Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  I could see from the foam that was bubbling on the top of the can that I was in for something a bit special. There was colour to this brunch – and it was green. The first mouthful of the hot broth was remarkable. The addition of these different, green, sand crabs had transformed snail soup into a wonderful rich concoction. They were only about the size of a fried egg – legs included – and so I simply bit them in half, the exoskeleton being soft enough to crunch and swallow, and that became the way I ate crabs for the whole trip. No shelling, fiddling or waste – I devoured them like whole logs fed into a wood chipper.

  It’s next to impossible to convey how good food can be when you are almost starving. It’s also interesting why it is so necessary to explain just how incredible it tasted. Food itself becomes all-consuming because your taste buds are so awakened that every mouthful is quite extraordinary. The crab had real meat on it and I could feel the nutrients seeping into my muscles and into my brain. The sprats, too, were wonderfully different with their more fishy texture and flavour and the whole dish just kept me searching for superlatives. I savoured the last slurps of the broth from the plastic bowl and then I refilled the tin with clay water for a morning brew.

  It was the beginning of week three. There still wasn’t quite enough water to do what I wanted to do and to be comfortable and, as a result, I was always slightly uneasy. My well was still dry and in fifteen days I reflected that I had received less than fifteen minutes of steady rain. So, in order to focus on something that I could indeed control and influence, I started to plan.

  With fire now achieved, I decided I would build a shelter fairly close to the cave, about 150 metres south and tucked into the tree line above the highest tide. This meant I was still on the protected side of the island and that the trees would further reduce the cooling effects of the wind at night.

  Remembering the farce of my previous attempt at construction I tried to talk to myself calmly: ‘I’m not going to panic about it, I’m just going to build a little bit each day.’

  To further emphasise my control I broke down the day into sections.

  ‘Today I’m going to start the construction of a house − I’m going to do:

  four hours’ construction work,

  two hours of fishing,

  one hour cooking,

  one hour collecting water,

  half an hour collecting firewood,

  I’m going to take two fifteen-minute breaks,

  and I like to have the first hour and the last hour to myself.’

  I suppose I was just searching for down time rather than the constant responsibility of survival. I had every waking moment to myself. If the list seems ridiculously regimented and overly structured now, there was necessity in this carving up of time. I knew from experience that in long-drawn-out tasks where there may not be perceivable regular goals it can feel as if you are treading water and achieving absolutely nothing. But by setting mini goals and allocating these periods of time I could congratulate myself on having applied myself for a certain period of time whether or not I had actually achieved any goal, such as catching a fish. It was a technique I had employed when revising for my A-levels − I set myself the goal of doing ten hours’ revision a day. Revision, by its very nature, has no obvious tangible goals at the end of each day – so it was vital to create some artificial goals to keep me motivated and to reassure me that I was working hard and not wasting my time.

  Those were my tactics anyway. In fact, I think that the obsessive planning and thinking put undue pressure on me. I was so out of control that I was trying to build a set of rules and schedules to stick to in order to give myself a sense of mastery. In fact none of it mattered – but I managed to create pressure and drama out of a situation in which there was none.

  I went out to look for hardwood for the trident spear − my softwood splinters wouldn’t penetrate a jellyfish. On the steep bank behind my beach I picked up a hermit crab that was inhabiting what looked like a blue plastic shotgun cartridge. I wondered if it was the same one that I’d terrified out of its gastropod shell and that had then found a new, more modern abode. It didn’t matter – with my fire burning he was now reclassified as food. Not wanting to kill the crab, and therefore start the decomposition phase, which would mean I had to cook him quickly before he went off, I simply broke his legs to disable him and popped him in my basket alive. This sounds pretty brutal, and it’s normally something I would never even contemplate. But in a survival situation, with no fridge to keep things fresh, keeping something alive is the best way to keep it fresh.

  Through the undergrowth I then ran into the goats and, even though I didn’t yet have a weapon, I decided to stalk them to see how close I could get. Frustratingly, they skipped up to the north of the island, moving too fast for me to keep up, so I gave up my pursuit and wandered down to my cave via the Faraway Tree.

  The nylon cord on my flip-flops was now cutting into my skin and leaving raw sores on the tops of both feet. I took some ragged blue material that I’d found attached to another flip-flop and I wound it around the nylon string to make it less harsh.

  Despite not having hardwood barbs, I managed to assemble my first trident spear. I simply bound three six-inch softwood splinters around the end of my straightest beach hibiscus pole with bark and there it was − my first hunting tool. It was pretty crude but it would do for practice and I wanted to get out there and fish. Despite the day being overcast, I covered myself in clay to protect my skin from the reflection of the sun in the sea. The soft brown creamy clay went on thick and smooth and I could tell it would work well in protecting me from exposure when fishing in the shallows.

  Covered in clay with my grass skirt, basket and new spear, I walked towards the water’s edge feeling and looking the part for the first time. Two weeks in and I was no longer the awkward chubby white man desperately throwing rocks up into coconut trees. I was clothed and protected from the sun. And, for the first time, I was armed.

  Spear held aloft, I glided into the calm water with a look of intent on my face. I felt that I was doing what I was meant to be doing. I wasn’t sitting in the dust of my cave moaning – I was thigh-deep in crystal-clear waters poised to strike and kill my prey.

  Sadly, my feel-good factor didn’t translate into food. The wind picked up and the water became choppy so that I couldn’t see below the surface. My spear felt wrong – the head felt impotent and the weight was at the other end. Naively I’d tied the barbs to the thinner end of the pole, thinking that the spear would fly better with the streamlined narrow end cutting through the air. Holding the weapon aloft it was at once obvious that the weighty end – the blunt end – had to be at the front so that the thin, tapered end would act as the flight. I twisted the spear around in my fingers and it at once felt balanced with the fat end at the head. I threw it on to the water and it did indeed fly better. But I still couldn’t see what I was doing so I gave up and waded back to the beach. I’d not seen a single fish.

  By late morning I decanted another third of a litre from the seep. I was content with the end product but still needed more water so I brought a large palm leaf around to this beach to try to shade the seep from the merciless rays of the afternoon sun. Hopefully this would now allow the seep to continue working outside its normal office hours of dusk to midday.

  Enjoying my wanderings, I travelled round to the other side of the island to collect lemon thorns and to try and scavenge crabs and snails en route. The thorns were long and strong and if used intelligently would be a fantastic addition to the point of a spear. While I was there I stocked up on lemon leaves for tea and, as I picked the young soft foliage from the branches, it was then that I realised that the smaller thorns on the younger branches were more like large rose thorns and could make great fishing barbs.

  On leaving the camp I noticed a pile of very old coconut husks littering an area the Fijian clan had obviously used to
break them open. In the middle of the area there protruded the stump of a sapling that had been felled with a machete to a sharp point. The locals must have used this hardwood sapling to open the coconuts and I immediately saw this as a gift: I’d identified at least one proper type of hardwood. With my clamshell axe I split off a section that I could later whittle into spear tips in the cave.

  I headed back to the cave to tend the fire. I really was just inching forward every day. I’d told myself that today I would do four hours’ construction but by the time I had foraged and fished it was early afternoon and I’d not even started work on the house. Every day there was so much to do just to survive. I saw no crabs as I walked around the shore, and that deflated me. Another two paces forward, another one step back.

  Back in the cave, the fire was still alight so I decided to break for a late lunch of the blue-housed hermit crab. This was a different grade of crab from the green skinny beach crabs or the standard brown rock crabs – a higher class altogether. The strong legs were hairy and the abdomen was plump and fleshy. In the pot it turned bright red and I devoured the body and savoured the juices that flowed from the abdomen. ‘It’s full of something fatty – is it shit?’ I mused. ‘Perhaps.’ But I was drawn curiously to the odd oily flavour. I munched each leg whole as if they were Twiglets as they contained vital protein. Sipping lemon leaf tea I felt recharged by the meal and ready to start work again.

  I spent several hours in the afternoon walking around the flat land just inside the island’s forest. If I was going to build a house I wanted it to be a good one. I didn’t want to waste several days on a house that would fall down or one that was temporary and would need replacing after a couple of weeks.

  I had proposed this whole adventure to Discovery Channel. I had sold the idea of the programme on the premise that from scratch I would evolve from a primitive beast into someone who tamed the island and was living a sustainable life in comfort. I even claimed I would be in a tree house by the end – Tarzan-style – with pulleys to haul up water and a veranda to sit on in the evenings surveying my territory. I knew therefore that I had planted seeds in the commissioning editors’ heads and that expectations were very high.

  By now I was only too aware how long things really took when you had no tools. Cutting down a three-inch-diameter tree took the best part of two hours using a blunt piece of clamshell as a hand axe. So when I began surveying the location of the impressive tree house I intended to build, I naturally looked for existing tree formations that would demand the least possible work. Perhaps I could find three trees positioned in a triangle that I could use as the main pillars of my raised home and, hopefully, I could find ones that had boughs coming off at the right height so that I could slot in beams for the floor.

  I searched and searched but I could not find the right configuration of trees to help me convert my dreams of a home in the sky into reality. I began to realise that such a building would be ridiculously over-optimistic. Even getting to the stage where I had a raised triangular platform could be three days of hard work and then I didn’t know if it would be strong or stable enough. Constructing a roof over this raised platform meant that I would be working at quite some height above the ground with no ladders, no ropes and no safety equipment. I started to fear that this pipe dream in the sky was never going to work.

  Time out.

  I returned to the cave, sat in my stone circle and breathed in deeply. Crikey, why was I piling so much pressure on myself? I looked out to sea and said a big thank you for the fact that I now had fire. I was winning. I then turned to the construction project and asked myself why I was really moving out of this cave. It was, after all, warm, dry and serving me perfectly well.

  The answer was that I could have slept in the shit on the floor of a cave eating raw snails for sixty days if I’d wanted to, but my aim wasn’t to just survive; it was, as I have said, to evolve and eventually to thrive. Building my own house had to be a significant part of that evolution. I accepted that but then asked myself why was I building a tree house and not a simple but practical shelter on the ground. The answer was that I wanted to live up to my naïve promises to Discovery Channel. I wanted to show off, to prove how I could not just get by, but I could live in style. I laughed at myself and the place that I’d got to. I could not have predicted how difficult this project would be − no one could − without actually attempting it and finding out how all of the different factors would come together to make it exceptionally hard. So why then did I not just allow the project to unfold naturally and build what was an appropriate shelter considering what I now knew?

  I concluded that my shelter did not need to be off the ground. I had an area that was dry and flat, and to ignore this very amenable forest floor was daft. I would build a simple double lean-to shelter – like a thatched ridge tent – and it would be waterproof, windproof and, most importantly, realistic to build in the circumstances.

  I wasn’t elated by the realisation that I’d have to redefine my goals because it meant that I probably wasn’t going to evolve as far as a tree house with built-in hot tub, but I consoled myself with the fact that I would at least be able to move into a home that I had built myself rather than adapted – and that I was doing the very best I could.

  More composed now, I walked back into the forest interior and looked at three different sites that had relatively flat ground and that were flanked by two large trees that would be the end supports for my shelter. I calmly walked between the three sites, assessing the pros and cons, and eventually decided upon a site that was a couple of feet above the line of coconuts that demarcated the highest of high tides and that had two great solid trees with handy Y-forks in their trunks just above head height that I could slot a ridge pole into. I walked back to the cave reassured that I had made the right decision and that I now had an achievable plan.

  In the evening I cooked in seawater again to save fresh water. It meant I couldn’t drink the snail broth with its vital nutrients but I had to be careful with my fresh water supply. I allowed myself a half-glass of lemon leaf tea and while its warmth was still in my belly I curled up beside my star fire and closed my eyes.

  ‘Morning. It’s day sixteen.’

  I smashed a brown coconut open on a rock and arranged the randomly shaped tiles of flesh around the fire. My baking technique was evolving, too, and now I particularly loved the blackened edge where the fire had burned and carbonised the sweet fragments. Each bite caused a mini explosion of hot sweet juices from beneath a caramelised shell.

  I replaced the softwood barbs with the hardwood that I found yesterday, this time lashing them to the fat end of the spear. ‘I’m no fisherman – I really am not – but looking at the ocean I can’t harpoon fish in this. It’s too rough,’ I said, gazing over the white waves of the lagoon. I told myself that there would be considerable periods of time when this method of fishing would not be possible. Should I turn to hunting? Rats? Birds? Goats? I berated myself for not spending enough time with the Fijian clan prior to the experiment. I didn’t know how they fished, where they fished, when they fished, or with what they fished. The whole fishing thing was a daunting prospect, not because it was scary but because I was loath to risk wasting time getting nothing.

  I therefore switched my attention to shelter as it would give me a more certain result. The first thing to erect was a ridge pole – the heart of my construction upon which everything else would depend, so it needed to be solid. I paced out the distance between the trees and quickly realised that I could not fell one tree that would be long enough and strong enough to span the gap.

  Confidence in my own ability brimming now, I opted for a tried and tested method that I’d used in construction projects in Belize − albeit with sawn lumber and nails. I would splice two poles together and lash them tight with hibiscus bark. This would make the pole long enough without my having to cut down a big tree, thus expending far too much energy. />
  I decided that my heavy coconut pole was too heavy for its current use and that it would function perfectly as half of this ridge pole. The second tree that I selected came down relatively easily after about an hour’s work. I dragged it down the steep slope to a point ten metres directly above my construction site, where the cliff became almost vertical. From there I simply propelled the pole off the cliff into my camp below and I then took an easier route to the bottom to collect it. With the branches trimmed off, I laid the two poles with their fattest ends outwards and overlapped the inner, narrow ends by four feet. I then tightly bound the joint together with bark to produce a very strong, very long ridge pole.

  By now, although I was still feeling very positive, all of the energy supplied by my breakfast had long since been used up. I just had to slot the pole into the natural nooks that were created by the support trees. ‘I think this is going to work – this is starting to be fun,’ I said as I could see the project coming to fruition. I eased one end up into the cradle of the branch and then brought the pole parallel to the ground by raising the opposite end and slotting that in place.

  I stood back to admire my handiwork.

  The effect was immediate. I had the beginnings of a decent shelter with a very solid ridge pole standing about eight foot off the ground between two trees. It had taken about three hours. But I was so chronically malnourished that everything I did drained me completely. ‘It’s like building a house on an overdose of Valium,’ I told the camera. ‘That there ridge pole means quite a lot to me – that’s the start of my new home.’

  I realised I had been admiring my fledgling timber frame for a good ten minutes in silence. One of the great things about the area was the bank of immature palms that separated me from the beach. The band of foliage was about five metres thick and completely cut out the wind blowing in from the Pacific. The more I thought about it, the more this site made sense. ‘I’m very dehydrated now – I can hardly speak.’