The Thief at the End of the World Read online

  But another spur drove him, too. He’d fallen far in status, and it grated on him. How could he rise in the world? He could not believe, as Lord Palmerston said, that Britain was a nation “in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness that lot which Providence has assigned to it.” He was not content with such orthodoxy. His family had fallen too far, too fast, and if there was no way to rise back in the Old World, maybe there was a way in the New.

  Men remade themselves in the Americas, conquering the wilderness, carving out plantations the size of small empires. No other group in Latin American history possessed a glossier patina than planters; through every revolution, they remained at the pinnacle of society, projecting wealth, nobility, and power. Classical and medieval authors echoed the sentiment of Cicero’s De officiis: “Of all the sources of income, the life of a farmer is the best, pleasantest, most profitable, and most befitting a gentleman.”

  On August 5, 1866, at age twenty, Henry sailed for the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua.

  It seems an odd destination. Edward Lane believed that Henry’s decision was “typical of his generation, when the pioneering spirit, fired by a desire to take part in the development of the Empire, induced so many young men to voyage to the Americas, to Australia, and to Oceania.” A studio photo made just before he left showed him already adopting the role of explorer; dressed in khaki jacket and pants, a pith helmet dangling from his right hand, he smiles to himself without the faintest touch of awkwardness. He’d grown into a tall, lean young man, just under six feet. According to Lane, “If anyone stated that he was six-feet tall, he would scrupulously remind them that his exact height was 5 ft. 11¾ in.!” He had jet-black hair, blue-gray eyes, a pencil-thin mustache, and an aquiline nose then called “Wellingtonian.” He was a handsome fellow; family attested to his “unbounded energy” and “easy-going indolence.”

  In some ways, Nicaragua had advantages for a young man hoping to enter the ranks of writer-explorers. The Mosquito Coast was an overlooked stretch of sand and coral, jungle and marsh that fronted the Caribbean Sea. It dropped from Cape Gracias a Dios in the north to the San Juan River in Costa Rica, a four-hundred-mile ribbon of white surf dotted with small inlets and reefs and plagued by treacherous currents and shoals. Blewfields (now Bluefields), in the south, was the largest city and provisional capital. Everywhere else, river mouths and lagoons were plugged by shifting sandbars, and many harbors were announced by the hulk of a steamer rotting on a shoal. The land rose slightly from the coast, covered by dense jungle that continued thirty to sixty miles inland before opening to a broad savannah carpeted by a coarse, wiry grass. This climbed west until meeting the blue mountains of the interior.

  Until recently, no one had really wanted the Mosquito Coast except the Indians who lived there. The Spanish preferred the more hospitable elevations of the Pacific side, although a few conquistadors had ventured into the area during the sixteenth century. In 1512, Diego de Nicuesa gave it a shot, but his expedition wrecked near the mouth of the Rio Coco, and later visitors grew discouraged by the inhospitable Indians, unforgiving terrain, torrential downpours, and maddening swarms of mosquitoes and flies. These were so bad, said one adventurer, “that neither Mouth, Nose, Eyes or any part of us was free of them; and whenever they could come at our Skin, they bit and stung us most intolerably.” Thus the name of the coast, while others attributed its christening to the presence of the Miskito Indians, a subgroup of Suma, who had migrated from South America.

  The informal British presence in Nicaragua mirrored its history throughout much of Latin America. Where actual possessions did not exist, a web of business interests and political meddling secured a foot-hold, the door kicked open by the 1824 fall of Spanish imperialism. In Peru, the British consul aided the quinine theft. Trinidad and British Guiana provoked conflict with Venezuela. British Honduras galled neighboring Guatemala and was seen as a pivot for British commercial and naval power. Nicaragua had its own British intrigue. From 1655 to 1850, Britain claimed a protectorate over the Miskito, but this was not aggressively pursued and existed primarily as a means to lay claim to the region’s potential as a gateway to the Pacific Ocean.

  Although Britain officially abandoned its Nicaraguan settlements in 1787, each Miskito king was educated in British schools and the Miskito royal family liked to think of “Mosquitia” as a province of the British Empire. When Henry arrived at Greytown on October 21, 1866, aboard the schooner Johann, he entered a land where British subjects were adored. The British in Latin America brought not only guns and money but such ideas as antislavery, capitalism, and the cult of the gentleman. The approach to Greytown was “prepossessing,” Henry wrote. The surrounding hills were “crowned with umbrella-shaped trees of great size.” Heliconius galenthus, a “handsome butterfly,” fluttered up on the breeze and into his boat. He kept it as a souvenir.

  Almost immediately, the Johann’s captain came within a hair of wrecking the ship on a sandbar. This harbor regularly took a mortal toll. During his fourth voyage, Columbus lost a boat’s crew there at the mouth of the San Juan River. In 1872, the commander of a U.S. surveying expedition and six sailors drowned while trying to cross the bar. Large sharks swarmed about the river entrance; the crew’s fate was known by their mangled remains.

  Henry came ashore the next day. Visitors described Greytown as a neat little town of white-painted houses tucked among palm, breadfruit, and other tropical trees, but Henry was an impatient traveler and wished to be on his way. He saw Greytown as “altogether a very uninteresting place,” surrounded by forests and water. It was called the second-wettest place on earth, right behind a Himalayan village that endured 128 inches of rain per year. Rainfall didn’t pierce Henry’s consciousness as much as the inhabitants did. Although friendly and talkative, the women were most un-Victorian, promenading at night with “cigars in their mouths, spitting in the most approved fashion.”

  Rather than the town, he was drawn to the forest. One morning he entered it for the first time. Those reared on temperate forests are rarely prepared for the tropical alternative. The tropical forest is a “great, wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse,” Darwin wrote, one in which both sound and silence pervaded. The insects are so loud in the evening that they can be heard from offshore vessels, yet inside the forest an absolute stillness reigns. A green murk prevails beneath the canopy, stabbed by canyons of light where the fall of a giant tree has ripped a rent in the gloom. One’s shirt and trousers are soon soaked; everything is moist, the tips of leaves dripping from a hundred unseen places, sweat pooling under one’s arms. An endless variety of trees sprouts at eye-level, their trunks furry with moss, wrapped in ropy lianas or girdled with spines. The smell of vegetable rot is omnipresent. Brush aside the forest litter, and a web of white threads appears just below the surface, a pallid tangle of tree rootlets and fungal mycelia that pierce everything organic when it drops, leaching out nutrients, transforming the world of the dead back into that of the living.

  Henry, like most first-time visitors, was amazed by the insect life swarming around him. Butterflies were “numerous and beautiful, varying from the size of a bat, to that of our very smallest species.” The woods were crossed by “beaten roads” of leaf-cutter ants, called wee-wees. Grasshoppers and katydids chirruped and “tinkled like bells” above the background chorus of frogs, some of which shrieked, while some made “a noise like a kettle-drum.” Henry’s English terrier, Jack, was “perfectly bewildered” by the din.

  In such a world, it was easy to forget the one from which he’d sailed. Another cholera epidemic was raging in London, killing 5,600 residents in a matter of days. One can almost hear Henry’s mother advising him to get out while he could.

  Harriette Wickham looms as the unspoken presence behind this first trip, and for a practical reason: Henry was shooting birds. With a milliner mother, his market for feathers and skins was assured. This was no leisure trip: Henry was always on the lookout for bright plumage, severely disappointed when he
missed his aim or ruined the skin. Around Greytown green parrots nuzzled under the foliage; toucans hopped among the branches; beautiful tanagers filled the edge of the forest, velvety-black except for one fiery-red patch above the tail. The trogon lurked near the columns of army ants, diving as insects tried to escape. The male was brightest, a beautiful bronze green on its back and neck, wings speckled white and black, carmine on the belly. There were red-and-yellow headed woodpeckers, jet-black curassows as big as turkeys, and olive-green motmots with their abnormally long tail feathers, naked at the tip. Nicaragua was a milliner’s paradise: the demand for “concoctions of feathers, chopped and tortured into abnormal forms” was so great that by 1889 the Society for the Protection of Birds would be founded to combat the craze. The coincidence is too great: That Henry’s first expedition would revolve around plumage and his milliner mother not be involved is hard to believe.

  Five days after arriving at Greytown, Henry booked passage north to Blewfields aboard the Moravian schooner Messenger of Peace. As he passed the Johann, the captain waved his hat. “I was glad to see he did not harbour any remembrance of the little difference we had had during our outwards passage,” Henry said. There is no other explanation of their “difference” besides a vague mention that he was required to pay duty twice due to a quartermaster’s mistake, but it is the first sign of Henry’s impatience with his fellow Westerner, an impatience that rarely extended to the natives.

  If anything, Henry seemed to like the indigenous people he met more than his fellow colonials. The first example of this occurred soon after arriving in Blewfields. He stood on the jetty, gazing out to sea while awaiting his baggage, when “a slight little fellow, who was standing by, asked me my name.” Henry answered “satisfactorily,” then inquired the youth’s in turn.

  “William Henry Clarence,” said the boy.

  Henry secured lodging at a Moravian mission house, followed by his new friend. The Moravians were sprinkled all along the Mosquito Coast. As the first large-scale Protestant missionary movement to go to the world’s enslaved and forgotten, they acted as an early Amnesty International, preferring education as a weapon against injustice and choosing indirect rather than direct confrontation with those in power. An apocryphal church story told of a Moravian farmer whose mule refused to plow: In desperation, the farmer finally said, “Brother mule, I cannot curse you. I cannot beat you. I cannot kill you. But I can sell you to a Methodist who can do all these things!”

  On the Coast, this approach meant educating the Miskito royalty. “I see you’ve met our little chief,” said a missionary, and when Henry glanced around, there stood William Henry Clarence, beaming at him. Without realizing it, he’d befriended the eleventh hereditary king of the Miskito Nation, and for the next week he’d be shadowed by miniature royalty as he explored the tropical town. “The little chief seemed to take a great fancy to me,” Henry wrote, “generally accompanying me when I went on a stroll with my gun. He was about ten years of age, and appeared very intelligent. He lived at the mission-house, and was, I believe, well grounded in his studies.”

  It was neither easy nor healthy to be king. The first king, known only as Oldman, was taken to England by the Earl of Warwick in 1625 and presented to Charles I. He died in 1687 at a ripe old age, something few others achieved. Two successors died of smallpox, spread by the colonists; one died while attacking the Spanish in Yucatán in 1729. George II Frederic, the seventh king, was assassinated in 1801 by the friends of one of his twenty-two wives, whom he was said to have killed with particular barbarity. His successor, George Frederic Augustus I, was either strangled in 1824 by his wife and his body thrown into the sea or assassinated by a “Captain Peter Le Shaw.” On the Mosquito Coast, the lessons of their Moravian tutors did not serve the royal family long, or well.

  The “little chief ” had been crowned six months before Henry’s arrival, on May 23, 1866, after the natural death of his uncle, the tenth hereditary king. William Henry Clarence had been privately educated in Kingston, Jamaica, and according to Wickham’s account seemed a happy, unpretentious boy. He would reign in Blewfields under a Council of Regency until he came of age in 1874, but even then he did not gain the power of his predecessors; his would be the first regency in which the Miskitos no longer had control of their fates, due to the 1860 Treaty of Managua. His reign as an adult would be brief: On May 5, 1879, after five years of court intrigue, the young chief who befriended Henry was poisoned and died at age twenty-three.

  Despite the attention, Henry was anxious to be away. He hired three men and a large pitpan canoe, stocked it with food, powder, and items for barter, and at dawn on November 5, 1866, paddled across the lagoon and up what he called the Woolwá River. It is hard today to determine exactly which river Wickham ascended, partly because of the changed names of geographic features and partly because of his own confusion. He said they joined the river in the lagoon’s northwest corner, but that is the location of the mouth of the Blewfields River, known today as the Escondido. The Escondido is a wide, straight waterway that cuts due west into the interior, nothing like the narrow, winding stream that Henry described. To the south lay a much smaller river; on most maps today, it remains unidentified, a narrow waterway that meanders through the trees, looping north, then west in a huge parabola—the same directions Henry logged. This would appear to be Wickham’s river, first in a long string of evidence that suggests Henry never truly knew where he was.

  Whatever his exact location, Henry started his journey by raiding someone’s field of sugarcane. A hurricane had ravaged the shore the previous year, leveling the forest in every direction. The slash-and-burn cane plantations along the bank were abandoned, their owners ruined or killed. Henry spent the night in a deserted thatch house, dining on iguana and cassava. In the morning he shot and skinned several birds before heading into the interior. After three days of this, the canoe reached a place between high banks where the current was rapid. On the heights above them reared the communal lodges of the Indian village of Kissalala:Bowing my head, I stepped across the little trench, and passed under the low-hanging thatch. I found myself in what appeared quite another world of manners and customs, which made a strange impression upon me, so totally different was everything that I now saw from all my previous experiences of life. Since that time, I have learnt to feel quite as much at home in an Indian lodge as in any other place.

  Thus began Henry’s sojourn among the Woolwá. For the next two months he used Kissalala as his base, paddling up the river to the next village or dropping down to unexplored tributaries. He “lay down and rose again with the sun,” occasionally working into the night skinning birds by the faint light of his bull’s-eye lantern. He settled in the lodge of the tribe’s headman, Nash; when Nash left for Blewfields, Henry had the lodge to himself. “Left alone,” he wrote, “I soon found that the life of a solitary traveler is not an idle one, for having to be at once master and man, renders his position no sinecure.” He hunted birds in the morning, then returned to the lodge for his meal, usually rice boiled with a few drops of coconut butter and mixed with plantains, cassava, and the meat of whatever bird he had bagged. He talked with the Woolwá, who treated him like an amusing if somewhat hapless child. He was not a good naturalist. Many of the birds were “exceedingly difficult” to skin, and when shot, “the feathers usually fly off in a cloud.” Those that were not hopelessly mangled were dried in the sun and carefully packed for the monthly mail from Blewfields to Liverpool. The day ended with a “strong cup of tea, brewed in the Australian fashion,” straight from the pot like the coffee of American cowboys. He followed this with his pipe, “never a greater source of enjoyment than on such an occasion.”

  But the tropics have a way of testing those from temperate climes. Life begins to resemble a bizarre hazing ritual; God piles on discomfort to see what you are made of. There comes a point that is very much like a light switch: You either decide you can endure whatever the tropics dole out, or the discomfort grows
maddening, and you must leave. That flip of the switch is always evident: The ones who can’t stand any more shut themselves up in a permanent sulk or are always on edge, snapping at every irritation. Those who acclimate simply slow down. Enduring the sun is one such tipping point: As it beats down relentlessly, one either bakes or instinctively learns to seek out shade.

  The other great test is the insect life, and that drives everyone crazy. “It was a long time before I became used to the ants, crickets, and cockroaches,” Henry wrote, “whose crawling, scampering, and buzzing kept me awake for many a long hour.” Large glistening cockroaches flew in his hair and entangled their legs: the only consolation was “knowing that they are easily killed.” He gave up brushing his hair in the morning when he found that tapping the back of the brush over a fire “caused myriads of minute cockroaches to fall in showers from the hairs, where they had comfortably ensconced themselves during the night.” The odor that impregnated the brush “was so unendurable that I had to content myself with only passing a comb through my hair.”

  Ants were the other insect plague that drove Henry to his limits. One morning he woke to find that a colony had deposited their eggs and larvae in the rolled blanket he used for a pillow. Army ants would march through the lodge, scouring it clean of cockroaches, tarantulas, and other pests. This was a convenience, but the idea of being caught napping by one of the swarms gave him the creeps, and he shivered at tales of the sick who were “much injured, as they lay helplessly in their hammocks, by these ferocious legions.” One defense against them was the ant’s “peculiar aversion to wet”: When the Indians wanted a column to bypass their lodge, they sprayed “mouthfuls of water at the head of the column.” Of greater danger was the inch-long Paraponera clavata, a glistening black giant sporting a massive hypodermic syringe at the end of its abdomen. The Woolwá called it a “fire-ant” due to the sting’s effect: one alighted on Henry’s shirt, and an Indian “filliped it off, with the remark that had it bitten me it would most probably have caused a severe fever.”