Seeking Robinson Crusoe

by Tim Severin

  A moment later, the Managuan herself fell over. A wave picked her up, then dropped her heavily on the reef. She crashed over on her port side, her deck at a steep slope. Moments later the second catboat was collected by a large wave, ripped off her fastening, and swept away. The crew hung on. They clambered up the slant of the deck to where they could brace themselves, shoulders against the bulwarks and feet on the raised coaming of the hatchway. Someone found a small sail, the jib staysail, and hauled the wet cloth over them. It gave a little protection from the impact of the waves, but each time a wave hit the men, they were lifted up like a row of dolls. In a spirit of desperation the captain began singing, and the crew joined him.

  Then the Managuan went under. She must have slipped off the reef or been washed into a gulley. Andrew Powery was left on the surface, spluttering. The mate and Early Groves managed to grab the capsized catboat which was still attached to its safety rope and hung on, one on each side of the capsized tender. Looking down into the water beneath his feet, Powery saw the glimmer of something pale. He realized it was the Managuan’s monkey rail. He swam across, hooked his foot under it, and pulled himself close. At all costs he had to prevent himself being washed clear of the wreck. If he was swept out to sea, he was lost. A moment later, with a gasp, the captain surfaced beside him and the two men hung on desperately to the rail.

  The Managuan had settled with just enough of the superstructure showing to offer handholds for the crew flailing in the water. Early Groves and the mate let go of the catboat, floundered across and also grabbed hold of the main vessel. Unfortunately they let slip the safety rope in the process, and the catboat floated away. Out of the confusion also appeared the young cook, and all five members of Managuan’s crew found themselves united again on the battered remnants of their fishing boat.

  Wave after wave washed over the heads of the men. They had no idea of what was happening, where they were going. They felt the wreck shifting and shuddering under them. There was a heavy rasping sound. The swell picked up the Managuan and dropped her back on top of the reef and saved their lives. The wreck caught fast on the shoal with the bow sticking up far enough in the air for the survivors to crawl into the tiny forecastle. They sat there perched inside the bow of the boat, with the water sometimes swirling up to neck level, while ‘the ’32 Storm’ moved onward.

  They spent Sunday night in this way.

  ‘Monday morning,’ Andrew Powery remembered, ‘was pretty fair; the wind had gone down fine; the sea was gone down good.’ The men were so exhausted by the battering of the previous thirty-six hours that they spent most of the day on the wreck as it lay canted over on the reef. They could see a patch of dry land on a small sand cay not far away, but to reach it meant crossing a deep channel where the tide was running strongly. Eventually the captain asked Andrew Powery, who was the best swimmer in the group, if he would try to swim across, taking the end of a rope. If he succeeded, the rest of the crew would use the rope to transfer to the cay. But the current in the channel was too powerful. It nearly swept Powery out to sea. Only by pulling himself back on the rope did he manage to retreat to safety.

  Pinned down to the wreck, the crew spent the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday in a state of increasing misery. They huddled in the forecastle cabin. It was soaking wet. The last time they had eaten was on Saturday and they had no food. Also there was no fresh water. To lessen their thirst, they occasionally got down from the wreck and on to the reef. They had only to step from the boat’s rail to be on the coral. They would pick up a whelk, prise out the gut of the shellfish, and hold it in their mouth hoping to extract some liquid. It brought little relief.

  On Wednesday morning, according to his own account, Andrew decided that action had to be taken. He calculated that he would have a better chance to swim the channel and reach the sandbar if he did not have to carry a rope’s end with him. On the previous attempt the drag of the rope had held him back. Of course if he tired this time, the current would sweep him out to sea, and he could not be hauled back to safety. He told the rest of the crew that he would make the attempt solo. If he succeeded in reaching the cay, then they would have to follow his example and get across on their own. Before wading into the water, he walked down to the end of the reef and ‘prayed to the good Master to take care of me and help me make it.’

  His faith in divine help, Andrew Powery said later, sustained him. ‘I was going with that determination that He would help me . . . so it wasn’t long before I got across, made it to that little cay . . . The current wasn’t running bad at all that morning.’ The other four members of the crew watched his progress. Encouraged when he waded out on the far bank they too entered the water and, one by one, managed to struggle across to the tiny cay. At last they were on dry land above high-tide level. It was the fifth day since their hurricane ordeal had begun.

  They dug in the sand, searching for water. It was a slim hope but they made several holes. Each pit was dry. Their situation had been improved by leaving the carcass of the Managuan, but not by much. The outside world had no idea that the Managuan was wrecked. Only when the fishing boat was long overdue would anyone go looking for her, and then the search would be in the wrong place, over on the Miskito Cays, her original fishing ground. Meanwhile the five castaways would die of thirst, stranded on their waterless sand cay. Their only thread of hope was to try to reach Big Cay where there was fresh water and – if they had survived – the two egg-collecting rangers.

  But Big Cay was out of reach. The castaways had established their position only approximately. They knew they were standing on the Serrana Bank at a point between Anchor Cay, where the Managuan had struck, and the nearest of the Triangle Cays, the original shelter anchorage. How far away they were from Big Cay they did not know exactly. The Triangles lay between them and Big Cay, and they were ‘good high cays’, in Powery’s words. But looking to the south, the castaways could not see the Triangles. There was only the flat horizon of the Caribbean, and in the foreground the brown and grey shadows of the broad coral reef, washed over by the tide. Without a catboat, there was no choice except ‘to walk the reef’.

  Walking the reef is a punishing exercise. Weed makes the footing slippery and conceals the spines of sea urchins and the spikes of shells. Gulleys and small channels force detour after detour. A person has to wade sometimes, to swim sometimes, and always to avoid turning an ankle, stepping into a hole, or shredding his shins on sharp rocks and jagged coral edges. The sea surge constantly threatens to push the reef walker off balance. On a rising tide he must identify a high spot on which to take refuge and, judging the moment, stay there until the ebb. ‘Walking the reef ’ requires careful judgement, and knowing when to call a halt.

  The reef walk of the five Managuan castaways reached its impasse after less than five hours. They picked their way along the crest of the reef until they reached a broad deep channel. It was midday on Wednesday, and the channel was about three-quarters of a mile wide. For most of the crew of the Managuan it was too far for them to swim. Once again, they turned to Andrew Powery. He agreed to attempt the crossing. If he succeeded, he would continue on along the reef by himself and try to get through to Big Cay and fetch help. But no one was sure how far he would have to travel, and in which direction precisely. The location of Big Cay was still vague.

  Powery asked for someone to go with him, but no one else believed they had the strength to swim across the channel. So he began swimming on his own. Behind him the Managuan’s survivors stood on the coral, holding up their arms as semaphores. Powery kept looking back. He was taking his directions from them as to which way he should swim. Ahead his destination was invisible over the wave tops. Behind him the figures of his shipmates gradually grew smaller and smaller until they too were lost from sight behind the waves. He kept swimming. He knew there was a current, and that it would set him off course. His best course was south-west but looking back he judged that he was travelling more to the south. So he altered his course. />
  ‘So I wheeled around,’ he recalled. ‘And I swam . . . and my legs felt like they were cramping up, they were string-drawing, you know. I swam out there till I was tired, looking for Mr Tom [a shark] to come up there ’longside of me any time.’

  The water around him ‘looked too blue out there for a lady to blue her linen’. All he could see around him was ‘the dark horizon’ and gradually he lost all sense of direction. He just ‘swum and swum’ not knowing ‘whether I going east, west, north, or south’. In the end, as the sun was dropping down, he came to the edge of the reef and clambered up on to the sand and rock. How long he had been swimming he had no idea. It might have been four or five hours. Nor did he know where he had come ashore or how far he had progressed. He looked around for landmarks. To the north there was nothing. Nor was there anything to be seen southward, the direction of Big Cay. If he was close, he knew he should see its light structure. Only to the west was there any land, a small cay which he guessed was one of the Triangles. He got up and started walking along the reef towards it, so tired that he was talking to himself. After some distance, he could make out some figures on the cay. Encouraged, he headed towards them, expecting to reach help. As the gap narrowed, he recognized the figures. They were the crew of Managuan. He had swum in a circle and come back to the cay that he had left.

  *

  ANDREW POWERY was helped up the steps of his daughter’s bungalow. He was still a big man with an impressive breadth across his shoulders, though his spine was now bent with age and his skin hung loose on the large frame. His pale skin was marked with the blotches of old age. His daughter Clarens gripped his arm to make sure he did not topple. He lived by himself. ‘Five years ago his wife died, and he sort of gave up,’ Clarens explained to me before she went to fetch him. Andrew lived close by, staying in his own little wooden house, surrounded by chickens and kittens. It was where he preferred, and he had his extended family all round to attend to him. It was clear that Clarens and her family held him in great affection. Clarens had told her father that I wanted to know about his experience as a Serrana castaway, and she had dressed him very smartly for our meeting – chequered shirt, light grey cotton slacks, black slippers and neat white socks, and a white hat on his head. Clean-shaved and with a head of tight-curled white hair, he looked trim and well cared for. He settled on the sofa next to me and gestured for one of his great-granddaughters to remove his black slippers so he could be more comfortable. Clarens leaned down and pulled up the grey trouser leg so I could see the shin. The leg was covered with a lattice of pale scars. They were the legacy of Andrew Powery’s journey of survival.

  ‘You should have seen my two legs, my two feet that night,’ said Andrew. ‘God knows what life is. Had hard punishment. He knows what I went through, He knows the pain that I felt.’ Andrew Powery had a marvellous rich deep voice. The delivery was long and slow and drawling, pulling out the vowels, then chopping off the final syllable abruptly. It had a West Country charm to it. ‘. . . and you are waaalking in the night, and you are waaalking in the water, and it is so many things in the water that may take your life . . . I look after shark that might eat me any time.’

  Andrew Powery had already slipped off into the memory of the twenty-two hours that followed his first attempt to fetch help for the survivors from the Managuan. It was the defining event of his life and I had heard the story on a tape recording made by the Cayman Islands National Archive as part of its oral history programme. But listening to him now, with his slow melodic voice, I began to appreciate the impact of that harrowing experience. The fragments which floated on the surface of his memory had a special importance.

  He went back into the water for the second attempt at dawn the next day. He had barely slept all night but lay in his wet clothes ‘shivering like a green leaf over fire’. He had thought of the obstacles that faced him, the width of the channels, the difficulty of traversing the rough surface of the reef, the clawing of the waves that tried to suck him off the coral. At the first glimmer of dawn he got off the sand and left his companions on the cay with scarcely a word. ‘The sun was rising, she was just popping up out of the water when I start to swim off . . . God help me, I carried a beeline right down that morning, I always looked back and I seen myself going straight.’

  Swimming breaststroke, he crossed the first broad channel without difficulty and climbed up on the next cay and looked back. He could see the far shore, the place where he had come from. Already his companions were lost from view. He was on his own once more. Ahead of him lay the long, low curve of the Serrana Bank barely showing above water. He knew little about the reef, except that somewhere at its farthest end must be Big Cay and, with luck, the huts of the two rangers.

  He began to walk and scramble and flounder across the coral. He could take his general direction from the angle of the sun and the wind and waves, but his actual track had to follow the line of the reef crest. It went first to the south-east, then curved back to the south-west. Often he was wading up to his waist with the sea washing over the reef and ‘the water boiling round my legs, catching me round my waist’. He kept staring ahead, hoping to glimpse the lighthouse on Big Cay, but saw nothing. Seaweed, ‘gulf weed’ he called it, came swirling past him, carried along by the current. It made him feel as if he was standing still and the sea was moving. It was also a warning that the current was dangerously strong.

  Two waves met, combined, and before he could save himself, tripped him and suddenly washed him off the reef and into the sea. Off balance, he felt himself being swept into the deep water and then into the pull of the current. He swam desperately. There was no chance of scrambling back on the coral, the surge was too strong. The best he could do was keep swimming, keep his head above water, and keep watching the line of the breaking surf so that he did not lose his bearings. He did not know how long he was out of his depth, but he just kept swimming and praying. ‘All two legs and arms too, pretty well tired out. But anyway praying to the Lord to help me, was His will, I swum and I swum and I swum and I swum.’

  The water around him suddenly grew warmer. He knew it meant he was in the shallows. Cautiously he lowered his legs and his feet found bottom. He waded out on the reef again. He looked around and realized that the current had actually helped him. It had swept him down along the reef and he was nearer his destination.

  He did not recognize the cay. It was very small, long and narrow. It might have existed before the hurricane, or it might have been created by the storm surge. It was covered with hundreds and hundreds of conch shells, probably thrown there by the storm, and a few lengths of broken timber which looked as if they were deck cargo swept off a ship.

  Powery was exhausted. He was at the extreme limits of physical survival. He had not eaten nor had fresh water to drink for five days. He assembled some of the broken timber to make a rough bed and lay down to get some rest.

  When he awoke he had lost track of time and was not sure of his direction. He still could not see the lighthouse on Big Cay but it seemed to him that he had nearly reached the angle in the reef where it turned to the south-west. He began walking the reef again.

  He was now so tired and so light-headed from lack of food and water that he felt numb. He stumbled along the coral, sometimes splashing through the water, often scraping and slicing his legs. He did not feel the spikes of the sea urchins. If a shark had taken him, he later said, he would not even have felt the jaws close around him. He saw plenty of sharks, mostly small ones near the reef. After a storm he knew that the larger sharks also came to the reef, to feed. The worst fright was when his foot went into a hole and something – it was probably a small octopus – grabbed hold of him. He jerked his foot from the hole with such a yell of fright so loud that ‘I thought I waked them up on the cay.’

  There were more channels to swim across, mostly narrow ones fortunately, and the sun was going down. By now he was reeling and staggering and tripping. He noticed that the tide, which had been ebbing, was exc
eptionally low. This gave him some hope. It was exposing more of the reef top than usual. He could not waste the chance. He forced himself into a weaving staggering run to try to cover as much ground as possible. He fell. He landed face down in the shallows and grabbed at the coral as the sea threatened to suck him off the reef once again. His arms felt as if they were being pulled out of their sockets, but his handhold on the coral – he was once again on pan shoal – held firm and he was able to pull himself back on the reef.

  The sun set. Fortunately there was a bright moon and he could see well enough to keep moving. He blundered on, and at last began to distinguish the dark shape of his destination, Big Cay. Around him the surf breaking on the reefs glowed white.

  Sometime around midnight he reached the last edge of the reef. Across the final channel lay Big Cay. From where he stood he still could not see the flash of the lighthouse. It was obscured by the central dunes of the cay. He paused, debating whether he should risk the crossing in the dark. He was very aware of the lurking sharks. ‘Well, it don’t do for me to stop here,’ he said to himself, ‘I going to try it, God will help me.’

  He ‘pitched in’ to the water and began to swim. Once again he lost track of time. He just kept swimming. Though he did not know it, there was one thing in his favour: the tide was slack. There was no current to sweep him off course. He kept his line and eventually, tired to death, he saw white water. At the same time he saw the flash of the lighthouse at last and could use it as his mark. He swam towards it, and kept swimming.

  By now he had lost all sensation of where or how he was moving. He was in numb suspension. ‘So I didn’t know anything till I felt my chest, my stomach brought upon it. Sand. On the beach. Well, I wouldn’t even rise up right away. I just returned thanks to the Lord and laid myself there, and I caught a little wind.’ It was about four o’clock on Friday morning and Andrew Powery had survived as a castaway for six days without food or water and reached the Serrana Big Cay.