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[Ross Devitt]

I know the castaway theory is rather old hat now, but recently I was in a position to do some tests again.  Some years ago before my brain lesion and subsequent injuries to my spine when they were moving me around planes and ambulances trying to save my life, stopped me sailing, I did another small experiment on one of my islands.

Following in from the 'sextant box' experiment I did many years ago, I did a coconut experiment.  Now, we have tropical islands, but coconuts are just not native.  it happened that the island where I used to live on my yacht had two coconut trees.  One planted by me when I was young, and another that just appeared.  So I acquired some nuts and experimented with opening them without any tools.  The experiment is written up in a post somewhere on this forum with photos using my watch to show how long it took.

But there was a serious error, that is often made by people not used to coconuts.  And recently I had a chance to discover how wrong I was.  because recently I have been living alone in a desrted resort (part of a rotating caretaking team) on an island about 2.5 miles long by about 1 mile wide.  Tropical, lousy soil, and not a natural environment for cocos.  And there have been drought conditions for a long, long time. 

There are coconut trees dotted around what used to be resort gardens, in a very small area.  Far less nuts than are on Niku, and probably similar to the number described as being on Gardner in 1938 reports.  So in efffect, a very similar situation, except it is only about 35 degrees C in the shade, so probably a lot colder than Niku.

Ok, back to the experiment.  When I go across to this island I have to take my own supplies for each week.  On one trip I was moving some cocos and realised they had water in them.  Having a girlfriend in the Philippines and having visited a coconut plantation they are involved with, I now knoe I used to look at the wrong nuts.  I assumed only mature nuts had water, and it has to make a noise when you shake the nut.

But pickiing up a small, immature green nut from the ground, that had fallen from a tree maybe 10 metres tall, I realised there was water leaking from it.  And, it was soft!!  So instead of trying to husk it as I did in my previous experiment, I cut into the stem end with a pocket knife.  It was so easy, albeit fiddly, using a pocket knife.

So next trip, instead of using my bottled water, I wandered around the jungle (used to be resort grounds, but now overgorwn) and looked for nuts of various sizes.  Green and about the size of two clenched fists were fine, and the ones a little bigger that were just turning from green to gold were also excellent.  Bigger than that and the outer skin was beginning to go hard and the inside was drying into the 'coir' that door mats used to be made from.

The biggest discovery though was that you don;t have to hear water sloshing around to have a drinkable but.  So many nuts I had passed over in the old days were so full that there was no air space to make the sloshing noise.  There was between 250ml and 400ml of refreshing water in each nut.  I collected half a dozen nuts most days, sometimes more.  Opening them once I could make a cutting tool, basically anything that would hold an edge, took maybe a minute, sometimes less.

Carefully pouring the coco water into a bottle about the size of a Benedictine bottle gave me a way to keep a bit to carry with me on a walk.   

The other interesting thing was that going directly from drinking normal water, to only drinking coconut water did NOT cause any upset to my system.  No diaorrhoea, no pee problems, no nausea.  In fact i was probably the opposite.

Since then I have drastically cut the amount of water I drink from the stocks I take each trip, and each morning the first job is to do a walk around looking for the appropriate nuts.   I have no idea how far TIGHAR crew got into this sort of experiment when they were on NIKU, or who might have decided to live ONLY on coco juice as their source of liquid.  But I've pretty well proven to myself that getting all your water requirements by opening and making use of nuts from a drought stricken plantation with only 50 or less trees is not only possible, but entirely likely.

Of course, the big difference here is that we don;t have to try to beat crabs and rats to the nuts.  I'm not sure how a castaway would overcome that - but records show that Amelia and Freddy were pretty good at improvising.

These are some of the small nuts collected one morning from the immediate vicinity of the unit where I stay (without power, water or sewage)  Basically just an old room that used to be the top of the range) and the lower 2 opened with a pocket knife.

[Ric Gillespie]

All very interesting but one thing we do know is that the castaway's final camp was far (over two miles) from the only cocos on the island.  Did she camp near the cocos until all of the drinkable nuts were used up or did she never figure out the trick that it took you so long to learn?

[Bob Smith]

That's very nice, Ross. How long do you estimate Amelia an Freddie would be able to live on coco water? If they were able to figure everything out about how to get into them?

[Ross Devitt]

It only took me so long to learn because in the past I only had access to a single tree, and nuts that were old and dried by the time I got hold of them.  And had never had the opportunity of consuming proper drinking nuts fresh.  Amelia and Fred had travelled extensively and it is rather likely both had seen fresh cocos opened by slicing the end off while the nut is soft.  I never experienced that until I was on a coco plantation and someone sliced the end of a nut and handed it (the nut - not the end) to me to drink from. 

Only being alone and isolated in a place where nuts fall every night gave me the chance to discover that many nuts falling from high up fracture a little and dribble water.  And I discovered that the first day I decided to make a pathway past a particular tree.  That one tree provided me with 4 nuts in one day.  Another tree gave me a few more. 

Next trip I actively began looking for a couple of nuts each morning because I like coco water.

Anyway, it can never be conclusive, because we were not on Gardner in 1937.  But it does provide a 'possibility' that if I can work out what nuts to use  and how to best open them in a morning of messing with them, Fred and Melly's combined intellects may have provided the smarts to do the same over a week or two. 

There was a possible finding of pocket knife parts in Niku dating to about the Earhart era.  But failing that, anythign that would hold an edge can scrape into the small amount needed to access the water, as you can see from the bottom two nuts.

And after that, the nut can be opened up completely with a decent stick or something to get some of the flesh to nibble on, which has stuff all nutritional value, but give the impression of 'eating.  I guess it would be better than nothing for a hungry castaway to nibble on coco flesh than to suffer hunger pangs, while waiting for a turtle or while scavenging shell fish.

I've never really had the option of being in a similar position to them with enough neglected, old cocos around me.  And, to top it off, I have serious mobility problems similar to or perhaps worse than they might have experienced in a bad landing.  Walking a couple of miles n hot coral rubble in 30+ degrees C is annoying, but not exactly a problem.  I do it even with my spinal problems.  As part of my therapy.

And each tree drops enough nuts all year round to ensure a frequent supply without any climbing.  Sometimes one tree dropw a heap of nuts in a night, next day it is another tree.  Sometimes only one or two nuts in a week from one tree.  But the number of trees reported by the 1938 reports is sufficient for survival.  And the rubbish I've heard about relying on cocos for drinking water making us ill is just that - utter rubbish.

So it is far from conclusive, but quite plausible, that if they were cast away,and even if injured, they might have known enough from their travels to know you can easily shave the top off a green to goldish nut and get a drink.  I'm not trying to be argumentative - just trying to explain my suspicion.

The big question for me is how the hell would they beat the crabs and rats to the nuts?

While I was writing this, Bob posted a reply.  So I'll answer here.
Bob, there are too many variables to even guess.  Were they injured worse than me?  Were they injured at all?  And the biggy from just aboce - How could they beat the natives to the nuts.  As I've found, nuts just fallen are soft.  You could probably open them with your teeth if you were determined enough.  Might have to try that next trip, I never thought about it. 

But as long as they could get 6 to 10 nuts a day even from trees affected by a long drought, they 'should' get 1.5 to 2.5 litres a day.  That would have to be 'each' to sustain life more or less indefinitely.  Then of course, any vegetable matter they managed to consume woudl contain more water, and the blood from any animal life they ate, like rats and such, would also contain water.

I'm pretty sure I would hate eating raw rat. But I'm pretty sure if I could not catch and eat raw fish I would eventually eat rat raw.  People eat raw human flesh under extreme duress.  And there was only one skeleton found...

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Some of your earlier posts, Wombat.



Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:31:33
From: Ross Devitt
Subject: Coconuts


I don't know how many coconuts you opened on Niku expeditions trying
to see how difficult it is using no tools. Last week I just happened
to be sitting on an island that I had all to myself, with a coconut
tree, a flat rock and a watch.


I climbed the tree (ok, it was a smallish tree) and twisted off 4
greenish nuts. Sat down and wondered how I would approach this task
if I was on an island and had no idea how to get inside the thing.


First nut, I bashed all over to loosen the husk. Turned out that the
end where it attaches to the tree started splitting, so I started
stripping the husk from that end, giving the occasional bash as I
went. Once the nut was divested of the outer skin, I had the coir to
contend with. A bit of messing around and I found I could strip that
most easily from the stalk end too, after some more gentle bashing.


It took about 20 minutes to get to the nut and open it by poking a
stick through the biggest 'eye'.


The next nut took a little over ten minutes and each nut after than
was about the same or less as I got more used to the technique.
These nuts have been in a drought for many years, so there was not a
lot of water in the nut, but it was there and because the Niku nuts
had been cultivated (mine were wild and immature) there would have
been more water in the nuts there, even after a drought.


As you are aware, I suffer serious fatigue problems as well as
having had both wrists, ankles, a hand and a foot broken and the
list goes on. I mention that because, as out flighty friends may not
have been in the best of health after a few days, I am not in peak
condition either. My 'bashing' of the nuts was rather gentle, and I
did not try to hurry the peeling of the husk. I just quietly
stripped it away a little at a time as I enjoyed the scenery and
solitude.


Something else comes to mind. Should someone be husking cocos, there
is a huge amount of husk left over from each nut. Dried, it could be
used for all sorts of thing.


Anyway, I assume with all the visits to Niku, someone sat for an
hour and husked nuts - but just in case they didn't, this proves it
was feasible to get water, even if it took a couple of hours a day
to get a quart. Makes one wonder if the Benedictine bottle held
water for drinking, or coconut water for drinking.


I had done some experiments on cocos on my old trees at my previous
house, but they were nuts lying on the ground. These were, as I say,
wild, stunted cocos on an island that has had several (about 7)
years of straight drought. Also, on that test I used whatever came
to hand. This time it was just a flat rock. the reason for the flat
rock, when a pointed one may have streamlined the procedure, was
that I didn;t want to take off my skin rather than the husk.


Cheers,


Th' WOMBAT


Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:45:50
From: Ross Devitt
Subject: Re: Water on Niku


>So it would appear that if the castaway's Benedictine bottle had been
>used for drinking water, it would possibly have been coconut water, at
>least after a time.


How much water do you get from individual nuts picked up off the
ground on Niku? I am assuming:


A - TIGHAR has opened nuts on the ground during expeditions.
B - The castaway would have had problems accessing nuts on the trees.
C - The castaway would have discovered rats and crabs like nuts and
taken appropriate action.


My experiments on tropical Islands with very little rainfall show a
considerable variation in the amount of water available, but little
difference between amounts in green (on the tree) or brown (on the
ground) nuts.


I think I worked out last time I did this experiment on an island
(August 2008) that one could need up to two hours and 10 nuts to get
a litre (quart) of water in some cases, based on a tested time of 10
minutes to remove enough husk form a green nut that it could be
opened.


Still trying to keep those castaways breathing...


Th' WOMBAT

[Ross Devitt]

Thanks Marty,

Geez it was a while ago.  And those two trees were small enoough for me to be able to climb back in those days.  From memory about 2 metres, maybe a tad more.  But it is the nuts that are different.  The nuts I got then and I believe I probably posted the photos of the de husking, were full of 'coir' fibres.  At 10 minutes a nut it was a fair bit of work. 

Now I have access to trees around the size of the Niku trees (these were originally planted around 1930ish) I have similar materials to work with.  The fibre inside the outer skin is soft, wet and pliable.  Anywayt, you can see from the photos in this recent post how little needs to be removed to get into the water.

Thanks for finding the old posts :-)

[Andrew M McKenna]

Ross

Very interesting stuff, thanks.

if you know what you are doing, and have the right tool, it is easier than you might think.

See Richie open and drink two mature cocos in 30 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8fMqSiLqw

Best

Andrew

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Thanks Marty

You're most welcome.


Glad to see you're still with us! 

[Ross Devitt]

yep.  and the right kind of nuts.  I imagine our intrepid aviators might have left the jungle machetes behing.  but still, it didn;t take me much longer than Ritchie to get into a nut using a pocket knife.

Anyway, it ijust confirms that without a regular source of water, Amelia and Fred might have survived months without much problem - IF they beat the crabs and rats to the nuts.

Th WOMBAT

[Tim Collins]

I believe there's a catch 22 to your coconut water survival scenario. Coconut water is also a rather dependable laxative. And for an already bodily-stressed castaway I wouldn't think the results would necessarily be very good.

[Ross Devitt]

Hi Tim.  One of the points I made at the beginning of this post is that coconut water is not necessarily a laxative. In a week.  No, actually 4 days going form a normal diet, to replacing ordinary water with ONLY coconut water, but eating fairly normal food, nothing refrigerated, I had no laxative effect at all.  Not even any difference in regularity, and stools were quite firm and knobbly some days and not knobbly other days.

So it depends on the particular person.  And in the initial stages 'if' Fred and Amelia were in fact castaways, they would not have been in a weakened distressed state. 

I was injured when I did this experiment.  Spinal injury that lets me walk, but I cannot feel surfaces or hot and cold through the soles of my feet.  So for example I can walk on melting bitumen on a hot day and not know until someone points out the blood trail.  And when it is bad I can do the polynesian fire walk at a party, although unlike them, my feet lose the skin (don;t ask me how I found out).  Alone on an island with only the food I carried in with me.  Diet went like this (from my diary):

******************
0530 - found some green cocos when scavenving and clearing paths. too small i think but collected anyway  tried hacking into one with winchester.  surprisingly easy.  try swiss later.  Drank nut.  about a coffee mug amount of water.
** NOTE added for this post -
winchester is a 'Winchester' sheath knife with a 4 inch very sharp blade. 
swiss is a basic genuine Swiss Army Knife with a 2.5 inch blade.

0700 - back from walk.  opened remaining nuts easily carving end with pocket knife.  beats the hell out of husking more mature nuts.  must do more and check tighar forum.  could be interesting.   might try 4 days on coco water. 

0830 - got 300ml, 250ml and 400ml out of remaining nuts.  so almost a litre.  need to find 4 or 5 more if i'm going to test this.  poured water from last 3 nuts into 3 600ml empty bottles from last trip.  abt half full each
Breakfast - 1 slice wholegrain bread  abt 300ml coco water

1040 - found a couple of nuts turning gold but only one 'sloshed'.  carved into a supposedly dry one and there's a pop noise and juice flowed.  seems the goldish ones don't slosh because they are actually full. 
Snack - Handful of cashews  abt 250ml coco water

1210 - snack fruit and jelly snack pack. about 125g mostly jelly. enough to fit in cupped palm of hand

1245 - slice wholegrain bread and about 300ml coco water

1640 - back. found 3 more small nuts.  opened with swiss.  saved water.  i guess close to 2 litres today, maybe a bit less.  drank one nut.
snack - 1 small apple

1700 - slice wholegrain bread

1830 - dinner - 100g can flavoured tuna and coco water
**********************

And the next few days went on like that with little variation.  I'm only ever there 4 or 5 days at a time and there's no radio and sporadic phone signal.  A friend flies overhead most trips so I even get to more or less test the question of whether I can get from the deserted resort, to the beach if I hear the plane.  As often as not I don;t realise it was there.

The diet above was not part of the experiment.  It, with small variations, is all I eat when I'm there.  And I suffer from a chronic fatigue problem, so I can only do 5-10 minutes physical exertion an hour, so moving palm fronds and old nuts off pathways is limited to that.  It is amazing how much physical work an exhausted, partly paralyzed guy can do in 30-40 deg C tropical heat, with no clouds in 10 minutes.  Then there's the 40 or 50 minutes before the next go at it.

Added to that is that I am being eaten by various bugs.  Australia is the home of things that bite and sting, and very often kill.  It is not unusual to be covered with green tree ants and they tend to wait until there are about 100 on you then all bite at once.  it's a team game to them.  March flies are big flies between 1cm and 1.5cm long that suck blood.  I killed 150 in an hour while I was resting.  And we have what we call sand flies.  Biting midges actually.  It is said it is not the bite, but their 'pee' that makes each bite swell and itch for days after a bite.  At around dawn and around dusk these things feed.  I'm not sleeping with screens or closed windows and doors, because there's no electricity.  So I'm living more or less as gallagher did.

I'm lucky.  As a sailor (I still own 2 yachts here) I'm used to this kind of life.  But it would have been interesting for Fred and Amelia, however I think if they were castaway and not injured worse than I am, they could have worked out the hard stuff in a few days to a week and got into a routine that would have them searching for nuts in the early morning, then wandering around looking for edible stuff during the day while keeping an eye out for nuts they may have missed.

Any ideas here can only be speculation.  But actually testing these theories has always been my pet thing.  I always wanted TIGHAR to do the sextant box test in my early days on the forum, and the living on coconut water thing.  But I can find no record of anyone actually sacrificing part of their holiday on Niku to dedicate themselves to the coco water thing.  Still amazes me that nobody followed up my sextant box test to try it in situ from one expedition to another.  But my results there more or less proved that one to me.

Had I been wealthy and fit enough to join a TIGHAR expedition I would have been a bit of dead weight in some ways, because I would have planned to 'play castaway' when this discussion was actually important.  Going onto a very restricted diet for at least a week, drinking ONLY coco water and any other water that could be scavenged, and trying to live on the equivalent amount of meat that would have come from rats, birds, shellfish and crabs.  Assuming the real thing was either impractical, illegal or unpalatable.

My morning walks here are always at first light when it is cool and when the cocos have just fallen.  I just never realise the small ones were drinkable.  I haven't bothered with coco flesh because, well I haven't needed to.  But my experience in the Philippines in 2012 taught me that the flesh in very young nuts is chewy and extremely tasty, as anyone who ever tried 'Buko Pie' in the Laguna area on Luzon (not far out of Manila) will vouch.  So as a food, although it has almost no nutritional value, it would be a great snack during the day.

Anyway, Tim - no bowel problems switching suddenly to coco water only for 4 days and none on my return either.  Coco juice is used in many places to keep kidneys in great condition, and you can now buy pure coconut water in your local supermarket or health food shop.

Th WOMBAT

[JNev]

I can't find it now, but I think I recall some information Ric shared once about coconut water's effect on the body - that for some it is fine, no effects, but on others a marked laxative effect.  It's good to know you did well on it and proved the point for at least part of the population, knobbly stools or otherwise notwithstanding.  I plan to avoid the experiment (or predicament, as it may be).

[Bob Smith]

Ross, you have an intriguing way of life! Can you tell more about it (briefly and without going too far off topic). Mainly things that would be similar to what a castaway on Niku would encounter?

[Jerry Germann]

http://www.naturallivingideas.com/coconut-water-benefits/

[Ross Devitt]

Thanks Jerry, I think that page on coconut water, whilst it may not be particularly scientific, more or less tells the story, and regarding any laxative effect I suspect the advice not to 'over do it' comes into play.  If you sit and drink a litre of coconut water four times a day it is very possible you might get the trots.  if your sole dietary intake is coconut flesh and coconut water, well maybe also.  But on no occasion where I've added coco milk to my diet, and certainly during this experiment, which involved a sudden switch from ordinary fluids to coco water withno tapering - well I was fine.

Bob, it's well known on the forum that I could talk under wet cement.  One reason why you see so little of Th WOMBAT here any more.  I was bad enough when I was using the forum to keep me sane after some dramatic injuries in the old days, but in 2011 I ended up with a Golden Staph abscess in the brain, and I'm pretty sure than has drastically lowered my IQ.  Probably no more than 160 or 170 now, so I don;t think well any more.

But once in a while I'm in a situation that reminds me of TIGHAR, and being invited to baby sit a tropical island with old, drought starved coconut palms that are too high to climb and a whole abandoned village to myself, about the size of the settlement on Gardner put me somewhere between our castaways and Gallagher.  There was just too much temptation to try something I wondered about when the castaway question was an active topic.

My methods are practical rather than scientific.  I have to carry all the supplies with me for each trip, including water.  But before the brain lesion I was living on one of my small (24 foot and 26 foot) yachts.  When I was first on the forum I was living on an 18 foot yacht, again among tropical islands.  So I'm used to improvising.  The only thing I had no access to was a 50 year old long term drought affected coco plantation - until now.

Lifestyle.  Well, I was something of an adventurer when I was young, doing many things I regret now from a health point of view,but would do again given the same opportunities.  I've been taken to places in my country that have probably never been seen by white men, and will never be allowed to be seen by white women.  I still have some of these places where until the brain lesion, I would go to lock myself into 'the earth', and will never share them with any non-indigenous person.  I, by the way, am not indigenous.  just was accepted by interesting people because of my attitude to them.

So I'm a weirdo - but not a tree hugger.  I started flying at age 15 and have logged flight time in many sorts of single and twin engined aircraft including biplanes, for fun - but never finished my licence because it was only done for and work or study always got in the way.  but I had passenger carrying privileges.  that's all I needed.  Probably called a 'restricted private licence' in the USA.  I'm trained in dressage and have won blue in dressage and show jumping but also ridden saddle broncs and bulls.  Probably some of the reason I am often partly paralysed now.  And I've lived in desert and snow.  I also have passed several units for a number of degrees (8 I think) at a few Universities, but never completed them.  If I could get through 3 or 4 units with a pass mark about 95% or better, it was all I needed to know and I got bored.  Oh, and back in the early days of lurking on TIGHAR, before I started posting, I 'accidentally' found myself inside the server of a certain University in the USA that had files, files and more files on Earhart and 'acquired' them.  But some time after they made most of them available online anyway. 

I've been learning about stuff and life, all my life, and what I learned mostly is that we never stop learning, and with what we think or discover, a single person is not always right.  It is possible for two people with two different perceptions of something - to be right.   So my opinions expressed on the forum are always just that - my opinions.  Not hard fact.  I'll discuss something and try to present reasoned suggestions based on my experience - but I can be wrong and am happy enough to be proved wrong.  Unless I have solid experience that I am correct, in which case, let others believe what they read elsewhere.  I'm happy with actual results.

Th WOMBAT

Bob, that should cure you of asking a simple question about my lifestyle - a biography instead  :-)