1 To Guyana

South America is the home of some of the strangest, some of the loveliest and some of the most horrifying animals in the world. There can be few creatures more improbable than the sloth which spends its life in a permanent state of mute slow motion, hanging upside down in the tall forest trees; few more bizarre than the giant anteater of the savannahs with its absurdly disproportionate anatomy, its tail enlarged into a shaggy banner and its jaws elongated into a curved and toothless tube. On the other hand, beautiful birds are so common as to become almost unremarkable: gaudy macaws flap through the forest, their splendid plumage contrasting incongruously with their harsh maniac cries; and hummingbirds, like tiny jewels, flit from flower to flower sipping nectar, their iridescent feathers flashing the colors of the rainbow as they fly.

Many of the South American animals inspire the fascination which comes from revulsion. Shoals of cannibal fish infest the rivers waiting to rip the flesh from any animal which tumbles among them, and vampire bats, a legend in Europe but a grim reality in South America, fly out at night from their roosts in the forest to suck blood from cows and men.

I had no doubt that, since we had visited Africa for our first Zoo Quest expedition, South America was the obvious choice for our second. But which area in such a vast and varied continent should we visit? Eventually we selected Guyana (then known as British Guiana), the only Commonwealth country in the whole of the South American continent. Jack Lester, Charles Lagus and I, who had been together in Africa were to go again, and we were to be joined by Tim Vinall, one of the overseers in the London Zoo. His current responsibility was the care of the hoofed animals, but during his long career in the Zoo he had looked after many other types of creature. His was to be the back-breaking and thankless task of remaining at our base at the coast and looking after the animals as we caught them and brought them to him.

So in March 1955, we landed in Georgetown, the capital. After three days of obtaining permits, clearing our cameras and recording apparatus through customs, and buying pots and pans, food and hammocks, we were itching to begin our collecting in the interior. We had already decided on an approximate plan of action. From the map we had seen that most of Guyana is covered by tropical rain forest which extends northward to the Orinoco and southward to the Amazon Basin. In the southwest, however, the forest dwindles and gives way to rolling grass-covered savannahs, and lining the coast is a strip of cultivated land where rice fields and sugar plantations alternate with swamps and creeks. If we were to assemble a representative collection of the animals of Guyana, we should have to visit each of these areas, for each harbors creatures which are not to be found elsewhere. We had little idea, however, where we should go in each of the districts and in what order to visit them, until on our third evening we were invited to dinner with three people who could give us expert advice: Bill Seggar, a District Officer in charge of a remote territory in the forests near the far western frontier, Tiny McTurk, a rancher from the Rupununi savannahs, and Cennydd Jones, whose work as doctor to the Amerindians took him to every corner of the colony. We sat up until early in the morning looking at photographs and films, poring over maps and excitedly scribbling notes. When we finally broke up, we had decided upon a detailed campaign, visiting first the savannahs, next the forest, and finally the coastal swamps.

The following morning, we walked into the Airways office to inquire about transport.

“The Rupununi for four, sir?” said the clerk. “Certainly. A plane is leaving tomorrow.”

It was with a sense of great excitement that Jack, Tim, Charles and I clambered into the plane which was to take us there. Nevertheless, we did not expect to find our hearts in our mouths as soon as we did. Our pilot, Colonel Williams, had pioneered bush flying in Guyana and it was largely through his daring and imagination that many of the remoter parts of the country had become accessible at all. As we took off, however, we discovered that the Colonel’s flying technique was very different from that of the pilot who had brought us from London to Georgetown. Our Dakota thundered down the airstrip; the palm trees at the end loomed nearer and nearer, until I thought that something was wrong with the machine and that we were unable to leave the ground. At the very last moment we surged into the air in a steep climb, missing the tops of the palm trees by feet. We all exchanged ashen looks, and after shouting our doubts and worries to one another, I went forward to ask Colonel Williams what had happened.

“In bush flying,” he yelled, out of the corner of his mouth, tapping his cigarette into the tin ashtray tacked onto the control panel, “in bush flying, I reckon the most dangerous time is at takeoff. If one engine fails then, when you are needing it most, you land with a crash in the forest and there’s no one there to help you. I always reckon to get up so much speed on the ground that my momentum is enough to take me up on no engines at all. Why, boy, are y’all scared?”

I hastily reassured Colonel Williams that none of us had been in the least bit worried; we were merely interested in the technique of handling aircraft. Colonel Williams grunted, changed the short-focus spectacles that he had worn for the takeoff for a long-focus pair, and we settled down for the flight.

Beneath us stretched the forest, a green, velvet blanket spreading as far as we could see in all directions. Slowly it began to rise toward us as we approached a great escarpment. Colonel Williams flew on without altering height until the forest came so close to us that we could see parrots flying above the trees. Then as the escarpment fell away, the forest began to change character. Small islands of grassland appeared and soon we were flying over wide open plains veined with silver creeks and freckled with tiny, white termite hills. We lost height, circled over a small cluster of white buildings and shaped up for a landing on the airstrip—a euphemism for a stretch of the savannah which seemed to differ from its surroundings only in that it was clear of termite hills. The Colonel brought the plane down gracefully, and bumpily taxied toward a little knot of people awaiting the plane’s arrival. We clambered over the piles of freight lying lashed on the floor of the Dakota and jumped out, blinking in the brilliant sun.

A cheerful, bronzed man in shirt sleeves and sombrero detached himself from the onlookers and came over to meet us. It was Teddy Melville, who was to be our host. He came from a famous family. His father was one of the first Europeans to settle on the Rupununi and begin ranching the cattle that were now thinly spread throughout the district. He arrived at the turn of the century and married two Wapishana girls who each presented him with five children. These ten men and women now occupied nearly all the important positions in the district; they were ranchers, store keepers, government rangers and hunters. We soon discovered that, no matter where we went in the northern savannahs, if the man we met was not a Melville, then as like as not he was married to one.

Lethem, where we had landed, consisted of a few white concrete buildings, untidily scattered round two sides of the airstrip. The largest of them, and the only one to have an upper story, was Teddy’s guest-house—a plain rectangular building with a veranda and gaping glassless windows, which was graced by the title of Lethem Hotel. Half a mile away to the right, on the crest of a low rise, stood the District Commissioner’s house, the post office, a store and a small hospital. A dusty red-earth road ran from them to the hotel and continued past a group of ramshackle outhouses into a parched wilderness of termite hills and stunted bushes. Twenty miles beyond, jutting abruptly from the plains, rose a line of jagged mountains, reduced by the heat-haze to a smoky-blue silhouette against the dazzling sky.

Everyone for miles around had come to Lethem to meet the plane, for it brought with it long-awaited stores and the regular weekly mail. Plane days therefore were always great social occasions, and the hotel was crowded with ranchers and their wives who had driven in from outlying districts and who remained after the plane had left to exchange news and gossip.

After the evening meal was over, the bare deal tables were cleared from the dining room and long wooden benches set in their place. Harold, Teddy’s son, began setting up a film projector and a screen. Gradually the bar emptied and the benches were filled. Wapishana cowboys, known as vaqueros, bronzed with straight blue-black hair and bare feet, trooped in and paid at the door. The air was filled with rank tobacco smoke and expectant chatter as the lights were put out.

The entertainment began with some sensibly undated newsreels. These were followed by a Hollywood cowboy film about pioneering the wild west, during which virtuous white Americans convincingly slaughtered great numbers of villainous Red Indians. Hardly tactful one would have thought, but the Wapishana sat watching their North American cousins being exterminated without any emotion on their impassive faces. The story was a little difficult to follow for not only had lengthy sequences been excised during the copy’s long life, but it seemed doubtful whether the reels were projected in their correct order, for a tragic and beautiful American girl who was savagely murdered by the Indians in the third reel, reappeared in the fifth to make love to the hero. But the Wapishana were an accommodating audience, and a pedantic detail of this kind did not spoil their obvious enjoyment of the big fight scenes, which provoked rounds of enthusiastic applause. I suggested to Harold Melville that the film was perhaps an odd choice, but he assured me that cowboy films were by far the most popular type of any they showed. Certainly one could believe that Hollywood bedroom comedies would seem even greater nonsense to the Wapishana out here.

After the show, we went upstairs to our room. In it were two beds equipped with mosquito nets. Two of us obviously had to sleep in hammocks, and Charles and I claimed the privilege. It was an opportunity which both of us had been thirsting to seize ever since we had bought our hammocks in Georgetown. With a highly professional air we slung them from hooks fastened in the walls. The results however, as we realized after a few weeks of experience, were hopelessly amateur. We had hitched them far too high and had tied them with enormously elaborate knots that were going to take a considerable time to loosen in the morning. Jack and Tim stolidly climbed into their beds.

The next morning there was little doubt as to which pair of us had spent the more comfortable night. Charles and I both swore that we had slept like logs and that sleeping in hammocks was second nature to us. But it was hardly true, for neither of us had then learned the simple technique of lying diagonally across the stretcherless South American hammock. I had spent most of the night trying to lie along the length of it, with the result that my feet were higher than my head and my body was slumped in a great curve. I had been unable to turn without breaking my back, and I got up that morning feeling that I should be afflicted with a permanent curvature of the spine.

After breakfast, Teddy Melville came in with the news that a large party of Wapishana had started fishing in a nearby lake by the traditional method of poisoning its waters. There was a chance that in the process they would come across other animals which might be of interest to us, and Teddy suggested we should go over to have a look. We got into his truck and set off across the savannahs. There was little to prevent us from driving wherever we wished. Here and there were tortuously weaving creeks, but they were easily avoided; we could see them from a considerable distance away, their banks being fringed by bushes and palm trees. Otherwise the only obstacles in our way were clumps of stunted sandpaper bushes and termite hills—tall, crazily spired towers, sometimes standing singly and sometimes concentrated in groups so dense that at times it seemed we were driving through a giant graveyard. A few well beaten tracks across the savannahs linked one ranch to the next, but the lake we were to visit was isolated and before long Teddy branched off the main trail and began threading bumpily between the bushes and the termite hills, following no track but simply relying on his sense of direction. Soon we saw a belt of trees on the horizon marking the site of the lake we were to visit.

When we arrived, we found that a long arm of the lake had been dammed with a barricade of stakes. Into it the Wapishana had crushed special lianas which they had gathered many miles away in the Kanuku mountains. All around were fishermen with bows and arrows at the ready, waiting for the fish to become stupefied by the poisonous sap of the lianas and float to the surface. The Wapishana clung to branches of trees overhanging the lake’s margin; they perched on specially built platforms in the middle of the water; some stood on small improvised rafts and others patrolled up and down in dugout canoes. In a clearing on the bank the women had lit fires and slung hammocks and now sat waiting to clean and cure the fish as soon as the men brought them in; but nothing so far had been caught and the women were getting impatient. Their menfolk had been foolish, they said scornfully: too big a section of the lake had been dammed and too few lianas had been gathered in the forest, so that the poison was too weak to affect the fish. Three days of hard work in damming and platform building had been wasted. Teddy talked to them in Wapishana and gathered all this information as well as the news that one of the women had seen a hole in the bank on the other side of the lake, which she said was occupied by a large animal. What kind of animal it was, she was not sure; it might be either an anaconda or a caiman.

The caiman belongs to the same group of reptiles as the crocodile and alligator, and to the layman all three animals look very much alike. To Jack, however, they were very different, and though all three are found in the Americas, they each have distinctive habitats. Here on the Rupununi, Jack said, we could expect to find the black caiman, the largest species in its own group, which is reputed to grow up to twenty feet long. Jack admitted that he would rather like a “nice big caiman” and, come to that, he would also be quite glad to catch a sizeable anaconda. As the animal in the hole might turn out to be one or the other, he felt we really should try to catch it. We all climbed into dugout canoes and paddled across the lake with one of the women to guide us.

On investigation, we found that there were two holes—a small one and a large one, and that they were connected with each other, for a stick pushed down the smaller one provoked splashes from the other. We barricaded the smaller hole with stakes. To prevent the unknown creature from escaping through the larger one and, at the same time, to allow it enough space to emerge and be caught, we cut saplings from the bank and drove them deep into the mud of the lake bottom in a semicircular palisade around the entrance. We had not yet seen our quarry and no amount of prodding through the smaller hole would drive it out, so we decided to enlarge the big hole by cutting through the turfy bank. Slowly we hacked away the roof of the tunnel, and as we did so the bank shook with a subterranean bellow that could hardly have been produced by a snake.

Cautiously peering through the stakes of the palisade into a gloomy tunnel, I just distinguished, half submerged in the muddy water, a large yellow canine tooth. We had cornered a caiman, and judging from the size of the tooth, a very large one.

A caiman has two offensive weapons. First and obviously, its enormous jaws; and second, its immensely powerful tail. With either it can inflict very serious injuries, but fortunately the one we were tackling was so placed in its hole that we only had to pay attention to one end at a time. Having had that momentary glimpse of its teeth, I knew which end was uppermost in my mind. Jack was paddling about in the muddy water inside the stakes trying to work out how the caiman was lying and how best to tackle the job of catching it. It seemed to me that if the beast elected to come out in a hurry, Jack would have to jump very quickly to avoid losing a leg. For my part, I felt I was quite near enough to danger wading thigh-deep farther out in the lake, maneuvering Charles in a canoe at a sufficient distance to get good film shots of the proceedings. In the event of the caiman making a lunge at Jack, I was quite sure that it would come with such a rush that it would knock our flimsy palisade flat, and whereas Jack could leap for the bank, I should have to wade several yards before I reached safety. I was in no doubt that the caiman, in such a depth of water, would be able to move faster than me. For some reason or other—perhaps my nervousness showed itself more than I imagined—I seemed unable to keep the canoe steady enough to make it practicable for Charles to work, and after I had given it a particularly violent lurch, which nearly threw him and his camera into the water, he decided that his apparatus would stand less chance of getting wet if he joined me wading in the lake.

Meanwhile, Teddy had borrowed a rawhide lasso from one of the Wapishana, and he and Jack, kneeling on the bank, were dangling it in front of the caiman’s nose in the hope that it might lunge forward toward Charles and me and, in doing so, thrust its head through the noose. It roared and thrashed the sides of its tunnel so violently that the whole bank quivered, but very sensibly it refused to come out any further. Jack cut more of the bank away.

By now there were some twenty locals watching the proceedings and offering suggestions. To them it seemed incomprehensible that we should wish to catch the creature alive and unharmed. They were in favor of dispatching it there and then with their knives.

At last, with the aid of two forked sticks to hold the noose wide open, Jack and Teddy coaxed the lasso round the caiman’s black snout. This plainly infuriated the beast and with a twist and a roar it shook the noose off. Three times the rope was on and three times it was shaken off. It went round a fourth time. Slowly, with the sticks, Jack eased it up toward the caiman’s head. Then suddenly, before the reptile realized what was happening, he drew the noose tight and the dangerous jaws were secured.

Now we had to guard against a blow from its huge tail. The situation began to look more alarming from where Charles and I were standing, for, having tied another noose round the caiman’s jaws for safety, Teddy told the Wapishana to uproot the palisade. There was nothing now but open water between Charles and me and the caiman which lay with its long head projecting out of the hole, glaring at us malevolently with yellow unblinking eyes. Jack, however, jumped down from the bank into the water immediately in front of the hole, taking with him a long pole he had cut from a sapling. Bending down, he pushed the pole into the tunnel so that it lay along the reptile’s scaly back, and reaching inside he secured it by tying a half-hitch round the pole and under the animal’s clammy armpits. Teddy joined him and, inch by inch, they drew the caiman out of its hole, tying half-hitches around its body and onto the sapling as it emerged. The back legs, the base of the tail, and finally the tail itself were securely tied and the animal lay safely trussed at our feet, the muddy water lapping round its jaws. It was just ten feet long.

It now had to be ferried across the lake to the trucks. We hitched the front end of the pole to the stern of a dugout canoe, and towing the caiman behind us we paddled back to the women’s encampment.

Jack supervised the Wapishana as they helped us to load the caiman onto the truck and then he methodically inspected its bonds one by one to see that none was chafing. The women, having no fish to cure, gathered round the truck, examining our capture and trying to decide why on earth anybody should value such a dangerous pest.

We drove off back across the savannahs. Charles and I sat on each side of the caiman with our feet within six inches of its jaws, trusting that the rawhide lassoes were as strong as they were reputed to be. We were both jubilant at having caught such an impressive creature so early. Jack was less demonstrative.

“Not bad,” he said, “for a start.”