Wild Coast Read online

  By 1628 Robert’s Newfoundland venture was drawing to an end. His plans for the colony had been almost as silly as his parcels. The best of these proposals he’d sent to the king, Charles I, through a lush mutual acquaintance, the Duke of Buckingham. In his letters Robert urged the building of a great new city out here among the fish. All it needed was a million men, but it would be known for ever as Carolinople. This hare-brained scheme finally fell apart only in August of that year, when an assassin managed to get his bodkin into Buckingham. With the end of Carolinople, Robert began to look around for an empire somewhere else.

  To anyone with a flair for disaster, Guiana was a perfect choice. At that stage attention was still focused on the ‘Wyapoko’ river, in what is now Guyane. There, disease and Portuguese raids had already polished off several English colonies. Not that this would deter a man of great poetic vision. In November 1628 Robert prepared a new will before his departure ‘by God’s leave to Guiane’. Then, along with a hundred others, he set off from Gravesend in ‘a shipp of London called the little hopewell.’ Three months later they arrived on the Wyapoko, built a fort and prepared the land for sugar.

  From an early stage I realised that Robert’s travels would never become a template for a journey of my own. There was simply not enough of him. With disaster written all over their adventure, he and his friends were almost certain to vanish without trace. And that, of course, is exactly what happened. Within eight months Robert was in the grip of a ‘burning fever’ and died of ‘the fluxe’. The following year the ‘Little Hopewell’ was wrecked off the mouth of the Amazon, with the loss of all but eleven lives. As for the colony, it was razed by the Portuguese, and no sign of it remains.

  I often hoped that our paths would cross, but it was never the objective of this journey. Instead, I’d make my own route, travelling down from Guyana to Guyane. But although Robert may not have provided me with a dotted line to follow, it was he who’d ignited the interest. What, I wondered, had become of the Wild Coast he’d known? In 2008 – almost exactly 380 years later – I set out from London, like him uncertain what I’d find.

  1

  THE TOWN OF GEORGE

  Despite its shortcomings and the marring effect of lawlessness and banditry, Georgetown is a city of undeniable character, unique attraction and indefinable charm.

  James Rodway, Guiana

  The number of children in Georgetown is frightening.

  V.S. Naipaul, Middle Passage

  There was plenty going on in Georgetown that week. An unknown Dutchman shot himself on Christmas morning in his room at a rival hotel, on account of feeling lonely.

  Evelyn Waugh, 92 Days

  NOTHING SPOILS A GOOD LUNCH quite like the threat of a hand-grenade attack.

  ‘But who’s going to attack us?’ I kept asking.

  Around the table the politicians shrugged and continued with their chicken.

  ‘Listen, man,’ said the bodyguard slowly, ‘we can’t explain you.’

  Bricko was no natural explainer. He was like a black Popeye, built out of tyres. I turned to the party’s chairman, who was watching the street. It was mid-afternoon, and only the mule carts were working. ‘Out there,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot of disappointed people.’

  ‘Like who?’ I tried. ‘Drug cartels?’

  ‘Maybe. But there’s some angry Indians too …’

  ‘… and people in big business …’ said his second.

  ‘… and Amerindians …’

  ‘And the Africans,’ growled Bricko.

  More beers arrived, and foamed over the table.

  ‘And then there’s the Chinese …’ said the party secretary.

  ‘And the other parties, the PNC …’

  ‘Or the PPP!’

  I was puzzled. ‘The government? They’d kill you?’

  An old Nissan whirred past and stalled at the junction. We all stared.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said the party leader, ‘you never know.’

  ‘But then that’s just about everyone, isn’t it? Everyone hates you?’

  Across the debris of bottles and bones, no one said anything. From the very beginning theirs had been a political party caught in the crossfire. After a moment the chairman spoke. ‘People,’ he said, ‘have lost faith in politics.’

  His second nodded, ‘That’s why we got so many churches …’

  ‘… And rum shops! Numbs the pain …’

  ‘But has anyone tried anything?’ I asked. ‘Bombs or shooting …?’

  Bricko shook his head. ‘Not here. Not yet …’

  The chairman frowned.

  ‘But this is Georgetown,’ he said, ‘so anything could happen …’

  The Townies, or people of Georgetown, still made a spectacle of murder. In a country with no obvious theatres and only two ailing cinemas, the courtroom was often the next best thing. The trials were laboriously British, went on for weeks and weeks, and were then lavishly reported. In Guyana nothing else got attention like this. Small wonder that politicians seemed to aspire to be killed.

  Soon after my arrival in the city I read about one of these trials and went along to watch. It was held in the Victoria Law Courts, a lingering fantasy of tropical Gothic. On the outside it looked like a vast tin palace, with corrugated gables and pillars made of iron. Inside, it seemed bigger still, and was richly inhabited by long-dead solicitors now whiter than ever in marble. There was even a statue of Victoria herself. I’d heard that, during the struggles for independence, a stick of dynamite had blown her head off. Now, I noticed, queen and bean had been solemnly reunited.

  It was an unforgettable trial. In one sense, it was like a courtroom drama, circa 1790. The accused, Blacksam and Buggins, were old felons who drank in taverns and ate saltfish and souse. Then, one day, they’d picked a Georgian quarrel with their neighbour and dispatched him with a cutlass. Having entered their pleas, they were brought to the court in chains. Dozens of witnesses were called. Their villages sounded like old sugar ships: Garden of Eden, Providence and Friendship. Most wore their Sunday best, and there was earnest talk of ‘coolies’, ‘larceny’, ‘house-breaking’ and ‘having carnal knowledge’. Somehow it seemed as though the last couple of centuries hadn’t really happened.

  In every other sense, however, the trial was like a snapshot of modern life in Guyana. The side walls of the court were open, and so the parrots sat in the palms outside, chattering through the evidence. Then the rains came early, and sounded like horses on the tin. Defence counsel, meanwhile, was – like almost half the population – Indian, and wore a black silk suit and robes. Whenever he could, he’d pound around the court, thundering away in a rich Creole, well larded with Dickens and Donne.

  The other races too played their part that day. The judge and all the constables were – like a third of all Guyanese – ‘African’, while the jurymen made up the rest: ‘the mixed races’. There, in their twelve furrowed faces was the story of Guyana, a hotchpotch of displaced souls: slaves, Amerindians, Dutch conquerors, ‘Chineymen’, Irish adventurers, Scottish cattlemen, pirates, pioneers and Pathans. Together, this volatile mix made up a population barely big enough to fill a little phone book. All that were missing were the whites, whose share of the whole was now a slice of 1 per cent.

  ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls …!’ thundered the Indian.

  Not that the jury heard. The whole building was shuddering under watery hoofs. Mercy, however, had survived, and the verdict was manslaughter. Off went the prisoners, grinning through their chains.

  ‘Yeh, man,’ said the constable, ‘just now them been spared the noose …’

  From the court a beautiful city, as light as feathers, fluttered off down the coast. Perhaps – like its people – Georgetown didn’t truly believe it belonged here, and so it hovered over the water. Nothing was firmly attached. It was all built on canals and breezes, a city of stilts and clapboard, brilliant whites, fretwork, spindles and louvres. The streets were as wide as fields, and th
e cathedral seemed to drift endlessly upwards, reputedly the tallest wooden building in the world. One area was even called Lacytown, as though, at any moment it would simply take off and drift away, home perhaps.

  Naturally, with so much kindling, Georgetown was always burning down. It was devastated five times by fire during the nineteenth century and then another four times in the century that followed. There’s always a good reason for these fires – riots or an eruption at the Chinese fireworks plant. The latest victims, in 2004, were a cinema – one of the last in the city – and the Roman Catholic cathedral. Faced with these disasters, the Townies would simply cut some more sticks and start all over again.

  Water too was a constant feature of the Townies’ lives. At high tide the sea towered five feet above the city, all held back with a wall. It was all a permanent reminder that, tropical though the city may have seemed, it had the soul of Amsterdam. For 200 years – well over half its colonial existence – Guyana had been Dutch, and this was the town of Stabroek. Muddy, hot and flat, it may not have looked much, but during peace negotiations in 1802 it was considered a better bet than Canada. A few years later the British grabbed it again and named it after George III, the farmer king. Soon afterwards, the whole soggy colony passed to Britain, to be known as ‘British Guiana’.

  Two centuries on, the moisture was as vigorous as ever. People often told me how, a few years earlier, their city had all but vanished under several feet of water. Most of the time, however, it was just a low-grade skirmish with the damp. The forest was constantly trying to creep back into this city, along with the mildew. Even concrete rotted here, and cars seemed to moulder. By day the canals were silky and green, and by night they were operatic with frogs. ‘Why? Why?’ they’d sing, which made the dogs all howl. Nature, it seemed, was gradually reclaiming its inheritance.

  Amid this riot of parrots and flamboyants, the Townies could still be fleetingly British. They’d talk about things like ‘spring’ and ‘autumn’ while the weather remained doggedly hot. They could even be a little archaic, with children peeing in ‘posies’ and having ‘tennis rolls’ for tea. In the shops, too, a little Britishness had survived; you could still buy Vicks VapoRub, a bottle of ‘Nerve Tonic’ or a stack of True Confessions. Meanwhile, Fogarty’s department store was like a huge pink slab of Croydon, now quietly decomposing. Downstairs it had a 1940s’ café, complete with skinny sausage rolls and dim lighting as though the war – like the café itself – was somehow still going on.

  But nowhere felt quite so left behind as the city museum. Downstairs were all the odds and ends of colonial life, together with Britain’s departing gift: a tiny Austin Rolls-Royce Prince. Upstairs, meanwhile, hadn’t changed at all since 1933, when Evelyn Waugh called by. The same faint miasma of formaldehyde still lingered over what he’d described as ‘the worst stuffed animals I have seen anywhere’. Not surprisingly, I had the place to myself, and so the curator pounced on me and made me take my hat off.

  Out on the street, traces of the old empire were harder to find. Of course, almost all the civic buildings were notionally British – although they didn’t always look it. Often even the queen’s most loyal architects had let heat and fantasy go to their heads. Father Scholes’s City Hall looked like a runaway doll’s house, and Blomfield’s cathedral had used up so many trees that, even now, it was at risk of vanishing into the mud. It was only in the details that Georgetown’s streets were still lingeringly British; the Hackney carriages, the EIIR letter boxes, the statue of a great sewage engineer and a pair of Sebastopol cannons. Once, however, I did see a large building site called Buckingham Palace, although – sadly, perhaps – before any resemblance had taken shape, the financing had failed.

  Despite these trappings, I soon came to realise that the Guyanese were neither British nor truly South American but lived in a world of their own. Sometimes it seemed that being foreign came so naturally to them that they didn’t even understand themselves. There were several thriving dialects, and the city would grind to a halt not just for Christmas but also for Diwali, Eid and Phagwah. Depending on who I asked, the national dish was either roti, chow mein, a fiery Amerindian concoction called pepperpot or chicken-in-the-rough. Originally each race had had its own political party, but now there were fifty. Among a mere 750,000 people, this sometimes made Guyana feel like several dozen countries all stuffed into one.

  I often felt this as I walked across Georgetown. One moment I’d be passing Chinatown, then a mosque, ‘The House of Flavours’, a Hindu temple, and the Pandit Council. Then I’d turn a corner and find myself in the middle of a ‘Full Gospel Miracle Crusade’ or a Mexican circus (‘With Real Tigers!’). Occasionally the different cultures seemed to elide, creating tantalising hybrids. Who, I wondered, was behind all the duck curry competitions? Or the ‘Festival of Extreme Chutney’? Most of the time, however, everyone kept to themselves. As I passed through each neighbourhood, the music changed – from reggae to Hindi, through soca and hip-hop, and back to calypso.

  All this would be odd in a big city, and yet Georgetown was tiny. There was only one escalator in the whole town (and it still drew a crowd), and the rambling National Gallery received just twenty visits a month. Everyone knew everyone, even the men who sold horse-dung from their carts. You couldn’t do anything, it was said, without word spreading outwards through the Spit Press (‘You tell Tara,’ as one taxi-driver put, ‘and Tara tell Tara’). Only I was the odd one out: a bucra, or white man, in a town with everything but.

  Most people I met told me a revolution was imminent. After a while I began to suspect this was merely a polite Towny way of saying that they were not to be underestimated.

  Not that I ever did. They were like frontiersmen, an exotic blend of optimists, who’d arrived on the edge of not-very-much after a long, hard walk through history. Many didn’t even have proper names, as though they’d simply jumped out of their lives. These nicknames were famously creative. I’d hear of ‘Blue Beef’, ‘Prophet’ Willis (who had a hotline to God), a sweet-maker named ‘Who Sucking’, and a man who made his living as a prize-fighter called ‘Slack Foot Johnny’; then there were the villains like ‘Jacket Wallah’, ‘Biscuit’ Andrews, ‘Banga Mary’ and the lock-breaker ‘Hocus Pocus’. But my favourite was the man who’d insisted he was white but was known as ‘Walker the Nigger’.

  But what really marked the Townies out was their sense of defiance. It didn’t seem to bother them that they were either being flooded or roasted or picked apart by poverty. Everyone considered himself important, and his political views of interest. Each day the newspapers ran ream after ream of trenchant views, contemptuous of failure and wary of success. But this was nothing compared to the views being expressed on the market stalls, and in bars and shacks and abandoned vans. It sometimes seemed as though the whole place was about to break into a fight, which – remarkably – it never did.

  ‘Something will turn up,’ people would conclude. Often they were right. While half the city’s workforce sat around wondering what to do, the other half were on the move. Either they drove minibuses with names like ‘Thug Life’ or ‘Try Jesus’, or they sold things. It could be anything: watches, cane juice, kites, horse-dung or a sugary drink called swank. The most enterprising even headed out into the bush to do a little mining. Sir Walter Raleigh would have loved it: here was a city in the Guianas, inhabited by paupers, all with gold teeth.

  ‘NO IDLERS’, said the signs, ‘NO TOUTS’. It was an impossible injunction. In Georgetown everyone was either one or the other.

  The rich weren’t much different, except that they had cars. Perhaps it was this mobility that made them hard to find.

  ‘They’s always out liming,’ said a vendor on the sea wall.

  ‘Liming’ meant loafing around. ‘Where?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Out in them big hotels …?’

  Being of the motorised classes was clearly not popular, so it took me a while to track them down. Eventually, however, I spotted
some in a place on Middle Street called the Sidewalk Café. It was a remarkable evening, treacly hot and full of surprises. A man just like Marvin Gaye was singing a cappella, and the first person I met had no name at all. Known simply as ‘The Man from Afar’, he wore a black suit and used words so long and convoluted that – after two shots of El Dorado – I wasn’t sure whether he was beginning one sentence or half-way through another.

  Fortunately, I was rescued by the owner. At first I thought she was the next act, she was so omniscient and twinkly. But Cathy Hughes was always like this, and that night she towed me round, introducing me to her friends and clientele. Coming from a city as battened down as London, their collective generosity was almost disconcerting. They pumped my hand and asked me about life on ‘The Outside’ (as they called the world beyond). Some, even by Guyanese standards, weren’t really rich at all. One was an old con man who went around telling people how he needed money for an old aunt or for petrol or a baby with galloping yaws. No one seemed to care; he was just part of the scenery – like missing manhole covers, the rum and Cathy’s deep-fried cutters.

  ‘He gets glorious,’ she explained (when she really meant drunk).

  The other guests were more determined survivors. That night I met gold prospectors, jazz musicians, a pilot, a beautiful Indian scientist called Racquel and Cathy’s husband, Nigel, a giant Afro-Guyanese lawyer who’d once been chairman of the country’s bar. The pilot told me he’d moved to Antigua and that there were now as many Guyanese working outside the country as there were at home. Another man, with a hard, stubbly head, said he’d gone all the way to America for work. By one of those strange twists of Towny fate, he’d ended up as a marine colonel, serving in Iraq.

  Nigel drove me home, deftly avoiding the cows and the gaping holes.

  ‘Life’s not always easy here,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t live anywhere else.’