In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Here they had planned to paddle up the river which emptied into the head of the gulf, and travel inland as far as possible by water. But the Spanish had anticipated their route. A guard ship and garrison were stationed at the river mouth, and the buccaneers hastily diverted before they were observed. They found a small creek a few miles to the north, sank their boats so as to leave no trace of their presence, and made ready for their epic dash across the isthmus. “While we were landing and fixing our Snap-sacks to march,” wrote Dampier, “our Miskito Indians struck a plentiful Dish of Fish which we immediately dresst, and therewith satisfied our Hunger.” Then the group of adventurers, including Wafer and “John Hingson, Mariner,” later arrested with him by Captain Rowe, turned their backs on the sea.

  The buccaneers had heavy loads. An armed buccaneer normally carried an unwieldy musket weighing about sixteen pounds, a pound or two of gunpowder in a flask, and at least a dozen lead bullets in a box or bag weighing another pound. Then there was his cutlass, or “hangar,” which served as a machete; perhaps a pistol; and a knapsack with spare clothes, tobacco, and personal possessions. All this added up to a burden probably in excess of thirty pounds. The buccaneers dumped all their surplus possessions when they scuppered the boats at the head of the creek before they set out on their trek across the isthmus. But of course they retained their booty. One buccaneer, “a weakly man,” strapped a bag of 400 pieces of eight on his back. Another buccaneer had a bag of 300 pieces of eight. Weighing more than 18 pounds, it was to be the death of him.

  “Being landed, May the 1st, we began our march about 3 a Clock in the afternoon,” Dampier recorded in his notebook. There were no Indian guides so the column headed across country, “directing our course by our pocket compasses, N.E.” That afternoon they covered only two miles before reaching the foot of a small hill. Unwilling to begin the climb and already exhausted, they built “small hutts” and lay down to rest. Until midnight it rained heavily.

  The next morning dawned fair, and the column began to ascend the heavily forested hillside, until the vanguard found an Indian trail leading through the trees. At first the buccaneers followed the track, but then the path deflected too much to the east, and they abandoned it. They were beginning to learn that Indian trails that looked promising at the start often proved to be a disappointment. Sometimes the correct path was a track that initially seemed to lead in quite the wrong direction. Later they realized that the local Indians sometimes had no idea what lay over the next ridge. Many Indians never traveled far from their village. They shunned territory that might harbor their enemies or evil spirits. At a loss to know which way to go, several buccaneers reverted to their role as masthead lookouts: they climbed into the tops of the tallest trees and scanned the green expanse of the forest canopy. On the north slope of the hill, they glimpsed the roofs of an Indian village. The slope was too steep to go there directly, and the column had to follow a roundabout track to arrive there.

  The buccaneers’ reception in the village was friendly. It was still early afternoon and most of the Indian men were away at work, tending their forest plantations or hunting. But their wives were willing to sell food—yams, potatoes, plantains, and the small wild pigs called peccaries—and they offered their visitors bowls of chicha, maize beer. A difficulty now arose: no one in the village spoke Spanish, and the buccaneers found it impossible to explain in sign language exactly where they wanted to go. The situation hardly improved in the evening when the menfolk came home. Finally the travelers learned that a day’s march away lived an Indian who did speak Spanish well. On payment of a hatchet, one of the villagers, an elderly man, agreed to lead the column there the next day.

  Before seven o’clock next morning, the column was trudging out of the village. The travelers already knew the advantage of covering as much ground as possible in the cool of the day. Nevertheless, one of the buccaneers was so exhausted by midmorning that he began to drop back. Fearing that he would be shot as straggler, he slipped away unnoticed.

  By noon the travelers had arrived at the house of the Spanish-speaking Indian, and were trying to explain the reason for their visit—to find out the best route to the northern coast. The Indian was dismissive. “He seemed to be very dubious of entertaining any discourse with us, and gave very impertinent answers to the questions that we demanded of him.” The Indian said he had no idea of how to get across the cordillera, and his manner was so aggressive that Dampier concluded “he was not our friend.” The buccaneers kept their tempers and tried to humor him. They knew how desperately they needed an Indian guide, and that “it was neither time nor place to be angry with the Indians, all our lives lying in their hand.”

  The buccaneers offered the bad-tempered Indian every inducement they could muster. They displayed “Beads, Money, Hatchets, Macheats [machetes] or long Knives” as payment if he would help them. The Indian was adamant. He would not assist the travelers. Then one of the buccaneers pulled out from his bag a curious item of plunder: a sky-blue petticoat. He draped it on the Indian’s wife, and she “was so much pleased with the Present that she immediately began to chatter to her Husband, and soon brought him to a better humour.”

  The petticoat tipped the balance. Obedient to his delighted wife, the Indian now admitted that he did know a route across the mountains but could not travel himself because he had cut his foot two days earlier and was lame. Instead, he translated to the column’s original guide, the old man from the village, where the buccaneers wanted to go and arranged that the old man should continue on for another two days, receiving a second hatchet for his pay.

  The Indian “way to the North Side” was not what the buccaneers had expected. The Indians had “no Paths to travel from one part of the Country to another . . . [so] . . . guided themselves by the rivers.” To their dismay the guide took the column on a long, wet, slippery scramble from one streambed to the next. Progress was only eleven or twelve miles a day, and the conditions were disheartening. The weather had a predictable pattern: a dry morning, followed by a wet afternoon, and a drenching night. “Tho whether it rained or shined, it was much at one with us,” Dampier noted wearily, “for I verily believe we crost the Rivers thirty times this Day.” In the evening the travelers cut branches with their cutlasses, made small huts, crawled in, and lay down in their wet clothes and sodden boots to try to get some rest. Two men always had to stay awake, “otherwise our own slaves might have knocked us on the head while we slept.” Amid such hardship, the fear of Spanish pursuit quickly began to fade so that “we began to have few other cares than how to get Guides and Food, [and] the Spaniards were seldom in our thoughts.”

  Dampier was having trouble keeping the pages of his journal dry. He rolled up the sheets of paper and stuffed them into a length of bamboo, sealing the cut ends of the tube with wax. It was a technique similar to the way the buccaneers protected their flintlock muskets. When carrying a musket in a dugout canoe or through a dripping rain forest, a conscientious musketeer covered the lock of his gun with a case and then sealed it with wax to keep out the water.

  But the gunpowder as well as the flintlock had to be kept dry, and it was much more difficult to shield the gunpowder from the effects of the prevailing damp. The problem was not so much with the musket cartouches, or cartridges, the prepared loads of gunpowder and shot rolled in paper. These were carried in a cartouche box with a tightly fitting lid. The sensitive material was the priming powder, which had to be placed in the firing pan of the flintlock. A buccaneer carried his loose gunpowder in the standard powder flask made from a cow’s horn. The horn had been softened in steam or boiling water, flattened, the open end blocked with a broad plug, and the tip cut off to provide a convenient pouring nozzle which could be closed with a small cork or stopper. But the powder flask was not completely airtight. The rain forest’s all-pervading humidity, seldom less than 70 percent, slowly permeated the interior of the flask. The gunpowder absorbed the moisture and grew damp and useless. Damp gunpowder was a m
uch more common cause for a “flash in the pan”—when the shower of sparks from the gunflint failed to ignite the priming powder—than any malfunction of the flint mechanism. It was routine for a musketeer to dry out his personal stock of gunpowder or risk a misfire.

  After five days of soggy marching the column had traveled almost forty miles and was about a third of the way through its journey. Ahead lay the crest of the Serrania de Maje, the first of the two main ridges that form the backbone of the isthmus at this transit. In this wilderness— surprising in such a remote part of the country—they came upon the isolated house of a young Indian who had lived for a time in the home of the bishop of Panama and therefore spoke excellent Spanish. The young man quickly struck up a friendship with the buccaneer’s own interpreter, the Spanish-speaking Indian who had accompanied the buccaneers from the day they had left their ship. The young man must have been feeling the isolation of his forest home because he invited the new Indian arrival to stay and help him with the work of clearing plantations and to marry his sister. To the consternation of the buccaneers, their interpreter-companion promptly accepted. This was very awkward. The buccaneers did not want to lose their interpreter, and although he had been with them for over a year, they did not trust him absolutely. They suspected treachery, perhaps that he would inform the Spanish authorities. In the end they agreed to let him go only on condition that he stay with the column for another two or three days’ march, by which time the travelers would be clear of any possible pursuit by the Spaniards.

  Sorting out this problem took the best part of the day, which was 5 May. Naturally, the men took the chance to light campfires, cook meals, dry their clothes, and relax. One man decided he would take the opportunity to dry out his gunpowder. Removing a silver dish from his plunder bag, he tipped the gunpowder into it, and held the dish close to the heat of the fire. According to Dampier, it was the surgeon Lionel Wafer who was holding the dish in his hand when “a careless fellow passed by with his Pipe lighted and set fire to his powder which blew up.” Wafer himself said that he was only “sitting on the ground near one of our men who was drying of gunpowder in a Silver Plate, but not managing it as he should, it blew up.”

  Whoever was at fault, the blast of the close-range explosion tore open Wafer’s leg.

  After the initial shock of the detonation the young surgeon examined the extent of his injury. He saw that it had “scorch’d my knee to that degree that the bone was left bare, the flesh being torn away, and my Thigh burnt for a great way above it.” The column, he knew, could not stop nor slow down for him. The buccaneers still had to put as much distance as possible between themselves and a potential Spanish pursuit, and his injury was no different from a gunshot wound taken in battle. In great pain, Wafer realized that his best chance was to try to keep up with his companions until they reached the coast, where he could get back aboard ship and recuperate.

  His comrades-in-arms were sympathetic and helpful. They wanted to retain their surgeon. His skill might be needed later, and there was “none to look after us but him.” So they redistributed the porters’ loads and detailed one of the slaves to carry Wafer’s baggage, including the remainder of the medical supplies. The surgeon was to hobble unburdened in the rear of the column.

  The wet season had now begun. One hundred twenty inches of rain—sometimes more—falls on this part of the Isthmus of Panama each year. Even its “dry season” is a misnomer as there can be heavy downpours on any day throughout the year. But from May onward, the precipitation increases noticeably. Heavy clouds gather over the cordillera and merge into a solid gray cloudcover which brushes the higher ridges and shuts out the sky. The sun disappears completely in the murk, and daylight dims. Thunder shakes the forest canopy, followed by the onrushing sound of torrential rainstorms. When a rainstorm arrives, it can last for a few minutes or for several hours. If the downpour loiters in one place, there is a sense that the roaring cascade of water will never stop. When it does cease, the silence is quickly filled by the manic dripping of thousands upon thousands of runoff trickles spattering down from leaf to leaf, and the gurgle of water draining through tree roots.

  The farther east the buccaneers went into the cordillera, the wetter it would become. The rain in the isthmus arrives from the east, originating as moisture carried by the trade winds. Forced upward by the mountain slopes on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, the moisture condenses and falls most heavily on the windward slopes. Lionel Wafer, William Dampier, and the other buccaneers were marching up the rainfall gradient. The rainy season would grow more pronounced with each day that passed, and with each mile they covered.

  Their pathway, the rivers, became treacherous. On 6 May, the day after Wafer’s accident, the column set out again after hiring new guides. They crossed the first river in a local canoe, shuttling in batches from one bank to the other. But there was no canoe available at the next river, so they had to wade across. A few miles farther on, their guide informed them that they would have to wade again, back to the opposite bank. Twice more they had to ford the river, floundering on the slippery boulders of the riverbed and struggling to keep on their footing as the current plucked at their bodies. On the final crossing the river was so deep that “our tallest men stood in the deepest place, and handed over the sick, weak and short Men.” The injured surgeon, Lionel Wafer, only just made it to the opposite bank. The current picked him up off his feet and swept him downstream “for several paces” before an eddy deposited him on a bend in the river, and he scrambled ashore. Two other stragglers, Robert Spratlin and William Bowman, lagged even farther behind than the injured surgeon. They arrived on the riverbank in time to watch Wafer nearly drown. Seeing his narrow escape, they lost their nerve and decided not to make the attempt to get across until the water level dropped. The rest of the men sat on the opposite bank and waited for half an hour. But instead of falling, the river rose even higher. The men in the main column shouted across the water to Spratlin and Bowman and “bid them be of good comfort and stay till the River did fall.” Then they marched on.

  After another two miles they stopped for the night and made their usual lean-to huts of branches on the riverbank. They had scarcely set up the huts when the river rose even higher, bursting its banks, and the travelers were forced to abandon their huts and retreat to higher ground in the forest. It was too dark to construct more huts and the buccaneers lay down in small groups under the larger trees and tried to get some rest. To add to their discomfort, said Dampier, “The greatest part of the night we had extraordinary hard rain with much Lightening and terrible claps of Thunder.”

  Sheltering from the downpour, the travelers failed to keep a proper watch. All but one of the slaves and prisoners took their chance to escape in the night. The exception was a drowsy slave “who was hid in some hole and knew nothing of their design, or else fell asleep.” When the buccaneers took stock of their losses next morning, they found that the runaways had fled with Wafer’s musket and all his money. More wretched from Wafer’s point of view was that the slave designated to carry his kit had run away with all the medicines “and thereby left me depriv’d of wherewithal to dress my Sore.” The only equipment the surgeon still possessed was a small box of surgical instruments that he had slipped into his pocket and a handful of “medicaments” he had rolled up in a cloth.

  Their guide now broke the unwelcome news that the column had to cross the river yet again. The buccaneers assembled on the bank. The water level had fallen considerably in the night, but the current was still running very strongly and though the river was narrow, it looked to be too deep to wade. Not all of the buccaneers knew how to swim, and even those who did wondered how they would get across with their heavy plunder. A council decided that the best plan would be for one of the swimmers to go across on his own, pulling a line behind him. This rope would then be used to haul across the bags and sacks, and afterward the nonswimmers. A man named George Gayny volunteered to go first. He took the free end of the line
and, unwisely, fastened it around his neck. Even more stupidly he took his plunder with him, a bag of silver coins. A colleague stood on the bank with the rest of the coil, ready to feed out the rope as needed. Gayny plunged into the river and was halfway across when “the Line in drawing after him chanced to kink or grow entangled.” The line handler checked the line, to give himself time to clear the tangle. The sudden tug on the rope plucked Gayny off-balance. He was seen to turn on his back in the current and lose his forward momentum. Rather than strangle Gayny with the taut rope, the line handler threw the rest of the coil into the river, “thinking that he [Gayny] might recover himself.”

  The flood was too strong. In a moment it swept Gayny, rope and all, out of sight. He was whirled away and “having three hundred dollars at his back, was carried down and never seen more by us.” Sometime later the two stragglers, Spratlin and Bowman, who had been left on the far bank, came across Gayny’s body. The corpse was lying in a side creek where a side current had driven it ashore. The bag of plunder was still lashed to Gayny’s back. The two stragglers did not touch the silver. They “meddled not with any of it, being only in care how to work their way through this wild unknown Country.”

  The column eventually got across the river by making a bridge. They felled the largest tree they could find, and balanced their way over.

  At last it seemed that they had reached easier country. They entered a broad valley where the trees were more widely spaced so they could advance more quickly. Progress had dropped to as little as six miles a day when they were struggling with the rivers, but it now increased to twelve miles. For food they “ransackt” the swiddens, the occasional patches of slash-and-burn agriculture where the natives would cut back the jungle and grow plantains and yams for a year or two, after which they opened up another clearing when the meager soil was exhausted. One guide handed the group over to the next, and on the fourth day since Wafer’s accident, 9 May, they reached an Indian village, the first since leaving the coastal plain, to find the entire Indian community assembled and waiting “in a large house to receive us.”