Survivor: The Autobiography

by Lewis, Jon E.

  Major rapids navigated were Inkisi and then the dreaded Borboro. Later we navigated an unnamed rapid which was not too severe. The river continues to drop and has fallen approximately 30 centimetres in twenty-four hours. Borboro was the most formidable rapid we have yet tackled. I did not dare to take the Avon S400s through manned and so ordered them to be towed by jets into centre of current and released without crews. This did not work as there is such a strong counter-current going upstream that they were continuously driven back, but, after some skilful manoeuvring, we got them through. Went through myself in Jet I with Tac HQ; waves enormous, about nine metres high. Just as we left rapid a great boiling mass of water erupted with a deep rumbling sound right beside us; it was some two metres in height. When it subsided the water began to spin wildly and as it accelerated a vortex appeared in the centre and I gazed down into a horrific whirlpool some thirty metres across and three metres deep in the centre. The river around us had gone mad, waves breaking, rocks flashing by and all the 220 horsepower of the jet’s engine were called upon to drag us from the grip of this revolving cavern. As we left it the hole closed up again and the surface became a sheet of fast-moving water. Similarly, another giant whirlpool appeared on our right and another ahead. The river was wild and it was almost as if some unseen force was trying to pluck us downwards.

  On 6 January we reached Isangila, the falls that had forced Stanley to abandon his boats and march over the mountains to the sea. Here I decided reluctantly to move the giant rafts overland as far as the Yalala Falls, leaving the jets and the Avon dinghies to tackle the ferocious stream alone. The giant craft simply hadn’t got the power to manoeuvre in these rushing currents and boiling water. In no time, one of the dinghies was ripped open from stem to stern on razor-sharp rocks and Jim Masters was injured. That night it took 900 stitches and a gallon of Araldite adhesive to repair the damaged boat. Jim drank a little J & B and recovered!

  It was late afternoon when our jets entered the relatively clear passage that would take us through the terrible Isangila cataract. We were halfway down when I saw two gigantic waves converging on our bows. With a crash they struck simultaneously, hurling the 3,000-pound boat upwards. I fell across Jon Hamilton, knocking him momentarily from the wheel, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Pam almost go over the side. Then as we hit the water again there was another huge wave towering ahead of us. For a moment I thought we were done for. It was a monster. The wall of water smashed over us blotting out the daylight; somehow we were still afloat. There was a strange silence; the engine had died. Ahead a line of black rocks rose like dragon’s teeth on the lip of a fall and we were being swept straight towards them. Jon tried desperately to start the engine, his face creased with concern. Fortunately on the third attempt it fired. It only stuttered for a minute, but it was long enough for us to get into an eddy behind a huge boulder, where we could hold position whilst the electric bilge pumps baled us out.

  Finally even the jets were halted by shallows and reefs at the Inga Rapid, but with two more short portages and some excellent warping with long ropes, we got the amazing Avon recce boats through to the foot of the biggest obstacle in the entire river, Yalala. A mile of water boiling over terraces and through jagged rocks at frightening speed greeted us. Meanwhile our giant rafts had been carried by a Zaïre army lorry to within two miles of the river. Here we regrouped. Some of us had marched over the crystal mountains just as Stanley’s men had done. We experienced the same elephant grass, endless rolling hills, ridges and sharp, suet-coloured quartz rocks underfoot that give these highlands its name. We too stumbled and fell on the slippery boulders at the river’s edge. Ken Mason suffered a badly ripped arm and I injured my back. Porters, descendants of the people who had helped Stanley, assisted us.

  At last we all came to the Yalala Falls, where the sappers were already clearing a way for us to carry the giant boats down to the river. For three days we toiled in the blistering heat with pick, spade and crowbar, and even some highly unstable dynamite, to clear the boulders and get the giant rafts to the water. Supporting us during this operation was our American officer, Captain Tom Mabe. Tom and his colleague, Sergeant John Connor, had come with us throughout the journey. Both were in the US Special Forces and were useful members of our team, although I fear at times we must have driven them mad. Tom had managed to get hold of the explosive, but it was delivered at the Inga dam construction site and had to be driven to the river over a bumpy track.

  It was late at night when Pam, Ken and I set out in a Land-Rover with at least two broken springs. In the back were large boxes of sticky, sweating dynamite and one crate of whisky. The vehicle lights didn’t work particularly well and as we motored along the rutted road in the night, Ken began to ask about the dangers of premature initiation. We soon convinced him that our journey was likened to that shown so graphically in the film, The Wages of Fear.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said, seizing a bottle of J & B from the back and clutching it between his legs.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Pam.

  ‘Well, I may as well get drunk and protect my courting tackle at the same time,’ rejoined our jovial photographer as we bounced along with our lethal cargo. The nervous tension made us roar with laughter and swig deep gulps of the bottle.

  Pam at this point looked very much like a boy, with her hair covered in mud and her shirt in grease. In fact some Italian engineers whom we had met had referred to her as ‘Fred the mechanic’ and I don’t think they really understood that she was a girl. Earlier in the expedition a chief had greeted her with ‘Bonjour, monsieur’, but her confidence was restored when we discovered he was almost blind!

  Finally, with sixty porters beneath each huge boat, we moved them like giant caterpillars down a 1,000-foot slope to the river. Here we joined up with the Avon dinghies that had been portaged or controlled by lines through the surging white water towards us. Now only three rapids barred our way to the sea, but with up to sixteen million gallons per second pouring through a gorge which had narrowed the river to a bare 400 yards, the power can be imagined. Indeed the depth here was probably about 140 feet at high water. The river seemed to be alive with great boiling bubbles rushing up from the depths and erupting on the surface. Then as quickly as they came they were replaced by whirlpools and swirling currents.

  Our porters, many of them Angolan refugees and some almost certainly Freedom Fighters, came with gifts of sugarcane wine and fruit to see us off, but the river was not going to let us get away unscathed yet.

  In the final rapid, La Vision, my flagship, was momentarily trapped in a whirlpool, like a cork in a washtub, being bent downwards and spun round and round with engines screaming. Before I could stop them coming down Alun Davies’s Avon was capsized by a fifteen-foot wave. The upturned boat with its crew of three clinging to it was swept towards a yawning whirlpool. The jets at this point had been sent back to Kinshasa, and from where I was situated 1,000 yards downriver, I couldn’t see what had happened. However the following recce boat saw the accident and its skipper, Neil Rickards, a Royal Marine corporal, decided to have a go. Taking his own small craft through the mountains of tossing water, he managed to get right into the whirlpool and circle around inside it, rather like a motorcyclist in a ‘wall of death’ at a fairground. In the centre of this swirling mass he could see Alun’s capsized Avon with its crew of three still clinging on frantically to the lifeline. Eventually, by going the same way that the water was revolving, Neil managed to get his craft alongside the stricken boat so that Bob Powell and Somue, one of the ZLOs, could pull the three men to safety. Then he circled up again in the same direction that the water was turning and out of the top. As they left he looked back and was just in time to see the upturned craft disappear down the vortex. Downriver, I was surprised a few moments later when the capsized boat bobbed up from the river bed beside me. The engine was smashed to pieces, the floorboards wrecked and there appeared to be no survivors. But the crew had all been saved
thanks to Neil’s courage and skill, for which he was later awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and made one of Britain’s ‘Men of the Year’.

  Two days later we reached the little seaport of Banana and at dusk our strange fleet, which had set out almost four months before in the centre of Africa, sailed into the setting sun. Basil, in cassock and surplice, held an improvised cross and beneath the flags of the nations represented in our team, he conducted a simple service. Under our hulls the water heaved gently. Strangely, it no longer tugged and pulled at us; there was no current, for we were now in the Atlantic.

  English soldier-explorer. During 1979–82 he led the first circumpolar navigation of the earth.

  With the outboards repaired and Bryn looking happier, we set out from Russian Mission [Alaska] on a blustery morning. I noticed with surprise that no boats were out or about, nor was there any other sign of life. This was especially strange since it was the middle of the salmon run, the short annual period when a healthy income could be made on the river.

  I received some nasty little shocks during the morning and took quite a bit of water in the aluminium boat. The inflatables could happily fill to the brim with water and carry on floating high, but any water in my dinghy had to be removed at once. Draining was only possible when moving fast enough to tip the bows up, then a clumsy wooden bung could be removed from a hole near the base of the transom. Unless the plug was replaced after draining, this hole could cause the boat to leak rapidly as soon as she slowed down and returned to a level plane. Lose the bung and things could get tricky.

  Until noon the confused state of the river made me cautious but not alarmed. I noticed a pall of dust in the sky further upriver but when we reached the area where I thought I had seen it, there was nothing there. Just a trick of the light it seemed.

  But some fifteen miles short of Holy Cross we entered a long narrow valley heavily forested on either side where the dust cloud effect was again evident. At the entrance to the valley an Eskimo fishing village nestled on one bank, its river boats drawn well up above the shingle bank. Two men watched us pass. I waved. There was no response but a slight shaking of the head from the older of the two.

  The water began to careen about, striking with miniature breakers against the rock walls on the rim of each minor curve. But still I felt no undue threat beyond the normal swell and undulation of the great river’s forces. As I nosed further out into the northerly-bearing valley, an unseen surge moved against the right side of my boat and almost tipped me off my plank seat by the tiller.

  With little warning, waves unlike any I had seen except in sizeable rapids seemed to grow out of the water like boils erupting from the riverbed. Breaking into a sweat, for I have a healthy fear of rough water, I steered quickly for the nearest bank. This was unfortunately the ‘cut’ bank, indicating that side of the river where the faster current runs. ‘Lee’ banks are very often low and dressed with gentle sand slopes for there the water is quiet. Where the river flows down a straight stretch, cut and lee banks may alternate on either side depending on the configuration of the riverbed.

  Dust clouds emanated from the cut bank as I made to escape the central turmoil. It was as though a dragon breathed there. As I closed with the bank, a pine tree toppled over and crashed into the river. Then another and, with it, a whole section of the bank itself collapsed. The roar of my outboard drowned all other sounds and the forces of destruction which gnawed at the river’s banks operated in silence as far as I was concerned. This added to the sinister, almost slow-motion appearance of the phenomenon, for such it was to me. I could not at the time grasp what was happening. I had, after all, boated up or down thousands of miles of wild rivers in North America and never once experienced this. Also, my private, long-nurtured idea of the Yukon was of a slow wide river as gentle as the Thames.

  Above the collapsed bank I saw that the forest, from undergrowth to the very tops of the giant pines, was bent over and alive with movement. A great wind was at work, although in my hooded suit on the boat I could feel nothing.

  For a moment I hovered in indecision. The waves in the middle of the river, some 600 yards wide at this point, were totally uninviting yet any minute my boat was liable to disappear under a falling pine, should I remain close in. There was no question of landing. No question of trying to turn broadside on and then head back downstream. My boat climbed and fell like a wild thing; shook as though in a mastiff’s jaws, then veered towards the crumbling cut bank in response to unseen suction.

  Ahead the river narrowed into a bottleneck, the banks grew steeper and the chaotic waves of the river’s spine here extended almost clear across our front. Between standing waves and crumbling bank, I glimpsed a sag in the water. It was fleetingly possible to see the river actually mounting in height the further away it was from the bank. I had often heard that the centre of a river can be several feet higher than at the edges given sufficient flow and force, but never before had I clearly viewed the effect. It was distinctly off-putting.

  I pushed with both hands on the tiller and the boat, reluctantly, edged away from the cut bank and began to head obliquely across the river. Perhaps things were better on the far side. But to get there I had to pass through the middle of the river, where the turbulence was greatest and the hydraulic waves so close together that my boat no sooner fell down the face of one than the next raced curling above me. It needed just one brief error on the tiller and I would add critically to the ten inches of silt-laden water already swilling around my feet. I would sink within seconds.

  From the corner of my eye I noticed Bryn had seen my dilemma and moved his inflatable as close as the turmoil allowed. When I sink, I thought, Bryn’s boat will be my only chance. ‘As big as houses’ I remembered the state trooper’s warning. I could see why such an exaggeration might come about. These waves were no more than four or five feet high yet their configuration, violence and closeness would make any local riverboat a death trap for its inmates.

  Before another wave could swamp my wallowing craft I turned broadside on to the hydraulics, applied full throttle and headed straight into the maelstrom in the centre of the river. Whether sheer luck or the shape of the waves saved me I do not know, but no more water came inboard. Much of the time it was like surfriding along the forward face of a breaker, then a violent incline and sideways surge as the old wave passed beneath and the next one thrust at the little tin hull.

  An edge of exhilaration broke through the sticky fear which till then held me in thrall. For the first time since entering the turbulence I realised there was a chance of getting through and began to experience the old thrill of rapids riding from the days long past when we had tackled far greater waves from the comparative safety of unsinkable inflatables.

  How long it took to cross the river was impossible to gauge but gradually the waves grew less fierce and less close and then there was quiet water but for the outwash from the rough stuff. Ahead I could see, between waves and lee bank, a lane of smooth water edged by sand. Bryn and then Charlie emerged from the waves like bucking broncos. Both were smiling for my narrow escape had not gone unnoticed.

  There were other stretches where conditions were tricky but never a patch on that first windy valley. That night we stopped in Holy Cross and the keeper of the travellers’ lodge, Luke Demientieff, told us we were lucky to be alive. We had been travelling north in the first big southerly blow of the year in winds exceeding seventy knots.

  ‘Even paddle steamers,’ he said, ‘would not, in the old days, venture at such a time.’

  We had covered the worst stretch of the river in the worst possible conditions and, as far as the riverside folk were concerned, we were quite mad. When I asked him how anyone should know or care that we had passed, Luke said: ‘It only needs one pair of eyes from one riverside shack to see you go by for the radio phones all along the river to start buzzing. When you passed the old huts at Paimuit and entered the slough by Great Paimuit Island the word was about you were goners.’
He paused and added with a chuckle, ‘Still we’re pleased you made it to the lodge after all. Business has been poor lately.’

  English naturalist and explorer. He spent a decade from 1812 collecting specimens in South America.

  The day was now declining apace, and the Indian had made his instrument to take the cayman. It was very simple. There were four pieces of tough hard wood, a foot long, and about as thick as your little finger, and barbed at both ends; they were tied round the end of the rope, in such a manner, that if you conceive the rope to be an arrow, these four sticks would form the arrow’s head; so that one end of the four united sticks answered to the point of the arrowhead, while the other ends of the sticks expanded at equal distances round the rope. Now it is evident that, if the cayman swallowed this (the other end of the rope, which was thirty yards long, being fastened to a tree), the more he pulled, the faster the barbs would stick into his stomach. This wooden hook, if you may so call it, was well baited with the flesh of the acouri, and the entrails were twisted round the rope for about a foot above it.

  Nearly a mile from where we had our hammocks, the sandbank was steep and abrupt, and the river very still and deep; there the Indian pricked a stick into the sand. It was two feet long, and on its extremity was fixed the machine; it hung suspended about a foot from the water, and the end of the rope was made fast to a stake driven well into the sand.

  The Indian then took the empty shell of a land tortoise and gave it some heavy blows with an axe. I asked him why he did that. He said it was to let the cayman hear that something was going on. In fact the Indian meant it as the cayman’s dinner-bell. Having done this, we went back to the hammocks, not intending to visit it again till morning. During the night, the jaguars roared and grumbled in the forest, as though the world was going wrong with them, and at intervals we could hear the distant cayman. The roaring of the jaguars was awful; but it was music to the dismal noise of these hideous and malicious reptiles.