Skeletons on the Zahara

by Dean King

  The stages of dehydration would be categorized a century later by W. J. McGee, a notable amateur thirst-researcher and director of the St. Louis Public Museum. His portrait of the process of human dehydration, which has become the sine qua non of the field, shows five distinct phases: clamorous, cotton-mouth, swollen-tongue, shriveled-tongue, and blood-sweat, each roughly equivalent to a 5 percent decrease in body weight. The Commerces had long since grown clamorous: uncomfortable, irritable, feverish. Their stale throats cracked when they spoke. Their fat, sore tongues restricted conversation to terse phrases, and they slurred or lost words. Their hearing had grown muffled, due to loss of moisture in the inner ear. In the cotton-mouth stage, the mind increasingly distorts reality and desires. Sufferers rashly toss off clothes or possessions or, in the case of the Commerces, become obsessed with how it would feel to die in the sea. It is normal for spells of feverish dreams to focus on the urge to drink, and the Commerces, parched beyond imagination and penetrated by salt, extolled the lush banks of the Connecticut River and craved a cup— or a barrel— of the delicious mineral water from the freshets that filled it. In his head, Riley built and rebuilt the stately spa he had dreamed of.

  That afternoon, Riley gave up any hope of a rescue at sea. To continue on meant certain death, roasting on the woeful collection of planks that formed their boat, now an inhuman prison cell that confined their bodies in cramped agony. They might fight on another handful of days, but they did not have enough food and water to maintain their strength. They would soon lose the power to affect their fate.

  Riley had an idea. To motivate the crew, he proposed heading back to the Commerce. The brig, built in Keeney's Cove, Glastonbury, across from Wethersfield, in 1811, was now their lone connection to the Lower Valley. If part of a shipbuilder's soul goes into his craft, then master carpenter Horace Fish was a worthy soul; he and the Glastonbury crew, men the Commerces knew, had produced a fine vessel. Mothballed during the war, she was still fresh and tight, smelling of Valley oak and pine. By the "will of Providence," Riley now suggested, the wreck might have been discovered by civilized people, who would restore them to their country and families. As farfetched as it was, this inspired bit of chicanery offered the crew new hope, and they seized on it. The invocation of family, Riley noticed, eased his shipmates' agony and even his own. It was as if they believed they were heading straight to the Valley to see their wives and children.

  Sentimentality was not one of Riley's chief characteristics. In the past he had begun at least one lengthy voyage on Christmas Day, and on this trip he had never considered postponing the departure of the Commerce to wait out Phoebe's impending childbirth. Yet he surely longed for his home and the embrace of his chestnut-haired wife of thirteen years. The clamor of his children was now a strange, far-off reality, but one that he had not yet given up hope of hearing again.

  In a voice vote, the tattered crew all agreed with Riley. They tacked the boat around and, steering by the sun, headed back to the coast. Though more storms followed, the crew remained hopeful. "Dismal as the prospect before us appeared," Robbins explained, "horrid as the recollection of the coast we had left was to our minds, we still felt a kind of desperate satisfaction in returning to it." They needed the resolve that this hope kindled, for starvation had left them weak and listless. For four days they had bailed the longboat incessantly, working two buckets at a time in roughly thirty-minute shifts (though they had no accurate way to tell time). The muscles in their arms, backs, and hands, which were raw and covered with boils from the abrasion of wood and salt, ached from the repetitive motion. While they lost strength, however, the sea did not. Its persistence made the task almost too difficult to bear. They ate the skin and raw flesh of the pig as it was doled out in precious, rancid-sweet bits. Then they ate its bones. They continued to wet their blistered and festering lips twice a day with wine, water, and urine. Their fiery heads and necks radiated heat. Their skin peeled off in sheets, leaving bleeding sores.

  Having sailed more than three days back toward the coast, the crew again grew desperate.4 Riley told them they would see land that day, and they kept a vigilant watch. Each passing hour grew more intolerable. By nightfall, they had not seen even a shadow on the horizon. They began to grumble. It was apparent to all, Riley noted, that they "could not hope to make the boat hold together in any manner above another day." That night, presumably while Riley, Williams, and Savage dozed, some of the crew— perhaps convinced that it was their last night in this world or perhaps to spite the captain whose promises that day had proved false— stole one of the two remaining bottles of wine and drank it.

  In the morning, Riley discovered the loss and demanded to know who had taken the bottle. Each man denied it. No one confessed to having drunk any of the wine, and all denounced the theft as "an unpardonable crime," whose perpetrators should be "thrown overboard instantly." In the heated discussion that resulted among the crew, however, it became apparent to Riley who the culprits were, though he never publicly named them. Attempting to identify them today, though difficult, is perhaps worth the exercise. From their rank in the crew, one might doubt that Barrett or Hogan would have dared such an offense. Horace was too young, and Deslisle, being the only black man, probably would not have risked calling attention to himself at a time like this. Savage, Porter, and Robbins had maintained a positive outlook and were among the most helpful in the early stages of the crisis, making them less likely transgressors. Excluding Riley, that leaves first mate Williams, whose subsequent behavior would make him more rather than less probable, Clark, and Burns.

  Although capital punishment would have been justified under maritime law, Riley decided the resulting blow to morale would be too severe. The wine was gone. There was nothing he could do about that. Besides, it was likely enough that the culprits would soon have their judgment day. "No remedy remained," he decided, "but patience, and stricter vigilance for the future."

  The breach in discipline was perhaps inevitable. That Riley had staved it off for as long as he had and then let it pass without a showdown demonstrated shrewd leadership. Raised in the black-and-white world of New England Protestantism, he was stern and moralistic by nature, so it was difficult for him to ignore the offense. True to that same background, however, he was pragmatic and egalitarian. He now led more by common consent than by divine right. In his manuscript Riley called his leadership role at this stage "advisory." Furthermore, he was human; his struggle to survive had already resulted in the loss of one man, whether intentionally or not, and he did not want to lose any more. Perhaps, too, he had gained an understanding of the depths to which despair could drive a man.

  Shortly after this confrontation, the sailors spotted land, far off but fortunately to leeward. Their spirits soared. "Why we should have rejoiced at beholding a coast from which we had so recently escaped with our bare lives is difficult to determine," Robbins later mused. Studying the shimmery ghost of land on the horizon, Riley secretly fretted. Despite his earlier promise that he was aiming to return to the wreck site, he had held out hope that they had traveled far enough south to escape the desert. To his eye, the land was uniformly flat. He guessed that they were looking at the Sahara.

  The boat neared the coast around sunset, with the fading rays running along the water behind them and pushing at their backs, like the hand of fate. When they were suddenly hurtled to the southeast like a canoe in rapids, they were rudely reminded of the nature of the current. They could now hear the tremendous influx of sea roaring as it crashed into the towering wall of the continent. The sand and brown cliffs came into clear focus, rising directly from the sea, in, as Robbins deemed it, "majestic and destructive grandeur."

  Riley did not like what he saw. He proposed that they stay at sea another night and search for a landing place farther south in the morning. The crew disagreed. Their patience had been stretched to its limit. They demanded an attempt on the shore. They would land or go down that evening. Seeing that his mates agreed with
the men, Riley reluctantly assented.

  Had they sailed on, they would doubtlessly have reached a gentler coast, or with real luck, and another sixty miles of southing, they could have made it to territory under treaty with the British occupying Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River. In that area, the tribes knew there was a bounty for shipwrecked sailors, and it was their practice to take them into Saint-Louis to be redeemed.

  Destitute as they were, the men had few preparations to make for the surf. Whether it was imprudent or not, Riley would not risk losing the last bottle of wine to the waves. He ordered it uncorked. Without prejudice to the offenders of the night before, they all took turns swigging it down.

  Now Riley steered for the ironbound coast. "We could discover no aperture through which we might pass for some time," Robbins recalled. "At length we saw something that had the appearance of a sand bank. We made for it with all our little strength." The vertical wall of the continent raced at them like an opaque gale. In a dizzying frenzy of percussive waves, their bruised backsides slammed against thwarts. Suddenly, the longboat rose, rose, and fell. The wave swept out from under them. The boat crashed down. Its weary timbers exploded at their feet. Sand.

  PART TWO

  Ships of the Sand

  chapter 6

  Purgatory

  The sailors' destiny now manifested itself in a barren strip of beach not much larger than their destroyed boat. Towering over them was a cliff. The little that had survived with them included some articles of spare clothing, several hunks of salt pork, a number of bottles containing water or urine, and the bag of silver. The urine was more precious to them than the silver.

  Even while at sea, the crew of the Commerce had opted for drinking urine over seawater. Riley reported that by the time they reached the desert, they were drinking their own shared urine "distilled"— having passed through their bodies— twelve times.1 He called the drinking of urine a "wretched and disgusting relief."

  Both anecdote and modern science indicate that drinking urine can be beneficial in small quantities for short periods of time. But in larger doses, when not diluted, its poisons and waste will overwhelm the kidneys and cause them to fail, a state known as uremia, which can ultimately result in brain damage and death.

  According to a young Swiss surgeon named Savigny who was a survivor and chronicler of the raft voyage that followed the wreck of the French frigate Méduse on the Arguin Banks of Mauritania in 1816, the urine of some of those on the raft was "more agreeable than that of others." One passenger could not bring himself to swallow any at all. "In reality, it had not a disagreeable taste," Savigny conceded, "but in some of us it became thick and extraordinarily acrid." Its most peculiar quality, he noted, was that after drinking it, one immediately had the urge to "urine anew."

  In 1877, a U.S. cavalry company lost in the desert drank their own urine sweetened with sugar, which, they claimed, improved it considerably. But an experiment by American World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who after an emergency landing in 1942 was stranded on a raft in the Pacific for twenty-three days, was not so successful. He and his raftmates collected their urine in empty cartridge shells and left it exposed to the air and sun for days, hoping this might purify it. "That was my idea," Rickenbacker confessed. "It was a bad one." The smell became absolutely intolerable and the taste unimproved.

  A very small number of known cases seem to belie science. In his narrative of the 1785 wreck of the Ste. Catherine, Pierre Raymond de Brisson reported that the ship's baker survived on nothing but snails and his own urine for ten days. In 1905, W. J. McGee, who was camped on the desert near Yuma, Arizona, studying the effects of light on desert life, rescued a Mexican who had been lost on the desert for eight days, existing for five of them solely on a burning desire to knife the partner who had abandoned him there— and his own urine. After examining the "shrunken and scrawny" man, whose skin had "turned a ghastly purplish yet ashen gray" and whose gums, nostrils, and eyelids had blackened, McGee recorded the facts of the case in minute detail and went on to conduct his groundbreaking research into thirst. Yet he could only struggle with the evidence when it came to uriposia. Ordinarily, drinking urine is "hardly helpful if not wholly harmful," he stated, but in this man's case it seems to have saved his life.2

  The same is true for the Commerces, who now found themselves trapped in a terrifying place. "Over our heads," wrote Riley, "pended huge masses of broken and shattered rock." More of this could tumble down and turn the eye-blink of a beach into a craggy grave. He examined the dreary cliffs above, running from east-northeast to west-southwest as far as he could see, and figured they were somewhere near Cape Blanco. They had actually landed ninety miles to the north, near Cape Barbas, but with no map or navigational tools it was a reasonable guess.

  Cape Barbas forms the southwestern point of the crescent-shaped St. Cyprian Bay. Ten miles to the east-northeast at the north end of the bay lies Morro Falcon, a flat-topped cliff that resembles a fort and reaches about a hundred feet above the sea. The St. Cyprian "river," really a wadi— a dry gully that flows only in the rare event of rain— lies just to the north of that. At both ends of the bay, the cliffs are made of white- to sand-colored strata turning maroon at the bottom. In between lies a sandy beach backed by dunes with steep rugged sides. The wind and surf shape all.

  Riley did not know what exactly lay above their bit of sand beach, only that they had to find a way up while they still had the strength. He instructed the men to prepare a site for sleeping. He and Savage would explore along the shore to the west, where he hoped the cliffs sloped toward the water at the cape's point. They climbed over wet, jagged rocks until they reached a dead end— no way up and no way around. They returned after dark and broke the news that they had not found a route to the top.

  The sailors wet their mouths with urine and ate shreds of salt pork. Before going to sleep in a huddled mass on a patch of sand partly sheltered from the wind by rocks, they prayed together.

  At daybreak on September 8, the twelfth day since the wreck at Bojador, the rising tide was still half out, and one of the men found mussels on the rocks.3 They all ate some, but the salt burned their sore mouths so much that they gave up. They began making preparations to head east along the rocky outcroppings of the cape. According to Robbins, they still held on to the scant hope of seeing a ship at sea and somehow waving it down. Not knowing exactly where they were, they also believed they might be able to return to the wreck on foot. In fact, they were more than two hundred miles south of the wrecked brig.

  The men divided the little bit of water that remained, each having his own bottle and thus, within a narrow framework, control of his own destiny. Using penknives and rope yarn, they cut and sewed portions of the boat's sail and extra shirts into small satchels. Each man stashed his ration of salt pork and his bottle of water inside and slung the sack over a shoulder. They could not afford to waste any fluid. In an ever-diminishing cycle, they would now drink from and urinate into their bottles.

  To reduce the weight and bulk they would have to carry, the men left everything else, including spare clothes, except for their jackets. They discarded the worst of the salt pork. Convinced that the silver had inflamed the Sahrawis' greed and cruelty, Riley also asked the men to leave behind any coins they had kept for themselves. It stood to reason that if a Sahrawi found one of them rich in coin, he might take the silver as his good fortune and murder or leave for dead the bearer; whereas if he found just a man, he would keep his new slave as his good fortune. The Americans buried the sack of dollars and flung away the rest as worse than useless. With reluctance, they also now abandoned the ship's colors; they could no longer afford the privilege to bear and the duty to protect their nation's flag.

  Before setting off, they made a solemn pact to stick together and to help one another out. "It was not merely common danger that made us friends," Robbins later reflected. "We had become attached to each other by previous sufferings and mutual favors."


  Porter and Robbins took the lead. The terrain to the east was even less promising than that to the west. The rise of the continent appeared either vertical or, worse, undercut by wind and surf and looming cavernously overhead at a dizzying height. Glacier-size hunks of the continent had ruptured and crashed to the sea, creating their path of boulders, rocks, gravel, and sand. They picked their way through tunnels formed by subsequent collapses and skirted impassable jumbles by traversing narrow strips of temporary beach or by wading. When there was no choice, they scaled ridges of scree, sometimes piled halfway to the summit. Hand over hand they climbed on slick, precarious ridges, knowing that one wrong move could send them tumbling into the breakers below.

  At each summit they then dropped down toehold by toehold to the water's edge again. Where there was neither a strip to walk on nor a climbable outcropping, they waited for the surf to recede and then waded chest-deep along the wall to the next outcropping or pile of scree, which they mounted between waves, each man helping the next up.

  "Surmounting one obstacle seemed only to open to our view another, and a more dangerous one," Riley later recalled. Two places were nearly impassable. The first was a harrowing sight. A crest of rocks deposited the men at a sheer face about fifty feet high. The wall plunged to a deep churning sea, but a narrow ledge crossed it, which Robbins estimated was about thirty rods, or 165 yards, long. On the ledge and suspended over it in improbable crags, rocks, some as big as cannonballs, rested, only temporarily halted on their journey to the sea. Riley and his crew paused to take in the situation. Their shoes were shredded, their feet cut and bleeding. The sun now beat down on their overheated bodies. The only thing worse than pushing on— and risk falling into the sea— was not to push on, only to die of exposure on the rocks. Below was death in the sea. They had no choice but to cross the face.