The Thief at the End of the World Read online

  Captain Hill was both floored and delighted to shelter this unexpected Englishman. The large, square house was roomy and comfortable, commanding a view of the mine sections across the valley. The company doctor arrived, examined Henry’s lesions, and pronounced him unfit to continue until they healed. Captain Hill “took me to his room,” Henry said, “where a dinner of beefsteak and bread was already on the table, of which I was very glad to partake.” The steak dinner made the prospect of ending his journey more palatable. He paid off his men and accepted the offer to stay. “I was not able therefore to take many birds among the surrounding hills or see as much of the country as I desired,” Henry lamented, but considering the speed with which he settled into this new life, he did not seem overly disappointed.

  He stayed at Consuelo a month and a half, until March 23, 1867, when he backtracked down the jungle river to Blewfields. His time in the mining camp was peaceful, strange, and sad. Captain Hill regaled his young guest with tales of his voyages in the South Pacific and the cannibal coasts of New Guinea while serving in the Royal Navy, information Henry stored away in his mind.

  One evening, as the two compared adventures, a mine worker ran up panting and said that a man had been stabbed while gambling in the carpenter’s workshop, a regular hangout on payday. They grabbed their revolvers and hurried off. The street was thronged with people, the workshop so crowded they could barely elbow their way to the workbench where the wounded man lay. “I recognized him at once,” Henry wrote:a tall, gaunt Spaniard whom I had seen in conversation with the native miners as they came from receiving their pay. . . . [A] single glance at his livid face was sufficient to show that his minutes were numbered; and so it proved, for before we left the shed he was a corpse. When we entered, the doctor was doing all he could for him; but though his wound between the ribs looked wonderfully small, and there was very little blood to be seen, the internal hæmorrhage must have been great, for he was very soon choked. I could not help thinking, whilst looking on the powerful frame before me, laid so low, and by so small a thing (a pocket clasp-knife, afterwards found in the shavings in the shop), how easily the “silver cord” is loosened. It seemed that none had witnessed the fatal blow, though the Cornish Captain, on hearing the disturbance, had gone in with his revolver to disperse the disputants in time to see the Spaniard fall. The next day, an officer, with some Nicaraguan soldiers, arrived, and made inquiries into the murder; in consequence of which about a dozen men, witnesses and petty offenders, were put into the stocks. They did not secure the murderer, who, of course, had made his escape into the bush.

  Where previously his journal had been full of wonder, now it was tinged with mortality. Hercules Temple came back for him when his sores had healed, and they retraced their route down the Woolwá River. On April 2, “we passed Kissalala, which place presented a most desolate appearance. The thatch had already been partly blown off the houses, and the whole land was choked up with weeds.” The villagers had never returned to their old home, but treated it as a cursed place. Where his Indian friends had seemed so vital and full of life, now his melancholy observations were laced with thoughts of “what might have been.” He returned to Blewfields on April 5, and from then until mid-July visited Miskito villages around the lagoon while staying with his old friends the Moravians. On May 10, he watched a prayer meeting in the Miskito settlement of Haulover: “The missionary standing, book in hand, in the centre of the roughly-thatched hut, surrounded by a circle of dusky listeners, the men on one side and the women on the other, speaking to them pleadingly in the sonorous Moskito language.” Outside, in the sunlight, girls peeped through the cracks between palmetto stems or drooped against the posts of doorways. It was a peaceful scene, but one drained of vigor. “Although, no doubt, in the old times the Moskito men were very superior in war . . . yet they do not appear to me at present to bear a very favourable comparison,” he observed.

  Disease and creeping corruption had been the unspoken theme of Henry’s journey among the Woolwá, and now the picture was painted explicitly:I was surprised to meet one day, near Temple’s lodge, a handsome young Woolwa, who had been one of the crew of my pit-pan on the river. He had a heavy axe . . . and was engaged in cutting some logs of wood, to be used, I believe, in building Temple’s new house. I was shocked to see how altered he had become; his skin, once as clear as bronze, was covered with rough blotches, the perspiration was running down in streams, and he seemed much exhausted. When with me he could not speak a word of Moskito; and I fear he must have had a hard time since then, for the Creoles are inclined to be tyrannical, and make perfect drudges of the Indians when they have the chance. Had I known that Temple would have brought him to Blewfields to make a servant of him, I should have seen that he returned to his home up among the rapids.

  On July 12, 1867, Henry left Blewfields forever, departing on the Messenger of Peace, the same Moravian schooner on which he had arrived eight and a half months earlier. The captain was Temple’s brother, and conversation centered on the threat of Nicaragua annexing the Shore:[T]he captain loudly deplored the falling off of the warlike spirit of the Moskitos. They were once sole masters of the coast as far south as the San Blas Indians, who alone were able to withstand the onset of their dorys of war. But he expressed a hope that, if the hated Spaniards did come, they would again clean and sharpen their rusty old lances, and arise from the drunkenness caused by the villainous stuff sold them as rum by the traders, which, with the aid of their own mishla, caused such demoralization. . . . As we sailed along, he pointed out several places where these Indians had fought . . . and related how the king used to go in his large dory to take tribute of the Spaniards of Grey Town.

  But all the old glories, conflicts, and empires had passed, turned instead into a parody of life and death, like the funeral of a Spanish child Henry watched on July 14 when he landed in Greytown:It was a strange sight:—first came a lad with a spade, after him followed two men bearing between them the coffin, which was gaily painted and dressed with flowers; on one side walked the men, and on the other the women, some of whom were smoking cigars; behind, were men playing on fiddles and guitars; and lastly, a number of people, who were throwing crackers about, and amusing themselves in various ways. One of these combustibles fell amongst a flock of guinea-fowl, which seemed to cause much merriment for the company.

  On July 15, he left, booking passage on the Royal West Indian Mail ship Tamar bound for Colón in Panama and then on to the island of St. Thomas. His description of Colón regains some of the romance he felt nine months earlier: “The mountains behind Porto Bello looked very beautiful: They were the deepest blue imaginable—here and there intercepted by dense rain-clouds and showers.” The town was surrounded by mangrove swamps, and the Panama railroad crossing the isthmus ran through town, the small-gauge engines “racing to and fro.” At the wharves, Indians sold canoeloads of plantains and seashells to visitors. It all seemed too postcard perfect, somehow unreal.

  Then, again, death intruded. He heard that Captain Hill, his savior and host at Consuelo, had died in Colón while the Tamar lay in harbor. This occurred during Henry’s final layup in Blewfields, when the old Cornish mine captain was returning to England to visit family. He’d been buried at a spot called Monkey Hill, a little distance out of town along the railway.

  Before he left, he tried to find the grave:I walked along this line one day for some distance, and discovered that the first part runs through a dark mangrove swamp; as far as I went there was very little elevated land. The amount of human life sacrificed in laying this line must have been immense, in consequence of the workmen turning up the slimy deposit of ages under a fierce sun: they say . . . that one man died for every sleeper.

  But he never found his old friend’s grave. When he turned back, it was intensely hot, hotter than he’d ever experienced, and though his skin was tanned and dark, the back of his neck became scorched and blistered. Somehow it was all wrong, so different than what he’d expected. Natu
re had seemed transcendent at the beginning of his travels, a peaceful world in which man could flourish and prevail. But as he continued deeper into the wilderness, that world changed. Nature ran amok, its luxuriance a trap, a brightly colored cover for a hymn of strangulation. The tranquil dream of Eden turned to chaos without end.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MORTAL RIVER

  Henry’s voyage to the New World had not been a rousing success. His packages of skins and feathers to his mother were not abundant; his drawings and journals were haphazard and confused. He even tried to buy a parakeet for his sister and failed. He came home weary and dispirited, with a lingering case of malaria and ugly scars on his ankles and shins. He made friends in Nicaragua and lost them; he’d seen the diminishment of a people he loved. He gazed at beauty and found death instead.

  Given the tone of his closing journal passages, it is surprising that he chose to return to the tropics. Most young men would chalk the affair up to sad experience and announce their wanderlust permanently cured. Not Henry. There were times when he seemed dazzled, as if the tropics transcended reality, like an opium dream. The gateway to his journey had been Castries, the naval base and capital of the island of St. Lucia. The cliffs plunged from overhead into the ocean, and “the very rocks are robed in the deepest green.” He chose to remember this, not the horrible deaths of the Woolwá sisters, the stabbing of the man in Consuelo, or his fruitless search for the grave of Captain Hill.

  From autumn 1867 to autumn 1868, Henry stayed at home in Marylebone and probably helped his mother in her Sackville Street shop. He worked on his journals and sketches and probably tried, without success, to get them published. That in itself would have made it hard for him to forget the tropics, but popular art and entertainment also seemed smitten. In February 1868, the Crystal Palace opened a Great Show of Singing and Talking Birds. Macaws, mynah birds, parakeets, and other winged tropical wonders were showcased in the newly built Tropical Department, “the most pleasing place for such a great exhibition.”

  Henry’s choice for a second expedition was just as dangerous as Nicaragua, if not more so. When Venezuela gained her independence in 1830, she initiated a seventy-four-year conflict between liberals and conservatives, including the feudal landlords called caudillos, which resulted in the death of three hundred thousand combatants and seven hundred thousand civilians. Venezuela’s civil strife was unusually virulent, even for South America. Operating in a sparsely populated country separated by huge geographical obstacles, the caudillos developed a rare skill in tearing the republic apart to increase their own power, and the creation of twenty federated states gave them the opportunity to do as they pleased. Now a new war had started. By 1871, another three thousand would be dead.

  Henry’s new route was more ambitious than the wide circular track he’d planned in Nicaragua. For the first leg of his trip, he proposed traveling the length of the Orinoco River, the massive waterway that stretches 1,500-1,700 miles and includes 436 tributaries, whose total basin covers 340,000-470,000 square miles. The river delta itself extends 165 miles, with 50 mouths opening to the sea. The Orinoco was the principal highway into wild country and had only been open for navigation since 1817. It was also the principal escape route for draftees avoiding military service and for blacks and Creoles fleeing slavery in the West Indies. But such freedom was precarious, and one observer commented that “all that many Creoles enjoyed along its banks was a gun, a hammock, a woman, and a fever.” The wars of liberation left large tracts of land abandoned and uncultivated. Between 1810 and 1860, millions of people left Europe for new homes, but only 12,978 settled in Venezuela. This was a harsh land that few people wanted, but it was up for grabs.

  When he left England in December 1868, Henry hoped to become the first Englishman to duplicate the route of German explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his companion Aimé Bonpland—and survive to tell his adventures. Von Humboldt was probably the greatest European explorer of South America of his age: he and Bonpland did nothing halfheartedly. When they set out for the Orinoco’s source in February 1800, they began by walking across the long flat grassland, or llano, that stretched between Caracas and the River Apure, the Orinoco’s largest tributary. From there they embarked on a long canoe journey, and by May 1800, accompanied by a Jesuit priest, had completed an overland portage to the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon. Near San Carlos de Rio Negro, on the disputed frontier between Brazil and Venezuela, they found the legendary Casiquiare “canal.”

  The Casiquiare is actually a two hundred-mile tributary of the upper Orinoco that also flows southwest through level marsh into the Rio Negro, forming a natural link between the Orinoco and Amazon that makes it the largest “bifurcation” on the planet. Until Humboldt’s account, it was just another jungle legend. In 1639, the Jesuit priest Father Acuna reported rumors of the canal, and in 1744, another Jesuit, Father Roman, accompanied some Portuguese slave traders when they returned from Venezuela to Brazil via the Casiquiare. No other European explorer had plied it since von Humboldt, though not for lack of trying. Alfred Russel Wallace tried from the Brazilian side but fell victim to a bout of malaria that nearly killed him. Spruce had contemplated the ascent until he found himself in the armed standoff in San Carlos between Portuguese merchants and Indians. Henry intended to drop down to San Carlos via the Casiquiare, then float down the Rio Negro to the Amazon and from there to the Atlantic, a journey of approximately five thousand miles.

  He began in typical fashion, with little preparation, carrying with him his fowling piece, trade goods, and sketchbook. There was no mention of a map or bottle of quinine: He’d depend on a mental sketch of the landscape and the good will of strangers. Historian Edward V. Lane believed “the main purpose of his journey was to study the rubber trade,” but in truth he didn’t mention rubber until he ran out of money and cast about for a quick source of funds. If there was a change in his method, it was that he took a companion, Rogers, “a young Englishman who accompanied me.” Henry seemed to know very little about him: Lane called him a sailor, which suggests they met on the voyage over from England. Their journey would be a litany of hardship, and through it all, poor Rogers rarely got a kind word. Why Henry invited him remains a mystery.

  Something had changed in Henry this second time around, and it wasn’t always attractive. He was more impatient with others than in Nicaragua, at times downright disdainful, a trait that led one historian to dub him a “self-respecting British prig.” Part of the change might lie in different circumstances. In Nicaragua, he’d been a tourist, happy to let new experiences wash over him, thinking perhaps his drawings of the tropics would bring some recognition. This time he was a seeker: His craving had blossomed during his year’s wait in London, and he sought, like others before him, an unspecified El Dorado.

  Henry was also more solidly “English” now than he’d been a year earlier. In Nicaragua he could easily criticize his homeland for abandoning the Mosquito Shore and their protection of his Indian friends. This time, on the way to St. Lucia, when they were delayed by the three-masted British warship Royal Alfred for a routine check of documents, he proclaimed, “What a difference there is in the appearance of the boat’s crew from an English man-of-war, on a foreign station, to the sailors belonging to any other power.” On board the Tamar with him was a recruiter for the 4th West Indian Regiment, “a very fine specimen of a West Indian soldier,” Henry enthused.

  Finding that no steamer would leave for the Orinoco for another three weeks, Henry spent two days securing passage on a smaller vessel. On January 11, 1869, Rogers and he hitched a ride with a boatload of smugglers. “Our little craft, about the size of a Margate lugger, was well manned; the crew were all excellent fellows in their way, although confirmed smugglers; indeed, the boat was afterward confiscated by the authorities.” The Creole master from Trinidad had been to England and seen the Crystal Palace; a man from Guadeloupe steered, while the Trinidadian cook “had traversed the Spanish main ever si
nce he was twelve years old.” Pedro, a mestizo from the island of Margarita, wrote down the native names of local fish and birds: “One hardly expects to find such a pitch of education in fellows with shirts like the rags remaining to us as relics of the Waterloo standards!” They crossed a well-defined line “where the greener water of the sea is borne back by the yellow tide of the Orinoco.” Sand spits around the mouth were thick with egrets and scarlet ibis. They penetrated the delta’s narrow, mangrove-lined channels and were engulfed by clouds of mosquitoes and flies.

  For two days they drifted up the labyrinthine channels of the delta, the sun broiling the inhabitants of the open boat, the still air sweltering and thick by midday. Sometimes they’d spot in a side channel the small canoes, or curiaras, of the indigenous Guarani, but they’d always disappear among the dense thickets, “paddling as for dear life,” Henry said. The tribe’s members were kidnapped and sold into slavery by the Spaniards, and smugglers like Henry’s hosts were not above participating. These Indians were said to “possess the knowledge of an ointment that is obnoxious to mosquitoes, which cease to torment them after they have anointed their bodies with the valuable charm.” After two days of this torment, they sailed into the main channel of the Orinoco and were driven upstream by a cooling coastal breeze. At sundown on January 22, nine days after entering the delta, they pulled into Ciudad Bolívar.