I think I understand better now the rawness of its human history. Along this coast mankind has always been made to feel a little frail. It’s not just the flora and fauna, but the sheer scale of the forest beyond. Ghosts and magic have always thrived and had often been a daily feature of my travels. But what had always seemed so odd about the supernatural life of the Guianas was the sheer consistency of its ogres. Everywhere I went the same fiends cropped up, particularly the water monkey. In a land comprising three different countries, three different cultures, three official languages, three currencies, myriad religions and umpteen different races, this was remarkable. It was almost as though, in cultural terms, the only thing that linked the Guianas was a fear of the unseen.
Freud once said that if you accidentally leave something behind, you don’t really want to leave. I now had lots of things I could have left behind. Although I’d given away most of my clothes, I’d accumulated over 3,000 pages of notes, ten hours of taped interviews and 1,000 photographs. I’d also acquired a bow and arrow, a Dutch wine bottle, some maroon togas, several clay pipes, a few yards of bead necklaces, various coins, feathers and rocks, and a small cannonball. The fact that I’d somehow hung on to this lot was a reminder that this was just a journey, and that – at heart – I wanted to get back home.
At the last minute, however, I did leave something on the minibus. It was my marked-up copy of Raleigh’s Discoverie. As the minibus didn’t look as though it had ever been cleaned, I suspect that this curious volume is still there, and that it will trundle up and down the coast for ever, or at least for the life of a South American bus.
In St-Georges I asked around about the burned-out cars. The town sat, very neatly, on the banks of the Oyapok. It was like a last vestige of old France, tottering on the edge of a loud, new world. It had a bakery, a war memorial, a little town hall, a hotel made of corrugated iron, a tin church with a spire, two grocery stores, a gun shop, and a Chinese bibelotier, or purveyor of fancy goods. There was also a garrison for thirty soldiers, just as there had been since the French first arrived. I tried to get inside the church but was seen off by a stray, giving birth to puppies all over the vestry. From the Brazilian side came a constant clunk of drums, like a heartbeat but faster.
I stopped by at the hotel. It had lemon-yellow shutters and was decorated with plaques from all the great régiments who’d called in for coffee. That afternoon it was full of gendarmes. President Sarkozy had just announced a big campaign against illegal migrants. Across the Guianas there were now almost half as many garimpeiros as there were lawful natives.
I asked one of the officers about his work.
‘Nous sommes debordés,’ he said. We’re being swamped.
And what about the Brazilians, the ones that he caught?
They’re OK, he told me. ‘Ce sont surtout de bons gens …’
‘And they work hard?’
‘Oui, plus durs que les guyanais.’
‘And what about the cars?’
‘C’est aussi les brésiliens …’
It transpired that the vehicles were stolen in Cayenne, driven down Route 2, stripped of their parts, and then set on fire. It happens all the time, said the officer. ‘Chaque jour, trois ou quatre voitures …’
‘So Brazil’s now here to stay, warts and all?’
‘Oui, bienvenu dans le futur,’ he said. Welcome to the future.
EPILOGUE
My friends, there is no more beautiful or richer country under the sun than this one. It is yours.
The governor’s words to Cayenne’s first convicts, 1852
The leather will rot in your shoes, and the seams of your clothes will come undone, and the material will be torn into shreds. Your instruments will fall to pieces. Everything you have will rot. Your brow will turn to water, and mushrooms will breed in your flesh.
Raymond Maufrais, Journey without Return
AT SOME STAGE DURING MY RESEARCH I’d realised that Oyapok had played an uncomfortable role in my family history.
As the last river in these travels, it was obligingly ferocious. From St-Georges the Oyapok looked merely huge, like a lake speckled with canoes. But everything I’d read suggested that, within twenty miles, it became a monster. Along its length (310 miles) there were said to be 120 sets of rapids. Even here the tide was constantly piling up sandbanks and then sucking them away. The river also had its own mist – called ‘The Shroud of the Europeans’ – and an entire population of mini-monsters from sucurís, or anacondas, to fish-eating rats.
Being so surly, the Oyapok had seldom been colonised. Most of the people living on its banks were Amerindians, tribes that had been here for thousands of years. They’ve never made easy neighbours. The biggest group were the Galibis, who were once known as the Caribs and who’d made a name for themselves by eating everyone else. Then there were the Karipunas, the Oyampis and – way upriver – the Emérillons, who were almost extinct. There was also talk of a tribe of women, who, once a year, coupled with the men of the Taïras, and then killed any males they produced. Raleigh had loved this story and had included it in his catalogue of Guianese delights, recasting the tribe as ‘The Amazons’.
With such strong allusions to the origins of Guiana, it felt right, ending my journey here. But there was another sense in which I was ending my travels where they’d begun. It had suddenly dawned on me that the Oyapok of today and the ‘River Wyapoko’ of 1629 were one and the same. That meant that Robert Hayman, my airy-fairy, ditty-jotting forebear had finished up somewhere near here. Of course, I had no way of finding him, but, having followed him down from Newfoundland, I did at least owe him the courtesy of an excursion: a little tour around the scene of his final disaster.
Which is how I ended up in a dugout heading for Brazil, with an Amerindian aged eleven, my rucksack, the bag of notes, my bow and arrow, and a very cold little piglet.
On the far bank we got out at Oiapoque. I made signs for a bigger canoe, and pointed upriver. The Amerindian took me to a gold-dealer, who spoke a little French.
‘Visitez Rona,’ he said, through a slot in the wall.
He gave the boy some directions, and we both set off, with the pig on a piece of string and me dangling history and weapons. After Cayenne, Oiapoque was like six towns compacted into one. I could suddenly feel all my senses abruptly jolted into action. Everything here seemed to howl or stink or glare or slosh around under the feet. In this part of Guiana – known as Amapá – only one house in fifty is connected to the sewers. It struck me that an earthy Stuart like Hayman would have understood it all much better: the streets like rivers, the waggons glooping through the mud, the banter of music, the hawkers with their ointments and gew-gaws, the chickens being cooked in the road, the public displays of insanity, the poor without shirts, and lives slowing down to the pace of a slouch. On the other hand, in Hayman’s day there’d have been nothing here at all, except a few Carib huts. I wondered what ‘Oiapoque’ meant. ‘Water-logged’, perhaps, or ‘The Place of Mating Dogs’.
At the edge of the town we came to some mangrove and followed a boardwalk out through the swamp. If birds had designed this planet, it would be covered in mangrove. All around us in the gloom was a fizzy black goo, humming with insecty treats. We also came across a small dead coral snake, and a sign that read ‘Perigo – abelhas’ (‘Danger – Bees’). I was glad when we re-emerged in the light. Ahead was a beach, and a clearing planted with bananas and coffee.
‘La Chácara du Rona!’ announced the boy, who then took his money and his piglet, and left.
Rona appeared. ‘Bom dia! Como vai?’
‘Tudo bem!’ I replied, in my schoolboy Portuguese.
Rona smiled and offered to speak in French.
He said he had rooms to let and boats on the river. Although in his sixties, Rona was still immensely solid, with tufts of thick black hair erupting at his collar and cuffs, as though he’d been padded. One of the first things he showed me was his hatchlings, tiny turtles he’d rescu
ed from the hunters. While I always had a sneaking feeling that Rona’s ancestors had made life hell for mine, it was hard not to like him. He was as I imagined a good quartermaster during la conquista, and could fix up almost anything. Under the trees there were giant canoes – all ready and waiting – together with barrels and oil drums and a crew of Caribs. Not only did Rona have the plantation and the huts, but he also ran cargo, right up the river.
I told him about Hayman, and his long-lost farm.
Rona was intrigued. ‘Quand est-il arrivé?’
‘Le dix-sept fevrier 1629.’
There was a whistle of surprise. What was Hayman growing?
Sugar and cotton, perhaps. Certainly cassava.
In that case, said Rona, he was probably near here.
How could he tell?
Because, downstream, the soil’s too salty.
And upstream?
Rapids. You can’t get a ship past.
Hayman, I said, took a canoe upriver. Twenty days.
That’s to the headwater. Now, with a motor, it’s seven.
Had Rona got a boat free tomorrow?
Sure, he said. Where are you going?
The Maripa Falls.
‘OK, não tem problema.’
I chose the Maripa Falls for a particular reason. Looking at the river, I now realised that, for all his airs and fancy ideas, Robert Hayman had undertaken an astonishing journey. With almost no experience of the continent he’d tackled one of its most violent stretches of water. He had no map, no medicine and no prospect of rescue. With his little crew he’d be constantly pulling the dugout out of the water and carrying it up through the rapids. His outfit may have been all right for a jaunt round Bristol or for filching gull’s eggs on the edge of the Labrador Sea, but it was hopeless in the tropics. He didn’t even have a spade, in case anybody died.
With him were three Caribs and his servant from Wessex, and together they travelled hundreds of miles inland. The idea was to ‘traffique’ with the Norrague people, who’ve long since disappeared and who lived three weeks upriver. What could they possibly have had, to make all this worthwhile? In years to come, explorers would come back with all sorts of wonders: a grass that could stop bleeding, mind-bending mahogany apples, and a leaf for entrancing fish. But what was Robert after? It’s one of the frustrations of this extraordinary journey that his shopping list, like everything else, has completely disappeared.
Particularly galling is the fact that there’s no way of knowing where this voyage began or even where it ended. Nowadays Robert would have his itinerary up on the web and would be tweeting his poems all round the world. But back then there wasn’t even so much as a handwritten log. The only evidence that this journey ever took place is a deposition, written by a friend, as proof of Robert’s death. ‘During theire stay at wyapoko’, it begins, ‘the said Robert hayman about the moneth of October last past and a servant of his called Thomas Duppe with Axes, bills, cassada irons, strong waters and diverse other Commodityes went up the river from his plantation …’
And that’s it, as far as geography goes. If my journey was to become intertwined with Robert’s – even if only at the end – I needed to find a spot where our paths were funnelled together. The Maripa Falls looked just the job.
Rona said that his boatman would drop me on the French side, at the foot of the falls. From there it was an hour’s walk up through the jungle to the upstream side. Hayman must have done much the same. The river here was about 300 metres wide, and dropped the height of a tree. There was no other way through, except overland.
Good luck, added Rona, and beware of the bees.
The boatman was, like Hayman’s, a Carib or Galibi. Although he was impressively po-faced, he wore a T-shirt that said ‘I AM THE NEW IN YOUR WORLD OF NEW’. Apart from this slightly puzzling sentiment, it would be a trip without words. If the boatman wanted me to do anything, he merely tilted his head or made some subtly anguished grimace. There was also a nod for ‘sit down’ and a scowl for ‘get out’. Three weeks of this, I decided, might have got rather trying. But at least the Caribs no longer regarded their visitors as lunch. In Oiapoque I’d seen some of their old war clubs. They were works of art, with huge diagonal teeth. The victim would’ve been not only knocked senseless but flattened and tenderised, ready for the grill.
Ten miles upstream the water began to buckle and heave. Ahead was what looked like an avalanche of crumbling snow and mud. Just to demonstrate that no one had ever paddled up here, the boatman opened the throttle, and we crawled through the froth to the bottom of this wall. For a moment we hung there, and then the water caught us and sent us spiralling off downstream. It was exhilarating in a way, like jogging through ten lanes of traffic and somehow surviving.
On the French bank the boatman scowled, and I jumped out into the forest. Amid the trees there was a miniature rail track that led up to the other side of the falls. All cargo used to come this way on a pousse-pousse, or handcart, but now the track was abandoned. Saplings were pushing up through the sleepers, and the bridges were rotting away. As always, the jungle was healing over. In places trees had fallen over the track, and I had to climb through the springy branches, listening carefully for bees. Soon it began to rain, and everything around me seemed to scream with pleasure. Songs belched out of the undergrowth, which sagged under the downpour. Then suddenly behind me there was a deafening crack, followed by myriad splintery explosions. I walked back to see what had happened and found that a vast tree had collapsed across the track, just where I’d been moments before. It wasn’t exactly a close shave, but it was a reminder that falling trees kill more people in the Guianese jungle than any other peril. I once heard a story in Guyana of a bulldozer driver who was so emphatically crushed that he had to be buried in his cab.
After an hour I came to the head of the falls. The forest opened out onto a small, sandy savannah, smouldering with rain. Beyond it I could see the Oyapok, now looking less like a tropical river than a strip of angry North Atlantic. I took refuge in an old, rotting shack and was surprised to find that I wasn’t alone. Out on the porch was a légionnaire with a machine gun, keeping watch on the river. If he was surprised by the sight of an Englishman, streaming water and covered in scratches, he didn’t look it. I didn’t trouble him with my ghost-hunt. Instead we talked about poisonous frogs and Madagascar, which was where he came from.
I also asked him why he’d joined the Foreign Legion.
‘Pour le passeport,’ he said frankly.
And, for that, he’d be here five years?
The soldier nodded. All he wanted was to get a degree.
I stared out across the rumbling tussocks of slate-grey water. Funny thing, ambition. Hayman had done all this for a little fame and fortune at the court of King Charles. Of course, he’d never found it. According to his friend, on the way back downriver ‘he dyed in the said Canoo of a burning fever and of the fluxe’. It wasn’t a great end to his trip, excreting blood and boiling in his skin. The Caribs and the servant, Thomas Duppe, had then dug a grave ‘close by the waters side, with paddles and Cassada irons’. Under the terms of his enterprise, Hayman’s worldly goods passed first to his partner, Charles Hellman – who also died a Wyapoko death – then to ‘one William Knevett, of london, ffishmonger’.
Poor Robert. In death he’d realised something that Europeans would take several centuries to appreciate: that Guiana would exact a terrible price for its beauty, and would rarely share out its wealth. In fact, Robert had come away with nothing, not even a single line of his jangling verse.
AFTERWORD
In November 2009 Guyana and Norway signed a historic deal in which Guyana placed its forest under Norwegian supervision in return for an aid package worth $250 million over five years.
DR ROOPNARAINE continues to struggle for social justice, although the days of armed revolt are long behind him. In 2010 he issued his prospectus for change, titled Call to Citizens.
LORLENE JAMES remarried and s
till lives in Georgetown, where she campaigns for civil society.
JANET JAGAN, the dental nurse who became Guyana’s first and last white American president, died in March 2009.
DEBORAH LAYTON, who escaped from Jonestown and brought the world news of its excesses, later became a stockbroker and still lives in California. Her brother LARRY was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the shootings at Port Kaituma but was released in 2002.
In November 2009, the Guyanese government erected a plaque at JONESTOWN, its first memorial to those who’d died thirty-one years before.
I continued to ring DESI BOUTERSE after my return to London but I never got an answer. In July 2010, he and his party (‘Mega Combination’) won the election, and Bouterse became Suriname’s president. Meanwhile, his trial in relation to ‘The December Murders’ continues, and Holland has withdrawn all non-essential aid.
French Guiana is still busily lobbing rockets into orbit. The latest, in November 2010, took with it Hylas-1, a satellite made in the old sea-faring city of Portsmouth. It promises Britons greater broadband access, and thus even more chatter.
Meanwhile, as the world gold price rose, there was more violence in the forest. In December 2009, Brazil despatched a military plane to Albina to rescue its beleaguered miners. The lure of gold, it seems, continues to vex this coast.
SOURCES
The Guianas
Finding books that provide an overview of the Guianas was surprisingly difficult. Few authors and historians have ventured into comparison. Perhaps the earliest, and easily the most imaginative, description of the region is provided by Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (reprinted by the Hakluyt Society, London, 2006). However, as he never actually set foot in the lands with which I’m concerned, his great work makes for a somewhat unreliable guide. Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (London, Penguin, 1972) also provides a few early insights into the region, if equally second-hand.
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