Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  ROBERT CARVER

  Paradise with Serpents

  TRAVELS IN THE LOST WORLD

  OF PARAGUAY

  Copyright

  William Collins

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by Harper Perennial 2007

  Copyright © Robert Carver 2007

  Map © HarperCollinsPublishers, designed by HL Studios, Oxfordshire

  Robert Carver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Source ISBN: 9780002570961

  Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007370351

  Version: 2016-01-12

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  Praise

  From the reviews of The Accursed Mountains:

  ‘A memorable debut. Robert Carver has fulfilled the dream of every travel writer to find somewhere strange, remote and unvisited, and to pin it to the printed page. The Accursed Mountains is a tale at once endlessly diverting and profoundly tragic’

  WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

  ‘One of the most exciting travel books for a generation’

  Spectator

  ‘A classic’

  JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT, Books of the Year, Observer

  ‘A dazzling account of a journey – always bizarre, often comic, and increasingly nightmarish – through one of the most dangerous backwaters currently to be found anywhere’

  PETER HOPKIRK

  ‘A splendid account of a courageous journey’

  DERVLA MURPHY

  ‘Required reading’

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  ‘Enviable writing skills … fresh horrors on every page’

  JUSTIN WINTLE, The Times

  ‘A gripping account of Albania in the 1990s’

  JAMES OWEN, Daily Telegraph

  Dedication

  Dedicated to

  St Antony of Padua

  Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

  Epigraph

  Unhappy is the nation in need of heroes

  Bertolt Brecht

  Cada uno hace su propia aventura

  Everyone makes his own fortune

  Miguel Cervantes de Vedra

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  I VOICES IN THE DARK

  1 The Silver of the Mine

  2 An Ambassador is Born

  3 Counting Paraguay

  4 Du Côté de Chez Madame Lynch

  5 Paraguay, Champion of America

  6 An Ambassador is Uncovered

  II PLOUGHING THE SEAS

  7 The Gigantic Province of the Indies

  8 MAMBFAK

  9 Piranha Soup

  10 Up River

  11 Smuggler’s Paradise

  III FLOWERING CANNON

  12 Rumble in the Jungle

  13 The Book of Complaint and Enticement

  14 Southern Exposure

  15 Du Côté de Chez Voltaire Molesworth

  16 The Strange Case of the Missing Pictures

  17 Gran Chaco

  18 Sol y Sombra

  19 El Día de la Virgen de la Merced

  20 Endgame

  21 Charlie Carver’s Gold Watch

  Some Sources and Further Reading

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  About the Publisher

  Map

  I

  VOICES IN THE DARK

  ‘When I first came to Asunción from Spain, I realised that I’d arrived in paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives. At night we’d go out walking the streets and I’d be aware of two things; the smell of jasmine and the sound of voices in the dark. But like any paradise, this one had serpents.’

  Josefina Plá, Spanish poet

  One

  The Silver of the Mine

  In the closing years of the 19th century a forgotten man returned to his home town in the Midlands of England, after an absence of more than thirty years. He had long been given up for dead. His father had been a wealthy man, an industrialist who owned lace factories and coal mines. This man had two sons, one who stayed at home and entered the family businesses, the other who went off to seek his fortune in the United States of America; he was never heard of again, and when the head of the family died his great fortune was left to both of his sons, in equal parts, though one of them had vanished, apparently for ever. In his will he had specified that advertisements in every English-language newspaper around the world should be run, each week, for a year, to inform the lost son of his new fortune, so that he could return to claim it, if he was still alive. At the end of that period, if the missing son had not appeared, his half of the family fortune was to go to charity, to found a theatre and a public hospital. His will was done. No one stepped forward to claim half of the great fortune. As a result, at the end of the year, the Nottingham Playhouse and the Nottingham Free Hospital came into being, founded and funded by half this man’s wealth.

  Then, years later, sensationally, a man returned from abroad, claiming to be the missing son. My grandfather Roy, at the time a schoolboy, recalled this event vividly. In his sixties, in the 1950s, Roy told me about this prodigal returned: a tall, massively built man who dressed in ‘the American style’, with broad-brimmed hat, long coat, embroidered high-heeled boots, silver Mexican spurs, and a fancy multicoloured waistcoat. He spoke with a marked American drawl, though spoke little but listened attentively to what others said. This man was Charlie Carver, my great-great-grand-uncle. He had returned home, at last, and he had a very strange tale to tell.

  He had left England as a restless young man, determined to seek his fortune in the post-1845 gold and silver diggings of Western America. He had taken ship for San Francisco, and had arrived safely. Several letters had been received by the family back in England. Then nothing – silence for over thirty years. What had happened was as follows: in a bar-room brawl Charlie had been hit over the head, and was knocked unconscious. When he came to he could not remember who he was. He had been robbed and had no papers or possessions to give him any clues as to his identity. He found that he had been shanghai-ed and was on board a sailing clipper bound for Australia, enrolled by persons unknown for a bounty, as a common seaman. For the next five years he served, first as an ordinary seaman, then as ticketed mate, on board the big sailing vessels that crossed the Pacific. For all this time he still had no idea who he was, nor where he came from. He acquired an American accent and mannerisms. Then, tiring of the sea, and taking his savings, he disembarked in the States, determined to seek his fortune on land. He tried many trades and moved from town to town, one of the legion of homeless
men drifting around the West in the 1970s and 1980s as the frontier closed in. Finally, he found a good position as a mining supervisor, south of the border, in Mexico. He still had no idea who he was, and was known to many simply as ‘Jack’, or el hombre sin nom – the man with no name. One day, inspecting a shaft deep inside the mine, a distant rumble was heard; it could mean only one thing – a fall. The miners, including Charlie Carver, alias ‘Jack’, all rushed for the distant pinpoint of light that was the entrance. They were too late. Dust, rock, pit props rained down upon them. Amid curses and cries of terror they fell to the ground, crushed under the weight of debris. More than twenty men died in that fall, but Charlie Carver was not one of them. He had a broken wrist and a dislocated shoulder, was bruised and cut about the head, but when the rescue party finally managed to dig the survivors out of the rubble, a shocked, semi-delirious voice cried out, in English, for he could no longer recall any Spanish, ‘I’m Charlie Carver from Nottingham – what am I doing here?’ The blows to his head caused by the rockfall had brought back his knowledge of who he was – and erased his memories of the previous thirty years. He had no idea at all what he had done or where he had been in the missing decades. His last memory was of a fight in a low saloon on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. This time, however, there were clues – his bankbook, his mate’s ticket and discharge papers, his clothes with their tell-tale maker’s labels from San Francisco and Sydney. And there were people at the mine who had known where he had been, where he had worked before, because he had told them before the accident.

  After he recovered his health he became a detective on the trail of his own past. He retraced his steps, back to San Francisco. There, in the shipping offices and newspaper stacks where the back-numbers were kept, he was able to trace his life as an anonymous seaman from the arrivals and departures of the grain ships, the muster lists and crew signings-on; on his mate’s ticket he was described simply as ‘Jack of England, Full Mate and Master-Mariner’. He had made his mark on the ticket, not signed it, indicating that in that other life he could not write. Somewhere in his travels he had learnt to use a knife and revolver. He found a keenly whetted blade in a leather sheath hidden in his left boot, and a pair of old, battered, but very serviceable Navy Colt .45 revolvers wrapped in oilskins. On his own body he found scars which he had a doctor examine: they were from the cat-o’-nine-tails, from fist fights, from knife wounds, and at least two puckered scars were old bullet wounds. On his back the doctor also discovered a tattoo of a Polynesian type then only found in Tahiti, made with native ink. It was in the newspaper offices in San Francisco that he saw the advertisements placed for him all those years ago, after his father died. He said afterwards, when he returned to England, that this was the only moment he lost himself, when, alone and surrounded by mounds of yellowing newsprint, he broke down and wept uncontrollably. He said he could still remember the bay rum lotion his father had used after shaving, the memory of it driving him to despair in his loss and pain.

  He was now two men. In his mind he was still the young, foolhardy, naive Englishman Charlie Carver, who had only just got off the boat in San Francisco to seek his fortune, but in his body he was the scarred, muscular, hard-bitten middle-aged man who had lived rough across the Pacific for decades, an experienced seaman who had lived under the lash, and a silver mining engineer to boot. The latter persona had been illiterate, nameless and left-handed; the former discovered he had genteel manners, was well-spoken and wrote in a fine, educated hand. He even recalled French poetry and Latin oratory he had learnt at school. He had saved some money – not a fortune, but enough to return to England. He had spoken fluent, colloquial Spanish after his years in Mexico, Texas and California, but the blows to his head in the mine accident had erased all that – and he had become right-handed once again. But he still spoke English with an American accent – and he could still use his weapons. My grandfather Roy was one of several family members who were shown his prowess as he blew a line of empty bottles off the top of a wall, using both his revolvers. He had not missed a single bottle, my grandfather recalled – twelve bullets had hit twelve bottles.

  The return of Charlie Carver caused a sensation. His family recognized him immediately: he had changed, of course, but was still in essence the same man in voice and body. When the two brothers saw each other for the first time in three decades they both spontaneously burst into tears. Charlie was now more or less broke. His half of the great fortune had long ago been disbursed to charity, but his brother Bertie then made an outstandingly generous move. He split his own half of the inheritance in half, and gave one half to his brother.

  There, by rights, the story should have ended. Now a wealthy man, with enough money to last him the rest of his days, Charlie Carver should have settled down to comfortable provincial obscurity. But he didn’t. He was still gripped by the fever of the silver mines. He had become convinced, like many others, that there was still a hidden Inca city lost in the jungles on the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil, a city founded on the wealth of one of the richest silver mines in the Americas. In the 1780s the revolt of Tupac Amaru, a direct descendant of the last Inca rulers, caught the Spanish authorities by surprise. The whole eastern province of what is now Bolivia, then part of the viceroyalty of Peru, was closed to the Spanish for several years. Systematically, the rebels destroyed the extensive gold and silver mines of the region, the survivors retreating eventually into impenetrable jungle to escape the revengeful Spanish. There they founded an Inca city-state which had as its currency and metal of utility the great hoard of gold and silver that the rebels had seized. Iron and copper had they none, so their plates, their knives and forks, their tools and implements were all made of either silver or gold; they also blended these two elements, making that precious metal known to the ancients as electrum. The Spanish never found the lost mines. Those who had known of their existence had been murdered in the rebellion, and the rebels had hidden and destroyed the entrances to these once profitable enterprises. Unlike El Dorado, these mines were not a myth – they had been producing gold and silver under Spanish tutelage before Tupac Amaru’s rebellion. Using old maps, a North American had found one of these hidden mines in the late 19th century, which when opened up began to produce huge quantities of rich gold ore. So, if the quest was a fantasy, it was a least a fantasy with a strong basis in factual history.

  Charlie Carver had acquired a map. He would not show it to anyone, would not tell anyone where he had got it, nor would he even say in which London bank vault he had deposited it. He made his plans calmly and carefully. Now, thanks to his brother’s generosity, he had the money to equip a serious expedition. He interviewed a number of candidates for his proposed venture into the jungle to search for Tupac Amaru’s lost city, sometimes called Paititi. One of the young hopefuls was a certain Fawcett, later to be known as Colonel Fawcett, who was to lose his life in the South American jungles looking for just such a lost city of gold. The two did not hit it off. Charlie Carver found Fawcett excessively romantic – a dreamer caught up in a web of fantasy involving a lost Atlantis in the depths of the South American rainforest. Also, and perhaps as pertinently, Fawcett had no money to contribute to the expedition. Eventually a suitable, tough, hard-bitten American was found, equipped with dollars instead of romance, and the two of them set off for Buenos Aires by ship, then up the Paraguay and Parana rivers on the Mihailovich steamer to Asunción, Concepción and eventually up into the tropical wilderness, still unmapped, right on the borders of Bolivia and Brazil.

  The old pattern repeated itself. At first, regular letters were received by the family at home in England – then silence, nothing. A long, an overlong silence. Enquiries began to be made by anxious relatives and the British Embassy in Asunción was stirred into action. There was no news. Once again, Charlie Carver had simply vanished into the blue. This time, though, there was to be no miracle, no reprieve. The last people who had seen Charlie and his American partner alive were a small gro
up of Spanish Catholic missionaries, working with Indians only just contacted by whites, on the very edge of known territory. The two explorers had stayed with the priests for several days before departing for the interior, into a region no whites were thought to have ever penetrated before. The smoke of their camp fires had been seen in the distance, coiling up into the sky for several days – then nothing. Some six months later, newly contacted semi-Christianized Indians appeared at the mission with several objects of European manufacture, shreds of cloth, buttons, and a smashed gold-plated, full-hunter pocket watch – manufactured in New York, with Charlie Carver’s name engraved inside it, together with his family address in England. It was all that remained of the expedition. Somewhere in the interior the two men had been killed by hostile Indians. The Indians who brought in the pathetic remains did not even know the tribe which had carried out the attack – they had traded the objects with another tribe, who had had them from yet another. The watch was returned to England, and was even repaired. My grandfather Roy showed it to me when I was a young boy, flicking open the front to show me Charlie’s name engraved in Victorian copperplate script. It still had many dents and bruises on its shell which no amount of repair could ever redress. Somewhere in the jungle the remains of Charlie Carver and his partner lay for ever lost to the outside world. Like so many Europeans they had searched for treasure in America only to find death.

  That, too, should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t quite. Colonel Fawcett, the rejected candidate, got a job as a boundary surveyor in South America, and after his experiences there returned again and again to try to find the lost city of gold and silver, until he too lost his life in the attempt. But before he died he told his great friend the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about his theories, about a lost Atlantis in the jungle, Phoenician traders on the River Amazon, about the lost city of Paititi, and about Charlie Carver and his expedition. This information, as we shall eventually see, Conan Doyle eventually put to very good use.