Wild Coast Read online

  Three miles upstream I reached the original, fortified plantations, or what was left of them. It was a promontory of terraces, blooming with lemon trees, flamboyants, corolla, mangos and bamboo. At the bottom of the slope was the Mazaruni – looking like a sheet of mercury – and a cluster of bushy islands, including Kijk-over-al. From here the Dutch had watched as their investment took root, sprouted, flourished and turned into wealth.

  The terraces were still in production, although now it was not sugar but vegetables and music. Since 1988 there’d been a Benedictine monastery up here, on Mora Camp. I don’t suppose the house was much different from the sort of place the planters had built: white-painted timber, loggias, louvred openings and windows without glass. Inside, it was furnished mostly with books, and a few simple pieces wrought from hardwood. Not a cent had been wasted in the pursuit of pleasure. Along the hall there was a row of cowls, and around each window a fringe of crusted lace. For a few dollars the brothers gave me a room of my own. I was their first guest for months and had a cell in the eaves.

  ‘We rise at six,’ they said. ‘Matins at six-fifteen.’

  It wasn’t long before I was part of the clockwork of monastery life. There were only two brothers, Pascal and Matthias, and an elderly abbot called Hildebrand. But they lived their life to a split-second horarium: matins, Mass, prayers (three times during the day) and then vespers, supper and compline. At exactly the moment they promised, their euphonious chanting would lift up out of the trees and carry out across the river. Loosing off canticles into this vast expanse of light and silvery water must have felt like addressing heaven itself. ‘The only way I can live with celibacy,’ Brother Pascal once told me, ‘is by having all this beauty.’

  I still have a recording I made of the chanting monks. It was a gorgeous, sepulchral sound. By day it seemed to blend in with the reedy hum of crickets, and by night with the chorus of frogs. After a while I almost forgot it was the music of the thirteenth century, filtered through the tropics.

  I didn’t always join them. Sometimes I swam out to one of the islands or wandered over the hill. After sugar, Mora Camp had become a rubber plantation, and there were still a few trees left. Occasionally I found the glass cups used for tapping latex, or shards of older glass that was bubbly and brown. When I took some pieces back to Hildebrand, he smiled and produced a complete, unbroken flask. ‘Jenever,’ he said. ‘The Dutchmen liked their gin.’

  Way across the river was another reminder of the days of the Dutch. It was a large collection of stone buildings, which was unusual for Guyana. Although little seemed to happen there, occasionally the whole place came alive with the sound of voices in song. This was said to be the most beautiful prison in the world: the Mazaruni Penal Settlement. It was here that Dr Jagan wrote his first political treatise, on toilet paper, in 1954. It was also here that the German explorer Carl Appun breathed his last in 1872. He was an illustrious chronicler of the Guianas (Unter den Tropen: Wanderungen durch Venezuela, am Orinoco, durch Britisch Guyana und am Amazonenstrom), but they also drove him mad. Believing that he was about to be eaten by his Amerindian guides, he swallowed a draught of carbolic acid. Puzzled by this gesture, his guides brought him to the prison, where he died in agony two days later. The prison was never as sweet as it looked. Even as late as 1918 every prisoner was ‘catted’ – or whipped – on arrival, and then again when he left.

  ‘It’s still tough,’ said the Abbot, ‘and no one escapes.’

  The early Dutch would have been proud to hear that, in the prison at least, their regime had survived. The Essequibo of the eighteenth century was still a dangerous place. But by 1744 a new confidence was beginning to emerge. The planters were about to embark on one of the world’s greatest feats of agricultural endeavour. It was time to sail downriver, and drain the coast.

  I said goodbye to the abbot and set off in their wake.

  The reason everything changed in 1744 was Vlaggen Eyland, or ‘Flag Island’.

  I stopped there on my journey back up the estuary. It was now called Fort Island, and from the river it looked like a tussock of floating jungle. But its appearance was deceptive. Commissioned that year, the fortress – although never Krak des Chevaliers – was better in a way. Here was a huge, unsinkable gunboat, moored right in the shipping lane, half-way up the estuary. I realised, as I scrambled up through the mud and bricks, that whoever possessed this outcrop controlled not only the river but also the thousands of acres of swamp all around.

  At the top of the bank was a track that led to the fort. Along the way I met a drunk called Bobby, who had big, clubbed fingers and swollen feet. He was soon tagging along. ‘You know what?’ he began. ‘Dere’s a huuuuge secret tunnel runs right here! Under de river!’

  Bobby was a terrible guide but an extraordinary magpie of planter life. From the folds of his tatty outfit he produced musket balls, clay pipes and trade beads. ‘Take them,’ he said, putting them in my hand, ‘we gets lots of dis shit.’

  We were now at the fort. Despite the encroaching undergrowth, it was still a formidable sight: a huge nest of ramparts, parapets, moats, scarps and counter-scarps. In the middle was a three-storey blockhouse, shaped like a diamond and built from brick. Every surface facing the river had been slewed through forty-five degrees, to deflect any incoming fire. It seems that the tireless Gravesande had ordered the very latest in military technology. His fortress – Fort Zeelandia – had been armed with over forty heavy cannon, and even now there were half a dozen left.

  Bobby was still babbling on about tunnels and treasure. While he hobbled off to look for snakes, I took out my notes. This was a moment that called for Bolingbroke. No one had known the old Dutch colony like Henry Bolingbroke of Norwich. For seven years, from 1798, he travelled the colony, working as an articled clerk. His memoirs, A Voyage to the Demerary, describe Guyana right at the end of Dutch rule, and at the very pinnacle of wealth. So confident was the colony, it didn’t need castles any more, and so Bolingbroke arrived to find this one in decay. ‘The cannon are dismounted, and the fort is totally deserted, save by the wash women who find it a convenient place for hanging linen to dry …’

  When I read this to Bobby, he snorted with pleasure.

  ‘Dat’s my grandmuddah! She took washing!’

  I didn’t like to question this. Bobby lived in such a fragile world of possibilities and drink. ‘I gonna show you de biggest fuckin building in Guyana,’ he said suddenly, ‘you wanna see it?’

  I said I did, and so off we went, back down the path. At the far end of the island was a long brick hall. It had tall, shuttered windows, the bell-tower of a church and the body of a warehouse. Bobby was wrong to think it was the biggest building, but – forts aside – it was probably the oldest. Inside there was a large expanse of flagstones, a cluster of well-laurelled tombs and a colony of bats. This was another of Gravesande’s creations (and it was often thought that he was still here, curled up under a slab). In its day the hall had been a church, an office, a college, a slave market and, most importantly, the Court of Policy. From here the great planters had declared dominion over an estate five times the size of Holland. They were men of exorbitant ambition, and each had a fancy title, such as the Predicant, the Captain-Commandant, the Vendue-Master and the Fiscal. Now all that remained of them were a few coloured pictures, each looking splendid in a breastplate and wig.

  Bobby peered at them closely and puckered with contempt.

  ‘Dis people ruled Guyana? Don’t make me laugh!’

  He was right in a way. It wasn’t really rule. Of the land the Dutch had claimed, 96 per cent remained unvisited and unexplored. All they controlled was one brilliant, fertile edge. As for the rest, their dominion was illusory. Out there, this great hall might just as well have been a Council-in-the-Sky, or a Parliament of Ants.

  Meanwhile, out on the edge, the Rule of the Farmers had taken shape.

  Between the two rivers, the landscape had been transformed. Had I set off on foot from the Es
sequibo, I’d have spent days walking to the Demerara, across the featureless grid of Dutch design. Instead, I was grateful for a lift, and the road round the coast. Even then it was daunting: the sheer flatness of it all, the crushing parallels, the endless rhomboids of cane and the great canals – some, sixty feet wide – trailing off into infinity. I remembered how it had looked from the air, like book-spines stacked in their thousands. Now here I was among the spines, each the size of a public park. The planters had moved perhaps a billion tons of earth, as they rolled back the sea, flushed out the salt and poldered the mud. The process had not only continued up the rivers, but also – ten miles deep – all down the coast.

  The road followed the sea wall along the shore. Out there the Atlantic looked sludgy and pink, like a desert of sediment except slightly more choppy. Just as I was wondering whether there was life in the silt, I spotted a heron, with charcoal plumage and eyes like spots of fire. The Guyanese were grateful for their wall. They called everything inside it the ‘backdam’, as though their whole world was a product of Dutch drains. But this wasn’t the only legacy of Holland. The plantocracy it had created would survive long after the arrival of the British. Even now there’s the sense that commercial life is controlled by the few. These days, however, the big houses are rarely Dutch: Booker, Correia, Banks and perhaps the occasional Gravesande.

  But there was another, more immediate, reminder of Holland. It was the names, scattered through the landscape. Sometimes, in West Demerara, it felt as though the Dutch had never left. Among others, there was Roed-en-Rust and Vreed-en-Hoop, Blankenburg, Den Amstel, Tuschen-de-Vrenden (or ‘Between Friends’) and even a miniature Hague. I enjoyed these places. They were like fleets of little boats, moored in the drain. Everything was painted in glorious colours, for fear of not being noticed. I remember a huge old cinema, looking like a bridesmaid, and a small café called Christ’s Professional Fish Shop. Did modern Zeeland still look like this? Somehow I doubted it. These were old plantations, and this was the landscape of slaves.

  I stopped overnight at Meten-Meer-Zorg. It was built on a grid of canals and had a temple, a mosque and a market laid out on sheets. My hotel, the Toucan Inn, was – like the town – still sprouting upwards and outwards. For the owner, a Portuguese-Guyanese called Gary Serrao, his great concrete creation would never be complete. In the last few years he’d added staircases, annexes, outer defences, a crow’s nest, a whole new storey and a series of gantries to link it together. Everything was white and gleaming, as though it had been iced. Inside, it was more like a contraption than a building, a tottering fantasy from Dr Seuss. There was even a swimming pool, right through the middle.

  ‘I used to be a gas-fitter,’ said Gary, as though that explained everything.

  But, as well as his fantasy guesthouse, this was also his museum. Gary had spent his life gathering up the pieces from Guyanese history. There was everything from kitsch to stone axes. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to judge countries by their ephemera. Here, the British period would be remembered as a time of ginger beer and postage. The Dutch era looked far more impressive. There were cannonballs and manacles and giant jars of fish. It was also more persistent. Gary said that both guilders and the Court of Policy had survived well into the twentieth century, and so had the law. Two centuries on, land deals could still get tangled up in tracts of Roman Dutch.

  ‘And then there’s this,’ said Gary.

  Guianese slaves in the 1770s. Attractive women were expensive but could be rented two at a time. (Illustration credit 4.2)

  He was standing in a room full of empties. There were flagons, demijohns, hand-blown wine bottles, decanters, crocks, pots and flasks. But mostly it was gin. Gary told me there were flasks everywhere, down every river and up every creek. As the old abbot had said, the Dutchman liked his gin. Perhaps it was more than this. If it’s possible to read history from the rubbish, then a curious picture emerges: by the 1780s the planters were living a life of luxury, up to their eyeballs in gin and fabulously dissolute.

  It was time to consult Bolingbroke, to see what he’d said. For this, I needed to get to the Reynestein estate so that at least our view would’ve been the same. Back in London, it had taken me days to find it, scouring old maps and books. I knew it was somewhere close to Zorg, up the Demerara River. Then I spotted it, an oblong of sugar, among a cluster of others. They sounded like brothels or old Dutch bars: Free and Easy, Jacob’s Lust, Vive La Force, De Yonge Rachale, and Goed Verwagting. I also discovered that they were now all lumped together into a super-estate called Wales, one of the biggest in Guyana.

  Next, there was the problem of getting there. Back in 1799, Bolingbroke had taken a tent-boat from Georgetown, rowed by some slaves. The journey had lasted two and a half hours, and throughout it the oarsmen had sung a song called ‘Good Neger make good Massa’. With this option no longer conspicuous, I decided to call my old friend the driver Ramdat Dhoni. Any chance he could pick me up and take me to Wales?

  Ramdat sounded puzzled. ‘OK, but it’s just a lot of sugar …’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, and so we were agreed.

  Actually, it wasn’t fine. In the back of my mind I still hoped there’d be something left of the Reynestein manor. Bolingbroke said it was a large white house of ‘the greatest elegance of style’. He described billiards, good coffee, the finest linen, floors scrubbed with citrus juice, farmland ‘like gardens’, solid dinners (‘salted ling, roast beef and Muscovy ducks, then Bologna sausage’) and hammocks round the table. Scattered throughout this pleasing scene was a riot of semi-feral infants. The ‘Massa’ of Reynestein, noted Bolingbroke, was ‘particularly fond of children and used to enjoy their antic nakedness.’

  Sadly, all trace of this had gone, ploughed back into the mud. Instead, all we found was a sugar mill, which looked like an ancient tramp-steamer, puffing away in the mud. Next to it was a stilted, end-of-the-Raj clubhouse, for the bosses of today. Inside, everything was made of darkening hardwood and lavished in sepia and cobwebs. Around the walls were enormous metal trophies given not for Formula 1 but for dominoes and whist. There were no naked urchins or Muscovy ducks. We did, however, find a manager, who generously agreed to show us around. His name was Mr George, and he was skinny, half Indian, and wore a uniform of corporate khaki.

  ‘This club is just for us,’ he said, ‘not for the cane-workers.’

  I asked if the two ever mixed.

  Mr George looked surprised. ‘Never. We live very different lives.’

  Back in 1799 the lives of the Dutch and their workers had often merged. It’s not a chapter of European history that’s easy to read. Even British visitors (such as Bancroft, Pinckard, Stedman and Bolingbroke) were less than charmed by what they found. Their journals describe a life of relentless duress, perfunctory intercourse and exalted greed. The planter, it was said, was ‘like a petty monarch, as capricious as he is despotic and despicable’, and his very existence was one long ‘round of dissipation’. Here’s a typical day.

  The planter rises at six, when his coffee or chocolate is waiting. He then summons his girls on an ivory whistle that’s always to hand. The finest young slaves attend, but they do not wash him. In contrast to the cleanliness of his house, the Dutchman prefers only to have himself dabbed with a napkin dipped in a glass of water. His is not an impressive physique. He weighs around eight stone, and his body is ‘generally exhausted’ by the climate and the vice. In the language of the slaves there is a term for this: wishi-wassi. It means ‘being Europeanised’, or enfeebled like a white.

  As his slaves dress him, he enjoys a pipe and a flask of gin. A typical outfit might include the very best Holland trousers, white silk stockings, red or yellow Morocco slippers and a nightgown of chintz. He will then wear a nightcap ‘as thin as a spider’s web’, and over that a beaver hat. If he’s not going out, he’ll have breakfast with his cringing slave-master, the baas or ‘overseer’. They will have bacon, broiled pigeons, plantains, cheese, M
adeira, Rhenish and Moselle, all the while being fanned by the most beautiful of slaves.

  If he is going out, a boy will dress him in white silk breeches, matching waistcoat, buckled shoes and wig. He’ll then set out to supervise the work of the estate, and to attend the daily flogging. If he’s going by barge, it will be suitably furnished with fruit and gin. He is now smoking all the time ‘to correct the effects of the strong drink’. If he’s on horseback, a boy runs behind him with his ‘segars and a stick of fire’. As the planter passes his slaves, they doff their hats and murmur ‘Ja, weledele gestrenge Heer!’ (‘Yes, great and honoured Sir!’). He affects not to notice them, even when they’re being beaten. After each lash of the hempen whip, they call out ‘Dankee, Masera’, or ‘Thank you, Master’.

  At midday he rests, playing billiards, perhaps, or taking a nap. Then, at three, he rises and is dabbed down again and perfumed in time for dinner. This will be another spectacle of food, commencing at four with ‘soop as in France’.

  Typically, a table of gentlemen will be waited on by naked slave girls, who’ve been oiled and plucked, all the better to enjoy them. Carnality, however, can be a complicated matter, and there’s often a moment of hesitation before debauching a slave. This is partly because the African is an adept poisoner, and is known to be passionate in revenge. The other reason is economic: a pregnant slave is an unprofitable one, and so it pays to avoid the casual conception. Owners, as Dr Bancroft notes, go to great lengths to prevent such mishaps, deploying noxious lubricants of ocro and gulley root. Often these leave the girls hopelessly infertile.

  If the planter has a wife, she will preside over dinner, an extraordinary sight. Dr Pinckard writes at length about the ‘astonishing supper appetites betrayed by some of the Dutch females’. On one occasion his hostess polished off a bottle of Madeira before tucking into the claret, and ‘a solid substratum of two heavy slices of fat ham, after which I helped her to no less than fourteen other dishes’. With that lot gone, she then started work on the fruits and sweets.