In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  Leonidas pushed his way in through the gate at four in the afternoon. He had a machete on one shoulder and a bunch of plantains held in one hand. With his slight stoop and wiry frame, he looked like an illustration of the kindly woodcutter returning home in a Victorian book of children’s stories.

  Leonidas must have been at hard physical work for six hours in the steamy rain forest. Yet he appeared active, as if he were just beginning the day. Sixty-three years old, he looked fifty. Dressed in sweat-stained shirt and dark trousers with broad bare feet, he exuded a gnarled competence. Greeting us with a nod, he disappeared to wash and then came back to hear what we had to say. “Taxi driver Spanish” was the perfect medium as Murdo ask permission for us to stay so that we might compare life on Kalidonia with what the pirata Wafer had described three hundred years ago. Leonidas brightened. He had never heard of this English pirata, but if he wrote about the Kunas then Leonidas would like to know what he said. Leonidas’s first responsibility as sahila-in-chief of Kalidonia was to teach his people their own traditions so that they could carry their way of life into the future. He would propose to the council of elders that Murdo and I should be allowed to stay.

  That night Leonidas returned from the onmaked nega, the meeting house to tell us that the council had agreed to our request. There was a condition attached: we had to live in the sahila’s house and we must respect the customs of the village. On certain days we would be confined to Leonidas’s compound and could not wander among the houses. “On what days?” asked Murdo. On the day of chicha fuerte, Leonidas replied—on the day of strong drink. It was the day, I guessed from Wafer’s experience, when every adult male islander was obliged to get hopelessly intoxicated.

  Wafer and his two fellow maroons, Gopson and Hingson, were not made welcome in the Kuna village where they had been left behind. The situation grew worse three or four days later when Spratlin and Bowman, the other two stragglers, lurched in. Now they were five extra mouths to feed. The Kunas, wrote Wafer, “look’d on us very scurvily, throwing green plantains to us as we sat cringing and shivering as you would Bones to a Dog.” Fortunately the Indian in whose hut they were billeted took pity on them and in the night would slip out of the village, gather ripe plantains, and feed them secretly. With his help Wafer began learning some Kuna words.

  Their ill treatment, Wafer felt, was uncharacteristic of the Kunas, who were “generally a kind and free-hearted People.” Despite the antipathy of the villagers, their ina duleds, “men of medicine,” began to doctor Wafer’s damaged leg. They prepared curative herbs by chewing them in their mouths to produce a wet paste which they spread on a plantain leaf. Then they laid this compress over the raw wound. Every day they changed this dressing and applied fresh paste. As a practicing field surgeon, Wafer was greatly impressed by the result. Their treatment was “so effectual that in about 20 days use of this Poultess, which they applied fresh every day, I was perfectly cured.” To Wafer such a rapid recovery from a blast injury—and he must have seen several of them after buccaneer battles—was little short of miraculous. The only after-effect was “a Weakness in that Knee, which remain’d long after, a Benummedness which I sometimes find in it to this day.”

  As soon as Wafer was able to walk, the villagers arranged to rid themselves of their unwelcome guests. Guides took the five buccaneers out from the village and along the track that the main buccaneer column had followed. After three days, when their traveling supplies—a small ration of dried maize—was consumed, the guides pointed out the track the white men should take, and turned back, leaving their charges bewildered in the rain forest.

  The first part of the trek across the isthmus had been bad enough. Now the attempt of five unaccompanied buccaneers to grope their way to the Caribbean coast was a far worse ordeal. The rainy season was in full force. Flash floods filled the river valleys along which the travelers tried to find their way. They had no food and only a pocket compass to guide them. The first day they made no move at all but stayed miserably on the hillside where their guides had left them. The following morning they tried following a riverbank that led in the right direction, northward, and were greatly encouraged to come across a tree trunk that had been felled so it lay across the river as a bridge. On the far side were “some old raggs hanging on a tree,” and the travellers concluded that they were in the tracks of the main buccaneer column.

  They decided to cross the river using the same bridge. But the tree trunk was now so slippery with rain and decay that they had to inch forward, one at a time, sitting astride the log. Despite their caution, Bowman, who was the last to try the crossing, lost his grip, slid sideways, and slipped off. He tumbled straight into the torrent below. His companions thought it was going to be a repetition of George Gayny’s drowning because Bowman, like Gayny, was carrying his booty, four hundred pieces of eight, strapped to his back. They watched as Bowman was swept away in the current and disappeared from their sight. Unable to find a path along the bank to go to help him, they gave him up for lost.

  Crossing the river proved to be a mistake. Flash floods had covered the tracks of the main column with a layer of silt and ooze, and the travelers, now reduced to four, decided to go back across the river by the slippery log and continue along the bank. To their surprise they found Bowman sitting on the muddy bank a quarter of a mile downstream. The current had tossed him against the bank and he had been able to grab some branches and haul himself out of the water.

  The buccaneers were drooping from lack of food. The last time they had eaten was three days earlier, and now they were fortunate to come upon a “macaw tree.” The tree has a evil appearance. Vicious-looking four-inch spikes stick out in rows from the trunk. But the macaw tree is a fruiting palm, and the fruit contains an oily seed which is edible. The travelers collected up a quantity of the ripe fruit, ate the seeds greedily, and carried away the surplus. They imagined that they had crossed the watershed and were on the north-facing slope, where the rivers drain into the Caribbean. Reaching the next river broad enough to navigate, they set about cutting down bamboos and small trees and using lengths of liana to tie them into small, bulky rafts. The scheme was to launch the rafts and use them as body floats, riding downstream to their destination.

  It was getting dark by the time the rafts were ready, so the buccaneers fastened the bamboo-and-wood bundles to the riverbank and set up camp, resolving to start on their river trip next morning. Soon after dusk, a tremendous tropical storm rolled in, and “It fell Raining as if Heaven and Earth would meet, which storm was accompanied with Horrid claps of Thunder and such flashes of Lightning.” Barrages of lightning bolts crackled all around the travelers, so close that they felt they would be choked by the sulfurous smell. As the storm increased in fury, they heard another sound. It was the roar of the river bursting its banks. Lit by the blaze of the lightning strikes, they saw the flash flood surging toward their campsite. They leapt to their feet and ran for safety. Each man went his own way. There was no high ground for refuge. Wafer, separated from his fellows, hobbled desperately from tree to tree looking for a way to climb out of reach of the flood water. But most of the nearby trees were huge, stately cottonwoods whose trunks extended upward for forty or fifty feet before the first branch. Running “to save my life” he came on a massive old cottonwood that had a hole rotted in one side, about four feet off the ground, and he sprang for it like a fugitive squirrel and wriggled in. The cavity was just big enough to contain his body, and he spent the entire night curled up, “head and heels together” inside the tree, feeling the huge cottonwood shudder as the floodwaters butted loose logs and other flotsam against its trunk. He fell asleep with exhaustion, only to awake and find that he was up to his knees in water. While the lightning flashes continued to hit around his refuge, he spent the next hours praying for salvation and lost all track of time until the tremendous storm moved away and the clouds dispersed. Peeking out from his hole in the tree he could see the morning star and knew “that day was at hand
.”

  With dawn, the flood subsided almost as quickly as it had risen. By the time the sun was fully up, Wafer was able to prize himself from his hiding hole and, stiff and weary, slide down to the ground. The campfire of the previous night had been totally swept away, and there was no sign of his companions. He called and called, and “made shift to ramble to the Place . . . but found no Body there.” Weak from hunger—in the previous four days he had eaten only the macaw berries—and in despair, he fainted.

  He awoke on the wet ground to the sound of a voice. It was his friend Hingson, who had survived the flood in a small tree and was now returning to camp. Soon afterward the other three buccaneers appeared, all with the same story. They had saved themselves by climbing into trees. After mutual congratulation on their escape, the five men searched for the rafts they had left tied to the trees the previous evening.

  They were downcast to find that the bamboo-and-branch bundles were waterlogged. The flood had found hairline cracks in the bamboos and filled their air chambers. The rafts, over which they had labored, were useless.

  Only later did they learn that the sinking of the rafts was a stroke of good fortune. Had they boarded them and set off downstream they would have floated into the hands of the Spanish. The buccaneers had overestimated their progress through the rain forest. They were still on the Pacific slope, and the river that they confidently assumed would drain to the Caribbean would have delivered them back to the Spanish blockade.

  Unaware of their lucky escape, but totally disheartened, the five men decided to retrace their path on foot. Nothing seemed to go right for them. They came upon a forest deer curled up and fast asleep. Aching with hunger, one of the buccaneers stalked the animal and crept so close that he could bring the muzzle of his musket to point-blank range. But he had failed to wad the musket properly by jamming a small pad of cloth down the barrel to keep the musket ball in place. As he pointed the weapon downward at the sleeping deer, the musket ball rolled gently out of the barrel and dropped to the ground just as the musketeer pulled the trigger. The bang of the explosion woke the deer which leapt to its feet and bounded off. Moments later it plunged into the river, swam across, and was gone.

  Driven by their hunger, the travelers decided to follow the track left by a peccary. They knew that the wild pigs looked for food in the abandoned swiddens of the forest Indians, and the buccaneers hoped they might find a few morsels of left-over plantain. Their theory proved correct. Before long they came to an abandoned plantation and, a little beyond it, a new “plantain walk” with every sign that it was being actively cultivated.

  At this point, after so much suffering, the five castaways lost their nerve. They did not know whom they would encounter, whether the Indians would be friendly or hostile, whether they would kill the strangers or turn them over to the Spaniards. After debating the matter, it was decided that starvation was the more real threat. Four of the buccaneers hid while one, Wafer, emerged from the forest and limped to the nearest Indian hut. To his chagrin, and to the amazement of the Kunas who lived there, he found that he was back among the very same Indians that they had left eight days earlier. The five buccaneers had blundered in a circle and were back where they had started. Wafer, overcome by the heat inside the hut and the heady smell of a pot of meat boiling over the fire, fell on the ground and passed out.

  José Arosemena, ina duled of Kalidonia, was ten years younger than Leonidas, and was his close friend. There was no difficulty in arranging for him to drop by the sahila’s compound to tell Murdo and me about his work. Unfortunately, José arrived walking with a bad limp. A moray eel had bitten him on the foot while he was fishing, and the wound was healing slowly. It made an unconvincing introduction to the village healer. Also, José was unremarkable to look at. Dressed in a paleblue short-sleeved shirt and frayed flannel trousers, he could have been any worried clerk in a store trying to understand a demanding customer’s requirements. He was frowning and nervous as he listened to Murdo’s questions. But his answers, delivered in a gravelly voice, were matter-of-fact and cogent. He himself was the son of an ina duled, and that was how he had begun in the profession. Anyone could become an ina duled, he said. It required only the desire to learn the craft, the patience to do so, and an experienced ina duled willing to let you watch him. A trainee ina duled learned by watching and assisting. José made the process sound almost humdrum. It was a matter of observing, helping, learning. You came to understand which herbs, bark, leaves, and seeds cured which diseases, how to treat certain illnesses, where to go in the mountains to find the simples you needed, and how to recognize them. Every so often the experienced ina duled would “show” a patient to his apprentice and ask him to diagnose the problem, obtain the correct herbs, and carry out the treatment. “Sometimes the student fails the test,” José added humbly. José had watched and helped his father for twenty years. After his father died he left the island and went to live with another ina duled for five years, then with another for four years. Afterward José traveled to the home of a fourth medicine man and accompanied him for a year until his death. I added up the total “medical training” that José took so lightly. It was thirty years. Only after his fourth and last teacher had died, said José, did he feel confident that he had acquired the proper skills.

  Murdo asked José how he would treat a leg wound where the bone was showing. The ina duled misunderstood the question and imagined a fractured leg. He would bind it straight and let the break mend. What about the broken flesh? José would cover it with a paste of herbs and have the patient rest. Only in the length of time for healing did José’s prognosis differ from the experience that Wafer described for his own wound: six to seven months for a complete mend.

  Healing a leg wound was straightforward. The three most challenging conditions for an ina duled to treat were snakebite, madness, and preparation for an easy delivery during childbirth. Pregnancy required the preparation of a special potion which the woman had to drink regularly, and a dilute solution of the same preparation in which she should bathe. If she followed the regime properly, the birth would be easy and the baby healthy. Subsequently, when talking to a Panamanian woman doctor working in the public maternity wards, I learned that Kuna women in the labor wards were watched closely. The Kuna mothers insisted on regular draughts of the medicine they brought with them. Often they gave birth so quietly and quickly that the nurses missed the birth completely.

  José had a plantation worker’s hands—large, well worn, and with prominent knuckles. Being an ina duled was not a full-time profession. He went to the jungle like the other villagers to tend his plantain trees, or set off in his dugout canoe to jig for small fish with a hand line. He was very modest. He was only one of three ina duleds on Kalidonia, he said. When Murdo asked him if he worked with nuchu, carved wooden spirit dolls, José shook his head vehemently. Oh no, he said, he was just a curandero, a herbal doctor. Wise and learned men like Leonidas knew how to work with smoke and the nuchu, who communicate between the spirit world and an invalid’s soul. If there was a serious emergency, José acted on the advice of physicians much more competent than himself.

  Two days earlier, a powerfully venomous snake—“a cobra,” as Leonidas put it—had bitten a man from Kalidonia. The snakebite victim had been on the mainland, spearfishing in the river at night with a torch when the snake sank its fangs into him. He was nearly dead when found. All of Kalidonia went into a high state of alarm on hearing the news. An ina duled hurried into the mountains to collect a fresh supply of herbs. The injured man was brought back from the mainland. He was not carried to his house in Kalidonia but to an uninhabited island close by. There he was placed in a specially built isolation hut, quarantined not from disease, but from the malign spirits that he had aroused. The vital harmony of nature, Leonidas explained to us, was out of kilter. The spirit world was in turmoil. On the mainland the evil spirits, the bonigana, were active. They were ranging the forest and the sierra. He and the village council immediat
ely recalled every Kalidonian from the mainland. They paddled back in their canoes without demur and crept into their houses. That evening Leonidas asked Murdo and me not to leave his compound. We should stay quietly in his house. For the rest of that day, and for the next three evenings, the whole of Kalidonia was hushed. The silence was more for the benefit of the spirit world than the repose of the snakebite victim. The Kalidonians were waiting, almost as if holding their breath, for the spirit world to calm. The forest would be alive with serpents, said Leonidas. When a boni in the guise of a cobra bit a man, many other bonigana would come to that part of the forest. Everyone was forbidden to travel to the mainland to attend to the plantations.

  Meanwhile the victim in his isolation was receiving treatment. An ina duled specializing in the treatment of snakebite arrived. He and his assistants examined the patient and prepared special concoctions of bitter herbs. They administered the medicine as a drink and as a body wash. They burned tobacco, peppers and special plants inside the hut to produce clouds of acrid smoke. An igar wisid, a chant singer, intoned magic formulae. The purpose was not to counteract the venom but to revive the victim’s soul spirit. A cobra boni had attacked his inner soul, which now lay close to extinction and death. The smoke fended off the other malign bonigana that might have been attracted to the weakened victim. The potions and baths revived and strengthened the spirit soul. The chants called to it as it lay, a weak shadow. José and Leonidas were confident that the treatment was correct. In the previous twelve months three men had died after snakebite because they were too far into the forest to be brought back to the islanders for this treatment. Two other snakebite victims had been retrieved, and both—like the man who was being treated while Murdo and I stayed quietly in Leonidas’s compound—survived.