by Ed Stafford
I gulped down ten snails in the dusky light, the bits of shell scraping my throat. I retched on the sixth and it came back up into the sand. I stared blankly at the loss of hydration and nutrition in my vomit on the beach.
There was a magical burnt light that ringed the horizon. It was a distant light, a light full of hope, laden with a heavy ceiling of dark cloud that stretched completely above my head. But out there beyond my own gloomy skies it was beautiful and orange. I could not help but feel the love of Amanda reaching out from afar.
Using that hope and light I tried to hold on to the positives and asked myself what I had done today. Water was now more plentiful and reliable; I had a fantastic new grass skirt; I’d experimented with weaving palm leaves and, although I couldn’t make a mat, I could make the tiles to thatch – and in fact that was the important bit. I’d done my exercises (I just had to do chin-ups in Lemon Camp), I’d eaten coconut and snails . . . I became distracted by the fact that there was more moonlight tonight. What else had I achieved? I’d experimented with a bamboo fire-saw, and I could do it if I found some better-quality (less dead) bamboo.
‘So you’ve done a lot!’ I told myself encouragingly. ‘One baby step at a time. I’ve got so much time, haven’t I?’ I drifted off and stared into the blackness. ‘Don’t worry, Ed,’ I eventually said. ‘It will be all right.’
Chapter 3
FIRE
‘Morning – day seven. Where’s my rock?’ I grunted as I scraped the seventh mark on the cave wall. ‘It’s not a system of sleeping that I would recommend. Every time you move it all slips off you and because the cave’s at an angle the bedding slips down the hill.’ I shivered and it turned into a comical noise that made me smile. I realised I was finding it amusing that I had a very cold, uncomfortable night! Humour − this was a good sign.
I had a new cut under the second toe on my left foot that was not healing well with the sand and cave dirt in it all the time. When I flexed my toes I could feel referred tenderness up the whole tendon that it was attached to, which was slightly disconcerting. There was nothing to dress my various cuts with so I washed them in seawater, left them open and hoped for the best. I wondered whether goat shit and rock powder was bad for wounds. I thought about the diseases you can get from goats. Anthrax? A bit too late to bother about that.
I didn’t have a poo yesterday but I could feel one coming on. Let’s hope it’s not explosive. It was heartening to get up to a fresh water supply in my cave and I had a morning glug.
‘Well, you could continue mumbling shit to the camera,’ I laughed, ‘or you could actually get up and do stuff, Edward. Actually – yes – it’s time to evacuate.’
Because of my light-hearted, self-mocking mood I decided to film it. ‘Mr Whippy! Excellent,’ I spoke into the camera.
‘Mr Whippy,’ I explained for the international viewers, ‘is a type of soft ice cream that comes out of a machine and curls lightly into a wafer cornet. Mr Whippy – I’m relatively firm – and that’s good.’
It would be easy to omit endless talk of defecating from this book but for me it offered vital information in a world in which I had none at all. I came to rely on a morning inspection to appraise the state of my physical health. Also, if it hadn’t been noted, this wasn’t a terribly civilised experiment. Not to discuss the most basic of bodily functions would have allowed a veil to be drawn over something most people don’t particularly want to hear about, but it wouldn’t have told the full story. Here everything was laid bare – quite literally – and the tribulations of my bowel movements were a significant part of my world.
My lips were starting to crack. ‘What a gorgeous pout, eh?’ I joked to the camera. The evacuation had taken it out of me and I stood slightly dazed on the beach as my internal organs adjusted themselves into the space left by my now empty colon. ‘Right – water.’
The water bottle at the seep had fallen slightly to the side in the night, allowing the wick to touch the side of the bottle. This meant the water had run down the outside rather than the inside. I was left with about 400ml – not disastrous, but I had to be more careful.
I decanted the 400ml into the bigger two-litre water bottle and reset the wick. Although it hadn’t rained at all last night my water reserve had now risen. I must not have felt the need to drink all my water yesterday. Over the course of the day I would aim to drink the entire 1.2 litres. I had a big swig. It tasted bizarre – like salty, clammy rock.
Via a note in the dropbox there had been a request for me to do a second drop per week, on a Friday. This was a nuisance as it meant that I lost another couple of hours to logistics every Friday now as well as every Tuesday. The reason for this was that on Komo Steven Ballantyne was struggling to download all of the Tuesday footage on to a hard drive in time for him to send it back to the UK on the Thursday. So this extra drop would even out his weekly workload. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was revolving around the requirements of Steven, when he was being fed three enormous meals a day and sleeping in a bed, but, as I actually enjoyed the enforced walk and realised that it would help him out, I agreed. Being on the move seemed to be beneficial for my mental health, and allowing myself to be in a position where I could assist someone else felt good, too. This particular trip served also to turn up some fresh sections of bamboo driftwood and some more of the slim nuts so I felt that just putting myself out there was always a good idea. You never knew what you might find or bump into.
As I mulled this over, as if to prove my point, on the forest floor I noticed a quite sizeable hermit crab scurrying from left to right in front of me. I picked it up by the shell to show it to camera and, to my surprise, it made an emergency evacuation – dropping to the ground, leaving its shell home in my hand. As I hadn’t got a fire I wasn’t yet in a position to cook it so I left it beside its empty shell hoping it would be able to move back in once it had got over the shock of meeting a clumsy white giant.
As I picked my way back down the western slope from the Faraway Tree I could hear the goats down on the beach near the cave. I yelped as loudly as I could to scare them off. ‘Don’t eat my bedding!’ was my immediate concern. By the time I reached the cave they had gone and the bedding was untouched. I needed to teach these goats about demarcation – this was my territory now. In retrospect I might have welcomed them in, making it easier to catch them later.
With my focus very much still on fire I experimented with the three different types of wood that I’d collected from the forest as hearths for a hand drill. I spent all morning carving notches into all the new hearths and the new bamboo saw. None looked that promising but I had to keep trying so that I might eventually stumble upon the right wood. Every piece of wood that I carved was teaching me about wood density, dryness and degree of decomposition. Through my failures I began to get an idea of what I had really been looking for in the first place.
Still keeping my options open, I also wanted to improve my bow drill set. The bearing block (a pretty shell I’d found on the beach) was biting into the top of the drill too much, causing friction where it wasn’t wanted and slowing it down. I placed a plastic bottle top inside the shell to act as a smoother inner bearing and the set ran considerably more easily.
One very inconvenient truth was that the snails were running out. It showed that one shouldn’t be too dependent on a single source of food but that was an unwelcome lesson as snails were my main protein source and had seemed infinite. Could they be seasonal and now at the end of their season? Had I eaten them all? Would their population re-establish itself? Two steps forward – another step back . . .
There are moments in life that you just know are right. Moments that sing through the darkness in a voice of truth and purity and vibrate from within your body so that you know they are significant. I stood and looked at a rather unprepossessing twisted tree with dark gnarled bark and nondescript oval leaves. It was on the edge of my beach and about twen
ty metres from my cave and I must have walked past it ten times every day since my arrival. I squinted, I smiled, I didn’t know whether to put my hopes into words for fear of jinxing what I believed – no, knew – to be true.
‘Tangalito.’ I almost whispered the word. ‘I will test it with Rama’s fire-plough method to see if it chars. If this is the tree that was identified to me on Komo then I can’t express how much this would mean.’ My measured words didn’t go half way to describing what was going on inside me. I knew this was a game changer. By now I was pretty resigned to the fact that I’d forgotten what tangalito even looked like and I was just trialling any old wood, but something was standing by this tree pointing at it with a green flag. Warmth spread through me as I used all my body weight to snap off a large branch.
I was so confident that I even handled this wood differently – as if it was an antique vase that needed due respect and a light touch. With my bow working well now, I knew that I was going to use that method. There were no sections long or straight enough to make a hand drill anyway. Taking two sections, I braced one against a rock and used the other to work aggressively back and forth as if I was scratching the itchiest of mosquito bites. Sure enough, without too much effort the pieces of wood began to char and a light wisp of smoke floated up. This method of testing could have been applied to every wood that I’d sourced to date and I realised it all too late. I could have saved literally days of carving and whittling if I’d just applied what I already knew.
I skinned a cigar-sized drill and cut it to length, then I carved the two ends into perfect circular domes with such care that I knew I would reap rewards for this diligence. I split the hearth and left both sections in the sun to dry. The wood was live so I guessed it would need a couple of days to dry out. Looking back, having already charred the wood I’m not sure that this was strictly necessary, but I wasn’t going to rush this; all my trust was in this wood. If I did this right it would change my existence here permanently.
While my prime candidate was drying, I experimented with bamboo and once more tried the fire-saw method. From the outset I had a far more compassionate and understanding attitude towards the experiment due to the security of having my tangalito in reserve and the reassurance that gave me. I had never tried to use bamboo to light a fire before but I knew the principles and so I decided that I just had to give it a go and see what happened. If it worked – great. If not – I would again have learned more about methods and materials.
In my first attempt the bamboo had been too weak and it had snapped. This new bamboo was better but for some unknown reason I could not create enough heat to get an ember. As a side product what I had found, however, was the best fine-grade tinder I had seen so far on the island, so, at the end of the day, when I decided that the fire-saw was not going to live up to its name, I took the incredibly fine bamboo tinder that I’d made and added it to the centre of my coarser coconut husk tinder ball. I’d learned more about a method and I’d improved my chances of turning an ember into fire by improving my tinder ball. Despite the lack of fire I glanced at the tangalito drying in the sun − I was happy with a productive and positive day’s work.
I think working in the shade of the cave with my hands on one single task had been calming for me. I was learning what I found reassuring and what unsettled me. As the sun dropped lower in the sky and filled my cave once more with a golden glow I sat solidly on the Cinesaddle and contemplated my state of affairs on the island to date with camera in hand.
There was a place I could get to where I wasn’t in conflict, where everything felt right and things just flowed. At the moment it wasn’t consistent but it was reassuring to know that I had the ability to step out of the confusion and the madness and tune into a purer, more peaceful self. I was far from understanding what this all meant but I was happy with how I felt this evening and what I’d achieved. Working with my hands had tuned me in so much that it had opened my eyes to the tangalito that I’d been walking past for days.
I allowed myself to feel out across the ocean to Amanda and the kids. I have the most striking fiancée; she is unique. Half-Japanese, half-British – with the posture of a dancer and the bone structure of a model, her glossy black mane is her strength flowing down her slender back. Her steely will and capacity to face problems head-on had led me to nickname her ‘Stands-with-a-fist’, after the character in Dances with Wolves, as it seemed to fit her inner commitment to what is right so well. Amanda had come into my life about thirteen months ago and I hoped we would always be together. She has two beautiful kids and I missed them now. With all my heart I missed them.
A tear rolled down my cheek in the twilight. I felt the luckiest man alive.
My body had tightened up from lying on the dirt floor and I clicked my stiff neck free. Anxiety bit me like a plague of eels as I surfaced to the worries of my situation.
As I pressed ‘OK’ on the InReach I desperately wanted to say more. To cry out that I was sad and lonely – just to have someone know how desperate I felt. Instead I passively watched the routine message send and powered down my narrow portal to the rest of the world.
My stomach churned and I knew what was coming. Not bothering to put on my grass skirt, I hurried down the jagged rocks and across the sand. Such was my diarrhoea that it started before I reached the water’s edge, leaving a humiliating brown trail behind me. Without the strength to squat and keep my balance I went straight down on all fours in the cold wet sand. In this inhuman position I felt pathetic – like a stray, disease-ridden dog. Wave after wave of knotted stomach pain gave way to degrading release as I sank on to my elbows to save energy and increase stability. Head resting in the cold sand I wondered why anyone would volunteer to put themselves through such a challenge. What was wrong with me?
Washing myself in the harsh seawater I felt that the skin between my buttocks was becoming dry and cracked. I walked back up the beach as if both legs were dragging bags of fertiliser through the sand. This, I knew, was a tell-tale sign of malnutrition and dehydration.
I spent an hour trying to repair my grass blanket. My novice construction had been crude and I’d not worked out that the layers of grass that you tie into the strands of bark must overlap, as if you are laying bricks. My blanket had huge lines of weakness where the ends of the clumps all finished together – now gaping holes. It would not survive many more restless nights. It was still keeping me warm but was it worth all this time expended? I put it down to experience – what else could I do but learn from the error?
In the end it took all morning. Crikey. I tried to reassure myself that it was vital to ensure that I slept well. Still, I couldn’t help beating myself up for not making it properly in the first place. It’s incredible how something so understandable, so easily forgiven in any other situation, starts to feel like a hanging offence when you’re on your own and trying to survive. Very crudely salvaged, I stopped work on the blanket. I needed a drink and I needed some food.
Upon inspection of the seep I was confused to see that the second fill of the day had only about 150ml inside the bottle. The seep was now emitting less and the only factor remaining was the uncomfortable reality that I’d not had sustained rainfall (nothing longer than a minute) since I arrived on the island and the groundwater was now drying up.
I saved the precious 150ml into my two-litre bottle and drank the measly 100ml that was in the top pool. The bottom hollow was dry.
I still felt sick as a pig, I’d lost a lot of water and I didn’t have the means to replace it. Doctors and survival experts agree that eating raw snails every day would have undoubtedly been one of the causes for my illness. In extreme cases if you lose a lot of water, and that is accompanied by loss of salt, you can fall into a coma and die because your brain starts swelling. But it was the milder symptoms − apathy, irritability, lethargy and poor decision-making − that were wracking me now.
The blazing heat of the sun slapp
ed my bare torso as a reminder that I needed fluids fast. My new Y-pole may have been a good two metres longer than the last one but that meant it was also much heavier. As I struggled along the beach to find a good coconut tree my legs started to set as if I’d just swallowed a bowlful of cement.
I stood below a coconut palm where my Y-trunk now reached the fruit and heaved the cumbersome tool upright like a flagpole. The weight was five times that of my previous pole.
Now I was standing with the base of the pole cupped above my chest in two hands and attempting to thrust upwards like a shot-putter into bunches of green coconuts, hoping to dislodge one of them. Each clumsy shove was feeble as a result of the great weight of my pole and I could not produce enough force to get a single coconut down.
No coconuts . . . I am still thirsty . . . and now I’m exhausted . . . because I’ve just spent all morning repairing a blanket . . . that is still in tatters . . . and now I’m panicking . . . because I need to drink . . . and I’ve wasted more time and more energy . . .
The panic gained momentum, spun around my head in chaos and exploded out of my mouth.
‘FUUUUUUCK!’
My verbalisation of despair was long and desperate.
There are times when roaring is a release valve to the mess that is going on inside, and I had no other way of expelling this negative energy.
‘FUUUUUUCK!’ I screamed again.
I had always said that I would aim to try to ride out any ups and downs in events by staying true to my own sense of self and yet it was day eight and I could not help but cast myself as a useless failure. I was struggling even to find water – let alone concentrate on more advanced survival priorities like making fire. I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and beat myself up that I was failing miserably. I don’t remember ever having felt this low before.
