The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  The worst, by far, were snakes. The place was a paradise for snakes: big black snakes with rose-colored bellies and tiny black snakes no thicker than a pipestem whose poison could kill a chicken after one step and three or four drunken pirouettes. There were poisonous whip snakes that ran the spectrum from dirty brown to emerald green. Their poison seemed to put a man to sleep. One walked him back and forth to keep him awake, and farmers discovered that if they could get the victim drunk on rum, he would survive. There were snakes in the house, under the house, underfoot, in the corners, crawling into bed. Once Violet went to the creek for a bath and saw the tail of a snake disappear beneath her dressing gown. “You may imagine I slipped out of it as quickly and quietly as I could.”

  Violet’s greatest war was with constrictors. They fought an anaconda in a salt marsh that was “as big round as [Henry’s] body.” They shot it and tied it with a rope that snapped several times like twine, until Henry finally pinned it to the ground with a pitchfork. It measured twenty to twenty-four feet in length. They used its tanned skin in place of canvas for a deck chair. Constrictors liked to glide into the henhouse at night. Once she killed one that was fifteen feet long and that had swallowed a chicken up to its legs. One night she awoke on hearing the hens cry out. “Henry, get up!” she hissed, shaking him from sleep, but he wouldn’t budge. “The fowls are just having bad dreams,” he groaned. She rushed out alone and found three chickens wrapped in a constrictor’s coils.

  During this time, Henry had become northern Australia’s sole promoter of tobacco. Though he might not grow much at home, he was growing more than anyone else, which meant he could consider himself the region’s authority. In 1884, he published a four-page pamphlet under the authority of the Queensland government entitled “Directions for Tobacco Growing and Curing in North Queensland,” a forerunner of his more widely-read 1908 treatise on rubber. He was turning himself into a crop promoter, if such a thing existed at the time.

  During this time we also see the first sign of a growing distance between Violet and Henry. She was often alone, as Henry was frequently absent, physically and emotionally. No word of childlessness was ever mentioned in the writings of Henry or Violet, nor in family tales. Violet never seemed to regret the absence of children in her life, and Henry was too driven to care. In compensation, Violet grew tough and independent. She hopped on her mare, Fairy, for a ride through the bush. “I did not need anyone with me,” she claimed proudly, “though once or twice I had a gentleman apologize for not escorting me.” She visited the neighboring ranch and brought home some beef in a saddlebag, “though I expect I considerably scandalized those neighbors.” She rode twenty miles to town to shop—town in the bush was two stores, a hotel, and a courthouse—sometimes taking along the Indian boy. She did her best to manage a social life during these trips, but during her decade in Queensland she went to the races once, went to one sporting event, and paid one formal visit to a neighbor to welcome a visitor. Violet did not whine, did not complain, and showed back in the Amazon that she could be as tough as her husband. But sometimes the loneliness of the bush peeks through her memoir, such as when she writes that those three outings were “the only recreations I had during our . . . years in Queensland.”

  Most of her waking hours were spent managing the farm, since Henry was usually away. The cultivation and harvesting of tobacco and sugarcane demanded a good deal of labor—cheap labor, if possible. During this time, the labor force in Queensland consisted almost entirely of South Sea islanders brought from their villages to work for a period of three years. As a rule, these workers were tough Melanesians who went by the general term “Kanakas,” a Melanesian word for “man.” The abuses connected with the “recruitment” of islanders made Kanaka labor one of the burning issues of Queensland politics. Slavery had been abolished from the American South, yet a society of huge sugarcane plantations resembling the antebellum South had grown up in Queensland, and residents were sensitive to accusations that a new slave system existed in the far reaches of the British Empire. To counter this, a number of government commissions investigated charges of abuse, and they almost always concluded that the work force was not mistreated. It certainly was a paternalistic system, as illustrated by an editorial in The Queenslander on May 14, 1881:The Kanaka is at best a savage, often tractable and biddable, but still undeniably a savage whose short contact with civilisation works little change in him. He is a child to be protected from the ill-use or deception of cruel or designing men, and is to too great an extent incapable of guarding his own rights.

  Although an islander’s service was regulated by the government, the real abuses took place during “recruitment,” far from the public eye. The “blackbirders,” as those employed in the labor trade were called, ranged through the islands recruiting shiploads of workers, and they lied to the natives without conscience. Few carried interpreters, but signed islanders up for their three-year stints based on a little pidgin English, trade goods, and pantomime. “A favorite device,” one contemporary newspaper reported, “was to hold up two or three fingers and to imitate the cutting of cane and grass or the digging of yams. One gentleman with a sense of humour took a yam and bit it three times.” Others impersonated missionaries and promised the gifts the clergymen usually brought. The tribesmen were left with the impression that they were only going for a short cruise to see the wonders of the white man’s world. They were astounded by what they’d bought into and often required what was euphemistically called “breaking in.” Kidnapping was rampant, often at the end of a gun.

  The consequences were inevitable. Several genuine missionaries, including an Anglican bishop, were murdered by natives. The biggest story for 1880 in Queensland was the May 30 massacre aboard the trading schooner Esperanza. When the ship was seized by a party of natives, the captain, two white seamen, and four native crewmen were killed and the vessel plundered and burned. Natives were killed during a punitive expedition. The blackbirders were excoriated and moved to virgin territory in the islands east of New Guinea. From 1883 to 1885, nearly seven thousand people were kidnapped or duped and sent to the farms of Queensland.

  Since she was the farm’s de facto boss, Violet managed the Kanakas. Apparently she and her neighbors did a good job:The chief Magistrate of the district is the Polynesian inspector and whenever he visits a district he has them all assembled for inspection and to hear complaints. They are well treated as a rule, shed tears in many cases at leaving when their term is expired, often returning for another term after a short time at home. They are provided with clothes, food and a fixed wage which they draw on very sparingly till their time expires, when they spend it all. The two first important things are a gun and trunk, after that knives, tools, shirts, bright blankets.

  On the whole, she liked her Melanesian workers, though she tended to look on them as children needing careful supervision:[W]e found them trustworthy, working as well without their master’s eye as with it. . . . They are difficult to manage when sick, losing heart instantly. However strictly cautioned as to diet, they eat all manner of indigestible food. The wife of the owner of the neighboring sugar plantation was in the habit of making delicacies for the sick Kanakas but from our own experience I am sure it was useless.

  Not even cheap labor could save their farm, however, and then Henry accidentally sold it out from under them. From 1880 to 1885, he’d partnered with a man named Hammick, but in 1885, Hammick wanted out. The chronic lack of capital, the labor costs, the fluctuating prices, the weather, and bad luck were just too much for him. The son of a wealthy planter offered to buy Hammick out, and Henry felt he might get a break, since the new buyer seemed wealthy. His star seemed to be rising. The market for tobacco was finally opening up, and the new partner, though young, seemed willing to pump funds into his plans.

  Then Henry made a stupid mistake. Hammick was so eager to pull out that Henry agreed for him to be compensated by a bank loan that would be repaid by the new partner. That’s when it happene
d: Henry acted as the loan’s guarantor. Without warning, the new partner backed out. He sent Henry a letter stating that his father disapproved of the venture, and their verbal agreement could not be enforced or ratified. Henry had depended on trust and never signed a contract. Now he had to repay the bank, and that ruined him. He held on another eighteen months, but in early 1886, a depression hit Queensland and his hard-earned farm was virtually worthless.

  “I have often wondered,” Violet later wrote, “whether it was not a plot between the new and old partner; but I suppose not, as they could neither of them have supposed Henry could be so unbusinesslike.”

  For the second time, he’d been too trusting. In spring 1886, Henry and Violet packed the few belongings they had left and took the three-month voyage back to England. He repeated history, but not as he’d wanted: he returned penniless, as he had from the Orinoco, not in triumph as he’d dreamed. The sum for the sale of his farm was, according to family stories, “probably little more than sufficient for the fares home.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE TALKING CROSS

  Then, when all seemed bleak, another savior appeared, like Captain Hill in Nicaragua, young confederado Watkins on the Orinoco, James Drummond-Hay in Pará, Violet’s father, and Clements Markham. At each point in Henry’s life when his future seemed ruined, a stranger responded to some quality in him that evoked sympathy or trust and bucked him up again. On to the next wilderness, the savior seemed to say. On to better things.

  This time, however, we do not know the savior’s identity, only Violet’s note that one existed. In summer 1886, shortly after his defeated return to London, Henry “agreed to join a friend in journeying to British Honduras,” she said. On November 12, 1886, he sailed on the Godalming, and on December 18, he disembarked in Belize, the capital city. It was the first time in a decade that Violet had been home to visit her family, and now her wayward husband was heading back to South America. “I let him go back some six months in advance,” she wrote, resigned.

  During those six months, it must have seemed to her that old friends and family lived in a different galaxy than the one she’d loved as a girl. It was a faster, brighter world than any she’d known in the tropics, and she couldn’t help but feel left behind. In 1878, two years after Henry and she took the Scottish Knight to Queensland, electric lights had just been introduced in London. Now they seemed to be everywhere. The underground trains, reaching far out of the city, were powered by electricity, their cables insulated in rubber from the Amazon. In 1881, the papers said, London’s population topped 3.3 million, making her birthplace the largest city on earth, larger by far than New York, with only 1.2 million. The year before, the Englishman John Kemp Starley had introduced the “safety” bicycle, and soon, people said, every Englishman would own one. She tried to imagine 3.3 million Londoners all on their bicycles at once, riding down Piccadilly, ringing their bells for the right-of-way.

  London was the world center for finance and transport, and all England was in motion. In 1881, the clipper ship James Stafford crossed the Pacific Ocean in twenty-one and a half days, a world record. Almost anywhere on earth was accessible in a matter of months. Soon there would be no place untamed by civilization, no place to run or hide. Even the vast American desert was no longer intractable: on September 4, the elusive Apache chief Geronimo had surrendered in a place called Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, thus ending the last major U.S.-Indian war. The papers said forty-eight thousand new homes were built in London last year. She’d stroll through old neighborhoods and they’d transformed into colonies of French, Italians, Russians, or Greeks, every space filled with settlers far from home.

  Violet knew she’d eventually have to leave this modern world to rejoin her husband, and in April or May of 1887, she did.

  British Honduras was a tiny place, an 8,867-square-mile strip of beach and jungle. The low coastline was swampy, with thick mangroves blocking the passage inland, punctuated by rivers. The colony was tucked like an armpit beneath the shoulder of Mexico’s violent Yucatán Peninsula and bordered on the west and south by Guatemala. The latter claimed British Honduras as part of her territory but never pressed the issue, and the British refused to leave. In that way, it was like Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast: The Spanish claimed but never settled the unhealthy strip of mangrove swamp, and only wanted it back when the British crept in under their noses. Most historical sources agree that the origin of Belize City, and thus British Honduras—for the two were synonymous during their early history—occurred in the 1600s. The earliest settlers at the mouth of the Belize River may well have been British privateers hiding from the Spaniards, for no coastline was better suited for guerilla warfare. The maze of islands and concealed channels was perfect for staging sudden attacks and retreats. The channels led into the trees to become a web of lagoons. The shore was protected ten miles out by a wall of coral that fringed the coast from the Yucatán down to Guatemala, a distance of about two hundred miles. Inside this strip water was smooth even when rollers pounded on the reef, but to pierce that reef one needed knowledge of its breaks and channels, something the Spanish never learned.

  There was an economic reason for settlement, however, and the buccaneers found it first. Very soon after landing they turned the minute colony into an important source of logwood, a dyewood that grew along the coast and was one of the great prizes on pirate raids. It was a short step from plundering logwood to cutting it in the interior, and by 1670 logwood sold for about £100 a ton, a good profit in those days. By 1705, the British shipped most of their logwood from the Belize River area.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, demand for logwood declined as new technology and better natural dyes were adopted by dyemakers, but as so often happened, the forest provided a new moneymaker. Mahogany, or Swietenia mahogani, began replacing logwood as the colony’s principal export as early as 1771. By the early nineteenth century, mahogany exports climbed to twelve thousand tons, providing a yearly revenue of nearly £20,000. Mahogany was a handsome red wood that had been popular with eighteenth century cabinetmakers and now was used in shipbuilding, construction, and later in railway carriages. Although the best trees grew in the limestone sands of the north, they could be found throughout the jungles of British Honduras. The trees were scattered, like rubber, and scouts pierced the forest in search of new trees. Crews disappeared into the wilderness in August, cut crude logging roads from the trees to the nearest river, and had to be out before the summer rains in May, which turned the roads into quagmires. Once dragged out, the giant trees were floated down rivers swollen by the storms, then halted by booms in the river mouth. They were formed into huge rafts and floated to the wharves of the Belize City timber companies for shipment abroad.

  In 1863, when British Honduras became a Crown Colony, overcutting had taken its toll and the business was in decline. New companies, squeezed from better logging areas, roamed far afield to find new trees. As early as 1790, they began raiding Spanish territory. Such “foreign wood” was forbidden, but as competition stiffened, the companies sent cutters into Guatemala and Mexico to cut mahogany then quietly ship it to Belize as “local wood.” By the 1820s, cutters operated north of the Hondo River, which formed the border with the Yucatán, and south of the Sarstoon River on the Guatemala side.

  When Henry and Violet arrived, the “plantocracy,” as locals called it, was the most powerful force in British Honduras. It held onto power even as supply ran short and profits fell. Its stranglehold on land stifled farming, which was prohibited on logging property. This meant that the entire population depended on imported food. Rather than change, the plantocracy entrenched, consolidating their capital, resisting all attempts at reform. By 1859, the British Honduras Company, which originated as a partnership between old settler families and a London merchant, emerged as the colony’s predominant landowner. It spread like an amoeba in the 1860s, usually at the expense of competitors, who were forced to sell their land. In 1871, the firm became the Belize Es
tate and Produce Company, a London-based business that owned about half the privately held land in British Honduras and acted as the chief force in the colony’s political economy for over a century. There were other companies that operated on the borders and in the deeper forests, but they did so by arrangement with Belize Estate and Produce.

  Thus, Henry and Violet came to British Honduras during one of the most openly corrupt periods of its history. The population was changing. As more black immigrants moved in from the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica, the white population dropped from 4 percent in 1845 to 1 percent in 1881. The timber houses still controlled the colony, but as the white settlers moved out, the houses came under absolute foreign control, usually from London. The Crown did not control British Honduras; the timber companies did, a fact that set British governors at odds with the “monied cutters.” The mahogany houses maintained British Honduras as a private timber reserve, and to do so they controlled the press, the government, and the courts. When the Wickhams arrived, British Honduras was in danger of becoming a colonial dead end.

  The main opponent of the mahogany houses was the colony’s new governor, Sir Roger Tuckfield Goldsworthy, a hero of the Indian Mutiny. Appointed by the Foreign Office in 1884, he’d alienated the plantocracy by summer 1885. Belize City had a history of yellow fever and malaria. Built on a muddy flood plain, surrounded on three sides by water, and rising a mere eighteen inches above sea level, the city was a sink of stagnant canals, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. When Goldsworthy took office, he sought land reforms and awarded all public works contracts to improve sanitary conditions to a local man who was no friend of the plantocracy. Within two years, the colony’s treasury, which had a £90,000 surplus when Goldsworthy took office, was in the red. The improvements and the governor were blamed. Goldsworthy also seemed bent on improving conditions for the nonwhite immigrants. Belize’s Colonial Guardian railed that he “never for one moment ceased to be a friend of the least reputable portion” of the population. The plantocracy-controlled press delighted in calling the governor “the most hated man in the colony.”