The gold machine, p.41
The Gold Machine, page 41
BRITISH SETTLEMENT IN PERU.
A COLONIAL ENTERPRISE.
“Yes, I went out to select 10,000,000 acres of the best land I could find in Peru. I have already marked out about 2,000,000 acres and have my eye on the rest. Before long I expect to have 25,000 men working there for the Peruvian Corporation, a company consisting of British holders of Peruvian bonds, to whom the Government of Peru has made over certain assets in the country, including this amount of land, in default of meeting the bonds. We shall grow coffee principally, and as both soil and climate are admirably adapted for cultivation, we have every prospect of getting a magnificent return for our labour. As for the Chunchas or Indians who are now spread over the portion of the country which I have selected, they will simply retire further back to the limitless unexplored forests and pampas eastwards of the Cordilleras.”
Mr Arthur Sinclair, a native of Aberdeen, an ex-coffee-planter of Ceylon and a mighty traveller, was the speaker. He arrived in Melbourne by the RMSS Oroya, and is paying a flying visit to Australasia in order to prime himself on the spot with the least information as to the suitability of coloured labour for plantation work in a tropical climate. For an enterprise of such magnitude it is necessary to examine witnesses and take the evidence of men of experience. When 25,000 men have to be conducted over the double range of the Andes and down into a hitherto unknown region in the valley of the Amazon, a journey which occupies several months, and has to be made through the territory of Indians armed with rude but effective weapons, and presumably as ready to fight as their forefathers were for their prairie homes, it is necessary that some care should be taken in selecting the colonists, or to put it more plainly, the invaders.
Mr Sinclair’s own feeling is in favour of Chinese labour, although the opinion in London leans rather to the white man. The ex-coffee-planter’s own experience has been that white men are not suited for field work in the tropics, and though the temperature in the selected region is not unduly oppressive, rarely rising above 80deg. Fahr. in the shade, its persistence is decidedly trying for the normal European constitution… Already 50 families of Italians and Frenchmen have been sent out to the chosen spot, which lies between the parallels of 5deg. and 10deg. south latitude, and between longitude 80deg. west and longitude 75deg. west. A few of the Frenchmen, scared by the solitudes that stretch away for millions of square miles towards the undulating plains of Brazil, bolted back to Paris immediately; but the remaining pioneers, under the control of a Scotch overseer, are devoting themselves to the cultivation of coffee, cinchona, rice, and manioc. The overseer, who is the only representative of Great Britain in the place, hails, as might be expected, from Aberdeen.
The directors of the Peruvian Corporation in London, whose chairman is Sir Alfred Dent, picked out Mr Sinclair as the best man that they could find to be entrusted with the duty of selecting the 10,000,000 acres handed over by the Peruvian Government, and Mr Sinclair, accompanied by Mr Ross, a coffee planter, and Mr Clark, the director of the botanical gardens in Ceylon, started on the long journey in the spring of 1891…When they left the train at Chicla the troubles of the travellers began in earnest. Friends in London had said good-bye to them without disguising their apprehensions that the explorers would never return alive, and they are now going forward into country where no native Spanish Peruvian even had ever shown his face. The three men were well armed and well equipped, and they started in good heart… with a cavalcade of 20 pack mules and two Spanish priests, who undertook to act as guides…
Making their way down towards the river Perene, a tributary of the Amazon, the travellers came upon the monarch of the Chunchas, King Chokery, an affable potentate… When King Chokery had shaken off his indisposition and been photographed with his wife and family, he caused rafts to be built and accompanied the explorers with a bodyguard of troops for 50 miles down the river, where the camp was pitched. Presently the troops became restless, and Mr Sinclair and his companions had an anxious and sleepless night, waiting, revolver in hand, for the expected rush. The warlike designs of the Chunchas were, however, peacefully dissolved in potations of native spirit, and the explorers lived to select the site of the new settlement. The first block chosen had a frontage of 60 miles on either bank of the Amazon, with a depth of 50 miles back, and here the experiment is to be begun by planting nurseries of the coffee shrub as well as cocoa and cinchona. The Chunchas, stupefied with drink, look on in blissful unconsciousness at this second invasion of their country. Not many miles from the new settlement the travellers were shown a crumbling tomb, said to contain the remains of the unfortunate King Atahualpa… Pizarro went through the country with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. The bondholders in London are taking a ledger instead of a Bible, and a ploughshare instead of a sword, for the enterprise is made in the name of commerce, and not in the name of religion… That is why the invasion has been planned, and as far as can be seen at present either Tamil Indians or Chinamen will form the bulk of the mercenaries.
And so I recognised, as a warning, with only the first part of the job achieved, the easy part, the journey, how swiftly myths can be cooked, and how casually ‘facts’ are suborned. The Australian journalist dutifully reported my great-grandfather’s pitch, while listening to the first rehearsal for a fiction of the 1891 expedition still to be written. In this Arthur was a true modernist, he fulfilled his contracted PR requirements before the book was published. He got his retaliation in first and he left the clues by which his descendants would be seduced into rounding out the history and accepting the consequences.
Proxima Centauri
Solly Mander
‘When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal. The boy whistles on a wall in Mexico. Tess leans her head against a cow. They will keep doing that forever.’
– Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise
You can always return, but you don’t come back. Sleeping dogs around the domestic hearth know your shape and smell, but they will not lift their heads to growl a welcome. You are indeed fortunate if your abandoned wife is not planning to murder you in the bath. A questionable fiction of distant adventure, explored and exploited, has become the pale shadow of a larger truth. Our remembered London, on the wrong side of the Peruvian expedition, was a sonar echo of that remark by the Theodor Koch-Grünberg character in Embrace of the Serpent. ‘When I came back, I had become another man.’
The implication being, although the foolish traveller has not yet begun to grasp it: he never did come back. Another entity has taken his place. The old self is extinguished: a shade, a replicant. One of those affectless spectres wandering jungle trails that disappear immediately behind them. The historic Koch-Grünberg, romanticised through a film impersonation, is obliged to reoccupy the hollow shell waiting for him in his old country: in his house, the marital bed.
We have inspected the cave of evidence, the story of the Perené Colony reduced to its constituent parts, bagged and left to rot on the floor. Because of our failure to reach the territory beyond the rapids, there would be no resolution to my great-grandfather’s unspoken challenge. And no confrontational encounter with his querulous spirit. Without an achieved destination for the balsa raft, there was no fixed point from which we could depart. I would have to re-learn, yard by yard, how to haunt myself on home ground where my footsteps no longer registered the faintest imprint.
My account now completed, I had to admit that my great-grandfather, author and performer in the drama of Peruvian coffee colonisation, was finally unknowable. Out of reach. Retracing his footsteps brought me no nearer to an understanding of my own impulses, flaws and obsessions. Soaking in a warm Hackney bath, I dipped into a recovered first draft of W.B. Yeats’ Journal. A couple of sentences took my eye: ‘Today, for the first time, I lost my temper with an actor. Sinclair refused to play the part he was assigned.’ And so he did. I had pre-scripted a narrative, based on a book published in 1895, but the main character stubbornly declined his ‘assigned’ role in a revised afterlife. Yeats was out of humour too, with the provincial politics of the Abbey Theatre, with endless squabbles over Irish nationalism. And with conjured spirits and projections with a mind of their own. But, worst of all, were the long hours these tedious affairs stole from the real business of doing nothing creatively; listening and waiting. The poet’s life task, as he acknowledged (and as I have quoted, time and again), was to ‘assist the imagination of the dead’. The ones who are always nudging and whispering at the window.
I couldn’t resist investigating this other Sinclair, the Abbey Theatre regular. He was billed as ‘Arthur Sinclair’: that was a good start. Arthur took the character parts, the comic roles, especially in O’Casey and Shaw. He married Maire O’Neill, sister of the celebrated performer/director Sara Allgood. Hitchcock wanted him for Captain Boyle in his film of Juno and the Paycock. Wanted his bluster. Arthur had to pass on that one, he was already under contract to tour the play. But he made an impression, supporting Margaret Lockwood and Dennis Price, in Brian Desmond Hurst’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill. Much more pertinent was the role of ‘Patsy’ O’Brien in the 1937 film of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Sinclair plays an Irish ‘dream chaser’ who fails to strike it rich with a South African mine. He persuades Allan Quartermain (Cedric Hardwicke) to give him a ride to the coast in his wagon. Along the way they pick up a dying man with a map of the route to the fabled treasure of King Solomon. Sinclair/O’Brien steals the map and vanishes into the night. It doesn’t turn out well. ‘Unfriendly natives’ are waiting on the other side of the mountains. There are rituals for ‘smelling out evildoers’.
‘Arthur Sinclair, Stage Star, Dead – Seen in Many Movies,’ reported the New York Times in December 1951. But ‘Arthur Sinclair’ was not really Arthur Sinclair. He was born in Dublin as Arthur McDonnell. The aspiring actor thought the Scottish adoption would look better on playbills. The Dubliner was ten years old when In Tropical Lands was published. I like to think he might have read it. He was the right age for stories of imperialist adventure, treasure maps, and magical ceremonies. But, on just one occasion, he wouldn’t take the role assigned to him by the great W.B. Yeats. And, thereby, earned his solitary reference in the Journal.
Something happened. The news from Bajo Marankiari was not good, Grant reported. Forbidden to return in order to complete his film without interference from his fellow travellers, the director was prospecting on Skype. Ashaninka internet, he said, was ‘patchy’. It was the rainy season. Shima-Shima, the weather shaman, would dive into Lucho’s taxi while they headed off in search of a signal. Roads were flooded. But shaman and guide were ‘in good form’. The village was isolated now, cut off by roadblocks. One old man had died. The chief’s mother, mistress of the smoke, had lost her mind and been taken to another place, where, it was hoped, she might in time recover it. Shima-Shima was brewing anti-Covid potions for the local police, the ones enforcing the enclosures. Denied all access to tourist income, the Ashaninka had reverted to planting and self-sufficiency. Velisa and her mother found a secret place in which to see out the time of the virus, while they dosed on ayahuasca.
Warnings from the spoiled past soured the light over Stratford. Something held the court of crows to worn grass still recovering from a lost summer’s parties. Immersed for winter months in the privileged darkness of research and recovery, I woke one fine spring morning, when those weeks of ‘female’ rain finally relented, to news of the latest and most resistant plague. A gift from the animal markets. An interspecies message from the last wild places. And a gift that keeps giving. I hoped it was not part of the luggage of guilt I carried home with me from the cloud forest. I was one of the fortunate few whose lives were easily accommodated to forms of elective lockdown, randomly imposed (and instantly revised) from above. I walked out early and then stayed at my desk. The cancellation of public events, talks, promotions, university classes, was even an advantage. But we couldn’t visit our children and grandchildren on the other side of the park, or entertain them in our house. It was a particular pleasure, therefore, to listen to Farne’s first edited podcasts from the trip we had made together, just in time. In the last days of freedom.
One of the recordings brought home to me how lacking in emotional intelligence my father’s side of the family had always been. Self-sufficiency, against all odds, as a highland boast. And how I had, in my own turn, inherited aspects of that. Farne opened one episode with a lovely insert. On the night before she departed for the airport, while she was still trying to force everything into her zipped carrying bag, she ‘interviewed’ her two children, asking them how they felt about the adventure on which she was launched. Her nine-year-old son said that he didn’t want her to go, he would miss her. But then he rallied with the order that she must promise to come home safely. Her twelve-year-old daughter, in a very measured and sensible response, said that she understood why the journey was necessary at this point in her mother’s life. And she supported it. It had taken Farne a long time, back with London, her job, her family and the dictatorship of the virus, to listen to those hours and hours of conversation from Peru, but in editing and introducing this material, she proved that she really had returned, undamaged.
Arthur Sinclair’s pilgrimages in tropical lands, his colourful experiences, dramas and comic encounters, are reported without reference to wife and family. His published autobiographical sketch positions him as emerging from a certain landscape, to which he makes continual reference. And to which he pays allegiance. He acknowledges, reluctantly, that he had a father. His mother, siblings and intimate connections are nowhere to be found.
Having mapped out the story of our trip in my great-grandfather’s footprints, instinct told me that I needed to make a week’s excursion, in company with Farne, to Aberdeen, Banff, Cults, and the other addresses where Arthur lived in his ten-year retirement. And Orkney too. Especially Orkney. Those unvisited islands held some teasing secret of origin. Scottish retrievals would, I felt, close off the book. I was especially taken with Arthur’s epiphany, in the teeth of Tasmanian horrors, when he remembered ‘rambling on Holburn Head, near Thurso’ and lying down ‘full length on the grass’ to listen to laverocks keening against the violent suck and pull of the sea. My great-grandfather experiences ‘something’ that cannot be named. But which must, surely, be still there, in that place, open to access. Such was my tentative plan. Dates were found. Census forms scoured. Graves located and inscriptions recorded. The solution was far too tidy. It was rapidly shredded by news reports and impossible government instructions.
Footballers in an Aberdeen pub closed off the city to outsiders. Trawlermen exported the virus to Orkney. There was even a train derailment to chime with the railway disaster on the Great North of Scotland line opened up by Sir James Elphinstone, Arthur’s patron.
My Scottish forebears told so many stories, described and evaluated so many lands, shaped so many anecdotes of human absurdity and savage accident, as a smokescreen. Readers must never notice that the closest things are left unspoken. And perhaps unfelt. Unconfessed. One time, when I was due to be collected from school in Gloucestershire by both parents, nobody appeared. And then, very late, when I was about to walk to the station, humping my bags, my father came alone. We drove back to Wales, not a word was said about my mother. I looked around the house for her. She wasn’t there. ‘Oh yes,’ my father admitted. ‘She’s in hospital for a little operation. She’ll be back in a few days.’ I did think, even then, that this was a little odd.
Farne, active on her laptop, sent me a photograph of Arthur Sinclair’s grave at Springbank Cemetery, Aberdeen. A sombre granite tongue for a man whose life, with dates, is summarised as: ‘Late of Ceylon’. His wife, Margaret MacGregor, who lived on until 1914, is interred with him. Along with their daughter Margaret Mary Rowlands, who died in 1927. The one who stayed in Scotland.
There was more. Farne discovered that Arthur rented Banff Castle from the Earl of Seafield for £55 per annum. She also turned up his Last Will and Testament. When ‘Debts on Heritage’ (and Funeral Expenses) had been subtracted from ‘Value of Heritage’, £751. 2s. 2½d was left. The youngest son, Henry Sinclair, a medical practitioner in Glamorganshire, is named as one of the executors.
Uncomfortable stories are suppressed. Gravestones advertise them. I found an album with the usual mix of known and unknown relatives and curious strangers. There was another Aberdeen memorial. I thought, at first, it was for my grandfather, the doctor. There was a tremendous spread of flowers, cards and messages. But then I looked more closely: Henry Sinclair, M.D., C.M., had designed and erected the gravestone for his daughter, Sheila Margaret Mary, who died at the age of seventeen. An aunt about whose existence I knew nothing. This loss was never mentioned. Her life was an unspoken mystery. There was a second photograph, without the flowers, taken some years later of the same memorial. Now the name of my grandmother, Jeannie Stratton Grassick, has been added. And my father’s younger brother, Leslie, is standing there, dressed in mourning black: 1938.
Going through the album, Sheila can now be identified, with her two younger brothers, among the dogs, horses, cats and Maesteg maids in starched pinafores. She poses by studio seascapes. She acts out, with her brothers, costumed scenes from Shakespeare. Then she is gone and removed entirely from the family legend, such as it is.
I heard about my own older sister, another Sheila, who died as a baby. Hardly in the world. But she was part of the Welsh story and always present, shadowing the drama of my own birth. Again it was Farne’s persistence that recovered my erased aunt. She died, in the house where I grew up, from an epileptic seizure. Painful as that must have been, the diagnosis carried a residue of shame. It was folded away in a sealed drawer. Like her father and mother, Sheila was buried in a far country. In a city we would not now be visiting.
