Perry's Ferry - March 2011

The skills with which in another life Perry navigated a deep-sea trawler are now deployed to manoeuvre bauxite through the interior of Suriname, smallest and least known nation of South America. The salty, sea-dog persona, Hull accent, and an underbite so pronounced there's likely no top set at all, make him difficult to understand for Costa the Ukrainian engineer, a crew of nine Indonesians (one spare because they are all new to this), and Rama, the cook from Singapore. 'Cold! They're meant to be hot!', he explains, by placing the offending object against Rama's hand, the better to explain the mystery of chips. It's 344 years since the English relinquished any political interest in this outpost of the Caribbean, but for the past ten, British shipping company, J.P. Knight, have been sending out captains of a fleet of tugs to restore a little incongruity to the recovery of Suriname's infrastructure.

The Kutari is the oldest and most derided of Knight's fleet. She doesn't even look like a tug. At 1800 horse-power she pushes two huge platform containers from the depot at Paranam, down the Suriname river, past the capital, Paramaribo, along the Cottica and then turns into the interior to bend and twist along the Comawijne to the quarries at Moengo and Coertibo (C'bo). It takes up to ten hours to convey the precious red earth from the quarry heaps, down the shoot into the containers – at least three and a half hours for the larger and two and a half for the smaller container – and the tug pushes the load back to Paranam.  Still the most efficient and cost-effective means, the whole journey could start at 2am on Wednesday morning and not end until 8am the following Friday. Perry and his fellow captains shuttle tugs up and down in stints of eight weeks on-eight weeks off.

Surinam's rivers look wide and still and chestnut-brown. In fact, these deceptive waters mask fast tides and currents which, for all her weight and power, can drag the Kutari off course. The further into the interior, the more narrow and serpentine they become. At night, in particular, Captain Perry and his Surinamese mate, Raman earn their pay, as they manoeuvre weight and length of inflexible iron  around tight bends, illuminated by searchlight. 'You may think they look powerful', says Perry, 'but these ones are rubbish'. He is full of respect and awe for what appears to be a natural Surinamese facility on these waters: 'that's what I mean about these people', as a tiny boat lands with pinpoint accuracy at an anchor point in the centre of the river's strongest current, managing to be one of the few people able to use the phrase "these people" and not sound in any way pejorative. Despite cold chips, and the monotony of eight weeks' shunting along the same route, Captain Perry is happy to have Raman to rely on, though they're not exactly Bogart and Hepburn.

Those wishing to piece together the history of the British presence in the Caribbean, especially during the early years of settlement in the seventeenth century, have to be creative and resourceful. The vast area which stretched from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to Suriname close to the Equator, was known as the Torrid Zone, and possessed a geographical and cultural coherence then which it often tries to deny in the age of independent self-government. Nevertheless, whilst the term referred primarily to the heat, everything about the region was torrid – the prospect of the Atlantic crossing, travelling in uncharted territory, meeting new people and dealing, unfettered, with friends and enemies amongst the same, old people. Every piece of correspondence, every invoice or bill of exchange was carried by a ship's captain 'QDC' – 'whom God preserve'. So, despite being a vital part of the 'Caribbees', Suriname tended to be an overlooked aspect of British interest – as a tiny settlement within the vastness of mainland South American jungle; humid and easily forgotten. Whitehall's loss was the gain of the Lord Proprietor of the Caribbees, Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, who, in 1650, either (we're not sure which) sent minions out from his territory in Barbados to settle in Surinam (it acquired an e when the Dutch took it over in 1667), or took over the settlement once it had been established by those enemies who had been attempting to escape his influence. Being on the American mainland provided the exiled aristo with an opportunity to rule potentially limitless territory. It used to be said that the capital, Paramaribo, where Willoughby started to build defences, was named after him, but he was capable of making much more direct and obvious references to his influence and control. He is the reason that there is a Parham Town in Antigua, but Surinam was referred to as Willoughbyland, and its centre was Fort Willoughby (now Fort Zeelandia).

A curious mix of peoples ended up here – Caribs (more correctly, Kalinago), Arawaks, Africans, 'maroons' (those African slaves who escaped into the bush), and rival European claimants – the English, Dutch, and French – all intent on continuing their civil, internecine, or international warfare in the jungle. This guaranteed Surinam a romanticised, exotic notoriety. Aphra Behn, better known as a playwright, set her only novel, Oroonoko, in English Surinam in the 1660s, with her heroes, the doomed African lovers, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who ran away with others to try to form a maroon community in the hinterland; her baddies, Willoughby's deputy, Anglo-Irishman William Byam and his Cornish henchman Treffry; and her valiant defenders of liberty, like George Marten, brother of the civil-war firebrand Henry (Behn was mistress of republican William Scott at the time), who saved the English party from a 'tyger' (jaguar). Behn published her novel in 1688, long after the English had relinquished their interest in Surinam, and had exchanged it with the Dutch, victors in the second Anglo-Dutch War to secure mastery of the oceans, for a tiny piece of real estate on Long Island, which the Dutch had called New Amsterdam, and the English decided to rename after Admiral James, Duke of York. The Dutch believed that Suriname could be their Brazil, ideal for growing sugar, but its status as forgotten piece of jungle, where acquisitive, combative men had free rein to live as they pleased, guaranteed Suriname retained its reputation for cruelty, exploitation and violence. When slavery was abolished, new generations of indentured labourers were drafted in from all over the world – South Asia, Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China, the Middle East, Indonesia, and other parts of the former Dutch empire in South-east Asia, and the Maghreb – which, by the twentieth century,  resulted in Suriname becoming the most ethnically diverse place on earth.

Around the time of the English surrender of Surinam, a beautiful, hand-coloured map was produced, showing as little whitewashed, red-roofed houses, the various plantations of Englishmen, Jews,  'Scotsmen' and 'Indians' along the Surinam, Para and Comewena Rivers. In actual fact, the houses were wooden, single-storey huts, with palm-leaf thatch, which was steeply pitched, almost to the ground, to allow the tropical rains to wash away from the settlements. It is fashionable to say that the English learnt next to nothing from their repeated experiments to colonise alien landscapes, but their bitter experience in Virginia had taught how unwise it was to allow pools of water to sit stagnant near habitation. There, Thomas Dale's 'Laws Divine Moral and Martial' had made it a capital offence to throw waste water anywhere other than the stockade perimeter.

Whilst it looks idealistic, what is more remarkable about the map produced in 1667, is how closely it accords with what remains four-hundred years later. After centuries of river erosion, tides, currents, and the fraught relationship between humans and the rain-forest, the map appears to have been commissioned in order to give someone the most accurate picture of English Surinam possible. The rivers have been marked up to show how far they were tidal: marked in depth in fathoms with the point at which the river ceases to be navigable by European vessels marked by a fine pen-drawing of a sailing ship. That point is Paranam, on the Suriname River, where Knight's tugs, dwarfed by huge container vessels, still moor up. Places at the mouth of the Suriname and Cottica rivers where it is possible and advisable to lay anchor are marked. It is at these points that the river-savvy Surinamese boatmen still anchor their small craft. In an area in which one would imagine that the waters had carved new channels and the pilots complain of having to ram and crash they way through mangrove and forest as the woodland encroaches in on the waterways, the twists and turns of all of the rivers surveyed in 1667 remain remarkably accurate. The seemingly still waters are described as having an eight-foot tide that runs as strongly at Byam's Point, Suriname, as at Gravesend.

They used to throw stones at the bauxite barges as they ploughed a route deep into the interior. Maroon communities, whose very existence was predicated on the need to get away from those who sought to disrupt their lifestyle, felt regularly under attack by the boats that would have to break trees to clear the river passage, and with the rivers being so narrow, shallow and serpentine here, sometimes missed and instead broke houses or canoes. Twenty years ago, before generators had been brought to jungle communities, the only experience most visitors had of maroons was the journey from Zanderij airport, invariably made after dark, and thus illuminated solely by the light of the fires outside each hut. They had only recently emerged from a bush war which had taken up much of the 1980s, and relations between the maroons, indigenous communities and government was fraught.

As Aphra Behn had hinted, slaves ran away from English plantations and established de facto free maroon communities. The migration of Africans to the rain-forest was accelerated under Dutch rule because of the opportunity afforded by such vast uncharted and difficult territory, because Dutch control of their possessions was lax and their treatment of their labour force notoriously savage. Dutch Guiana was never profitable as a sugar colony, nor in coffee, cocoa, gold, or fruit. But there was one valuable commodity produced throughout Suriname's four centuries of colonisation which was not necessarily for export profit – its timber – and after World War I the economy finally found a valuable commodity when the Aluminium Company of America (ALCOA) began to dig and process bauxite deposits. Forestry and mining impinged on both the maroons and the indigenous peoples. There are four indigenous groups: the Trio of the south-east and Wayana of the south-west, with pockets of Arawak and Kalinago in the coastal areas. There are five maroon Tribal Communities: the Saramaccaners along the upper stretches of the Suriname River, Kwintis at Coppername, the Matawai on the Saramacca River and the Ndjukas and Paramakaners who live along the Cottica and Marowijne Rivers. It is these last two past whom Perry and his colleagues take their bauxite barges.

Suriname won its independence from the Netherlands in 1975, with a parliamentary democracy of established political parties, largely defined on ethnic lines: the African-Caribbean National Party of Suriname, the Progressive Reform Party which drew its support from the Hindustani communities, and the Javanese Indonesian Peasants' Party. This came to a sudden end on 25 February 1980, when a military coup under Desiré (Desi) Bouterse seized power. Fort Zeelandia, a museum of Surinamese history and culture, became a military fortress once more, and in December 1982 was the site of the deaths of fifteen prominent opponents of military rule.

In 1986, opposition to the Paramaribo government came from another source. In July, former soldier and Bouterse bodyguard, Ronnie Brunswijk, led a maroon uprising, attacking economic targets in the interior. The maroons formed the Surinamese Liberation Army, more colloquially known as the JC guerrillas – 'Jungle Commando'. They severely disrupted the bauxite industry, but the Surinamese economy was already in collapse, as western governments withdrew aid and investment, anyone who had an opportunity to flee the country did so, and, it was said, the military kept themselves in power by arming the Tucayana and using the indigenous population in the west of the interior to fight the maroons in the east and courier cocaine. The Bush War decimated the maroon population; uprooted, displaced over the border into French Guiana, and killed. It did, however, contribute to the ousting of the military government in elections in 1987, which brought to power a coalition Front voor Democratic en Ontwikkeling (Development), who together with the French government began negotiations with the JC, and signed the Kourou Accord in 1989.

The Accord was the latest in a 400-year chain of agreements which all had two things in common: all made statements about access to the land; none of them was fully complied with. Peace treaties in 1684, 1760, and 1762, agreed they 'remain on the spot where they are now, and all the necessary country there, at least two days or ten hours from any Plantation', whilst cutting timber for sale was bound by special rules. In the nineteenth century, treaties gave the maroons more autonomy but cemented rivalry between maroon and indigenous communities who were not to impinge on each others' land rights; and thus the same statements of rights, along with competing ambiguities, were built into the Gold Ordinance of 1882, the Mineral Ordinances of 1932 and 1952, the Agrarian Ordinance (1937), the Timber Ordinance of 1947, the Decree called the Principles of Land Policy (1982), Forestry Management Act of 1992 and Nature Protection Resolutions (1986 and 1998). Bouterse opposed the Kourou Accord, swooped on power again – the Christmas 'Telephone Coup' of 24 December 1990 – but this was foiled by pressure from the Organisation of American States and the USA.

In 1991 Suriname was in a perilous state. Under military government – of the insecure, tooled-up, heavily-braided variety – everywhere was rubble:  trash and tension on the streets. The Fort was no longer a museum –  a site of historical interest in itself – but it was a reminder of four centuries of unstable, militarised administration. It was not possible to visit the Fort then, nor to get close enough to take photos. There were signs and guns everywhere, reminding you of the fate of the 1982 opposition. The only vehicles on the streets were long and black and had darkened windows. Few went into the interior. One who did was the pilot who was authorised to fly into maroon territory and deliver them ballot boxes; for an election meaningless to them, and one in which if they did take part they would not vote for the military government, and the boxes would not be collected. Although Ronald Venetiaan's New Front coalition was successful in the elections of May 1991, Bouterse resigned from the military and founded the National Democratic Party, the 1990s were difficult. The economy was on its knees.

The elections of May 2000 returned the NF again, and social and economic reforms were gradually introduced. The Dutch loaned nearly 140 million Euros. The Dutch courts found Bouterse guilty of drug trafficking. In 2009 President Venetiaan unveiled a plaque at Fort Zeelandia to the 15 martyrs for democracy, and the Surinamese government began proceedings against its former leader for their murder. Suralco, the Suriname arm of Alcoa, and its rival, Billiton, began again to exploit the country's bauxite deposits, and JP Knight quietly slipped into Suriname to transport the red gold. Displaced maroons were encouraged to repatriate abandoned villages. Now, at regular intervals, there are 'fish sticks' – wooden stakes driven into the water as traps – canoes, landing stages and everyday life along the rivers. Generators have brought light to the jungle. The city of Paramaribo has developed and new hotels are open, old ones reopened, although they still jar on the skyline as the capital is not geared up for tourism. Nevertheless, the country is trying to attract visitors. The visa application office in Amsterdam is jammed with crowds trying to negotiate the red-tape necessary to discover this most neglected part of South America. The biggest growth area is in eco-tourism. Companies, such as the most prominent and successful, Orange Travel, run tours up the rivers, and past the 'plantations', by which is meant those established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Those who fled Suriname to escape military government and economic collapse are returning to re-announce their pride in being Surinamese. These include a couple intent on establishing an eco-spa at the confluence of the Suriname and Para Rivers – close to George Marten's former plantation – with treatments based on traditional maroon medicine. But for every small maroon child who waves at Perry as he passes by on his tug, there are fifty surly, unmoved and hostile faces feigning obliviousness. The airport is no longer staffed by seven varieties of uniformed, armed official; but the progress of getting out of Suriname is still officious and sinister. And in the visa office in Amsterdam, returnees are overseen by a photograph of their President, described by Al Jazeera as 'one of Suriname's wealthiest men and most popular politicians'. Despite being wanted by Interpol and indicted for murder, Desi Bouterse was re-elected in May 2010.