The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  ‘It’s a sad thing to see them giving over our sea what our generation from 1492 of existence of civilization that done inhabit this island been surviving on,’ he said quietly. He looked up to catch my eye for the first time. ‘Those guys that say they’re rich; they’re not rich. They prefer to have some thousand billion bucks before having just the pleasure of your eyes to see that natural power and beauty. We ten thousand times more rich than them. Bill Gates is a ras to me.’ The CD started jumping. ‘But rich people have got better stereos,’ I said. Richard stared ahead forlornly.

  ‘I feel like England should come back and take over and put his…scare into it. Because what Providence needs much more than anything is protection. This was a fruitful garden,’ he said, and listed the many varieties of mango that had grown on the island when he was a child: John Smith, Rachel, Number 11, Sally tongue, bull nut, kidney, Thai. ‘Twelve varieties of mango alone we used to grow. What! But we are making our own famine.’

  So why did everyone stop farming? I asked him. ‘Laziness and ignorance come in here because English move out and education fly away. And still Spaniard thinking that by black we still their slave.’

  Do you know when the English first came here? ‘They don’t really have capacity to know definitely who the first set,’ he said evenhandedly. ‘But the redskin Indian that come down through the United States was here first. Then the Spaniard come and kill them out and took their precious stone and riches. Twenty-seven civil wars. Then Henry Morgan come in and kill out the Spaniard dem.’

  So Morgan was the first Englishman on Providence? ‘Not really. Well, he was the first English pirate. He get that savaged that his mum sealed him out in a barrel from Jamaica to Trinidad, and then he come to St. Andrew’s and get to know these places. So he went back and call up some of his friends and make bargain with them, and take three galleons and four hundred eighty slaves, and brought over here. Morgan sent Edward Mansveldt ashore to let Governor O’Neille know that he has two hours left to stay on this island. Mansveldt say, “We come to take over, and we’re going to kill out all you guys” [Richard said this with a lascivious slur]. “We take over and we let them go Cartagena.”’

  ‘But Providence came first,’ I said. ‘The English were in Providence before they were in Jamaica, weren’t they?’

  ‘No,’ said Richard.

  ‘Yes,’ said his friend Thomas, piping up from his hammock.

  ‘No,’ said Richard. ‘Is afterwards that Morgan comes here. That’s why they have so many civil wars, because everybody wants to be the owner of this island.’

  ‘So how long did Morgan stay on Providence?’

  ‘About sixteen years. He started giving names to the villages and give each one of the pirates in such a village orders to kill. The slaves was authorized to be like the soldiers now and kill out all the living Spaniards. Then Morgan killed himself, and the people them scatter and start to live on their own. That’s why Providence is a big family disorganized, separated into villages. Spain come back in, and until now they still on us.’*2

  Here was Providence’s creation myth. In the United States, it is still widely believed that the Pilgrim fathers arrived with God’s blessing, and that this explains why America went on to become the most powerful nation on earth. But the only heavenly authority that Providence’s pirates respected was tempestuous fate, and they were loyal to no master but the Admiral of the Brethren. After the death of Henry Morgan, they had fallen upon one another, and without unity, they had been unable to resist the encroaching Spanish.

  ‘You have a little bit of harmony and unity but still there is something against us. You can’t rebel against the system you alone, because then you become more crazy than normally crazy. And we like to stay normal crazy,’ Richard said with a malevolent chuckle.

  There was a tantalizing postscript to the island’s creation myth, which kept the ghosts of the distant past ever present. ‘Through they get to find out they was killing all the Spaniard, the pirates dem leave. It was a bad weather, but they decide to risk it, and two of the three galleons get out the channel safe and took off. But the third one get bilge outside and sank there,’ said Richard. ‘That’s the treasure—the third galleon. 8,600 million dollars—that is value of world history of treasure hunting.’

  ‘That is there,’ added Thomas authoritatively. ‘Seventy, eighty feet maximum. A lot of people know about it, but they don’t know where it is because I don’t tell them.’

  ‘So why don’t you go and get it?’

  ‘You can’t just get that shit like that!’ said Richard savagely. ‘If you go out there, the barracuda with green eyes and blue tears that minding the treasure will drown you now. You have to go down there with a good invocation of spiritual and metaphysic part, to get that shit.’

  ‘What we really need from you is some good detector,’ said Thomas. ‘We need some money.’

  ‘They’re not expensive,’ I replied evasively. Talk of sunken treasure was nothing new on the island. As long ago as 1877, the Colombian government had issued a decree banning the islanders from helping foreign treasure hunters. I had been warned that as soon as the islanders knew what you were looking for, you were at risk of being robbed.2

  ‘There’s a game going on,’ said Richard. ‘It’s pretentious to be more smart.’ In spite of his volubility, I could see that he hadn’t lost his initial reserve. He went back to watching the horizon, while I went back to my seaside cabin to pack my bags.

  * * *

  After four months on Providence, I was keen to see its hinterland: the English-speaking towns that dot the Caribbean coast of Central America between Portobello and Cape Gracias a Dios. Since it is no longer possible to make the crossing by sea, I had to take the catamaran back to San Andrés, and then catch a flight to Panama City. After four weeks spent wandering towns I had only known about from history books, I made it to Bluefields, where I caught a boat to the Corn Islands.

  For as long as Antonio Escalona, the sea-fearing intendente of San Andrés, governed the Corn Islands, Colombian sovereignty had only ever been nominal. But in 1890, the Nicaraguans took possession of the islands, as part of their campaign to incorporate the Miskito Coast into the rest of the nation. In 1894, the islanders petitioned the British government, in the hope that it would make the Corn Islands a protectorate. When that failed, they petitioned the governor in Cartagena, but Colombia had already given up its claim over the islands in return for Nicaragua’s renunciation of its claim over Providence and San Andrés. The Corn Islands remain Nicaraguan territory to this day and are of great strategic importance, for they stand at the gateway to the proposed Interoceanic Canal.

  I sailed on the Captain D (I think the D stood for ‘Dios,‘ since there was a picture of a robed Jesus, his arms outstretched, on the prow of the ship). The deck was crowded with drums of diesel, hessian sacks of plantains and watermelons, and bags of cement. It was a day or two before Semana Santa, so there were also a lot of passengers, mainly locals, and some Nicaraguan tourists who had flown in from Managua. They occupied every last inch of space: on the poop deck around the captain’s cabin, around the wheels of the minibus that took up much of the main deck, and atop the rusting freezers of meat on the deck closest to the prow.

  Once we were at sea, I went in search of food. It took me a while to negotiate my way through the mass of bodies to the mess room. The older islanders had commandeered the dining tables and were watching The Last Temptation of Christ on the TV. The queue slowly shuffled forward through the heat, all eyes on Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. In the canteen, a man I guessed to be of Zambo descent was making instant noodles. How he took so long to make such a simple dish was beyond me. His wife was spreading jam over packaged bread with a teaspoon, and they were both flustered and unsmiling. I lost patience and headed in to help myself to some hot water, but he was having none of it and chased me out of his kitchen.

  Once I had been served my instant noodles, I returned to the prow and
fashioned a seat for myself in a pile of coiled ropes. The passengers around me were dozing on stacks of timber or listening to reggaeton on their phones in the shade cast by a mountain of mattresses. The Miskito man next to me had his legs pulled up under his chin and a hooded rain jacket over his head. He was pathetically seasick and was shivering from what I guessed to be exhaustion.

  When the sun began to lose its strength, the ship’s captain played country and western over the stereo, and I got up to watch flying fish skip across the water. The rhythm of the slide guitar was in sync with the ship as it pitched through the waves, and a melancholy voice, which alternated between English and Spanish, ebbed and flowed with the direction of the wind. Those who weren’t dozing looked out over the sea in silence as low clouds diffused the last of the sunlight. Gradually the curtain fell on another day, and the stars came out one by one, until they dotted the entire sky.

  Until 1999, only a handful of tourists made it to Little Corn, but the Americans had arrived in force since the island’s inclusion in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, that tome of commandments for those with eyes on the horizon and leisure time to burn. By the time I got there, everyone on Little Corn was making money from these tourists, whether by taking them on diving trips, cooking their meals, or cleaning their rooms. They had learned to make French toast and pancakes, and traditional dishes like gallo pinto and ‘run-down’ had become anachronisms.

  I hadn’t seen foreigners en masse for months and watched them with fresh eyes. They invited looks, in their bikinis and board shorts, elaborate tattoos, and T-shirts with important messages on the front. Fearing anonymity and craving recognition, they literally made spectacles of themselves, yet the looks they returned were often suspicious and watchful, and they seemed strangely brittle. While they prized both personality and physicality, the locals didn’t seem to set much store by either. With so few meaningful choices to make, the locals spent a great deal of time ruminating on the nature of powers that would never be theirs. Weren’t the Americans still blessed by providence? Weren’t the islanders, like their piratical forebears, still more fearful and fatalistic?

  Being on Little Corn, it was easy to forget that the island even had a history. The natives were there to keep the visitors from earthly cares, and the discretion with which they served them meant that it was all too easy to ignore the islanders. So as not to disrupt the tourists’ back-to-nature fantasies, they had tucked their homes in a dip in the dunes, and it was easy to believe that the world had been designed solely to please the five senses.

  The beach huts at the smartest resort, which was run by a service-conscious American from Boston, were named after famous castaways like Gulliver, Robinson, and Napoleon. The guests were finding it hard having nothing to do. They were always active, whether reading, checking the news on their phones, or swapping stories with their friends. They flocked together for comfort, and on the rare occasions I saw them alone, staring out over the flat sea, they looked hopelessly forlorn.

  Wherever I had been in the western Caribbean, I had had problems finding locals able to tell me about their history. The closest I had come to a relic was a solitary brick, in its own glass cabinet, in the Corn Islands’ little museum. The teenage curator told me that it had arrived as ballast on an English ship in the seventeenth century. When I asked her if there was someone who could tell me more about the island’s past, she suggested that I talk to Mr. Otto, but a freshly painted wooden marker in the islands’ cemetery told me that he had just died. I was directed to Miss Bridget, but she was feeling shy and didn’t want to talk, and Rasta Punch was at work.

  Then the waitress at the restaurant where I had lunch mentioned Wanki and had her daughter walk me to the little shack behind the restaurant where he lived. I found him sitting in his wheelchair outside his shack. Both his legs had been amputated halfway down the thigh, and his chair looked homemade. It had a bicycle chain running between two sprockets, with handles instead of pedals, so he could power the wheels with his hands. I had found him on his eighty-fourth birthday, he told me. Although there was still life in his eyes and his fingers toyed absently with the frame of his chair, there was no strength left in his voice, and I had to crouch close to his wheelchair to hear him. He seemed to be giving a running commentary on the thoughts passing through his mind.

  ‘I don’t know where she gone. United States, somewhere around there. She gone long time. The doctor is what do this. Cut this one first. Then afterwards, cut this one.’

  Why did he cut them off? I asked. ‘This one was the sugar. This one never had no sugar, but still he cut it.’

  In the old times, did the pirates come to Little Corn? ‘I believe.’

  Like Henry Morgan? ‘Right by that mango tree over there. The swamp.’

  Did you ever go to Providence or San Andrés?

  ‘No. If you got boat to load, go to Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas. The captain that I work with, him come and take lobster. Lobster! Used to catch lobster like sand. But now, no money in lobster. Hawksbill and loggerhead, all of them turkle used to come right there and lay eggs,’ and he pointed to the spot where an old woman was selling fizzy drinks from under a beach umbrella.

  I tried running the names of the fishing banks by him—Quitasueño, Roncador, Serranilla—but he just groaned weakly, so we watched the tourists traipse across the sand for a while. In the neighbor’s yard, a cock was crowing.

  Were you a farmer? ‘Yeah. When we had plenty coconut we used to make the coconut oil by the drum. We send Managua to make soup.’ Soap? Coconut soap? ‘Yeah. All kind of soup used to make Managua.’

  Did you learn Spanish and English at school?

  ‘Yes. Spanish and English and Miskito. Three of them I speak. Them times, I don’t know because I never born yet, but my grandfather was Miskito king.’

  This was an unexpected turn of events. What was your grandfather’s name? I asked him.

  ‘Andrew Henry Clarence,’ he said with a chuckle, as if at a dirty secret.

  And Wanki is short for Juan Carlos?

  ‘Wanki? That is the country where I come from. That is a big river. Rio Coco them call it, but the place them call it Wanki.’

  The River Wanks (or Wanki) was the old name for the River Coco. It started to sink in: I really had stumbled across the heir to the Miskito throne. One of my reasons for visiting Bluefields had been to follow up on a rumor that the heir was running a pool hall in the town, but the rumor was forty years old, and I had found no trace of him.

  ‘From ten year old I traveling. Before them kill me. Them wicked people. They want to kill everybody. From I was in Bluefields, 1979, one fella name Walder Hooker, lawman, he was going to send me to a place…England, because there is king too.’

  He sounded very pleased when I told him that I came from England. ‘Well, you know then.’

  But you didn’t go? ‘No! People said if they carry me plane, they going to throw me out and kill me. So Walder Hooker tell me say, “Best thing you go to little island.” That’s how I come here. Not a soul knows that I is here now. Everybody think I dead. But I still living!’

  So what happened to your mother and father? ‘I only one month old and my mother dead. And my father, them kill him good. Them study science business, so them kill you just so, without shooting you, without knifing you, without touching you.’

  Necromancy? ‘Yes. Them know about necromancy,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘When my grandfather dead, the president take him crown, the gold, half a million dollar, that too. Everything them take and sold.’

  I found myself making a dreamy hum of assent. My voice had slowed to a woozy trickle of words that threatened to come away from each other.

  ‘But he was a king,’ Wanki said, as if to reassure himself that his memories weren’t just part of a fantastic dream, and that once upon a time, the Miskitos really had ruled the coast. ‘That’s why the England come and put the crown on him, because him win something.’ He chuckled, and his voice faded to a w
hisper. ‘All kind of history, it is. Well, I never born yet.

  ‘When I come here, I was drinking rum. After a while, I see rum no good, so I give up the drinking and I baptized. I was studying from California Bible study. I promised that I would never touch that again, and God said, “I will take care of you until I call you.”’

  And your name is?

  ‘Yeah.’ What’s your full name, Wanki? ‘I’ll die here. I can’t go home and I don’t want to,’ and he chuckled again. He rolled up his trousers to reveal the stumps where his legs had once been.

  ‘I never feel it, you know? Him inject it and him say, “How you can’t sleep?” I don’t know. Just wide awake, didn’t even feel it. Up to now, I don’t got no pain out of this. Everything is excellent. Good.’

  It was time to go. I thanked the king of the Miskitos for his time, and he thanked me for keeping him company. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me when I asked him his full name. Perhaps there were a few things he didn’t want to tell me, or anyone else for that matter. Now I wonder, not why he didn’t answer my question, but why he chose to tell me his secret at all. Perhaps I was the only person who had ever asked him about the history of the Miskito Coast.

  *1La Haya is the Spanish word for ‘The Hague.’ In December 2007, the International Court of Justice recognized Colombia’s sovereignty over San Andrés and Providence, but left open the question of the demarcation of the maritime boundary and sovereignty over the cays of Serranilla, Quitasueño, Serrana, and Roncador. The ruling was very unpopular on Providence; the cays have always belonged to Colombia, but the islanders felt that Bogotá had not done enough to uphold their claim, thereby allowing Nicaragua to claim jurisdiction over them.

  *2Richard was right to highlight the role of the slaves in Morgan’s fight with the Spanish, but he confused seventeenth-century figures like Henry Morgan with late-eighteenth-century figures like Tomás O’Neille.