The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Partly as a result of his injuries, and partly due to his lack of skills, Ed was a beggar. He was redundant—and voluntarily so. Even confined to a chair, he could have been chopping up fish or sitting behind a desk, if any office would have had him, but he preferred to beg. And now he was boasting to his new best friend in his stepfather’s yard: of how he had once been the cacique of the prison, didn’t like people who were all mouth and no trousers, and was afraid of nobody.*2 But I was more embarrassed than intimidated. It must be hard for a cacique not to be feared anymore.

  When I asked Manny how the island had changed since he left for California, he said that these days every family has a relative involved in the cocaine business. Providence was too small for capos to hide out, so the big Colombian organizations—the Paisas, Urabeños, and Rastrojos—came no farther than San Andrés. Drive-by shootings had become commonplace there, he said. There were drug-related deaths on Providence too: when a bale went missing, one of the fast boat’s crew had to pay for the mistake. But those extracting payment were always careful to throw the body overboard a few miles out to sea, where it was sure to be eaten by sharks. If a young man ever died on the island, it was usually after trying to pull a high-speed wheelie on his scooter.

  * * *

  Having tried and failed to go to church with Ed in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I was determined to get there the following Sunday. But when I got to Rocky Point, I found myself dawdling outside the New Jerusalem Baptist Church, worried that I might ascend the steps to find the congregation sitting in a horseshoe around a chair reserved just for me. So I sat and watched the believers arrive for Sunday service on their scooters instead. The men came in their Sunday best, the women in high heels and hats, their rumps squeezed into dresses that fell just short of the knee, with an infant on their lap. Once inside, they sang hymns that sounded like power ballads, with names like ‘I Am Not My Own (I Belong to Jesus).’ The voices that carried through the open windows were all female, which only added to my suspicion that the men were only there to appease their partners, who were in turn only there to show off their babies and have a good singsong.

  The music stopped and there was a reverent hush before a slick and assured voice made itself heard. The minister made a big effort to sound heartfelt, but the sermon he preached was so anodyne, I felt sure he expected to be judged only on his delivery. His performance was an expression of wholly temporal values: social standing and a presumed right to judge who was respectable and who was not. His message echoed what I had heard from every islander over the age of forty: the island’s youngsters regarded manners, morals, and respect for one’s elders as things of the past, and the rot would only stop when the congregation inculcated a culture of discipline in their children.

  I had tried talking to the younger islanders, to see how they responded to the charges being leveled at them, but without much luck, for most of them had inherited their parents’ deference, if not their devotion. The few to proffer an opinion confirmed what I suspected: the age of self-sufficiency and unquestioning respect for authority was over; the world was a big place now, and they would be leaving for jobs on the mainland as soon as they were able.

  The minister was addressing an echo chamber. Worse still, the rot that had crept through the political establishment had also found its way into the Baptist church. The island’s politicians and clergymen had long kept up the pretense that right was on their side, and that the wrongdoers were always ‘panyamen.’ But there were those in the congregation who knew full well where the money to pay the church’s new pews and embroidered cushions had come from. Plenty of the islanders had looked the cocaine business straight in the eye on the Sunday a stray bale washed up off Rocky Point. When the news reached the crowded pews, they dashed to the shore, eager to beat those rushing to the prize from all over the island. Among those seen racing home with a five-kilogram brick of cocaine balanced on the petrol tank of their scooter were several middle-aged women in broken heels and lopsided hairdos. They were extreme variants of a type common to all communities where religious faith and conservative values collude: the ‘one-day-a-week Christian.’

  *1Colombians use the Spanish word for a toad to describe informers, because they can’t help croaking.

  *2The word cacique was originally used to refer to to a native chieftain, but in this context, it means ‘top dog,’ or ‘boss.’

  [21]

  ‘Still a Little Behind Time’

  I SPENT CHRISTMAS AT POSADA Enilda, which floats on the unmarked border that separates Smooth Water Bay from Bottom House. Enilda Chamorro and her brother ran a tight operation, along the lines they’d learned working on the cruise ships, and hadn’t lost the habit of dressing in white. Since building a house out of steel would have been impractical, they had done the next best thing and built it out of concrete. The islanders had embraced the stuff with gusto; it made for a rather barren built environment, but aridity was part and parcel of modernity in those parts, along with the gallons of room fresheners, deodorants, and bleach used in the island’s more respectable households.

  My room at the Posada Enilda had air-conditioning, which made a refreshing change but brought problems of its own. To keep the room cool, the sun had to be kept out, so Enilda had covered the windows with sheets of adhesive black plastic and told me to keep the curtains drawn. It was a bit like living in a fridge, except that the light only came on when I closed the door.

  Enilda was one of several islanders hoping to find recompense for the collapse of farming in the tourist trade. But their first experience of mass tourism had not been encouraging. A few years before, the captain of a cruise ship carrying two thousand Americans had decided to pay Providence a visit. Since his vessel was too large to dock at the wharf, he had dropped anchor outside the harbor and ferried his passengers to the dock in longboats, ninety at a time. He had a soap dispenser and a vat of clean water installed on the dock, and instructed them to wash their hands before and after going ashore and not to touch, eat, or drink anything, for his medical staff would not treat anyone who returned to the ship with an infection picked up on the island. By the time they left four hours later, the tourists had bought eight T-shirts and ten pairs of earrings. Even the tourist brochures and raizal handicrafts had gone untouched. The island’s guides, who had welcomed the visitors ashore with beaming smiles, glared at them sullenly as they clambered back into the longboats. It had been a humiliating experience and one they saw no point in repeating.

  On Christmas Eve, I scootered into Town and found a Christmas tree standing in the little square in front of the wharf. Except that it wasn’t a real tree, but a twenty-foot-high wire cone wrapped in dark green tinsel. The lights on the pretend tree, and the illuminations that had been strung up over the road leading out of Town, were Father Christmases, and candles had been replaced with seashells, seahorses, and crabs. The Puritans would doubtless have approved of keeping the religious component of the year-end festival in church.

  The islanders were in church until midnight that night. Only then did the bands strike up, as they did on the three following nights. The compere introduced them as long-lost members of the family, returned to their ancestral home. They came from Colón and Portobello in Panama; Cahuita, Bastimento, and Bocas del Toro in Costa Rica; and were it not for Colombia’s long-running dispute with Nicaragua, they would have come from Bluefields and the Corn Islands too. They sang in English, and like the local groups, they played calypso. Even their instruments were familiar: the guitar, violin, and mandolin carried the melody, with the rhythm supplied by a single bass string set in a round metal tub, a clave, and a horse’s jaw, which was played with a stick to produce a sharp tap, or run along the teeth to make a sound like a snare drum.

  The best known of the groups from Providence was the Coral Group, whose front man was Willy B. Archbold. ‘The typical music that we play from my grandfather’s time is from Jamaica,’ he told me over a postgig drink. ‘We call one of the
tune pasillo, one quadrille, one is jumping polka. Call one wals, call one schottis, call one mazorka. Look very pretty to see. We don’t want this music to abolish, so we training so young one come to know it.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Jamaica?’ I asked him. ‘Yeah. I been a cook on a small tanker carrying oil, and we went to Jamaica plenty time. They have big tubes running under the earth, taking crude oil fifty miles off shore from the Gulf to Mexico. Hard work, man. But I got sick with my heart running brown sugar to Bahia Dulce, Guatemala, so when I reach home, they take me Medellín and put in a pacemaker. After that, all work was over.’

  I asked Willy what had happened to the English who first settled the island. ‘We never see them anymore. This Providence was given by England to Colombia, so we speak English. Then we was vexed because we said, “Why the hell you did that? You should keep us.”’

  But that was a long time ago, I said. ‘Yes, long time ago,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Bad people fi that, because Colombia treat us like dog. Spanish up in Bogotá take up all the money and put it in him pocket. If England could take it over back, I would rather that.’

  I had heard variants of the same story from several of the older islanders: Queen Victoria had given Providence to Colombia as a gift when the new republic won its independence from Spain, but on one condition: that if they ever gave the islanders cause for complaint, she would take it back. It was a nice story, but one that owed more to the fantastic Edward Seaward than the real Francis Archbold.

  ‘Well, I will be soon out of this punishment,’ said Willy. ‘That’s the last touch, because seventy-six years I have now.’ He asked me how long I’d been away from England. About four months, I told him. He thought for a moment. ‘England is by America?’

  Yes, it had all been a long time ago. Yet England survived in unexpected places. Shortly after arriving on Providence, I had heard a strange song called ‘The Ram Goat,’ by an island musician called Wycliffe Archbold. ‘The eye of that old ram, it was really shine indeed / It made a light as bright enough to shine all over the world,’ he sang. The chorus went: ‘I tell you that is the truth, for I would never have start to lie / And if you go to Derbyshire, you know you might well as die.’

  Since when had Derbyshire been such a hellhole, I wondered, and what did an old singer on Providence know about it? Thanks to the Internet, I later discovered that ‘The Derby Ram’ is an old folk ballad, thought to date from 1760. The lyrics had evidently been warped in crossing the Atlantic, and the brilliance of the ram’s eyes exaggerated, for the original version goes: ‘The little boys of Derby, sir, they came to beg his eyes / To kick about the streets, sir, for they were football size.’ The chorus was more innocuous too: ‘And had you been to Derby sir, you’d have seen it as well as I.’1 The bitter note of Wycliffe Archbold’s version must have been adopted somewhere between England and the western Caribbean.

  The next band to strike up was the best of the night: a young group from San Andrés called the Caribbean Style New Generation. It was an artless name, and one that belied the great sounds they produced. They marshaled two guitars and a mandolin, with all four players singing, not in English but Spanish, and the sweat was soon pouring down their faces. This was the younger generation of islanders whose grandparents had told me not to bother talking to. Their music spoke volumes: they were clearly untroubled by their dual Anglo-Hispanic heritage, determined to get the crowd dancing, and had no interest in copying the pretty, melancholy note that the older players struck.

  The mayor, who was sitting with six other pale-faced old dignitaries at a trestle table at one side of the stage, watched them play impassively. I caught sight of his foot tapping in time with the music, but only for a couple of beats. The crowd seemed equally unmoved: the older ones had pulled up chairs and taken the weight off their feet; the younger ones seemed happy to watch the band and exchange greetings with friends, while their children darted around under the mayor’s trestle table. I was mystified; the mood was more reminiscent of events at the parish hall in the Devon village where I grew up than any social event I had been to in Colombia, where any gathering without dancing was considered a flop.

  But we were a long way from the mainland too. The islanders were never less than courteous and friendly, but they always seemed to be holding something in reserve. They were not open and demonstrative like the Colombians, but watchful, as if waiting for someone to mock or admonish them. Wasn’t that part of the Puritan legacy? The culture of discipline the Puritans promoted had no time for the ribaldry and lightheartedness of the saints’ days, when every country village in England came together to play sports and make music. As far as the Puritan conscience was concerned, leisure time was wasted time. Their censoriousness had made their parishioners austere and frugal, but it had also made them self-critical and socially awkward. The battle between merry and not-so-merry England has been raging ever since.

  * * *

  On my last Saturday on Providence, I went to a horse race on the beach at Southwest Bay. Horse racing had flourished on the back of the old trading circuit between the region’s English-speaking communities. The older islanders had told me fondly about the days when they would sail to the Corn Islands and Bluefields with their horses to take part in races. But after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979, the Nicaraguan government discouraged communication with the islands, for fear that the Colombians’ American allies would use them as conduits for their attempts to undermine the new government. Horse racing has never been popular in Colombia, and as the mainlanders exerted more influence on Providence and San Andrés, it had been largely eclipsed by baseball. Since the millennium, the cocaine traffickers have begun plying the waters separating Providence from the Miskito Coast, making them still more dangerous for islanders wanting to visit relatives in Central America. From my Spartan seaside cabin, I had watched the spotlights of antidrug police helicopters comb the mangrove swamps where the smugglers come to refuel their fast boats.

  So a race day was a rare treat. I was hoping to run into Richard Hawkins, who was said to be one of the island’s keenest horsemen, but he wasn’t there—an old man told me that his wife had found out about his Swiss girlfriend, and he’d had to leave the island until things cooled off. In the days before the slave traders came, Ghana had had a cavalry a hundred thousand horses strong, the old man told me. Many of the riders joined the Arabs when they invaded Spain, and later generations of riders came to the Americas as slaves, which explained the love of horse racing on the islands.

  Horse racing is closely associated with obeah, the form of African witchcraft that has never quite gone away. Richard’s late mother had been the island’s principal practitioner of obeah, the old man told me, but she had died not long after electric light came to Bottom House. In his childhood, he had often tried to sneak a look at the horses before the race but had always been chased away by their trainers, who were worried about strangers casting spells. The obeah men would try to put the jockey’s soul in a bottle, the better to destroy him. How did they do it? I asked. ‘You have to read the black book, which only an obeah man has,’ he told me with a laugh. Nothing made him laugh harder than the imponderable workings of the obeah men, he said.

  The day after my day at the races, Richard’s girlfriend flew back to Switzerland, his wife cooled down, and he went back to ‘Richard’s Place,’ the little bar where he sold cocktails to the odd tourist who made it to the end of the beach in Southwest Bay. I found him lounging in a hammock with a spliff and listening to Bob Marley with a friend. He must have been in his late fifties, but he was still strong, with no trace of the bloated gut common to most islanders of his age. He was wearing workman’s boots, black jeans, a white shirt, and a black waistcoat, and was one of the few island men with dreadlocks. He looked like a swashbuckling pirate, and a black swashbuckling pirate at that. I found him reserved, and a little intimidating. He gave me a quick look up and down, and went back to watching the horizon.

  ‘See, th
e Haya given over seventy-five thousand kilometers in square to Nicaragua just like that,’ he said in a deep baritone voice.*1 ‘And they already have business plan to do with China, which would be causing forty-two thousand million dollars. What the hell is that?’

  The hell that was, was the Interoceanic Canal, which the chairman of HKND, the Hong Kong–based construction company proposing to build it, was calling ‘the biggest construction project in the history of humanity.’ Like most Latin American countries, Nicaragua’s biggest trading partner is no longer the United States, but China. In return for the right to build a new canal through Nicaraguan territory, the Chinese would pick up the £23 billion bill (four times the size of Nicaragua’s annual GDP). HKND was confident of breaking ground on the project later that year and having it finished within five years.

  The canal’s proponents see it as essential, if the world is to handle ever-larger trade flows and the ever-larger cargo ships needed to carry them. Each of the new generation of cargo ships is capable of transporting a million flat-screen TVs, but they will be too large for the Panama Canal, even after its current expansion. Critics argue that the new canal will have a devastating impact on the Miskito Coast, and HKND has no history of building canals, or anything else for that matter. Their suspicions have only been heightened by the veil of secrecy that the Nicaraguan government has thrown over its negotiations with the Chinese company.

  ‘Nicaragua knows long time ago their lindera is eighty-two meridian down there on the west west, two hundred seventy on the compass,’ said Richard. ‘So don’t let me catch you over the border! If treasure is here, if reef is here, if petroleum is here, you don’t fucking business with that!’ He petered out, muttering curses at the Nicaraguans, the Chinese, and the Colombians’ half-hearted defense of their territorial waters.