Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  Eight years have now elapsed since the young Waterton first arrived. The old Dutch colony suits him well. He’s improved his outfit with the addition of gold epaulettes and a cocked hat, and has joined the Demerara militia. He’s also done a spell on the family sugar estates, known – of course – as Walton Hall. But he’s not been happy with plantation life. (‘Slavery,’ he says, ‘can never be defended’.) It’s only with the death of his father that Waterton becomes the man he wants to be. Armed with a dangerous curiosity (and a huge inheritance), he sets off into the interior. Between 1812 and 1824 he’ll undertake four of these stupendous forays, each lasting up to fourteen months. Along the way he’ll meet the tribes, learn their languages and gather hundreds of specimens, many of them previously considered scientifically absurd. What’s more, he’ll always travel alone, unsupported, barefoot and theatrically attired.

  It’s on the first of his trips that we find him paddling up the Burro-Burro. He makes an impressive sight, astride a mound of fur and feathers. Every now and then he jumps out of his canoe or scrambles off into the trees. At one point he leaps astride an alligator and rides it like a jockey (a feat of horsemanship he attributes to his years spent riding to Lord Darlington’s hounds). Another time he comes face to face with a ten-foot boa and punches it full in the mouth. The poor snake is so surprised that all it can do is wrap a bit of tail around its astonishing assailant and give him a useless squeeze. At least it manages to fight. Another fourteen-footer finds itself wrestled into a ball and lashed down with a pair of gentleman’s braces.

  Waterton is deterred by nothing, not even the bouts of malaria. Whenever he feels peaky, he simply lets a little blood – which he calls ‘tapping the claret’ – or swallows a draft of mercury with ‘calomel and jallop’. Remarkably, these ministrations don’t make him worse, just more inquisitive. He leaves his feet out at night so he can watch the ‘vampires’ eat him. (In vain, as it turns out. Bats clearly don’t like mercury-flavoured humans.) Then, the next morning, he’s up again, out in the grass or climbing trees. He thinks nothing of shinning up fifty feet into the canopy. (A few years later, on a visit to Rome, he’ll climb up St Peter’s and plant his glove on the crucifix. It’s said that when Pope Pius VII can’t find a steeplejack willing to retrieve it, Waterton will happily oblige and climb back up again.)

  The public will love these stories. Every time he gets home, the indomitable squire bundles up his adventures, and they’re a publishing sensation. Eventually they all end up in one chaotic volume: Waterton’s Wanderings in South America. It’s a magnificent rambling yarn, bursting with improbable creatures, affection, family history, half-told stories and misplaced narrators. The critics mock it, but the readers love it. During his life it will be republished four times and earn Waterton a place in the National Portrait Gallery (depicted in a gold-buttoned coat, with a decapitated cat). The book will inspire not only Darwin, who’s still a boy, but also a whole generation of infant scientists. As an introduction to the weirdness of an untamed continent, Wanderings is the best there’s ever been.

  As a guidebook, however, it’s a disaster. Waterton doesn’t care where he is and seldom gives us names. All I can be sure about is that, at some stage, he comes paddling up the Burro-Burro, perhaps stopping here to tussle with the snakes.

  In order to stand a little longer in Waterton’s footsteps, I’d have to pay a visit to Walton Hall. As the Guyanese version was now merely a name, that left only the original, back home in England.

  I went there some months later, on a brittle February day, when the lake was frozen hard. All around lay Waterton’s parkland like an etching in the snow. Everywhere there was the hoot and clank of wildfowl. It was almost a Guyanese scene, depicted in negative. Perhaps, as the years lengthened, that’s how Waterton had remembered his ‘magical woods’. I could just make out the wall he’d built, eight feet high and three miles long. It was supposed to wall off a bit of paradise and keep out the foxes and poachers. The result was the world’s first wildlife park. There were artificial rookeries, stumps for owls and a grotto for the bats. On the weekends the local millworkers had visited, and Waterton would boil up water for their tea. He was a much-loved man and always had some stunt, such as wearing birds’ wings or barking like a dog. Even at the age of seventy-seven he could still scratch his head with his foot.

  The hall was exactly as he’d described it, on an island in the lake. There was the same iron bridge, and a barge for the coal. I even found the bullet-holes around the gatehouse door (the work of heretics, said Waterton, who’d besieged the house in the name of Oliver Cromwell). Only the inside had changed. It was now a hotel, and smelt of curious innovations such as peach-flavoured air-freshener and skinny cappuccino. But the biggest change was the departure of the Guyanese fauna. Once these hallways had teemed with lifeless wildlife, including a ten-foot caiman, several armadillos, an anteater and over 300 twitterless, glass-eyed birds. Now they’d all gone, having migrated down the road to Wakefield Museum.

  All that remained of South America was a giant stone otter above the door. After his fourth expedition Waterton had never been back, although, in a sense, Guiana came to him. In 1829 he married the granddaughter of an Amerindian chieftain. Anne-Mary was only seventeen, and it’s hard to know what she made of her husband’s Yorkshire-Rupununi. He, on the other hand, declared himself ‘the happiest man in the world’. It was, however, a happiness that wouldn’t last. The following year Anne-Mary died giving birth to their son, Edmund.

  Waterton never got over the blow and mourned her for the rest of his life. From then on he never slept in a bed again but spent his nights under a portrait of St Catherine of Alexandria, with only a plank for a pillow. Fortunately for Edmund, Anne-Mary’s two sisters moved in and became his substitute mothers. Although the four of them made occasional trips to Sicily, to watch the migration of birds, there were no journeys back to Guiana. The two Amerindian sisters are buried in Scarborough, where they eventually retired.

  Waterton himself is buried at the far end of the lake that he so loved. On his grave it says simply, ‘Pray for the soul of Charles Waterton, whose weary bones are buried here.’ It had been an agile life, right to the end. At the age of eighty-two he could still climb the highest tree in the park to watch the birds and read some Horace. Later that year, however, he tripped and landed on a log. Within a few hours he was dead.

  On 3 June 1865 the Squire of Walton Hall was placed aboard the coal barge and rowed down the lake. Behind his coffin came a procession of boats draped with laurels and crêpe. Among the mourners were a bishop, four canons and thirteen chanting priests. It was all a far cry from the curious ensemble that had paddled down the Burro-Burro over fifty years earlier. This time the wildlife fell silent. It’s said that only as the coffin was lowered into the grave was any sound heard: a single bird offering its song.

  Ironically, Waterton’s most enduring legacy was a gift to humankind.

  I asked Hubert about this, as we were walking back.

  ‘Blowpipes?’ he said, ‘I know how to use one – but none of us do.’

  Waterton would have been disappointed to hear this. He was fascinated by blowpipes and, with an eye to his readers, had called them ‘The Tubes of Death’. But it wasn’t so much the pipe that intrigued him as what came out of the end. Each little dart was tipped in a remarkable compound known as woorali. This brown, syrupy gum was concocted from vines, ants, snakes’ teeth and Indian peppers. To taste it or eat it would do no harm at all. But if it entered the bloodstream – even through the tiniest nick – it would induce an extraordinary death. ‘It destroys life so gently,’ wrote Waterton, ‘that the victim appears to be in no pain whatever.’ Poisoned creatures, he noticed, just seemed to lose the will to move and drowned in their own inertia. What was this poison, he wondered, and what could it do for us?

  He wasn’t the first explorer to be intrigued by woorali. Raleigh said it was the most curious thing he’d ever seen (and thought the antidote
was garlic). It was also described, in 1759, by the French explorer Charles Marie de La Condamine, who added an intriguing detail: woorali, he said, was always cooked up by those condemned to die. (The potion was ready when its cooks fell lifeless to the ground.) Ten years later an English physician, Dr Bancroft, tried a few experiments of his own but got some in his eye and had to plunge his head in the Demerara River. Alexander von Humboldt brought a little more gravitas to the learning in 1800, with his discovery that the only active ingredient was the vine (now called strychnos toxifera). But Waterton would take matters much further: he struck a deal with the Makushi, acquired a vial of the priceless poison and brought it back to Yorkshire.

  ‘Our woorali was easily the best,’ said Hubert.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it killed all the Caribs.’

  Back at Walton Hall, the squire set to work. It was already suspected that life could be prolonged by assisted respiration, and Waterton now tested this, using a donkey. After a massive shot of poison, he ventilated the animal with a pair of bellows, and after a while the animal began to rally. (It survived for another twenty-five years, until 1839.) In this rather crude experiment Waterton had conclusively proved the essential properties of a new drug, curare: it was a muscle-relaxant and brought on temporary paralysis of the victim’s respiratory muscles. But what could it be used for?

  Waterton himself thought he’d stumbled on the cure for rabies. Later, doctors started using curare in the treatment of psychiatric illness. But the true importance of the Makushis’ poison wasn’t understood until 1942. It (or rather, its synthetic sister) would become a key component of general anaesthesia. By chemically relaxing the muscles, it was possible to reduce the dose of dangerous sedative. Now, every day, around the world, this simple idea saves thousands of lives. I like to think it all began with a small Makushi vial, now sitting in Wakefield Museum.

  When I told Hubert about the donkey, he frowned.

  ‘Did it taste good?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think Waterton ate it.’

  Hubert huffed. ‘My grandfather never wasted his woorali.’

  Two days later I said goodbye to the Allicocks and Hubert, and set off in search of the water monkey. Across the Guianas I’d come across several versions of this monster, but the worst of them lived in the rivers. No matter who was describing him – or when – he was always the same: long-haired, humanoid, clawed, with teeth like a tiger and an appetite for belly. The Amerindians told Evelyn Waugh that it would drag a man to the bottom and smash every bone in his body. As though this wasn’t bad enough, the beast had another nasty trait. In 1769 Dr Bancroft (the physician who’d plunged his head in the Demerara) brought the world news of a Guianese ‘orang-outan’ that clambered from the rivers to ‘ravish the female of the human species’.

  I often wondered about the origins of this entrail-eating sex pest. Some say he’s a horribly mutated variant of the West African gorilla, who survived in the imagination of the slaves. But all Guianese seem to claim him – and fear him. (Once I even met a Hindu woman who told me which rivers were haunted.) It’s no great surprise, therefore, that his name tends to vary. To the Amerindians he’s the Water Tiger, or the Dai-Dai. To most Africans he’s the Massa Couraman, but to the descendants of the runaway slaves he takes on a deviant female form: the Ouata-mama. Perhaps, however, the most grotesque name of all is that on which Evelyn Waugh alighted; this was no tiger, it was the Water monkey.

  Of course, I didn’t actually expect to find him or break the rules of mythology and come running back with proof. Instead, all I wanted was to slip quietly through his watery domain and hope that something would happen, if only understanding. What better way of doing this than by taking a tiny metal boat up the Rupununi, with two Amerindian storytellers called Tiberius and Joe? They would drop me three hours upriver, at Karanambu. ‘Just be careful,’ they said, ‘and keep your hands inside the boat.’

  From the start it was a beautiful, well-toothed voyage. The great river seemed to trot along, nervously skirting the golden sandbanks and the bursts of luxuriant green. Everything here was either about to eat or to be eaten. Some creatures looked as though they were just waiting to be chosen – such as the capybaras, who were rabbity and plump, and helpfully myopic. Then there was a selection of delicious-looking birds – ibises, kiskadees and herons – all dutifully taking their place half-way up the food chain. Another, the piping guan, even had a call that sounded like a dinner bell.

  As for the predators, they were mostly in the river.

  ‘Caiman!’ shouted Joe, as we passed a long black thug, slumped in the sand.

  But the alligator was merely the tip of a predatory iceberg. Below us in the water was a vast society of flesh-eating beasts. My guidebook had this to say: ‘Beware of swimming in Rupununi waters. The nine-inch perai is drawn to the smell of fresh blood. Stingrays and electric eels – the 500-volt variety – also inhabit the otherwise tranquil waters.’

  Back in 1769 there was even worse news, from Dr Bancroft. Ducks’ feet, he said, were frequently being amputated, ‘as have been the breasts of women and the privities of men’. This last indignity could be avoided ‘by tying a napkin or handkerchief around the waist’. Was he joking? Who’d be mad enough to dip anything into this liquid meat-shredder (with or without the serviette)?

  I asked the boys what they felt about the swimming.

  ‘Sure, we got plenty of perai …’ said Tiberius.

  ‘… and eels,’ chimed Joe. ‘They makes a big, blue flash …’

  ‘… sometimes knock you out …’

  ‘… and then there’s stingrays …!’

  ‘… they got a spike,’ said Tiberius, ‘can lash you open …’

  Soon the stories were gushing free. Joe’s ancestors had used the spikes in warfare. They were good for fighting because they always snapped inside the body and left a bit behind. The venom could be cured only with the spoil from an earthworm’s burrow. Other injuries were harder to repair. Everyone knew people who’d lost fingers and ankles (and perhaps the occasional privity). But the worst creature, agreed the boys, was the water camoudie, or anaconda. Tiberius said he’d known it creep up behind someone, unclip its jaws and swallow him whole. I then remembered something that Dr Bancroft had once said about this snake (he could always pip a good story with one of his own). His version of the anaconda was also known as ‘the sodomite snake’ because it killed its victims by creeping up on them and shoving its tail right up their arse.

  ‘Aieeee!’ screamed the boys and then lay down in the boat and laughed.

  I was pleased that my story had had this effect. It meant that there was a frontier, weaving its way between fact and myth. Even in these bloody waters some things were real and some things weren’t. I wondered which side of the boundary the water monkey stood. Waterton knew. (‘Ludicrous extravagance!’ he declared. ‘Pleasing to those fond of the marvellous and excellent matter for the distempered brain.’)

  But Tiberius wasn’t so sure and refused to discuss it.

  ‘Not here,’ he said, ‘not so near the river.’

  Anyway, we’d almost arrived. On the left-hand side of the boat were some low black cliffs, like chunks of cinder toffee. Joe said that this was a holy place for Makushis, and that these were the bodies of a defeated enemy. As I gazed up into the smooth, dead crags, a bowman appeared. He was almost naked and carried a bundle of razor-toothed fish.

  ‘Welcome to Karanambu,’ he said shyly. ‘I’ll take you to Miss McTurk.’

  There have been McTurks in Guyana ever since the departure of the Dutch. For the first hundred years they were pillars of the coastal community. They’d been doctors and planters and had sat in the Court of Policy. Then they’d bought ships, and for a moment it looked as though they might leave for ever and set up home in Liverpool. But then Grandfather Michael stowed away on one of his father’s boats and returned to Guiana. It was the beginning of a new generation of McTurk
s, this time slightly feral. Michael’s greatest achievement was a survey of the Venezuelan frontier in 1895, which almost sparked a war. Then, two decades later, his son Tiny wandered off into the interior, and that was the end of the coastal McTurks.

  As a place to settle, the Rupununi was still an odd choice in 1922. It took as long to get to Georgetown as it took for Townies to get to London. There was no doctor, no government and still a handful of tribes who’d shower you in arrows. But Tiny McTurk didn’t seem to mind. He was an enormous, plough-jawed man with an appetite for hardship. He taught himself to hunt with a bow, and could survive on a diet of turtles’ eggs. Once, when bandits tried to steal his cattle, he followed them back to Brazil, snatched all their guns and burned down their houses. After that, the Rupununi eagerly adapted to Tiny McTurk. He even acquired a riverside ranch, above the cinder toffee cliffs. There he built himself a sort of palace, a vast, rambling structure, shaped like a beehive and made out of leaves.

  The remarkable thing about Tiny’s life is that he managed to find a beautiful English girl willing to share it. Constance arrived in 1927, and together they became the savannah’s new aristocracy. Apart from Waugh, almost every notable visitor to the Rupununi paid them a call. Over the next fifty years they received visits from princes, presidents, David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell and all the world’s best zoos. It was always a slightly uncertain grandeur. No one ever wore shoes, and a goat ate all the books. Even more disconcerting were the young McTurks, the children that came tumbling out of the trees. Among them was Diane, the present incumbent of the Karanambu estate.