Wild Coast Page 21

  It was two months before Cuffy attacked, but by then it was too late. The grim black soufflé of Dageraad was now latticed in ramparts and trenches. A hundred and fifty diseased defenders fought off an onslaught of 2,000 slaves. Meanwhile, from the river, three warships sprayed the rebels with canister and shot. For the first time, Cuffy was forced to retreat.

  This defeat soon had loyalties back on the move. The treachery that had begun with the English now seeped in among the rebels. Field slaves turned against house slaves and Creoles against Africans. The Africans even began to turn against each other. On one side were those – like Cuffy – from West Africa, Asante and Dahomey. On the other was a far more warlike faction, from the Congo and Angola. Eventually, in about August 1763, Cuffy’s leadership was challenged by a field slave called Atta. After only five months in power the greatest hero that Guyana has ever had conceded defeat. In the Akan tradition he gathered his closest supporters together and killed them, before turning a gun on himself.

  By December the revolt had fragmented into countless civil wars. But it wasn’t this that finished it off. Instead, it died of the victor’s disease. In their triumph the slaves had defeated work and brought an end to human toil. It was a glorious sight, the fields set free. Now everyone was a boss, and for a while there was fattening plunder. Even after the raiding parties ceased, the celebrations went on. First there were feasts of cows and dogs and then, finally, just words. The exhilarated slaves now lacked for nothing, except a bite to eat. Defeat had arrived in its most curious guise, and that was euphoria.

  Slaves paid a high price for revolt. On ‘The Rack’, every bone was meticulously broken. (Illustration credit 5.2)

  After Dageraad the river widened again. Ahead lay a great, blank estuary, the colour of sharpened knives. I remember thinking how bright it seemed, and how the only shapes were two straggly lines of attenuating mangrove. Out in the glare nothing moved except dolphins, forming soundless hoops of pink and grey before vanishing in rings. It looked like a film at the end of its spool. The blankness was compelling, as though anything could happen. This, it seemed, would have been the perfect place to watch the revolt in its final throes.

  First I’d have seen the Dutch rushing their apothecaries to Dageraad. Berbice had proved reliably unhealthy. Its dysentery had resisted all manner of herbs and leeches, and was now liquefying the troops. On one ship alone, fifty-four men had died. Many didn’t wait for the diarrhoea to come and kill them. The head of the militia, Lieutenant Pronk, spent the entire campaign feigning illness. Another man, Captain Hattinga, decided to set off on his own mission, got blind drunk and shot everyone he saw. Not surprisingly, Dageraad became dangerously depleted. By October 1763 there were only forty-two men standing, and the only way to defend the place was by opening the sluices and flooding it in water.

  Next, I’d have seen a small Dutch flotilla sailing up the estuary. News of the revolt had taken three months to reach Holland. The States-General then mustered an expeditionary force, but it was another six months before it arrived in Berbice. It was a humbling sight: two warships, two longboats and 260 soldiers. They’d go upriver and join up with a party of Amerindians, still being paid for each amputated hand. Dr Bancroft reports that these were prosperous times for Caribs; they became rich on severed hands and plump on human flesh. The manhunt had begun.

  The following month, January 1764, an even more daunting spectacle had appeared on the river. It was a force of 660 volunteer marines, under the command of a cold-hearted killer called Colonel de Salve. He was here to gather up the colony’s possessions, to capture rebels, execute their leaders and mutilate the rest. His arrival was so impressive that he soon had rebels changing sides.

  Among the traitors paddling downstream were two that I’d hear of time and time again. They were Okera and Gowsary. Both had been close to the revolt’s leaders, and each had made a crude assessment of his chances of survival. Living, it seems, was preferable to loyalty, and so they’d set off in search of de Salve. Not surprisingly, the colonel was only too happy to come to a deal. In return for their lives, the turncoats would tell him all he wanted to know. In fact, they did so well that de Salve later appointed them as drummers in his regiment. Meanwhile, he had everything he needed. Within two weeks of his arrival de Salve had found the rebel camp, burned it down and sent thousands of rebels reeling backwards through the bush.

  It wasn’t long before the ships were returning down the estuary, loaded with captives. Over the next three months some 2,600 slaves were recaptured. Atta himself held out until 14 April 1764, having wandered around like a hunted animal. In the end he was tracked down by his old lieutenants, Okera and Gowsary. It’s said that they laughed as he was tied up over a fire. De Salve then ordered that Atta’s flesh be torn away with red-hot pincers. For four hours Atta endured this before eventually dying. Observers say that throughout the ordeal he hardly uttered a sound. Having been tortured most of his adult life, he was, it seems, impervious to pain.

  Far upriver, the revolt fizzled on until the end of the year. The last to give up were the Angolans. Some two hundred of them had established a tiny, nightmarish state, viciously defended by mantraps of sharpened bamboo. Inside, it was like Angola in miniature. Cannibalism was the source of all power, and there was a militia that ran on discipline and magic. The leader of this gruesome dystopia was Accabre, a witch doctor from the Imbangala tribe. They believed that their women should not give birth but that the tribe should expand through abduction and theft. To join, all a man had to do was to kill an enemy and eat his flesh. Accabre’s men would have eaten their way across Berbice if they hadn’t been betrayed. Soon they too were back in their chains. It was the end of the revolt.

  Along these banks the colony lay ruined. A third of the white population had fled or perished, along with half the slaves. Most of the Dutch had no appetite for rebuilding what was gone. Van Hoogenheim pleaded exhaustion and resigned, aged thirty-five. Some of the colony directors even suggested abandoning Berbice, shutting it up and sailing away. But others saw a new future, out on the coast, and it was they who prevailed. The interior would never recover. The sad, empty river that I’d seen was entirely the product of 1763, a year of riot and revenge.

  Meanwhile, ahead lay the coast, and the curious world post-revolt.

  New Amsterdam still felt like an outpost at the end of a war. Although it was supposed to be the biggest city in eastern Guyana, it had all the exuberance of a temporary camp. Bars were booming, and so were shops selling shovels and lanterns and rolls of barbed wire. I have a lasting impression of lives lived outside; people dancing, canoodling and boiling up fish. All this was done with a certain intensity, as though all that mattered was now. I remember thinking how odd it was to drink this urgently, and to live every day like one last party. It was different at night. Then, there was no lighting or drama, and all the frogs squealed like incoming shells.

  Somewhere in among this human furniture an old Victorian town was quietly picking itself apart. It had a bell-tower, a street called The Strand and – like Georgetown – a large pink store called Fogarty’s. But the pavements had crumbled away, and nothing had been painted for years. Grog-shops had wild apocalyptic names such as Destiny’s Guinness Bar or Diner’s End. Then there was Good over Evil, the barber, and an electrical supplier called EVIL EYE. I couldn’t decide whether, as a town, it was sad or mad or somewhere in between. This was the place to come and buy a bag of dried-up alligators or a hand-powered sewing machine. It felt like a long-lost African colony on the brink of antiquity. Every street ended in some sort of trench or catastrophe. Donkeys ran wild, and the police had an entire garden full of rotting cars, like a patrol made of turf.

  Even my hotel felt like a relic from an earlier age. The Hotel Aster was built like a clipper, and had hardwood decks and a thick cream hull. Inside, it was so dark and cramped that I had to wriggle my way to my room. Like all good ships of its age, there was no unnecessary luxury. My cabin was lime-gre
en and contained only a washstand and an old iron cot. Mr Kertzious, the pilot, had said this was the cheapest hotel in town and had brought me to the door. It also happened to be run by his sister, Maylene. She, however, wasn’t always there, and at night the only other person around was a hefty ruminant known as ‘The Fat Girl’. But when Maylene did reappear, she was always pleasingly Victorian. She was prim and dainty, and wore a colourless frock and lace-up shoes. ‘You’re kindly welcome, sir,’ she’d say, as though the last hundred years hadn’t really happened.

  But of all New Amsterdam’s oldness, nothing was more conspicuous than its hospital. It was all painted yellow and green, and was three storeys high and two blocks long. When it was built, in 1881, it must have been one of the grandest hospitals in South America. Amid the grandeur I could see clapboard, frets, frills, crystal lights, balconies, demilune windows, rooftop pagodas and an enormous wrought-iron staircase cascading down the front. It was that particularly British style that’s never seen anywhere else. I’ve always wondered what it’s called. Neo-pavilionism? The Regatta Movement? Or perhaps Seaside Realism? As no one was around, I decided to slip through the fence and take a look inside.

  It was only then that I realised the whole place was abandoned. Everything was in place, but all the patients had gone. I climbed up through the wards and the old dispensaries. There were bottles on the shelves, and beds scattered down the stairs. It was as though everyone had received terrible news and had just jumped up and left. I came across a note for Mr Vanderbilt’s steroids, and a coffin in the yard. I even found a photocopier, paralysed mid-copy and now richly slathered in droppings. I was surprised that no one was stealing all these things.

  ‘But dey are,’ said the waitress at Diner’s End.

  She explained that there’d been guards for a while.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Dunno. Even they’s gone.’

  ‘And now it’s all quiet?’

  ‘No, I don’t sleep at night for de noise.’

  ‘Noise?’

  ‘Junkies, tearing up de zinc.’

  ‘And you don’t know what’s going to happen to it all?’

  The girl smiled wearily. ‘Everything here fall down.’

  With the future looking so sketchy, most people, I realised, had put their faith in prophets. This, like everything else in New Amsterdam, was not exactly new. Almost all the oldest sites in the town had some religious function. There were the Lutheran courts for the planters, a kirk for the Scots and a shady old tree for the slaves. Each new crisis seems to have brought a fresh new wave of prophets. After emancipation it was the Congregationists and the Wesleyans. Then, as the sugar failed, it was the Jordanites. They believed in polygamy and the divinity of a man called Mr Jordan. Now, however, the singular wife was back in control, but so were the Missionaries of Charity, the Shalom Full Gospels, the Church of the Nazarene, the Universalists and half a dozen others. They’d do anything to attract attention. Some had bright pink churches, and others had speakers mounted on the roof. Once I came across a bakery with a notice, tucked in among the rolls: ‘This stall is covered with the blood of Christ.’ It was certainly an arresting thought, if not an appetising ploy. Equally weird were the white evangelists. They wore ties and starched shirts, and stalked the town like the FBI.

  For a while all this was pleasantly distracting. But then, after a day or two, I began to feel what the city had felt for years: a sense of purpose set adrift. It was time to move on and begin the journey east. But, before leaving, there was one more place I wanted to see. I rang Mr Kertzious and arranged to meet for a drink.

  ‘Do you know where Fort Canje is?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘why you want to know?’

  ‘It’s where the slaves were taken after the revolt.’

  The old pilot tutted and whistled through his teeth. ‘Well, it’s still there …’

  ‘And will I get in?’

  Mr Kertzious frowned and took a thoughtful swig of stout.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘except it’s now the city madhouse.’

  Fort Canje, it seems, has yet to recover from the horrors of 1763.

  It was always a sickly piece of land. Even now, few people live out here, on the swamps formed at the confluence of the Berbice and the Canje. The clay is always weeping oily water, and the air is itchy with mosquitoes. I remember thinking how fat and glossy they looked, as they settled on my jeans. This must have been a joyless posting for the Dutch. I could just make out their earthworks, bounding a plot in the crook of the rivers. There was no view beyond, just an enormous burning sky and a fringe of thick mangrove. At some stage the fort had failed altogether, leaving only the occasional outcrop of brick. Later, the British had replaced it with the only building possible in a place such as this: an asylum for those beyond the stage of caring.

  Mr Kertzious announced me at the gatehouse and then shrank through the door. Behind a desk, a warden was watching cartoons on an old television. She was so fat that only her eyes seemed to move. ‘What you want?’ she murmured.

  I explained that I was here about the revolt.

  The eyes surveyed me coldly. I could see that she was working out how best to bully me, but my whiteness was confusing and so was my request. ‘All right,’ she said, eventually, ‘but no photos of inmates.’

  At first, we didn’t see any inmates at all. The old British asylum was there, of course, tottering into the swamp. It was like the hospital in New Amsterdam, except pink, and more emphatically decayed. Much of the fretwork was fluttering away, and whole sheets of tin had wrenched themselves free and were flapping in the heat. In some places entire buildings had skewed and stumbled off their stilts, and lily ponds had formed in the wreckage of the wards. The plumbing of eviscerated laundries now lay sprawled across the weeds, and – round the back – we found an enormous boiler, cast in Glasgow, and now nosing out of the ooze like some strange, unearthly fungus.

  Then, amid the debris, we spotted the inmates. Although they now had concrete barracks around the perimeter, some still preferred to wander the ruins. I was surprised how serene they looked. Perhaps the derelict mind finds comfort in chaos? One woman, who was whispering to the weeds, was luminously beautiful. It struck me that, however cruel insanity may be, it’s scrupulously fair. Beauty probably didn’t count for much up in the barracks. They had heavy steel locks, and wire across the windows. From inside I could hear the clank of metal, and a bitter miasma of urine and squeals billowed through the mesh. I don’t think that – until then – I’d ever truly appreciated the sheer proximity of madness to pain.

  Among the barracks was a small brick plinth, worn smooth by centuries of feet. I had an idea that here I’d stumbled upon the spot where one period of madness had ended and another had begun.

  The conclusion to that savage year was perfunctory and grim. On 16 March 1764 fifty-three of the most prominent rebels were tried at the fort in a single day. They were charged with ‘Christian murder’, and not one of them was permitted to give evidence. All were found guilty. De Salve had wanted to have them locked in iron cages and put on perpetual public display, ‘giving them too much food to die and too little to live’. But, perhaps mercifully, a more traditional view prevailed. The slaves were killed, as Dr Bancroft put it, ‘with all the various species of cruelty for which the Dutch have long been notorious’. Fifteen were burned over slow fires, and sixteen were tied to the rab rack and broken up with hammers. Another twenty-two were dragged over the plinth and hanged at the gallows. The following month the whole exercise was repeated, and another thirty-four were killed.

  Now, over two centuries on, there was little agreement about the revolt, or what it had achieved. Was all the slaughter worth it? Was this Guyana’s proudest moment, or its worst? During the ’60s, the rebels were re-cast as revolutionary heroes, which was a sure sign of bigotry to come. Even now there are Guyanese historians who describe the revolt as ‘the first steps of freedom’, although with
out any great conviction. Freedom was still too far away, and was not the work of violence. Besides, the rebels never spoke with one voice and were soon at each other’s throats. Then there was the treachery, and men like Okera and Gowsary. Having betrayed the revolt, they then sailed off to Holland and joined the marines. There they’ll be forgotten, at least for the moment.

  Only Cuffy has a memorial. It’s an angry-looking piece, cast in England and erected in Georgetown. What Cuffy would have made of this is anyone’s guess: a statue of a man whose appearance is unknown, made by the old enemy and erected in a city that did not exist at the time, was in the wrong colony and took no part in the revolt. Meanwhile, Berbice has nothing – except the plinth, of course, and the anguished squeals of the chronically insane.

  The road to forgiveness, it seems, is lined with Hindu temples.

  Beyond the outskirts of New Amsterdam the walls of vegetation parted, and India appeared. Suddenly I was among paddy fields and coconut trees. I passed the Uttar Pradesh Pottery, and through a long string of villages painted lime-green and pink. It was exhilarating, the return of ornament and colour. There were prayer flags in the sugar and all along the sea wall. I remember concrete elephants and a Vedic healing centre, and a petrol station, called Vishaul and His Three Adorable Sisters. It was all so strangely upbeat that it was impossible not to feel a sense of restoration. Even my minibus was jauntily Indian. Its music was like an over-excited heartbeat, and across the windscreen were the words ‘LOVE CONQUERS ALL’.

  I also felt perversely relieved to be back among overcrowding. Perhaps I’d just had too much of empty hospitals and forest. It was exciting to be once again in the open, and among humankind, however tightly packed. Along the coastal strip the villages were so prolific they had numbers instead of names, and everything seemed to be richly clustered in people: piers, stalls, fishing boats and ghats. I even saw four people on a moped once, and cane-workers riding sixty to a truck. Of Guyana’s 350,000 Indians, nowhere are they more concentrated than here in East Berbice.