the substance, my trusted guide nodded his head to indicate he knew what I was talking about. He returned from an unseen kiosk in Laayoune with a six-inch sheep-shinbone pipe still adorned with wool and a bag of a sweet-smelling brown substance that he called menajie. Smoking it was like smoking tobacco, and, in fact, I was told by another guide that menajie was a blend of tobacco from Mauritania.

  3. Riley calls lhasa, the Arabs’ semolina or barley mush, “lhash” or “l’hash.” Robbins calls it “laish.”

  Chapter 13: Skeletons