Wild Coast Read online

  I hadn’t expected to find much – even here, a good ten miles before the Cottica begins. The land was sodden and ripe, and the mangrove had swelled up out of the river and reclaimed the dykes. There were roads still, but sometimes they led nowhere, except into the swamps. At one point I found myself walking through the skeleton of a vast sugar factory, with cattle now grazing among the machines. Everywhere smelt of earth and steam, and crumbling wood. Occasionally I came across the great open spaces of the past, now shrinking under the trees. But the slave-yards had all gone, of course, leaving nothing but the stragglers. One of these little shanties was still littered with large pieces of artillery. Another had a dede-osu, or morgue, on which someone had painted ‘WAKE UP AND LIVE’.

  Even more surprising, I’d found two old plantation houses. The first was on the south side of the river. Plantage Zorgvliet dated from Stedman’s time and was a large, wheezy clapboard house, mounted on enormous brick piers. It looked like Noah’s Ark, waiting for the flood. The other house, Fredericksdorp, was on the north bank and was built a few years later. This is just how I’d imagined an old plantation, with lawns and fruit trees and a view of the river. As it happened, the whole place had been restored by a more recent Dutch soldier. Captain Hagemëyer had arrived in the ’60s, fallen in love with the emptiness of Commewijne and stayed ever since. He’d been so faithful to the original plantage that he’d even resurrected its statutes and spruced up its prison.

  ‘Let me show you this,’ he said.

  At the back was a wide stone pavement, for drying coffee.

  ‘You know how they knew the beans were ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘When the slaves burned their feet.’

  I could have spent all day pottering around with old Captain Hagemëyer, but it was soon time to go. I’d got one more place to visit, back across the river. It was the home of the Godeffroys, known as Plantage Alkmaar. In Stedman’s torrid tale few people emerge with much decency, apart from the Godeffroys. The family were German, a cut above most, and had a magnificent crest, replete with eagles and lions and a hefty coronet. Perhaps it was their blue blood that affected their attitude to slavery. It always seemed more feudal than commercial: at Alkmaar, said Stedman, ‘slaves are treated like children’, and ‘here were no groans to be heard, no fetters to be met with, not any marks of severity to be seen – but all was harmony and content.’ Slavery never got more enchanting than this.

  A few miles upstream I’d found the Alkmaar dykes. Charles Godeffroy had designed most of them himself, over the last thirty years of his life. By the time Stedman arrived, he was sixty-nine, and the sheer effort of draining the Hinterlands had taken its toll. He died on the very day the revolt restarted. But his family had never forgotten Stedman. Widow Godeffroy would lend him a home, encourage his writing, pay for his book and look after Joanna, whenever he went away. She even bought the girl herself, so that no one else could have her. Joanna, of course, was effusively grateful, although – as a matter of honour – she insisted on remaining in Mrs Godeffroy’s service until the widow herself was repaid. In the meantime Mrs Godeffroy gave Joanna her own house, her own garden and her own little complement of slaves.

  Enchanted Alkmaar had, I realised, all but disappeared. Of the big house there was now nothing left but a field of cinder and weeds. It horrified me how completely the Godeffroys had vanished, having transformed so much of the landscape. I wasn’t even sure that this was Alkmaar, rather than the next plantation, ‘Nyd en Spyd’ (or ‘Anger and Sorrow’). But then an Indian woman emerged from the grass. She looked frightened at first, until she saw the pencils and bites, and my old tape-recorder, and realised I was harmless. Although she didn’t speak English, we somehow scraped by in Talkie-talkie.

  ‘Plantage?’ I tried, pointing at the weed.

  ‘Me no sabi.’

  ‘Plantage Alkmaar?’

  ‘Disi Alkmaar,’ she nodded. ‘Disi Alkmaar, dyaso!’

  ‘Godeffroy?’ I tried, and then pranced around like a king.

  ‘Godeffroy? Yu wani see?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, me wani see,’ I said, without being sure of what.

  The woman then called her daughter, who came with a cutlass.

  ‘Kon un go!’ they said, and so I followed them into the grass.

  Some way in was the wreckage of an old wooden house that had buckled and collapsed. The women started tearing at the beams and throwing them aside. They were immensely strong, and soon we’d cleared away half the house and were down to the sand and ash. Then, as we started digging, there was the perceptible clink of stone, and an eagle appeared, followed by two lions and a hefty coronet. The Indian got up and stood aside.

  ‘Disi Masra Godeffroy …’, she said, as though by way of introduction.

  It was old Charles himself, magnificently entombed at the heart of his estate. The date on his gravestone was ‘9 Juny 1773’, almost exactly four weeks before Stedman sailed past, in search of uncertain glory.

  Night fell, but the Kite carried on rumbling upriver. From the mast two brilliant rods of light, sparkling with insects, felt out the shoreline ahead. In the wheelhouse all the dials and screens came twinkling to life, and the Master hauled himself off to bed. He was replaced by the First Mate, called Saiman, who added to the electrical effects with a boom box and the sound of Javaans. Although he was Indonesian, his family – unlike those of the deckhands’ – had worked this river for almost a hundred years. ‘My father was a fisherman,’ he told me, ‘but now I’m up here, I’m so happy …’

  In the darkness, everything closed in. I was no longer conscious of the enormous boat, or the enormous river all around. Ahead, the water looked like tar, sleepy and deceptive. Occasionally we’d hear a faint bump, and a tiny shiver would ripple through the Kite. It was the tree trunks, disintegrating under 15,000 tons of steel. At some stage we passed into the Cottica, but nothing seemed to change. Stedman had described a little fort here, owned by the Society. Its cannon had commanded the river, and I noticed that it was still marked on the chart: Post Sommelsdijk.

  I asked Saiman what happened there now.

  He laughed. ‘Just bush-bush!’

  ‘And ghosts?’ I joked.

  Saiman frowned. ‘Yes, yes. Everyone afraid of the ghosts …’

  More sandwiches arrived, together with the night watch. I sat with them for a while, peering into the beams. It was mesmerising, and soon I couldn’t make sense of anything, whether it was shadows or reflections or trees with arms and heads. I decided to go to bed and clambered back down to my cabin in the hull.

  There I lay on my bunk, leafing through Stedman. From this point on, he’d said, every plantation lay in ruins. Looking at the chart, I was surprised that so many names had survived. I could see Nieuw Klarenbeek, where Stedman had found a military hospital overrun with rats, Charlottenberg, where he’d treated his men to a feast of twelve ducks and thirty-six bottles of claret, and Groot Marseille, where the slaves themselves had fought off the rebels. I was just beginning to wonder whether, since then, anything had ever happened in these places when sleep began to merge with history, and soon I could feel myself grinding through my dreams, as though they too were powered by diesel and jolted by the logs.

  At about dawn the engines stopped and I woke up. I went up on deck, and found that overnight the river had narrowed, and that we were now in the mouth of a small tributary. The forest was so close that huge shoots of mocco-mocco leaned nosily over the decks. It was a bewitching place, and I could now see why Stedman – when he wasn’t dying – had loved these swamps. The river was like liquefied sky, and the trees seemed to hover above it, without any land beneath. In the steamy early morning warmth I was tempted to do something Stedmanesque and plunge into the water. But then the Master appeared with a story about fishing here, and an alligator so big that it broke the rod in two. Instead, I had bacon and eggs and the news from the BBC.

  Saiman was still up in the wheelhouse, wearing hi
s Breton cap, with his uniform all pressed and neat. He told me we were waiting for the tide, that we’d done sixty miles since Paramaribo, and that he always stopped here. ‘My favourite place,’ he said, ‘They call it Koopmans Kreek.’

  It had obviously been a popular ankerplaats for several centuries because the Charon and Cerberus had moored here, at exactly the same point, on the fourth evening of their fateful excursion.

  For the Charon, that night was almost her last. By now, Stedman and his men were deep in rebel territory. Sometimes they could hear the Bonis at night, calling to them or ‘talking’ on the drums. Occasionally the men even managed to get a shot in, but all that ever fell out of the trees were giant snakes and monkeys. Once, everyone rushed to arms in the middle of the night, only to find a sea cow snuffling round the hull. Perhaps Farmer Klynham was right, and they’d never see the rebels? No one had any idea where they came from, or where they were going, or how they managed to be everywhere at once. The marines didn’t even know how their enemy managed to land or negotiate the river. The woods looked as though they floated on the water, with no sign of any riverbank beyond. ‘Not a footstep of land could we find,’ wrote Stedman, ‘where we might cook our salt provisions safely.’

  Unable and unwilling to land, the marines were imprisoned in the barges. Every function and every disease they shared with the slaves. The soldiers now looked sallow and taut like drum-skins. Cooking on board had already proved difficult, with the men packed so tight (one marine had fallen foul of the kettle and lost most of the skin on his back). At Koopmans Kreek they tried again, and this time the Charon caught fire. Fortunately the blaze was contained, and disaster narrowly averted.

  Another day of this, and the men would have started dying at Koopmans. The next morning, however, they managed to row another two miles to a Dutch camp and started dying there instead. Despite its perky name, ‘Lands Welvaren’, or the ‘Welfare of the Nation’, it was a verminous spot. It had once been a plantation, but it now seemed to be a place where soldiers came to die. Nothing thrived here except mosquitoes and jiggers, and half the garrison were already in the hospital. There, wrote Stedman, ‘I beheld such a spectacle of misery and wretchedness as baffles all imagination.’ To alleviate the suffering of the sick, he went out and shot a twenty-two-foot anaconda, returning with ‘four gallons of fine, clarified fat’. But despite his thoughtfulness, most patients died. Within weeks the ‘pesthouse’ had claimed all the best Scottish officers, together with his ensign, Mr Cottenburgh, Mr Owen and Mr Stromer, the commander of the Cerberus. With such a grisly record for ‘intolerable unhealthiness’, the fort would be known from then on as Devil’s Harbour.

  For the next seven weeks the barges sallied forth from the fort on their sickly patrols. They ranged over thirty miles upstream, and sometimes the men left the river altogether and tramped up the ‘communication paths’, abandoning those too weak to walk. Along the way, they experienced ‘ring worm, dry gripes, putrid fevers … horse-flies, wild bees and bats, thorns, briars and alligators … burning hot days, cold and damp nights, heavy rains and short allowance’. They planned mutiny, shot more snakes and supplemented their salt beef with monkeys, which Stedman said reminded him of children, ‘especially with their little hands and their heads’. By the end he had only twenty-one men left out of an original party of fifty-four. But the loss was mostly in vain. During the entire campaign they hadn’t seen a single rebel. In fact, apart from captives and stragglers, Stedman wouldn’t see a rebel on the next campaign either, or the one after that. It would be another two years before he came face-to-face with the mysterious Bonis.

  Once a Dutch stronghold, Devil’s Harbour has now sunk back in the litter. (Illustration credit 8.3)

  Meanwhile, after seven weeks Stedman was recalled to Devil’s Harbour and put in command. By now everyone’s sanity was beginning to totter. Disease was still thinning the ranks, and yet among the slaves the revolt seemed to flourish. To the south another three plantations were torched, and their owners cut up or skinned. Each night there was talk of a massed attack on the fort. Stedman calculated that he needed 300 healthy men to defend the perimeter, and yet all he had was twelve. When they heard of the revolt, however, even the sick rushed to the defences. ‘For this whole night’, wrote Stedman, ‘we again watched under arms, and in the morning found two more of our little party dead on the ground.’ But no attack came, and the marines would die fighting shadows. By 2 September 1773 there were only seven men left fit to fight. It seemed that, if the Bonis waited long enough, their enemy would simply perish of their own accord.

  Eventually, however, reinforcements appeared, and Stedman finally cracked. In a state of ‘distraction’ and ‘agitation’ he was bundled into a canoe and paddled back to Paramaribo. There he discovered that he’d already been given up for dead, that his house had been re-let, and that the insects had eaten all his clothes, including twelve pairs of shoes.

  Devil’s Harbour is still a cursed place, courting human failure.

  The river was even narrower now, and seemed to curl back on itself before swinging round in a series of hairpin bends. It must have been a brave man who first sent the tugs down here, with their barges out front, 500 feet long. It was like trying to squeeze a warehouse down a woodland path. At any moment we could have become jammed fast or torn in two. The Master said that these were some of the most difficult waterways he’d ever known. At least one captain had lost a barge out here, and another had lost his wits. ‘Just couldn’t handle it,’ said the Master. ‘They had to send him home …’

  At Devil’s Harbour – now on its third name, Cabanas – the Kite slowed. As we came into the bend, I peered into the foliage, but the clearing had gone, along with the officers’ mess, the powder store and the ‘pest house’. I was just trying to imagine all those Germans and Scots laid out in the sub-soil when the Kite suddenly lurched. We’d hit a mudbank, and all around us in the black water great blooms of khaki came floating to the surface. Up ahead, the leading barge skated to one side and smashed through a tree. No one said anything, the engine snorted and struggled for a moment, and then we were back on our way. Meanwhile, the deckhands moved up front, checking for damage. ‘And looking for snakes,’ said the Master, ‘which sometimes fall out of the trees.’

  Further up, there were more bends and the first signs of life. We hadn’t seen anyone for almost sixty miles. Now there were breaks in the trees, and the occasional figure appeared; a maroon fishing, or a woman on the bank, peeing in the sand. Then there were two tiny clusters of timber and tin, marked as Agiti Ondro and Wanhatti. When the villagers heard us, they came running out, shouting ‘Bari! Bari!’

  I asked Saiman what it meant.

  ‘Barrels. They want our old oil drums, for collecting water.’

  ‘And who are they? What kind of maroons?’

  Saiman craned over, studying the people below. ‘N’Djukas mostly.’

  ‘So, no Bonis?’

  He’d smiled, as though I was joking. ‘No, no Bonis, not here.’

  Saiman had no particular affection for his neighbours upriver. He told me that they ate ‘tree chicken’ and ‘water chicken’, or iguana and caiman. During the bad times, twenty years ago, they used to come on board the tugs. ‘They looked like madmen,’ he said, ‘and I guess they were on cocaine or something. One of them was wearing a pair of Nikes and had like a machine gun, a German gun. I think he was the leader, and I also heard he had a hideout right here in Wanhatti. He kept asking if we had any soldiers, and they broke open all the lockers. They wanted food and radios. I remember the leader … He was killed eventually, by the Amerindians.’

  ‘You must have been frightened.’

  Saiman shrugged. ‘Nobody liked it. But it’s my job. Maybe they’d kill me? I don’t know, but the insurance would pay my family …’

  Two hours on, we turned into the Coermotibo. The kreek here was so narrow that it looked like silver trickling out of the forest. The trees were close enough t
hat I could almost reach out and pick the livid orange fruits. One tree, the tafrabon, was taller than the others and completely white, like some lanky arboreal ghost, and sometimes we could see lines of monkeys spilling through the branches, way overhead.

  But the strangest figures in the foliage were the herons, who stood ramrod straight in their shabby uniforms of royal blue. They had the look of deserters, hoping not to be seen. Stedman and his men had hated the Coermotibo more than anywhere else. ‘A most dismal solitary place,’ he wrote. ‘Here we saw nothing but water, wood and cloud.’ It was funny, I thought, how often the world’s most beautiful places (Afghanistan, Tennessee, the Dolomites …) were its most unforgiving in times of war.

  Just when I was thinking how much he’d have liked the creek today, we arrived at the mine. Strangely, Stedman himself had long predicted the presence of metals here (and had urged the Dutch to search ‘in their bowels’). But what he can’t have predicted is the sheer volume of output, or that its aluminium would one day make flying barges that would soar over Germany and pound it to gravel. Even now Coermotibo produces almost 2 million tons of bauxite a year, and – to get it to civilisation – the little fleet of tugs travels the equivalent of four times round the Earth. None of this makes for a pretty sight. Up at the wharf, the forest looked as though it had been gored and then crudely dissected by mechanical monsters. As bowel-searching goes, even Stedman would have been suitably impressed.

  While thousands of tons of pink porridge bubbled into the hoppers, the crew had a rest. It was about then that I became aware of the tug’s chief engineer, a Scot called McLwraith. He’d spent most of his life below the waterline, and this had left him looking slightly wary and nocturnal. But he was a kind man and told me that he’d always been more at ease with engines than with humans. I asked him why there were so many Scots in Suriname’s story, what with Seacoast and the Scots Brigade. He said he didn’t know, but that no place had ever made him feel happier and that he was about to marry an Arawak. This we celebrated with mugs of Earl Grey and Glasgow-sized bacon butties.