by Tim Severin
Unfortunately they had come in “the hungry time.” This was the interval between the abandonment of the exhausted plantations and the fruiting of the new plantings. The influx of forty armed and hungry foreigners overwhelmed the food resources of the village. The Indians “made us welcome to such as they had, which was very mean,” Dampier wrote, “for these were new Plantations, the Corn being not eared . . . . Potatoes, Yams and Plantains they had none, but what they brought from their old Plantations.” Once again the problem of interpreters arose. The buccaneers had kept their word and allowed their Spanish-speaking Indian guide to return back to the house where he had been promised a wife. Now the travelers had to struggle to make themselves understood. They asked for guides to take them on to the Caribbean coast, and as quickly as possible. They were under the mistaken impression that they were nearer to their destination than they actually were. They were tired of squelching through the rain forest, sleeping in makeshift huts made of branches, swatting at insects, living off unripe plantains, and constantly being soaked by rain and river water.
Their impatience showed. Two Indians who had a smattering of Spanish agreed, on promise of payment, to lead the buccaneers onward. But they cautioned the buccaneers to wait for a day and rest. The buccaneers would have none of it. They wanted to be on their way, and next morning they set out, determined to plunge forward, even without guides. Reluctantly the two guides went with them, though it is not clear whether they were coerced. The buccaneers left a sour atmosphere behind them.
They also left behind three of their own men. Richard Gopson had always been an unlikely buccaneer. He was an “ingenious Man and Good Scholar” who could read classical Greek. Earlier in his life he had been apprenticed to a druggist in London, and he was rather bookish. In his luggage he carried a copy of the New Testament in Greek. This he would read aloud “and translate extempore into English to such of the Company as were dispos’d to hear him.” The second relict was John Hingson, “Mariner,” who would be arrested with Wafer eight years later by the Dumbarton. Both Hingson and Gopson were “so fatigued with the journey that they could go no further,” Wafer later wrote in his account of the adventure.
Wafer recalled how “there had been an Order made among us at our first landing, to kill any who should flag in the Journey.” But he acknowledged that “this was made only to terrify any from loitering and being taken by the Spaniards, who by Tortures might extort from them a Discovery of our March.” The reality was now very different. The Spaniards were too far behind to be a threat, and the three men were genuinely incapable of keeping up with the column. So “this rigourous Order was not executed, but the Company took a very kind leave both of these [men], and of me.”
The three were now a fresh batch of maroons, left deep in the jungle by their own wish. It was the same manner of voluntary abandonment that Alexander Selkirk had chosen, and there was another reason for Lionel Wafer’s fate to interest Defoe. Selkirk’s story provided inspiration for Robinson Crusoe’s adventures; Wafer’s tale foreshadowed a deeper purpose of Defoe’s novel.
Robinson Crusoe and Lionel Wafer were both advocates, one symbolic, the other real, for one of Defoe’s favorite themes—the creation of new colonies in the Americas. When Wafer returned to London, the surgeon became involved in a grandiose scheme to set up a colony in Panama where he was marooned. When Robinson Crusoe returns home, he too nurtures a “new Collony” on the island where he was shipwrecked.
Crusoe demonstrates that his island can be made to flourish. He clears the brush, raises flocks of goats, plows, seeds and harvests crops. In short, he is the model of an ideal hard-working, resourceful colonist. When he and Man Friday leave their island, they abandon there three of the mutineers whose ship Crusoe has captured. Sixteen Spanish and Portuguese sailors will soon join them. They have been living as castaways on the nearby mainland coast, and Crusoe sends a canoe to fetch them.
Many years later Crusoe is a widower and approaching retirement, and he is curious to see how the islanders have managed. He goes back to the scene of his adventures aboard a merchant ship. He finds that the Spaniards and the “villains” have settled their differences and that his island is prospering. Women have been brought in, and there are twenty children. Crusoe hands over “supplies of all necessary things, and particularly of Arms, Powder, Shot, Cloaths, Tools” and after staying twenty days sails onward to Brazil, leaving behind “two Workmen which I brought with me, viz. A Carpenter and a Smith.” From Brazil he sends yet more colonists to his island, including seven more women to be wives for the settlers, and a small vessel loaded with cows, sheep, and pigs, “which, when I came again, were considerably increas’d.” On the very last page of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, Robinson Crusoe rejoices in the creation of a flourishing, wealthy, happy colony on his once-desert island and he sails away, promising a sequel of fresh travels and adventures.
The all-too-real colony that was to follow Wafer to Panama was, by contrast, an epic catastrophe. Between 1698 and 1700, some three thousand men, women, and children set out to make their lives on the shores of the isthmus. Only three hundred of them ever returned home. The rest were left in unmarked graves at the edge of the rain forest, drowned, were buried at sea, or were snapped up as cheap labor in other, more successful colonies in the New World. Scotland, the country that sent the victims to their tragic fate, went into shock. At least £200,000—a sizable part of the country’s available capital—had been squandered, and the national psyche was deeply scarred. After eighteen months on the coast of Panama all there was to show was an abandoned site, labeled by mapmakers Caledonia and its derelict town, New Edinburgh. Many of the humble dead who lay buried there, the ordinary “planters,” had been Gaelic speakers. Had they survived, they might have put to the test Lionel Wafer’s claim that the language of the local Indians, though quite different in vocabulary, used the same sounds as Scots Gaelic.
Appropriately, my companion when I went to Caledonia in search of Lionel Wafer’s life as a maroon was a Scot from the Outer Hebrides.
Murdo had a Celt’s mixture of fair skin, dark eyes, dark hair, and fine features. With his good looks, outgoing energy, and an engaging Scots accent, he was a bachelor who regularly attracted acquisitive feminine glances. Thirty-two years old, he was a teacher of geography at the secondary school on the island of Benbecula, but had previously worked in radio and television. He was passionate about the story of the Scots colony in Panama. For four years he had tried to interest television companies in making a documentary about this pivotal event in Scotland’s history. He had written trailer pieces for radio, drafted television scripts, located Scots sponsors, and helped to organize exhibitions on the Scots Darien colony, as it came to be known. Always, at the last moment, the project had slipped from his grasp—for lack of funds, a change in television schedules, bureaucratic inertia. Murdo had grown disheartened by the time I met him by chance on a visit to his school. I mentioned that I was traveling to the Isthmus of Panama and needed a Spanish speaker to go with me. Murdo instantly volunteered. He had spent three years teaching at a school in Bogota in Columbia, he told me. There he had learned to speak what he called “taxi driver Spanish,” largely from fellow supporters of a Bogota soccer team. “Taxi driver Spanish” would be the common language of the Indians of the Panama coast, and Murdo had another aptitude: he had the proverbial Scots habit of thrift. He always asked for a discount and carefully scrutinized every bill. Traveling with Murdo would help stretch our budget.
Our final destination was a small island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, close to the Colombian border. The island is still called Kalidonia. Close by lie Puerto Escoces, Roca Escoces, Punta Escoces, and Canal Escoces. The cluster of names—Harbor, Reef, Point, and Channel of the Scots—distracts from the fact that an even smaller island immediately adjacent to Kalidonia once had an equally significant name—Golden Island, the rendezvous of the buccaneers and the point of departure for Wafer, Dampier, and t
he “Merry Boys” when they set off on their original march across the isthmus to the Pacific. The buccaneers’ overland trail to the Pacific was an essential ingredient in the Scots’ scheme for their colony. The directors of the enterprise reasoned that if the buccaneer road could be improved to carry merchandise between the Caribbean and the Pacific, then their colony would become an international trade center and “emporium of the world.” They hired an ex-buccaneer as the pilot of their colonizing fleet and gave him orders to steer for Golden Island. There the leaders of the expedition were to sign a treaty of friendship with the Indians and create “Caledonia.”
Golden Island has an Indian name now—Suletupu. All the coast from the Colombian border for 140 miles to the northwest—more than a thousand square miles of mainland and archipelago—belongs to the same Indian people who signed the treaty of friendship with the Scots. They are the Kuna, the people among whom Lionel Wafer was stranded.
At six o’clock in the morning, the sight of Kuna women waiting in a drab airport lounge in Panama City jolts awake the bleariest traveler. The women dress for the journey in their most vivid wardrobe. Every square inch of clothing is patterned with intricate designs and motifs. Carmine, yellow, orange predominate. Each woman is resplendent in bright red and yellow head scarf, patterned blouse with puffed-up shoulders and astonishing embroidered body panels, front and back, and a wraparound skirt below which a bare knee leads to tight leggings made of a myriad of brightly colored beads meticulously wound around the calf as far as the ankle. The feet are bare. Matching bands of colored beads extend from elbow to wrist. Loops of silver coins hang in broad necklaces on the chest, and from the central cartilage of the nose dangles a small, thick golden crescent. Alongside the Kuna women their menfolk look positively drab in a plain white shirt, jeans, and, if they are feeling formal, a small black panama hat.
The Kunas are dwarfed by the average Panamanian—it used to be said that only African pigmies have a smaller average height than the Kunas—but the diminutive Kunas radiate self-confidence. They have good reason to do so. The government of Panama has agreed that the 50,000 Kunas living in the country are a people apart and their land is to be respected as their own. The region is autonomous, officially the Region of San Blas. The Kunas call it simply Kuna Yalah and regard it as inalienable territory. No one can own land there who is not born a Kuna. When you fly from Panama City and arrive on one of the tiny airstrips dotted along the coast, a four-and-a-half-foot-tall Kuna woman dressed in the same flamboyant but more faded clothes approaches every stranger and demands a landing tax. The Kuna people are determined to preserve their race as well as maintain their cultural and territorial identity, and in many ways they are profoundly exclusive. A Kuna man may marry outside his people, and even though the liaison is accepted, his wife and children will not be welcome back in Kuna Yalah. If a Kuna woman marries outside the tribe, that is a scandal.
When Lionel Wafer lived among them, the Kunas were spread right across the isthmus, in the river valleys and on the coast. Then something strange happened. Sometime (the date is unclear but it seems to have been in the mid-nineteenth century), the vast majority of the Kunas abandoned the uplands and moved toward the Caribbean. They paddled offshore in dugout canoes and settled on a chain of tiny islands which are barely more than sand and coral reef tops. The Kunas say they moved to avoid the snakes and insects and illnesses of the jungle.
The move to the islands was an extraordinary decision. Of the fifty distinct Kuna communities, forty of them now live on small islands where almost nothing grows except coconut palms and a few cultivated breadfruit. The soil is too sandy, and the land on the islands they selected is rarely more than a few feet above sea level. To grow food, the Kuna must start out at dawn every day and paddle across to the mainland, walk to their clearings in the rain forest, clean and plant and prune the crops, carry the produce in sacks and on shoulder poles back to their canoes, and then paddle home in the afternoon. It is grinding labor. Even more remarkable is that few of the islands have springs of fresh water. Formerly, hauling and rationing water was a way of life. Every drop of drinking water had to be collected in earthenware jars from the streams on the mainland and paddled across to the villages. Plastic undersea pipes have now been laid from the mainland. Fresh water can be piped in, but dry land is not so easily gained. Some islands are no more than five or six hundred yards across. At spring tides the sea creeps up and inundates the floors of the outer huts.
As the small plane we had caught in Panama City banked and began its descent I looked down on the roofs of our immediate destination, the island of Mulatupu Sasardi, population four thousand, according to the guidebook. Murdo and I had flown there because the community has the longest airstrip close to the island of Kalidonia. All four thousand inhabitants of Mulatupu Sasardi live crammed together on the crown of a single coral and sand outcrop. Seen from the air, the pale thatched roofs cover every square foot of the chosen island, with the exception of a central basketball court and a tracery of footpaths. The houses extend to the beach and beyond, some of them being built out over the water on artificial bases. The place appears as a thatched village floating on the ocean, isolated from reality. I felt I was looking down at an entire people who had chosen to withdraw from the normal world. They had deliberately marooned themselves.
Murdo and I took a ride on the municipal dugout sent to collect passengers from the airstrip on the neighboring, deserted, island. We were the only non-Kunas. The boatman brought us to the wooden jetty on Mulatupu Sasardi and deposited us under a sign that warned visitors to return to their vessels by dusk. The warning was aimed at hucksters who putter up from Colombia in ancient wooden motorboats of African Queen style to exchange foodstuffs and cheap clothes for the Kuna crop of coconuts. The warning does not yet apply to foreign tourists, but we were told to report to the village council, state our business, and ask permission to stay. The council office was on the upper floor of a tin-roofed building beside the basketball court–cum–main square. The secretary to the council was a small elderly Kuna with the timeless air of a minor functionary; on his otherwise bare desk were a tin cash box and ledger. He told us that the village council would meet next day and decide how long we could stay.
The guidebook is enthusiastic about Mulatupu Sasardi, stating, “The Kuna here are extremely friendly”—not the case farther north, earlier pages note, as cruise ship tourism has soured relations between the Kunas and outsiders. There is mention of “a very basic hotel” with a bucket in a barrel for taking a shower, the pleasing behavior of Kuna children who run up to the visitor with welcoming cries, and a single eating house serving delicious chicken and run by a Kuna woman “who has a smile that would melt a glacier.” On all three counts the guidebook was wildly wrong. Murdo and I found neither hotel nor guesthouse, the children had seen enough tourists to learn to pester them, and the only place to buy a meal was a grubby bakery by the jetty where bread and eggs were served with great reluctance and a surly scowl. We stayed overnight in the hut of an elderly and friendly Kuna who clearly was not planning to pay any attention to whatever the council would decide.
The reason for this melancholy state of affairs was that Mulatupu Sasardi is a double community. Mulatupians and Sasardians had chosen to live on one island, and for some reason the two village councils had quarreled. Each now had its own agenda. When the sahilas, the village elders, meet, they bicker over who owns the cultivation rights along the coast and compete to fleece the unwary foreign tourists. Previously, violent crime was virtually unknown; now, petty theft was common, a tourist had been robbed, a Kuna girl had been raped, and the place was in a state of semianarchy. When Murdo and I appeared in front of a committee of elders, the Mulatupian branch, we were asked for a four-hundred—dollar fee if we wanted to pursue our research into the extinct Scots colony. Murdo was outraged. Mulatupu was living up to its name, which translates as “island of the buzzard vultures.” Murdo and I hired a dugout canoe and quietly
slipped away to Kalidonia. There, when we got to know the Kunas better, our acquaintances wrinkled their noses in distaste when they heard that we had tried to negotiate with the Mulatupu elders.
On Kalidonia we still needed permission if we were to stay. But the sandy footpaths of Kalidonia were wider and cleaner than those in Mulatupu Sasardi, the cane-and-thatch houses were set farther apart and were in better condition, and there was a feeling of wariness rather than distrust as the Kalidonians gazed at us from their doorways when Murdo and I walked from the jetty to the house of the chief sahila, whose support would be crucial.
Leonidas, the sahila-in-chief of Kalidonia, was away on the mainland tending to his plantain groves when we arrived at the cane fence of his compound and pushed open the wood-plank gate. His eldest daughter, Leonilla, greeted us and asked us to come in and await his return. Anywhere in the world Leonilla would have been regarded as a beauty. We learned later that she had appeared in an advertisement promoting the sale of the Kunas’ modern cash crop, the hand-embroidered panels called molas which decorate the women’s blouses and are also produced for sale to tourists in Panama City and to foreign collectors. Athletically petite, she had a perfect copper-brown complexion and always looked like a fashion plate, though she had two small children and, with her sister, Rosa, played a major part in running Leonidas’s household. When the two sisters were not preparing food, sweeping the bare earth floor, or engaged in all the chores of child rearing, they sat in the day hammocks that swung between the wooden posts holding up the thatch roof of the porch. There, bent over and their needles darting, they stitched mola after mola.