In Search of Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The following day, when the waves and tide were lower, we successfully crossed the ford and reached Leonidas’s plantation. While Leonidas and Vitello were cutting back the undergrowth, a band of howler monkeys came swinging and shouting into the kupu trees close by. The monkeys stayed there for an hour. They ran back and forth on the branches fifty yards away, swung by their tails, and kept up a territorial hooting and yelling. They were so bold that I wondered whether they would do what Wafer had claimed—“skipping from Bough to Bough, with the young ones hanging on the old ones backs, making faces at us, chattering, and if they had the opportunity, pissing down purposely on our heads.” I remarked to Leonidas that the howler monkeys seemed almost tame, and he told me that it was very common to hear the hooting calls of the howlers but that never in his entire life had he known the monkeys to come so close or stay for so long. Once again he looked thoughtful, and I wondered, knowing how the Kunas find a close link between all life on earth, whether plant or animal or human, what sort of reputation Murdo and I were acquiring.

  Murdo had established himself as a favorite of Leonidas’s family. He was so friendly and enthusiastic that the two daughters, Leonilla and Rosie, began to smile the moment Murdo embarked on a lively, gesticulating conversation in his Spanish. It helped that Murdo was a schoolmaster by profession, because Leonilla’s husband, Eladio, was the village schoolmaster on Kalidonia, and the two teachers could compare experiences. When Kunas marry, the man moves into the wife’s family compound, so Leonidas’s household was substantial. With sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, there were more than a dozen people living in the cluster of thatched huts within the compound’s cane fence. Murdo’s theory was that Leonidas’s calm and equable nature came from having to coexist with so many exuberant children in such close quarters. Murdo himself coped effortlessly with the urchins who peeked in through the gate and the privileged few invited by Leonidas’s grandchildren, who watched, open-mouthed, as Murdo put his contact lenses in his eyes.

  Every evening Leonidas donned a clean shirt with the sleeves rolled down, dark trousers, and his formal hat, and set off to the congress hall. Sometimes he carried one of his authority sticks. His favorite was a small staff about a yard long, carved into a spiral. It was brightly varnished and decorated with a human figure carved on the head, a seated figure with crossed arms and tall wings like an archangel. Leonidas made the staffs himself as emblems of his office, and there was one whose knob, painted green and blue, was clearly a self-portrait—a short, standing figure in jacket, trousers, and a neat little hat. The congress hall was situated near the island jetty. It was an oversize version of the traditional Kuna house, a massive barnlike structure with a high thatched roof and low sidewalls of cane. There Leonidas joined his fellow sahilas reclining in a row of hammocks suspended in the gloomy, unlit interior of the building. All the villagers were supposed to assemble on the ranks of wooden benches and listen while the sahilas discussed the concerns of the community and sang the chants that enshrined Kuna lore. But the sessions could last three or four hours, and sometimes the audience was sparse. Yet Leonidas never shirked his office. Often it was ten or eleven at night before he returned home.

  The day of strong drink, of chicha fuerte, was under discussion. The event was to celebrate the end of clearing the plantations before planting began, and was to be held in a special building, the inna nega, or chicha hall. This was another huge, thatched shed next to the congress hall. Chicha fuerte was made from sugar cane—the weaker chicha was made from maize—and gallons of cane juice were already fermenting in several large wooden troughs. The actual day of chicha fuerte depended on when the alcohol was ready to drink. Chicha tasters, “the chemists,” Leonidas called them, came each day to sample the brew, determine the degree of fermentation, and predict the best time for the party. Shortly before the chicha fuerte was ready, a reserve supply of beer was ordered from Mulatupu.

  At six-fifteen on the appointed morning there was a great shout of “Eladio!” from outside the compound’s cane fence, and the village schoolmaster went out to join his drinking buddies. His wife, the beautiful Leonilla, stayed behind, looking disapproving. Women were expected to join in the chicha fuerte ceremony but both Leonilla and Rosie preferred to stay behind with the children. Their father, Leonidas, left the compound at 7 A.M. dressed in his formal outfit and looking purposeful. Two young constables passed the gate soon after, crying out to remind the community to assemble at the inna nega.

  Then, for five hours, the whole of Kalidonia went silent. Confined to Leonidas’s house as had been agreed earlier as a condition of our visit, Murdo and I listened for signs of merriment. There was nothing. The chicha hall was six hundred yards away, hidden in the cluster of thatched huts. We could hear only the occasional scuffles of a child and in the background the rumble of the surf breaking on the reefs that protect Kalidonia from the trade winds. Shortly before noon Eladio appeared, looking flustered. The chicha fuerte had all been drunk, and the reserve supply of beer in cans had not arrived as promised. He went off in a canoe with the outboard engine to hurry up the delivery boat. The long, quiet day dragged on until Murdo and I could no longer contain our curiosity. We sallied out cautiously. The sandy lanes were deserted. Our route took us past the huge thatched hangar of the inna nega and we averted our eyes decorously. But there was nothing to see except for a couple of huge empty chicha tubs on the sand outside the door. Then we heard it. The inna nega was humming. The sound was low and unwavering in pitch. The enormous thatched chicha house resembled a huge hive. The noise was the sound made by a swarm of angry bees muttering and buzzing. We slunk back to Leonidas’s compound.

  We deliberately left the compound gate ajar, and in the late afternoon Leonidas came in view. The sahila-in-chief of Kalidonia was walking home very unsteadily between two of the junior sahilas. All three men were holding one another up with a grave solemnity as they headed for Leonidas’s gate. Our host crossed his threshold, and his two companions accepted two cans of beer from Leonilla and went fumbling toward their own homes while Leonidas disappeared into his hut. Murdo and I—judging that the chicha ceremony was now over and we were free to explore—went for a stroll. All the adult Kunas we saw on the street—men and women—were completely intoxicated. They were weaving and stumbling, owl-eyed with concentration. Murdo and I prudently edged around them or turned aside down alleyways. But we were ignored. We came to the jetty by the little harbor. Standing in the shallows was a Kuna youth, aged about sixteen. He was fully dressed and up to his waist in the sea. In one hand he held up a clear glass bottle. It contained rum. He brought the bottle to his lips with a wide ceremonious sweep of his arm, took a swig, and toppled backward in slow motion. . . He disappeared completely underwater except for his hand and the bottle, which remained above the surface like the hand holding Excalibur. He struggled back to his feet, spluttered and shook himself, took another pull at the bottle, and fell slowly backward once more. Again and again, he rose and drank and sedately fell. Finally the bottle was empty, and another young Kuna of about the same age waded purposefully into the sea, took his swaying friend gently by the arm, and pulled him to dry land. There the drinker’s mother was waiting—a short, stocky woman in full traditional dress of colored head scarf, embroidered blouse, beaded leggings, and golden nose ring. She took hold of her son on one side, his friend held him up on the other, and the trio walked away sedately. The scene was the classic picture of the drunkard homeward bound. But on Kalidonia there was no disapproval, rather the reverse. On chicha fuerte day the young drunk had done his duty.

  Wafer proposed Golden Island as the site for a new colony of the sort that Defoe conjures up from Robinson Crusoe’s former home. Wafer knew the island well. He had “been ashore at this Golden Island and was lying in the harbour near it for about a fortnight.” It had, he said, many natural advantages. Though small in area, the island was “rocky and steep all round to the Sea (and thereby naturally fortified).” The lan
ding place “was a small sandy bay on the south side,” from where the hillside rose gently upward in a pleasant slope that was “moderately high and cover’d with small trees and shrubs.” The harbor itself was first class. The approach for a sailing vessel was by “a fair deep Channel between it and the Main.” Ships could enter or leave the anchorage from either side of the island, and this was one reason why Golden Island had been so popular with buccaneers and pirates. A harbor with two exits offers a chance to escape and is difficult to blockade.

  Golden Island now belongs to the Kalidonians. They call it Suletepe because its profile seen from Kalidonia is the shape of a crouching sule, or painted rabbit, a shy nocturnal animal like an oversize guinea pig that inhabits the high forests of the cordillera. Suletepe lies so close to Kalidonia that it took Leonidas less than ten minutes to ferry Murdo and me there in his canoe.

  The harbor was surprising small. No more than four or five ships could anchor there; it was utterly deserted now. Yet the vessels would be in perfect calm, in 28 feet of water and sheltered from the prevailing northeast winds by Golden Island itself. The wind was blowing at close to thirty knots when Leonidas brought us there, but the water in the anchorage barely ruffled. Our entry was between protecting reefs and islets of dead coral, and the buccaneer ships were able to drop anchor in good holding ground less than fifty yards from the beach. Best of all, any vessels in the anchorage were hidden. No one could see them from the sea, and from the landward side their masts were lost from view against the green mass of Golden Island, and their hulls were cloaked by the surrounding fringe of mangrove swamp. The Kuna name of this secret refuge, said Leonidas, was “the place where the caymans come to bask.”

  Leonidas made the canoe fast to a convenient coconut palm at the landing place and led us through a pleasant grove of mature coconuts. There is no gold on Golden Island—the name is a glamorous fiction—but it was easy to understand Wafer’s enthusiasm for its potential as a spot for a settlement. On the rich soil near the beach the Kalidonians were cultivating mango, gourds, and breadfruit. They had set young banana plants in the shade of the coconut palms. Higher, on the shoulder of the hill overlooking the harbor, was a broad field of cassava plants. Leonidas led us along a footpath that circled the island. From flowering vines and ferns came the sound of bird songs and marching lines of leafcutter ants struggled across our path with their burdens. To our left the terrain rose steeply to the 470-foot-high central peak and was covered with secondary forest. Here were small balsa trees, and a half dozen “cedar pines” of Golden Island towering starkly against the sky with massive pale gray trunks and contorted branches, leafless at that time of year. Where a great tree trunk had recently fallen across the path, the fleshy tendrils of a cactuslike jungle plant were already climbing over the host, making thin green veins on the pale bark. Surprisingly—for Wafer had not mentioned it specifically—there was fresh water on the island. Two small springs trickle down each side of the central hill, cutting deep grooves into the slope, and empty into the sea among boulders on the beach. This is where the visiting crews must have filled their water barrels. On the northeastern shore was a sweep of sandy beach where the sea turtles once came to lay their eggs.

  Five minutes’ walk brought us to the south-facing side of Golden Island. From there we looked across to the mainland, three miles away. Directly opposite was the mouth of the deep bay which is Puerto Escoces. Here perished the hapless Gaelic-speaking “planters” whose failed endeavor gripped Murdo’s imagination. Now that I had seen the advantages of Golden Island, I wondered whether the outcome might have been different had the Scots established their colony on the island as Wafer the maroon had recommended. Then Defoe’s fiction of an island colony that flourished in the wake of Robinson Crusoe’s sojourn might have become a fact.

  Bursts of surf springing from the rocks of Punta Escoces were the warning. They were waves smashing into the headland, driven ashore by the prevailing northeast wind. A little to the right, another spouting fountain of whitewater marked Roca Escoces, a dangerous reef. The headland and the rock define the entrance to Scots Bay. With extraordinary lack of foresight, the leaders of the colony chose a harbor that was downwind of the prevailing wind, and was a nautical trap. As the first fleet from Scotland entered the harbor, in November 1698, the Unicorn, packed with colonists, collided with Roca Escoces. The ship bounced off and survived, though leaky, but it was an ill-omen. Once the fleet was inside the bay, it was difficult to emerge again. Only a well-handled and agile ship could beat to windward out of the bay. The clumsy Scots transport vessels were marooned for weeks on end until the wind changed. A visiting French vessel tried to sail out on Christmas Eve 1699 with her crew either hung over or drunk. The waves rolling into the mouth of the harbor picked her up and tossed her on the lee shore. She sank in full view of the colonists.

  The Scots colony lasted less than eighteen months. With heart-breaking mistiming, a second fleet of colonists arrived soon after the first group of planters had sailed away leaving four hundred graves in pitiful rows. Disease and dissension destroyed the second installation, and a Spanish military expedition landed and accepted the surrender of the survivors. If the Scots had settled on Golden Island, they would have done better. They could have fortified the slopes, as Wafer suggested, and fended off any Spanish attack. Their supply ships would have come and gone as they wished. Above all, they would have been spared the diseases and fevers of the mainland. Like the Kunas they would have found the islands a much healthier location.

  Today you have to search closely to find the least sign of the Scots colony. The jungle has smothered nearly every trace. There are some tumbled dry stone walls, a shallow ditch dug as a defensive moat, and nothing more unless you scratch the soil and, if you are fortunate, turn up fragments of clay tobacco pipes. Divers found the wreck of an illfated supply ship, the Olive Branch, close offshore under eight feet of silt. She was carelessly set alight at her mooring by the ship’s cooper who was using a lighted candle to search for brandy below decks. She burned and sank with all her stores on board.

  Looking across at the graveyard of Scots hopes, I wondered whether anything in this tropical landscape would have reminded the settlers of their homeland. I could imagine only the gray granite rocks that lay on the foreshore, and the swirling mist that the steady wind whips up from the sea and carries far inland. The Kunas think of Puerto Escoces as a place inhabited by evil ghosts. A man of Kalidonia, said Leonidas, sold the site of New Edinburgh to a man from Mulatupu for the value of two machetes. Coconuts grow there but no one likes to stay for long in such a place. There is only a temporary camp for the workers, and the new owners periodically hold mass exorcisms to cleanse the site of ghosts.

  After four months with the cacique, Lacenta, Wafer persuaded him to let his five foreign guests go on their way. Wafer and his companions were escorted to the Caribbean coast to La Sounds Key, a harbor known to be popular with visiting buccaneers. But there were no ships waiting. Wafer consulted with the local conjurers, for he had come to believe that the Kuna shamans were able to foretell the future. The shamans would seclude themselves in a house and “make most hideous Yellings and Shrieks, imitating the voices of all kind of Beasts and Birds.” They clattered stones, blew conch shells, drummed on hollow bamboos, and made “a jarring Noise . . . with strings fastened to the large bones of beasts.” Any foreign objects interfered with their magic and were banned. The conjurers found a bag of seamen’s clothes and threw them out of the house “with great disdain,” then they fell to work again “all in a Muck-sweat.” They prophesied that two ships would arrive in ten days time, that a gun would be lost, and that a man would die.

  It all turned out as they foretold. The two pirate ships appeared on schedule; Gopson, the scholarly, Greek-reading buccaneer, lost his musket when the canoe carrying the buccaneers to the ships overturned in the surf; and poor Gopson himself was dragged half-dead from the water. He died three days later aboard ship.


  Wafer never mentioned what is today the most celebrated feature of Kuna culture—their stitching of the intricate and beautiful molas. It seems that in his time the Kuna women did not practice the craft, nor did they wear the distinctive bands of beads on their arms and legs. Instead they draped rope upon rope of beads around their necks and mixed natural pigments with oils to make paints and decorate the bodies of their men. Their brushes were sticks chewed soft, and they used them to “make figures of birds, beasts, men, trees or the like, up and down and in every part of the body more especially the Face.” These pictures were creative and “of differing dimensions as their fancies lead them,” and their favorite colors were “Red, Yellow and Blue, very bright and lovely.” Wafer was so enchanted by the body painting that he gave up wearing his seaman’s smock and breeches when he was with the Kunas. Instead he wore a breech cloth and had his body painted all over. To complete the Kuna look, he took to wearing a gold ring in his nose. He was dressed in this way and covered in body paint when he went aboard the buccaneer ship at La Sounds Cay with his companions. His former shipmates greeted his four companions while Wafer, who had a sense of humor, stayed squatting down on deck among the Kunas. It was some time before one of the buccaneers looked among the Kunas, and suddenly exclaimed, “Here’s our doctor!”

  Back in practice as a buccaneer surgeon for the next seven years, Wafer went on to join the Batchelor’s Delight, help rescue Will the Moskito, and fall afoul of Captain Rowe and HMS Dumbarton on antipirate patrol. He and his disreputable friends, Hingson and Davis, had to spend two years in a Jamestown gaol before a clever lawyer got them acquitted. They succeeded not only in escaping the charge of piracy, but—on getting back to London—successfully sued to recover their booty, which Captain Rowe had seized. In 1698, when the colony of New Caledonia was being planned, the Scots promoters of the enterprise considered sending Wafer back to the Kuna country as an adviser. But after interviewing him—and extracting most of his information gratis—the Scots dropped the scheme when Wafer asked for a salary of £750. Instead they paid Wafer twenty guineas to delay publication of his memoirs of life among the Kunas. The Scots did not want commercial competitors to learn too soon that a lucrative colony could be created in the place where the surgeon had been marooned. It was only after the first batch of doomed colonists had been set ashore that Wafer’s book was published—the same book that was to appear in the “lost list” of the auctioneer Payne when he sold off the contents of Defoe’s library.