The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  By mid-November, the rainy season set in, the frequent cloudbursts sheeting the land and obliterating all other sound. After a half hour the rain would subside to a steady drip drip drip. Fires in the lodges blazed bright, and the Indians took their last meals of the day. Such evenings were lonely for him. The cry of the goatsucker, Nyctidromus, would drift across a patch of maize—“Who-are-you? who, who, who-are-you?”—and Henry would ponder that very question. Who was he, a fatherless child, alone in an alien world? What was he trying to prove? “I know of nothing so suggestive of reflection, tinged with a wholesome sadness,” he wrote, as “to find oneself alone in a pathless wilderness, associating with a race utterly strange.” The moon silvered the forest around him, and a crake rattled in the sedges at the water’s edge. He felt face-to-face with the “Great First Cause of all”; the drum of frogs filled the early night, “but later on no sound, except the occasional hoot of an owl, broke the unusual stillness.”

  One fills silence with talk, and Henry learned the ways of his hosts to pass the time. The Mosquito Shore was populated by several related tribes that had pushed their way north over the centuries from the coast of Colombia into what today is Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They were a handsome people, with fine features, thick hair worn over their foreheads to their eyebrows, and a “warm, reddish-brown skin.” The men’s arms and chests were well developed but not their legs, probably because they paddled everywhere by canoe, Henry theorized. Nash, the headman, and Teribio, who had two wives and had paddled with Henry from Blewfields, both had a good command of English. Henry passed out tobacco to the village men, and the nightly conversations were long and leisurely. The Woolwá, or Suomoo, as they called themselves, seemed a martial people, and much of their talk was tales of war. The Spaniards of Nicaragua did not recognize the Miskito’s claim to self-governance, and so there was anticipation of an invasion. They liked to talk about past engagements between the British Navy and the Spanish, and stories were still told about Horatio Nelson and the attack on Greytown.

  The theme of such tales was obvious: Invaders would be repelled. Now, for the first time, Henry heard of the bloodshed accompanying the rubber trade. The Woolwá did not tap caucho, as they called it here. That was left to outsiders who understood and profited from the world’s need for rubber. A few months before Henry’s arrival, some Spaniards from Honduras had ascended the Rusewass, a tributary of the Woolwá, and built a number of thatch houses. They planned to tap Castilla elastica, the main source of latex in Nicaragua. These Hondurans were a hard bunch. In the forests south of Lake Nicaragua, they kidnapped Guatuso women and children to sell as household slaves. When the Woolwá demanded payment for the use of their land, a fight broke out; a tapper slashed an Indian with his machete, and that night the tribe returned to club the intruders to death, “leaving none alive to tell the tale.”

  But on the whole, Henry’s hosts seemed a peaceful people, and his time among them slipped away. His attitude to other peoples was a peculiar mix of Victorian racism and an admiration that bordered on the protective. When he first met the Woolwá, he reacted in shock: All were quite naked except for a loincloth reaching from waist to mid-thigh, and of the women he only mentioned “their decidedly light apparel.” Like many of his time, he preferred racial purity to “mixing.” Unlike others, however, he did not place whites at the pinnacle of creation. Toward the half-black, half-Indian Creoles, he seemed to harbor no ill will, though he thought them a lower race; the mestizos of mixed Spanish blood were sinister or degenerate. But as he grew to know the Indians, he had only the highest praise. They exhibited a “scrupulous honesty” in all their dealings with him, and a praiseworthy etiquette in their relations with each other. Once, through his ignorance, Henry violated a tribal taboo for separation of the sexes: He surprised a woman alone as she washed pots. After the first shock, she recovered her presence of mind, “remembering probably that I was but a stranger from some distant land of barbarism, and therefore unaccustomed to polite society.” Though spoken half in jest, he really did like these people and defended them often: “I am sure if some of those who condemn Indians as a lazy race had seen them at their work they would have revoked their judgment.”

  On November 25, his solitude was broken by the rancorous arrival of the trader Hercules Temple, sitting in a dory filled with men he’d hired to collect rubber. Since Temple was known to the Woolwá, his band was not in the same danger as the slain Hondurans. Each tapper was a Creole, descended from escaped slaves from the West Indies, and “Temple himself was nearly black, with crisp hair, like many of the Blewfields Creoles: he assured me that his mother was an Indian woman of the Toonga tribe.” Henry began to realize the strange makeup of the world he’d entered, a world where entire populations were in flux. There were hereditary refugees like Temple and the Creoles; indigenous groups like the Miskitos and Woolwá; and intruders like the Hondurans, who came dreaming of quick riches and slaves. Each was to some extent what sociologist Everett Stonequist in the 1930s called a “marginal man,” the individual who suddenly found himself “poised in psychological uncertainty between two or more social worlds.” He balanced on a precipice—by leaving one life, he was unable to enter the other, and found himself “on the margin of each but a member of neither.”

  The New World was not only physical but psychological, and remote places like this were a testing ground for the future. Henry wondered if such different peoples could ever coexist, and if not, whether the jungle was wide and deep enough to hold them all. Temple and the Creoles, though friends with the Woolwá, were much different than their hosts. On the night of their arrival, they fiddled and joked until the early hours, “a contrast to the quiet of the Indian part of the encampment.” The next morning, shortly after sunrise, “the whole of the population went off like a flock of birds, some up and some down the river, leaving the Blewfields trader, his son, and myself alone.”

  Temple was talkative, curious, self-assured, and sometimes dictatorial; if not a king on this forgotten river, he considered himself a merchant prince, secure in the knowledge that he was the Woolwás’ sole source of machetes, cast iron pots, and tobacco, items that had started out as luxuries and evolved into necessities. He may also have brought another of civilization’s byproducts—disease. Historians believe that malaria followed explorers and slave traders across the Atlantic: Temple’s arrival from Blewfields may have duplicated this on a miniature scale, since the female anopheles mosquito, which carries the malaria plasmodium in her gut and passes it to a new host with every blood meal, is an expert stowaway. The egg-shaped parasite attacks the red blood cells; it heads straight for the liver or kidneys, and once it gets in the liver, malaria can linger for years. The bite is actually the most pleasant part of the experience. Three to eight days after being bitten, a victim starts vomiting, runs a fever of 102-104° F, sweats profusely, and shakes uncontrollably. The fever subsides for a day while the parasite changes to a nonpathogenic gamete, which allows it to multiply and spread. Soon the fever returns, and red blood cells are ruptured in huge quantities. At this point, an untreated victim can lapse into coma and die. Death depends upon the number of parasites. In severe cases, there can be as many as 80-100 per microscopic field.

  Two weeks after Temple’s arrival—about the time for the plasmodium’s latency period to end—Henry began to feel the onset of a “slight feverishness and weakness.” Every third evening, he was gripped by violent shivers as the sun dipped. He’d build a fire and sit over it, and “being thirsty without hunger, would brew a quantity of strong tea, drinking it as hot as possible,” hoping to sweat the fever away. He’d spend the night rolled in his blanket and wake in the morning sweat-soaked and tired. He’d consume great quantities of sugarcane after each attack, this being the only thing for which he had an appetite. On Christmas Day, he lay on his raised bamboo bed and watched the termites “driving their covered ways along the supporting beams just above my head.” He missed his home, his frien
ds, his family. For the first time since arriving, he wanted to go back.

  Temple had returned to Blewfields before Christmas, but before he left, Henry arranged for him to take a shipment of bird skins and then, on his return, “go with me into the interior.” Henry planned to ascend the river to its source, then head north along the edge of the savannah until meeting the Patuca River and tracing it back to the coast. He’d stocked a wide assortment of beads, fishhooks, and knives for trading. There were rumors of never-chronicled tribes in this region, so maybe he’d be the first to discover them.

  But when Temple returned on January 22, 1867, he brought something far deadlier than trading beads or the mail. He’d been delayed by an epidemic of cholera, which swept up the coast from the south in a particularly macabre way. In December, it had broken out aboard a river steamer belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company, which plied the San Juan River. It hit with such fury that the captain beached the ship in one of the creeks, and everyone abandoned the vessel in fear.

  Some Miskito men in Greytown heard of the disaster and boarded the ship for plunder, but before they made it home, one of them was seized by cholera and died. The others threw his body overboard and continued north to Blewfields Lagoon. When another man died, they put into a bluff overlooking the water to bury him. The job was done with such haste that his legs protruded from the grave, but “they continued on their journey north, no doubt sowing there the seeds of the harvest,” Henry said. A boy from a nearby village went to the bluff to cut sugarcane, but when he arrived, he smelled the rotting corpse and went to investigate, thinking it might be someone’s dead cow. Instead he saw the man’s legs sticking from the ground like roots, and rushed back to his village to report his discovery. “As it was Christmas week, he went to a dance in the evening, the custom of these people being to go in a party from house to house, until they have danced in all the houses. . . . While still at one of these houses, he was taken ill, and died before morning.” And so the disease spread through the villages, ultimately reaching Blewfields.

  Word travels fast on the river, even as far as Kissalala. When Temple returned to Blewfields before Christmas, he’d taken with him a young village boy; now the boy’s two sisters set out to fetch him in their family pitpan. The “sickness,” as they called it, was feared in every little village up every remote tributary. It had killed thousands during the “filibusters,” or invasions, of Nicaragua in 1855-60 by American soldier of fortune William Walker; it came with the ships from the white man’s world. The two sisters arrived just as Temple was about to return to Kissalala, and they all traveled back to the village without any apparent harm. But on the afternoon of their return, one sister was hit with diarrhea and grew worse by evening. A kinsman rushed to Henry for medicine, but all he had was some essence of ginger, which he mixed with strong tea.

  A grand mishla feast had been underway with guests from villages up and down the river when the sisters returned from Blewfields. Because of that, Henry grew truly afraid. Mishla was the principal fermented drink at these feasts, the cause of many drunken brawls and squabbles, and as a precaution the women usually hid all weapons until the effects turned to sleep and hangovers. But mishla was a far, far greater danger now. Its production was a communal event, a “disgusting process” as Henry called it, in which the women collected a large pile of cassava root and chewed, spitting the juice into a large earthen pot or jar. When their jaws got too tired to continue, they boiled the remaining roots and mixed it all together, stirring and skimming the pot and letting it stand for a day or two until it had fermented. When the sisters returned and still seemed healthy, they added their share to the pot. When the first sister fell sick, Henry went to the lodges and tried to persuade his friends to overturn the pots of mishla.

  Now the futility of Henry’s position became all too clear. He was an outsider, an amusing pet, acting in ways that seemed incomprehensible to the Woolwá, like shooting birds and sending off their skins. This sudden insistence in overturning the very reason for the feast was just another example of the white man’s irrationality. What could Henry know of ancient ways? His growing anger and helplessness shows through his journal: He is a boy of four again, his father dying in the next room, and there is nothing he can do. For the first time since his stay in Kissalala, he grows so frustrated as to think of them as ignorant savages, but he likes these people, he has become their friend, and there is a moment’s relief when his ginger tea seems to soothe the girl’s pain. Maybe they will be reprieved; maybe this Paradise will not be destroyed. But that same night, the girl’s family gave her another draught of mishla, and “just before dawn,” Henry wrote, “I heard the crying of the women, by which I knew she was dead.”

  Panic set in. Each lodge threw fuel on their fires, believing that heavy smoke would act as a disinfectant. Guests from other villages loaded their canoes, “and I heard the rattle of their paddles while it was yet dark.” At daybreak, the second sister began retching and, “creeping down the steep bank to the water’s edge with great difficulty, with the aid of a staff, died there in about two hours.” Another woman who’d been drinking from the same mishla pot began vomiting; mishla pots everywhere were dumped, but too late. Teribio, Henry’s companion since his arrival, “looked quite pale and complained that he felt very sick.” The panic so overtook them that flight was their only thought. Henry had already packed, and Temple and he jumped in a canoe and followed others north. Friends were screaming, cutting their hair in grief, staggering to the water’s edge and retching; others scattered to their canoes, leaving the accursed place for good. As Henry looked back, he saw the body of the second sister draped across the sand. Above her wailed her mother and the younger brother whose innocent visit to Blewfields had brought death and ruin upon them all.

  Henry, Hercules Temple, and the Woolwá paddled for their lives deep into the interior. The wildness seemed to calm them. They were absorbed into a primeval world of immense and towering trees joined together by a “wild, matted tangle of flowering vines, and by the multitude of other parasites, which blend the whole into one gorgeous mass of flowers and leaves.” The profusion of greenery was so great that it overwhelmed one’s senses. Henry made a rare aesthetic comparison and wondered whether Nature was not more pleasing if carefully tended as in England, where “our oaks, elms, and beeches stand out in individual completeness and beauty of form.”

  By January 28, they were five days upriver from Kissalala and no one else had died. The rest of the village split off up different little creeks; the community of Kissalala was no more. Wickham, Temple, Teribio, and two other Woolwá continued deep in-country, and that night they saw for the first time another inhabited Indian encampment, the first people they’d seen since their flight. For those five days, the desolation had been complete. “[A]t all the other places we passed the Indians had fled far up the little creeks at news of the ‘sickness,’ generally leaving at the mouth of the creek a wand, with a piece of white rag fluttering at the end, to indicate the direction they had taken.”

  For the next twelve days, they pressed north up the steadily narrowing river, spending more time portaging over falls and twisted, rocky rapids than paddling their pitpan. The world around them was silent except for the flight of startled bats, which shot like arrows from crevices in the riverbank, only to disappear into the shade of dark caverns. The abundance of game diminished. Temple complained about the lack of meat, and Henry suffered physically. He developed a ring of suppurating boils around his ankles, and the pain in his feet and legs made travel tormenting.

  In Kaka, the last settlement on the river, they heard that the mining town of Consuelo lay beyond the forest in the nearby hills. On February 9, Henry limped with Temple’s aid along a faint track up the side of a steep hill. They broke from the woods at the summit, and before them lay “a view of great extent and beauty: the plain beneath, diversified by hills of different elevation, stretched far away to the foot of the distant
mountains.” He’d made it to the savannah as he’d hoped, and near the opposite hill they passed through a narrow valley strewn with wooden shacks, workshops, and machinery on every side. Henry knocked on a door and asked if any Englishmen were around. The resident led them through the town, and “Temple and I saw enough to convince us that we were in a mining settlement of considerable importance.” On the right, fifty yards from the road on a grass-covered slope, stood a whitewashed wooden house surrounded by a veranda and connected to a rear kitchen by a covered walkway. They limped to the house and their guide pointed to a man sitting in a hammock. Two women, looking pale and English, “were cooking at a stove what looked more like beefsteak than anything I had seen for a long time.” Henry’s mouth watered. He turned to the man in the hammock and tried to stand straight. “Are you English?” he inquired.

  The man leaped up in shock. “I should rather think so!”

  So ended Henry’s first expedition to the New World. He made it no farther than the little gold mining town of Consuelo, part of the celebrated Chontales Mining Company. The pain from his sores was just too great to bear. His surprised host was Captain Hill, R.N., a transplanted Cornish miner, part of that wave of British investment that started in the 1820s with the collapse of Spanish mercantilism. When the new Latin republics opened their arms to Old World money, few investments were more enticing than gold. This hilly Santo Domingo country was loaded with the precious metal, running in parallel veins of auriferous quartz so numerous that in a mile-wide band a new vein could be found every fifty yards. The value of ore treated by Chontales averaged seven pennyweight per ton, enough that several company towns sprang up to stay for about fifty years. Even today, the Santo Domingo country retains a legacy of blue-eyed Latin children and that local delicacy, the Cornish pasti.