EXCLUSIVE: We survived a terrifying ambush by gun-wielding Peruvian pirates in the Amazon – by fighting them off with PADDLES: Two ex-Royal Marines tell their incredible true story
- To watch the full episode of MailOnline’s new series ‘My Story’, click here
Two former Royal Marines have told MailOnline how they were ambushed by gun-wielding Peruvian pirates in the Amazon before fighting them off with paddles.
John Bathgate, 35, and Ian Roberts, 34, were attempting a world-first expedition across 3,186 miles of the Amazon River from its highest point in Ecuador at Volcán Chimborazo, across South America to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Brazil.
But while approaching the Colombian border in their canoes, the British former commandos were ambushed and held at gunpoint by two Peruvian pirates.
Despite only being armed with oars and suffering gunshot wounds, Mr Bathgate and Mr Roberts fought back – managing to overthrow the bandits and flee to safety.
Now, they have spoken to MailOnline about their ordeal during their ‘Summit to Sea’ adventure, which forms the latest episode of this website’s new human interest series on YouTube called ‘My Story’ featuring people with extraordinary life stories.
To watch the full episode click here.
Ian Roberts (left) and John Bathgate (right), who were attacked by pirates on the Amazon River
Mr Roberts and Mr Bathgate were attempting a world-first expedition across 3,186 miles of the Amazon from its highest point in Ecuador, across to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Brazil
Mr Roberts, from Devon, and Mr Bathgate from Rosewell, Midlothian, began by explaining how they wanted to travel down the length of the Amazon from its highest source at the top of the Chimborazo in Ecuador.
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The mountain, an extinct volcano, is the highest in Ecuador and the top happens to be the furthest point on the Earth’s surface from the Earth’s centre.
Talking about what it was like to go on such a long adventure, Mr Roberts said: ‘Being out in the wilderness is hugely important to both of us just to be able to not have that connection to electricity, essentially social media and all that sort of thing.
‘And the mental health side of it is the challenge in itself. Basically the hardship that you go through to complete the challenge expedition, it’s just great for your mind because it just alleviates any anything in your head that could, you know, that’s just not important, I guess.’
The inspiration for the trip was Mr Bathgate’s father David Bathgate, who in 1968 went on an expedition in Peru to climb the south-west face of Huandoy, a mountain in the Cordillera Blanca region of the Peruvian Andes.
On their return, David and his friends travelled back to the east coast of Brazil via the Amazon River, and discovered the story of a Chimborazo being the highest source.
Mr Bathgate said: ‘He thought as a climber, it’d be great to follow the river from its highest source. And he never got round to that. Two years ago, as I was leaving the Marines, he kind of recognised that I needed to a next project. And he presented the idea of it to me.
‘And since then I was I was planning it for two years, mapped it and got Ian and my brother and some other friends on board. We set out and tried to get it done – it didn’t quite go to plan.’
John Bathgate was inspired to travel the entirety of the Amazon river by his adventurer father
They told how parts of Peru were areas where ‘nobody had seen a Westerner for ten years’ and ‘heard that Westerners are trouble’, so the duo often had a ‘hard time explaining to them that we were not a threat and were simply trying to pass by’.
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They added that they were effectively ‘abducted’ on two occasions until they could prove to the villagers that they were not a threat.
Speaking about the day on which they were attacked, Mr Bathgate said about two and a half hours into the ‘day’s paddling’ they heard an engine approaching them.
Mr Bathgate said: ‘This guy was right on our on our stern, came in, stopped, came in a bit closer, stopped. And then eventually came alongside us and basically looked… there was no reason for him to be there, he wasn’t asking us for things. He wasn’t offering us anything.
‘He was just going to check us out, trying to see if we were armed and trying to see if we were worth robbing.’
They said that after about five minutes, he ‘decided that we were worth robbing’ and pulled out a 9mm pistol.
Speaking about the ‘malevolent look in his eyes’, Mr Roberts added: ‘We won’t forget that because I think it’s is quite a unique experience to see someone’s face when they know they’re going to pull a pistol out to try and essentially kill us.
‘That’s not sticking in my mind like a nasty thing. Just more that’s quite interesting to see in someone’s face.
Mr Bathgate described the boat the bandits were on as a 7m-long native canoe known as a ‘peke peke’ with an engine on the back.
He continued: ‘The guy at the rear was standing on the engine and he said very little, but the guy that ended up pulling the weapon out was quite a young looking lad, shorts, football top, cap on and blatantly drunk as well, you could see the red lines in his eyes from two or three days drinking.’
John Bathgate, pictured in August when he spoke to the Daily Mail about the men’s ordeal
One of the pistols wielded by the pirates is seen following the scuffle on the Amazon River
Mr Bathgate added that there had been a big festival a few days earlier for Peruvian independence day, so he ‘might have been suffering from a hangover from a couple of days drinking’.
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Mr Roberts said they tried to get away, but continued: ‘I think we both sort of understood what this was, but before we could really do anything, he pulled the pistol out and it changed the dynamics completely.
‘I had a paddle in my hand and he was close enough. So I thrust my paddle high up in his chest and put him off balance. I didn’t want him to be able to get that pistol up and aim.
‘We’d kind of discussed before that the two of us were pretty comfortable in the water, quite good swimmers, and we thought one of the only ways we can really take on an amount of men in a canoe is to capsize and then play kind of king of the castle of the underwater essentially. So I sort of went for that, hit him with a paddle and dove in, came up on the other side.’
Mr Bathgate said Mr Roberts hit one of the men with the paddle – before Mr Bathgate ‘basically jumped onto their boat to try and wrestle the weapon off of them’, before hearing two shots.
He continued: ‘The first one missed, the second one hit me in the shoulder just here, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water. So I must have either fallen or jumped out of the boat at that point.
‘And I remember being under their boat thinking, which side should I come up on, assuming that when I do come up, the guy’s just going to pop one in my head because he’s got the high ground and the weapon at that point.
‘And when it did eventually come up, Ian had already surfaced and he was in the process of capsizing their boat and kind of wrestling with the gunman. So as soon as I saw that I just kind of grabbed the gunman and pushed him under, essentially just trying to drown them.’
Mr Roberts said the gunman was ‘holding his gun arm from a bit of a precarious position, trying to keep it away from my face and centre of mass’.
Mr Bathgate sustained two gunshot wounds in the tussle and was treated for his injuries
The duo with a member of the British consulate in Peru and a Peruvian Naval commander
He continued: ‘As that was going over, luckily John surfaced and just plunged this guy straight underwater and just solved the problem for me quite nicely.’
But Mr Bathgate then got shot again. He said: ‘I probably should have been a aiming for his weapon hand instead of his just plunging his head under.
‘So when I was doing that, he shot me again through the leg. And at that point I sort of realised that I needed to get this weapon off him as quickly as possible.’
He added that in the murky water, he was ‘able to train my hand down his arm and found the weapon at the end of his hand and twisted, twisted it out the back of his hand and fired two shots in return at him and one of them hit him in the hip’.
Mr Bathgate continued: ‘And then I was able to surface and we swam as quickly as we could back to our boat, which had drifted off slightly.’
The men then shouted for help and saw women and children on the bank, before they were helped by a group of villagers. The men then sent out an SOS through a satellite communication kit, which notified the Navy.
Mr Bathgate said: ‘They sent an armada of support Seals, an infirmary boat, like gunboat, and they ended up taking us back to back to Iquitos and giving me really good care. So a huge thank you to all the lads from the Peruvian Navy.
‘The round that I took in the leg, I took underwater. So a lot of the quite dirty Amazon River water followed the bullet into my muscles.
‘So when I got back to Iquitos and the doctor was scooshing some, I don’t know what it’s called, disinfectant water up into the wound and pushing it all out and then he had to sort of cut round the wound to get rid of the dead skin and then stitch them back together.’
But Mr Bathgate said ‘that was all the treatment I needed for the leg’ and he was ‘fine’ and able to ‘walk and everything’.
However, the other bullet that went through his shoulder ‘snapped a nerve that goes to my bicep’. He added: ‘So I don’t have any feeling in this part of my arm and I can’t move my bicep. But other than that, the arm works well.’
After arriving back in Britain, Mr Bathgate was treated by plastic surgeons in Glasgow who ‘managed to take some nerves out of my calf and then graft them to the damaged area in my shoulder’.
He said it was ‘unbelievable work from the NHS’ and he hopes the bicep will be fully recovered after six months of physiotherapy.
The men do want to return to the Amazon to complete their adventure, and Mr Roberts said: ‘We’re going to take a bigger team back.
‘And it would essentially be mostly bootnecks, Marines that will be coming with us. So we’re more secure for when we return to finish the job.’
You can read more about the Summit to Sea adventure and the charities it is supporting by clicking here
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