Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  In Lemon Camp I picked some of the leaves off a lemon tree for tea. I knew that this would make an excellent alternative tea to pine needles and I could add the leaves to seafood broths, too, to add flavour. The fire had opened up so many more possibilities from which I kept getting further morale boosts every time I realised I could now achieve something new.

  I could feel my thoughts accelerating again and my senses coming alive. Hot food had done wonders. I carried all my empty bottles over to the well. A matt-brown surface of dry clay stared back at me in place of my reflection. The bottom was dry. This was a bit of a blow but I could see why it had happened and it couldn’t be helped. The clay probably wasn’t 100 per cent watertight and, added to that, the residual water could also have evaporated over the last two days. It would have taken a lot to get me down that day and I took the bad news in my stride. Remembering the fire, I decided to rush back to the cave; if it went out on the first day that would be a disaster.

  Back at the cave all sorts of things that I hadn’t had a use for became invaluable. The hair gel container became a Tupperware soup bowl. It would even keep a meal hot for me if I wanted! I washed it out in the sea below the cave.

  ‘Shit – the fire!’ I hadn’t even checked it on my return. I looked up at the entrance to the cave and there was no sign of fire. ‘Bollocks!’ I huffed as I leapt up the stone staircase. There were no flames or smoke but I could tell that it was salvageable. I slid the charred sticks inwards so that all of the burned ends were touching. They were still warm. I knelt down, took a deep breath and blew gently into the logs. Before the breath was even finished – WHOOMF – the flames jumped back to life. I smiled at the ease of recovery and patted myself on the back. Phew.

  It was the end of week two tomorrow and so I did my exercises on the beach. The results were unremarkable. Not amazing, as I’d been ill. Not pathetic, as I’d found renewed vigour from the fire. I would build from here, I told myself.

  I collected a large bundle of firewood, conscious that I did not want to run out in the night. As I balanced it on my shoulders and looked up at the cave I was reassured to see the orange flames softly warming the entrance and welcoming me home.

  I took a cracked bucket I had found that I’d tried to keep crabs alive in and heated the spoon up in the fire. With the hot spoon I melted off the brittle broken walls, leaving a small plastic camping plate. Simple – but really useful.

  As on previous days, as the afternoon came in my energy started diving. My limbs became a burden to haul around and my brain seemed to fill with black tar, blocking any spark of life. I lay down to have a little rest by the fire and sank deep into the dusty floor. Every part of me pressed hard into the ground and cherished the physical support. I groaned at the pleasure of being horizontal and glanced at my new plate. Quiet satisfaction cut through the heaviness and a satisfied grin spread over my face. I closed my eyes.

  When the warmth of the fire dropped I sat up to add more wood. The power nap had done me good and I brushed the cave dust from my arms and face. The tide was turning so I collected my trap and a small shoal of unattractive brown loach. Once they’d been disembowelled by squeezing, I washed the tiny fish in seawater and popped them in the tin pot for supper. I wanted to cook again but to save fresh water I opted to cook with seawater. It was an experiment – I knew I would not be able to drink the broth – but the food should be nice and salty and I would then have enough fresh water for a small glass of lemon leaf tea afterwards.

  I also experimented with boiling coconut flesh as I was determined to up my energy levels. The meal was seawater, coconut flesh, sprats and crabs.

  It was so nice to have fire; in the jungle we called it ‘jungle telly’: something to sit around and stare at and draw morale and warmth from. Something to focus on. ‘There’s nothing like a fire, is there? There’s just nothing like a fire to make you feel comforted and safe. Day thirteen has been a good day,’ I told the camera.

  The sprats tasted like proper cooked fish for the first time. They had a vague undertaste of sharp fish poo but were relatively good eating. The steaming crabs broke apart in my fingers and gave off oily fats that tasted exquisite. I decided that the answer was to spend more time catching crabs − their flavour was amazing. The coconut flesh was unaffected by the cooking and still tasted raw. That hadn’t really worked and didn’t add to the dish at all. But lesson learned.

  I drank my lemon leaf tea in the dark. What a difference a single day could make to my life. I was sipping hot aromatic tea having eaten my third hot meal of the day and the fire was warming my bare skin and giving my eyes an enchanting sight to focus on. The cave felt so different. The orange glow was guarding me from the dread of the night. The cold blackness could no longer creep in and force me beneath my pile of grass to shiver and wait. My cave had become a warm home from which I could view the outside world with the assurance that I was safe and protected. It was civilised and I could relax. I could not have been happier with what I’d achieved.

  To say that I woke up on day fourteen would suggest that I’d actually slept and I’m not sure that was the case. A night of experimenting with the fire had left me dazed and exhausted.

  Initially, the fire had been close to my head – simply because that’s where the cooking position was at the side of the cave. But I quickly discovered that to heat my entire body from there I would need a really big fire but that would use up far too much wood and my head would burn! I allowed the fire to die down a little and to grow smaller; I still used the dry grass to help keep my body warm but my torso was still relatively cold. So I decided to make another fire by my waist, by transferring some of the burning logs. This was great for heating my body but I then worried that having two fires was a real extravagance and so I stopped putting wood on the one by my head and let it die down. I built the new waist-level fire in an elongated shape so it would heat more of my body but it soon became apparent that, as I laid wood on the fire longitudinally, it would burn too quickly and too fiercely and was far too hot initially. And then, as I let it die down, I would either run the risk of it going out or add more wood and repeat the erratic cycle. When it was roaring hot I worried that my hay blanket would catch light and I would spontaneously burst into flames in the night and so I put the hay to one side and relied solely on the fire for heat. But the speed with which I went through my enormous pile of wood was frightening. I never fell asleep properly for fear of waking up shivering and without my biggest source of comfort.

  Eventually, though, the dark sky softened and the pair of starlings (that oddly enough I never contemplated eating) began their morning chattering just as I was down to my last few twigs. What a night. I was still happy that I had a fire but I felt that it had created further concerns. How much firewood was I going to have to collect every day? How long was that extra task going to take out of my busy day? Realistically, was I ever going to get a solid night’s sleep again? Bloody hell − the stresses of civilisation had arrived only a few hours after I’d lit my first fire.

  I wanted to start construction of my new house but there was too much to do. I needed to collect wood immediately, I needed to collect some water, I needed to go out and find some seafood such as crabs and snails as I had nothing in the larder. I needed a new coconut pole as my present one was too heavy, and I needed to collect more coconuts. To cap it all it was dropbox day and I had to visit Lemon Camp twice before nightfall. So much to do – so much to do!

  For breakfast I smashed into a brown coconut and snapped out some of the white flesh, although I was now sick of the sight and smell of it. I decided that it was the water content and slippery texture of the flesh that was making me gag and so I placed the segments on the rocks around the fire to toast the pure white chunks. The results were exciting and cheered me up: they tasted like burned coconut biscuits and were very edible. They were sweet and much easier to force down and so, as if out of nowhere, I now had a
snack I could graze on throughout the day that was both reliable and constant, as these fallen coconuts littered the ground. So my calories did indeed increase a lot, but, as most of my fuel was coming from saturated fats, my legs still felt like lead as I was having to convert my protein from snails and seafood and my fat from coconut into the glucose that my body needed for energy. This was a great way to lose weight but it was an inefficient way of fuelling my body and it caused my energy levels to remain very low.

  Foraging now meant that I needed a container in which to collect everything and so I spent the first part of the morning with palm leaves in the cave trying to make my first palm leaf basket. I’d failed in my attempt to make a hat and I had the same difficulties with making a basket. I had to make a circle that looked like a thatched crown and then I had to plait the thorns of the crown together so that they would link and form the underside of the basket. It was easy in theory – but inevitably somewhat harder in practice. I made one – but it was pretty crude and had several large holes in it. I confidently predicted that if I did it again I would be able to make quite a good one.

  The fire. ‘Shit! Not again!’ I turned to look at the flat grey pile of ash. ‘Stafford, you are stupid!’ I said out loud as I leapt across the cave to examine the crime scene. I held my flat hand over the ash – it was still warm. With my bare hands I flicked the embers together into a small pile and gently blew on them with a slow, sustained breath. The increased oxygen immediately caused the embers to glow and then burst into a small flame. Phew – ‘How careless can you get, Ed?!’

  I stoked the fire up and headed out to collect wood. The flat, forested area adjacent to the beach had lots of hanging dead wood – perfect for burning as it was off the floor and thus bone dry. I made a number of piles the size of giant Galápagos tortoises and ferried them back to my cave cradled in my outstretched arms.

  Once I had a large enough pile of dry wood to last the night I told myself that I needed to decide upon an area for the shelter. I wasn’t relaxed − I was storming from one task to the next. Then I caught myself – rushing and rushing and rushing. ‘If you were working in England, Ed, you would take breaks,’ I smiled to myself. ‘Just have yourself a cup of tea, Staffs – yeah?’

  As I sat down with the glass jam jar of lemon leaf tea pinched between my forefinger and thumb I let myself breathe. Once more I drew strength from simply gazing into the fire. The warmth reassured me and the dancing flames entranced me.

  On my second lap of the island, to complete the day’s time-consuming dropbox routine, I saw a couple of quite big fish so I decided to have a bash at making a trident harpoon. Back on the western shore I collected three very straight sections of beach hibiscus. The wood was light and easy to cut and I thought would make a great spear. I bashed the bark off and used it to fill the gaps that were appearing in my grass skirt, as it had dried now and become somewhat revealing.

  The dead kid goat had been lying untouched for days and I experimented with the bones to see if they could be worked into a spear tip. I decided to work in the woods as the cave was too hot in the afternoon and I’d been round to the other side of the island twice so far today and had too much sun. The dried-up carcass was too brittle. The bones were soft and snapped easily. It would be like carving a cog out of balsa wood. I wondered if the lemon thorns might work to provide the sharpest point and to make a reverse-facing barb, too. But I still needed to find hardwood to splice them into – the bones were hopeless.

  I tested different woods from local trees but none was hard enough to hold a point and crafting them was virtually impossible. Essentially I resorted to snapping and twisting the wood and to encourage natural sharp, splintered fragments that I could use. The results were low-grade and I knew it – tomorrow I would find stronger wood.

  A metallic silver ocean and expansive graphite clouds sandwiched a horizontal band of burned brightness at the horizon as I flipped open the camera screen to record a video diary. ‘Everything’s OK. I made a trident harpoon,’ I began unconvincingly. ‘I have decided that if I build a shelter then I have to build something that isn’t a thrown-up, temporary affair. It has to be storm-proof, comfortable and able to house me and my amassed items as well as the cave does. The cave is very good in many respects and I can’t build anything that’s not going to be at least as good. I’ve decided to build a raised house in the trees.’

  It might seem stupid to move out of the cave but this wasn’t just a survival experiment. I was seeing if I could thrive here and wanted to see how far I could evolve.

  I fought to convince myself that I’d achieved something today and that I had a solid plan. Neither was true and I could see through my self-delusion. I still seemed to be governed by what I was achieving and I couldn’t stop planning and worrying. I was basing my sense of self on my achievements rather than a core knowledge of who I was. I realise, looking back, that I was constantly battling to be somewhere else rather than enjoying what I had. That is why, even with a fire and a cave, food and water, my shoulders were still tightly hunched and my forehead furrowed. I still felt no sense of peace.

  Chapter 4

  SHELTER

  I’d never had to rely on a fire’s warmth for heat in the night before this project. On expeditions I had always had a hammock and a sleeping bag and in the military it would have been out of the question because a fire was not tactical – the enemy would be able to see you. As a result I was still thinking of the child-like drawings in the Ray Mears book after I’d panicked and read it on the plane on the way over. He had this lovely fire that, on paper, looked as if it would be great at night because it was long and thin and kept the entire length of the body warm. As with so many things on this island, though, if I’d stuck to what I knew from experience I’d have fared a lot better.

  Having a fire that is long and thin means that it is inherently alight in a lot of places at once over a long thin surface area. Hence the huge amount of heat. But, as the first two nights had so far proved, that meant that you went through a vast amount of wood because when adding wood you have no option but to lay it lengthwise on top and the whole stick burns at once. This may be appropriate in extreme, cold conditions where there is plenty of wood but my nights were just bloody chilly and my firewood situation was somewhat restricted.

  My favourite fire has always been a feeder, or star, fire. It’s predominantly used for cooking, which is why I’d allowed myself to become distracted by Ray’s pretty drawings. Essentially, though, it’s dead simple. As soon as you’ve got an established heart to the fire you add wood like the spokes of a wheel – with only their tips in the burning heart. This means that each piece of wood burns gradually from the end like a cigarette. It means that after a while the fire will slow down and in order to get it burning you only have to slide the spokes inwards a little and you have a roaring fire again. There is often no requirement to add new logs at all. It is far more efficient with wood and burns far less. It is also great for cooking, as it is adjustable: pull the logs out to turn the gas down, push them in to crank it up. At night if you want the fire to die out you can just pull the logs a bit further out; without other logs to hold the heat they will go out. Conversely, if you stoke it up and have enough wood on when you go to bed, it is often the case that in the morning you can just push the charred ends together and gently blow on them and you can get flames again in a matter of seconds without a lighter. In a nutshell, it’s a cracking fire.

  So after trialling a method that I didn’t like I reverted to what I knew and trusted. My feeder fire was positioned at waist level about a metre from my body. This meant that, in these relatively mild tropical nights, it kept my entire body warm enough to sleep. It also meant that three out of four times when I woke up I had only to feed the spokes into the heart rather than adding new logs. I slept better not only because I was warmer but because my regular interruptions could be done half asleep knowing I wasn’t using much
wood. I also knew that if the cold woke me up, and I’d overslept my two-hourly fire adjusting, all I needed to do was push the ends together, blow gently on the log tips and I would have flames again in seconds. I began to relax.

  I woke up, as usual, without food. On the whole this was the way it was for most of my time on the island. I’d eaten all my toasted coconut flesh in the night and it was time to get out and go foraging.

  The tide was low and still going out and so I set the inverted plastic bottle trap in the rock pool. On the way back I saw a small dark shape disappear into a hole in the sand. A crab! So far my crabs had come from the rocks, and this sand variety was new. I leapt towards the hole and forced my hand in like a vet assisting a cow to give birth. The crab was not in the main tunnel shaft so I dug sideways trying to locate it. My fingers touched something harder and I felt the tips burn as the claws clamped into my skin. I grabbed the entire crab, still attached to my fingertip, yanked it free of the sand and instinctively pressed my thumb through the shell on its back into its head. The pincers relaxed their grip. I carried the crab in one hand and looked along the beach that revealed a short row of similar holes with small sand mounds beside them. I ran to the next and my knees sunk into the sand as, like a ravenous JCB, I excavated the primitive burrow system. After twenty seconds there was a hole the size of a space hopper but no crab. Bugger. I rose and sank by the next hole and repeated the exercise. Again, I couldn’t find the homeowner.

  In the next six holes I only caught one more crab, which I despatched again smartly with my big blunt thumb through its brain. But two crabs was exciting. Two crabs was breakfast. Back in the cave I put the new species of crab in my tin can to keep them out of the dust and I returned to the rocks to collect snails with my hair gel container. Because of the crabs I only picked five small snails and screwed the lid tight. The rock pool yielded two more sprats and so I had the makings of a decent meal.