TheThiefattheEndoftheWorld

Henry Wickham was thirteen when the cinchona mission started and fifteen when Robert Cross straggled back to Kew with the purloined red-bark seeds. Though the triumph was covered in the papers, he could not have cared less about the imperial implications of cinchona’s domestication. What mattered was the jungle and the writings of Spruce, Darwin, Bates, Wallace, and others. In the heat and moisture of the Amazon Basin existed a fertility like nothing Western man had experienced, a force of life beyond control. There was something hypnotic about the rain forest: “I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest,” Darwin wrote in his Beagle journals. “The air is deliciously cool and soft; full of enjoyment, one fervently desires to live in retirement in this new and grander world.”

Earthly paradise was the recurring theme. Columbus was the first European to be enchanted by the land where “the good and soft smell of flowers and trees was the sweetest thing in the world.” The scientific names for the banana—Musa paradisiaca and M. sapientum—elicited this notion, the latter associated with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree was God’s dwelling place in sacred mythology: the cypress was sacred, the ash in Scandinavia represented the universe, the fig in India. Just as God spoke from trees in the Bible, He spoke to explorers in the forest. It was in the jungle that Man was closest to the Divine.

But Nature’s exuberance could seduce the unwary. In the forests of Yucatán and Belize, there dwelt a lovely but sinister temptress called Xtabay who appeared to hunters who’d spent too much time in the bush. They glimpsed her through the leaves and could not help themselves; they followed deeper into the forest as the twilight thickened, sometimes drawing so close that they could catch her wild scent or feel the lash of her hair. If they ever awoke, they were lost and disoriented. If they emerged from the forest, they spent the rest of their lives in ruin.

It was irresistible for a dreamer, which by all accounts Henry had become. Although his education was “indifferent,” he possessed by his teenage years an intense love of art; when asked at school of his ambitions, he’d said he’d be an artist someday. At seventeen, he began a two-year class in art, and “his many drawings with pen and ink, supplemented by colour washes, reveal considerable ability and technical skill,” said Edward Lane. This was not a passing fancy: In the 1871 census, when he was twenty-five and about to embark upon his greatest adventure, he identified himself as a “traveling artist,” and throughout his travels he’d keep his sketchbook nearby.

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.”

By mid-November, the rainy season set in, the frequent cloudbursts sheeting the land and obliterating all other sound. After a half hour the rain would subside to a steady drip drip drip. Fires in the lodges blazed bright, and the Indians took their last meals of the day. Such evenings were lonely for him. The cry of the goatsucker, Nyctidromus, would drift across a patch of maize—“Who-are-you? who, who, who-are-you?”—and Henry would ponder that very question. Who was he, a fatherless child, alone in an alien world? What was he trying to prove? “I know of nothing so suggestive of reflection, tinged with a wholesome sadness,” he wrote, as “to find oneself alone in a pathless wilderness, associating with a race utterly strange.” The moon silvered the forest around him, and a crake rattled in the sedges at the water’s edge. He felt face-to-face with the “Great First Cause of all”; the drum of frogs filled the early night, “but later on no sound, except the occasional hoot of an owl, broke the unusual stillness.”

One fills silence with talk, and Henry learned the ways of his hosts to pass the time. The Mosquito Shore was populated by several related tribes that had pushed their way north over the centuries from the coast of Colombia into what today is Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They were a handsome people, with fine features, thick hair worn over their foreheads to their eyebrows, and a “warm, reddish-brown skin.” The men’s arms and chests were well developed but not their legs, probably because they paddled everywhere by canoe, Henry theorized. Nash, the headman, and Teribio, who had two wives and had paddled with Henry from Blewfields, both had a good command of English. Henry passed out tobacco to the village men, and the nightly conversations were long and leisurely. The Woolwá, or Suomoo, as they called themselves, seemed a martial people, and much of their talk was tales of war. The Spaniards of Nicaragua did not recognize the Miskito’s claim to self-governance, and so there was anticipation of an invasion. They liked to talk about past engagements between the British Navy and the Spanish, and stories were still told about Horatio Nelson and the attack on Greytown.

The theme of such tales was obvious: Invaders would be repelled. Now, for the first time, Henry heard of the bloodshed accompanying the rubber trade. The Woolwá did not tap caucho, as they called it here. That was left to outsiders who understood and profited from the world’s need for rubber. A few months before Henry’s arrival, some Spaniards from Honduras had ascended the Rusewass, a tributary of the Woolwá, and built a number of thatch houses. They planned to tap Castilla elastica, the main source of latex in Nicaragua. These Hondurans were a hard bunch. In the forests south of Lake Nicaragua, they kidnapped Guatuso women and children to sell as household slaves. When the Woolwá demanded payment for the use of their land, a fight broke out; a tapper slashed an Indian with his machete, and that night the tribe returned to club the intruders to death, “leaving none alive to tell the tale.”

But on the whole, Henry’s hosts seemed a peaceful people, and his time among them slipped away. His attitude to other peoples was a peculiar mix of Victorian racism and an admiration that bordered on the protective. When he first met the Woolwá, he reacted in shock: All were quite naked except for a loincloth reaching from waist to mid-thigh, and of the women he only mentioned “their decidedly light apparel.” Like many of his time, he preferred racial purity to “mixing.” Unlike others, however, he did not place whites at the pinnacle of creation. Toward the half-black, half-Indian Creoles, he seemed to harbor no ill will, though he thought them a lower race; the mestizos of mixed Spanish blood were sinister or degenerate. But as he grew to know the Indians, he had only the highest praise. They exhibited a “scrupulous honesty” in all their dealings with him, and a praiseworthy etiquette in their relations with each other. Once, through his ignorance, Henry violated a tribal taboo for separation of the sexes: He surprised a woman alone as she washed pots. After the first shock, she recovered her presence of mind, “remembering probably that I was but a stranger from some distant land of barbarism, and therefore unaccustomed to polite society.” Though spoken half in jest, he really did like these people and defended them often: “I am sure if some of those who condemn Indians as a lazy race had seen them at their work they would have revoked their judgment.”

On November 25, his solitude was broken by the rancorous arrival of the trader Hercules Temple, sitting in a dory filled with men he’d hired to collect rubber. Since Temple was known to the Woolwá, his band was not in the same danger as the slain Hondurans. Each tapper was a Creole, descended from escaped slaves from the West Indies, and “Temple himself was nearly black, with crisp hair, like many of the Blewfields Creoles: he assured me that his mother was an Indian woman of the Toonga tribe.” Henry began to realize the strange makeup of the world he’d entered, a world where entire populations were in flux. There were hereditary refugees like Temple and the Creoles; indigenous groups like the Miskitos and Woolwá; and intruders like the Hondurans, who came dreaming of quick riches and slaves. Each was to some extent what sociologist Everett Stonequist in the 1930s called a “marginal man,” the individual who suddenly found himself “poised in psychological uncertainty between two or more social worlds.” He balanced on a precipice—by leaving one life, he was unable to enter the other, and found himself “on the margin of each but a member of neither.”

The New World was not only physical but psychological, and remote places like this were a testing ground for the future. Henry wondered if such different peoples could ever coexist, and if not, whether the jungle was wide and deep enough to hold them all. Temple and the Creoles, though friends with the Woolwá, were much different than their hosts. On the night of their arrival, they fiddled and joked until the early hours, “a contrast to the quiet of the Indian part of the encampment.” The next morning, shortly after sunrise, “the whole of the population went off like a flock of birds, some up and some down the river, leaving the Blewfields trader, his son, and myself alone.”

Temple was talkative, curious, self-assured, and sometimes dictatorial; if not a king on this forgotten river, he considered himself a merchant prince, secure in the knowledge that he was the Woolwás’ sole source of machetes, cast iron pots, and tobacco, items that had started out as luxuries and evolved into necessities. He may also have brought another of civilization’s byproducts—disease. Historians believe that malaria followed explorers and slave traders across the Atlantic: Temple’s arrival from Blewfields may have duplicated this on a miniature scale, since the female anopheles mosquito, which carries the malaria plasmodium in her gut and passes it to a new host with every blood meal, is an expert stowaway. The egg-shaped parasite attacks the red blood cells; it heads straight for the liver or kidneys, and once it gets in the liver, malaria can linger for years. The bite is actually the most pleasant part of the experience. Three to eight days after being bitten, a victim starts vomiting, runs a fever of 102-104° F, sweats profusely, and shakes uncontrollably. The fever subsides for a day while the parasite changes to a nonpathogenic gamete, which allows it to multiply and spread. Soon the fever returns, and red blood cells are ruptured in huge quantities. At this point, an untreated victim can lapse into coma and die. Death depends upon the number of parasites. In severe cases, there can be as many as 80-100 per microscopic field.

Two weeks after Temple’s arrival—about the time for the plasmodium’s latency period to end—Henry began to feel the onset of a “slight feverishness and weakness.” Every third evening, he was gripped by violent shivers as the sun dipped. He’d build a fire and sit over it, and “being thirsty without hunger, would brew a quantity of strong tea, drinking it as hot as possible,” hoping to sweat the fever away. He’d spend the night rolled in his blanket and wake in the morning sweat-soaked and tired. He’d consume great quantities of sugarcane after each attack, this being the only thing for which he had an appetite. On Christmas Day, he lay on his raised bamboo bed and watched the termites “driving their covered ways along the supporting beams just above my head.” He missed his home, his friends, his family. For the first time since arriving, he wanted to go back.

Temple had returned to Blewfields before Christmas, but before he left, Henry arranged for him to take a shipment of bird skins and then, on his return, “go with me into the interior.” Henry planned to ascend the river to its source, then head north along the edge of the savannah until meeting the Patuca River and tracing it back to the coast. He’d stocked a wide assortment of beads, fishhooks, and knives for trading. There were rumors of never-chronicled tribes in this region, so maybe he’d be the first to discover them.

But when Temple returned on January 22, 1867, he brought something far deadlier than trading beads or the mail. He’d been delayed by an epidemic of cholera, which swept up the coast from the south in a particularly macabre way. In December, it had broken out aboard a river steamer belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company, which plied the San Juan River. It hit with such fury that the captain beached the ship in one of the creeks, and everyone abandoned the vessel in fear.

Some Miskito men in Greytown heard of the disaster and boarded the ship for plunder, but before they made it home, one of them was seized by cholera and died. The others threw his body overboard and continued north to Blewfields Lagoon. When another man died, they put into a bluff overlooking the water to bury him. The job was done with such haste that his legs protruded from the grave, but “they continued on their journey north, no doubt sowing there the seeds of the harvest,” Henry said. A boy from a nearby village went to the bluff to cut sugarcane, but when he arrived, he smelled the rotting corpse and went to investigate, thinking it might be someone’s dead cow. Instead he saw the man’s legs sticking from the ground like roots, and rushed back to his village to report his discovery. “As it was Christmas week, he went to a dance in the evening, the custom of these people being to go in a party from house to house, until they have danced in all the houses. . . . While still at one of these houses, he was taken ill, and died before morning.” And so the disease spread through the villages, ultimately reaching Blewfields.

Word travels fast on the river, even as far as Kissalala. When Temple returned to Blewfields before Christmas, he’d taken with him a young village boy; now the boy’s two sisters set out to fetch him in their family pitpan. The “sickness,” as they called it, was feared in every little village up every remote tributary. It had killed thousands during the “filibusters,” or invasions, of Nicaragua in 1855-60 by American soldier of fortune William Walker; it came with the ships from the white man’s world. The two sisters arrived just as Temple was about to return to Kissalala, and they all traveled back to the village without any apparent harm. But on the afternoon of their return, one sister was hit with diarrhea and grew worse by evening. A kinsman rushed to Henry for medicine, but all he had was some essence of ginger, which he mixed with strong tea.

A grand mishla feast had been underway with guests from villages up and down the river when the sisters returned from Blewfields. Because of that, Henry grew truly afraid. Mishla was the principal fermented drink at these feasts, the cause of many drunken brawls and squabbles, and as a precaution the women usually hid all weapons until the effects turned to sleep and hangovers. But mishla was a far, far greater danger now. Its production was a communal event, a “disgusting process” as Henry called it, in which the women collected a large pile of cassava root and chewed, spitting the juice into a large earthen pot or jar. When their jaws got too tired to continue, they boiled the remaining roots and mixed it all together, stirring and skimming the pot and letting it stand for a day or two until it had fermented. When the sisters returned and still seemed healthy, they added their share to the pot. When the first sister fell sick, Henry went to the lodges and tried to persuade his friends to overturn the pots of mishla.

Now the futility of Henry’s position became all too clear. He was an outsider, an amusing pet, acting in ways that seemed incomprehensible to the Woolwá, like shooting birds and sending off their skins. This sudden insistence in overturning the very reason for the feast was just another example of the white man’s irrationality. What could Henry know of ancient ways? His growing anger and helplessness shows through his journal: He is a boy of four again, his father dying in the next room, and there is nothing he can do. For the first time since his stay in Kissalala, he grows so frustrated as to think of them as ignorant savages, but he likes these people, he has become their friend, and there is a moment’s relief when his ginger tea seems to soothe the girl’s pain. Maybe they will be reprieved; maybe this Paradise will not be destroyed. But that same night, the girl’s family gave her another draught of mishla, and “just before dawn,” Henry wrote, “I heard the crying of the women, by which I knew she was dead.”

Panic set in. Each lodge threw fuel on their fires, believing that heavy smoke would act as a disinfectant. Guests from other villages loaded their canoes, “and I heard the rattle of their paddles while it was yet dark.” At daybreak, the second sister began retching and, “creeping down the steep bank to the water’s edge with great difficulty, with the aid of a staff, died there in about two hours.” Another woman who’d been drinking from the same mishla pot began vomiting; mishla pots everywhere were dumped, but too late. Teribio, Henry’s companion since his arrival, “looked quite pale and complained that he felt very sick.” The panic so overtook them that flight was their only thought. Henry had already packed, and Temple and he jumped in a canoe and followed others north. Friends were screaming, cutting their hair in grief, staggering to the water’s edge and retching; others scattered to their canoes, leaving the accursed place for good. As Henry looked back, he saw the body of the second sister draped across the sand. Above her wailed her mother and the younger brother whose innocent visit to Blewfields had brought death and ruin upon them all.

Henry, Hercules Temple, and the Woolwá paddled for their lives deep into the interior. The wildness seemed to calm them. They were absorbed into a primeval world of immense and towering trees joined together by a “wild, matted tangle of flowering vines, and by the multitude of other parasites, which blend the whole into one gorgeous mass of flowers and leaves.” The profusion of greenery was so great that it overwhelmed one’s senses. Henry made a rare aesthetic comparison and wondered whether Nature was not more pleasing if carefully tended as in England, where “our oaks, elms, and beeches stand out in individual completeness and beauty of form.”

By January 28, they were five days upriver from Kissalala and no one else had died. The rest of the village split off up different little creeks; the community of Kissalala was no more. Wickham, Temple, Teribio, and two other Woolwá continued deep in-country, and that night they saw for the first time another inhabited Indian encampment, the first people they’d seen since their flight. For those five days, the desolation had been complete. “[A]t all the other places we passed the Indians had fled far up the little creeks at news of the ‘sickness,’ generally leaving at the mouth of the creek a wand, with a piece of white rag fluttering at the end, to indicate the direction they had taken.”

For the next twelve days, they pressed north up the steadily narrowing river, spending more time portaging over falls and twisted, rocky rapids than paddling their pitpan. The world around them was silent except for the flight of startled bats, which shot like arrows from crevices in the riverbank, only to disappear into the shade of dark caverns. The abundance of game diminished. Temple complained about the lack of meat, and Henry suffered physically. He developed a ring of suppurating boils around his ankles, and the pain in his feet and legs made travel tormenting.

In Kaka, the last settlement on the river, they heard that the mining town of Consuelo lay beyond the forest in the nearby hills. On February 9, Henry limped with Temple’s aid along a faint track up the side of a steep hill. They broke from the woods at the summit, and before them lay “a view of great extent and beauty: the plain beneath, diversified by hills of different elevation, stretched far away to the foot of the distant mountains.” He’d made it to the savannah as he’d hoped, and near the opposite hill they passed through a narrow valley strewn with wooden shacks, workshops, and machinery on every side. Henry knocked on a door and asked if any Englishmen were around. The resident led them through the town, and “Temple and I saw enough to convince us that we were in a mining settlement of considerable importance.” On the right, fifty yards from the road on a grass-covered slope, stood a whitewashed wooden house surrounded by a veranda and connected to a rear kitchen by a covered walkway. They limped to the house and their guide pointed to a man sitting in a hammock. Two women, looking pale and English, “were cooking at a stove what looked more like beefsteak than anything I had seen for a long time.” Henry’s mouth watered. He turned to the man in the hammock and tried to stand straight. “Are you English?” he inquired.

The man leaped up in shock. “I should rather think so!”

So ended Henry’s first expedition to the New World. He made it no farther than the little gold mining town of Consuelo, part of the celebrated Chontales Mining Company. The pain from his sores was just too great to bear. His surprised host was Captain Hill, R.N., a transplanted Cornish miner, part of that wave of British investment that started in the 1820s with the collapse of Spanish mercantilism. When the new Latin republics opened their arms to Old World money, few investments were more enticing than gold. This hilly Santo Domingo country was loaded with the precious metal, running in parallel veins of auriferous quartz so numerous that in a mile-wide band a new vein could be found every fifty yards. The value of ore treated by Chontales averaged seven pennyweight per ton, enough that several company towns sprang up to stay for about fifty years. Even today, the Santo Domingo country retains a legacy of blue-eyed Latin children and that local delicacy, the Cornish pasti.

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. Nature 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.