Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  If the planter is not married, he’ll need to improvise. ‘A European’, writes Bolingbroke, ‘generally finds it necessary to provide himself with a housekeeper or mistress.’ Females can be either rented at the fortnightly Stabroek Ball ($12 for two) or bought. However, decent specimens are in such short supply that often they have to be imported from Barbados (a traffic run by coloured women, paid on commission). A good, well-trained girl, notes Bolingbroke, can be purchased for around £100 to £150, and ‘they are tasty and extravagant in their dress’. The best can read and write, and ‘most are faithful and constant once an attachment has been formed’. They embrace all the duties of a wife, and, if children are produced, they are generally sent to England for education ‘at the age of 3 or 4 years’.

  Dinner done, the planter rises to consider his next move. Whether he has a wife or mistress, this does not imply restraint. Here is how Stedman describes the end of the day: ‘His worship generally begins to yawn about ten or eleven o’clock, when he withdraws and is undressed by one of his sooty pages. He then retires to rest, where he passes the night in the arms of one or other of his sable sultanas (for he always keeps a seraglio) …’

  So it was that lives merged, in contrast to today.

  Another aspect of Reynestein had remained eerily unchanged: work. All around us was the landscape of the seventeenth century. It was like stepping into a painting by Koninck or Van Ruisdael. The view was mostly of sky, but along the bottom there was a strip of flatness, busy with people and oxen and barges full of greens. Occasionally, huge brick kokers and sluices loomed up out of the ditches, and then – beyond them – stretched the cross-canals and ‘Dutch beds’, and endless miles of ‘Middle Walk’. Mr George said modern machines would never survive in this and would just vanish in the mud. ‘So it’s all still cut by hand. Four thousand hectares by two hundred men!’

  I asked him whether anything had changed in 300 years.

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you if you want.’

  Mr George had a powerful new pick-up, and so we set off in that. At first, we drove around the edge of the estate, through the villages where the cane-workers lived. In Bolingbroke’s time these were called ‘niggeryards’, and were staunchly African. In Reynestein he’d found some families in their third generation of slavery.

  Now the Africans had long gone, and the villages were Indian and known as the ‘schemes’. I thought they looked quaint, with their old Morris Minors and their bungalow-mosques. But often they were anything but. Every day the papers had some story of a murder on the schemes. These usually involved a girl in a ditch, or a piece of jewellery, or a man in a beer garden, run through with a cutlass. ‘We never stop here,’ said Mr George, solemnly. ‘It’s a drinking culture.’

  Then we were in the cane. Ramdat hadn’t ventured so deep into the sugar for years and was curiously excited. He gasped as we sped towards the vanishing point, and as the cane closed in, like a forest of long grass. At one point we came across a weeding gang. They were all women, dressed in overalls and gold. Nowadays everyone worked in the fields, said Mr George (although you could never ask Hindus to kill the rats). It was slightly different in Bolingbroke’s day. Then, only a quarter of the slaves worked in the cane. The rest were an extravagance, there to service the lives of the Dutch.

  Eventually, after about five miles, we came across a cutting gang. They’d just burned off the rats and the snakes, and the crop was still smouldering. Everything was sticky and black: cane, hands, clothes and hair. The chicken hawks had gathered in the hope of something charred, and one of the men was holding a deadly labaria, as long as himself but lifeless and limp. ‘About every twenty years,’ said Mr George, ‘someone here dies of a snakebite.’

  The work was still brutally hard. During his four-hour shift each man had to cut over 2½ tons of cane, tie it in bundles and then carry it down to the barge. There was no shade and no stopping, and the temperature was now somewhere in the eighties. The cane-worker had little to be grateful for. If he didn’t achieve his target, his wages were docked. No wonder he was so famously angry. ‘For these people,’ said Mr George, ‘it’s a rough and bully life.’ Only for the slaves had life been harder: their day, of course, was unpaid, spurred by force and three times as long.

  As we drove back, Mr George suddenly stopped.

  ‘I want to show you this,’ he said.

  We got out and sloshed through the clay, towards a patch of scrub. ‘It’s all grown wild,’ said Mr George. ‘I can’t get anyone to clear it …’

  We pushed into the grass, and there in front of us was an old stone tomb. It was scrolled and grand, but the inscription had gone.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  Mr George shook his head. ‘Probably the planter.’

  Perhaps it was the Master of Reynestein? Or the cringing overseer, after all that sausage and ling? I had a sudden image of a pale, thin man, with his silvery breeches and his flask of gin. It was unsettling to think he might be here, leering up out of the clay.

  Mr George shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘This thing terrifies my men. They won’t even touch it.’

  Two centuries on, an unspeakable violence still haunted the sugar.

  What shocks me most about plantation cruelty is that it was so candidly commercial. Here was the beginning of a new era in human depravity. What was different was not so much the scale as the deference to profit. There was no passion or fervour, no diktats from tyrants or instructions from God. It was simply about gain, and managing the units of production. In these strange, new economics atrocity varied according to supply. That’s why, as the slave trade began to falter, around 1807, planters began to consider less destructive means of control (such as cancelling holidays, or the stoppage of rum). Until then, however, mutilated slaves could be easily replaced, and the brutality knew no limits.

  The quantity of violence usually related to the impact on production. Some aspects of the slaves’ performance needed greater correction than others. The most serious aberrations were disobedience and absence. But because the slaves owned nothing, they were hard to penalise. All they could be deprived of were parts of their body – usually breasts, testicles, arms and feet. It would all be hacked away without either a trial or an anaesthetic. For the most demanding cases, the transgressor could be tied to a wheel and then pounded with iron bars until every bone was broken. Other transgressions were dealt with on a limb-by-limb basis. If a slave raised his hand in anger, it would be amputated. If he ran away, his Achilles tendon would be sliced through, leaving him ‘hamstrung’, or permanently lame. If he ran away a second time, the leg would be cut off altogether. For all other matters there was always the lash, or the ‘Spanish whip’, which not everyone survived.

  In this vicious economy everyone had their price. For each judicial amputation the colony doctor was paid £6. The Amerindians, too, had set rates. For each runaway recovered, they received 400 guilders, or 200 for an arm (and in one year, 1795, they put in a claim for seventy arms). Meanwhile, overseers were paid on results, which only multiplied their malice. But in all this brutality the most surprising agents were the slaves themselves. With Europeans outnumbered by eleven to one, it was often Africans wielding the whips. According to Bolingbroke, ‘Africans of all masters are the worst to one another.’ He said that the greatest threat a slave could face was to be sold to one of his own. It was as though the machinery of slavery was now so great and violent that it could almost run itself.

  But not all the slaves were so compliant. In fact, by 1763, the outer margins of the colony were ripe for revolt.

  What happened next is still, for many Guyanese, the most important moment in their story. It’s the only one they celebrate with holidays and statues. Other events – such as emancipation and independence – have an ambivalence about them, perhaps because they feel like donations or the start of some new trauma. But 1763 is different, at least for the Africans. For well over half their Guianese history,
they’ve lived in slavery, and this was the moment when they grappled with control. It’s also given them a hero, one of few in a long, hard search.

  It all begins with a note from the planters in Berbice. ‘For God’s sake, send and help us in our hour of need.’ The slaves had risen up and declared a republic.

  5

  THE BLOODY BERBICE

  The River Berbice is shallow but broad; nearly a hundred plantations have been formed on its banks.

  Henry Bolingbroke, A Voyage to the Demerary

  Formerly a land of mud and money, it was now a wilderness of mud and mosquitoes.

  James Rodway, Guiana

  BERBICE STILL FELT LIKE ANOTHER COUNTRY. In Georgetown people talked about it as though it were another planet. They said that upriver the journey was impossible, there were no roads or telephones, and that often everything was flooded. One man told me to expect giant frogs, marijuana plantations and strange, old people jabbering in Dutch. Another said I’d find no one at all, just a lifeless river and vast black forest. (‘Take a gun,’ he said, ‘and a satellite phone, although don’t expect any help’.) All anyone would agree on was that Berbice was remote, backward and different. It was also relatively new, and had been a completely separate colony until 1831. Georgetown had yet to get used to its strange green neighbour.

  All this made Berbice hard to understand. Few people went there, and there was no useful map. Even the one I had was intriguingly obscure. Along the coast I could see a road, dotted with breezy English names (such as Waterloo, Whim, Gibraltar and Nigg). But inland the marks faltered. There were just a few tracks, the thick snakey river and a scattering of words, all stubbornly Dutch. Right at the bottom, I could just make out the old Rupununi cattle trail, wandering northwards before fizzling out.

  Berbice didn’t even appear much in books. In all I’d read there was barely a mention. Schomburgk had called by, of course, and so had Bolingbroke, dutifully noting all the belting and gin. But other visits had been more cursory. Trollope had trotted along the coast (and loved it), and Waugh had ploughed through the middle (and hated every moment). Attenborough remembered it as the place where he didn’t catch a manatee, and Waterton avoided it altogether, as did Durrell and Keymis and Shiva Naipaul.

  After a while it began to feel like an anti-destination, a place to be shunned. Least inviting of all were the history books. Berbice seems to have erupted in revolt at almost every great moment of Guyanese history; abolition, the arrival of the East Indians, the departure of the British, the election of an Indian and the African dictatorship. Was there anything left of it? What had become of its first revolt? And would I ever get there?

  Just when I was giving up hope, someone introduced me to Alex Mendes. He was a rancher from Berbice and was up in Georgetown buying feed and ammunition.

  ‘I can get you to the ranch, and you can stay the night. Then – from there – you can get a boat to the coast. We’re about ninety miles upstream.’

  He said the old name of his ranch was Peereboom, or ‘Peartree’.

  It was perfect. Ahead lay a journey through 1763.

  All I remember of the drive to Berbice are trees and aluminium. First there were the trees, and then the road to the mines. This was an outlandish construction, four lanes deep but only half-an-hour long. Alex explained that it was all the work of an aluminium giant, ALCOA. They’d built everything: the bridges, the culverts and even the signs along the verge. Now we had it all to ourselves. It was like a short, wide stump of American freeway, lost in a country without any cars.

  ‘It was a gift,’ said Alex, ‘in 1965.’

  It was a funny gift, I thought, as I watched the road swooping around in the sand and scrub. Who exactly was it for? A new African regime or the American consumer? I suppose the clue was in the beautiful tarmac, heading straight for the sea. For over seventy years the United States had been scraping the bauxite out of Guyana. The busiest time was the Second World War. I’d often heard about the wartime aluminium. People liked to tell me how, once, the world’s greatest airforce was two-thirds Guyanese.

  Soon we were in the mining town, and then among the pits themselves. These were huge orange holes, bruised with purple and black. Some were half a mile wide and sixty feet deep. This is how Mars would look if you blew it to bits. The dust got everywhere, said Alex: in your teeth, in your hair and under your nails. You could wash your truck three times, and it would still come up a nasty pink. Things even tasted of aluminium. It was in the river and the water butts, and it powdered the forest. Alex told me that a few years earlier it had almost killed him. He’d spent his thirties breaking bones and was in a wheelchair at the age of forty-two. It was the aluminium, mischievously mimicking the effects of old age. ‘I’m better now,’ he said, ‘but I don’t swim, and I never drink the water that comes off the roof.’

  After the pits, the bauxite never really left us. The road was now brutally red and dived back into the trees. Five hours later we were still lurching along in the dark and dust when, suddenly, a white house appeared and, beyond it, the great black river.

  It was Peereboom, the seat of the revolt.

  All around the farmhouse was the wreckage of that day: 3 March 1763.

  The house itself was a replacement for the one that was burned. It sat at the end of a long, steep bluff high above the river. There was nothing grand about it. A few large tree trunks had been set in the ground, cleaned up with axes and then stitched together with carpentry and planks. I could still see the axe marks as I lay in my bed. The man who’d built this place hadn’t wanted a mansion. He’d just wanted a stopover, somewhere from which to pump cows into Europe. It was, of course, Harry Melville, of Rupununi fame, cobbling together the end of his trail. He’d even given the place a new name, Du Bu Lay (‘Double A’), which looked better on a brand.

  Further along the bluff were the traces of a far more imposing house. Although the mansion at Peereboom was now no more than shingle, it had produced a lot of pieces. The fragments began on the bluff and then spread down the slopes and along the riverbank. Among them I spotted brickwork, tiles, lumps of earthenware and delicate slivers of Delft. There was also evidence of wine: not whole bottles but thick tufts of glass, like chunks of hand-cut thistle. A little distance back were a few of the drinkers themselves, tucked up in their fancy graves (‘Hier leyt begraven …’). They all had elaborate, king-size headstones, scrolled and swagged, and finished off with a fetching skull and crossbones. Rococo details like this don’t occur naturally in Guyana and must have been shipped out along with the claret and chintz.

  ‘Looks like business was good,’ I remarked.

  Alex grunted. ‘Maybe. But it’s poor soil. All leached and acidic.’

  He said he was trying new breeds of sheep, for the Islamic market. ‘All they have at the moment is the old Black Belly.’

  ‘Not a very appetising name …’

  ‘Not an appetising sheep. It’s just a reproductive skeleton.’

  At three o’clock, a bell rang, and all the farm workers took off across the field. There must have been sixty of them – all African – shepherds, weeders, herders and ploughmen. Many still had their old Dutch names, such as Amsterdam and Linden. How odd, I thought, that in every waking moment, there was a reminder of the afflictions of the past. How would their descendants remember the present age? That depends on who survives, said Alex. Along the river, AIDS was now depressingly common. It was a mean twist of fate that, after centuries of fearing the outsider, people now feared each other.

  When the workers got to the river, they stepped into their dugouts and paddled away. It was like watching a regatta for the chronically dispossessed. I tried to imagine a much earlier Berbice. Surely it hadn’t always been like this, acid-cursed and Black-Belly poor? Once I saw a map of the river, made soon after the introduction of Angolan slaves, in 1714. It showed plantations on both banks, almost all the way back to the coast. Now, if I looked downstream, all I could see was a mirror-black su
rface and jungle spilling out over the water. According to Alex, there was hardly any work on the river these days, and people would paddle for miles just to get a job. ‘Some of these workers,’ he said, ‘have a two-hour journey home.’

  As the last of the canoes disappeared, I tried a little mental archaeology. I peeled away the jungle and cut back the trees for a mile inland. I scooped out miles of drains and ditches, and levelled the land for a crop of sugar. I also replaced all the shacks along the waterway, the kokers, the wharfs and the large thatched mansion at the top of the slope. Peereboom was almost ready. All I now needed was to recall the canoes (filled with ancestors and furious Angolans), and to have a riot of slaves – 600 strong – come tumbling out of the woods.

  With everything back in place, the revolt could begin.

  The owners of Peereboom had been expecting trouble. The previous week, on 23 February 1763, there’d been an outbreak of violence on the Canje River, fifteen miles to the east. There was no pattern to it, and no sign of leadership or strategy. The slaves had simply risen up in revenge, killed their overseers and then helped themselves to whatever they’d found: muskets, powder, cutlasses, waistcoats, fancy hats, white women and rum. As the gang moved upriver, they became a band, then a rabble and then eventually a mob. What they left behind was not pretty: burning mansions, and body parts in trees. It also took the colony completely by surprise. Throughout Berbice there were only about two dozen soldiers, and most of them were laid out with dysentery. The fury looked unstoppable.

  Peereboom was prepared for a siege. As one of the few brick houses on the river, it became a fortress for those all around. The windows were barricaded and the fire buckets filled. Guns were primed, and preparations were made for an assault by barefoot slaves. All the wine bottles were smashed, and around the house was laid a thistle-bed of glass. No one would ever have imagined that this little detail would still be there more than two centuries later.