Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The intention was to launch a hit-and-run raid on the Spanish mining town of Santa Maria. The town lay on the far slope of the continental divide that runs down the narrow waist of Central America. If they did not find enough loot in Santa Maria, they would continue on to the Pacific shore and strike at an even more ambitious target, the city of Panama. The raiders made little pretence of having the correct privateering documents to legitimize such an assault. Their ‘commissions’, one of their leaders put it, would best be read by the light of the muzzle flashes from their guns.

  The raiders formed up in six companies, each company approximating to the crew of the ship that had brought them. In the vanguard came Captain Bartholomew Sharpe. He had recently been ill and was still feeling very faint and weak; he had contributed forty men to the expedition. Their marching flag was red with a bunch of green and white ribbons. Next came Captain Richard Sawkins with thirty-five men forming up behind a red pennant striped with yellow. Captain Peter Harris’ ship had the largest crew, 107 men. Those who had been picked to go on the raid marched as two companies, each with a green flag. Behind them came the man elected as overall commander of the enterprise, Captain John Coxon. His war band was reinforced with volunteers from two of the smallest ships whose captains were staying behind to look after the invasion fleet. The sixth company followed a red banner striped with yellow. On this background Captain Edmund Cook had emblazoned his personal emblem – a hand and a sword.

  The colourful quasi-military array masked the fact that the expedition was little more than a smash-and-grab raid by a gang of amphibious brigands. ‘Gold was the bait that tempted a Merry Pack of Boys of us’ was how one ruffian jauntily described their motives. Their rule was to be the ‘Jamaica discipline’: all decisions were to be made by vote of a general council; the men would elect or dismiss their leaders; and they would divide any booty equally and immediately.

  Several members of the column had no vote nor any share in the booty. They were the prisoners and slaves, mostly Indian or black. They were treated as pack animals to portage the extra munitions and supplies. Nor did the Indian auxiliaries have any votes. The local Indian tribe, the Kuna, had suggested the attack on Santa Maria and Panama, and only the Kuna were capable of conducting the expedition through the difficult tangle of muddy footpaths leading up over the central cordillera and down the far slope to the South Sea. But very few of the Kuna spoke English. This was a disadvantage when the entire business of the expedition was conducted in English, the votes of the general council were called in English, and the raiders themselves were proud of their Englishness. Two more pirate captains had promised to provide men for the project, but had backed out at the last moment because, as one of the desperadoes scathingly wrote, their crews were ‘all French and not willing to go to Panama’.

  There was one conspicuous exception to this barrier of racial, linguistic and chauvinistic discrimination. Scattered throughout the raiding column was a handful of Indians who spoke enough English to make themselves understood, and some were fluent. They had been promised, and would be paid, a full share of any booty. The English pirates were careful that no one should cheat these Indians. It was a level of respect the buccaneers gave to no one else, in a situation where double-dealing and chicanery in dividing up the spoils was normal. Most remarkable of all, the Indians were also absolved from the rule that forbade any person to leave the expedition without the permission of the general council. They could come and go as they pleased, and no one would dream of stopping them. The English gave these Indians nicknames; the man who was to be the model for Man Friday was called Will.

  These brothers-in-arms to the English pirates were Miskito Indians. They were ‘esteemed and coveted by all Privateers’, according to Dampier. When a Miskito man volunteered to sail on a visiting ship, his offer was quickly accepted, and ‘It is very rare to find Privateers destitute of one or more of them.’ However, the Miskito preferred to join a ship where ‘the Commander or most of the men are English’; for they ‘do not love the French, and the Spaniards they hate mortally’. What made the important presence of the Miskito among the English buccaneers even more remarkable was that there were so few of them. In their homeland, a swampy strip of Caribbean coast in today’s Honduras and Nicaragua, the entire Miskito nation numbered less than 2,000 individuals.

  Miskito men solved a logistical problem faced the buccaneers – how to feed such a large number of sailors. Dampier claimed that just two Miskito men could catch enough food for a hundred men. The secret lay in their technique. Most seafarers, of course, knew how to fish with hook and line and how to set nets. But this required time and patience, and a knowledge of where to find the fish. Even then the results were uncertain. The ‘Moskito Men’ took fish quite differently, and their method was effective wherever their travels brought them. A Miskito launched his small dugout canoe from the deck of the ship and paddled off, standing upright in the narrow and unstable boat ‘which our men could not go in without danger of oversetting’. With phenomenally good eyesight, he scanned the water for movement. The instant he saw a target, he flung the barbed trident, his ‘fish gig’, and very seldom missed. So the buccaneers called their Miskitos their ‘strikers’ and never ceased to marvel at their accuracy. ‘They are very ingenious at throwing . . . any manner of Dart, being bred to it from their Infancy’, Dampier wrote, ‘for the Children imitating their Parents, never go abroad without a Lance in their Hands, which they throw at any Object till use hath made them masters of the Art.’ Trainee Miskitos were so deft that as a game two youths would take up their positions facing one another ‘at a fair mark’. One would then fire arrows at the other. His opponent was expected to flick away the oncoming arrows using a small, thin stick no thicker than a ramrod. ‘When they are grown to be Men’, concluded Dampier, ‘they will guard themselves from Arrows, tho’ they come very thick at them, provided two do not happen to come at them at once.’

  A Miskito ‘striker’ seldom took the clumsy white men in his canoe when he was fishing, and he resented any interference. If irritated, the Miskitos were known to make their hungry shipmates pay the price. They ‘purposely strike their Harpoons and Turtle Irons aside or so glance them as to kill nothing’.

  The spear-fishing skill of the Miskito was so important to the English that when the time came to careen the ship they brought their vessels to places on the coast where their strikers could hunt the prey that provided the most flesh. The most productive catches were manatees or sea cows and sea turtles, the latter being ‘the best meat in the world’. For each species the Miskito carried special throwing spears – the turtle spear was tipped with a ‘peg’, a short stubby point capable of penetrating the turtles’ thick shell, whereas the manatee lance had a longer point and was more like a harpoon.

  There is no description of what ‘Will the Moskito’ looked like, though Dampier describes a typical Miskito as ‘tall, well made, lusty, strong’. He had a long narrow face with a dark copper complexion, and long black hair. His expression was ‘stern and hard favoured’, and he was a good man to have on your side in a fight, as he would not flinch when the battle was going badly. The Miskito ‘think that the white men with whom they are, know better than they do when it is best to fight, and let the disadvantage of their party be never so great, they will never yield or give back while any of their party stands.’ At home the Miskito had a more sinister reputation. They regularly deployed their weapons and fighting prowess to raid their neighbours, seizing slaves and tribute, and they conducted an unremitting guerrilla war against the Spaniards. Their dexterity and aim with the harpoon made them natural marksmen with firearms, and their buccaneer name Moskito may have been acquired, not from a comparison with stinging insects, but as a derivation from the word musket which they used so accurately.

  Self-confidence, curiosity and adaptability made the Miskito natural travellers. On visits to English settlements they bought and wore European clothes and ‘take delight to go neat an
d tight’. But the moment they came home they reverted to their native dress, ‘wearing only a small piece of Linnen tied about their Wastes, hanging down to their knees’. In their homeland they liked nothing better than ‘to settle near the Sea, or by some River, for the sake of striking Fish, their beloved employment’.

  The buccaneer raiding column took a fortnight to walk through the jungle from the ‘North Sea’ to the ‘South Sea’, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. It was a labyrinthine journey, even with six Kuna guides to show them the way. On one dismal day they had to wade the same river between fifty and sixty times. When the Kuna finally obtained canoes, the buccaneers found that there were so many shallows and rapids that they had to dismount from the dugouts and drag them over the rocks, and got drenched in the process. Kuna villages along the track gave them food, so they were not hungry, but the attack on Santa Maria was a disappointment. Captain Sawkins led the charge, and when the buccaneers burst inside the palisade they found that the Spaniards had been forewarned. The Spanish officials had shipped out all the gold from the placer mines in the region, and Santa Maria’s strong room was empty. The raiders decided to press on, hoping to seize Panama.

  Their audacity was breathtaking. They emerged from the mouths of the river and paddled out on to the Pacific in a swarm of dugout canoes. They were equipped only with their muskets and cutlasses. Their targets were usually merchant ships, yet they also tackled full-sized sea-going vessels equipped with cannon. They suppressed the cannon fire by shooting the gunners on deck, an extraordinary feat from a small open boat, then they boarded and captured their targets. Soon they had acquired a small flotilla in which they ranged up and down the coast, spreading terror and fighting a series of running battles with Spanish patrols.

  Their boldness was matched by equally disastrous mismanagement. Under Jamaica discipline there were quarrels, reversals of earlier decisions, and feuds. A rapid turnover of commanders was exacerbated by a high mortality rate. The bold Captain Sawkins, hero of Santa Maria, led one charge too many and was killed; Captain Peter Harris died of wounds after a tussle with a Spanish guardship; and Captain Coxon, feeling slighted, withdrew from the expedition and led fifty men back across the mountains to the Caribbean. He was to have a spectacular career as a pirate and finish up, according to rumour, living among the Miskitos on the Honduran coast. Captain Bartholomew Sharpe, having recovered from his fever, was voted to overall command after Sawkins was killed, though by December he was in charge of an expedition which had been severely reduced by death, desertion and capture to less than half their original number, though it still included Dampier and ‘Will the Moskito’. At that stage the expedition decided to withdraw and spend Christmas at that favourite place of recuperation – the island of Juan Fernández.

  The buccaneers were still loitering on the island after three weeks, undecided as to their next move, when a boatload of their men appeared in one of the ship’s boats, frantically rowing towards their ship and firing muskets to attract attention. They had been hunting wild goats in the heights of the island, and from their vantage point had seen sails approaching. They feared that this was a Spanish flotilla coming to check on the known buccaneer hideout. Half an hour later the visitors were identified as three Spanish warships. Another confused embarkation took place as the buccaneers hoisted sail and fled. Unfortunately they left one man behind. This time the maroon was one of their highly prized Indian comrades. ‘Will the Moskito’ had been hunting goats in the interior of the island, and no one was able to warn him that the ship was leaving. Will was left to fend for himself. Unlike Selkirk, he was a genuine maroon and had not asked to be left behind. So he had to make do with what he happened to have with him at the time – his musket, a flask of powder, and some shot, and a hunting knife.

  Will’s reaction to his predicament was very different from Selkirk’s passive response.

  He took matters in his stride. He began by taking his food from the sea rookery, though he was not fond of the taste of sea meat. Later he only killed the seals and sea lions so that he could slice their hides into thin strips and make fishing lines for himself. For shelter he erected a typical Miskito hunting camp – a small hut of branches and thatch – about half a mile from the sea. He lined this shelter with goatskins for warmth and to keep out the rain. Inside his hut he built a barbecue. This was not for cooking meat, but the original ‘barbecu’, a low frame of sticks, about two feet high, which the Miskito and other Caribbean Indians used as a sleeping couch to keep them off the damp ground and away from insects. This bed he also covered with goatskins.

  His main enterprise was to destroy his musket. As soon as he had expended all the powder and shot, he started on the task of turning the now-useless weapon into more functional equipment. He began by cutting notches into the blade of his hunting knife until he had converted it into a makeshift hacksaw. With this tool he proceeded to ‘saw the barrel of his gun into small pieces’. Next he hardened a section of the barrel in the fire, ‘having learned to do that among the English’. Against this tempered metal he struck the flint salvaged from the gun, and so made himself fire whenever he wanted. Now he took the pieces of gun barrel and began to make himself ‘Harpoons, Lances, Hooks and a Long Knife’. He heated each piece in the fire, and ‘the hot pieces of iron he would hammer out and bend as he pleased with Stones’. Once he had achieved the rough shape, he did the finishing work using his jagged knife, then re-tempered the metal to extra hardness, and finally added a sharp edge by grinding the metal against rocks. ‘All this may seem strange to those that are not acquainted with the sagacity of the Indians,’ Dampier comments, ‘but it is no more than these Moskito Men are accustomed to in their own country, where they make their own Fishing and Striking Instruments without either Forge or Anvil, tho they spend a good deal of their time about them.’

  Time was a commodity that Will the Moskito had in abundance. Like Selkirk he was only disturbed by the occasional visit of the Spaniards. But whereas Selkirk was seen only by chance when a Spanish landing party came ashore, the Spaniards deliberately came looking for any stragglers from Captain Sharpe’s gang. The Spaniards suspected that Will was somewhere on the island, but had no more luck that any one else. The Miskito hunter was too agile and wary to be caught.

  The Batchelor’s Delight, which came over the horizon in the late autumn of 1684 (three years after Will’s marooning), was a former Danish merchant ship. The pirates who captured her off the African coast had converted her into a sea raider, and sailed round Cape Horn to begin another raid on the Spanish. Astonishingly, several men aboard her, including Dampier, had been with Captain Sharpe when they beat a hasty retreat from Juan Fernández, and left Will to his fate. Now they were curious to see what might have become of their former companion.

  The Batchelor’s Delight carried its own Miskito ‘striker’. His shipmates called him Robin and he made sure he was in the ship’s boat when it was rowed to the beach where Will stood waiting. Will’s clothes had long since fallen to pieces, and he was dressed only in a loincloth made of goatskin. As soon as the ship’s boat touched the beach, Robin leaped out and ran pell-mell towards Will. When he came close, he threw himself face down on the ground. Will stooped over, and helped him back on his feet. Then the two men threw their arms around one another, and embraced. Now it was Will’s turn to throw himself flat on the ground before his fellow tribesman, and be raised back to his feet. Again the two men locked in a close hug. Dampier and the other pirates looked on in wonder. ‘We stood with pleasure to behold the surprize, and tenderness, and solemnity of this interview which was exceedingly affectionate on both sides’, wrote Dampier. ‘And when their Ceremonies of Civility were over, drew near.’ It was an exuberant reunion. One by one the pirates who had known Will previously, embraced him and congratulated him on his survival.

  With this touching scene, Will the Moskito vanishes from the pirate record as a historical figure. He sailed away on the Batchelor’s Delight and participate
d in her piratical cruise. Whether he was still aboard her when she returned to the Caribbean four years later is not known. It is equally possible that he left the ship in the Pacific and accompanied a group of the English pirates who joined up with a force of French buccaneers to make an extraordinary reverse trek overland across Honduras. They came down the Río Coco, which flows into the sea in the Miskito territory on the Caribbean shore. If he did, Will probably brought home his booty and was able to settle down on the Miskito Coast at some place ‘near the Sea, or by some River, for the sake of striking Fish, his beloved employment’.

  *

  THE COSTA DE MOSQUITOS is still marked on modern maps, partly because such a large and vacant space begs a label. The 400-mile-long swathe of coastal lagoon, swamp, woodland and savannah bordering the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua is virtually empty. There are no mountains for the map-makers to identify, only half a dozen rivers, a thin straggle of roads, and just two towns – Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields. Human settlement is almost entirely confined to the coast. There the people are so widely separated that the cartographers have room, if they wish, to write in the names of villages and hamlets which would never be remarked in a more populous part of the world. The names are relics from a wild past. The Moskito Coast begins in the south at Bluefields, a ramshackle seaport in Nicaragua named after a Dutch buccaneer who made it his practice to careen his vessel there and which became, for a brief time, the world’s biggest banana-shipping port. From there the coast runs almost due north past Haulover where a portage led to Pearl Lagoon, Set Net where the turtle fishing was good, Little Sandy Bay, another Haulover with another portage, and Big Sandy Bay. Then the Coast angles abruptly to the west and into Honduras. The corner was named Cabo Gracias a Dios by Christopher Columbus, who wished to give thanks to God for finally being able to clear its maze of dangerous shoals and continue on his explorations.