Wild Coast Page 15

  One of the first was a chancer called Harry Melville. Born in 1864, he was the son of a Presbyterian archdeacon with a flock in Jamaica. But Harry never had his father’s appetite for God, and preferred the sight of gold. At the age of twenty-seven he decided to extract himself from Scottish Jamaica and set off in search of ore. His gold-washing brought him to Guiana. There, in 1891, he plunged into the forest and was soon cooking up a case of malaria. At the moment of death – the story goes – he was found by some Amerindians. Harry had no wish to die in the dark and asked for help to reach the light. With either payment or pathos, they agreed and brought the dying Scot out onto the savannah. There he liked what he saw and lay down to die.

  Death on the savannah suited Harry well. The next thing he knew, the grass was his home. He acquired two Wapisiana wives and settled down to become a trader in the finest fish hooks and trinkets. It was good business, and after twenty years he was the most powerful man on the savannah. Not only was he now the father of ten children; he was also a cattle baron, a district commissioner and the Laird of Dadanawa. It was the largest ranch in the world, and covered an area about the size of the Lowlands of Scotland.

  ‘HBC’, as he now called himself, had arrived. All Dadanawa needed was some sort of link to the rest of the Empire. On cue came the First World War, and a surge in demand. British soldiers would march to Berlin on Rupununi beef. It was an appealing image, and the funds flowed in. By 1917 Melville had begun work on one of the most ambitious private trails in the world. Soon Dadanawa would be pumping cattle up into the heart of Guyana, and then off to the coast.

  Or so he said.

  Life at Dadanawa still looked as though it had ground to a halt in 1923. At the top of the rise was a large and shady Brazil nut tree. All around it were the ranch buildings and the peeling grandeur of Melville’s design. There were several workshops and saddle stores, barracks for the vaqueros, slung with rows of hammocks, an abattoir, a tannery, two kitchens with huge ranges and drying-lines dripping with buttery tripe, half-a-dozen water towers and an ancient wind-pump that sometimes stuttered and stopped, a small brick cottage for the foreman and the enormous wooden halls of the management – all finished off in the Melville livery, balance-sheet white and Highland green.

  ‘You’re in the big guesthouse, sir,’ said the cook.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind the bats,’ said the ponytails.

  I didn’t mind anything by then. Dadanawa was enchanting. It wasn’t just the livery and the lovable staff, and the distant blue hills, melting together. It was the sense of a peculiar past, all around. My room was high up on stilts and looked as though it had been quietly – and elegantly – flaking away since the First World War. Then there was the manager’s house, which was like the officers’ mess of an Edwardian army. Around the walls there were weapons and saddles, and at sundown we’d all sit on the balcony drinking punch. As the ranch no longer had electricity, we were soon in the dark and beginning to itch. ‘Time for dinner!’ Sandy would trill, and then – with all the ponytails – we’d fumble our way downstairs. There we’d sit in Melvillian splendour, dining on tablecloths adorned with his crest. As we sat working our way through three great courses of soup and mutton and chocolate mousse, the bats would come wheeling in through the windows and squeal around our heads.

  But even better than this was the ranch store. This was the place to buy a stirrup, or a beer, or a single cigarette. At night people gathered here to listen to the distant crackle of the BBC, or for the cook – armed with a needle – to dig the jiggers from their feet. But, as well as a bar and a clinic, the store was also the repository of almost a century of grassland junk. There were jaguar skins, giant fish skulls, several antique guns repaired with tape, a truncheon, a pickled snake and endless Land Rover parts, going all the way back to 1950. Even things too big for the store were never thrown away. Just behind it was a collection of old army trucks, now green and hairy and reverting to soil.

  I often met the old tanner at the store.

  ‘I think I’m eighty, but I never go to school.’

  I liked Uncle Cyril. He had a big, shapeless face, full of scrunched-up smiles, and he was wide and squat like an old leather chair. People said that he was all that remained of the Atorads, a tribe that had perished in the Great Spanish Flu. Perhaps it was this brush with oblivion that had made him a tanner. In his tank of preservative he had three jaguar skins.

  ‘But aren’t they endangered?’ I protested.

  ‘Jaguars? Not here! They attack us every night!’

  ‘It’s true,’ said the ponytails, ‘they kills four hundred cattle a year.’

  I asked Uncle Cyril who did all the shooting.

  ‘Not me. I was hit by a bull. So now I leave it to the boys.’

  The vaqueros were certainly a lethal-looking crew.

  ‘Nearly all Wapisianas,’ said Sandy, ‘I delivered most of them myself.’

  Every morning they assembled at the store. There were fourteen vaqueros in all. With their long knives, El Greco faces and leather gaiters – clinking with buckles and spurs – they were like some ancient barefoot cavalry. Scowling and spitting, and shooting blasts of snot, they always looked impressively dangerous. I once watched them kill a calf. Their knives descended on it like a shoal of fish and swam around through the trembling flesh until suddenly everything was gone. It was said that Wapisiana men liked their women like this, with razor-sharp teeth filed into points, just like piranhas.

  Sandy told me they were beautiful people, but hard to manage.

  ‘If you ever shout at them, they just pick up their things and vanish.’

  It was at least a day before they acknowledged I was there. The first to speak was the capataz, or foreman. ‘I am Oswald,’ he said, ‘and these are my sons: Osbert, Oswin and Osmond …’

  Soon others were curious.

  ‘What insults do you have in your country?’

  I was taken aback. ‘Oh, anything, really. Wanker?’

  ‘We don’t understand,’ they said.

  I explained, and they all collapsed, howling in the dust.

  ‘We call people old foreskins!’ they spluttered.

  ‘… or horse-heads!’

  Then a boy with long, crow-black hair pushed forward.

  ‘Orvin wants to find you a giant anteater,’ said Sandy.

  I thanked him, and he galloped off into the grass. An hour later he found one, a beautiful sleepy specimen with a tail like a cloud. But I noticed that Orvin’s arm was swollen, as though it were sprouting an egg.

  ‘I got bitten by a snake.’

  ‘Then you should rest,’ said Sandy, ‘and not do the round-up.’

  But Orvin wouldn’t be deterred. For the vaqueros the round-up was like a beautiful, violent game. They wore their best Brazilian football shirts, and, if they had saddles, these would be trimmed with jaguar and beads. Most, however, went bareback, and barefoot. The youngest, I discovered, was only twelve and sang as he rode. One of the older boys, who looked splendidly cruel, even had an MP3 player, so he could thunder along with his head full of screams.

  Once I went to watch them, out in the corral. There was a bonfire for brands, and – high up in the rails – the boys clambered around, waiting for their moment to drop down and join the fight. Below them, in the arena, hundreds of animals swirled round, blind with dust and mad with panic. Whiplashes, forty feet long, sizzled over their heads, hissing and crackling like gunfire. Then the vaqueros dropped, knives drawn. What followed wasn’t so much sport as medieval warfare. Horn and withers became tangled in rope, and – amid the bellows of terror – the knives began to dart around, nicking ears and emasculating bulls. At one point a steer seemed to explode from the melee and, like some huge and bloody meteorite, smashed through the rails and took off over the savannah. No one seemed to notice that they’d almost been killed. Even when the work was finished, the vaqueros weren’t. Each found himself a furious steer, jumped on its back and then rode it for a few exhil
arating seconds until the animal bucked him off.

  ‘What can I do?’ said Sandy. ‘It’s the only life they know.’

  I didn’t see the vaqueros again after that. By my last day they were far away, rounding up distant cattle. Across the ranch they had over a million acres to cover. While Dadanawa was not what it was in Melville’s day, it was still twice the size of Suffolk.

  Not that size was ever the issue. The problem for Dadanawa was an old one. Here it was, hundreds of miles from civilisation, in one of the most inaccessible spots on the continent. Cows still had a long way to go before they were beef.

  Harry Melville had long recognised this, and so, in 1923, he took what he could and slipped away. It was years before his purchasers realised their mistake. Melville had even diddled them on the number of animals and the quality of grass. As for the cattle trail, it was a gruesome failure. At the first attempt to use it, over 70 per cent of the animals simply vanished in the forest. But still the company persisted. They bought more wire, and at the ranch they installed one drunk after another. Perhaps the worst was Mr Connel. ‘Women were his hobby,’ states the company reports, ‘drink his downfall, and an aversion to work his ingrained habit.’ (Eventually he conned an Indian princess into marriage, and they moved to the slums of Pimlico, where they drank themselves to death on a cocktail of red wine and methanol, known as ‘Red Biddy’.) After that, Dadanawa only had a moment of prosperity. Then came the age of the plane, and in 1953 the trail was closed for good.

  Meanwhile, Harry was long gone. Having abandoned his wives and children, he’d made it to London. There he took a third wife, a nurse called Ethel Barker, and they settled down in Twickenham. Suburbia was a strange choice for a man who’d spent so much of his life owning the horizon. But then, in July 1927, for the second time in his life Harry Melville died. He was rich, sixty-three and intractably malarial. This time he was carried to Richmond Cemetery and has never been heard of since.

  I thought a lot about Harry, as we drove away down his ill-fated trail. I also thought about the ten children he’d left behind. The Rupununi’s twentieth-century history is rich in Melvilles. They crop up in all the books: Waugh, Attenborough and Durrell. Another, more distant Melville, Pauline, even became a novelist herself. After a life in British films she won the Whitbread Award for The Ventriloquist’s Tale, a beautifully torrid tale of Rupununi life.

  Meanwhile, back on the savannah, the Melvilles have been politicians, ranchers and legends. The oldest son, John, was known as ‘Dynamite’. It’s said he was immensely strong and could lift a pony over his head. He once challenged a senior New York zoologist to a duel, causing the entire expedition to scatter in panic. Then, in 1947, he brought the southern savannahs their first vehicle, delivered in a plane. But John had nothing of his father’s ambition, and this was never the beginning of congestion.

  Then, suddenly, towards the end of the century, the Melvilles go quiet.

  ‘What’s happened to them?’ I asked. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘There are still a few around …’ said the ponytails.

  ‘… Don and Shirley …’

  I was puzzled. ‘A few? There must be hundreds by now …’

  No one said anything. Then Sandy spoke.

  ‘There was a terrible revolt,’ she said, ‘and all the others fled.’

  The burned-out nucleus of the revolt was still there: the Lethem Hotel.

  It was right on the edge of the dissipated town, next to the airstrip. Parts of the building had collapsed, and the windows were covered with mesh and bulging with rubbish. In its day this was the Rupununi’s first work of concrete and its first hotel. But it was never much of a place. Harry’s son, Teddy, had run it up quickly to service the planes. When Attenborough was here, in 1955, none of the windows had glass, and to V.S. Naipaul the whole place was ‘rough’.

  But, for all that, it was still, even now, the hub of airstrip life. Out at the front there were stalls, selling skewers of meat and Brazilian beer. There was also a large, dark shop under a mango tree. It was owned by Don and Shirley, the last of the Melvilles. Don was sad to see the old hotel crumbling away. In happier times, he told me, Uncle Teddy used to show movies here every Saturday night. They were always cowboy films.

  ‘The Wapisianas loved them. Watched them over and over again.’

  But then, in 1968, a new movie appeared. This time there were no cowboys and Indians, just voices of dissent. Uncle Teddy and his ranchers suddenly started talking about independence. They already regarded themselves as the lords and masters of their grassy domain. But, added to their flyweight feudalism, there was also anger. They saw their leases threatened; their candidates cheated at the general election, and an African government contemptuous of whites. What’s more, they weren’t the only ones who were angry. Promises made to the Amerindians had never been honoured. Just so they knew who was to blame, Teddy and his friends showed them a film. It had been made in the South Pacific, and depicted a blackish people killing the natives and eating their flesh. ‘That’s what’ll happen to you,’ said the ranchers, and so – somewhat bewildered – their vaqueros lined up and joined the revolt.

  It wasn’t hard to find an armourer. Venezuela still claimed the Rupununi, and a lot more besides. They’d have moved in and grabbed the lot, if it wasn’t for Brazil. Instead, they had to content themselves with this Ruritanian revolt. But was the map really about to be changed for ever? By who? Some hard-drinking cattlemen, a few thready cow hands and a family of hotheads known as the Melvilles? Somebody thought so. On Christmas Eve 1968 the rebels were secretly flown to Santa Teresa and recast as the gallant new army of Guayana Esequiba. A week later they were draped in guns and flown back to the savannahs.

  I asked Don whether he remembered the day the fight broke out.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not the person to ask.’

  It was no good. Melvilles don’t talk about what happened next.

  ‘Speak to Esther. Her family was here, and were all expelled.’

  Esther Park ran a mining company on the other side of town. She was a strange person to find, directing trucks. I’d expected some swarthy, industrial figure, but instead she was assured, intelligent, beautiful, part-Indian and oddly urbane. I later found out that, in exile, she’d been a model. ‘But now I’m back,’ she said. ‘I love the Rupununi. During my time in Venezuela, I missed it every day.’

  She told me her father had once been an administrator here.

  ‘Then my brother got mixed up with the rebels …’

  I asked her if she minded bringing up the past.

  ‘No. People must know. Come, I’ll show you what happened.’

  With that, we were out in her car, on a tour of the revolt.

  ‘This is where my parents lived …’

  We were in the old colonial area. Esther pointed out the wreckage of a dance hall where a Chinaman had once sold tickets for a weekly dance. Then there was the Amerindian hostel, now quietly falling apart. I don’t think Esther really saw the decay. For her everything was just as it was the day her childhood was snatched away: 2 January 1969. ‘I was fourteen,’ she said, ‘when the revolt began …’

  We were now outside the old office of the District Commissioner.

  ‘This,’ said Esther sadly, ‘is where the shooting started.’

  It wasn’t distinguished combat. The only casualty was Inspector Braithwaite, whose life and otherwise dignified career were brought to a sudden and undignified end. Most people agreed that it was a Melville boy that fired this shot. But whoever it was, there was no turning back. From here the rebels spread out across the savannahs in a collection of old farm vehicles and Mini Mokes camouflaged with branches. ‘At first, I thought it was something to do with the feast of St John,’ said Esther, ‘and then I thought it was the Venezuelans, coming here to kill us.’

  She drove on, stopping by the police post. Out on the porch two young ‘ranks’ were asleep in the sun. ‘This was the worst place.
Somebody threw a hand grenade through the window, and four young policemen were killed. Nobody knows who did it, even now. It was so senseless, so utterly senseless …’

  For the rebels it was also the end of the fight for Lethem. They gathered up the dead and put them in the abattoir, along with their prisoners, the government officials. They then blocked off the airstrip with trucks and declared independence.

  The Rupununi was finally a republic, at least for the day.

  The end for the republic came at Manari.

  ‘I’ll take you over there,’ said Esther, ‘it’s just out of town.’

  Manari was five miles away, deep in the thorn. It was an ominous place, with its long, empty airstrip, its ghoulish anthills and its mournful views of the Moco-Moco Hills. Esther said that a few descendants of Harry Melville still lived out here. One was his granddaughter, a retired doctor, known locally as Pixie. She lived in a new house by the runway, and just when I was wondering what kind of pixie she was, she suddenly appeared. With her pink bathrobe and cut-glass vowels, Pixie could not have been less puckish. But then, like Esther, she didn’t really belong in this scene. She was the daughter of a notorious Polish rancher called Cesar Gorinsky, and, as she explained, she’d spent much of her life in England.

  The occupants of the other house were more complicated.

  Manari’s old ranch-house was a sprawling fantasy of bricks. It had loggias, pagodas, terracotta heraldry and a mock-Tudor front. Once this had been the grandiose home of a Basque, called Orella, but now the wind had its nose in the roof and was peeling back the tin. Esther told me that Orella had married another of Harry Melville’s daughters, and that their son Louis had only just died, deep in his eighties and fighting off doctors. Now his huge, gaunt mansion lay abandoned, with its furniture scattered all over the steps.

  We walked round the outside, found a door and wandered in. It all seemed empty at first, but then we got to the kitchen and were surprised to find Louis’s family still there, gathered in silence around his chair. With their long, Amerindian faces they looked like a portrait of Victorian mourning. We tiptoed in and stood at the back.