by Ed Stafford
With no great expectations, I checked the seep. As predicted, virtually no fresh water in the plastic bottle at the end of the day. The sun, which was now pressing down on the horizon, had cooked and decommissioned the water collection system all afternoon. I tried to bash down ten raw snails before bed and these were slightly different – darker, larger shells with a body that had a green fleshy section on it. I almost gagged after swallowing the first but on number six I started vomiting. And I kept on vomiting. Five coconuts’ worth of fluid emptied from my stomach. I’d just lost all my hydration.
Again.
Back in the cave the purging left me feeling reflective. ‘Do you know what? I’m never going to take anything for granted again. I have an amazing life. I have an amazing life. This isn’t amazing, though – this bit of my life,’ I chuckled. ‘This bit of my life is less than amazing.’
I started to smile and caught myself doing so. ‘Why are you smiling, you idiot?’ The black humour seemed to work, though, as I became distracted and grinned. ‘Eeee − I got a shirt today!’ I was wearing the green long-sleeve top to bed and it felt really good to have some form of proper clothing on. I was a bit warmer, a bit more comfortable, and, most importantly, I felt a bit more normal. I’d said I’d save it for fishing but it was cold at night – really cold – so it became my pyjama top, too.
My triumphant strike through the second block of five on the wall of the cave took me, significantly, into double figures. But I knew ten days was only a fraction of what lay in store.
‘Morning, day ten,’ I reported to the camera with a clipped matter-of-factness. I hadn’t slept much as it had been a particularly windy night.
At the back of my mind I hung on to a glimmer of hope that digging a well would solve my problems. As a geographer I determined that if there was any fresh water to be found on the island it would be subterranean. The island was too small for rivers but after rainfall water would be concentrated in certain areas. The only obvious drainage basin that I had located was on the east of the island surrounding Lemon Camp. A drainage basin is simply land that is shaped like a bowl or an amphitheatre. Water that falls within the limits of this basin (the watershed) would flow towards the lowest point because of gravity. If my instinct was right, there should be a small gully or natural drainage ditch near Lemon Camp – at the lowest point towards which the water was focused – and finding this was my quest for the morning.
I ambled back into the forest and began to climb. I found it difficult not to sound melodramatic about just how little energy I had in order to complete this journey. My whole body was full of scrap iron, and four times in the (normally now fourteen-minute) journey I had to collapse into the leaf litter so as to recharge my batteries just enough to pick myself up again and start walking. My hunger had returned with a vengeance. The crossing took about fifty minutes.
On the other side of the island in Lemon Camp I found an old basket made from coconut palms that I could use to harvest sea food. I then ate six of the slim wafer-like nuts. I was pretty sure it was the coconut making me sick as I’d just drunk one and immediately felt awful.
Facing Lemon Camp, with the beach behind me, I turned left and followed the land downhill. Within a minute I was standing in an area where, when I was facing the island, the land rose both to my left and to my right. I squinted through the trees looking inland and I was indeed in a very shallow, almost unperceivable, gully full of fallen trees and undergrowth.
I decided to follow the gully inland and to look for an obvious natural point to excavate. I pulled myself through small gaps between trees and climbed over and under fallen boughs. Twenty metres in I found a depression. A large horizontal tree root had created a mini cliff in the gully that had subsequently formed a small dried-up plunge pool below it. The base of this depression was filled with large rocks piled on top of each other. I dropped heavily to my knees in the clay and hauled aside one rock after another. I began to excavate the gully with my bare hands – wiggling the vast rocks from the sucking clay and casting them aside. The sloppier the clay became the more I knew I was excavating the right place. I used a stick and then my bare hands to claw away the soggy lumps of clay and was eventually left with a two-foot-deep hole in the dry riverbed.
I knew that clay is virtually impermeable and therefore that I would not hit a water-table as such, as the soil particles were too densely packed to allow much water to flow through it. This meant my well would not fill from the groundwater seeping in and I would probably have to wait for rainfall. The waterproof characteristics of the clay should, however, ensure it worked as a vast collecting bucket. Rainwater would run down the hillside and concentrate in the gully and flow down to my newly excavated hole and, with a bit of luck, fill it up.
Despite the fact that I’d not been able to hit a water-table, I had more information about the island’s hydrology and I had a new method of collecting rainwater on a far bigger scale than I would have imagined possible. Screw giant clamshells – I was now able to harness the rain that fell in an area the size of New York’s Central Park.
Should the rain ever fall.
The way back was even slower. Once, when I sank to the floor, I think I allowed myself almost to drift off to sleep. Apathy was overtaking me once more. ‘I just don’t care.’ I reminded myself of the stories I’d been told of Everest climbers who’d given up, sat down and accepted death. Due to the lack of oxygen and fatigue, they just didn’t care about death any more – it seemed inviting compared with having to walk any further. The comparison allowed me some perspective and I realised my situation was nothing like as dire. It spurred me on.
I smashed open a brown coconut that had a reasonable amount of milky fluid in it. I forced down a few chunks of the white flesh and then grabbed a fistful of snails from the water’s edge. I gulped down the first slippery mollusc and felt nauseous. The second made me gag violently and once more I vomited forcefully into the sand. I stood, dazed, looking at the familiar sight of my vomit (it represented all my nutrition and hydration for the day) yet again wasted on the beach.
I wasn’t learning, was I?
Back in my cave I felt cold and helpless. The vomiting made me despise the sight of the coconuts and I tried to force some of the slippery flesh down but it made me gag again.
‘Should I take that first course of antibiotics?’
Long pause for thought.
I needed to get rid of this diarrhoea and vomiting to have any hope of building up my energy levels. ‘Maybe I should. I don’t care about breaking open the kit any more.’ I couldn’t have cared less about the project or the Discovery Channel series – both seemed surreal and contrived in my weakened state. Breaking open the medical kit meant that I could not say that I’d only used what was on the island to survive – but I was ill, and desperately weak, and I just didn’t care. I took five metronidazole tablets as a one-off, kill-everything-bad-inside-my-gut dose.
In my muddled state, blame still seemed to be my brain’s way of coping with my predicament and I projected my frustration outwards. With anger now came a certain degree of paranoia. How could they be so stupid as to put me on an island without a reliable water source? Were they incompetent or just careless? Were they now laughing about this? Wankers. Could I sue them for any illness that resulted from this?
This unconscious behavioural strategy sent me more out of control than ever. I could not change what they had done. I had made myself the victim here and I felt pathetically sorry for myself. I could not make it rain and I got angrier and more indifferent about the survival task itself. It was all so outside my control anyway. In this helpless state I couldn’t even entertain the idea of a failure and so, as the afternoon passed, I did no work to help progress my ability to make fire. I lay in the cave and told myself it was a waste of time and wouldn’t work anyway.
The sky darkened and mirrored my drab mood. A light grey mist of drizzle
blew in from the south-west. But the mood association with bad weather lifted as I watched my prepared clamshells fill with pure fresh rainwater. This was fresh water − no amount of depression could suffocate the excitement that stirred inside me as I gazed at the raindrop bombs exploding into my field of ceramic-looking bath tubs. After ten minutes the rain stopped and I used the same sucking and blowing technique with the straw that I’d used for the forty seconds of rain that I’d got on day six. I collected over a litre of fresh rainwater, screwed the lid on the water bottle and took it up to the cave.
I crawled into my patch of dirt and pulled the dry grass over my fragile body. Lying down was bliss. Not having to use any energy felt amazing. There was still half an hour of daylight left but I shut my eyes and told myself that nothing ever stays the same. I had my water. Tomorrow had to be better.
I tried to scratch the eleventh mark on the cave wall but, as I’d run out of flat space, they were no longer really recognisable as marks. As I’d got to grips with the cameras I’d decided to set the date and time so the primitive markings were pointless now anyway. Bugger what I should do − what they wanted me to do. I was going to use everything I had to get through this nightmare.
I took a quick inventory of my physical state and I did feel somewhat less ill – perhaps the antibiotics had worked. I glanced at the two-litre bottle. ‘Ooh, that’s a nice amount of water to wake up to – I forgot it rained last night.’
I climbed down to the shells. It had indeed rained again in the night so I was able to do my decanting-by-straw palaver again to top up my growing stores. ‘That’s a pretty special moment,’ I beamed at the camera. ‘Two FULL litres of fresh rainwater!’ I hadn’t even checked the rock seep yet. The seep provided another 600ml, including the top pool.
‘Drinking freely – drinking freely, Edward! Hee hee hee,’ I chuckled.
It was dropbox day and I set out around the coast to Lemon Camp. I was keen to see the results of my newly dug well. ‘Water – with renewed vigour,’ I stated, already considerably more hydrated and feeling the benefits. ‘And hopefully we can put this one to bed as water really bores me.’
I made the drop of used cards and dead batteries and with high hopes went to inspect the nearby well that I’d excavated the day before. I pushed between the bushes feeling as if I had a winning lottery ticket and knew that my numbers were about to come up. Sure enough, as I peered over the circular opening in the forest floor my own reflection stared back at me in a glossy brown mirror of water. ‘It works! It bloody works!’ I howled through the trees to every living thing that could hear me. Yesterday evening’s and last night’s rainfall had indeed tracked down from every distant reach of the catchment area to fall at the last hurdle – trapped in my well – rather than flowing out into the ocean.
I had brought five plastic bottles with lids on and one by one I submerged each bottle in order to hear the soft brown bubbles of air escape as they filled with fresh rainwater. If I’d had more bottles on me I could have filled them, too. The resulting liquid consisted of a lot of clay sediment in suspension but I could tell that if left to settle in the cave I could gently pour off cleaner water. From a hydration point of view things were looking much, much brighter.
In the clearing behind the camp were the two taro plants that I’d found earlier. Widespread across South-East Asia, taro is a plant with large arrow-shaped leaves and edible starchy tubers that taste a bit like potatoes. I began to carefully dig down through the damp soil with a sharp stick to unearth my next meal.
I was pleasantly surprised to reveal four potato-like corms and I decided to replant the main stem of the taro in the hope that it might produce again. With two of these corms in each hand I made unusually light work of the return journey to my cave on the beach. Carbohydrate – what a great find! Of course I had coconut, which I had thought was a carb for my time on the island, but for some unfathomable reason it didn’t give me much strength or fullness in my muscles. Later, back in the real world of Google, I was to find out that coconut is in fact 89 per cent saturated fat – so it was little surprise that it wasn’t the ideal choice for replenishing my depleted glycogen stores. Taro, on the other hand, would do just fine.
In the cave I used a natural ledge at the back to rest the bottles of clay water in a neat row to allow the sediment to settle. I’d found two more flip-flops washed up from the ocean that were wearable and the cushioning under my soles was a real life-saver as sometimes now I woke up in the night for a wee and could hardly stand. The bottoms of my feet were almost beyond soreness. They were a constant reminder that my existence here was still precarious.
The carbohydrate find had been a real boost and, not wanting to spend too long on my bottom in the cave, I took one of the now plentiful plastic bottles into the shade of the woods and decided to make a fish trap. I knew the theory and I could tell it would be simple to implement. But as I explained what I was doing to the camera I found I was stumbling over my words and that even a simple explanation was now a challenge for me. I would benefit from any extra protein and omega oils if this trap worked to get my brain working better again. I had to chop off the tapered end of the bottle to leave two parts: a tall tub and a funnel. My clamshell was too big and blunt to use to cut the plastic and a rusty tin lid I’d found in Lemon Camp days before wasn’t sharp enough either. In the end I used my teeth and tore the bottle apart. It wasn’t pretty but at least it was now in two pieces – I sighed a half-amused smile at the crude result. I then turned the funnel end around and slid it inside the bottom section, spout first. What resulted was a trap that had a large orifice that tapered down to a small entrance to a contained space. Fish would be able to find their way in, but they are not the brightest of creatures and most of them would never be able to find their way out.
I whistled the tune of A-Ha’s ‘The Sun Always Shines on TV’ as I walked the small plastic lobster-pot-like trap 200 metres further down the beach. The rock pool I selected was cupped by a large expanse of black rock that sat at the south of Alpha Beach like a vast old wooden ship that had run aground. I had observed the pool before and knew it had a good constant stock of two- to three-inch sprats. I smashed two snails, crudely shelled them and stuffed them down the spout into the trap’s belly as bait. I then lowered the bottle into the pool, resting it at arm’s length on the sandy bottom. The salt water lapped at my armpit hairs and the tiny fish darted in to nibble my cracked fingers. I placed a flat rock on the top of the bottle to keep it in place and, satisfied, walked, quietly expectant, back to the cave.
Even in the sun I realised I was shivering cold. With goose bumps standing my arm hairs on end I tiptoed down to the water’s edge to wash the taro corms in the sea. In the state I was in I could have wolfed down all four of these vegetables in one sitting and still been ravenous but they were raw and I knew that I had to attempt to make such valuable food last. I decided I would allow myself one vegetable a day for the next four days and selected the one that would be consumed now. I lay sprawled on the beach to save energy and tried a small mouthful. It was easier to eat than a raw potato. Was that because I’d never tried a raw potato when I was this hungry? The white starch swam around my gums − I could still hardly eat it. ‘I feel sick. Anything that goes into my stomach makes me feel sick.’ I lay back and let out an exasperated cry: ‘Aaaaaarghhhh! What is wrong with me? Get out the sun, Stafford. You are embarrassing yourself.’
I dragged myself back up the beach to what I’d now named Shipwreck Pool – for want of a better name – and plunged my arm into the cool water. The plastic broke the surface of the pool and I was elated to see a swirling vortex of brown bodies inside the chamber. I estimated I’d caught seven two-inch sprats. A grin spread across my face as I reaped the emotional rewards of success. That was the easiest fishing trip ever. And I knew I could repeat it at every low tide.
Try as I might, I could not ride the wave of elation for long. Back in
the cave I lay down on the grass with my eyes shut for about half an hour to recover my energy. I also set the camera down on the back of the large black Peli case (plastic waterproof case that I’d brought all my camera kit in) so that I could film myself cutting into the fish with the rusty tin lid. The cross-section of the fish was perhaps only a centimetre in diameter but I could see that it was indeed real flesh. I removed any gunk from the insides by tenderly squeezing down the body until it popped, like a big zit, out of their rectums. The sprats were in fact more like loach, the fish you buy for your fish tank that swim along the bottom and clean the gravel. ‘They’re a bit ugly . . . and they eat shit,’ I explained, deadpan. I wiped the black gooey innards on my leg and popped each fish whole into my mouth. They had a nasty sharp twang to them, and they took a bit of crunching into, but they were better than raw snails and they provided me with vitally different nutrients such as omega oils and higher-grade protein.
As the fish fats soaked through my brain, oiling the dry cogs, the innovations department that had been closed due to lack of resources flicked on its lights, rolled up the shutters and put a sign outside declaring it was once more open for business. I held the rusty tin can lid between my dirty blunt fingers. Maybe – just maybe – this could work . . .
Without a fire I had no chance of cooking the taro corms conventionally but there was more than one way to peel a potato. With visions of large, golden, oven-baked potato crisps, I took the metal lid and used it like a knife to slice through the potato. It worked perfectly and a thin, flat, crisp-like sliver was freed from the raw vegetable. Genius.
I padded down my rocky staircase and into the shallows to wash my hair gel tub full of slivers of taro root in seawater. Once washed, and half-intentionally slightly salted, I carried the ingredients over to Snail Rock where I located an ideal flat ledge that was above the high tide and exposed to direct sunlight. I was smiling as I carefully laid out my soon to be Ready Salted Crisps on the black rock – I was having fun today – this was exciting! I stood back and the heat of the intense sun on my bare back told me this would work.
