Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  As I walked further I noticed an obvious crack in the face of the rock on my right. Below the crack the rock face was darker. As I moved closer my instincts picked up on something important and I started to smile again. Camera on. Lens cap off. Press record . . .

  ‘This is exciting.’ My gut instinct immediately told me what I’d found. I am a geographer and I knew that a fault in the rock like this could only mean one thing. Fresh water. As I inspected the crack it became obvious that a small hollow had been chipped out of the rock by visiting islanders so that the water collected in a shallow recess. Of course I’d known there had to be a source of water on the island and that I just needed to find it – but this could not have been a more important find. Fears of failure in the first few days because of dehydration disappeared as I tried to get my mouth into the small rock pool. With a short slurp I got a slug of water that was definitely not salty. ‘That is fresh water!’ I announced. ‘But something tells me I’d better clean that out first,’ I spluttered as I spat out sediment and sand.

  I could immediately see the potential for using some cordage to act like a wick and draw the water into a container, but for now I picked up the biggest giant clamshell I could find and took it down to the water’s edge. I filled it with seawater and gingerly carried it back to the seep to use as a flush to clean out the stagnant water. Once it was cleaned, I stood back and savoured the importance of having found a source of water. Granted it was not actually flowing – rather, it was an imperceptible excretion of dampness into a hollow – but it was fresh and my spirits were duly raised.

  My mental tick list came back into play and I pondered my current state of affairs. I had found a fresh water source. I had drunk a mouthful and cleaned it out. I’d also eaten two snails and, as yet, had no negative reaction to them. I’d drunk the contents of a green coconut and I’d eaten some jelly-like goo from inside it. For a first morning on an island things were looking not at all bad.

  Ever conscious of the need to record the intricacies of how I was coping with the event mentally, I spoke a monologue to the camera: ‘It’s funny how my mind works. I just walked past the cave and my urge was to go and sit in it, as already it is my base, my home. But I had to tell myself – you don’t need to go and sit down – you have things to do. But all I wanted was to just go and sit.’ On reflection, I think there is a natural urge to make a home and to delineate a space that is your own. Once established in this unknown and unsettling new world, my instincts made me want to withdraw into my safe shell where the possibility of danger was lower and the variables were limited. But fight this instinct I must.

  It was time to do something both utterly essential and yet, from a survival perspective, completely gratuitous. I decided that my nakedness needed addressing and that I would look to make myself a grass skirt. Having been to Australia to visit Harold and Jeremy only recently I knew that I could make a grass skirt and that all I needed was to find a beach hibiscus plant. I walked back towards the cave and then beyond so that the ocean was now on my right and the interior of the island to my left. The rock face soon gave way to a tree line of coconuts and other green foliage. As I drew closer I could easily recognise the large round leaves of beach hibiscus. It was the predominant bushy plant beneath the palm trees.

  Beach hibiscus is amazing because the bark is so flexible and yet so strong that it can be used as cordage without any processing at all. I simply removed a branch, bashed the bark with another stick until it loosened it from the wood and then I peeled away the bark as easily as skinning a banana. No plaiting or modifications of any kind were needed, and each inch-wide strand was strong enough to tow a car. When split longitudinally into thinner strips, beach hibiscus can be used as cord and knotted very easily due to its flexibility.

  Making a grass skirt is easy. You take a strip of bark long enough to go around your waist and string it between two branches like a clothes line. You then take more strips and tie them on to the clothes line with a simple overhand knot, the type of knot a child would automatically do without ever having been taught anything – simply the very first stage of tying your shoes – but pulled tight around the clothes line. You do this until you have tied enough strands of bark on the line to cover yourself. Nothing could be more straightforward.

  What happened next is therefore perhaps a good indication of how all over the place I was at this stage. After tying about twenty strips of bark to my clothes line I came to the conclusion that this was taking too much time and that I should be doing something more ‘essential’ to my survival. The skirt would so far definitely not cover anything and so I panicked and grabbed some grass and decided to knot the grass into the bark, as if making a grass blanket. I was mixing two methods and was now trying to create a solid front to the ‘skirt’ so that my cobs could not be seen through it. What resulted was essentially a square grass sporran that sat in front of my tackle and coarsely scratched at it and my thighs. I looked like Ed McTwat.

  It was uncomfortable, it was difficult to walk in, it exposed me whenever I sat down, it did not cover me from behind at all, and most importantly – when you are filming a documentary for Discovery Channel to be seen in two hundred countries around the world – it looked bloody daft. This was to be my first badly thought through and poorly constructed project of the day.

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Ed,’ I reported as I did a silly hip-wiggle dance for the camera to pretend that I was happy and didn’t mind that it looked stupid. I did mind, a lot, but I had rushed it (and bodged it) and now felt ever more pressured to get on with something else. I believe it was about two or three days before I regained the composure to fully admit to myself that my skirt was terrible and to make another one. To make a good one in the first place would have taken only fractionally longer than my absurd sporran attempt; and in the end I spent far longer because, of course, I had to make two skirts. The whole episode offers an insight into my mental state at the time. Rather than calmly solving a problem, I created more worry and conflict for myself.

  This state of indecision and doubt made me afraid that I didn’t have the ability to cope and this made me think more and beat myself up and get down and depressed. I was listening to the thousand dissenting voices in my head – the noise of the tangled brain – instead of listening to my one true voice, my gut instinct. But in this state I hadn’t the perspective even to identify what was going on.

  I tiptoed through the decaying coconut shells and into the island’s jungle perimeter. Inside the tree line I immediately spotted several red-topped plastic bottles standing out against the leaf litter. As I scanned the forest floor I saw perhaps ten or fifteen bottles that had been washed up by the last spring tide. The scene was unsightly and a disgusting reflection on the cleanliness of the oceans but it was also very obviously fortunate for me.

  Every bottle had a top on it as clearly only the bottles that had trapped air inside would float. This meant they were intact and could be used to store water. As I began to collect the bottles I threw them into a small cleared area of forest floor. One bottle, two bottles, three bottles, a broken flip-flop, four bottles, a polystyrene fishing float, five bottles, a plastic hair gel tub. My Womble treasures stacked up fast. I allowed myself to bask in the comfort of a dream-like situation where I could be sitting in my cave and smugly glance over at twenty or thirty litres of fresh water reserves. I cannot describe the sense of reassurance I derived from such a seemingly boring discovery.

  To boot, one of the Coke bottles had a plastic straw in it. Like a kid finding the free gift in a packet of cereal, I smiled a wide thank you to the skies. I could see that it could be used for drinking water from the otherwise inaccessible rock hollow at the bottom of the seep. This old plastic straw was valuable and I would treasure it.

  Back on the beach I squinted through the burning sunshine wondering where to go next. I didn’t know what was on the far side of the vast rocky headland and so, with the oce
an still on my right, I made my way over a slippery as glass wave-cut platform. Crabs scuttled out of my way and under rocks. They were everywhere. I knew that eating raw crab meat was an invitation to serious food poisoning but it was going to be crab soup heaven if I managed to get a fire lit.

  The soft wind gently played at the hairs on my bare chest as I came round the cliff face and on to a stunning smaller beach – the sand glaring white. It was picture-postcard beautiful, as if that mattered. I quickly checked the height of the palm trees to see if the coconuts were accessible and then returned to the cliff face to check for fresh water seeps.

  The flat expanse of rock that made up the big platform at the base of the rocky outcrop was incredibly slippery. A fine coating of dark green slime meant that I could have almost ice-skated across it. Standing was hard enough, let alone walking over it to search for fresh water. I tried to work out geologically how the water could be channelled down through the rock to a further seep. Inevitably my bare feet eventually shot forward and I fell hard on my bare bum and jarred my hips on the unforgiving surface. My sense of humour didn’t enjoy the particular slapstick comedy. I felt sorry for myself lying pathetically on the slimy black rock and decided that my explorations were over for the day. At least I hadn’t seriously injured myself.

  I returned to my own rock seep near the cave and sipped water using a small spoon-shaped clamshell as if I were eating a bowl of soup. The fresh water tasted healthy and clean as it ran down my dusty throat. The sky darkened and I looked out to sea. A grey wall of rain was approaching and it made me realise that I had no means of harvesting it.

  In the Amazon, a heavy downpour had saved us on several occasions when we had run out of water and there were no rivers in sight. We had simply erected our bashas (tarpaulins) between the trees and put improvised collection pots (anything that would hold water) under the corners to collect the rain that fell on this large surface area. Using my camera’s rubber dry bag I had collected thirty litres of water one evening in only about ten minutes. But here I had no tarp or any other waterproof material.

  On earlier expeditions to Belize teaching jungle survival I had made rudimentary rain collection devices by using palm leaves to make a large surface area on a simple wooden frame and collecting the run-off water. I decided to use this principle and adapt it to local vegetation.

  As ever, the coconut palm was the obvious candidate. When I looked at an individual palm branch I could see that each one had a natural gully that led to the main stem. If I could position the palms so that the rain would flow down the leaves to the stem, and then down the stem to the tip where it would drip or pour into a clamshell, I would be on to a winner. In theory.

  Without a knife or machete I looked around for something with which to cut down a palm branch. By now I had established the nature of the rocks on the island − either soft and crumbly or hard and volcanic − but I could see immediately that neither could be knapped like flint into an axe or primitive cutting tool. It would have been like trying to make a blade out of a concrete paving slab. I had been told by one of the Fijian boatmen that if they are stuck without a machete they smash a giant clamshell and use the fragments as a crude blade but I had not seen this method in action.

  I took a clamshell about the size of a standard casserole dish and slammed it with all my might down on to the rocks at my feet. It emitted a dull clunk and remained in one piece.

  Try again.

  This time I held the shell above my head and with all the force I could muster I hurled it on to the ground. This time the shell splintered and broke into two bits, each as blunt as Old Harry. I took one half and again slammed it into the rocky beach. It fractured again and splintered into something resembling a blade. With enough applied force I might be able to use it like a hand axe to cut through a palm.

  Using this most primitive of tools to cut palms I soon managed to skin my knuckles. The edge was dull and required considerable effort – it was more tearing through the palm than cutting – but it worked, especially if I bent the palm back to apply tension to one side first before striking it. This made removing quite large palms manageable.

  As I was catching my breath between palms a small gecko moved on the bark of a tree directly in front of me. Without hesitation I snapped my hand forward and trapped the little animal between my fingers and the bark. I was surprised how easy it had been to catch and found myself standing with the gecko in hand before I’d even had the chance to consider whether I actually wanted it.

  I had set the camera up a few metres away in the sand and I moved towards it and lay down to show the little creature to the camera. ‘It’s obviously meat,’ I thought to myself. ‘I can eat this.’ Clearly I’d never eaten a gecko before but it would be a good source of protein and so I decided I would. I briefly deliberated about whether it needed gutting and then just opted for squeezing it from the neck downwards to force all the excrement from its anus. Don’t look for that in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, you won’t find it.

  I wiped the mess on a leaf with my fingers and then chucked the lizard in my mouth. It took a bit of chewing before swallowing and tasted more like I’d bitten my tongue than I’d eaten food. The little tail was still wriggling on the ground so I brushed off the sand and ate that too.

  My structure for trapping rainwater reminded me of the little pigs’ house that was built out of straw. Badly thought through and poorly constructed, project number two looked pathetic really and I doubted it would still be standing in the morning. But I’d made something and I’d eaten a gecko so I tried not to be too hard on myself about it.

  My rainwater trap wobbled unsteadily in the wind and reminded me that I wasn’t really much closer to getting a constant supply of water. In the meantime I needed a long pole with a Y-shaped fork at the end to help me dislodge coconuts from trees. My new clamshell was put to use once more. I found a tree that was long and thin and that forked at a height that would be useful for me. I then set about cutting down my first tree with a clamshell.

  To reiterate, this was by no means a knapped blade such as you could produce from flint. It was simply a break that produced an edge that was less than ninety degrees and could be used with force to chop at things. It was about as sharp as a spoon and if I hadn’t been worried about my teeth it might have been quicker to try and bite the tree down.

  Each clean strike would do no more than dent the tree. Each miss would take yet more skin off my knuckles. I attempted to work my way around the trunk, creating a ring of dents, that then became a ring of deeper wounds, that then became a tiny trench around the tree, until it was eventually damaged enough to put my shoulder to the trunk and snap it over. This first tree took me about fifteen minutes and used all of my energy. Once it was felled, I trimmed off the branches by snapping them with my hands until I stood tall with a short, crude Y-pole in my hands.

  I stood beneath a tree from which I’d previously not been able to reach the coconuts and positioned the fork at the point where the green stalk joined the coconut itself. Then I shoved upwards with two hands . . . and watched the coconut rise up and flop back down again like some extremely resilient green, floppy testicle. I shoved again, applying force as sharply as possible so as to jolt the fruit free. By now, sweat was running into my eyes and I was being showered with bark and dead wood. Each thrust felt like valuable energy lost and I began to become frustrated and short-tempered. Eventually, however, I had some luck. The stalk snapped and a coconut plummeted into the sand with a hard thump. My first castration completed, I moved on to the next until I had five green fruits ready to drink.

  I found a sharp edge in a small cliff that was at chest height and used it to smash the coconuts in order to be able to access the water while still standing up. These fruits were the best so far, with plentiful clear liquid inside. For the first time I felt like I was properly hydrating myself.

  With fluids inside me I decided to eat
ten snails. I’d not reacted at all to the first two and wanted to keep my energy levels as high as possible. I stood by a rock and cracked each little shell, peeled it like a hard-boiled egg and swallowed it whole. They were a bit gritty but seemed to do the job. I felt as if I was slowly taking control back from the island. I might have expended more energy collecting and preparing them than I got from eating them but there was protein and animal fat entering my body and that was reassuring.

  Before I did anything else, I stowed away my precious plastics stash in my cave. In a world in which I felt so much at the whim of fate I strove to regain control and grab hold of the reins whenever possible.

  I took the flip-flop and examined the broken thong part around which the big toe goes. The rubber had perished and become brittle but I could easily see how I could replicate it with nylon cord from one of the fishing floats that I’d collected. The result was uncomfortable but at least the sole stayed on my foot. I now had one shoe and a grass sporran, the kind of things people get forced to wear on stag nights. Ironically, for me it was a step towards dignity.

  I shovelled down some brown coconut. For some reason I didn’t like the flavour or texture. Along with the snails this was the first proper ingestion of calories after the slippery coconut jelly of last night and yet I could only manage to eat a third of the fruit before abandoning it in the sand.

  Feeling the sun overhead, I registered that before I explored more of the island I needed to protect myself from its rays. The fine powder on the floor of the cave might make a paste and I could smear myself with that. It was probably the result of the degradation of decades of animal poo and rock fragments falling from the ceiling but it would have to do. I carried a clamshell full of the powder to the water’s edge, mixed it into a paste as best I could and rubbed the odorous lotion all over my shoulders, neck, head and face in one large mud pack, or, rather, poo pack. It definitely wasn’t clay – but it would be better than no protection at all from the burning sun. I swivelled my itchy sporran around to cover my increasingly red bottom.