Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  As I wandered back to the cave I mulled over my day’s work and also considered the extent to which my most productive times had all been when I focused on one single task. I could already tell that it was going to take about a week to construct the frame and thatch the shelter – and that was if I focused solely on construction. To avoid starting something that would drag on and on, I would give all my working day to construction. That meant I would clearly have to do the daily admin to keep me afloat, such as collecting firewood and foraging for snails and crabs, but I would have to put more adventurous activities such as hunting and fishing on the back burner for now.

  I had become a little bit casual about the length of time I was leaving the fire unattended in the cave and I came back to the smallest of embers in a pool of light grey ash. I wasn’t worried, though; I was now so comfortable with my fire and how to keep it going that I knew a couple of sticks and some gentle blowing would raise flames again in seconds. That practical competence gave me confidence in myself.

  I bit some chunks of taro and spat them into the pot for supper. ‘It’s been a funny old day, Granville,’ I confided to my best friend, the camera, referring to the closing scene in the British television comedy series Open All Hours that somehow reflected my daily struggles and the acceptance of the repetitiveness of life. ‘I could feel panic rising this morning because I hadn’t achieved anything since lighting a fire. So I committed to the shelter and announced to myself that there would be no fishing or hunting until I’d made a good home. Once I’d committed to the one project – rather than flitting from one thing to another – I immediately relaxed and the work became easier.’

  Eating the toasted coconut ‘biscuits’ from the rocks around the fire had given me more energy throughout the day. I hung my coarse grass skirt up on a hook-like protrusion in the back of the cave and sat down naked on the Cinesaddle.

  A ten-minute walk earlier in the day had turned up a handful of sprats from Shipwreck Pool and I went in search of more edible marine life. My pot of thirty snails was now a given − why eat ten when you can eat thirty? I spotted a crab darting for cover under a rock and hurled myself towards it to catch my swiftly departing supper.

  ‘Got ’im!’ I sang triumphantly.

  On the lowest rock that formed the precarious ramp up to my cave I smashed, peeled and washed the snails and with the lone crab made myself up a half-decent dinner.

  With hot food inside me and a brew on the go I sat in my rock circle, the sun about ten minutes from kissing the blue horizon and disappearing.

  ‘Thank you, Amanda. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Harold. Thank you . . . ’ the list was endless and I felt a deep gratitude for everything that had happened over recent days. My appreciation of small comforts was enormous and I felt that I was being looked after again. I allowed the successes to bask in their glory and to feel the warmth of the fire on my side as the evening cooled. It had taken a long time to get here but I was definitely on track.

  As the sun hit the horizon I connected mentally with Amanda. ‘Hi, my love!’ I began. We had talked about how we would handle the zero contact for sixty days; we decided to set aside a part of the day when we would both take time out and do nothing but think about each other. The knowledge that we were doing this at precisely the same time, on other sides of the world, was comforting and it helped to keep us connected despite the vast distance between us. It felt a bit like sitting on the phone without speaking to each other, just knowing that Amanda was taking time out of her morning in the UK to think of me meant that we were still together despite the odds.

  Anyone who has ever felt the presence of a loved one after their death will, I’m sure, understand my desire to keep that connection open at all times. It didn’t have to be a case of out of sight, out of mind; that was the last thing I wanted. We’d opted for my sunset, as I didn’t know whether I’d be able to stick to any other time accurately. All Amanda had to do was Google ‘sunset time in Fiji’ and she would know exactly when to tune in for a bit of time to ourselves.

  I’m past caring whether this brands me as a sissy or an alternative hippy freak. This was for Amanda and me and no one else. It was an acknowledgement that the separation would be tough on both of us and it was a way of improving difficult circumstances. So why mention it? Because it is the coping tactics and the unexpected stresses and worries that make this real-life story interesting. Of course I could stick to writing about coconuts and snails but the truth of the matter is if you are stranded on an island, you are taken to far deeper places and faced with far greater demands than eating and drinking. What really matters in life is made utterly clear to you by what you miss and what you think about. Private or not, macho or otherwise, my attempt to maintain a real connection with the woman I love played a big part in keeping me positive enough to complete the ordeal.

  ‘Goodnight, my love. I love you with all my heart,’ I said out loud. Another tear rolled down my cheek in the darkness.

  ‘It’s day seventeen. Good morning. Very roughly forty-three days to go.’ I scratched the chalk mark on the wall all too aware of precisely how long that was.

  I walked up the beach, taking the inverted plastic bottle sprat trap to keep my omega oils up. A coconut tree had fallen in the night and this provided me with a bountiful gift of green coconuts that I could simply collect from where they lay on the sand. Bizarrely convenient considering that I’d used my old coconut pole in the construction of the ridge pole only yesterday. I was being looked after again.

  I caught a hermit crab opportunistically munching on the fallen coconuts and scooped it up for lunch, automatically twisting the claws to snap them and render the creature defenceless. I collected brown coconuts, too, for grazing on − these were by now far and away my main source of calories.

  The goats were in the woods when I went in to start work. They slowly walked up the hill away from me. I contemplated having a bow and arrow or a spear. Hunting surely had to be my next project, rather than fishing. But for now I had to concentrate on construction.

  The first thing I did, after necking a full green coconut, was to clear away all the small vines and foliage in my build area so that my construction site was clean. On my hands and knees I used the clamshell to tidy the sixteen square metres of turf. There was also a big branch in the way where the roof was going to be. I hacked at the bendy limb for ages – it moved every time I struck it – but eventually the build site was clear. Lunchtime.

  From downing tools to having lunch on the fire took forty minutes. I collected sprats, snails and crabs and added them to fresh water and my now usual splash of seawater. ‘It will take ten minutes to boil so by the time I’ve eaten it will be an hour lunch break,’ I fretted. Then I caught myself. I was thinking like a berk. ‘You’ve not been resting – you’ve been working collecting food! You’ve only just sat down. Don’t worry! Relax!’

  Sitting and waiting for the pot to boil, I realised that the sea was always so much calmer at low tide. I quickly worked out that it must be because the reef adds more protection at low tide, as it is relatively higher, thus protecting the lagoon. I extrapolated from this that I should therefore try to fish at low tide when the water would be less choppy and I would be able to see the fish more easily.

  I wiped my plastic bowl clean from breakfast with my fingers and banged out the remains on my knee. A crack had developed in the bottom of the bowl so I had to tilt it when eating so as not to lose any of the nutritious broth that I loved so much. ‘Nectar,’ I said as I swallowed it. My diet wasn’t so different from the time I was ill but the fact that I was now cooking it before eating made so much difference. ‘I think I’m going to appreciate fine food and nice things for the rest of my life. I now salivate at the thought of the juices of sea snails. They are amazing.’ They say hunger is the sweetest of sauces and clearly I wouldn’t touch these at home, but in a world stripped of luxury joy comes from far sma
ller, simpler pleasures. I now loved finding food, cooking food and eating food. I appreciated every step of the process. And this from a man happy to eat pasta and gravy for dinner if that’s all that is left in the kitchen cupboard.

  More profoundly, I was even, on occasions, beginning to enjoy my own company: the quiet and the calm. This was a million miles from the man whose days were normally crammed with meetings, training, phone calls, tweets and emails. Once I’d adjusted to the solitude, and had scrambled through that feeling of being totally overwhelmed by everything for which I now had to be responsible, the resultant freedom was clear and light.

  Thankfully, day two of construction was always going to be quite straightforward. I knew I wanted twelve trees to act as rafters that would effectively lean up against the ridge pole and provide the bones for one side of the construction. These rafters would be the skeleton upon which the thatching would be lashed and so they needed to be relatively straight but, more importantly, they needed to be strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of palm leaves.

  I scrambled up the jungle wall behind the campsite towards the Highlands in search of suitable poles. The interior behind my camp was open forest and there were many mature saplings to choose from. Ever conscious of expending energy, I wanted ones that would do the job but that weren’t overkill. I used my fingers to gauge the circumference of some possibles, and could tell at a glance the trees that would work best.

  At each selected tree I knelt down and commenced the lengthy process of gnawing round the trunks with my clamshell hand axe. Each tree took the best part of forty minutes to fell. Every short, intense burst of chopping was interspersed with exhausted, panting breathers to recover.

  By mid-afternoon I had three trees down and dragged to the shelter. After a quick stop to set the loach trap and eat some burned coconut, I felled a further three trees in the late afternoon, then the day had gone. I began readjusting my estimation of how long this build was going to take.

  I was still leaving the palm leaf shield over the seep in an attempt to increase the afternoon flow but it didn’t help much. The heat radiating from the rock was still strong and I swilled a mouthful of warm plastic-tasting water around my mouth. I decided to forgo my lemon tea in lieu of snails and loach soup. This could be a much bigger meal if cooked with fresh water and I didn’t want to lose the oils from the tiny fish.

  I reassured myself that the morning spent clearing up the site had been vital and that cutting trees down is something that just takes time. I had hoped to cut all the rafters today but six would have to do. It was progress − physical, tangible progress − but I still wasn’t quite satisfied.

  After three back-breaking trees I was exhausted and decided to stop for lunch. I was feeling down because I was facing snails and coconuts again. I mean, I like snails and coconuts but I like other things, too – variety being the spice of life and all that.

  ‘But I haven’t got enough time in the day to eat better if I want to get this shelter built,’ I told myself. ‘I can survive on coconuts and snails – but I don’t want to live off them for the rest of the time here – I really don’t.’ I acknowledged to myself that eating simply for a while was the sacrifice I was prepared to make to build a new home.

  During the afternoon the sound of crashing waves proved too much for my inactive brain to process and listen to quietly. It seemed that my coping strategy was to overlay the relentless white noise with annoying songs. I recalled how in the film Touching the Void the song ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ had got stuck in Joe Simpson’s head for several days as he dragged his injured body from the depths of a crevasse to safety. ‘Bloody hell – I’m going to die to Boney M,’ he thought. My song for the afternoon was ‘Grandfather Clock’, a perversely inane song that focused on a clock ticking as if to twist the knife by making me ever more conscious of time:

  My grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf,

  So it stood ninety years on the floor;

  It was taller by half than the old man himself,

  Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.

  It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born,

  And was always his treasure and pride;

  But it stopped – short – never to go again

  When the old man died.

  Ninety years without slumbering (tick, tock, tick, tock),

  His life’s seconds numbering (tick, tock, tick, tock),

  It stopped – short – never to go again when the old man died.

  After a few hours I was starting to envy Joe’s playlist. I tried to sing other songs in my head but as soon as I paused – tick, tock, tick, tock would resume.

  At one point I just had to stop everything and sit down. My brain had been going berserk and I had to calm down and listen to my mind. As I stopped identifying with the voices and neurotic thoughts they faded away and I managed to relax a little. But the songs kept on playing and playing. If this seems trivial I can assure you it did not feel so at all. I was faced with the unsettling truth that I could not control my own mind, not great when you are alone on a tropical island for sixty days. Does that mean I’m mad? If I want it to stop and it’s not stopping, then who is bloody well playing the songs against my wishes? Another bit of me? Am I schizophrenic? Who are these two voices? Which one is real?

  Three more trees felled, I laid the final six rafters up against the structure. I decided I would do one side of the shelter at a time. The side that backed on to the prevailing wind was obviously the most important so I would construct and thatch that side before I worried about the other. It made sense as I could live in half a shelter and, being half the size, it would be twice as fast to build. For the first time my lean-to started to take shape properly in my eyes and I reflected on why I was building this type of shelter.

  It was a vast surface area to thatch and I was concerned that the thatching would take days. There were several factors in play here. If I built a shelter that was big enough just to house me when I was sleeping then I would immediately need another one for a fire, another to store the huge pile of firewood in a dry place and yet another to house my camera equipment and accumulated stores. This didn’t make any sense as, presently, I was living in a cave that was perfectly big enough for all of these things under one rock-solid roof. So it was clear that if I was moving out I needed space equivalent to what the cave was providing.

  The next factor was that I would hardly be evolving (Discovery’s and my mission in all this) if the shelter leaked – I would be regressing – so the thatch had to have a steep enough pitch to allow proper run-off and to minimise pooling. Pooling equals leaks. This steep pitch meant that, to get the floor space that I needed, I had to build high. Significantly more than head height, actually − so about eight feet tall. This meant that the shelter was about twelve feet long, eight feet high, but therefore that the diagonal rafters were about ten or eleven feet from the ground to the pole. So the surface area to be thatched was eleven feet multiplied by twelve feet – 132 square feet of thatch! A lot when you consider that it would only cover sixty square feet of earth floor space. I was now predicting that the entire build, including thatching, would take ten days. If I was devoting six hours of my working day to construction, that meant that the cost of my real estate was one man-hour per square foot. Actually, that didn’t sound too expensive.

  Including the time spent on reflection it was still only mid-afternoon and so I made a journey to the other side of the island in search of water. The sun was scorching hot and, as I wanted to travel along the coast, I again used the clay residue from the water that I’d collected as sunscreen. This was one of those things that I’d heard about, then had its efficacy confirmed by the Aboriginals, but it was only when spreading this viscous mud on my body that I could appreciate how remarkable it was. The clay spread smoothly on my skin; it did not harden, feel itchy or crack and f
all off – rather, it felt as if it was feeding my skin and remained supple and protective all afternoon.

  Sadly, my search for water was fruitless. The hole, despite some light rain, was dry once more and I realised that I needed to be pretty sharp if I was to make use of this collection method. Directly after a storm it would be full to the brim – but it was not the perfect solution that I had first thought it might be.

  Behind Lemon Camp I dug up various plants to determine if they had edible roots. I dug for over an hour in the hard clay soil using a stone and a long pole as a digging stick. By now I had shed my flabby excess City weight and was leaner and darker skinned with a green T-shirt wrapped like a turban around my head. My digging, however, produced nothing.

  I pulled up the taro that I’d replanted. There were no more taro corms but I decided that the core root of the taro was starchy, too, and therefore I would eat it. It was the size of a large turnip and a not insignificant addition to my carbohydrate. I duly chucked the hairy root into my woven basket.

  Ever on the lookout for alternative foodstuff, I decided to eat a leaf of the vegetable; they were large and green and looked as if they should be edible. They were, after all, sprouting from an edible root.

  Immediately I did so, my gums and tongue started stinging. I knew straight away that I was having an adverse reaction as pins and needles attacked my mouth and my lips and tongue swelled alarmingly. ‘Stafford, you are stupid,’ I said to camera. ‘My tongue is on fire.’ I knew all too well about the process of testing new foods when you haven’t positively identified them as edible. Even if I skipped the rubbing on my gums I should at the very least have limited my testing to a very small portion. But I’d just screwed up the whole leaf and chomped through it like a fat lad with a kebab at closing time.