Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  The rapid response unit had taken two hours to arrive at their own office. Traffic had been difficult. Then a problem arose about rummaging, the procedure of searching the suspect boat from top to bottom. I had expected the Black Gang to swoop on the little yacht as she lay at anchor. But there was no patrol boat to ferry the Black Gang from shore to ship, and Ash’s little dinghy would have sunk beneath the weight of the burly dog-handler and his colleague. So Trondur and Tristan were detained, and Ash and I were ordered to bring the yacht to the inspection dock. We explained that this would be difficult as Ziska had no engine and there was no wind. There was another long pause. Perhaps a tow could be arranged, I suggested. After a further hour’s delay the patrol boat arrived on the back of a trailer. The shiny new speedboat would have done credit to a paragliding operation for tourists, except for the row of crossed marijuana leaves painted on the superstructure. Each green leaf recorded a successful drugs interception. There weren’t many of them.

  By now the Black Gang had swelled to eight operatives, and there was another long wait to get the patrol boat down a suitable ramp into the water. The ramp was already occupied by a tourist dive boat that was repairing its engine. As the hours slipped past, the Black Gang’s menacing posture began to wilt in the hot sun at the dockside. The youthful plainclothes officer was on his second paper cup of fried potatoes and there were several crumpled greasy napkins on the floor of the Landcruiser. Only the dog-handler, who was in charge, kept up the gruff pose. When Ziska was finally towed alongside the wharf, he was waiting on the quayside with his sniffer dog on a leash. The dog peered down from the height of the dock to the little boat, took fright, and began to whimper. After several futile tugs on the leash, the dog-handler took the creature in his arms and jumped down on deck. He put her on deck and she ran to investigate a piece of raw sharkskin. The last time Trondur had harpooned a shark, Ash had wanted to wrap a piece of its skin around the tiller as decoration. Trondur obligingly skinned the animal and Ash had stretched and nailed the skin to dry in the sun. That had been three days earlier, and the skin was now distinctly ripe. The sniffer dog took a deep breath, and lost interest in any further rummage. Meanwhile her massive master was having trouble in squeezing down into Ziska’s cramped accommodation. His belt tools kept catching on various projections. He had difficulty in turning round, and the cabin was unbearably hot and stuffy. When he finally emerged from the hatchway, his black overalls were crumpled. He was drenched with sweat. He had of course found no drugs of any sort. Maintaining the final shred of his authoritarian approach, he lifted his whining dog ashore, and clambered back on the wharf. His junior, the plainclothes operative, followed him. As he jumped across the gap between boat and quay, there was a distinct plop. His telephone pager had flipped from his waistband and fallen into the harbour. Disconsolately he stood on the edge of the quay and peered down. Twenty feet below, in George Town’s admirably clean harbour water, the little silhouette of the pager winked back up. ‘Can any of you fellows dive down and get it?’ he asked us plaintively. We shook our heads.

  The dog-handler, Malachy, was not really as fierce as he had pretended. After he had mopped his brow, he enquired what we had been doing prowling about the Caribbean in such an antique vessel. I explained our quest for Robinson Crusoe and that we had come to Cayman, now that our task was done. The crew would go their separate ways. Trondur and Tristan would go by air to Europe, Ash would take Ziska single-handed to Florida and away from the hurricane season, and I would stay in Georgetown a few days to visit the libraries and public archives to see if there were any records of castaways. ‘Oh, you don’t have to go to the library for that,’ Malachy observed, ‘go to talk with Andrew Powery. He was cast away on Serrana. He has quite a story to tell.’

  Finding Andrew Powery was easy. He was a living legend. Persuading his family to arrange a time when I could meet him was rather more difficult. The family was very protective as Andrew Powery was old and very frail. In view of what he had gone through, it was a miracle that he was alive at all.

  *

  ON 26 OCTOBER 1932 Andrew Powery had sailed from Grand Cayman as a deckhand aboard a local fishing boat, the Managuan. She was a small wooden boat, a workaday vessel of twenty-two tons, yawl-rigged with two masts. She had no engine and was considered to be rather a slow sailer. What made the Managuan slightly unusual was that she had a fish well, a open box built into the centre of the hull and linked to the sea, where fish could be kept alive and sold fresh in port. Andrew Powery, a big, strapping twenty-year-old at the time, was one of two deckhands. The other was called Earle Grove or Early. Also aboard was Captain Jeffery, a mate, and a young cook. The plan was for the Managuan to sail to the Miskito Cays, off Nicaragua, catch ‘scale fish’ – mostly garopas and cut eye snappers – put them in the well and then sail back across the Caribbean to sell the catch in Jamaica.

  Managuan had scarcely arrived at the Miskito Cays when her helmsman carelessly ran her on a sandbank in broad daylight. It took almost twelve hours of laboriously unloading the ballast, laying out the anchors, and waiting for the highest moment of the tide before the crew could float her off. This mishap caused Captain Jeffery to change his plans, almost on a whim. He suddenly announced to his crew that instead of fishing the Miskito Cays, he would take the Managuan to the Serrana Bank, where he had heard there was excellent fishing. His spur-of-the-moment decision was to put his boat into the path of what would prove to be the worst hurricane to hit the region in living memory.

  What came to be known as ‘the ’32 Storm’ began to develop north-east of Barbados on 31 October. Over the next eight days it strengthened into a fully fledged hurricane as it drifted in a wide slow semicircle. Its track brought the eye a few miles north-west of Serrana, before it looped up towards the Caymans. The eye passed south of Grand Cayman on 7 November with wind speeds of 150 m.p.h. and then struck Cayman Brac, the smaller sister island almost dead centre. By that time the storm was calculated to be generating winds of 200 m.p.h. After the hurricane finally left, one house near the shoreline on Grand Cayman was found to have been picked up and shifted inland a distance of 157 feet by a combination of gale and storm surge.

  The threat to low-lying Serrana can be imagined.

  As ‘The ’32 Storm’ approached Serrana from the south and east, two men were living on Big Cay, as the Caymanians called South West Cay. They were rangers from Cayman Brac. ‘Ranger’ was a local word to describe the roving fishermen who were taken out by sailing boat and delivered to remote, uninhabited islands. There they were dropped off with their nets and lines and small catboats to catch turtle and fish, often nurse shark, valued for their fins. They lived in isolation, often for weeks at a time, until the mother ship came back to collect them. The two rangers on Big Cay, however, were not there to fish. They were collecting noddy eggs, packing them in boxes of 500, and storing them in a shed, ready to be taken to Jamaica where they would be hawked in the streets. As a sideline the two men were also filling sacks with phosphate-rich bird droppings to be sold as fertilizer.

  Late on the afternoon of Thursday 3 November the two men on Big Cay, Bill Tibbetts and Will Ritch, saw the Managuan hove-to close inshore. The two rangers rowed out in the catboat to show Captain Jeffery the best place to anchor. Already they were worried by an ominous sign. A huge, slow swell was rolling in from the south-east. They did not yet know it was driven by the force of the approaching hurricane. The swell had washed up hundreds and hundreds of conch shells, tearing the shellfish from the sea floor and throwing them up on the reef. It was something that neither ranger had witnessed before.

  When Tibbetts and Ritch woke up the next morning in the little hut that was their home on the cay, they were immediately aware that a major hurricane was on its way. The swell of the sea had increased, clouds were massing in the east, and the great mass of seabirds was strangely disturbed. Thousands upon thousands of noddies, boobies, man-of-war birds were rising and circling above the island, rising and cir
cling above the island. The two islanders went again to the Managuan and advised Captain Jeffery to shift anchorage. Big Cay was too exposed. The little island was on the wrong end of the Bank, the end facing the approaching storm. They suggested that the fishing boat go to the northern end of the Serrana Bank and creep her way into a patch of protected water between three small islets called Triangle Cays. There she should put down all her anchors and prepare to ride out the storm.

  Tibbetts and Ritch then began making their own hurricane preparations. At that time Big Cay was just a raw expanse of sand and guano. The great juniper thicket had not yet been planted. The hordes of seabirds nested on the ground. There was only their hut and a larger shed for storing the fertilizer sacks. It was dreadfully exposed. They hauled their little catboat out of the water and dragged her as far up as they could on the highest ridge on the island. The two rangers heaped sand around the boat and filled her with conch shells to try to stop her from being blown away. They buried big galvanized tins of food.

  The sky was an monstrous portent. Recording his impressions nearly sixty years later, Andrew Powery still remembered how ‘it looked like heaven and earth was coming together. I never seen an element like that in my whole like before or since . . . Clouds down here, clouds up here, and clouds up . . .’ The roiling clouds were ‘five, six, seven, yes ten storey’ high. Bizarrely, the clouds reminded him of popcorn.

  The Managuan fled to shelter at Triangle Cay, and anchored. She was already leaky, and her hull had been further strained by the recent grounding on the Miskito Cays. The crew decided to get ready for the hurricane’s onslaught by repairing the bilge pump, which was not working properly. They dismantled the pump but then with almost criminal negligence decided to leave completion of the job until the following day. They retired to their bunks to get some rest, leaving Andrew Powery on watch by himself.

  Andrew Powery spent the first part of the night crouching in the forecastle, the little forward cabin. ‘She leaking like a basket,’ he recalled. The large fish well amidships blocked any water which leaked into the forward part of the boat from draining back where it could be removed easily. He shifted the ballast stones lying forward of the fish well to make a space where he could dip a bucket and began throwing out the water. By ten o’clock he was so exhausted that he crawled into a bunk in the forward cubbyhole and put his head down to get some rest.

  He was woken up by shouts of panic. Bursting from the forecastle he found his fellow deckhand, Early Groves, on deck. He was baling frantically and yelling that the Managuan was sinking. The seas were now running so high that they were breaking over the little fishing boat, threatening to bury her. Tons of water were arriving on deck so fast that it did not have time to drain overboard through the scuppers, the drain holes at the side of the deck. Pressed down by the additional weight of water the Managuan was rolling sluggishly and scarcely able to rise to each wave. Grove was working frantically to clear the surplus water with a bucket. Powery saw that the task was futile. There was no chance that Grove could keep pace with the onrush of water. The solution was to clear a wider path for the water to run overboard. By now the captain and mate had also emerged on deck, and the mate took an axe and began to hack at the scupper holes to make them larger. But it was slow work. The head of the axe kept getting stuck in the white pine. Powery found a hand saw and began to cut out a section of the monkey rail, the low bulwarks at the edge of the deck. When the monkey rail was nearly cut through he took the axe and, as he recalled, ‘I whopped! And that piece fell, that went out yonder, in the water. And the water went r-r-rrrrrrsh . . . and then the water start to run.’ He made a second cut in the monkey rail on the other side of the vessel and, freed of her deck water, the Managuan was saved for the time being.

  The wind was now increasing to full hurricane force so, after cutting down the mast to reduce the area exposed to the blast, the crew retreated to the cabin. There was little more that they could do – if they stayed on deck, they risked being swept overboard by the thundering waves. The Managuan heaved and pitched, tugging massively on her anchor chain. Every quarter of an hour, Andrew Powery, as the strongest man aboard, was sent to crawl forward on deck with a torch. The wind and rain were so fierce that he had to clamp his hand across his face and peer between his fingers just to make his way along the deck. When he reached the hawsepipe where the anchor chain passed through the deck, he could only check the situation by touch. He reached down and felt the links of the anchor chain, bar-taut. Looking forward into the sea he could see nothing in the black, howling murk punctuated by cresting waves which came roaring down on the Managuan. He felt desperately cold.

  On Sunday morning the crew dumped as much as possible of the Managuan’s deck gear into the sea. They hoped to lighten her still further, but it was a token gesture. Then someone on board suggested the technique of putting oil on a rough sea to reduce the breaking of the waves. But he did not realize that for this technique to be effective, the oil slick has to be started upwind of the boat so it can spread down towards the vessel. Andrew Powery was sent to the bows of the boat with an old blanket and a sugar sack soaked in oil with instructions to hold them overboard. Every time he did so, the waves threw the oil-soaked cloth back on the ship, and nearly washed him into the sea. He could see that his effort was useless and, angry with the crew sheltering in the cabin, he let go the blanket and the sugar sack. In a moment they were swept away in the darkness. He went back below and resumed baling.

  While he was below, he suddenly felt the motion of the boat change. The Managuan was no longer heaving and snubbing – coming up with a heavy tug – on her anchor chain. She veered and swung, changing position. He jumped up on deck in time to hear the mate announce, ‘Captain, she’s gone!’ For a moment Powery thought that the mate meant the anchor chain had snapped. Then Powery realized that the mate had deliberately slipped the anchor chain and let the boat go free. He had been fearful that the Managuan, tethered to her chain, was about to founder under the press of weather. The mate judged that she stood a better chance of survival if she floated free.

  The mate’s action in slipping the anchor meant that the little fishing boat was now adrift, without mast or sails, and at the mercy of the sea. The captain and the mate stood at the wheel in an attempt to steer the ship. Andrew Powery, convinced that the mate had made a dreadful mistake, took a length of rope, wrapped it round a remaining section of monkey rail, and then looped the free ends over his shoulders and around his waist. He was determined he would not be washed overboard.

  The Managuan was now surging downwind on the stormy sea. She see-sawed as the waves rolled under her. On the front of each wave the bowsprit thrust down into the water. On the back of the wave the bows came up and the spar pointed to the sky. The fishing boat was out of control.

  In the next instant there was a loud scraping sound as the little boat slithered across the top of a reef. She had hit what the Caymanians called a pan shoal, a flat-topped table of coral and compacted sand. As the boat skidded and scraped on the pan shoal, the shock of the impact popped open the hatch of the fish well. As the water poured in through the shattered bottom of the hull, it flowed up and out of the hatchway. With the upwelling came the scale fish. Their catch, the garopas and others, swam back into the sea.

  The Managuan was now doomed. Each time she thumped on the reef, her hull cracked open a little more. Soon entire sections of the planking were gone. It was time to abandon ship. Andrew Powery untied the rope that secured him to the hull, went down into the cabin to stuff his belongings into a flour sack, and found he was walking on the reef. Much of the lower hull had been stripped away by the coral and the floor of the cabin was now the top of the reef.

  The crew gathered on deck and tried to estimate where the last mad headlong rush of their vessel had brought them. Peering through the driving spray they could make out a small cay. They thought they recognized it as a desolate cay called Anchor Cay. They had scarcely identified it when the
gale, which had eased for a short time, came back with increased fury, and the speck of land disappeared in the spray and spume.

  There was now a choice: should they try to reach the cay in one of the sloop’s two catboats which were lashed on deck, and risk the wrath of the sea, or should they stay with the crippled vessel hoping the Managuan would hold together long enough for the hurricane to ease, and for them to clamber onto the reef?

  A heavier than usual wave washed along the Managuan, struck the cookhouse structure and slammed it against the railing. She was gradually being pounded to pieces. Andrew Powery and Early Grove hauled their way to the uprooted cookhouse, grabbed it, and toppled it overboard. They then tied a safety rope to the bow of one of the catboats and led the rope back around the stump of the mast. That way, they hoped, the catboat would stay with the sloop even if her tie-downs gave way. Soon afterwards a boarding wave did strike the catboat and washed it into the sea. The catboat flipped upside down, but the safety rope held. The boat floated there, off the stern of the Managuan and bottom up.