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  The story of Joanna would one day nudge history off course, or at least the history of slaving. Twenty years later – long after her death – Stedman would bring her to an English readership, and this little tropical tragedy would seep, insidiously perhaps, right to the heart of political society. Abolitionists would even extract her tale from Stedman’s journals, to create a book of her own, the Narrative of Joanna, an Emancipated Slave of Suriname. It was an important tale for the way it recast slaves. A good slave was not merely loyal or strong but also compassionate, intuitive and inexplicably humane. She could also be a lover, and not merely a helpless victim.

  Joanna herself made a perfect heroine. She was only fifteen, and her blind grandfather had once been a kingly figure in an unknown country. Although she’d never been to school and could barely read, Stedman gave her the voice of an English queen. (‘Yet though a slave,’ she once told him, ‘I have a soul, I hope, not inferior to that of a European, and blush not to avow the regard I have for you.’) It’s hard now to distil reality from the fondness of Stedman’s old age, but one thing is clear: Joanna was impressively expensive. At £200 she must have been not only bright but profitably handsome. At the sight of her, even Stedman, normally such a trenchant observer of the female scene, was rendered shamelessly soppy: ‘Her face,’ he wrote, ‘was full of native modesty, and the most distinguished sweetness. Her eyes, as black as ebony, were large, and full of expression, bespeaking the goodness of her heart … Her lips, a little prominent, discovered, when she spoke, two regular rows of teeth as white as mountain snow …’

  Her beauty would kill her in the end, and had dogged her all her life. She was born at Fauquemberg, the property of a planter, known only as ‘DB’. Her father was a Dutchman who’d spent years trying to buy her off her owner. But DB was a man of reptilian warmth and had always refused. It was said that eventually the refusal killed her father, and that all Joanna had left of him was her magnificent outfit. According to Stedman, she was festooned in gold chains, rings and medals, and wore a red chintz petticoat, with a shawl of India muslin covering one breast, and ‘a beaver hat, the crown trimmed round with silver’.

  The unlawful affection that she’d felt for her father would be repeated with Stedman. The slavery was always there, like a frontier between them. But at least at Fauquemberg there would be some kind of justice. Eventually, most of DB’s slaves rose in revolt and ran away. Without his labour DB went bust and fled the colony for Holland. The liquidator then put the whole plantation on the market, including Joanna and the last of the slaves. But with the revolt raging there were no takers, and so for the next five years she remained in commercial limbo, bankrupt stock as yet unsold. Meanwhile, her uncles had run away and joined up with the rebels.

  A hint of her family’s defiance survived in Joanna. Despite the obvious affection she felt for Stedman, she never truly surrendered. She would court him carefully; she’d send him secret gifts after first spotting him at the house where she worked; she’d nurse him through his fever; she’d keep him going through the foul campaigns ahead, with crates of fruit and claret; she’d maintain his house and his bed, and would love him even when he returned from the forest, stinking and purulent; she’d be his friend, his mistress, his confidante and his saviour, but she’d never be what he wanted, and that was his equal. Stedman was always trying to liberate her, and she was always defiant. It was almost as though she feared a white man’s freedom more than his slavery. As a precious possession, she lived the life of an exalted concubine. The same could not be said, she realised, for the wives of the Dutch.

  For Stedman her humility was tantalising, and made her more irresistible than ever. As he lay recovering on his sick bed, in May 1773, he knew that here was a girl who, in every sense, he simply had to own. The problem was how. On his current captain’s pay he’d never be able to pay for her manumission. The only way this could change was if he somehow managed to distinguish himself, and that meant hoping for a war.

  Meanwhile, Stedman decided on one of his great, impetuous gestures. If he couldn’t buy Joanna, at least he could marry her. Although the arrangement would be invalid under Dutch law (as were all contracts with slaves), she accepted his proposal, and so – two weeks after they met – the couple were married, with all the ceremony that Stedman could muster.

  Paramaribo still mocks the pomp and fanfare of the Dutch. People were always dressing up in top hats, gloves and ‘bum-freezer’ jackets. The biggest of these mock pageants was ‘The Snow Ball’, which happened to be on while I was there. This wasn’t a private party but an enormous free-for-all, in the tradition of the slaves. One moment I was quietly enjoying a grassy snooze on Independence Square, and the next I was surrounded by hundreds of neo-Georgians all dressed in brilliant white. It was like waking up in the middle of a variety show deep in the Afterlife. There were dazzling trumpeters, shimmering drummers, a parade of large, lacy ladies, dandies in starched frock coats, a fleet of white limousines like a motorcade for hairdressers, a master of ceremonies in pearly tails and a troupe of gorgeous, skinny dancers, wearing nothing but their smalls.

  Next to me, a man was whistling through his teeth.

  ‘Nice girls,’ I said, assuming he spoke English.

  He nodded, still transfixed by the dancers.

  ‘That’s all this country has,’ he sighed, ‘nice girls and cocaine.’

  On 15 June 1773 festivities like these were interrupted by news from upriver. For most, it was the moment they’d dreaded. The revolt had restarted.

  The story of what had happened would be a grim foretaste of the war ahead. Some weeks earlier a detachment of Society troops had set off up the Cottica. At their head was a former Life Guard called Lieutenant Lepper. Nowadays he’d be described as ‘dashing’, in the sense of ornamental and rash. Some months earlier, he’d fled Holland after killing a friend in a duel. While some men might have paused for reflection at this point, Lepper didn’t. Instead, he was still desperately in search of heroism, which is how he and his men found themselves in a swamp, up to their armpits in mud. For the Bonis, it was like shooting apples in a barrel. They killed thirty soldiers, captured six prisoners and took Lepper’s head as a prize. The captives were then taken to the rebel camp, where the Bonis stripped them and beat them to death ‘for the recreation of their wives and children’. Lepper’s handsome (if slightly empty) head was then mounted on a pole and would adorn the Boni village for several months, until it was recovered by the Dutch.

  Only a handful of soldiers survived. When Stedman found one of them, weeks later, dying in the jungle, the survivor described how the Bonis had moved among them, cutting and butchering and hacking off heads. He himself was only saved because, as the rebels came close, their leader had shouted: ‘Sonde go sleeby, caba mekewe liby den tara dogo tay tamara’ (‘The sun is going to sleep, we must leave these other dogs till tomorrow’). After that, the survivors had wandered the forest for ten days until they stumbled into a Dutch camp, half starved, witless and ‘our putrefied wounds full of live worms’.

  Paramaribo reacted to this reverse with a mixture of fluttery outrage and downright sloth. It was three weeks before the marines were dispatched up the Cottica, in a collection of ‘crazy old sugar barges’. Stedman said these boats were like the colliers on the Thames, except roofed over with boards (‘which gave them the appearance of so many coffins’). He himself had two under his command, Charon and Cerberus. Each was rowed by ten slaves and carried about thirty soldiers. Both boats were armed with swivels and blunderbusses, and Stedman called his ‘the wooden walls of the colony’ or, less charitably, his ‘hen coop’.

  Still, he was relieved to be under way. War was good for his love life.

  A few days after the Snow Ball, I also said my goodbyes to Paramaribo and set off in a barge. For months it had troubled me, how I might follow Stedman into the swamps. On the map I’d been able to see nothing but a snaggle of enormous rivers spread over 2,000 square miles. There were no roa
ds through this scribble, and no marks except the heart-sinking symbol for bogs. Back then, the Charon and Cerberus had paddled down the estuary to Fort New Amsterdam, where on 4 July 1773 they’d turned right into the Commewijne River. This bit was easy: several times I’d been out there on a combination of bicycles and boats. But after that, things looked more difficult. Beyond the Commewijne, the vast, empty weed-world began, and it was still another seventy miles along the Cottica to the Coermotibo River, and the seat of the revolt. How would I get there? Rent a boat? Buy a canoe? No man can easily imagine his own demise, but I did have a sudden vision of myself, inextricably lost in this enormous labyrinth of water.

  Then I remembered my friends at the tug company, which happened to be English. Did they know the Cottica River? Sure, they said, every day one of their tugs headed up to Coermotibo or returned with a load of bauxite. It was a round trip of 232 miles, but I was welcome to join them. ‘Just give us a call,’ they said, ‘when you get to Paramaribo.’

  So that’s how I ended up aboard the MT Kite, as it gnashed its way down the Suriname River. Unlike the Cerberus, this was no hen coop. Everything about it had a deep, industrial bellow. Out at the front were two hoppers, or barges, each 200 feet long. When they were empty, as now, they drew only three feet of water, and so they bobbed along like vast rectangular balloons. When full, they’d carry 3,500 tons of bauxite each, and sink to the depth of a house. As for the Kite itself, it was ninety feet long and three storeys high. From the bridge I could see Paramaribo shrinking into the mangrove, and a wartime wreck – the German freighter Goslar – way below. The Master told me that, up here, we were further above the river than the river was deep.

  ‘A comforting thought,’ I said, ‘if ever we sink.’

  ‘Yup,’ he replied. ‘Just sit tight. You won’t even get your feet wet.’

  8

  THE HINTERLANDS

  The colony of Suriname is reeking and dyed with the blood of African Negroes.

  V.S. Naipaul, Middle Passage

  Farewell, ye shady woods, thou pleasing gloomy forest, pregnant with so many wonders and so many plagues, and which in the opinion of so many sufferers, even surpassed the ten plagues of Egypt.

  John Stedman, Expedition to Surinam

  Son sma no man gi den srudati pardon fu den hat’ sani san den ben du den sma.

  (‘Some people cannot forgive the soldiers for the painful things they did to people.’)

  Surinamese phrasebook, 2009

  THE HINTERLANDS HAVEN’T ALWAYS LOOKED so empty. If anyone really wants to know what lies out there, they need a map from the 1760s. It would show over 800 plantations along these rivers – in places, one every 500 yards. Among them there are cacao farms, palm oil plantations, little forts, French settlements (such as Mon Désir and Groot Marseille) and a Huguenot colony, called La Providentia. Linking it all up are the rivers themselves, canals, ditches, dykes and a few paths cut through forest, each marked cordonpad and as straight as a gunshot.

  But now it’s almost all gone. These days, whatever was there before can only be appreciated by satellite or plane. It’s not much, just a vague waffling of the earth’s surface, or the spectral outline of some vast endeavour. In places this great watery forest extends almost fifty miles inland, and it’s all largely empty. How different things were in 1699, when Maria Merian, a German artist, came out here to sketch and visit the plantations, getting over her divorce. She stayed for two years, and her botanical illustrations, published as Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, are some of the most glorious ever produced. Today, the same work would be almost impossible. Once you get to the Cottica, there’s barely a school or a shop, let alone a mansion.

  On this, our crowded planet, such dereliction is remarkable. It’s as though humankind’s been forgotten and virginity’s returned. Not that nature’s complaining. I’d heard that the sea cows, or manatees, were back, and that there was now a rich society of turtles. Only the Creoles were unhappy. They thought the emptiness was devious and that the Cottica was cursed. People often told me there was a cocaine laboratory upriver, run by a former president. Some even took the view that these days only fugitives inhabited the swamps.

  Perhaps they were right. No one seemed to take any chances. Even the crew of the Kite were prepared for the worst, and, the day we left, they had a full-scale practice of their piracy drill.

  Quite soon, life aboard settled down and became somehow quaintly British. Cups of milky tea appeared, with bacon sandwiches and bottles of HP sauce. Up and down the companionways there were pictures of great London tugs, and in my tiny cabin I had a bar of Lifebuoy, and a panel of awkward English sockets. Even the smells were British, the fried bread and the loos. It didn’t seem to matter that six out of eight of the crew were Indonesian: the Kite was like a little British factory, clanking down the river. As though this Britishness wasn’t enough, there was also the Master, who was strict and gingery, and expansively Welsh. ‘Went to sea at fifteen, I did,’ he once told me, ‘working the paddle steamers on the Bristol Channel.’

  I used to like sitting up in the wheelhouse with Captain Mansbridge. It felt as though we were sitting in a tower, enjoying two lives at once. Down there was Suriname, sliding by, looking steamy and lush. Up here it was cool, and we had big aircraft seats, the Welsh teas and almost fifty years of seagoing tales. As he eased us through the shipping lanes, the Master hardly seemed to notice the world beyond, and so we pootled along as though we were off to the Mumbles. I heard all about Mrs Mansbridge and her top-notch cooking, about the caravan, about the best tugs and the best rum, about the best fights in Cardiff docks, and the foolish magistrates and fiercest captains, about Bantry Bay, and about the young cabin boy who’d had his face whipped off by a hawser, and all the men who’d been crushed or drowned. Lester Mansbridge was a human repository of lives at sea.

  ‘And how long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirteen years. Know this river like my hand.’

  For the operator of such a hulk, he also had an extraordinary insight into the little lives along the shore. On the Suriname River he knew all the unseaworthy boats, the homes of the drug barons and the politicians-for-sale, the captain who’d not washed in thirteen years, and the villas of the rich. He also knew the Hindu fishermen, who’d head out to sea in open boats and stay away for weeks. Then there were the ‘sand-dancers’, the tiny dredgers in the mouth of the estuary. They were always being mown down and smashed to bits. ‘Imagine that,’ said the Master, ‘getting yourself killed for a boat full of sand.’

  Stedman’s armoured barge: harmless to its quarry but lethal to those inside. (Illustration credit 8.2)

  We’d now reached the star-fort and veered right, up the Commewijne.

  A short way ahead Stedman was finding his barges difficult. He was only a day out of Paramaribo and yet already he’d renamed them: Sudden Death and Wilful Murder. Beneath the boards, the heat was crushing. Then it rained, and everything began to rot: hammocks, tunics, black bread, knapsacks and biscuit. The mosquitoes didn’t help, or the fug of tobacco. Already men were beginning to sicken and bicker with the slaves.

  Stedman realised that to survive he had to adapt. His orders were to patrol the rivers for a month, to prevent rebels crossing, to harry them inland, to kill them and generally to make the prospect of another African homeland seem hopelessly remote. At this rate, however, he wouldn’t last a week. He wasn’t even in enemy territory yet, and the patrol was beginning to fail. Only slaves knew how to survive in conditions like this, and so Stedman did the unthinkable and sought their advice. Strip down, said Caramaca, the oldest slave, swim every day and get rid of your shoes. Stedman began immediately and plunged into the river.

  From now on he became known as Le Sauvage Anglais and, out on campaign, never wore shoes and fought only in linen. Every morning he took a swim in the river, and – his own refinement, this – he finished each day with a generous glass of claret. By the standards of today’s bushc
raft this may sound a peculiar regime, but it worked for Stedman. It would sustain him through three and a half years of sweltering warfare, including seven forays into the Hinterlands of up to five months each. No one else would fight like Stedman, and perhaps that’s why they died.

  Meanwhile, he was glad to be among the last, surviving plantations. The barges stopped at each one, taking on fruit and wasting time. Stedman had often been out here before and knew most of the estates. These had not always been easy visits. At Sporkesgift he came across a slave who’d been hamstrung, or surgically crippled, and at ‘Schovnort’ he found a ‘fine old negro’ chained to a furnace, consigned to ‘the intense heat of a perpetual fire night and day, being blistered all over till he should expire’.

  Now, it seemed, revenge was all around. Almost all the planters knew of friends who’d been lashed apart with billhooks and displayed in the trees. At Elisabeth’s Hope the owner, Mr Klynhams, had this advice for Stedman:

  As for the enemy, you may depend on not seeing one single soul of them; they know better than to make their appearance openly, while they may have a chance of seeing you from under cover. Thus, Sir, take care to be upon your guard – but the climate, the climate will murder you all.

  As the soldiers pulled away, they caught one last sight of Klynhams’s daughter. She was unforgettably beautiful, and she stood on the pier waving, the tears streaming down her face.

  The Kite didn’t stop for the plantations, or what was left of them. But a few days earlier, I’d ridden out here on my bicycle and taken a boat across the Commewijne.