Skeletons On The Zahara (13 page)

The Sahara was not always like this. From 5500 to 2500 B.C., it was relatively fertile, wet and inviting. Up until Roman times, antelope, elephants, rhinoceroses, and giraffes roamed a savanna densely studded with acacia, while crocodiles and hippopotamuses wallowed in lush rivers. Ostriches, gazelles, and antelope still persisted in 1815, but by then the Saharan climate was arguably the most extreme on earth. Its temperature could sizzle at more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, the ground temperature soaring 50 degrees higher in the sun; at night, the thermometer could plunge as much as 85 degrees. These conditions, combined with frequent windstorms and less than five inches of average annual rainfall, made sustained life virtually impossible in many parts. As flora and fauna died off or adapted, the land itself deteriorated. While only about a tenth of the Sahara is covered in barren sand dunes, or erg, almost equally formidable are its stepped plains of wind-stripped rock covered in boulders, stones, and dust— the lower elevations generally known as reg and higher ones as hammada.

To the sailors— to the outside world— it was all a vast unknown. Period maps show the Sahara, then often spelled “Zahara” or “Zahahrah” but better known as the Great Desert, as only a large empty space with a few tribal names scrawled on it. The sailors of the Commerce had landed in what would become in 1884 the Spanish protectorate Rio de Oro. In 1958, the Spaniards would combine this district with the Saguia el-Hamra district to the north to form Spanish Sahara; this in turn would become the disputed region of Western Sahara after the Spaniards left under duress in 1976.

In 1789, Brisson of the Ste. Catherine described the western Sahara in stark terms:

These regions afford no variety, the country being entirely flat, and not producing any plant whatever. The horizon is there obscured by a reddish vapour. It looks as if there were burning volcanoes on every side. . . . Neither bird, nor insect, is seen in the air: a profound silence, that has something dreadful in it, prevails. If now and then a small breeze arise, the traveller immediately feels extreme lassitude; his lips crack, his skin is parched up, and little pimples, that occasion a very painful smarting, cover his body (pp. 381-82).

According to Robbins, when the sailors reached the hammada, their minds played tricks on them. Training their professional eyes on the horizon, searching for a reprieve from the void, they thought they saw a lake to the south. They briefly discussed going to it, before realizing that it was nothing but “the striking of the rays of the sun upon the dried sand.” Some of the men were for stopping. Riley, Williams, and Savage urged them to get up, but the officers' exhortations rang hollow. When asked what he thought they should do, Hogan, the ordinary seaman from Massachusetts, replied, “I don't know— but what's the use of lying down to die as long as we can stand up and walk?” It was not what he said so much as how he said it: “with perfect apathy,” Robbins recalled.

Paradoxically, Hogan's utter absence of enthusiasm motivated the men. No tinseled hope would spur them now, only the dispassionate notion that they might as well walk on simply because they could. They picked themselves up and trudged over the flint-hard red earth, marine sediment dating back 60 million years, which spawned dunes in only its most recent 2 million years: some live dunes, granular and yellow, unstable; and some dead in hard brown swells thirty feet high, covered in travertine and undercut by the wind. The sailors stuck to the familiar coast, where the desert ended abruptly, its broken surface having been tossed to the sea below, the dissolution of dead land.

Though it looked devoid of life, the desert around them was home to more creatures than they could have imagined. While the larger mammals had long since fled south, the hyenas and jackals, the wildcats, the reptiles and scorpions had adapted, often with exquisite efficiency. The Saharan cheetah can prowl fifty miles and needs only the blood and urine of its prey to slake its thirst. The horned viper, the Sahara's most feared snake, hunts with its body buried in the cool sand and its wedge-shaped head resting on the surface like a stone. When hungry enough, the ferocious gray monitor will attack a camel, and the foot-long lizard sometimes wins.

The Sahara yielded the sailors a few cryptic signs of accommodation. At first they ignored them: brittle shells of dead locusts and low, dry stalks that resembled wild parsnip. But they soon learned to adjust their sights. Toward sunset, they noticed small holes on the hard surface, according to Robbins, and decided they had been dug by some animal to get to the root of a weedy plant.

They found more of the plants and clawed in the hardpan with sharp stones.5 The effort produced finger-length pieces of a root that tasted like celery, but the plants were too scarce and too dry, and the digging too difficult, to give them much hope.

Robbins later recalled seeing “large heaps of muscle [sic] shells, and the appearance of a former fire where they probably had been roasted by the natives.” They thought they saw human tracks. In a haze of starvation, exhaustion, and thirst, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the men's brains to focus and analyze.

They next spotted in the distance a break in the cliffs and a gradual descent to a swath of beach. It was more of the same, but different, enticing now that they were treading over the bed-of-nails surface, bruising and puncturing their feet. It gave them a reason to keep going, and as night fell upon them, they marched forward. They had been reduced to finding hope and incentive in sand, enough inspiration to carry them another three miles to a place where they could at least lie down in relative comfort and die.

As they walked and the evening wind cooled them, the desert turned black. In the darkness, James Clark, whose keen eyes had served Ketchum before Riley, saw it first. In a hoarse croak, he called out to the others, “I think I see a light!”

Captured

The men agreed that the faint light they saw flickering in the distance was a campfire. A simultaneous rush of joy and fear brought them back to life. At last there was a possibility of relieving the thirst and hunger that burned in their guts like fever. The fear, Robbins said, was that the medicine would be worse— if possible— than the malady. Though miserable, they were still free, and it was known that captives generally did not fare well among the coastal Sahrawis. Caravan merchants from the north were robbed and murdered. Spaniards whose Canary-based fishing vessels ran aground here were routinely slaughtered, and other Westerners endured brutal captivity. The band of Sahrawis that had captured Pierre de Brisson had amused themselves by watching hungry ravens pick at one of his shipmates, who was unconscious but still alive. Later Brisson discovered his enslaved captain's emaciated corpse, teeth sunk into hand: his master had stopped feeding him when he became too ill to work.

Though Riley felt his hopes revive at the sight of the campfire, he remained cautious. He recommended that they rest that night, so as not to surprise the men camped around the fire and send them into a murderous frenzy. The crew agreed.

At the break in the cliffs, they slowly picked their way down a maze of tumbled, broken rocks to the sand they had seen, still well above the sea on an awkward slope. The hardpan they had crossed had cooled rapidly as the sun set, but the sand retained its heat. According to Riley, it was still hot enough “to have roasted eggs” on, but they were too exhausted to go any farther. The Commerces dug down to the cool sand below the surface, making shallow pits for their bodies and shoving the hot sand down the bank. They shared a bit of their remaining water, prayed, and then wordlessly fell asleep, all except for Riley, whose mind whorled. Despite his weariness, he lay awake mulling over their future and suffering from thirst. He bore the responsibility for his men heavily, especially the young ones: Savage and Robbins, whose families had such close ties to his own, and Horace, whose dead father he had loved and whose mother would now in all likelihood lose a son. The next day the Sahrawis would either kill them or enslave them. The best they could hope for was to eventually be ransomed. It was almost too much for him to bear.

Riley craved any end to his thirst, even death. Remorse was vanishing in the agony of his thirst. He had few reflections on his life, on his children, made no silent farewells to his wife. All thoughts of his family, he later confessed, with the candor of a compulsively truthful man, were “driven almost entirely from my mind”; he would sell his life, he admitted, for a “gill of fresh water.”

Though he prayed for sleep, even just an hour, it never came. Bitter thoughts tormented him. He begrudged his men their successful stupors. Finally, in his despair, he broke down. Instead of trading his life for a gill of water, he forfeited his honor for a few drops of stale urine. “[I] stole a sip of the cook's water, which he had made and saved in a bottle,” Riley later confessed. The briny substance only increased his fiery thirst.1

At daybreak on September 10, Riley awakened the men. They were reduced almost as much as a group of men could be: they had no food or drink to speak of— a few still possessed bottled urine and knots of pork— no shelter, little clothing, no weapons, and they were in a hostile environment, to their eyes devoid of resources. The equation was now simple and the eventual result clear. An outside force was necessary for their salvation, and they knew of only one outside force.

To prepare the men, Riley dispensed practical information. “If it is ever in your power, you must write Mr. James Simpson, the American consul general at Tangier, and tell him of the fate of our vessel and crew. Or write to any Christian merchant in Mogadore, Gibraltar, or elsewhere,” he said. "Address the consul at Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli if you hear those places mentioned.

“Remember,” he added, “Providence has worked in our favor. Submit to your fate like men, and should we be made slaves, be obedient, as policy requires, to your master. We must submit to save our lives. Resistance and stubbornness will only make us more miserable and probably prompt the natives to murder us out of resentment.”

As they prepared to walk to the campfire they had seen the night before, the men bowed their heads and Aaron Savage led them in prayer: “Heavenly Father, we implore you to protect and support us in whatever situation we might be placed, in whatever scenes we might be called to act, and in whatever sufferings we might be compelled to endure.”

“Amen,” they said together.

The men descended to a beach and walked northeast along it in the direction of the campfire. After about two miles, they came to a massive dune. When they climbed it, they saw a valley separated from the sea by a ridge of sand and from the desert by the coastal bluffs. About half a mile from them, camels and Sahrawis thronged around a well.

The sailors recoiled at the sight of these strange people and their ungainly beasts. It was one thing to pursue a distant flicker of firelight, which, at the end of a desperate day, had seemed a beacon of hope. It was another to beg for mercy from men they viewed as savages. Now the crew's opinions differed. Some wanted to wait and watch. “They might assist us,” others argued. “This might be a caravan heading north.” Riley was convinced they had no choice. They moved forward.

An Arab man in a haik and two women in flowing robes, who with some children had wandered off in their direction, spotted them first. As soon as he understood what he was seeing, the man drew his scimitar and made for them with the women and children at his heels. Those around the well soon realized that fate had put them at a disadvantage and set out with the zeal of men wronged.

Riley advanced with mates Williams and Savage. They bowed to the ground and then slowly rose. Riley continued to try to indicate their submission, but it quickly became apparent that this was not the issue. Possession was.

The man, whose name they later learned was Mohammed, charged ferociously at Riley with his scimitar poised overhead. Riley believed the man was about to cut him down. He waited, knowing that any sign of resistance would only guarantee it. He bowed down again. The man dropped his weapon and began to pull Riley's clothes off.

The two frenzied women did the same to Williams and Savage. Then, with their children, they fearlessly assaulted the rest of the crew, stripping off their clothes. Only Robbins and a few others managed to keep their pants. Mohammed now advanced on the crew, jabbing his scimitar at their chests and swinging the curved blade over their heads until they cowered together beneath him. Clutching Dick Deslisle, he returned to the officers before the charging horde reached them. He tore off his own haik, leaving himself naked, and stuffed all the clothes lying on the ground into it. He put the bundle on Deslisle's shoulders, indicating to Riley that he and Deslisle belonged to him now and that if they lost the bundle he would kill them.

Spears, scimitars, war clubs, and muskets glinted in a swirling storm cloud of dust and confusion as ululating tribesmen, dressed in animal skins or flowing white haiks and turbans, bore down on them. Some were on foot, others lofted to absurd heights on their frothing camels. As the beasts lurched to a halt, the riders leaped off and attacked.

The naked man and the two women unleashed their own fury, screaming with atavistic rage, crouching and defiantly tossing handfuls of sand into the air to ward off the attackers.

“All seemed anxious to be the first sharers in the plunder,” remarked Robbins, in the calm of hindsight, “when alas, they could find no plunder but our miserable bodies.” Riley was still standing out front with Williams and Savage when the newcomers surrounded them and, disregarding Mohammed's prior claim, began to fight over them. Half a dozen shouting men vied for control of Riley, grabbing at him and pulling him in different directions. The same happened to Deslisle.

Like a cyclone in a thunderstorm, Mohammed leaped about, fending off the aggressors with threats and thrusts of his scimitar. He barked at the others to divide the rest of the sailors as they pleased but to stay away from these two. Some heeded his emphatic gestures and left to seize other men, but there were too few sailors to go around. They continued to fight for Riley, their weapons flashing at his sides and inches from his head, until the whir of their metal sounded to him louder than their shouts. He was the helpless fulcrum of a pitched battle, in which he observed them “hacking each other's arms apparently to the bone, then laying their ribs bare with gashes, while their heads, hands, and thighs received a full share of cuts and wounds.” Blood soaked white garments. It was bedlam, and all that the horrified Americans could do was pray that a blade did not strike them down.