Wild Coast Page 26

  Later I’d catch up with the Bonis – but not here. They’d never signed a treaty or drunk blood with the Dutch. They hated the other maroons and had never emerged from the forest. The last time they came to Paramaribo was in 1769, when they’d held the city by the throat.

  The Bonis see themselves not as delinquent but as a cleansing scourge.

  While the planters were drinking away their faculties, this new group of fugitives gathered in the swamps along the coast. They’d found a perfect natural hideaway, a spur of jungle 100 miles long, bounded on one side by the sea and on the other by a river called the Cottica. At the heart of their refuge was a citadel called Boucou, or ‘Mould’ (it would rot, they said, before it ever fell). It was a daunting little fortress, defended with mantraps, stolen swivel-guns and underwater paths. Getting maroons out of there would be like trying to winkle shadows from a maze-within-a-maze, to say nothing of the disease and heat, the constant bog and the benighted forest.

  Encouraged by the success of the Saramaka, the Bonis rose in revolt. Here, in the words of a Dutch soldier, is what happened:

  The most beautiful estates in the settlement, called plantations, were once more seen, some blazing in flames and others laid in ashes, while the reeking and mangled bodies of their inhabitants were scattered along the banks of the River Cottica, with their throats cut and their effects pillaged by their own negroes, who all fled to the woods, men, women and children, without exception.

  By 1769 the ‘Cottica Rebels’ (as the Dutch called them) had reached Paramaribo and were setting fire to the edges of the city.

  Bloated and luxurious, the planters were unable to respond. Although the company that ran the colony, the Society of Suriname, had its own army, they were the ‘outcasts of all nations’, with barely anyone fit enough to fight. So the company did what any good company would, and paid someone else. As the only men left were slaves, it was slaves that they employed. This ought to have been the end of Suriname, and yet in some ways it was only the beginning. Even today, it is a country with two minds: one urbane and slightly dissolute, the other wild and ascetic.

  The Society’s gamble paid off. The Neger Vrijcorps (or ‘Negro Free Corps’) was never short of volunteers. For some, it was the simple promise of food and freedom. For others, it was about self-preservation; they didn’t want to throw in their orderly, relatively prosperous lives and become like the savages within. But there were also a few who just wanted their old lives back, Africa’s cycle of warfare and booty. The Dutch promised them 25 florins for every hand that they recovered, dried and smoked in the normal way.

  By 1772 the colony had a force of over 300 ‘Black Rangers’. They would prove to be better than any Society troops, and just as loyal. (The entire Vrijcorps was commanded by four white men, known as ‘Conductors’.) They were also perfectly adapted to this swamp warfare. Each ranger was armed with a sabre and a flintlock, which he mastered with ease, and – out of preference – he tended to fight naked, except for breeches and a scarlet cap which bore his number. He was assiduously obedient and wore an amulet of metal and bones that made him both invincible and euphoric in the fight. Before long, the Red Caps, or Rode Mutsen, were fanning out along the Cottica, hacking off hands and gathering florins.

  Later that year they arrived at Boucou itself. After a short but inconceivably violent struggle the hideout was captured. It was not, however, the end of the rebellion – far from it. After this, the Bonis would disperse throughout the Cottica basin, losing themselves in over 2,000 square miles of primary forest. Just to prove that the war was only just getting dirty, they captured twelve rangers as they left. Eleven of them had their throats cut, and the twelfth was sent back to his comrades, with his ears, lips and nose all crudely sliced away. He was just able to convey the horror of the day before he also died.

  The Dutch weren’t sure which worried them more: the Bonis or their reliance on the rangers. In desperation they appealed to the Staten-generaal in Holland. It was months before anything happened, but then, on Christmas Day 1772, a large expedition set sail. It was a typical Dutch army of that time: an unruly body of over 1,200 marines, mostly Germans, Scots and Swiss. They’d never fought together before, and by the time they reached the tropics they were struck with such lassitude that, when the bosun’s mate fell overboard, no one bothered to rescue him. Eventually, however, after five weeks of scurvy and lice, they pulled into the Suriname estuary and gratefully dropped anchor.

  One clear, bright day I borrowed a bicycle and hurried out to meet them.

  There was still a great star fort ten miles downstream, in the mouth of the river. It was called New Amsterdam, like the city that became New York.

  In the estuary I hired a ferryman to take me across. The fort didn’t look much from a canoe, but once I was up on the bank, I could see the beginnings of La Rochelle, or the foundations of Corfu. Huge, rounded hummocks of turf splayed out in all directions. I imagine that for a passing parakeet it might still have looked like a star, although it was no longer much of a fort. Two British invasions, one American landing and 300 years of tropical rain had left it looking lush and herbaceous. The moats were now full of lilies and little alligators, and along the old earthworks were luxurious clumps of mango and palm. It was all beautifully sleepy and exotic. Deep in the grass I found a complete armoured car, now more vegetable than metal. There was also a little empty prison, with pictures of girls still pasted to the walls. But what surprised me most of all were the cannons, which lay everywhere. They were like little fat men, asleep in the turf.

  Right in the middle of the star was an old, white gunpowder house. It was exactly the same as it had been the day the great expedition landed on 2 February 1773. With so much of their hardware still around, it wasn’t hard to picture them strolling through the camp. They must have been a heartening sight; new marines in smart leather hats and natty blue jackets turned up with scarlet. They too were happy and thought they’d landed in heaven. A cargo of fresh fruit was sent out to them, and from the plantations all around came the gorgeous scent of spice. Only two things marred this, their glorious arrival. One was the jiggers they’d picked up around the fort (and which could only be removed by bathing in fresh lime). The other was the sight of a slave girl who’d just been given 200 lashes, and whose skin had been colourfully shredded. Heaven, it seemed, was a complicated place.

  Amid all the celebration, no one had any idea of the trials ahead. Of the 500 marines that arrived that day, almost 90 per cent would never make it home. Of the senior officers, only two would survive. One was the expedition’s commander, ‘a Swiss Gentleman of the Alpine mountains’, called Colonel Fourgeoud. He was a veteran of the Berbice revolt ten years earlier, and although he was now sixty, he’s still this story’s psychopath. He’s like Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore: a thundering, bare-chested killer who will eat nothing, feel nothing and fear nothing. He would be brutal with the maroons but equally brutal with his own men. In the words of one of them: ‘He was not cruel to individuals, but was a tyrant to the generality, and caused the death of hundreds by his sordid avarice and oppression … few men could talk better but, on most occasions, few could act worse.’

  The other officer to survive was Fourgeoud’s opposite in every respect. He was gregarious, humane, proud, passionate, occasionally silly and always impetuous. He was for ever fighting duels and, in Paramaribo’s taverns the brawls he’d start would be remembered for years. (‘Hats, wigs, bottles and glasses flew.’) But he was also poetic, and his account of the insanity that follows would be the Apocalypse Now of the eighteenth century. He was Captain Stedman, lately a luitenant in the Prince of Orange’s most loyal Scots Brigade.

  John Gabriel Stedman was born in the wrong place, and 200 years too early. His own era constantly irked him, like a skin that doesn’t fit. It infuriated him that soldiers were flogged, that leadership was a birthright and that the poor were so dispensable. Slavery too would disgust him, although he was never quite old e
nough to imagine abolition.

  But worse than being born in 1744 was being born in Holland. There, warfare was almost a constant feature of everyday life. The country’s frontier was so insistently violated that the States-General could no longer muster the soldiers to guard it, and so instead employed mercenaries, including the brigade of Scots. That’s where Stedman’s father came in. He was a hapless lowlander who’d arrived in search of his fortune, joined the brigade and then lost all his money. The only sensible thing he’d ever done was marry Antoinette van Ceulen, who was by all accounts indomitable. She’d hady nine miscarriages by the time she delivered John, and then two years later she was right in the thick of it, bandaging the wounded at the Battle of Roucoux.

  But for her, being shot at wasn’t nearly as bad as being Catholic. So great was her fear of John’s papal pollution that she eventually sent the boy to his uncle in Scotland. There he spent his time stealing pigeons, raiding orchards, street-fighting, killing cats and dogs, breaking windows and firing off pistols behind old ladies’ backs. Eventually, at the age of twelve, he was returned to Holland with all the education he’d ever need.

  After that Stedman drifted for a while. One moment he wanted to be a priest, and the next he wanted to become an artist and go and live in Italy (a scheme regarded as altogether far too Catholic). He took to wearing coloured shoes and crimson breeches, and strutting around with his face painted and his hair ‘elegantly frizzed’. It couldn’t last, and so, in 1760, he did what he’d been signed up to do since the age of three, and that was join the army. But just as he was drifting into the Scots Brigade so his father was drifting out of it. After falling off his chair one day, Stedman Senior began to lose whatever was left of his marbles. He’d spend the rest of his life sitting by the hearth composing little ditties. When he eventually died in 1770, all that John inherited was a steel penknife, a crucifix and some books (which he was obliged to sell for £10 to pay off the debts).

  Meanwhile, life in the brigade was surprisingly unstructured. Sometimes Ensign Stedman turned up for duty, and sometimes he didn’t. He was supposed to have been guarding the frontier but was often to be found sprawling anywhere but. ‘Heusden’, he wrote, ‘was a town where I offered incense to Bacchus; Nijmegen to Venus, and at Breda I used sometimes to rattle the dice.’ He was drifting again, except this time in uniform. From Amsterdam he ‘escorted the Whores like a wild man to Rotterdam’, and once he got so drunk that he lay in the street until daybreak. In his rare sober moments he read Plutarch, Fielding and Smollett, and posed as a doctor to pay off his bills. At one point he left the country altogether and set off for Carolina, to make some money. However, this adventure got no further than London, where he fell in love with a sail-maker’s daughter and decided to stay. For nine months he made his living playing a fiddle in a bar and heaving ballast on the Thames, until eventually he was arrested for fighting in Kensington Gardens. In 1771 he returned to Holland and the Scots Brigade, only to find that – rather surprisingly – he’d been promoted to luitenant.

  When, the following year, volunteers were sought to quell a slave revolt, it seemed like a tempting offer. Stedman again abandoned the Scots and joined the marines, taking the rank of captain. As he set out for Suriname, his mother gave him everything she thought he’d need: two blue shirts, a hammock, a silver spoon, two lumps of Spanish sugar and a small but powerful bottle of medicine.

  Five weeks later he was sailing into the estuary. He would recall how, at the sight of Fort New Amsterdam, the men in the rigging burst into song. ‘But’, he adds, ‘how miserably these poor fellows were mistaken in their reckoning shall soon be seen.’

  After a promising start, the expedition soon began to falter. A week after their arrival in the estuary, the three great transports docked at the Red Steps. For Stedman it was an enchanting moment; the country was ‘delicious’, and the city ‘uncommonly neat and pleasing’. As he and his men disembarked they were thronged by the crowds and fêted as saviours. Soon every man had his uniform adorned with sprigs of blossom. Colours flew, a band played and the little fort burst into life with an eleven-gun salute. The governor had even ordered one of his half-naked banquets, and women of all races turned out, looking powdered and expectant.

  The marines marched up the Waterkant to the Oranjeplein, that great grassy space now known as Independence Square. There they formed up in lines. Some had been below decks for almost two months, and in their tight uniforms they began to faint in the heat. Together they made a curious spectacle, of uncertain talent. There were the Swiss, of course – such as Fourgeoud – some formidable Germans and an affable Dane called Baron de Gersdorph. But there were also plenty of Scots. They’d made respectable border guards, but how would they fare in the swamps? Of the subalterns, a few would still be around twenty years later, but Messrs MacDonald and Campbell would perish in the early sorties, and Mr Small, who was as fat as Falstaff, would very soon go mad.

  The Scots, however, weren’t the only imponderable soldiers. There were also two drummer boys with a well-earned reputation for treachery and killing. They’re not new to this story but are old acquaintances from the revolt in Berbice. It’s Okera and Gowsary, who’d betrayed their comrades in 1763 and then joined the marines. Now they were back, in the theatre that they knew, and in time they’d prove useful, as they could read smoke and interpret the drums. Fourgeoud would love them like he loved no one else. They were what every soldier should be: inexhaustible, functional and pitiless. Okera wasn’t even perturbed when, by coincidence, he came across his brother, still working as a slave.

  Only the governor cast a slight cloud across the day. He was thinking about money, and what all this would cost. Although the United Provinces were to meet half the expense of the expedition, the Society of Suriname was coughing up the rest.

  Out on the estates, the planters felt the same. ‘They hesitated not,’ wrote Stedman, ‘to call us the locusts of Egypt, who were come to devour the fruits of the colony.’ Even before the expedition had arrived, the colonists were planning its departure. Over the next four months the marines would not set one foot in the jungle, and yet three times they were shown to their ships and told they could go. Each time all that ever stopped them was the rumour of maroons.

  And the demands of the women.

  It’s no great surprise, perhaps, that the fate of this easy, languid city was determined by sex.

  For those first four months Stedman could think of almost nothing else. From the very beginning there was the promise of sensual adventure. He discovered that slave girls ‘exult in the circumstances of living with a European’, and that some would happily bestow their favours ‘for a dram or a broken tobacco-pipe, if not for nothing’. Even the clergy would take advantage of these ‘customs’, and the whole city, it seemed, was maddened by its itch. By the end of his first fortnight Stedman had been offered a wife of fourteen, and almost anything he wanted. He even found himself, on his very first night, at the house of one Mr Lolkens, being bedded by the maid. Having planted an ardent kiss on his lips, he says, she ‘insisted upon pulling off my shoes and stockings, and in a moment disencumbered me of that part of my apparel …’

  But it wasn’t just slave girls mobilised by this great surge of men: so were the whites. For Dutch women, the expedition offered the prospect of a lover. The slave society had never brought them adventure. (If a white woman was caught with a slave, he would be shot, and she would be branded and expelled from the colony.) Now, with such a shortage of lawful, potent men, the arrival of the transports was – to the ‘fairer ladies’ – like a dream come true. With little dignity and even less restraint they threw themselves at the marines. Two women even fought a duel over a particularly angular specimen, and another offered Stedman unlimited access to her slave girls if only he would marry her. Although he was generally impressed by this ardour, he was less impressed by their offering. White women here, he noted, were ‘languid, sallow’ and ‘shrivelled’.

  But,
with or without Stedman, the women had their way. The marines, they told the governor, were to stay where they were.

  As might be expected, vice and disease were soon thinning the ranks. During those first four months of inactivity the marines drank and fornicated, and then drank all over again. It didn’t seem to worry anyone that there were still rebels round the city. It was easier not to think about it, just to swill back the gin and take another lover. Some died of yellow fever – or ‘The Seasoning’ – and some died of heat, but many just melted away. ‘Now,’ wrote Stedman, ‘our common soldiers fell the victims of idleness and licentiousness, and died frequently six or seven in a day …’

  By July 1773, five months after its arrival, a quarter of the force was either dead or unfit, and they hadn’t even left Paramaribo. The cemetery where the dead were buried is still there, looking weedy and abandoned, right in the heart of the city. Even now, no one ever goes inside or walks among the tombs. The gates are padlocked, and people say it’s haunted by wintis. This is hard on those who did nothing worse to Suriname than arrive here and die. Among them there were the expedition surgeon and two lieutenant-colonels, including the affable Baron de Gersdorph.

  Even Stedman came close to death. ‘I became a member of a drinking club, I partook of all polite and impolite amusements, and plunged into every extravagance without exception. I did not, however, escape without the punishment I deserved.’ On 17 May he developed a fever and took to his hammock, preparing to die. But dying was a cumbersome business in the Paramaribo of 1773. One whiff of mortality and all the neighbours would turn up with cures and unguents, cordials, quacks, lamenters and professional wailers. Death was like a last great public appearance, and yet for Stedman this was a defining moment. Afterwards, he was never again quite the rake he had been. This was partly because he’d peered into the abyss, but there was also something else: a beautiful slave had just walked into his life, by the name of Joanna.