Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  A vicious fight ensued. By the time the mob reached the Berbice, it was a full-scale rebellion. It had numbers, arms, leaders and the beginnings of a purpose: liberation. For some of the rebels it felt like an African war all over again. They’d even prepared missiles, bundles of hobnails wrapped in cotton, which they lit and hurled into the thatch. The planters managed to extinguish the blaze, but still the rebels came. Hands and arms were ripped away, and feet were cut with glass. The fighting was given a particular intensity by the thought of losing. It was always better to die furiously than to be calmly sawn up and dangled in the trees.

  Eventually, however, stalemate was reached, and a dialogue took shape. The rebels were defiant negotiators. They said that Christians were no longer to be tolerated in Berbice and that the plantations were now theirs. If the whites wanted to leave, they could, and they’d be allowed to their boats. After some discussion the planters agreed.

  What happened next would set the mood for the war to come. The planters emerged from the house and gathered themselves on the bluff before heading down the slope. Then, as they reached the water’s edge, the rebels opened fire. Most of the Europeans were killed, although a few got away by boat, or fled into the woods. For the rebels it was a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, the Dutch would not forget them. On the other hand, the day was theirs, and so was the booty. For themselves, there were guns, bottles, jars and Delft, and – for their leader – there was a plump white wench called Madam George.

  Then, of course, there was Peereboom itself. Soon it would be burned and smashed to pieces. Up on the bluff, nothing would remain but lumps of brick and china, the wreckage of the day.

  The next morning I got a ride downriver with an old marijuana grower called Fridge. It was a cruel name for a man so sensitive and black. But then, I suppose, he was also large and square, and seemed to occupy space like a household appliance. When I first saw him in his tiny boat, I wondered what it was that kept them afloat. Fridge, however, insisted on his buoyancy and said we’d easily make Fort Nassau, thirty-four miles downstream. It was here, I’d read, that the Dutch tried to make a stand. After the destruction of Peereboom, its survivors had paddled off to join them, and so – 245 years later – we set off in pursuit.

  ‘How long will it take?’ I asked Fridge.

  He smiled. ‘Softly, softly catch de monkey.’

  It was a surprising morning. Even this far upstream, the river was several hundred feet wide and as dark as a pond. At first I couldn’t make sense of anything. All I could see were patterns endlessly replicated, then vitrified and inverted and repeated all over again. The only time the trees parted was to admit a tiny church with a steeple, and then they closed in again like banks of bright green cloud.

  For the enormous man sharing my little saucer of boat, all this was just a neighbourhood quietly flowing along. Fridge knew every tree and every creek. If ever we saw a boat, he knew whose it was, what they were doing and what they sold. His forest wasn’t unfathomable but replete with drama. He knew who had AIDS, who did what and who’d had who. There were the Vandenbergs, the Van Lewins, Mr Vanderstoop (with the brand new outboard) and the slippery Van Sluytmans. Fridge said that everyone was up to something. He told me that the Amerindians were busy making land claims, and the Seventh-Day Adventists (who’d only hunt creatures with four stomachs) had eaten all the deer. There was nothing Fridge wouldn’t talk about – except marijuana. That aspect of his life (I was later told) had all ended when he’d found someone stealing his crop and had rearranged him with a cutlass.

  But what was even more remarkable about Fridge was his nose for the eighteenth century. He seemed to have some sort of innate extra sense for whatever had been there before. Although there was nothing left to see, he could still name all the old plantations: Juliana, Zeelandia, Lilienberg, Helvetia and Hoede Hoop. Wherever there’s a giant silk cotton tree, he’d say, that marked a boundary. Once he even took a small, historical diversion, steering in under the trees. For a moment we bobbed around in a catacomb of roots, like a forest planted upside down. Then a mudbank appeared, and a stilted hut, made of strips of wet, black wood. ‘Dis man,’ said Fridge, ‘still find all de tings what de Dutchman have left.’

  From the hut a tiny wizened figure appeared and skipped across the mud.

  ‘What you found now?’ asked Fridge.

  The mudlark said nothing but held out a coin, dated 1762.

  ‘He sell dis tings in Georgetung. Must be making a mint!’

  The mute grinned, pocketed his booty and danced off over the slime.

  ‘Time we was gone,’ said Fridge and turned his boat around.

  Out on the river I had a sudden sense of desolation. Everything had died here and was now dying all over again. The mute had reminded me of one of those figures on the Napoleonic battlefield, collecting up knick-knacks and digging out teeth. It was almost as though the great revolt had only just passed through, leaving behind a trail of looting and disease. Even the butterflies now were funereal and black, and the egrets hung in the trees like handkerchiefs out to dry. Along this stretch of river little had survived the jubilation of the slaves. Every plantation was torched, and at Juliana the wife of a brutal manager had been decapitated, and her head mounted on a stick. The Dutch have never forgotten this horror, and even now they have an expression: ‘Naar de Barrebiesjes gaan’ (‘Get thee to Berbice’), the equivalent of ‘Go to Hell’.

  ‘And here,’ announced Fridge, ‘is Hollandia.’

  Through the trees I could just make out a small savannah. In the middle was a cluster of palm trees and a small, unpainted house. Once the mansion that had stood here had been the headquarters of the rebels, at least for a while. Now there was no one around except half a dozen children. They were mostly naked and fighting in the mud. It was a battle of impressive ferocity, and they only stopped when they spotted me. I wondered whether the younger ones had ever seen a white man before. They stared, and I stared. It was as though, suddenly, the years had dispersed and we’d all spotted ghosts.

  Hollandia is probably best remembered for the letters written there.

  The author of these letters was a man of rare dignity and unusual expression. His enemies are always ‘excellencies’ and are showered in greetings and praise. No one knows what Cuffy looked like. All that can be said is that both he and his lieutenant, Akara, were Akans from Asante (now Ghana). Cuffy may even have been a prince in his former life, but in slavery he’d been sent to Lilienberg to work as a cooper. After his role at Peereboom he’d been awarded not only the best of the spoils (including Madam George) but also the leadership of the revolt. In this he was a shrewd master of his meagre resources. Above all, he realised that, while it might not be possible to defeat the Dutch, they were capable of compromise. Already, in Suriname, they’d signed away millions of acres of rebel land. Five days after Peereboom, Cuffy sent off the first of his proposals, styling himself ‘The Governor of the Negroes of Berbice’.

  Over the next five months there were eight letters in all. They begin by demanding the surrender of Berbice, but within a month there’s the suggestion of partition. ‘The Governor will give Your Excellency one half of Berbice, and all the Negroes will go high up the river, but don’t think they will remain slaves. Those Negroes that Your Excellency has on ships, they can remain slaves …’ This wasn’t exactly a declaration of rights, but it still horrified the Dutch. ‘We will fight,’ continued Cuffy, ‘as long as one Christian remains in Berbice.’

  The first letter didn’t have far to go. It was addressed to the other governor of Berbice, now holed up in Fort Nassau, a few miles downstream. His name was Van Hoogenheim, and although he was only thirty-four, he’d already established a reputation as a canny governor, with some sympathy for slaves. But he was also Cuffy’s equal in terms of resolve. Not for a moment did he intend to yield to a negeropstand, or ‘Negro revolt’. He sent replies in one direction, stalling for time, and orders in the other, demanding troops. For as lo
ng as he was in command, he was determined that Berbice would not be lost.

  Meanwhile, there was the small problem of how to defend Fort Nassau against 900 rebels, when all he had was ten fit soldiers and a few dozen planters ruined by Malmsey and vice.

  Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the fort. I suppose I ought to have been more pleased at this arrival. I was leaving behind the haunted woods of the early revolt, and ahead lay the promise of a fortress. In one of the pictures I’d seen – a print dated 1682 – it looked like a large wooden cake, mounted with a Cambridge college. I’d noticed flags, weathervanes, cloisters and an elegant hall of crow-stepped gables. But now, peering up into the foliage, I wasn’t altogether happy to be back, broaching a more familiar world. I’d enjoyed being with Fridge, and absorbing his revolt. Leaving him here felt like crossing over into enemy lines.

  He dropped me on the riverbank, at a tiny clearing. It was like a niche in the forest wall. I was surprised not to see a castle, but at the back of the clearing was a small haphazard structure. It looked like something built by children and dropped from a tree. Fridge explained that this was the caretaker’s house, and that Mr Grimmond had spent all his life defending the fort, and fighting the flora. Eventually the task had overwhelmed him and he’d taken his place among his forebears’ bones. Now all that was left was his indifferent carpentry, a pile of 10 lb cannonballs, and his indomitable widow.

  ‘She gonna look after you,’ said Fridge, and then he was gone.

  Actually we looked after each other. Mrs Grimmond was seventy-five, and everything you’d expect of someone whose ancestors were partly Angolan and partly blond. She was pale yet ebullient, glad of a guest and proud of her Dutch forebears. All that she had left of them were a few broken goblets, with delicate air-twist stems. I think she liked the idea of them dining at the hall, toasting Colonie and Companie. Not even the deformities of age would prevent her showing me around. On our walk through the jungle she’d be the brains and I’d be the banister.

  ‘Careful of the pits! It’s them people looking for treasure …’

  I enjoyed our tour at Zimmer-frame speed. Inside the forest it was cathedral-cool, and the path was rich in detail. We found the old ramparts, a small brick bridge, some glazed tiles and a stash of hand-blown bottles. Mrs Grimmond also found us food and cures, where I saw only mulch. If, by chance, one of her late husband’s paths had led us astray, we’d have survived for months, lost in the wild. There were herbs and palm nuts, roots for constipation and ‘bitter stick’ for bile. We even had coffee – thanks to the Dutch – and a tree on which to summon help. The kumaka was like a waterfall of wood, pouring out of the canopy, and Mrs Grimmond said that, if we beat its buttresses, the noise could be heard for twenty miles around. Back in 1763 the booming of the kumaka would have signalled the start of the revolt.

  ‘Nice, eh?’ said Mrs Grimmond, ‘we calls it the singing tree.’

  Laxatives and yodelling trees were all very well, but what had become of my fortified college?

  ‘You’re already in it,’ said the old lady.

  She was right, of course. After we’d hauled each other over a giant root-ball, I hadn’t noticed the shadowy outlines all around. We’d landed in an enormous hall. Only one account remains of this building, by a traveller called Hartsinck. In Beschrijving van Guiana of de Wilde Kust he’d described a structure 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, which had served as a church, a storehouse, the government and the home of the ‘corp de guarde’. Now all that remained was this diagram, and beyond it more rectangles: stables, according to Hartsinck, two smithies and some barracks. It was still like Cambridge, I suppose, except ground down, overgrown and ankle-high.

  Mrs Grimmond sat down on a set of steps that led to nothing.

  ‘Just think how great this place would be but for that revolt …’

  Greatness was not the planters’ first thought when they heard the kumakas booming. Most acted with memorable funk. It’s said that, at the approach of the rebels, the only sound from Fort Nassau was that of ‘woeful lamentation and consternation’. Those who could, jumped in their boats and fled for the coast. Even Van Lentzing, the captain of the militia, tried to bluff his way downriver, along with two members of the Court of Policy. No one wanted to be around when the slaves were testing out their fury. It was an unedifying spectacle, the sight of officials making excuses. Perhaps the faintest of the fainthearts was the government secretary, Harkenroth. It wasn’t panic, he blustered, just a matter of contract. ‘I do not consider myself bound to stand here and be shot at for twenty guilders a month.’

  Only Van Hoogenheim stood firm. He wanted to take on the slaves, although the odds were against him. Not only was he lacking a workable militia, but the fortress was rotten. The palisade that ran around the earthworks was now so old and wormy that, if the big guns were fired, the whole thing might simply fall apart. Van Hoogenheim, however, still thought the slaves could be held off until a warship arrived. But his colleagues were far less sure. His last chance of rallying them ended when a Dutch woman arrived, mad with terror. She said she’d come downriver and had seen the mutilated whites. It was the end of the debate.

  On 8 March 1763 the guns were spiked and the fort was set on fire. The Dutch took to their boats and left behind the upper river. From that day on everything would change, and Fort Nassau would cease to exist. Once the flames and the rebels had finished with it, there’d be nothing left but glass and rubble.

  The revolt too would be different from here. Ahead lay two new dangers; the first was the English, and the second euphoria.

  The euphoria was easy to understand. The slaves had captured a beautiful river.

  From the fort I got a lift with a water pilot called Mr Kertzious. He was a friend of Fridge and had a boat like a torpedo, which skimmed along on two magnificent plumes of spray. Suddenly a dank journey downriver had become a wild skedaddle through the afternoon sun. Suddenly, too, the banks opened up, revealing fields and fruit trees, with villages and farms. Everything now was lavished in ship’s paint, and there were gardens sprouting marigolds and tyres. There was more traffic too. Often these were outlandish, home-made craft: floating cowsheds, motorised logs and carnival hulks. Optimism, it seemed, had triumphed over everything, including the laws of physics. Even the weekly ferry looked like a block of flats, bowling up the river.

  We stopped only once, at De Velde.

  ‘Just gonna visit my parents,’ said the water pilot.

  The Kertzious family had a smallholding on the edge of a savannah. They’d lived here so long that they no longer knew whether they were mostly African or nearly Dutch. Their house looked like a tiny stage-set and was painted baby-blue and pink. Inside, all the walls wobbled, the shelves were trimmed with lace, and there were rag-mats on the floor. For old Mr Kertzious the only mystery was why, of his nine sons, only one of them still lived on the river. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, ‘this is the most beautiful place in the world.’

  ‘Nowhere like it,’ agreed his wife, ‘in Heaven or on Earth.’

  As we prepared to leave, she pressed a bottle in my hands.

  ‘Take it,’ she said, ‘we had it sitting here for years.’

  It was a squat Dutch flask, bubbled and misshapen like an old glass bladder.

  ‘Just a reminder,’ said Mrs Kertzious, ‘of our little Paradise.’

  This was a pleasing thought, as we sped away. All round us were pretty smallholdings, cut and drained by those who’d once been slaves. It was true: each was, in a way, its own paradise, after all the years of brutality and toil. This was also the only land in Guyana ever to have been liberated by the slaves themselves. Their exhilaration is hard to imagine. It’s said that for days they dressed up in beaver hats and chintz and rode around in tent-boats, mimicking the massa. Everyone wanted to be a soldier. Soon the slaves had their own army, with swords and generals and swanky parades. No one, it seemed, would ever have to work again.

  Fifteen minutes do
wnstream the river began to widen, and the jollity dispersed. I asked the pilot where we were, and he peered at the distant shore. A thin black soufflé of forest was now bulging over the banks. ‘Dageraad,’ he said.

  We’d reached the limit of the rebel advance, otherwise known as ‘Daybreak’.

  Here the revolt develops a nasty English twist, convoluting loyalties.

  Van Hoogenheim had passed Dageraad on 10 March 1763. The journey that had taken us a quarter of an hour had taken him two days. Along the way he’d run a gauntlet of musket fire and had stopped wherever he could to rescue the last of the planters. Here at Dageraad he’d again proposed a gallant stand, but nobody would join him. Reluctantly, he’d agreed to the evacuation of the colony. Berbice was on the brink of becoming South America’s first and only republic of slaves.

  Then the English turned up, and everything changed again. Quite why an English ship happened to be sailing by (with a hundred fresh new troops) is hard to explain. The effect, however, was startling. Suddenly, those slaves who were still in planters’ hands found the courage of their convictions and rallied to the Dutch. Most were Creole, or born in the colony, and had no interest in an African war. The planters may have been pigs, but Cuffy was a savage. Colonial Berbice was saved. A few weeks later Van Hoogenheim returned to Dageraad at the head of a remarkable army, composed of his natural enemies.

  The arrival of the English had also thrown Cuffy off his balance. At the very moment when he ought to have been delivering the coup de grâce, he hesitated. It was fatal. The English force was just sufficiently frightening to tempt him into diplomacy. He had no idea it was wracked with dysentery and couldn’t even muster the sentries to man Dageraad at night.