by Ed Stafford
The boat returned for the pick-up. As this was already my second visit to Lemon Camp today, and I didn’t want to go all the way over to the other side of the island, I just tucked myself into the bushes and hid. This was against the rules – I was meant to be well clear of the pick-up area when a boat came in – but I didn’t care. I was tired and bored with playing games. I was hungry and this survival scenario was real: I wasn’t going to waste my energy when it wasn’t absolutely essential. Plus, I was intrigued. I could hear the boatmen laughing and walking up the beach. I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach as I silently observed the civilised people from my make-believe savage world. I had no desire to go and speak to them, but observing them, knowing that they had no idea I was there, gave me a buzz.
As I heard the motor starting up again I crept out of the bushes and went to examine the dropbox. I unwrapped a new radio microphone kit and the replacement camera and watched the tiny boat disappear through the reef.
In order to have a proper log of the route back to camp I decided to video the whole way home. I had yet to do a journey that didn’t involve an element of disorientation and so I was adamant that I would attempt to eliminate any unknowns. The camera was to be my stopwatch and my journal.
As I reached the Faraway Tree I turned around to see the direction that I’d come from and then I took three sticks and made an arrow on the floor pointing backwards so that the guesswork would be removed. Then I did a circuit of the enormous tree and found the arrow that I’d left on the outward journey that denoted the direction of my cave. This was simplification in the extreme but needs must and it appeared that I needed this degree of marking.
It was the first time I’d arrived back into the cave area cleanly, without any mistakes. It felt good to have taken my time to log it and solve the problem. I had left a mini trail of destruction along all routes taken, too – snapped branches and knots tied in palms – so I really could not get lost on that route again. If I removed the messing around at the tree for five minutes the timer on the camera told me I had taken twenty minutes to walk across the island barefoot. That was also good to know. I suppose that the whole procedure was a form of evolution on the island – I now had two signposts and a delineated road.
The evening was unbelievably still and the water, as I broke out on to my beach, was like a vast sheet of polished metal. No waves were crashing on the beach or the reef so the sounds were soft and gentle. I had become increasingly aware, and slightly irritated by, constant earworms in my head. Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ − initially rousing but can get wearing; ‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger’ by Kelly Clarkson − annoying from the outset. But with the stillness that resulted from the lack of wind and waves the tunes obliged and paused their marathon recitals. Thin ragged clouds allowed golden light to filter through, providing calmness and peace.
Home, sweet home. I was back twenty minutes before sunset and so I ate ten snails, smashed open a brown coconut and collected some more bedding so that I would sleep well. I wasn’t feeling bad for day four. Maybe it was the fattening up after eating the stick insect. I swallowed the gritty snails without thinking.
From this point onwards I became almost permanently hungry – a hunger that would be relieved only sporadically throughout my stay. This may sound ungrateful but I didn’t want only snails and stick insects and spent a lot of time fantasising about proper food.
I thought about food more than anything else. I was constantly battling hunger and food cravings. I wanted stodge − cakes, peanut butter on toast, flapjacks, Cornish pasties, and chips with mushy peas. Basically, if a Greggs Bakery had appeared on the island I’d have demolished it in about ten minutes.
If I let myself think about food before I went to sleep, that was it. I was up all night long salivating over the exact menu I was going to use to bake a carrot cake or what components I was going to build my muesli from once I got home − almonds, coconut, dates . . . It would be a bitter-sweet experience.
Eyes closed. I love sleep. I love lying down. It is my favourite part of the day. Five more minutes – who’s here but me to know whether or not I get up?
I had slept well and felt strong and happy as I awoke. I had kept my arms tucked into my body – mittens-style – and I had been considerably warmer. But soon guilt started banging pots and pans in my chest saying that it was time to get up. I blinked and the warm morning light on the ocean constricted my pupils to the size of pinheads. I stood and stretched and pissed down on to the beach. The patch below the cave was starting to smell like a urinal. I clicked my neck right and left and etched the fifth chalky white mark on the wall of the cave to complete my first batch of five days. It was a triumphant bold strike through the first four: IIII. New InReach messaging device powered on. ‘All OK’ message sending . . . Message sent. Power down. Put back in case. Scratch balls like the caveman I have become.
‘Good morning, it’s day five,’ I grunted to the plastic flip-out camera screen while scratching my stubble with my dirty fingernails. ‘Only fifty-six days to go!’
Morning poo result: yesterday it had been explosive and I had literally screamed – roared out – across the ocean in carnal release. Today was more solid and settled like a runny cow-pat. For me this was a step in the right direction and I was content with the fond farmyard association. I’d been urinating four or five times a day and it was straw-coloured so, although I wasn’t worried about currently being severely dehydrated, I knew that limited fresh water and diarrhoea were a bad combination. The coconut water was obviously filling the gap but for it to be sustainable I had to find a more reliable and plentiful source of water.
Finding another water source would require elements outside my control. It required fortune and I could not bank on luck going my way. I had to make the most of what I could tangibly affect and so I opted to attempt to enhance the flow of water from the rock seep and improve my system of collecting it. I gave myself that task and nothing else for the day so that I could look at it calmly and get something done that was genuinely valuable and would improve my situation long term.
Facing the seep, I reached up for a left-hand grip, then a right, and with my right foot in the water hollow I raised myself off the beach by a metre to examine the top of the crack in the rock. Although the hollow at the bottom could hold four hundred or so millilitres of water I knew what I wanted: and that was to be able to position one of the plastic bottles against the rock so that it would constantly collect water. I was far from certain it would work but I thought that the only way to divert such a slow flow was to use some sort of wick to draw the water from the damp rock face.
I sifted through the assorted junk that I’d so far hoarded in a giant clamshell. One dirty frayed length of cordage was about eight inches long. It looked absorbent – cotton, not nylon – and my hopes ignited that this might just work. Back at the seep I looked at the crack and how it was formed. There were two pools or hollows, one about seven feet above the beach and one about three feet. The one at seven feet filled first and could hold about 500ml of water. The bottom one held about 400ml. The top one filled first and when full would overflow down the rock face and some of the overflow would help fill the bottom one. Because the pools were not vertically above one another, the rest would be wasted and flow down the rock face into the sand.
To allow any water to overflow from the top one was therefore a waste. I looked at positioning my bottle above the top pool but there was nothing to wick from – the rock was barely damp – so I knew my bottle had to sit just below the top pool and allow gravity to siphon the water down.
But there was an obvious problem: there was no ledge or surface that I could position the bottle on below the top pool. The lower pool was four feet lower and the wick was only eight inches long.
The more I looked at it the more I questioned whether this whole formation was natural or had been carved out of th
e rock by generations of tribal Fijians or Tongans who had visited here and had the same issue. I had a hunch that what I had previously considered to be a natural channel, formed by water, between the two pools was actually chipped out of the rock by man, perhaps many thousands of years ago.
By deduction I came to the conclusion that the rock must indeed be soft enough for me to mould the rock face and so I went to fetch my primitive clamshell hand axe. From the first few strikes I could tell that this might work. It was no hammer and chisel – more like carving a hole in a brick wall with a wooden spoon – but little by little the wall recessed and a ledge for placing my bottle started to form. I worked, with occasional breaks for small raw snails and coconut, for about four hours on the ledge before it was deep enough to allow a 600ml plastic bottle to sit snugly below the top pool. It was held in place by a fist-sized rock to stop the wind blowing it away and it was fed by the eight-inch section of cordage that was in turn held in place at the top by a small pebble that was holding one end in place in the top pool. I tried to ensure that as the wick entered the bottle it did not touch the sides of the lip so as not to lose any water down the outside of the plastic.
I stood back expectantly. This really could work. I had also attempted to open up more of the seep above the top pool to encourage flow by chipping away at all areas that were damp and creating a further gully down into the top pool. The end result looked fantastic. Patience had paid off and I had made alterations to this seep that would last for centuries. And, hopefully, ones that would work. After cleaning out the enormous amounts of brick dust from the whole system with seawater I left the wick- and bottle-siphon system to work its magic.
Fingers crossed.
Feeling lucky, I decided to turn my attention to fire. To have fire would mean so much to me: I would be able to cook snails and mussels – everything that I could find; I would be able to boil water and have a hot drink; I would be able to be warm each night, comforted by a reassuring glow that would fend off cold thoughts.
Why had it taken me so long to get around to attempting fire? I could just put it down to my mind being in a spin, but that would be only half the truth. The other half is that there is an unprecedented amount to do to set yourself up when you start to survive with nothing, and many of these, like water, food and shelter, are higher priorities – you need them to survive. Fire was a luxury that no other animal in the world had the ability to master and, as such, it wasn’t top of the list as they all seemed to cope perfectly well without it.
And so I acknowledged the progression from crude necessity to aspirational desire. I wanted a fire. I needed a wooden stick that I could spin in place on a flat board. The friction between the ‘drill’ and the ‘hearth board’ is what would, hopefully, create enough heat for me to form an ember – the very embryo of a fire. I would either spin the drill with my hands or make a simple bow to help me spin it faster, harder, and for longer.
In Australia – about a month before I was dropped on the island – the Aboriginals had mentioned that beach hibiscus would work for a hand drill. I was cocky about my abilities and so, without testing it for myself, I simply logged it as a given and ticked fire off my list of worries.
I returned to the hibiscus sticks that I’d cut and started to dry the day before feeling reasonably confident. I needed a long thin drill, half a metre long and the thickness of my little finger, and a fatter hearth board that I could make from a short section with a two-inch diameter. An hour later I had what I wanted and, exhausted but positive, I carried them back to my cave.
The drill, once the bark was stripped off, just needed to be left in the sun to dry out. The nine-inch hearth section needed to be split longitudinally to produce two long half-moon cylinders. I thrive on simple, practical challenges like this. It’s why I ended up doing expeditions in the first place. Everything is tangible and physical and you just have to apply your mind and find a solution. I’d used wooden battens to hammer machetes through logs in the jungle to split them longitudinally and so I decided that I would just swap the machete for a long thin shard of clamshell and see if it worked.
Several demolished clamshells later I stumbled upon a fragment that I thought would work as this chisel-like tool. I rested the white blade on the top of the vertical column of wood and, holding one end, gently tapped at the other with a further section of hardwood. Tap, tap, tap. I created a small trench-like indentation in the cross-section and grew more confident as the shell cut down into the column, splitting the wood apart lengthways.
‘Aaargghhhh,’ I screamed like a wuss as I hit my finger. But I smiled as I realised that I was making good progress, so the pain was short-lived.
Ever conscious that I wanted two fairly even halves, my focus was on the angle and the force of the tap, and then I could see the perfect result and the two sections of wood gently and uniformly came apart.
‘They’re actually really good. Oh, I love it when a plan comes together. I could cry – that’s so pathetic I could cry.’ An unexpected wave of elation rose from within. I started to well up. ‘That worked,’ I stated – overwhelmed. ‘I really am on the verge of tears. That fucking worked! Yes!!’
Surprised by the happiness that I felt, I allowed the emotion in, but, without realising this, I opened the floodgates to all the other emotions that I’d been repressing. Stowed away was a whole lower deck of other worries and stresses; they all surfaced and I began to sob both with happiness and with the release of the tension of so many days.
Beach hibiscus is a softwood and so I managed to cut an ember notch in the hearth board, using a tiny sharp seashell, in about forty-five minutes. Unprepared and yet excited that now I potentially had a fire kit that would work, I decided to trial my home-made equipment. With the hearth board on the floor and the drill sitting in the notch, the whole set-up looked like an inverted capital T. I held the hearth in place with my bare foot, knelt over the kit and took the drill between my palms. Back and forth I worked my hands – spinning the stick in the hole faster and faster – and gradually the heat created by the friction started to produce powder and smoke rose from the notch. I kept working my hands down the drill until I was exhausted and dripping with sweat. My arms were on fire with the intense short burst of exertion. On examination, the powder that I was producing was light brown; this wasn’t good – I knew it should have looked much darker. The hearth, too, was almost worn through after two attempts. Frustrated, I determined that, actually, beach hibiscus must be too soft. I should have known this and so I chastised myself once more for the lack of responsibility in my preparations.
I admitted to the camera that the only trees I could identify were coconut, beach hibiscus, lemon and some sort of pine. As a result I had no option but to use the same tactics I had in navigation – experiment and learn as I went. My old coconut Y-pole was the first thing to be tested but I soon worked out that chopping a section of wood that is not attached to a tree with a clamshell is even harder as the wood bounced on the rock and sent vibrations up my aching arms. Instead I simply fed it through the natural fork in a tree and used all my weight to tension the wood and then snap it. It was brute force over intelligence or skill – but that’s never worried me.
After collecting four significantly different types of wood I was covered in sweat and abrasions from the bark and decided that these would do for my first round of trials. I laid the different shades of wood on a rock in the sun so as to dry them out completely. Despite searching intently I couldn’t find the mythical tangalito, the one first mentioned to me by Rama, anywhere.
With these new harder woods I suspected that I might need to use a different method of lighting so as to generate more heat with less energy. I would have to make myself a bow.
A fire bow looks like a small bow used by a child to fire toy arrows. I was in search of a curved section of wood that was about two foot long and would not snap. Ideally I wanted a nice Y at one end
to assist with tying on the bowstring. I would carve a simple notch in the other end.
This was straightforward – I could do this task. Clutching my clamshell hand axe, I turned left out of the cave and picked my way over the snail-covered rocks that split my beach and were now half submerged by a high tide. On the south section of my beach I turned left again, slipped into the tree line and went in search of a bent stick.
I soon worked out that I wasn’t going to find a piece that was strong enough on the floor. If it had been weak enough to fall off the tree then it wasn’t even on my shortlist. I soon found a branch that wasn’t pretty, more a snapped-in-half octagon than a sweeping crescent, and started the primitive tree surgery. Fifty crude blows, three bloody knuckles and one bellow of frustration later, I used all my weight to snap my ugly fire bow free of its life-long home. I whisked up a small amount of beach hibiscus cordage and trotted back to the cave with my new stuff.
None of the random bits of scavenged man-made cordage that I had amassed seemed of sufficient calibre for use as a string and so, as I was now well aware of the strong yet flexible natural properties of hibiscus bark, I attached a bit of that to my bow.
Glancing at the initial fragile and rather sad-looking water collection frame that I had made on the beach, I decided that it was bad for my morale to keep walking past evidence of my failure and so I ripped it apart and threw it into the tree line. My clamshells had long ago usurped this anyway and were still poised ready to harvest any downpour.