Wild Coast Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by John Gimlette

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd, London.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gimlette, John [date]

  Wild Coast : travels on South America’s untamed edge / by John Gimlette.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in Great Britain by Profile Books … London, in 2011”—T.p. verso.

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59665-9

  1. Guyana—Description and travel. 2. Suriname—Description and travel. 3. French Guiana—Description and travel. 4. Gimlette, John, [date]—Travel—Guyana. 5. Gimlette, John, [date]—Travel—Suriname. 6. Gimlette, John, [date]—Travel—French Guiana. I. Title.

  F2373.G56 2011 918.81—dc22 2011009370

  v3.1

  Jacket images courtesy of the author

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  To my sister, Philippa, and my brothers, Matthew and Edward

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 The Town of George

  2 The Town of Jones

  3 The Golden Rupununi

  4 A Parliament of Ants

  5 The Bloody Berbice

  6 Good Morning, Suriname

  7 Paramaribo

  8 The Hinterlands

  9 The Last of the Colonies: Guyane

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned nor wrought.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and

  Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana

  The Guianas have fascinated me. It always seemed odd that these three little gobs of empire should survive in the general explosion of South American self-government.

  Evelyn Waugh, 92 Days

  No elaborate outfit is necessary. For day wear, drill or palm beach shirts or light suits are general … revolvers are unnecessary.

  The South American Handbook 1947

  AS FAR AS AMERINDIANS ARE CONCERNED, the land between the Orinoco and the Amazon has always been Guiana, the ‘Land of Many Waters’. European explorers, however, took a while to appreciate this name. On early French and English maps the region was marked as ‘Equinoctiale’ or ‘Caribana, Land of Twenty-one Tribes’. To the Dutch, on the other hand, this was – for a while – the original ‘New Zealand’. Then they thought of a name which expressed what they felt. It had about it the promise of danger, risk, wealth and perhaps even desire. It was de Wilde Kust, ‘The Wild Coast’.

  Certainly nowhere else in South America is quite like it; 900 miles of muddy coastline give way to swamps, thick forest and then – deep inland – ancient flat-topped peaks. It’s never been truly possessed. Along this entire shore, there’s no natural harbour, and beyond the mud the forest begins. It covers over 80 per cent of Guiana, and even now there’s no way through it. Such roads as there are stick mainly to the coast. Without an aeroplane, it takes up to four weeks to get into the interior, and there the problems begin.

  With such an abundant canopy, most of Guiana never sees sunlight. Perhaps it’s therefore no surprise that – both in science and history – the story of this land reads like a long, green night. Huge tracts of the interior are only vaguely described, and new species are always tumbling out of the dark. Even some of the more common ones make unnerving companions. Guiana has the biggest ants in the world, and the biggest freshwater fish. There are head-crushing jaguars, strangling snakes, rivers of stingrays and electric eels, and whole clouds of insects all eager to burrow in under the skin. To some this is hell. To others it’s an ecological paradise, a sort of X-rated Garden of Eden.

  But it is water, as the Amerindians recognised, that defines Guiana. Through this land run literally thousands of rivers (in Guyana alone there are over 1,500). These aren’t like the little waterways that meander through the Old World, but vast sprawling torrents that thunder out of the forest and then plough their way to the sea. Some have mouths big enough to swallow Barbados. But, even the biggest of them – the Essequibo, Corentyne and Marowijne – are intolerant of shipping; beyond ninety miles inland, nothing larger than a canoe gets through without being battered to bits. Once it was thought that these furious rivers all linked up, and that Guiana was really an agglomeration of islands, bobbing around in the froth.

  But whatever the layout, water still rules. It dominates development, trims opportunities and seals off the world. It makes islanders of tribes, and supports long-lost communities of prospectors, Utopians and runaway slaves. It feeds malaria and nurtures some of the world’s most ambitious strains of dengue fever. Damp gets everywhere, rotting buildings and feet and making steam of the air. From the very earliest times human beings have realised that their best chance of surviving Guiana is by living right next to the sea. Even now, nine out of every ten of its inhabitants live on a long, muddy strip, barely ten miles wide.

  It’s curious, life in the silt. Most of the houses have legs, and every town is built on a grid of velvety, green canals. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean here is the colour of plaster, caused, it’s said, by sediments harvested in Peru, washed across the continent and disgorged by the Amazon. It makes for a beautiful world, luminously lush and drenchingly fecund. Not surprisingly, its inhabitants are proud of it and give it affectionate names. In Demerara they call their land ‘The Mudflat’ (and their neighbours the ‘mudheads’). But not everyone’s impressed. As one visiting English yachtsman wrote in 1882, ‘It appears a hopeless land of slime and fever, quite unfitted for man, unless it be for Tree-Indians, a low race of fish-eating savages …’

  Naturally, this claggy, overgrown, fish-breathed coast was never immediately inviting. For years the newly emerging Europeans had steered well clear. In theory, Spain was the first to claim it (along with the rest of the western world) under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was five years, however, before they sent a ship, and even then it didn’t stop. Another thirty years passed before anyone tried to land, only to be eaten by the locals. After that, Spanish interest in Guiana shrivelled, and the only part they ever occupied was the north-west end, now part of Venezuela, called ‘Guayana’. Meanwhile, the Portuguese colonised the southern flanks (now the Brazilian state of Amapá), and the bit in between was up for grabs.

  It’s this bit of Guiana – the chunk in the middle – that interested me, and eventually it became the setting for these travels. It’s an area about twice the size of Great Britain, divided into three unequal, roughly rectangular shares: Guyana (formerly British Guiana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) and Guyane Française (also known as French Guiana). They are sometimes referred to – usefully, if a little inaccurately – as ‘The Guianas’, and form the only part of the South American mainland that was never either Spanish or Portuguese. What’s more, they’ve totally resisted the influences of the continent all around, never knowing salsa or tango, Bolívar, machismo, liberation theology or even the li
beration movement. In fact, independence for two of the Guianas arrived only some 150 years after the rest of the continent, and even today Guyane remains a département of France. It’s almost as though the giant at their backs has never existed. Even as I write, there isn’t a single road that leads from the Guianas into the world beyond.

  The story of how this oddity came about is surprisingly bloody. After the Spanish lost interest, it looked, for a moment, as though England might quietly acquire this coast. In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh propagated a rumour that there was a city of gold here, that the women were biddable and cute, and that there was a fat partridge draped on every branch. Although these claims were rather obviously over-puffed, there was plenty of interest. First off, in 1597, was a barrister called John Ley, although he never planned to settle. Plenty of others did. But insolvency killed off most of their ideas, and ridicule the rest. Even the Pilgrim Fathers briefly toyed with the idea of planting New England here in Guiana (before a more sober assessment prevailed). Eventually, however, in 1604, colonisation began, with a settlement of English gentlemen in what is now Guyane. Most were dead within the year.

  Their colony, however, heralded the beginning of a murderous game of musical chairs. For the next two hundred years, the three great European powers – France, Britain and Holland – scrambled around on this coast, snatching colonies and killing the previous incumbents. These wars always began and ended in Europe, and there were nine in all (First Dutch, Second Dutch, Grand Alliance, Spanish Succession, Jenkins’ Ear, Austrian Succession, Seven Years, American Independence and Napoleonic). At the end of each round no one was where they’d started, and the coast was in ruins. Modern-day Guyana changed hands nine times, Suriname six and Guyane seven. All three were seized at one point (1676) by the Dutch, and at another (1809) by Britain. Even today, the Guianas – as I’d soon discover – still reel from the impact of this antique chaos.

  Warfare has also left a curious mess of the map. The original Guianese, the Amerindians (who make up about 3 per cent of the population) now find themselves scattered through all three Guianas, and into Venezuela and Brazil. As for the borders, they’re almost accidental, the upshot of wars begun long ago, and over 4,000 miles to the east. As the fighting drew to an end, in 1815, the Europeans carved out shares that broadly reflected their prowess at arms. Britain got a slab of land about the size of itself (83,000 square miles), while Dutch Guiana was half this size. France, meanwhile, was left with what’s still the smallest territory on the continent, a damp, unworkable inferno known for a while as Cayenne.

  But still the borders are dangerously vague. Deep in the watery, green anarchy of the interior there’s little agreement as to who owns what. Vast areas of the map lie blank except for the words ‘FRONTIER IN DISPUTE’. Everyone claims a piece of each other. Venezuela claims almost 70 per cent of Guyana, which it marks on its maps as ‘La Zona en Reclamación’. Elsewhere, the contenders for this vast, unoccupied space attack each other with gunboats and build bunkers in the forest. Their claims are usually as wild as the jungle itself. Often they’re based on ancient Elizabethan maps, drawn up by dreamers who thought there was a golden city here, and a tribe of headless men.

  These days no one’s quite sure what the fight is for – perhaps oil, perhaps gold. But for the old sea powers, there was something much more valuable at stake: sugar. By the 1700s Europe was addicted to the stuff, and anyone enterprising enough to plant it could double his capital in less than three years. In places such as Bristol and Amsterdam it created a new class of millionaire: the exotic, silk-slippered nawabs of Wild Coast sugar. Meanwhile, the Guianas themselves were transformed. Sugar dominated the economy for over 300 years, creating its own ruling class, known as ‘The Plantocracy’. Even on the eve of its decline in about 1860, sugar still accounted for 95 per cent of British Guiana’s exports. The region’s history since then could almost be summarised as the struggle for life after sugar.

  Nowhere is sugar’s hold on Guianese life more obvious than from the air. Examine this coast on Google.earth and you’ll skim over mile after mile of ghostly oblongs. These are the old cane fields, each one a work of almost pharaonic effort. For every square mile of cane it was necessary to dig over sixty-five miles of drainage canals, and shift over 10 million tons of earth. None of this, of course, was done by the Europeans. It’s entirely the creation of slaves.

  For me, grappling with the concept of slavery was one of the most troubling aspects of this Guianese journey. On the one hand, slavery seemed to have disappeared completely; the ‘yards’ have gone, the impedimenta have rotted away, and across the entire region there are barely a handful of monuments. On the other hand, slavery was everywhere, even in the food and the way people lived. Sometimes I felt as though slavery was like some weird metaphorical telephone exchange and that every strand of Guianese life somehow led back to this point.

  This, of course, is to say nothing of the difficult questions we Europeans must ask. How did we manage to suspend a basic tenet of humanity for almost 300 years? Was slavery a last relic of medieval thought, or was it the beginning of a modern phenomenon, where – if the price is right – anything goes?

  Whatever the answers, the Guianese example is an unedifying tale. Almost everyone played their part. It began with the creation of a more comfortable moral climate for the trade, in 1454, with the papal bull Dum Diversas (which encouraged the Portuguese to go out into the heathen world ‘and reduce their persons to perpetual slavery’). Once Portugal had made a virtue of slavery, the Dutch made it a business. In 1652 they brought Guiana its first slaves. After that, everyone piled in, including the Danes and the Swedes. But it was the English who made it an industry. (By 1760 they had a fleet of 146 slavers, with a capacity for 36,000 captives.) No one knows how many African lives were merged with the Guianese clay, but it must be hundreds of thousands. Worse still, this savage, unbelievable trade continued in the Dutch colony until 1870, stopping just short of the Age of the Car.

  Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552–1618) gave Guiana a mythical reputation, which it spent hundreds of years shaking off. (Illustration credit itr.1)

  Guiana has always had an uncertain place in English literature.

  As I picked my way through Raleigh’s great 1595 prospectus, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, I realised how energetically he’d shaped our early impressions of this coast. He’d promised his investors not only plenty but perfection. Quite apart from golden cities and comely Amazons, here were diamond mountains, dog-headed mermen, week-long drinking festivals and men with their eyes in their chests. Better still, the locals were conveniently hopeless. ‘Those Guianians’, he wrote, ‘are marvellous great drunkards, in which vice I think no nation can compare with them.’ Reading all this, I sometimes wondered whether he’d been to Guiana at all. The Discoverie, it seemed, was a composite of Spanish tittle-tattle, salesmanship and a feverish classical education.

  For all this, it made an unforgettable impression. Long before the first green shoots of sugar, Guiana became a byword for fertility and wealth. Even Shakespeare was taken in (his Falstaff flatters Mistress Page, as ‘a region of Guiana, all good and bounty’). Milton too was entranced, and an ‘unspoilt Guiana’ pops up in the heart of Paradise Lost. Two centuries later, Trollope went there himself and, in his praise, became uncharacteristically light-headed. ‘Life flows along,’ he wrote, ‘in a perpetual stream of love, smiles, champagne and small talk.’ Perhaps Raleigh had got to him too, or perhaps it was all that bubbly.

  More recently, literary Guiana has seemed not so much enchanted as somehow cruelly jinxed. Evelyn Waugh found only a ‘destructive and predatory civilisation’ and predicted that it would disappear ‘like the trenches and shell craters of a battlefield’. The Naipaul brothers would have no better news after their visits of the 1960s and ’70s. V.S. found the whole place ‘deceitful and sullen’, and Shiva concluded that he was gazing at ‘social collapse’. Both economically and poetically,
Guiana, it seems, was sliding off into obscurity.

  Several decades later, I’d hardly heard of it at all.

  But then, in 2002, I caught a distant glimpse of Guiana while researching a journey through Newfoundland. Ancient trade routes, I discovered, had once run between the two; molasses heading north for fishermen, salted cod going south for the slaves (in fact, Newfoundlanders still drink Guyanese dark rum, known to them as ‘Screech’). The two colonies even seemed to share a strange, Georgian vocabulary, and a taste for place-names such as ‘Profit’ and ‘Success’. Better still, I discovered that I had a distant ancestor who’d played a role in both colonies, one after the other, with disastrous results.

  Robert Hayman was a lawyer, poet, dilettante and layabout. Few men were less suited to either the challenges of the sub-arctic or the rigours of the tropics. Born into an up-and-coming Devonshire family in 1575, Robert spent his formative years floating around the universities of Oxford and Poitiers. If he’d ever had any aptitude for the law, by the age of forty-two there was still no sign of it. In desperation, his father – who had friends at court – blagged him a job in the colonies. The following year, 1618, he was appointed Governor of Harbour Grace, a wind-scoured inlet in northern Newfoundland, famous for nothing but fish.

  As governor, Robert ruled with spectacular indifference. He hardly seemed to notice that all his men were dying of scurvy. He himself was not a man to get his ruffs dirty, and by his own admission he refused to lift a finger. Instead, he spent his time translating Rabelais (‘that excellently wittie Doctor’) before beginning work on his own, rather curious oeuvre: Quodlibets, lately come over from New Britaniola, Old Newfound-Land. Epigrams and other fmall parcels, both Morall and Diuine. To call it ‘parcels’ is to flatter it with content. In reality, it’s merely vacuous doggerel, distinguished only by the fact that it’s probably the first English poetry to emerge from the New World.