Then the hoppers were full and it was time to go. Ahead of us lay another twenty-hour voyage, and we were seen off by swifts, nipping the water all around. It would feel like a different journey in the failing light. The Coermotibo was now a canyon of trees, and then we were back on the Cottica, which had become a huge pink ballroom, lit by millions of candles. It was the fireflies, enjoying their first and last fortnight of life. Then, just as darkness finally descended, I caught a glimpse of a gaping hole in the wall of forest: the entrance to Barbakoeba Kreek.
Little had anyone known it, but this dank, overgrown aperture led right to the core of the revolt. Several days walk from here – north towards the coast – lay the Bonis’ last great hideout, called Gado Sabi (or ‘God knows’). There they kept their families and grew their cassava and rice. It was a pretty place (‘in the form of an amphitheatre,’ as Stedman wrote later, ‘romantic and enchanting beyond conception’).
Slightly less enchanting were the rebels themselves. By now there were probably several hundred of them, here and elsewhere. They had two leaders, both of whom would lend the group their name. One was Aluku, who soon fades from view. The other was Bonny, or Boni, who was altogether more memorable. He was a bos creool, born on the Barbakoeba, and his father may even have been the local planter, called Heer van der May. His mother, however, had run away in about 1730, and Bonny had spent the next forty-odd years adapting to the forest and cultivating his own brand of terror. He wore ‘a gold laced hat’, trusted no one, kept a retinue of women and ruled by voodoo and fear. It was like old Africa again, the men believing they were invincible and eating their enemies.
But they were also adept fighters. Colonel Fourgeoud’s marines had already discovered how the Bonis could be both everywhere at once and yet also elusive. The maroons would never engage the Europeans head-on, but they could always spot weakness: an unguarded plantation, perhaps, or a platoon crossing a swamp, their guns held high and dry. They’d even rigged the jungle with traps, digging pitfalls of sharpened bamboo and poisoning the swamps. All they lacked was shot. By 1775 they were loading their guns with coins and buttons and bits of stone.
For years the marines had ignored the entrance to Barbakoeba Kreek. Stedman and his men had moored here countless times, wondering where to go next. He’d even stood here in October 1773, just a month after his little brush with madness. But instead of going up it, he’d travelled east for four months, reaching almost as far as French Guiana and nearly starving to death. Then he was back again in early 1775, marching almost a hundred miles inland. As always, men had died, although nothing was found. But then, the following August, news came through of an enormous rebel camp right under their noses, up the Barbakoeba.
This time the prospects for a kill were so good that even Colonel Fourgeoud came, along with 200 soldiers. By now, the old Swiss was almost as charmless as the rebels themselves. According to Stedman, he’d become ‘impetuous, passionate, self sufficient and revengeful’. Even his own men weren’t spared his brutality. He insisted that salt rations would harden them, and when the City of Amsterdam sent them food parcels, Fourgeoud confiscated the treats, sold them and trousered the proceeds. ‘Hannibal’, he once told Stedman, ‘had lost his army by too much indulgence.’ He himself, however, maintained a box of fresh provisions, but his real secret, he insisted, was tisan, a brew of Jesuit’s bark, liquorice and cream of tartar so foul that no one else could stomach it. On campaign, his only other luxury was his wig, freshly powdered every day.
He must have made a daunting sight on Barbakoeba Kreek, right at the head of his column. ‘His dress’, reports Stedman, ‘consisted of nothing but a waistcoat, and through one of the button holes he wore his sword; on his head he wore a cotton night cap with a white beaver hat above it and in his hand a cane; but he seldom carried his musket or his pistols. I have seen him all in rags and barefooted like the meanest of soldiers.’ The slaves thought Fourgeoud was mad and would kill them all, whereas he considered himself a military figure somewhat akin to the Duke of Cumberland. He once asked Stedman to paint his portrait in full ‘bush equipage’, believing such a picture would advance his prospects in The Hague.
Back on the kreek, the raiding party was ready. At dawn on 15 August 1775 they set off, with the pioneers cutting a path. It was slow going. That day they cut their way through ‘briars’ and ‘brambles’ and covered a mere eight miles. The next four days were worse, a torment of drums and yelling, lice, fire-ants, horseflies and hairy spiders. By night the mosquitoes were so bad that Stedman was forced to sling his hammock in the tree tops ‘near one hundred feet above my companions’. To begin with, the odd soldier disappeared, but then ‘our poor men were dying in multitudes’ and ‘thrown promiscuously into one pit like heaps of loathsome carrion’. At one point a Boni sprang up out of the leaves and then bolted like a stag. The men were too surprised or spent to get a shot in and were only cheered when a hundred ‘black rangers’ overtook them, all spoiling for the fight. ‘One of these negroes’, noted Stedman, ‘is preferable to half a dozen white men in the forests of Guiana.’
On the fourth day the marines reached Gado Sabi, and there was a sudden flurry of colourful, polyphonic violence. Both sides used tutus, or trumpets, and there was a spirited exchange of curses and insults. Amid the screams came explosions and crackling as the greenery burst into flames and the forest turned white with smoke. In the confusion the Bonis slipped away and became invisible again. Coins and buttons sizzled through the air, ripping at the skin but leaving muscle and bone intact. Then, at some stage, a rebel climbed down from the canopy and started calmly reloading his gun. Stedman was fascinated: he’d never seen the enemy in action. The man was covered in amulets and charms, and clearly thought nothing could harm him – until the moment a musket-ball smashed through his femur. Then, as he lay there, reassessing his invincibility, another soldier put a musket in his ear and ‘blew out his brains’.
At some point the screaming and the smoke subsided. The flames had left Stedman’s men no spoils, except some broken spoons and a few half-eaten heads, mounted on stakes. Piqued by the lack of booty, the Vrijcorps rangers toured the dead and injured, found a few rebels and prised off their heads. When they started playing bowls with their trophies, Stedman protested, but they just insisted that it was ‘the custom of their country’. Later, they would snip off the lips and ears and smoke them, as gifts for their women.
All night the battle of words continued. Both sides were now almost out of powder, and they goaded each other to come out and fight. The Bonis taunted the rangers as ‘poltroons and traitors’. In reply, the Red Caps ‘damned the rebels for a parcel of pitiful skulking rascals’, too lazy to work. Then Fourgeoud joined in, offering the maroons ‘life, liberty, victuals, drink and all they wanted’. The rebels hooted with laughter and said they wanted nothing from the half-starved Frenchman, and that his soldiers were scarecrows, hardly worth good ammunition. They were just ‘white slaves hired to be shot at for four pence a day’. Bonny, said the rebels, would soon be governor of Suriname. Then, just to reassure everyone that they weren’t finished, they tinkled their bill hooks, fired off a volley and scattered into the forest. Fourgeoud was furious and swore to pursue Bonny ‘to the world’s end’.
And that, broadly speaking, is what he did. It took the marines three days to march back to the entrance to Barbakoeba Kreek, and they then spent the next four and a half months scouring the jungle. Although they wouldn’t find Bonny, they’d cover hundreds of miles and would find themselves in places that few people have visited since. By the end, Stedman was not only half naked and half starved, he also had ‘a bad foot, a sore arm, the prickly heat and all my teeth loose with the scurvy’. He was also deeply depressed by the ‘constant train of tortures to which I could see no end’. Maybe the Bonis were right, and he was merely a scarecrow, barely worthy of powder and shot? In early January 1776 Stedman was granted leave and boarded a barge bound for Paramaribo.
When I wok
e the next morning at dawn, we were well over half-way back. The Indonesians were in the galley cooking noodles, and the Master was on his bunk, an enormous pair of boots keeping watch at his door. Saiman was up on the bridge, sitting back in his huge chair, enjoying the sprawl of water ahead. He’d got rid of the tinny music and now wore his cap perched on the back of his head, as though he were Huckleberry Finn. All around us the river looked like a photograph slowly developing, its long, pale shapes gradually seeping from the morning mist.
I asked Saiman where we were.
‘Just leaving the Cottica. Coming to the Commewijne.’
Ahead lay the junction of the two great rivers. We were heading off to the right, where the Commewijne widened again and arched away towards the sea. But off to the left it veered into the bush, where, according to the chart, it wriggled inland for over a hundred miles. I could still see the names of the plantations that Stedman had known: Fauquemberg and L’Espérance. In all the madness of the Boni War it was here that he’d found what he’d least expected, and that was happiness.
‘How do I get up there?’ I asked Saiman.
‘You can’t. No ferries. No boats any more.’
‘But what about this road I can see?’
‘OK, you can stand on the bridge and see the river.’
‘But all the old houses are gone?’
‘All gone. Burned down in the Hinterland War.’
I was puzzled. ‘What? Two hundred years ago?’
Now Saiman was looking at me strangely.
‘No, the Hinterland War,’ he said, ‘the one we just had.’
Ah yes, that one, I thought. An old war in new skins.
A few days later I would go out to the bridge and look down on the river.
Although I knew it was a forlorn enterprise, I found a driver who spoke English and asked him to take me out to the Commewijne. Jupiter was part Chinese and part N’Djuka, and had been born in the Hinterlands. He told me that the Chinese traders used to buy their wives off the maroons but that now he hated everything Chinese. After an hour of paddy fields and jungle we came to the bridge.
‘See?’ said Jupiter. ‘Just a river.’
It was the same river I’d seen earlier, except blacker and clustered with trees. Somewhere in among the roots there’d be the remains of tiles and dykes, and hardwood piles. There were once great country houses all along this river, and in February 1774 Stedman had sailed up here, and – finding one abandoned – had made it his home. The war was almost forgotten for the rest of that year. Stedman restored L’Espérance, clearing the dykes, rebuilding the roof, driving off the rats and then, finally, calling for Joanna. She arrived in a tent-boat, rowed by eight slaves, and so began the only perfect part of Stedman’s life. For the next ten months he and Joanna walked, bathed, ate, tended their garden and made love. ‘I was never so happy,’ he wrote many years later. Towards the end of 1774 their son, Johnny, was born, and was immediately bathed in Madeira for his contentment and health. Just at that moment it didn’t seem to matter that – as the son of a slave – he was also a slave, and the personal property of somebody else.
L’Espérance, the scene of something like happiness in a savage and eerie war. (Illustration credit 8.4)
Nor did it really matter that the war still went on. Stedman may have found contentment on the upper Commewijne, but it was never quite tranquillity. By night there were the drums, and the alarm guns all along the river. Then there were marines billeted near by, ‘so very disorderly’, noted Stedman, ‘as to oblige me and my officers to knock them down by the half dozen’. Although he and Joanna were always planning a beautiful future, as Stedman’s journals show, the madness of war was never far away. ‘A marine drowned himself,’ reads one of the entries, ‘in one of those phrenzy fevers which are so common in Guiana …’
‘Jupiter,’ I said, ‘there’s one more place I’d like to see.’
On my old map there was a path leading up from L’Espérance.
‘I know this path,’ said Jupiter, ‘but it’s all broko now.’
He was right: at the point where the path had joined the road there was nothing left but a house made of twigs. When we stopped outside, three very old people emerged, shaking the sleep from their filthy clothes. ‘If they’re maroons, they won’t tell you anything,’ whispered Jupiter. ‘That’s the tradition.’
But they weren’t maroons and they chattered away in Talkie-talkie.
‘A pasi gras’grasi,’ they said. The path’s overgrown.
L’Espérance had gone, they told Jupiter, and no one lived there any more except a few N’Djukas. But the talk of war excited them. The two old women said their brother still had a bullet lodged in his skull. It’s been there since Korea, they said. At this the old man drew himself very close and squinted into my eyes. I need this bullet, he said; if they take it out now, I’ll probably die.
As the Kite passed through Paramaribo, I asked the Master what he’d do when the trip was over.
‘Turn her around,’ he said, ‘and do it again.’
I’d almost forgotten that my river adventure was merely part of a cycle. There’ll probably be tugs shuttling along the Cottica for ever, or for as long as the bauxite holds out. And what if it stops and the cycle ends? I had a sudden vision of the trees knitting together and the forest healing over.
It was different for the Bonis and Fourgeoud’s marines. For them the cycle did end, although it wasn’t the end of the war. By 1776 the pillage had all but ended, and the relentless rounds of manhunting had slowed to a grind. Both sides were exhausted. There would be no treaty, and no one could claim victory. The Bonis didn’t have the weaponry to hold the forest, and the Dutch didn’t have the manpower to sieve it. Stalemate ensued. If there was one lesson to be learned from the war, it was that only the Surinamese could properly fight in Suriname. From now on all maroon revolts would be dealt with by the Red Caps, or Vrijcorps. In time they’d become the Corps of Black Guides, and were only disbanded in 1863. At that point, it’s said, they became maroons themselves, and their descendants still live on an island, far up the Marowijne River.
Meanwhile, Fourgeoud’s marines were utterly spent. They’d covered thousands of miles of waterways and paths, and had burned twenty-one villages and over 200 fields of rebel crops. True, they’d contained the revolt, but they’d never captured the Boni, and the cost was catastrophic. Of the original detachment of 1,200 men, only a hundred remained. Of them, many would never get over the trauma, and remained, according to Stedman, ‘in a state of incurable insanity for ever’.
As for the maroons, they’d continue their resistance but without the Bonis. The ‘Cottica rebels’ would abandon the Hinterlands. They could always cope with the loss of their villages, but not the loss of food. The final straw came in January 1777, when Fourgeoud discovered them on the Marowijne and burned everything they had. This time the Bonis crossed the river into French Guiana, leaving Suriname for ever. For Fourgeoud this was as good as success. The old colonel was now sixty-five and declared that ‘having ransacked the forest in every direction and driven the rebels over the Marawina into Cayenne, he was determined no more to return to the woods’. He would never get the honours he felt he deserved, but died shortly after his return to The Hague, attended only by his slave.
Bonny too perished, after leaving the Hinterlands. For a while, all had seemed well in Cayenne. The French had often been accused of supporting the revolt, and now Bonny swore them an oath and even acquired his own little village (known, of course, as Boniville). But there was still fighting to be done and, in the end, Bonny was killed by rival maroons. It’s said that as his killers fled down the Marowijne, they reached some falls where Bonny’s severed head suddenly bounced up out of their canoe, grinned and then vanished in the rapids. The falls are, even now, known as Lèssé-Dédé (‘Leave the Dead’), after Bonny. Right to the end, he’d given everyone the slip.
A few weeks later I was on the Marowijne and caught up with the
Bonis. They still lived on the far bank, near where they’d landed. At first, their village didn’t look very different from other maroon villages I’d seen, with its geometry and togas, and triangular huts. But then I noticed that, in the detail, it was French. Each hut had a blue enamel number; there was a small triangular town hall; all the canoes were painted in the colours of French football teams, such as Paris Saint-Germain; and even the shrine to the Gran Ouata Sinecki, or Great Water Snake, was draped in a tricolore.
The Bonis had always loved the novelty of France, with its guns and its gadgets and its hoity-toity language. According to my guide (who was Surinamese), there were now almost 6,000 Bushi Nengués living in Guyane, enjoying all its trimmings. He said that at one time the Bonis had even given their children fancy French names such as Bateau, Champagne and Bicyclette. Not that names mattered. At any moment a Boni can shake off whoever he is and become someone else. This horrified the Surinamese. ‘The people don’t have laws,’ said the guide. ‘They don’t care about work or marriage. No one controls them! France thinks it does but, to them, France is just … useful.’
There was still something of the warrior about them. The men on the jetty were all daintily cloaked and coiffed like Tudor men-at-arms. Their hair was lavishly plaited into wavy puffs, and they watched us with studied indifference. The Bonis have always unsettled outsiders. In 1948 the American explorer Hassoldt Davis wrote of the ‘cold war’ that characterised his travels with the Bonis. They had ‘little heart and no ambition’, he wrote, and would happily have killed him. Perhaps it was just contempt passing through the genes.
One of the men got up, and ambled over.
‘Téléphone?’ he asked.
I showed him my feebly blinking screen. ‘Pas de signal.’
Wild Coast Page 29
