Columns & Blogs

The American missionaries who came to serve the people of Guyana were faced with many challenges. My parents came in 1960 and stayed until 1966. In those days, the runway at Paramakutoi Village in the Roraima Mountains where we lived, was not paved. In fact, there were no paved interior runways.

Not long ago, I visited the site of the world's greatest mass suicide, in NW Guyana. Remote and derelict, it's hard to imagine that up to 1,000 people had lived here.

How else do you describe watching Guyanese cowboys (or vaqueiros) at work in a corral? At Dadanawa Ranch, there was a bonfire for brands, and – high up in the rails – the boys clambered around, waiting for their moment to drop down and join the fight. Below them, in the arena, hundreds of animals swirled round, blind with dust and mad with panic.

In the UK, we tend to associate the end of this gruesome trade with William Wlberforce. But there are a few other Britons associated with abolition, all with links to either Guyana (then the colonies of Demerara and Berbice) or Suriname:-

The ancestors who vanished, somewhere in South America. Most madeirans that I met had no idea that a large body of their ancestors had gone to Guyana (or British Guiana as it was was). They're aware of the Venezuelan connection but the rest of the continent is rather vague. Several people were sure that Guyana was in Africa ...

Too little water, everything dies; too much, it drowns. In Guyana, the problem for farmers has often managing the country's vast reserves of water; draining swamps, maintaining channels; stabilising the watertable.

The Madeirans immigrants will have been astonished by the remoteness and the emptiness of the British Guiana in 1835. It was the size of the Great Britain, and yet - under its recent Dutch masters - only 10% of it had been explored. It's borders had yet to be defined, and enormous features like the Kaieteur Falls were still unknown to the outside world.

Life in the Guyanese interior has always been tough, and the hunters there will have seen plenty of danger. But for the Madeirans, no hunt was as dangerous, as remarkable or as cruel as the one they'd left behind: the whale hunt.

For the Madeirans arriving in Guyana, the wild life must have been bewildering. Madeira has no indigenous land mammals at all, no poisonous creatures, and no snakes. By contrast, Guyana has the biggest ants in the world, and the biggest freshwater fish.

Only a few of the descendants of the Madeiran immigrants to Guyana will have ever made it back to the island. The ties are too distant and the memories (if any) too unhappy.