by Ed Stafford
In the dirt of the cave lay the tantalising, almost complete bow drill set. I knew I had to carve a notch in which to build up the ember and I sat down in the afternoon sun and worked the dull shell tool into the wood, initially using the strength of my fingers. Over a couple of hours, as the sun became less intense, the notch deepened and took shape. Fingers and forearms almost cramping up, I glanced over at Snail Rock and decided to check on supper.
They were ready. I felt a MasterChef-like urge to be über-descriptive so as to make tasting them, not a very televisual experience, actually mean something to the viewer. ‘They’re crunchy, and edible, and slightly salty’ was the best I could muster. I felt thrilled, smug even. Despite having no fire, I’d managed to come out on top and cook a potato using the heat of the sun.
‘Do you know what?’ I told the camera. ‘I needed something like that today. I needed something to go right. It is the difference between having a packet of crisps and eating a potato straight out of the ground. You wouldn’t eat a potato straight out of the ground.’ I stated the obvious to underline the miracle transition. ‘I’m happy with that. Really happy with that.’
And I was. I collected up the chips and put them back in the old hair gel container. That was half of supper sorted out.
Having left the fish trap to sit for a few more hours, I returned to Shipwreck Pool. The tide was coming in and I didn’t want to lose my new collecting device. I reached down to the bottom of the blue aquarium and retrieved the bottle, which now contained five more fish. The second half of supper was sorted, too.
My main course was simply inserting nutrients. That’s how it felt – there was no pleasure in consuming the raw fish and grinding them between my teeth into a consistency that I could swallow with my eyes shut. In contrast, dessert was pure indulgence. I savoured every salty crunchy mouthful of my packet of crisps. The entire meal was probably less than 300 calories but it felt like a feast and I could feel the positive effect of my fish and chip supper filtering through my joints.
Next, I checked the bottles of clay water and found them transformed. The bottom inch of each bottle was pure clay and the water above it was clear. I gingerly lifted each one and siphoned off three litres of clean fresh water. The clay that remained had the consistency of tomato ketchup and I dolloped it out into a giant clamshell for use as sunscreen later. It was smooth and creamy and I knew it would work perfectly.
Water, sunscreen, fish and chips. Not bad for a day’s work. I pondered on how much of today’s luck was self-created. I hadn’t found it easy to keep going but I had done so and was reaping the rewards. I knew I had to learn from this and keep myself positive if I was to thrive on the island. I also knew myself and how hard that would be. I drifted off to sleep with a gurgling belly and full of renewed hope.
Hope, and a sated feeling from my fish and chip supper, stayed with me all through the night. I awoke in a light, happy state and spent a pleasant morning pottering in the shadows of my cave. I replaced the fire-bow’s grey, knotted cordage with new, tougher black cordage that I had found tied around a section of driftwood on the beach. It was now running much more smoothly and didn’t jump. Using the improved bow, I burned in quite a nice black hollow on the tangalito hearth, and the ember notch below was beginning to take shape, too. For the bearing block I was using the plastic bottle top but, as it was still heating up much too much and burning my hand through the plastic, I had begun to carve the top of the drill sharper so as to reduce friction. I also found that adding chewed grass to the bottle top helped; it both lubricated the upper contact point and cooled it down. In short, although you don’t really need to understand the details of the above, I was having quite a nice time.
In the afternoon I reviewed the footage and became aware that my reaction to things taking a long time to do was gradually changing. Initially, if a task had taken a long time I would start to panic, to stress and rush decisions. I would accept a low standard of work in order to move on to the next task as quickly as I could. Now I saw myself chuckling at the absurdity of spending a day and a half cutting a one-inch notch in a piece of hard wood with a shell. Each dull scrape with the shell removed only the tiniest fragment of wood and the process was taking for ever, but I smiled, both in acceptance of what was, and at the patience and diligence I was now displaying.
The ember notch on the hearth board (the pie slice that had to be removed to allow space for the hot dust to build up in) had almost reached the centre of the burned-in drill depression. The kit, dare I say it, was pretty much there.
Daylight woke me like a kick in the face, stealing my sleep and leaving me battered and confused in the dirt. In the mornings I always did the simplest things first as they required the least brainpower. Task one: scratch day thirteen’s completely unnecessary mark on the cave wall with a chalky stone. My brain yawned and farted – day thirteen: let’s hope it’s not unlucky for me.
Skirt on, I stepped down the rocks to harvest my morning snails. As I brought the rock down sharply on each shell I longed for the normality of a fridge stocked with fresh groceries, a toaster, a bacon sarnie and a mug of sweet coffee. Picking the tiny splinters of shell from the moist insides I swallowed each slimy body whole – one after the other – until I decided that I’d eaten enough protein. As my brain was now calming down, my newfound composure allowed me to focus on one thing at a time. I allowed myself to consider at what point the snail would actually die. Upon the impact of the rock? In my mouth? As it plunged into my pool of stomach acid? I sipped some clay water and then returned to my dusty workshop in the cliff face.
Today’s task was to continue improving the bow drill until I had ironed out every flaw, and then, in theory, I should be able to make fire. To recap, the hearth board was the relatively flat piece of wood about a foot long, an inch or so wide and about a quarter of an inch deep. Yesterday I had been carving an ember notch that was meant to be a ‘pie slice’ cut into the board. The pie slice needed to be an eighth of a circle, but was mine a bit too small? Would the hot dust collect in a pillar that would eventually reach such a temperature that it would congeal into a single glowing ember? I was pretty sure that it wasn’t ready but, because carving took hours with my blunt clamshell fragment as my only tool, I opted to test the bow drill to see how it currently fared.
I went down on one knee in the shade of the cave. My left leg was forward, shin perpendicular to the ground, my right leg tucked behind me under my bum. I coiled the string of the bow around my stubby six-inch drill, ensuring the sharper end was pointing upwards. Wrapping my left arm around my leading left leg I applied downward pressure to the drill through the white plastic bottle top. To reduce friction this ‘bearing block’ was now lubricated with green leaves as well as spit. To make it sturdier the bottle top sat inside a seashell in the palm of my left hand. All the friction – and therefore the heat – should now be at the bottom of the drill where it sat neatly in the blackened circle on the hearth board. The circle was in turn penetrated by the pie-slice collection notch whose dimensions I was intending to test.
Deep breath.
Keeping the pressure on the drill with my left hand, I gingerly drew the bow back and forth with my right arm, causing the drill to spin in place.
So far, so good.
Everything seemed to be working. I increased the frequency of the bowing until small particles of hot wood dust began to fall into the ember notch. As my pace increased wisps of smoke began to emanate from the area where the two pieces of wood touched – a good sign, but it was by no means a foregone conclusion that an ember was being made. But something in my gut was starting to ignite, too. I could tell that the dust was dark and that there was plenty of it and I could see the smoke was thickening and building. Although this was just meant to be a test – not a serious attempt to create fire – I increased my efforts as my hopes jumped up and down inside me like a hyperactive kid on an overdose of Tartrazine. Mo
re smoke, lots more black dust building up. It was looking very promising.
The moment of truth comes when you stop bowing. As I did so, a kite line of smoke continued to drift defiantly from the tiny pile of dust in the notch.
I had created an ember.
‘Tinder bundle?’ I flapped, scanning the cave floor for the melon-sized ball of fine dry lichen, coconut husk and ultra-fine bamboo scrapings. I seized the parcel and gently teased the hearth board away from my nascent ember. To turn the smoking ember into fire I had to transfer it into the heart of this dry fibrous ball very carefully, as if it were a priceless gem. I gently squeezed the husk around it between my fingertips as if I was trying to restrain, but not damage, a butterfly. Holding the entire smoking mass aloft – above head height so as to reduce the effect of the moisture of my breath – I blew softly into the precious bundle.
As the ember started to heat the tinder the sound of my breath was obscured by the tiny roar of materials catching light. My fingers started to get hot and the smoke became thick and white. ‘A couple more long, soft breaths – come on, COME ON!’ I willed it, and with that – WHOOMF! – an orange flame leapt into life between my palms.
‘We have fire! We have fire!’ I chanted as I danced around the cave scrabbling for dry wood. I suppose that ‘we’ meant me and the camera – or was it me and the audience? I’m not really sure – but I did feel as if I was sharing the experience. I laid the pocket of flame in my virgin fireplace and added small twigs, first about the thickness of a match, then of a pencil, until I had a proper fire going and could put wood of any size on it.
‘We have fire!’ I repeated, on the verge of tears. ‘This has to be one of the best days of my life!’ All modesty or emotional restraint went up in smoke with the fire and I unleashed a guttural scream at the ocean:
‘YEEESSSS!’
This was quite a leap – fire, after all, was one of the greatest discoveries in the evolution of humankind. All I had to do now was invent everything from the wheel, through to the moon landings and the Internet. It felt more important than any of those things. I could cook my food; I could expand my diet to eat shellfish and crabs; I could cure meat in the smoke; I could warm myself throughout the night and sleep better; and – best of all and most immediately – I could have a cup of tea.
On the face of it tea may not appear to be a life-altering factor in the art of survival. But the very ability to do something normal, something everyday, meant that this was becoming less of a survival situation and more of a way of life. The very fact that I could do something that made me smile, that wasn’t essential, and that reminded me of home, accounted for a huge positive shift in my mental state from this moment onwards.
The entrance of my cave was flagged by a skeletal pine tree that clung to the rock like a desperate limpet. ‘Vitamin C!’ I thought as I broke off a fistful of the youngest of the soft green pine needles. Pine needle tea has been used for centuries by Native North Americans to prevent coughs and colds and, just as importantly for me, it would make a really nice aromatic tea.
I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen a use for the discarded condensed milk can that I’d picked up a few days before on the beach. It was now so obviously a cooking pot! The top had previously been punctured twice to get at the contents and so, using a shell as a chisel and a rock as a hammer, I excitedly worked around the lip. I folded back half of the top to make a handle, filled the can with my precious fresh water and placed it in the embers of the fire. I added the pine needles and watched the tin can start to turn black as my first cup of tea began to brew.
If coldness, wetness and darkness exacerbate the fear of isolation on an island, fire is the antidote. I sat and watched the red and yellow flames parade around the tin can like loyal soldiers coming to my rescue. The sense of accomplishment − the feeling that I was regaining control − gave me a warm glow of morale-boosting pleasure. It was as if the fire emitted strength, comfort and confidence. As I anticipated my first brew, all the challenges that lay ahead morphed from being frightening and overwhelming obstacles into exhilarating and exciting adventures.
As single bubbles gradually accumulated into a rolling boil I snatched the tin can sharply from the fire fast enough not to burn my London-soft fingers. Watching the steaming can I wondered whether most adult men shared my seemingly permanent doorway into childish happiness. The simple thought of my first sip of tea was making me smile and sing a silly song about having a cuppa: ‘I got a brew on. I got a brew on,’ I sang delightedly. Why hadn’t Afghanistan knocked this excitable kid out of me?
In fact, Afghanistan was at times so mad that I wonder if it made me more childish. I had been there as an ex-military consultant, in charge of the operations room in Herat during the run-up to the first presidential elections. Our base was made up of flimsy Portakabins surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags out near the airport. We were out there because our previous base had been burned to the ground by angry rioting mobs.
One day I was sitting in the Portakabin operations room with another former military consultant, Jonny, when there was a thunderous explosion which made the ground shake beneath us. Then another. Then another. We were being mortared by the Taliban and, as we were in a ruddy Portakabin with no overhead protection whatsoever, there was absolutely nothing we could do to get out of the line of fire.
There wasn’t a sensible solution to our predicament so we came up with a stupid one to distract ourselves from the threat of impending death. You may as well die with a smile on your face. I wish I’d remembered that during my time on the island. It might have helped put it all in perspective. So what did Jonny and I do? We ran around the room with our hands on our heads, of course, shouting, ‘Don’t panic, Captain Mainwaring! Don’t panic!’
I took the water from the fire and poured my first cup of tea into a salvaged glass jam jar.
The reality was even better than the anticipation. The hot fluid passed my lips and ran down my throat in a wave of pure success. Imagine the best cup of tea you’ve ever had – perhaps at the end of a mammoth walk in the cold and wind, or made for you by your mum and brought to you in bed on exam day because she wants to get you off to a good start. It had taken nearly two weeks but I had made fire and had an ability that no other animal in the world had – to make a brew.
My stomach grumbled and growled from the wake-up call of the hot fluid. Having been disturbed from a deep hibernation it now demanded to be fed some hot food. I set about making a snail soup. Until now I had been eating my thirty snails a day raw but now I had the means to transform these cold gritty balls into cooked flesh. I delicately removed every flake of shell from the small lumps of meat and popped them into my hair gel tub. Then the ten naked snails went into the pot with rainwater and a splash of seawater for salt.
When it came to tasting, it was not so much amazing as simply reassuring. The snails were cooked now. I could bite into them, I could chew them. There was a soup to drink afterwards that was slightly salty and had a hint of snail oil. My unloved metal spoon at once became one of my most valuable possessions.
Fire was to be the biggest game-changer in my entire time on the island. I was very, very happy.
I collected some firewood from the surrounding area and it soon dawned on me that I could not chop hardwood, as the clamshell hand axe was too blunt and the energy and time expended wouldn’t be worthwhile. So I needed to collect dead wood that I could snap into pieces. I would clearly have to try to keep the fire as small as possible to conserve fuel.
Early in the afternoon I trod on a couple of terrified crabs and made my first multi-ingredient broth. The crustaceans were fast but I was faster; if I reacted quickly, and they were far enough away from cover, I could bring the flat of my foot down hard and crush them against the flat rock. I emptied 300ml from the seep into the tin, just enough to cover the crabs, and added a splash of seawater for flavour. Lastly, I spotte
d the remaining taro chips and decided to chuck them in the pot as croûtons.
I could hardly contain my glee.
With the fire going and my crab and taro soup on the boil, I had an overwhelming sense of ‘Phew. I can relax now.’ I could feel the tension flowing out of me. I took the soup off the heat, drained the broth into the jam jar and picked the legs apart, popping tiny chunks of white meat into my mouth.
The taste was beyond words.
Into a world of functionality and simply existing there arrived pleasure and enjoyment. I half considered whether I needed to avoid certain parts of the crab but threw caution to the wind and ate everything inside the shell. The lunchtime soup was hearty, too, but I noted that I wouldn’t add the taro next time, as it was a bit starchy – like drinking boiled potato water.
One thing I was concerned about were the two holes in my feet. One on each foot, to be precise. They were not healing properly and so I hobbled down my beach to Shipwreck Pool and, sitting on the edge, cleaned the wounds as thoroughly as I could. They were now fairly deep into the sole of each foot. I took fistfuls of sand and worked it into the holes to act as an abrasive scrubbing brush. Once clean, they looked better but I knew that I needed to try and keep the cave floor dust out of them to allow them to heal over. They were raw and tender and exposed to everything that I trod on. I submerged my fish trap and rested the rock on top.
An ability to cook was a godsend but as a consequence I needed more fresh water than ever. I realised that I’d left some in the well on day eleven and so decided to travel around the island to collect it now. ‘I’ve had a hot meal!’ I smiled as I walked.