Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  We arrived at the chaotic bus station near Stabroek Market in central Georgetown. I followed the mouth-watering smell of food and was rewarded with the best chicken curry and roti I had ever tasted.

  I started looking for a guesthouse, taking in the pungent smells as I walked. The streets pulsated. It was a place of superlatives: the friendliest people, the most persuasive con men, the loudest music, the craziest traffic, all set against a swaying backdrop of the most achingly beautiful girls.

  It was dusk and, with a bit of help, I found a guesthouse called Trio La Chalet which was clean and, importantly, safe; the streets looked like they could get a bit tasty after dark. I washed with a bucket of cold water and fell into bed. I was dog-tired.

  Early the next morning, I awoke in a brooding frame of mind. In the headlong rush to get into Guyana, I really hadn’t considered what I would do when I actually arrived. The arrogance and optimism of youth had carried me along so far – it was a classic case of act, then think – but now I was thinking and I realised my position was not great. With my money running low, crunch time was upon me.

  I concluded that before I could set up some kind of mining operation, I needed to fix four main problems – there were lots of others, but these were the main ones: lack of money, lack of knowledge, lack of contacts and lack of legal papers to work.

  One of these problems I could probably overcome, two posed a challenge, three might not end well, but all four problems together were a recipe for disaster. This dawning reality was not helping my confidence and I felt a bit down, daunted by what I was trying to achieve. How on earth was I going to make a fortune here, surrounded by some of the poorest people on the planet? I had no local contacts or knowledge and did not know how to go about gold mining, which was the very thing I had come here for in the first place.

  I have always had the habit of writing down quotes in my diary. During moments of self-doubt, I would browse these lines for inspiration and I did so now, opening a page at the following: ‘Keep on going and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.’

  If that was good enough for Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the auto starter motor, it was good enough for me.

  I ventured out, seeking breakfast and opportunity. It was humid and warm, even at that early hour. Most buildings were wooden and poorly maintained. There were numerous ditches and small canals with the smell of rotting vegetation.

  In one part of the city I came across a most striking building. A sign said:

  St George’s Cathedral, one of the tallest wooden buildings in the world at 44 metres. Built 1892.

  An entire cathedral, all made of wood, complete with flying buttresses. I stared up at the structure, suitably impressed.

  ‘What do you do, man?’ a voice said.

  The speaker was an engaging yet somewhat grubby Guyanese man who looked a bit down on his luck.

  ‘I’m a geologist.’ It was kind of true.

  ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to be, you know, but I never got the schooling chance,’ he said. ‘I love geology.’

  I perked up a bit at meeting a kindred geological spirit (although I suspected that if I had told him I was a dentist his reply would have been suitably amended).

  ‘Let me show you where the geologists hang,’ he said.

  ‘That would be terrific, thanks,’ I said politely.

  ‘No problem, just one little thing, could you just gimme a one, one raise, nah?’

  I hadn’t quite got the Creole thing yet, but it was clear where he was coming from, in a financial sense.

  I would have cut off proceedings at that point but, then again, I needed some kind of a break; maybe it was worth seeing ‘where the geologists hang’.

  I bought him breakfast on the way in lieu of payment: fried plantain and coffee. We eventually found ourselves in a better part of town outside a handsome, colonial, three-storey wooden house. There was a large sign hanging on the gate:

  No Hawkers

  No Beggars

  No Jobs

  In other words: Fuck Off.

  It looked like I had been conned out of breakfast. I gave my friend a glance.

  ‘No man – look,’ he said pointing to a different, smaller sign that said ‘Golden Star Resources Limited’.

  ‘They use geologists,’ he said earnestly.

  It seemed absurd, but as my entire plan was somewhat daft, I had nothing to lose. The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what a geologist even did for a company like this, far less being able to actually do it.

  I gave the large security guard a wave and he came over. I took the direct approach.

  ‘Hi, I’m a geologist and, er, I’m looking for a job.’

  I don’t think he heard the second bit. He just heard the magic word ‘geologist’, saw I was white and, with a big grin, open sesame: not a bad start.

  The ‘Fuck Off’ sign clearly did not apply to white geologists.

  I thanked my friend with a tip and in I went. Sensing further payoffs, he tried to follow, but melted away under the hazing stare of the security guard.

  A short Indian-looking guy sat behind an imposing desk in a large hot office on the top floor. He eyed me suspiciously, then introduced himself as Hilbert Shields, the exploration manager. Clearly the boss of the outfit.

  Hilbert also introduced me to David Fennell, a Canadian. Sitting in the corner of the office chain-smoking, he was a giant, far larger than anyone I had come across in the army. My hand was lost in the handshake.

  It was now my turn. I had to come out with some magic to the unspoken question that hung heavily in the air – ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I have a geology degree from London University, some field experience,’ (bit of a stretch) ‘and I’m looking for work,’ I gushed.

  I racked my brain for something geologically intelligent to say, but I couldn’t remember a damn thing from my degree, and I started to dry up. Hilbert and David, looking unimpressed, began to stir. Instinctively I ploughed on.

  ‘I just left the British Parachute Regiment. I finished a tour of Northern Ireland, which was interesting, so my man-management skills are strong.’

  Hilbert coughed importantly to stop my blathering; I could feel myself sweating.

  ‘How many people have you killed?’ David Fennell asked from the corner.

  That took the wind out of my sails. ‘Er … well, I didn’t actually kill anyone in the army,’ I said.

  The big man looked disappointed, so I felt somewhat obliged to at least warm to the subject.

  ‘We were bombed in the base at Crossmaglen, though, and the IRA shot down a chopper just before I arrived.’

  David cheered up a little.

  ‘What experience in mineral exploration do you have?’ Hilbert asked, looking impatient.

  I wasn’t sure if this was a good cop/bad cop thing. I was so green I didn’t even know what mineral exploration was, so this was a bit trickier. Not understanding an apparently obvious question was not an option, so I struggled on.

  ‘I, um … I did a number of field trips at univer–’

  David Fennell interrupted me: ‘What weapons did you carry in Northern Ireland?’

  This was getting ridiculous. I was trying to impress the boss with my geological skills and this guy kept asking me questions about killing people.

  I told him we carried SA80s, 5.56 mm, which had great sights. ‘Now, about this field trip,’ I said.

  David stood up. ‘Hilbert, give this maniac a job,’ he said, and promptly left.

  Right. David was the boss.

  Hilbert sat up and said magnanimously: ‘Jim, congratulations. I’m pleased to offer you a position with Golden Star Resources.’

  He then added ominously, ‘You are lucky that David is so keen on the military.’

  David Fennell was something of a legendary figure. The president and fo
under of Golden Star Resources, he was a former Canadian football star who was in the Football Hall of Fame. His nickname was Doctor Death, a sobriquet earned through inventing some notably gruesome type of football tackle.

  He was also a military fanatic.

  It was twenty-four hours since I had landed in Guyana. Now, with one silver bullet, I had solved my four main problems.

  It really does pay to turn up, even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

  CHAPTER 8

  GOLD RUSH

  There was a gold rush unfolding in South America and I was now a part of the action. Spikes in the gold price along with notable recent large gold discoveries in the region had attracted the attention of international investors and prospectors alike.

  A speculative rush of people was surging into the vast interior of the continent to hunt for new gold deposits large and small. Within Guyana, goldfields like Mahdia and Marudi Mountain were swarming with gold prospectors, both local and Brazilian. And rivers like the Potaro, Cuyuni and Essequibo were centres of intense gold-dredging activity.

  The Serra Pelada photos that had inspired me were the tip of the iceberg. I had heard that Boa Vista in Brazil, just over the Guyanese border to the south, was currently the gateway to a northern Amazon gold rush of 50,000 diggers.

  Golden Star Resources was an overseas mineral exploration company, whose aim was to discover and exploit large gold and diamond deposits in the region and make a fortune for its shareholders in the process. The company had about 30 employees in town and over 200 in the bush. The men (and they were all men) in the bush camps were based at the company’s three mineral exploration projects: two for gold (Omai and Mahdia) and one for diamonds (Mazaruni).

  At Golden Star, there was a go-to person for every aspect of the organisation: fixing government paperwork, logistics, purchasing, administration and customs clearances. There were drivers, radio operators, storemen, cooks, cleaners and security guards. A lot of people were employed by Golden Star, but this was Guyana and labour was cheap.

  My first stop was the company fixer. This person has the government connections and can get visas, permits and paperwork all fixed with a phone call. If you end up getting arrested, it is the fixer who will get you out. At Golden Star, nothing was ever quite what you expected and neither was the fixer.

  Mrs Williams was a perfectly mannered, fifty-something English lady who oozed class. Underneath her smooth veneer was a person of considerable steel and resolve. Mrs Williams (I never did find out her first name, nor did she ever offer it) took me under her wing. I left my passport with her. She returned it to me with an immigration stamp and the valuable working visa: simple!

  There was only one rule with Mrs Williams, and that was to never bad-mouth former president Burnham in front of her, no matter how much of a crazed despot he may have been. Mrs Williams and her influential Guyanese husband had been close friends of Burnham.

  For accommodation, the company had a senior staff house right next door to the office; the junior staff had to fend for themselves. The house was a fine, three-storey, colonial wooden building with breezy verandas. Thankfully, I was considered senior staff and was given my own room with crisp, clean cotton sheets. All the meals were catered for by an excellent cook. After the bed-bug-infested khazis I had been staying in, it felt like utter luxury.

  There was no one else at the staff house, so that night I went out for a lone celebratory beer and ended up at a local dance hall. It was packed with people partying hard. I watched the amazing dance moves of the young and beautiful, black and brown, gyrating to Janet Jackson.

  ‘What are you doing in Guyana?’ a good-looking young woman asked me.

  ‘I’m a geologist,’ I proudly replied. ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a prostitute,’ she replied with a sunny smile, as if describing a promising career in accounting.

  Such disarming honesty took me aback, and it was refreshing. People here spoke English, but it wasn’t England.

  Next morning, I was off to start work at the Omai gold project in the interior of the country. In the chilly dawn, about ten of us gathered outside the office. I was the only foreigner. Brendan, the logistics manager, got things organised and we loaded up an old truck with provisions. We then jumped on board and headed off south along the pothole-strewn road, hanging on to the tubular frame for dear life.

  Before long the city gave way to rice fields and then verdant bush took over. After a couple of hours, we arrived in the medium-sized town of Linden. As we drove through the town, much to my surprise I saw rising above an earth bank ahead of us a large ocean-going cargo vessel. This was a bauxite-ore carrier and it was impressive to see how far up the Demerara River this ship could travel. This was a country of extremely big rivers.

  Bauxite mining and the export of rice were just about the only industries in the country that earned hard currency for the government. The significant gold and diamond production in Guyana was all privately operated and the production almost entirely sold on the black market. The miners would sell their minerals to local buyers, who would onsell to larger purchasers. These traders would then smuggle the goods out of the country, with no tax being paid on anything. The only major input required was fuel, and I had already seen how that worked.

  We drove on to Rockstone Landing on the Essequibo River. In Guyana, ‘landings’ were shallow riverbanks where boats landed people and goods. Sometimes there was a small shack selling food; often there was nothing.

  Awaiting us was an 8-metre open wooden boat with two large outboard engines. We loaded up the provisions, then clambered aboard, sitting on wooden planks. I clutched the all-important mail sack.

  The boat captain took off at an alarming speed and we all hung on for an exhilarating journey. It had been hot and muggy at the landing, and the cool breeze from travelling on the river was a welcome change. The scenery was breathtaking: we were on a vast river many hundreds of metres wide, the banks lined with an unbroken line of tall trees lush with foliage and vines hanging into the river.

  Disturbed by the noise of our engines, occasional flocks of scarlet macaws took off from the forest. In the distance, mountain mesas rose forbiddingly above the carpet of green forest.

  After about an hour we came to a set of rapids and the boat captain steered us expertly through some alarming-looking rocks and fast water. Soon after this I saw the first gold dredges, each the size of a light truck and floating on two large wooden pontoons. As we came close, I saw a wide wooden sluice box about 8 metres long by 3 metres wide draped over the central portion of the dredge. Water and gravel were cascading over the sluice to fall back into the river. Somewhere out the front of the dredge, unseen on the riverbed, was the diver. He would be directing the end of the pipe that sucked up the gold-bearing gravels.

  These dredges grabbed my attention. This was the kind of modest-scale operation in which I could see myself getting involved. I was learning.

  My eyes moved to a group of young women on the bank next to a rough camp. They were flashing themselves to us and hollering that we should stop and pay them a visit. My companions on the boat stood up, waved and shouted, and such was their enthusiasm we came close to capsizing, until the boat captain shouted at them to sit down. It looked like a friendly community on the river.

  After three hours in the boat, we pulled up at the Omai Landing. The camp had about ten wooden accommodation buildings, an office, store and cookhouse. There was hilly jungle on one side and the Essequibo River on the other.

  At the main camp I was greeted by Carlos Bertoni, the chief geologist in charge of the project. Carlos was Brazilian, in his early forties, and at the top of his game. He had a formidable intellect, spoke five languages, and his English was so good that he would later, to my embarrassment, go over my reports and correct my written work. I also met the two other geologists in the camp, Randy Singh and Bob Shaw, both Canadians.

  Bob showed me to our accommodation block, a wooden dormit
ory protected by mosquito mesh. I then went for a walk around the camp just as the men were streaming back from work.

  Guyana has a mix of several races of people and the Guyanese are mindful of each other’s ethnicity and cultural leanings. The Amerindians were the original indigenous inhabitants, but were only about 10 per cent of the current population. West Africans were brought in as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their descendants now constituted 40 per cent of the country; they were locally called black.

  Following the abolition of slavery in 1834, large numbers of workers from then British India had come to the country as indentured labourers to work the sugar plantations. These Guyanese of Indian descent (40 per cent of the population) were known as east-Indians, or coolies in the local slang, a term that was not pejorative. There were also a smaller number of white people of either Portuguese, Dutch or English descent, known locally as Portuguese to differentiate them from white foreigners like myself.

  The workers at Omai were mainly black Guyanese. They looked like a tough bunch. One group in particular stood out as formidable, covered head to toe in mud. These were the banka drillers.

  Bob the geologist was a clever, wiry little guy, and later that night he explained to me what made Omai tick.

  ‘Omai is an advanced gold-development project, not yet a mine. There are about three million ounces of gold in the ground.’ (Worth around $3.6 billion in today’s money.)

  Now that made me perk up: there was some big money being uncovered in this remote spot.

  ‘Our role is to prove up the gold deposit with a series of ongoing drilling campaigns,’ Bob said. ‘For your first job, you’ve really started at the sharp end with a big project. There are three diamond drill rigs (using a hollow diamond head to produce a rock core sample), two banka drill rigs (for alluvial sampling), a survey crew, sample preparers, mechanics, carpenters, an electrician, cooks, storemen, clerks, a male nurse, a radio operator and cleaners. All up, there are around a hundred and ten Guyanese men in this camp, and it gets rowdy.’