Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  Edgar seemed to enjoy all these questions. It’s always hard to know whether a professional guide feels any more for you than a vague sense of investment. But at least my curiosity seemed to humour him. I think he thought I was daft, not knowing how to deal with colic or fix a fractured femur. He was even more surprised that I’d never heard of the Monster and the Worm. It took him a whole boat ride and half a mountain to tell it as it should be told, but here’s the gist of it.

  The Makushis were being slaughtered by the Caribs, and so they asked the monster Ok’ Kraimî to help. This he did, but then he turned on the Makushis and started eating them. He also had a sidekick called Iwo, who was a giant worm, with a nasty habit of pulling people’s heads off and lapping up their innards. It was a while before the Makushis were able to bring this outsize pest under control, but they did. Eventually they killed both Iwo and Ok’ Kraimî, leaving nothing but a name: Iwokrama.

  By the time we’d finished this story, we were five miles down the Essequibo, and half-way up Turtle Mountain. But myth was almost nothing compared to the peculiarity of life up here. We were now surrounded by giant amber crabs and vines as fat and smooth as transatlantic cables. Meanwhile, up in the canopy, there were balls of mud, assembled by the ants, the size of cars. We could also make out troupes of monkeys, way above, trickling through the sunbeams. Everything here seemed to cackle and scream. I asked Edgar what he used to hunt, and he told me racoons, squirrel monkeys and porcupines. But those, of course, were not the words he used. Instead, he reverted to the old, bosky language of the hunter: ‘Crab, sakiwinkis, dogs and pimpla hogs.’

  As our little boat clattered back upriver, Edgar told me about the voyages of his childhood. From the age of eight, he and his father had set off every year canoeing to the mouth of the Essequibo. It was a journey of over 200 miles and had taken almost a month. Along the way they’d slept in the trees and traded fish for salt and clothes. Then, when they’d got enough, they’d paddle home. ‘It was slower then,’ said Edgar, ‘against the current.’

  This wasn’t a new journey, I realised. Europeans had been paddling up the Essequibo ever since the seventeenth century. The Dutch had even had a trading post, just below Turtle Mountain. Now it was almost impossible to follow them downstream. Nobody went by boat any more, so I’d have to take the road.

  ‘Yes, a long road,’ said Edgar, ‘up through the forest.’

  Behind me, the Essequibo hauled itself away, off on its watery adventure.

  It was another week before I found myself back on the banks of the Essequibo. In the meantime it had been transformed from a riotous, ten-lane adolescent to a swathe of inland ocean. There was now no doubt about its status: the greatest river within the Guianas. Since its source – over 1,000 kilometres inland – it had gathered up millions of tons of gaily coloured sediment, whole rafts of forest and hundreds of smaller rivers.

  One of these tributaries was the Potaro. I flew up there once, on a day tour from Georgetown. The river itself would have been worth the trip, like a gorgeous seam of folded jet. But then suddenly it just ended. It poured over a lip and vaporised as it fluttered away into a deep abyss. These were the Kaieteur Falls, and without having seen them they’d have been hard to imagine. Every minute, the equivalent of twenty-four Olympic-size swimming pools was falling twenty-seven storeys. In other words, one moment a river the width of the Thames was looping through the jungle, and the next it was dropping from a ledge the height of Telecom Tower.

  Somehow our little plane managed to land on this ledge, and we all got out and crept towards the rim. It was like watching all the whisky in the world tumbling into an explosion of weather. Way below, we could just make out the river, reassembling itself from the clouds and then swirling off through a canyon. Conan Doyle would have loved it up here. It would have confirmed his belief that there were Lost Worlds, and that they were right here in Guyana. Among the oddities living on the edge were swifts that could fly through hundreds of tons of falling water and a tiny yellow frog that spent all its life on a single bromeliad, swimming in its cistern.

  Only one man lived up here, called The Caretaker. He was very thin, and the roaring loneliness had given him hot pink eyes and fiery breath. Just when I was wondering how one cared for anything so huge and unruly, we set off on a tour. The Caretaker obviously hadn’t seen anyone for weeks, and in his excitement he skipped off over the rocks, leaving us all behind. Later we caught up with him and found him chattering away in Creole and addressing his plants in Latin. ‘Heliconia!’ he’d squeal, ‘Digitalis! An ere is de local Viagra!’

  I’d like to think that in this wonderland of canyons and microscopic frogs it’s always been the rivers in charge. But that’s not so. Every now and then Man has blundered in and asserted his stupidity. The worst time was in August 1995, at the junction of the Potaro and the Essequibo. Here a Canadian company had established the biggest gold mine of South America, called Omai. It was producing not only 300,000 oz a year (imagine eight little cars of solid gold) but also 20 million tons of rock and a lake of industrial cyanide. It was not a happy combination, and one day a dyke burst, and the lake and river merged. A billion gallons of cyanide set off down the Essequibo. For days the world’s media watched as this great toxic surge bubbled towards the sea, killing everything before it. To the Guyanese, cyanide on this scale felt like the ghost of Jonestown, trickling back through the heart of the country. To the rest of the world, it was one of the worst environmental disasters ever known. It was ages before the Essequibo was safe again to drink.

  Surprisingly, for this superhuman error no one was punished. Within weeks Omai was back in production, spewing out dirt. The Guyanese have always hated it. (‘The mine dug out de heart of dis country,’ said The Caretaker, ‘and we gets nothing at all’.) I remember seeing it once from an aeroplane. It was huge and red, and streaming with slurry. Too late, Guyana had discovered that its El Dorado was not a golden city but a suppurating boil.

  At the point where I rejoined the Essequibo it was ten miles wide. From here I was expecting a long, empty day, travelling forty miles up one of the continent’s most magnificent estuaries. As it turned out, it was certainly magnificent but never empty. People were now back in the landscape, with bundles and stories, and all their pomp and mischief.

  There were plenty of boats going upstream, but I got a lift with Captain Cesar. He was a large hairy African, covered in scars and baubled in gold. His boat was different from the others. Most people were paddling around in corials and balahoos and other forms of tree trunk, but Captain Cesar’s boat was owned by a mining company and had two aero-engines and a cabin like a cockpit. Packed inside were several months of provisions, including over 400 toilet rolls. When it shuddered to life, it felt like we were airborne, off to bomb Dresden with a payload of shopping.

  ‘Be there in an hour!’ roared Cesar.

  As we flew along, he greeted the islands and called out their names.

  ‘Leguan! Wakenaam! Lau-Lau and Hog!’

  Cesar said that on the Essequibo there was one island for every day of the year, and that he could identify them all. Sometimes it sounded more like gossip than geography. Some of the islands had secret little beaches, and others had villas and love-nests, or a camp full of misfits. It seemed that anyone who was anyone had a bolt-hole here, for when the heat got too much. There was an island for drug barons, and Khaow for the lepers. The singer Eddy Grant even had an archipelago of his own, mounted with a palace. Then there was our island, Baganara. It was owned by the mining consortium, and through the trees I could make out an enormous lozenge of fuel and a company airstrip. Cesar dropped me at the far end, by a colonial-style mansion, now the company hotel.

  ‘Enjoy your stay,’ he said, crushing my hand in his.

  I said I would, and of course I did. It wasn’t hard. Baganara was a beguiling place. The beach was like sifted sugar, and the water was dark and warm. Even the names of the birds – tanagers, tyrants, plovers and snipe –
sounded collectively decadent and louche. At sundown there were cocktails on the terrace. Most of the other guests were Europeans, working in development. I don’t suppose they were much different from the colonists before, at least in terms of poise. One was an Italian banker, who’d arrived on a yacht. Another was Swiss, and the more she drank, the more her make-up migrated. After a while it became hard to focus on her, she was so blurred around the edges.

  One of the other guests was harder to place. He was always heading out on lavish cruises and throwing back the beers. ‘I’m going to Bartica,’ he’d say, ‘and get me some girls.’ He told everyone he was the son of the American ambassador (who also happened to be black). This was so obviously absurd that I thought it was some kind of Guyanese joke. But not everyone got it. It was only three weeks later that I learned the full extent of his deceit. According to the Kaieteur News, John Spence was just a boy from the sugar fields with the gift of the gab. Both the Italian and the Swiss had given him hundreds of euros, and the hotel was down by $2,000. For the boy, it was a little adventure that would cost him a year in the Camp Street jail.

  But Baganara would survive its guests, whoever they were. When you live on the edge of an enormous forest, you can never be sure who’ll turn up next. There was a picture of Mick Jagger in the bar. But even more surprising was the British army. They’d been riding around in helicopters, buzzing the river for days. Captain Cesar said they’d stopped over at Baganara the week before. (‘Big men,’ he confided, ‘I see one drink seventeen bottles of beer’.) As coincidence would have it, the island had been one of their earliest bases, back in the nineteenth century. But before that it had been a camp for another army, this one far more brutal and ambitious. It was, of course, the Dutch.

  No people have died for this river quite so willingly as the Dutch. Others would die in greater numbers, but in the white-hot heat of commerce it was only the Dutch who died so freely.

  Take the case of Laurens Storm van ’s Gravesande. He served the West-Indische Compagnie from 1738 to 1772, rising from secretary to director-general. His greatest achievement was making money, and under his management the two colonies, Essequibo and Demerara, ran at a fabulous profit. But it also came at a heavy personal cost. During his period of office he lost not only several infant children but also his wife, a grown-up daughter and three adult sons. By the end he himself was utterly spent, and three years later he was committed to the dirt for which he’d given so much.

  It’s been an enduring sacrifice. The Dutch were on this coast from 1595 to 1977, arriving long before the English and leaving long after. Here, on the Essequibo, these riverbanks were, for a while, the richest farmlands in the world. In the peace treaties of the seventeenth century they were accorded the same value as vast chunks of West Africa, or the city of Madras. It was like a tropical Holland, with all its dimensions exploding outwards. But not anyone could turn it to profit. Only the Dutch had got what it took: a nose for finance, the brass for a fight and an aptitude for drainage.

  To get some idea of this long-lost Holland, I decided to visit its earliest fort.

  The hotel lent me a boat and a guide, called Leon. Together we set off into an enormous tangle of rivers, like a knot made out of Danubes. First we had to double back up the Essequibo and then loop past the mouth of the Cuyuni, before turning back on ourselves and up the Mazaruni. The fort turned out to be a small nob of jungle, out in midstream. How had the Dutch found it, in this gigantic labyrinth of water?

  That was the point, I suppose. Although by 1616 Holland was one of the greatest landowners in the world – with vast possessions in Africa, Indonesia, Formosa and Ceylon – it was not yet master here. This was still the ‘Wild Coast’, contested by Spaniards, unpredictable savages and English privateers. To survive, any fort had to be unobtrusive, well inland, heavily armed and easy to defend. This one even had a vigilant name: Kijk-over-al, or ‘Watch over all’.

  Leon found a jetty, and we pulled in to land.

  ‘Careful where you step,’ he said, ‘it’s very overgrown.’

  Nature had spent the last 300 years throttling the fort. Huge roots were now levering up the masonry, and a large mango tree had sunk its claws deep inside the rock. Leon said it was a very old tree. Perhaps once it had supplied the garrison with fruit, and now it was prising it apart. An account of 1669 describes a dinner here of ‘roasted water-hare’ washed down with barrels of brandy and rum. It must have been like life on a petrified ship. The crew had spent their time learning Carib, and at some stage the commandant had married an Amerindian princess.

  Now all that remained of the grandeur was a large brick arch. In architectural terms it wasn’t so much a door as an exclamation mark. It declared that this was the beginning of a great Dutch world. From here plantations would spread out downstream, fifty miles to the sea. But not just yet. At the time of the water-hare dinners this river was still deeply infested.

  Every now and then piracy returns to the Essequibo, even today.

  Soon after my fort excursion I left Baganara and got a boat down to Bartica. It was a gold-mining town, at the crutch of two rivers: the Essequibo and the Mazaruni. Everybody there was into gold. People no longer wanted a grand gateway to the coast, just an orifice into the forest. Every day great bladders of fuel arrived by boat and were then being hauled away on trucks. The beach was like a long thin junkyard of old steamboats, draggers and dredgers and other contraptions for sucking up ore. All around were things abandoned in the rush: machines, hovels, sawmills and dogs. Surprisingly, despite its temporary, impatient feel, Bartica was now the largest town in the Guyanese interior.

  Work went on all day and then long after midnight. No one seemed to notice it was dark, and that there weren’t any lights. This made Bartica a hard place to contemplate once the sun had gone. I was for ever stumbling over hungry dogs or falling down drains and bumping into cows. The only place to enjoy the light was Auntie Chan’s Massive Upper Level Restaurant. It was superbly misnamed (being African, earthbound and pokey), but it did screen soap operas like Sexy Mistress. The miners loved this and hooted with pleasure at the merest kiss. This only made the waitresses look sulkier than ever. They wore prim, lime-green uniforms and had seen it all before.

  For many, the work had never brought much wealth. Although the rich had big pink houses like birthday cakes, everyone else had shacks. The very poorest lived in an enormous old iron barge, mounted with a slum. Most of the miners were Brazilians, which gave poverty here a paler complexion. It also gave it a bright red parrot, and a constant drumbeat like a thin, metallic pulse. These were precarious lives, of people easily bullied. I remember a notice outside the hospital which said, ‘PATIENTS ATTENDING THE GYNAE CLINIC WEARING PANTS WILL NOT BE ADMITTED.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sign so pointlessly demeaning.

  I stayed down the road, at the government guesthouse. It was a towering tongue-and-groove structure, full of wobbly colonial furniture. The two crones who ran it took an instant dislike to me, and whenever I went near, they’d start muttering in proverbs. (‘And thou shalt smite every male thereof! And eat the spoil of thine enemies!’) I think the only time they spoke to me in post-Apocryphal English was when I asked for a key. ‘The door doan lock,’ they said. ‘The watchman goan come.’

  It was unusual to encounter such hostility. Most people in Bartica were curious to find a foreigner among them, and the miners were effortlessly friendly. One, an old man called The Sultan, even took the trouble to explain how things worked.

  ‘Gold is easy to smuggle’, he said. ‘Very easy, yes, Sir. None of it go through the lawful channels. Nearly all these rich guys here smuggle gold. And now they’re into cocaine. They got islands out on the river, and airstrips in the bush. These people are powerful, man. I shouldn’t even be telling you this. If they heard, they’d probably come after me, and put a bullet in my head. Just like that. Bang.’

  He looked up the street. ‘You heard of Roger Kahn?’

  I said I h
ad. He was on trial in the USA.

  ‘OK, he owned Khaow Island, and a lot of the interior. He even had his own little army. They were all ex-cops. Imagine that, man! These people runs everything, and they buys everyone. Everyone! They can have whatever girl they wants, and just send a taxi round to school. They got factories, planes, ships, politicians … And those stupid pink houses! I hate to think what coke’s doing to American kids but this is what it’s doing to us! Bent cops, bent courts, bent government, and millions of dollars …’

  A new economy, it seemed, had settled on the river.

  With such bloated pickings, it was inevitable the pirates would return. Just before leaving Bartica, I walked down to the wharf. It was a large barn of a place, full of reflections and smelling of brine. The only person around was an old Indian guard, in a uniform of crumpled claret. He was standing on the wooden stelling, staring into the water. It was here, six months earlier, that the water-thieves had clambered ashore. There were twenty of them; masked, camouflaged and clattering with guns. First they rounded up the stevedores, and then they forced them onto the decking and shot them where they lay.

  ‘Just here,’ said the Indian, ‘five men dead.’

  The divots in the timber were still ragged and fresh.

  ‘But what did the killers want?’

  The guard shrugged. ‘They just goes robbing round the town …’

  I followed the bullet holes out through the wharf into the streets beyond. After shredding the police post, the pirates had stolen a truck and ridden around blasting at will. For over an hour Bartica was forced underground while the raiders toured above. But were they really just robbers? No one seemed to know. The Sultan said they were after those that ran this town, the big-shots like Mango Man and Vulture. But they never found them, and nor was very much stolen. In the end eleven people died, and their killers vanished into nothing. Perhaps it was all a warning, or just a blast from the past.