The gold machine, p.6
The Gold Machine, page 6
Close reading reveals notes signed by ‘Old Colonist’. I know this to be one of Arthur Sinclair’s pseudonyms. The style, with its characteristic fondness for colourful anecdotes, clearly belongs to my great-grandfather. He tells how Elphinstone, when he decides, on a whim, to sweep a gravel path, is mistaken for one of his gardeners. With hilarious consequences. Lady Elphinstone brings news to her husband, as he patrols the lawn.
‘You are the father of twins.’
‘Two! That’s one too many for a poor man.’
The anonymous author plays metafictional games by awarding himself various minor walk-on roles. Arthur is listed as attending a dinner celebrating the coffee enterprise, and chaired by Sir James Elphinstone, but he does not take a prominent part. The most intriguing aspect of the pamphlet is a landscape-format photograph: ‘Sir James Elphinstone amongst the Planters.’ Behind the shaggy bearlike group is a low shed with the steep ridged slopes of a plantation rising threateningly behind. The planters have an abundance of untamed beard to shame Shoreditch. They look like a Devil’s Island crew, denied barbers, and gathered, prisoners and warders together, around their visiting commandant. The ‘Old Colonist’ concludes by naming those who posed for the group portrait at Kadienlena Harvest Home in January 1870.
‘Arthur Sinclair,’ he says, ‘kept in the background.’ My great-grandfather might be the one who positions himself at the end of the second row, where he crouches, half-hidden. The only one who is at liberty to deny that he was ever there. Arthur quotes Charles Lamb: ‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.’
Persisting, I arrive at the proper books, leather-bound, lettered in gilt, decorative covers and spines: false glitter on a dingy shelf. There aren’t many antiquarian items left. Ceylon in 1888 by John Ferguson has a presentation inscription: ‘To Arthur Sinclair, Esq (Birkhill, Dundee), the oldest & best friend made in Ceylon by the author. 1883.’ Ferguson was one of the editors and publishers of the newspaper responsible for so many of Arthur’s reports. His book is a promotional exercise, lavishly produced, with engravings, foldout maps and charts. Chapter XI is headed PRESENT PROSPECTS FOR CAPITALISTS IN CEYLON. ‘Still a good field for investment – Its freedom from atmospheric disturbances – Shipping conveniences at new harbour of Colombo – Low freights – Cheap and unrivalled means of transport – Large tracts available for tea and other tropical culture – Openings for young men with capital – High position taken by the Ceylon planter.’
‘As a body,’ Ferguson writes, ‘Ceylon planters are among the most intelligent, gentlemanly, and hospitable of any colonists in British dependencies. The rough work of pioneering in the early days before there were district roads, villages, supplies, doctors, or other comforts of civilization, was chiefly done by hard-headed Scots: men bivouacked in the trackless jungle with the scantiest accommodation under tropical rains lasting for weeks together, with rivers swollen to flood-level and impassable, while food supplies often ran short, as none could be got across the wide torrents.’
But the book that excited me most also helped to move Arthur’s story towards the final chapter, his fateful expedition to Peru. The Great River (Notes on the Amazon and its Tributaries and the Steamer Services) was published in Paternoster Row, London, in 1904, a year before my great-grandfather died. The half-title has his wavering ownership signature. There are so many haunting black and white photographs and casually speculative maps that The Great River feels more like an alternative-world graphic novel than a PR pitch for the Amazon Steam Navigation Company. The steamers pictured, coughing smoke, stern wheels spinning, are ready to be auditioned for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. There are illustrations of ‘Hauling Canoes through the Rapids’, remote trading stations, tapirs, alligators and ‘Types of Amazonian Indians’. Selective portraits of rubber plantations put a gloss on the barbarous horrors exposed in the report commissioned from the Irish diplomat Roger Casement. Photographs can be so easily suborned, edited to advantage. They mean what we need them to mean. Casement’s lucid reports and his diaries from the Congo and the Amazon, actual or improved by the Secret State, must be read alongside the images he captured for criminal evidence or private pleasure. Both duties, the public and the personal, are crawling with guilt and shame.
‘With his gun at hand, ready for any shot,’ writes the anonymous provider of the Steam Company’s promotional copy, ‘the visitor can paddle for miles through this fluvial paradise, wandering through a perfect Elysium of beauty, where scarce a ripple disturbs the water, and the foliage is mirrored so clearly that it is often difficult to determine where the reality ceases and the reflection commences.’
The introduction to The Great River comes with a full-page pen and ink drawing suggestive of antebellum Mississippi: two dandified plantation owners, puffing on cheroots, shake on a deal, while a swaying waterfront lady, like Carmen Miranda in blackface, balances a huge platter of fruit on her head. The photographic illustrations of indigenous people are neither ethnographic nor authentic records of encounters. They are studio-contrived to expose naked, pre-adolescent breasts, male weapons and headdresses.
The scanty population of the upper districts of the Great River is largely composed of Indians and half-castes, who have gradually been brought within the pale of civilization by communication with traders and others… It is a remarkable fact, attested by the best Amazonian authorities, that the Indians cannot withstand the heat of the climate so well as the negroes (of whom, however, there are comparatively few up the rivers) and, indeed, the Indian seems to suffer from its effects more than the White man does.
Transported Africans, formerly enslaved on the plantations of Barbados, become, by force of circumstance, themselves the enforcers, the corporals charged by rubber barons like the infamous Julio César Arana of Iquitos, or Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, with hunting down runaways pressed into servitude. The corporals are required to carry out tortures, whippings, amputations, brandings, burnings and drownings, when insufficient quotas of rubber are returned from the forest. The whole unnatural system has been turned on its head; victim becoming victimiser becoming victim, in the service of remote investors and a booming market. The corporals are the metal-tipped tentacles of a rhino whip hidden in the drawer of a partners’ desk in the offices of the Peruvian Amazon Company, chartered and thriving in London, where the obscene oligarch Arana kept his house. And entertained compliant bankers and magnates.
Casement’s camera filtered hurt. ‘I’ll leave my bones on that damned trip,’ he says in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Dream of the Celt. Sickening, willing his coming disgrace and execution, like that other knight, Walter Raleigh, with his futile voyages in search of El Dorado, the civil servant took down the strategic confessions of the men from Barbados – on the promise of helping them to be repatriated to the island which was never their home. The condemned cell was a necessary device in which to make a reckoning of a spoiled life.
In Vargas Llosa’s novel, the plantation owner, Victor Israel, a Maltese Jew, replies to a challenge from Casement. The man tasked with producing a report into the iniquities of the rubber trade asks his reluctant informant if he has ever tried to understand the point of view of ‘the people you call savages’. How do they feel when ‘white or mestizo gentlemen come with rifles and revolvers and demand that they abandon their families’?
‘Do you put cannibals of Amazonia on the same plane as the pioneers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who work in heroic conditions and risk our lives to transform these forests into a civilized land?’ Israel replied.
A civilised wilderness remains a wilderness. And ‘civilization’ is rapidly and comprehensively wilded. The virus of horror – the horror, the horror – is shipped out with the stolen plants. Herzog’s riverboat, dragged over a mutilated hill by paid Ashaninka extras, driven to this inexplicable task, becomes a tin can in the rapids, a smashed shell with bloodied technicians, paying a posthumous homage to that man of history, Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald.
The rubber baron was buried in Iquitos General Cemetery in 1897. He died at the age of thirty-five, in company with a Bolivian business associate, when his ship the Contamana went down on the Urubamba. A fate that the indigenous members of the crew might have seen as a blessing, a confirmation of Fitzcarrald’s messianic status. The river was accepting one of its own. In Puerto Maldonaldo you can still view the skeletal remains of the wreck, its ribs being slowly crushed by the serpentine fecundity of the jungle.
The Amazon, efficiently serviced by steamers, twin-screw vessels of good speed, fitted with electric light, was open for business. After preliminary chapters on ships and wharves and railways, The Great River offers a useful summary of the state of rubber cultivation, the best methods and the highest yields. ‘It would thus appear that the supply of Rubber in Amazonia is practically inexhaustible, for although a few trees may perish every year through injudicious tapping, there are numberless seedlings constantly growing up in a wild state to take the place of the ancient stock.’
An upbeat introduction concludes with a paragraph recommending the services of the Royal Mail Steamers of the Booth Steamship Company Ltd., with their head-office at 30 James Street, Liverpool. There are three or four sailings a month for Pará (at the mouth of the Amazon), after coaling at Cardiff. ‘The voyage occupies about fifteen days.’ The young Casement, sent away from Ireland, worked as a clerk for the Elder Dempster Line, another Liverpool shipping concern. They traded between Britain and West Africa.
The Great River closes with advertisements for valves, engines, hauling-lines, Manila rope, rubber goods, railway carriages, bridges, jetties and English Royal Sanitary Ware. A page is reserved for The Booth Line. FREQUENT & RAPID SERVICE FROM LIVERPOOL TO PARA & MANAOS (RIVER AMAZON). PASSAGE MONEY, FIRST CLASS: FARES FROM ENGLAND & PARIS TO BRAZIL, FROM £21 to £30. PARTICULARS TO BE HAD ON APPLICATION.
When the Barbadian overseers, having confessed their part in the atrocities, accept Casement’s plan, to smuggle them out to La Esperanza, and then on the first boat to Manáos, their interrogator confirms that he will be there to pick them up on the Atahualpa of the Booth Line. A nice touch, this invocation of the original Inca chief and his Andean successor with his cave of gold.
Casement fears for his life. The agents of the Peruvian Amazon Company understand the implications of the report. And the possible consequences. But what might not have been appreciated at the time was that the director of the pioneering Liverpool shipping line, a man of remarkable drive and energy who sailed on the maiden voyage to the Amazon in 1866, was Charles Booth, instigator of a monumental statistical research programme, Life and Labour of the People in London. Booth’s colour-coded maps of previously unexplored urban terrain offered the well-intentioned classes as much of a terra incognita as the Amazonian rainforest. If the psychogeographers of the 1960s looked for the beach beneath the streets of Paris, Booth tramped the alleys and tenements of the Victorian night with an implanted fever dream of the jungle: the cries of beasts, the dirt-crusted alien hordes crammed together, waiting to be classified, patronised and made ready for improvement.
The Beast in the Jungle
‘This horror of waking – this was knowledge…’
– Henry James
Look closely at late photographs of Charles Booth. Look at what is printed on tightening skin, the mask pinching against bone resistance: family, property and good works. There is a heavy price to be paid for material success. Those maps of poverty, menu cards of London’s shame, are coloured with Booth’s blood and breath. Where so many of the grave beards in my story – Arthur Sinclair, Roger Casement, and the regiment of half-mad adventurers disappearing into the jungle – believe that the great thing, the transformative mystery, is elsewhere, across the ocean, accessed by risk, sweated miles and tamed natives, Booth knew that the condition of darkness was waiting in the city. It was a qualification of ignorance.
Later urbanists, like the Beat Generation writers and poets in wartime New York City, hustling through subterranean versions of a mechanised hell, and shipping out in the Merchant Marine, fantasised about the ultimate high: the death trip of the Amazonian vine. Yagé, ayahuasca, daime. Burroughs and Ginsberg making their pioneering junk-sex tourist expeditions through Peru, Panama, Ecuador and Chile in the late 1950s. Exchanging letters.
‘The whole fucking Cosmos broke loose around me,’ Ginsberg reported from Pucallpa, Peru, in 1960. ‘The strongest and worst I’ve ever had it nearly… I hardly have the nerve to go back, afraid of some real madness, a Changed Universe permanently changed.’ But what Burroughs retrieves is the confirmation that the membrane between the fiction of the jungle and the fiction of the city is wafer thin. You can put your fist right through it. When Manhattan collapses into pharmaceutical chaos in Blade Runner: A Movie (1979), he asserts that the city of his imagination ‘has come to represent all cities’. The swarming fish from private aquariums have been dumped into the waterways of New York. ‘Freshwater sharks cruise the Hudson.’ Wild animals have been released from the zoo in Central Park. Pushers roam the ruined streets selling jungle vine extracts. ‘Amazon pill meester? Very good price… $500.’
The ageing Booth is trapped within the subtle light-creep of mortality in a photographic portrait. High cheekbones and frown lines like incisions for a botched facelift. Tight mouth muted in a neatly barbered beard. Waistcoat pulsing with constellations of tiny white points, a chainmail mesh under the best Irish tweed. The haunted expression is a rictus of caste. He has seen so much on his London walks, more than he could erase on the fifteen-day voyage to Pará. But the jungle he will never penetrate absorbs him. In the sudden, shrieking darkness it lets him know what is surely coming. The heavy tides of the London streets stall his progress. He is one of those urban witnesses that Rilke identifies: ‘People who have been walking too long and simply stop.’ It is more painful to be stopped than to be dead. Dead in life. But these compulsive tramps, mad for statistics, are worse than stopped, they are lost. After so many laborious circuits, the walk continues without the walker.
Born into a Liverpool family of corn traders in 1840, Booth took the company into the leather business, and then shipping. He opened up regular transatlantic routes to South America and down the Amazon to Iquitos. Alongside these mercantile activities, he spent much of his fortune on organising a comprehensive inquiry into the horrors of London. He was obsessed with the spectre of urban poverty, the jungle that might at any hour overwhelm us.
There is such morbid beauty in the ‘Descriptive Maps of London Poverty’ that illuminate the seventeen volumes of diligent statistical harvesting that comprise Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London. The maps are strangely modern, anticipating digital captures of a self-revising topography. Painterly grids, stitched from numerous wearying journeys of research, solicit further journeys.
Reliable maps are the first requirement of the colonist. The lower depths of Victorian London, still unfathomed, were a potential resource. Religion was weaponised, the church had its armies of occupation. Booth’s meticulously graded delineation of ‘chronic want’ converted ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ blots and pestilential ‘dust holes’ into attractive destinations for trespassers: journalists, missionaries, evangelical Christians, and lowlife novelists excited by evidence of blight; the sooty blush on the complexions of a tubercular workforce. Those canvas-backed classroom maps celebrating imperial trade routes were an inspiration. There was always somewhere to discover and to possess by force of arms. But who wants to voyage into local rumours of hunger and poverty? Who wants to peek into dark places stacked with the spectres of cruelly abandoned old age? And yet some primitive instinct draws us towards the cave of the ‘lowest class’ from which no light escapes, and from which it is almost impossible to ascend.
Arthur Morrison published his Tales of Mean Streets in 1894. ‘But who knows the East End?’ he wrote. ‘A shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin… The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed.’ Jack London shouldered his way into the territory as a muscular tourist in rag-and-bone-shop disguise, primed with notebook and camera, to make a documentary report, The People of the Abyss. A travel journal that behaves with all the swagger of fiction. The novels of George Gissing navigate the perimeter of ruin, the point at which a respectable clerk or jobbing author might fall through the colours of Booth’s Poverty Map, from the purple of moderate comfort to the dark blue of shame. Curdled beer and butchery: the miasma of London poverty, carried on that dreaded ‘wind from the east’, was a singularity he was driven to explore and describe.
Taking up Booth’s maps, we notice the fading of the City of London, the disappearance of Hyde Park, and the tactful erasure of the grim panopticon of Millbank Penitentiary. Acknowledged sites of recreation or containment are not required in this comprehensive survey. The riverside settlement, the walled City of investment, doesn’t register on the Poverty Map: nobody lives there. Nothing thrives except debt and credit. The products of the Amazon, of India and Ceylon – rubber, coffee, tea and cinchona – are traded in the Mincing Lane exchange. But those unmentionable activities are left as secure as the society gatherings in Julio Arana’s palatial mansion.
A few paces away, through the portal of some tight alleyway, beyond the hustle and stink of a sprawling street market, colour begins: blues, purples and blacks. The immigrant quarter of Whitechapel is the authentic English jungle, a brick-built Amazonia with few exploitable resources apart from the hidden lives and habits of its voiceless tribal inhabitants. ‘As there is a darkest Africa,’ Booth wrote, ‘is there not also a darkest England?’
