The fort with a view
By Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in Caribbean Beat, March/April
2007
On a concrete wall above the stelling at
Bartica, in bold black and red letters, someone had painted an appeal
to public morals. But the final line was worn away by the rain, and the
message trailed off ambiguously. “What’s the Rush? Maybe everybody is
thinking about Sex but not everybody is doing it. Why not wait! You can
have...”
We clambered from the speedboat up the wooden stelling — the Dutch word
for a wharf, still used on the coasts and rivers of Guyana. The little
blue-painted huts of the Bartica market came right to the edge of the
river. It was mid-morning, and the market was crowded with women
shopping, men pushing barrows laden with vegetables, dogs hovering
anxiously near the butchers’ stalls.
An hour before, we had pulled away from the stelling at Parika, near
the mouth of the Essequibo, thirty-five miles downstream. The
speedboat, laden with sixteen passengers and three crew, had extricated
itself from the knot of river-traffic, swept past the ferry being
loaded with bales of cargo, and pointed its bow south. At its mouth,
the Essequibo is more than ten miles wide, with three main channels
divided by islands, but up-river it narrowed to a mere three miles.
Along the banks, small houses and lumber yards gave way to mangrove,
then thick forest. Finally a plume of smoke appeared, then a line of
colourful buildings like dots in the distance.
Bartica is a small, busy town of maybe eight thousand people, with an
orderly street grid, a hospital, a school, and a nearby Benedictine
monastery, all situated on a sort of promontory where the Essequibo,
Guyana’s biggest river, is joined by its biggest tributary, the
Mazaruni. Three miles up, the Mazaruni is in turn joined by its own
most important tributary, the Cuyuni. At the confluence of these three
great rivers, Bartica is sometimes called the “gateway to the interior.”
For more than a century, it has been the last outpost of “civilisation”
for miners, loggers, missionaries, and explorers heading into Guyana’s
remote forested north-western region. In the early twentieth century,
during Guyana’s modest gold rush, it grew into something of a boom
town, with saloons and brothels springing up to service hard-working,
hard-living pork-knockers, as gold and diamond prospectors were once
called.
But Bartica’s history stretches even further back, to the earliest days
of European colonial contact with this part of South America, and we
had come in the hope of visiting one of the oldest surviving relics of
that time: Kyk-over-Al, the ruined Dutch fort in the mouth of the
Cuyuni.
*
But first we had to find another boat.
In a semi-official-looking hut at the top of the stelling sat a man
with a huge ledger. We asked him where we could catch a boat to Fort
Island.
“Talk to my friend Carter. Carter! Some persons looking to hire a boat.”
Carter was a tall, serious man wearing a red baseball cap.
“To go to Fort Island and come back? Ten thousand.”
Ten thousand Guyanese dollars: about US$50. Clearly some bargaining was
called for. “Too much. We’ll stay in Bartica” was our opening gambit,
and we strolled away through the market. Carter followed, explaining
that boat fuel was expensive, boat captains in high demand.
The price nudged down, but not enough. “No, thanks.” We climbed a
rickety staircase to a little restaurant above a general goods store,
and ordered orange juice. Ten minutes later Carter reappeared in the
doorway. Had we reconsidered? Had he?
Half an hour later, a deal was struck. In return for a “special rate”
we would detour to a nearby settlement, to deliver another batch of
passengers with all their morning shopping.
*
The Guianas, the region of South America between the Orinoco and the
Amazon, fascinated European adventurers. A century after Columbus
sailed past, Walter Raleigh explored this coast, feverishly searching
for the route to El Dorado. But the Dutch were the first Europeans to
establish a permanent settlement here. In the early seventeenth
century, a party of Dutch colonists sailed up the Essequibo and a short
way up the Mazaruni, and chose a small island for the site of a
star-shaped fort. Armed with a few guns, it was first named Fort Ter
Hoogen, but soon its nickname, Kyk-over-Al — “see over all” — took
over. Offering admirable vantage over the three river highways,
Kyk-over-Al became the effective capital of the Dutch Essequibo colony.
From here, Dutch traders penetrated far into the interior, establishing
commercial relations with the indigenous Amerindians. By the 1650s,
sugar plantations stretched along the banks of the Essequibo. On the
promontory where Bartica would be built was a plantation called Vryheid.
In 1666 — the year of the Great Fire of London — English forces managed
to capture Kyk-over-Al. A trio of French ships did the same in 1708.
Both times the Dutch recaptured it. In 1716, Kyk-over-Al was bursting
at its seams and a roomier site on the nearby river bank was developed.
Eventually, as Dutch engineers reclaimed Guyana’s fertile low-lying
seacoast, the focus shifted north, and in 1748 most of Kyk-over-Al was
demolished, its bricks used to build a sugar mill at a plantation
downstream.
The Dutch administration moved to the east bank of the Demerara River,
to a settlement called Stabroek. Later the English would rename it
Georgetown. And for eighty years the forest reclaimed the one-time
capital of Dutch Guyana.
In 1829, the Church Missionary Society established a station in the
north-west, the better to proselytise the Amerindians. As the Dutch had
done, the missionaries liked the advantages of the Essequibo-Mazaruni
confluence, and on the former Vryheid plantation they established
Bartica Grove. By the end of the century, Bartica, having dropped the
“Grove” and forgotten its spiritual origins, was on the verge of
becoming a minor gold-rush boom town.
Kyl-over-Al also enjoyed a return to relevance: during the 1897
boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela, British authorities
excavated its ruins in an attempt to prove the antiquity of the Dutch
settlement. The keystone of the fort’s surviving arch, it’s said, was
removed all the way to London for examination, then transported back
across the Atlantic for careful replacement.
*
We returned to the stelling and found Carter’s boat, and headed off
round the promontory and into the Mazaruni. The confluence of the
rivers was a vast expanse of water, rimmed on three sides by low river
banks. It felt as if we were putting out to sea. A couple of small
islands rose from the “bay.”
Had the history of Guyana taken a slightly different turn, this might
today be the site of the country’s capital city. Bartica’s situation
rivals for grandeur any of the world’s great harbour cities: San
Francisco, Hong Kong, Sydney.
Twenty minutes later, we approached a small, nondescript island. From
behind a couple of trees a brick arch emerged, familiar from dozens of
photographs.
We docked at a long jetty. There were flowering shrubs, and a big mango
tree, and someone had recently cut the weeds and vines that covered the
low rise. There, behind a hibiscus bush, was all that remained of the
once-crucial outpost. The red-brick arch was perhaps ten feet tall. The
much-travelled keystone once sported a coat of arms, but centuries of
rain had worn the carving down to a few lumps. The sun beat down
relentlessly, and the river, swollen by August rains, oozed silently by.
I’d like to report that we had some kind of epiphany as we walked
around the arch, some unexpected historical insight. But the heat was
overwhelming, and after nearly four centuries the Kyk-over-Al arch was
well-practised in keeping its secrets.
It was too hot even to talk. On our way back to Bartica, Carter stopped
at Baracara Island, a little sandspit in the Mazaruni just big enough
for a beach-house and a few palm trees, so we could swim in the
Coca-Cola brown river water. Across the river macaws circled and
called. Kyk-over-Al, maybe a mile behind us, felt hopelessly far away.
*
The western sky darkened and glowered as we returned to the Bartica
stelling. Thunder hummed down the river. At the first market stall a
woman sold us cups of sweet, milky coffee and freshly fried plantain
chips, while her husband made a still-life in his vegetable barrow,
arranging bundles of string beans, eggplant, cabbages, with the
deftness of an Impressionist. A cow lumbered past. Two men clutching
beer bottles started arguing loudly, hurling baroque obscenities. The
rain came with a roar, and Bartica hunkered cosily down. +