‘I’m going to the Paraguayan jungle to find a one-hundred-year-old Aryan colony set up by the sister of the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and I need some suncream, mosquito repellent and a hat.’
The man in the survival shop in London’s Euston Station batted a laconic eyelid, just one, for the sake of form. These shops are used mainly by two sorts of people: those who think they might be in danger of getting killed and want to prevent it; and those who think they might want to kill someone else and want to do it efficiently. Survival, to judge from the racks of guns, knives, gougers, stabbers and garrotters on display, tends to involve homicide.
Nietzsche himself might have approved of this violent approach to survival. ‘My way of thinking calls for a warlike soul’, he wrote in The Gay Science, ‘a desire to hurt, a joy in denial, a hard hide.’ The man in the survival shop had Nietzsche down to a tee. ‘It’s a jungle out there’, he said, probably not for the first time that day. ‘What factor would you like?’ I bought a large tub of something which he promised would stop anything from coming near my hide: water, insects and burrowing worms as well as ultraviolet light. It smelled faintly of silage.
The Euston survivalist thought it might well rain a fair bit, so I bought a rather dashing panama hat, a jacket which promised to keep the rain out while allowing my pores to breathe (the few that would still be breathing after applying my suncream) and half a dozen waterproof notebooks. I later practised with one of them in the bath.
In between the literature on potholing, unarmed combat and bodybuilding was a slim pamphlet entitled Jungle Survival, a military guide to sub-tropical conditions and how to stay alive in them. It stated: ‘Whatever the type of country in which you are unfortunate enough to crash-land … your chances of survival and eventual rescue depend on a few definite factors. By far the most important of these is the first, “determination to live”.’ And it carried on:
The greatest dangers lie in the demoralizing and cumulative effect of sometimes rather insignificant factors which may be summarized under the following headings:
a) panic
b) sun and heat, and sickness therefrom
c) sickness and fever
d) demoralizing effect and danger from all forms of animal life
e) poisoning.
The book was peculiarly depressing, although it did explain which sea anemones are edible and how to make essential clothing out of your parachute. I bought a copy anyway. If I ran out of food and there weren’t any sea anemones about, I could always eat it.
‘What colour are they in Panama then? Black?’ asked the survivalist.
‘It’s Paraguay, and they’re sort of brownish mostly.’
He looked doubtful.
‘But the ones I’m going to find are white, I think.’
He looked relieved. ‘That’s all right then.’
According to The Present State of All Nations, written in 1739, ‘It must be acknowledged that Paragua Proper is a perfect terra incognita. I meet with no author or traveller that pretends to give any description of it, or know the extent of it; and our map-makers are so ingenious as not to incumber their maps with the name of one town in all the country.’ The situation has only marginally improved.
Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster had called their colony New Germany, Nueva Germania in Spanish. A journalist had visited the area some years earlier, but Nueva Germania didn’t appear on my atlas, nor in the only guidebook I could find which covered Paraguay, nor in any novel by any South American author, living or dead. There was New Italy, New Australia and New Bordeaux, but New Germany seemed to have vanished. The staff at the Paraguayan Embassy politely but firmly insisted that no such place existed, at least not in Paraguay. They suggested trying the Brazilian Embassy instead. ‘Actually the only one of us who has been to Paraguay in the last thirty years is the Ambassador’, said the receptionist, ‘and he’s in Wales at the moment.’ The only map I could find which actually pinpointed Nueva Germania was Elisabeth Nietzsche’s own. In 1891 she had published a book called Bernhard Förster’s Colony New Germany in Paraguay. It was an exercise in self-justification, the first of many, printed in Germany and intended to recruit more colonists. It contained a map, an updated version of one drawn up by Bernhard Förster himself based on a military chart made by the Hungarian expatriate, Colonel Heinrich von Morgenstern de Wisner. The name Colonel Heinrich von Morgenstern de Wisner looms large in Paraguayan history; he was also partly responsible for the creation of New Germany. Once a noted wag at the imperial court of Vienna, a Hungarian aristocrat, suspected pederast, military adviser, amateur historian and cartographer, Morgenstern ended up as Immigration Minister for the Republic of Paraguay at the time that Bernhard Förster was deciding where to start his colony. It was partly Morgenstern’s propaganda talents that persuaded him, and Morgenstern’s maps that guided him.
Morgenstern was highly suited to the job of Immigration Minister since it involved, among other things, a talent for extreme mendacity; his main role in the years after the War of the Triple Alliance was to lure Europeans to depopulated Paraguay with apparently generous land deals and an extensive tissue of misinformation about the country’s natural advantages. The Colonel’s ‘Report on the State of Paraguay’ had been printed in European newspapers, including The Times, inviting European colonists to apply for land. One who did was Bernhard Förster. The German colonist and the Hungarian émigré must have met on several occasions, and as a foreigner who had survived for forty-six years the vicissitudes of life in Paraguay, the aged Colonel may have provided Förster with a remarkable, if rather bizarre role model. What Förster cannot have known, however, was that Morgenstern’s real name was in fact Morgenstein and that he was probably Jewish.
As a young man Morgenstern had used his aristocratic connections to gain a place at the Viennese court, which he was then obliged to leave in a hurry after an unseemly scandal. But Europe had proved too small for this professional, courtly flaneur, and he turned up in Paraguay in 1845 as part of a Brazilian military delegation to the Paraguayan dictator Carlos Antonio Lopez. Though the climate was foul, the opportunities were boundless for a man with a little refinement and a lot of ambition. Morgenstern quickly became the toast of Asunción’s undemanding high society. As a foreigner there was a simple recipe for success in the upper reaches of Paraguayan society of the mid-nineteenth century: you grossly flattered the dictator of the time, or ran the risk of being executed by him. This became particularly essential when Carlos Antonio was succeeded by his son, a portly young sadist with poor teeth by the name of Francisco Solano Lopez, who butchered his way to the presidency in 1865. Morgenstern went one better than the avid sycophants who buzzed around the new dictator: he captured the attractive ear of the only person who had influence over the President-for-life – his mistress, a talented Irish courtesan called Eliza Lynch, whom everyone knew as La Madama.
Morgenstern, with his snobbish manners and urbanity, was exactly what Eliza Lynch needed to put the noses of the Asunción ladies firmly out of joint; they persisted in calling her La Concubina Irlandesa behind their fans and snubbing her at parties. Morgenstern treated her with extravagant Viennese courtliness; in return she persuaded Lopez to make him Lord High Chancellor. When Eliza threw one of her masked balls, Morgenstern chose the wine and pruned the guest list and advised her on which silks were à la mode in London. President Lopez, his megalomania reaching imperial proportions, announced that he was another Napoleon and that he intended to rule the whole of South America. Morgenstern was promptly made his chief military adviser. He soon became one of the largest, and certainly the fattest landowners in Paraguay. The high point of Colonel Morgenstern’s career came at the grand opening of the National Theatre in Asunción, an exact replica in miniature of La Scala in Milan. The President and his mistress both attended. Behind them in the presidential box sat the beaming figure of Colonel Morgenstern de Wisner, wearing the uniform of a Hungarian Hussar, a doublet embroidered with silk frogs and an Astrakhan collar; and what is even more extraordinary, no one dared to laugh at him.
Together the dictator, his beautiful Irish mistress and the Hungarian adventurer plotted the conquest of South America. The result was the War of the Triple Alliance, waged simultaneously against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Morgenstern had been one of the few foreigners to survive; he had been found cowering in a wood with eleven of his Paraguayan ‘slaves’ by a troop of Brazilian cavalry, who for reasons unknown decided not to stick a lance through him. He was soon back in government and spent his last years drawing maps of the country and, as Immigration Minister, encouraging other Europeans to colonise it.
Bernhard Förster had used Morgenstern’s map as a basis for his own, tracing the routes he had followed through Paraguay between 1883 and 1885, while a smaller inset map showed the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg, to give it a sense of scale and importance. Elisabeth had taken a pen to Förster’s map and inked in the relevant bits. ‘Col. Nueva Germania’ appeared as a triangular strip of land, between two glottal rivers, the Aguarya-umí and the Aguarya-guazu, about one hundred and fifty miles north of the capital Asunción. The route she sketched followed the wriggling Rio Paraguay to a point just above where the Rio Jejui flows into it; from there she had drawn a line east by north-east, clearly the largest and straightest road in Paraguay. Unnervingly, the road stopped dead after Nueva Germania, which, according to the scale on the map, seemed to cover an area about the size of London.
I knew enough already about Elisabeth’s cavalier approach to accuracy to view the map with some distrust; her description of the journey from Asunción, intended to entice settlers to the colony, made it sound impossibly easy: ‘Several small boats travel up the Rio Paraguay but there is only one ship that goes regularly, the Posadas, which leaves Asunción on Wednesdays.’ The river journey, she claimed, would take a couple of days, counting stops, then ‘you change to the ship Hermann which flies under a German flag’ as far as San Pedro on the Jejui, and continue the last part of the journey by horse and oxcart along a forest track. This final stretch, wrote Elisabeth, was ‘hard going’ and would take several days. Even taking into account Elisabeth’s tendency to play down the obstacles, and the fact that her description was a century out of date, I estimated it would still take a week or more to get to the colony from Asunción by following her route; if, that is, anything like a colony still existed.
Elisabeth Nietzsche’s bizarre experiment in the name of racial purity had envisaged thousands of settlers, a New Germany covering, initially, a territory the size of a dukedom and later spreading throughout South America. The hordes of willing converts never materialised, and Elisabeth’s new Germany was, by all accounts, a failure. But what had become of the fourteen German families she had taken out there in 1887, and what of their descendants? Had they survived? And, if so, what sort of people were they now? More importantly, what would they make of me?
What is left of my hair is fair, my eyes are blue and I speak an Indo-European language. That is about as Aryan as I get. But it struck me that after a century of isolation, the people of New Germany might not be too choosy any more about who did or didn’t pass the Caucasian test. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that I would be captured by this lost tribe of Aryans and kept chained up for the rest of my days to be used for breeding, a captive pump for the genetic pool. At dusk, jungle Brunhilds, perfect Teutons in every way with bright-blue eyes, would emerge from the forest to the clearing where I lay strapped naked to a trestle table; one by one they would line up … It was too horrible to think about. I packed some sleeping pills.
The Försters had gone into minute detail about what the prospective colonist should bring in the way of equipment. On Elisabeth’s advice I packed a poncho, boots, linen trousers, a straw hat, medicine, needles, cooking equipment and a blanket. Bernhard Förster recommended ‘the odd luxury … as presents to establish friendly relations with the neighbouring family, souvenirs of the Fatherland’. Quite what would remind a nineteenth-century peasant in the middle of a South American jungle of the Fatherland, I wasn’t sure; I packed some postcards of Berlin nightlife and a three-cassette pack of Wagner’s music for the Walkman.
After some reflection I decided against carbolic to keep off the vampire bats and in favour of the multi-purpose silage-flavoured goo from the survival shop. Förster was graphic about the various carnivorous insects I would get to know, and one in particular:
The next worst bug [after mosquitos and bloodsuckers] is called a ‘sandfly’ by the Germans. A fairly small insect, it bores into the epidermis of the foot on people and animals and gradually lays eggs. The boring is barely perceptible, and it is only when the insect grows during the egg-laying period that it becomes noticeable. Then every sensible person will have it removed by an operation which can be learned, with a little practice and the aid of a pointed knife … anyone who allows these small parasites to multiply, which usually attack newcomers, can pay for his lack of hygiene with extreme pain.
I scanned the medical dictionaries for the sandfly, and found the Phlebotomus (Greek: Phleps = vein; tomos = a cutting), sole carrier of Leishmania, and where I was going, Leishmania brazilhiensis: ‘the initial cutaneous sore [is] followed after a relatively long interval by ulceration of the mouth and palate extending through to the nose’. It is also called the oriental sore, Baghdad boil, Aleppo boil, Sart sore, Delhi boil or bolsa de Biskra, depending on where you are when it bites you. On the other hand, Förster could have been talking about bilharzia, which, according to a medical friend, enters the body through the skin after spending a while in a snail and then reappears as a worm out of your eye. (A German doctor born in 1825 called Theodor Bilharz discovered bilharzia in Egypt around 1850. Poor Theodor; the praise heaped on him for his ‘excellent diagrams of a pair of copulating flat-worms’, which helped to identify the disease, meant little to him; he always thought his work on the electrical organ of the thunderfish was much more interesting. He died in Ethiopia at the age of thirty-seven, bitter, disillusioned and looking for thunderfish.)
I went back to the survival shop and bought a knife which looked like a knuckleduster with a small scythe stuck on it, just in case self-surgery should become necessary; it was confiscated by the airline authorities before I left Heathrow.
Reading matter was clearly going to be important, since there is a strict limit to how long anyone can exist on an unrelieved diet of Jungle Survival. I decided to take a combination of Friedrich Nietzsche, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and the Försters.
Both Bernhard and Elisabeth had written books about Paraguay, he with the intention of founding a new Fatherland in South America, she with the purpose of maintaining it. For two years before he settled on a site for his colony, he travelled a country left almost deserted after the War of the Triple Alliance; he noted everything that might have been of interest (and rather a lot that probably wasn’t) for prospective German colonists: flora, fauna, the river routes and how to get the best out of your mandioca plantation. He had a talent for snappy titles, and the resulting tome was called German Colonisation in the Upper La Plata District with Particular Reference to Paraguay: The Results of Detailed Practical Experience, Work and Travel 1883–1885. It was an advertising tract, intended to persuade good German workers of the advantages of his colonial vision. The long, strangling German sentences are interlaced with anti-Semitic asides, encomia on vegetarianism, Lutheranism and Wagner, rotund with grandiloquent rhetoric about the future of the German race. But it is thoroughly engrossing, and slyly revealing about the author: fastidious and pedantic, driven equally by pride and prejudice. The frontispiece is an etching of Bernhard Förster himself, with his square beard and fanatic’s eyes, and scrawled beneath it is the Goethean motto, written in Förster’s elaborate hand: ‘Over all obstacles, stand your ground.’
At that time Förster had unwittingly toured on horseback the precise area where the colony would later be founded. Had he known that, he would surely have painted a less daunting picture of his promised land:
My first worry was to find the most direct route to San Pedro. Until now I had only heard that it was impossible. The whole way was supposed to be one great swamp, almost impassable for a single person and full of dangers. My own experience confirmed these reports … the horses had to cross deep swamps of mud. Only occasionally was there high land, firm underfoot. Moreover the area was completely uninhabited, and there are great numbers of deer, foxes, tigers, monkeys, ostriches etc … To emigrate here would surely be a Herculean task, though the ground appears fertile. Along the way, a few tiled houses, now collapsed, bore witness to the fact that there must have been a cattle-raising livelihood here before the war … Part of the population are negroes, former slaves. The chief one of these was an old blackamoor who understood neither Spanish nor anything else. He couldn’t be bothered to help me, so I was forced to sleep in the open … the dangers here are said to be tigers, Indians and snakes. I saw numerous tiger tracks and several snakes, but was never attacked. The only Indians I saw were in a very miserable, domesticated state … the Indians are scarcely dangerous, and would make good servants. But the Lengua are more dangerous, and occasionally cross the Gran’ Chaco on raiding parties. The real difficulties faced by a traveller unacquainted with the country are losing your way, bad weather on lonely paths, and the feeling of solitude brought about by the complete beauty and horror of the place, and, last but not least, hunger … If you are simultaneously suffering from hunger, the beating rays of the sun on your head, the wetness of the marshes and streams, and the effect of the tough, high grasses on your feet, the illness may affect you for days. A weak constitution may easily collapse with the fever, to which I remained immune.
Förster was motivated by what Nietzsche would have called Ressentiment, a combination of envy, jealousy and revenge. A morality defined by contrast to other moralities, which it labelled evil, Nietzsche called a slave morality. Christianity was, for him, the ultimate slave morality, but nationalism and racism were others. Bernhard and Elisabeth Förster were slave moralists par excellence.
In his Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche wrote, ‘While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside”, what is “different”, what is not “itself”: and this No is its creative act … The man of Ressentiment is neither upright nor naive, nor honest nor straightforward with himself. His soul squints, his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and hiding places …’
Nietzsche is like no other writer, in German or any other language. He is rude, violent, a rebel and an iconoclast. To read him is to enter a world shorn of all moral certainties; he urged his readers to live dangerously, to embrace the conflict which he saw as the motive force in human affairs. Humanity was motivated by a will to power, he said; whatever increased power it accounted good; even the slave morality was a form of this will. It was the brave, the strong, the self-possessed who would inherit the real world, the only world there is, while the meek, the pious and the kind would inherit, and deserved to inherit, nothing. He scorned and feared the mediocre, the mass, and beliefs that acquired the status of morality through sheer weight of numbers. Nietzsche’s philosophy took a hammer to ideologues, dogmatists whose ‘truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman’, Christians, politicians, preachers and populists of any sort. He believed above all in the individual, the strong, purposeful, independent-minded free spirit who rode roughshod over morality, the ‘herd instinct in the individual’, and who, if he could overcome his own Ressentiment, might attain the status of a Superman, or more exactly Overman.
It is refreshing but dangerous stuff. His imagery is often violent and his style prone to some of the worst myth-making tendencies that found their apogee in Nazi rhetoric, the ultimate in Ressentiment. But cant and hypocrisy were his sworn enemies, and if he tended to use a claymore where he might have used a scalpel, that was only because of the originality of what he had to say and the urgency with which he needed to say it.
Despite his opposition to codified systems of belief, Nietzsche’s name has been associated with practically every ‘movement’, intellectual or otherwise, in this century: feminism and structuralism, Marxism and anarchism and behaviourism, as well as fascism. If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath. Nietzsche saw it coming: ‘Whoever believed he had understood something of me’, he wrote in his autobiography Ecce Homo, ‘had dressed up something out of me after his own image – not uncommonly an antithesis of me, for instance an “idealist”; whoever had understood nothing of me denied that I came into consideration at all.’ And he admitted that it pertained to his nature as a philosopher ‘to want to remain a riddle in some respects’.
He saw his contemporaries, the Europeans of his day, being emasculated by their own piety, ‘a shrunken, almost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of goodwill, sickly and mediocre …’ He urged freedom above all, and self-realisation, and spurned ‘the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats’. As so often with him, the tendency to lash out, the very violence of his language, offends and angers – which was exactly what he wanted, to jolt his readers out of their torpor and force them to scale, as individuals, the heights he thought they were capable of. For in spite of his lacerating language he loved humanity and believed that by ‘writing with blood’ he could do apathetic man ‘a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible’. His was an anguished cry for individuality. Thus spoke Nietzsche: ‘Overcome, you higher men, the petty virtues, the petty prudences, the sand-grain discretion, the ant-swarm inanity, miserable ease, the “happiness of the greatest number!”’ He is contradictory and contrary, and at times thoroughly dubious; he knew he was dynamite – a horrible explosive in the wrong hands. But he was no dogmatist: ‘We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that. But perhaps for the right to have our opinions and to change them.’ What Oscar Wilde wrote about Dorian Gray applies equally to Nietzsche: ‘he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail … no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.’
As an antidote to the constipated moralising of his sister or her husband, Nietzsche’s very contrariness is a purge; as Montgomery once said of Chairman Mao, ‘He would be a good man to go into the jungle with.’ And if, like Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust reading Dickens in the jungle, I was imprisoned and made to read nothing but Nietzsche for the rest of my life, I would at least go mad fairly quickly.
In 1869, the same year that Friedrich Nietzsche was made Philology Professor at Basle University, an aristocratic Scottish youth of seventeen, who had learned Spanish at his grandmother’s knee on the Isle of Wight, set off for Argentina to find adventure and make his fortune. For much of the next sixty years, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham wandered through South America living dangerously: in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and, above all, Paraguay, he worked as horse-breaker and cattle rancher, traveller and writer. Sporting the pointed beard and long hair of a hidalgo, he could throw the boleadoras as well as any of the hole-eyed gauchos who were his companions and who called him ‘Don Roberto’. He was constantly in trouble, in debt and, I think, in hysterics. His life was a series of hilarities and close calls. In Uruguay he was kidnapped and pressed into service by some revolutionary gauchos; while riding through Paris, he knocked down a pretty Chilean girl of eighteen, Gabrielle de la Balmondière, and promptly married her; on their honeymoon in Texas, they were attacked by Apaches. He voyaged to Morocco in disguise, to find the lost city of Taroudant, but was captured by a Kurd.
And he scribbled it all down, in thirty books of sketches and short stories, histories and travelogues. His writing is odd but poetic, a tumbling scree of half-built phrases and hiccuping grammar, vividly redolent of his own chaotic life. He was equally happy on a horse or at his desk, but most contented of all riding through the forests of Paraguay.
Rejecting the confinement of Victorian life, a gypsy-philosopher, Cunninghame Graham came closer to being Nietzschean man, in a way, than Nietzsche himself ever was; he may even have read Nietzsche, for his autobiography begins with an epigraph from Zarathustra: ‘Remain true to the earth, my brethren.’ (The other epigraph is from King Alonso XII: ‘You know well that when I am needed in any place, I am there, and if there is danger, I am there the sooner.’) He was one of that great British tradition of travellers and writers – Byron, Doughty, Burton, Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Even in old age the hidalgo–laird fulfilled Nietzsche’s prescription for the youthful soul: ‘A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its senses. “Better to die than to go on living here” … a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangement, coldness, soberness, frost … that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master privilege of the free spirit.’
He loved life and loathed bigotry, and there was barely a trace of Ressentiment in him. Nietzsche believed that such men gravitate to political power, as to a birthright. In about 1880 Don Roberto returned to Britain and was elected Liberal MP for North Lanarkshire in 1886. He became a close friend of Joseph Conrad (who re-read Cunninghame Graham before writing Nostromo); he shared a speaking platform with Engels and created the Scottish Labour Party with Keir Hardie. On ‘Bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887, Cunninghame Graham insisted on going to a banned demonstration in Trafalgar Square. A policeman hit him on the head with a truncheon, cracking his skull, and he was sentenced to six weeks in Pentonville Jail. ‘His getting into prison’, wrote his friend George Bernard Shaw, ‘was as nothing compared to his getting into the House of Commons. How he did it, I know not, but the thing certainly happened, somehow.’ Only one word of Cunninghame Graham’s appears in Hansard: ‘Damn.’ It was a curse on the hypocrisy he saw on both sides of the House. When asked to withdraw the remark he replied, ‘I never withdraw’, and was suspended. Shaw then promptly stole the phrase – for the Bulgarian hero of Arms and the Man. Like Nietzsche, Cunninghame Graham distrusted demagoguery. ‘I care not in the least for theories’, he said, ‘for this or that dogma of politicians and theologist, but take my stand on what I heard myself …”
So he returned again to the beauties and dangers of South America. As a foreigner he never claimed to be part of Paraguay, but his books about the country are eccentric and vivid, if syntactically abstruse:
When I think on them, pampa and Cordillera, virgin forest, the ‘passes’ of the rivers, approached by sandy paths bordered by flowering and sweet smelling trees, and most of all the deserted Jesuit Missions, half buried by the vigorous vegetation, peopled but by a few white-clad Indians, rise up so clearly that, without the smallest faculty for dealing with what I have undertaken, I am forced to write.
Again like Nietzsche, he mourned that he had not been born to sail with Columbus; he died at the age of eighty-four in Buenos Aires. The following might stand as his own epitaph, to an anti-didact:
I have no theory of empires, destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, spread of the Christian faith, of trade extension, or of hinterlands; no nostrum by means of which I hope to turn Arabs into Christians, reconcile Allah to Jahve, remove the ancient lack of comprehension between East and West, mix oil and vinegar, or fix the rainbow always in the sky … I fear I write of things without a scrap of interest to right-thinking men. On the contrary, of lonely rides, desolate empty places, or ruined buildings seen in peculiar lights, of simple folk … in fact of things which, to a traveller, his travels o’er, still conjure up the best part of all travel – its melancholy.
I packed four of Cunninghame Graham’s books – two on Paraguay’s history and two of short stories. He and Bernhard Förster had travelled in Paraguay at about the same time. They almost certainly never met, for, if they had, there would surely have been a fight. Förster ended his book with an appeal for Aryan disciples to his prospective colony, the sort of thing that would have made Nietzsche and Cunninghame Graham want to spit:
The main things you must bring with you are courage and resignation, strength and endurance – the moral fibre from the old Fatherland to pass on to the next generation.
I didn’t have any of the above. What I did have was a suitcase full of old books, several pints of foul-smelling and possibly toxic mosquito repellent, a vague idea of where I was going, and a feeling that if that sort of moral fibre had been passed on to succeeding generations, I might not want to get there at all.
I agreed with Nietzsche completely on one thing: ‘To make plans and project designs brings with it many good sensations; and whoever had the strength to be nothing but a forger of plans his whole life long would be a very happy man; but he would occasionally have to take a rest from this activity by carrying out a plan – and then comes the vexation and the sobering up.’
See notes on Chapter II: Terra Incognita