A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  The reality of early abandonment, however, is not so optimistic. There have been approximately a hundred recorded cases of ‘feral children’, although most of them are hotly contested: how accurate are the records? How long and from how early had the child lived with its adopting animals? Was the child abandoned precisely because it was already brain damaged in the first place? But overall this particular experience of involuntary silence has grim consequences. Children raised outside human society have the greatest difficulty in re-entering; they seldom acquire language or learn to relate to other human beings, and they usually die young. With the subterranean truth of ancient stories this is to some extent acknowledged in the earliest legends. Genesis recounts that although Ishmael survived, he grew up to be ‘a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man’, to ‘dwell over against all his kinsmen. He will live in the wilderness,’ while Romulus murdered his brother and organised the mass rape of the Sabine women in order to populate his new city.

  Some of the adverse mental effects that Grassian observes in his prisoners may be to do with the physical ‘confinement’ as much as its ‘solitary’ nature. But fortunately for me there is also a surprisingly large literature of involuntary silence without close confinement.

  For example, a fairly well documented version of involuntary silence is marooning – setting an individual ashore on an isolated island. This course of action was invented by early eighteenth-century pirates. They built the ‘terms and conditions’ for marooning quite formally into their ship’s articles. In 1724 John Phillips, the captain of the Revenge, included a clause which read, ‘If any Man shall offer to run away, or keep any Secret from the Company, he shall be maroon’d with one Bottle of Powder, one Bottle of Water, one small Arm, and Shot.’10

  Prior to its adoption by pirates the word ‘maroon’ had meant an escaped slave, but it was so regularly used on ships that pirates were referred to as ‘marooners’. It was a punishment exercised both by captains against insubordinate crew members and by successfully mutinous crews against their captains. The stipulation about the ‘small arm and shot’, which was conventional in such articles, was so that the marooned could kill themselves if they chose, and they might as well so choose, because the most likely, and to the best of our knowledge the most normal, outcome of marooning was to die alone and slowly. In periods where death was mandated for the most minor crimes this reluctance to execute the traitor directly feels strange. Perhaps it is this awareness of immanent death, endured in silence, that undermines sanity and lets in the dark. It is not an unrealistic fear: silence can kill you, or drive you so insane that you never find a narrative of return. And if you are dead you cannot tell anyone about it – you are finally and completely silenced.

  Almost miraculously, though, people do survive and do find a language to tell us about it. And in these accounts, over and over again you see the shadow side of the positive experiences of silence. A different subjectivity, a different day, a tiny piece of good or bad luck, shifts the balance between positive and negative experiences of silence, as it does between life and death.

  Marguerite de la Rocque survived. She was marooned on an island in the St Lawrence seaway by her uncle, as a punishment for immorality, in 1542. She survived there for two years and five months before she was rescued. She is probably the first European woman to overwinter in Canada and possibly the first to give birth in the New World. She is one of the earliest modern suvivors of this kind that we know about. She haunts my imagination, as she has haunted the imagination of a number of writers, especially women, from Marguerite of Navarre, who retold the story in the Heptameron,11 onwards. One of my very first attempts to make fiction out of and about silence was based on her marooning.12

  By any standards it is an extraordinary survival story. Marguerite was a young upper-class woman who had never been out of France before and cannot have had any ‘wilderness experience’ whatsoever. She was a member of one of the worst-run expeditions in the history of exploration. The leader, her uncle Roberval, patently did not have a clue what he was up to. His ‘crew’ were a highly unqualified and unstable mixture of convicts and his friends and relations, many of whom seem to have gone along as tourists. He refused to take advice from Jacques Cartier, the most experienced French captain-navigator of his period, who was appointed by the king as Roberval’s second-in-command. Cartier finally, and in dereliction of a direct order, left the expedition and returned to France. The basic idea behind this ill-thought-out venture was to sail up the St Lawrence and build a settlement about where Quebec is now as a launch pad for the exploration and colonisation of the Canadian interior. As the expedition was sailing upriver from Newfoundland, very shortly after Cartier had declared the whole mission to be suicidal and had deserted,* Roberval discovered his niece was having an affair with another member of the expedition and marooned the two of them (plus a maid!) on a small island on the northern shore of the St Lawrence seaway, over 50° N (the Arctic Circle begins at 66° N). The seaway at this point is frozen solid for four months of the year. This was no Caribbean island.

  During the first autumn both her lover and the maid died, and later in the first winter so did the baby that Marguerite gave birth to on her own. That spring Roberval abandoned the fort and sailed back past the island; there is no evidence that he even attempted to find out what had happened to her. Marguerite survived alone for more than another year, including a whole winter. We have very few details about how she survived, presumably by hunting and fishing. She killed a bear cub as ‘white as an egg’. We know, too, that she was persecuted by demons – they screamed abuse and threats at her in the darkness, and she shot at them through the roof of her hut, and later, when she had no more gunpowder, shouted bits of the Bible at them. But she survived. Eventually she was rescued by some fishermen. (Despite all the talk about exploration and discovery, the fact is that these waters had been fished by both Breton and Basque fleets for years.) She survived; she went home to Picardy and set up a school. At some point thereafter she told her story to a sea captain called Jean Alfonce, who seems to have repeated it to André Thevet, a Franciscan priest, explorer and writer whose written account is accepted as essentially accurate and historical. It is almost certainly through his account that the queen, Marguerite of Navarre, came to know the story.

  I sat in the little house in Skye, having chosen it, warm, safe, with a car and a telephone if I wanted to escape, and with electric lighting and plentiful supplies of food. I heard the wind in the roof as a choir singing in Latin – it does not seem to me a huge step to Marguerite in an unimaginably long winter darkness, in a land she knows nothing about, with death all around her and no persuasive hope of rescue; bereaved, post-partum, probably guilt-ridden, certainly without the comforts of home or of religion. I cannot even think about her without tears, but also without a profound admiration at the courage and resourcefulness that enabled her to survive.

  Alexander Selkirk survived. There are a number of accounts from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries of marooned sailors who were subsequently rescued but Alexander Selkirk gained immortality by becoming the prototype for Daniel Defoe’s novel The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, or more simply Robinson Crusoe (1719), which interestingly is directly influenced by Ibn Tufail’s novel. Selkirk, a somewhat truculent Scot who originally went to sea to escape a criminal summons for unruly behaviour in church, spent four and as half years alone on the Island of Juan Fernandez, about 300 miles off the coast of Chile. It would be hard to imagine a better island to be marooned on – as there was fresh water, fertile soil, reasonable weather and populations of feral goats and cats. In addition Selkirk was unusually well equipped because there was a ‘voluntary’ element in his leaving his ship, which he believed to be ill founded and whose captain was both incompetent and tyrannical (and was later stripped of his captaincy on the accusations of other crew members). This meant that he went ashore with:

  his Sea-
Chest, his wearing Cloaths and Bedding, a Fire-lock, a Pound of Gun-powder, a large quantity of Bullets, a Flint and Steel, a few Pounds of Tobacco, an Hatchet, a Knife, a Kettle, a Bible, and other Books of Devotion, together with Pieces that concerned Navigation, and his Mathematical Instruments.13

  He also had not unreasonable expectations of an early rescue because the island was a favoured watering anchorage for both British and Spanish privateers. Nonetheless he was said to have run along the beach at the last moment begging to be allowed back on board, which his infuriated captain would not allow. Selkirk himself was, probably unlike de la Rocque, tough, ingenious and skilled in ways that improved his chances of survival.

  After his return to Britain Selkirk attracted a good deal of attention. Travel writing was enjoying a vogue and the story had obvious appeal, so we know a good deal about his experiences. In particular, Richard Steele, the Irish writer and politician, interviewed him and published an essay on him a periodical called The Englishman in 1713. Unlike most of the accounts, which focused on his physical survival in an exotic location, Steele was explicitly interested in Selkirk’s emotional state of mind.

  When we consider how painful Absence from Company for the space of but one Evening, is to the generality of Mankind, we may have a sense how painful this necessary and constant Solitude was to a Man bred a Sailor … The Necessities of Hunger and Thirst, were his greatest Diversions from the Reflection on his lonely Condition. When those Appetites were satisfied, the Desire of Society was as strong a Call upon him, and he appeared to himself least necessitious when he wanted every thing; for the Supports of his Body were easily attained, but the eager Longings for seeing again the Face of Man during the Interval of craving bodily Appetites, were hardly supportable. He grew dejected, languid, and melancholy, scarce able to refrain from doing himself Violence, till by Degrees, by the Force of Reason, and frequent reading of the Scriptures, and turning his Thoughts upon the Study of Navigation, after the Space of eighteen Months, he grew thoroughly reconciled to his Condition. When he had made this Conquest, the Vigour of his Health, Disengagement from the World, a constant, chearful, serene Sky, and a temperate Air, made his Life one continual Feast, and his Being much more joyful than it had before been irksome … I forgot to observe, that during the Time of his Dissatisfaction, Monsters of the Deep, which frequently lay on the Shore, added to the Terrors of his Solitude; the dreadful Howlings and Voices seemed too terrible to be made for human Ears; but upon the Recovery of his Temper, he could with Pleasure not only hear their Voices, but approach the Monsters themselves with great Intrepidity.

  When I first saw him, I thought, if I had not been let into his Character and Story, I could have discerned that he had been much separated from Company, from his Aspect and Gesture; there was a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him.14

  In fact, though, Selkirk never did return to his previous way of life – after a brief period, apparently enjoying his fame, he became increasingly reclusive, took to living in a cave and died at forty-five. In this account there is a powerful mixture of positive and negative effects of silence.

  Joe Simpson survived. For those who have neither seen the film nor read the book, Touching the Void,15 Simpson is a mountaineer. In 1985, climbing with his friend and climbing partner Simon Yates in a very isolated area of the Peruvian Andes, at the end of a successful ascent of the previously unclimbed Siula Grande (6,356 metres), Simpson broke his thigh. At that height and under the circumstances this is usually treated as a death knell and Yates might have acceptably left him there. Nonetheless the two of them began an attempt to get him down the mountain by lowering him on a rope through the night and with the weather worsening. Finally, unable to support Simpson, who after yet another slip was dangling barely conscious over a crevasse, Yates cut the climbing rope – apparently the only chance of either of them surviving – and allowed Simpson to fall to his presumed death. The next morning Yates got himself back to their base camp only with the greatest difficulty.

  However, Simpson was not dead; seriously injured and in great pain, without food or fresh water, with a badly broken leg, additional injuries from the fall and alone with the knowledge (from the rope end) that this had not been ‘accidental’, he spent four days struggling out of the crevasse and down the intensely inhospitable terrain, arriving back only hours before Yates and the third member of their party, the non-mountaineering Richard Hawking, were planning to strike camp. Touching the Void is a barely endurable account of extreme human isolation, and both physical and mental suffering, yet for Simpson there is an element of negative ineffability: ‘For me this book still falls short of articulating just how dreadful were some of those lonely days. I simply could not find words to express the utter desolation.’16

  One of the things that kept him alive was a voice (which, in his book, he always refers to in italics). It drove him relentlessly, not towards destruction and disintegration, but towards the opposite:

  There was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life and me sitting there. It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images and memories and hopes which I attended to in a day dream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice … The voice had banished the mad thoughts from my mind. An urgency was creeping over me, and the voice said, ‘Go on, keep going … faster.’17

  As soon as he found the camp and his companions the voice disappeared, leaving him a sobbing, collapsed wreck.

  The minute I knew help was at hand something inside me had collapsed. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl. There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.18

  In one sense this was a short ‘involuntary silence’ but the intensity of the experience – the altitude, the bizarre circumstances, the extreme emotional trauma, the absolute uncertainty and above all the physical pain seem to have forced a high-speed version of the psychological effects of enforced silence on Simpson – and his book is by far the most distressing account of such an experience I know. It contains, in an intensified form, many of the effects of negative silence: as well as the voice hearing, he fell into confused ritualistic patterns of behaviour; he lost a normal sense of time; he experienced wild mood swings and an increasing loss of mind control.

  Anthony Grey survived. He was a Reuters journalist in Peking at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In 1967 a ‘frenzied’ group of politicised Red Guards invaded his house at midnight, tortured and hanged his cat in front of him, daubed him with black paint and then kept him in isolation in his own basement, which the Chinese government described as a ‘restriction of movement’, for over two years. Essentially he was a political hostage – and at one level a well-chosen one because he was not a diplomat. His ‘solitary confinement’ was a peculiar sort of silence because at one level it was not silent at all. Grey set himself in the later stages of his ordeal to learn Chinese, but until then he had to listen endlessly to his guards talking together, singing and chanting the aphorisms from Mao’s Little Red Book, but no one spoke to him, he could not understand what they were saying and apart from two half-hour consular visits he spoke to no one during this time. In his account of the episode he speaks very movingly of the additional pressure that the constant noise, supervision and uncertainty imposed on him, while he himself was silenced. But, despite the differences, his account of his own emotions is surprisingly similar to Steele’s account of Selkirk’s. He describes a practical phase where you deal with the physical realities of your situation and test their boundaries, followed by an escalating inertia, overwhelming depression and a mounting sense of claustrophobia, paranoia, terror and fantasy, and an increasing dependen
ce on ritual – in his case daily prayers and yoga (interestingly, much the same routine as Moitessier seems to have adopted in his joyful and free isolation) as well as a strange, almost Gnostic ritual numbering and naming of days.

  In these particular cases not only did the individuals survive, but so did their stories. Simpson and Grey are both writers; Selkirk and Marguerite de la Rocque encountered writers who had an interest in their stories and the ability to tell them. There are other examples, too, that we know about, and innumerable ones that we cannot know or tell.

  Obviously there are far fewer stories from those who went into a silent place or a silent period and did not survive.

  Chris McCandless did not survive. A young American from a prosperous east-coast American family, McCandless ‘dropped out’ after graduating from college in 1990 and two years later was found dead in the Alaskan outback – the autopsy gave starvation as the most probable cause of death. He had been living ‘in retreat’, alone and in silence in a derelict bus, endeavouring to live ‘off the land’ in an extreme terrain, for four months before his death. In Into the Wild 19 Jon Krakauer has made a bold attempt to explore those final months. Into the Wild is an extraordinary meditation on solitude, the call of the wild and particularly the seductive thrill of peril, adversity, and what he calls ‘Tolstoyan’ asceticism and renunciation. Krakauer, a journalist of extreme adventure, incorporates into his book detail of his own experiences and those of other modern ‘wandering hermits’, and despite the different context and intention that he and his characters had from mine, I find this book both moving and helpful.