Searching for El Dorado: A Journey into the South American Rainforest on the Tail of the World's Largest Gold Rush [Lingua Inglese] - Rilegato

Herman, Marc

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0385502524 ISBN 13: 9780385502528

Casa editrice: Doubleday, 2003

Riassunto

A journalist offers an action-packed account of his journey into the rain forests of Guyana and into the lives of local gold miners in search of a fortune, profiling these independent prospectors who search for gold in the same way as California's forty-niners and the international corporations who own the mines and fail to alleviate the region's poverty.

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L'autore:

Marc Herman's work has appeared in publications including Mother Jones, Spin, Harper's, and McSweeney's. He first earned an enthusiastic following for his coverage of the 1996 elections for Might Magazine. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

THE MYSTERIOUS PROSPECTOR

It is a misconception that you sleep in a hammock with your feet at one end and your head at the other. You'll fall out. The proper way to do it is to lie diagonally across the hammock's width. In southern Guyana, where they make some of the world's better hammocks, people sometimes sit entirely sideways in theirs. The best come from a group called the Wapisiana. The Wapisiana make their hammocks with cotton twine woven back and forth like a fishing net. Nothing special. But you could hang your entire family in one and it wouldn't break. The hammocks are also nearly impossible to fall from because the design is a long, luxuriant oval that will catch you no matter how you move. An example is in the British Museum and another in the Smithsonian's collection in Washington, D.C.

A North American hammock by comparison is small, tippy, and not appropriate for use in the forest. So my first night in Guyana I did not sleep well. I was hanging over the ground in a hammock made from a few strands of crudely tied nylon. I had bought it in ignorance the prior month at a sporting goods store in Los Angeles. It proved too small to hold my legs and distributed weight badly. I also rigged it wrong from the poles in the shelter where some local gold prospectors and I were sleeping. It hung too low.

I was tired from riding to the camp all day in the back of a truck so ignored the problem at first.

However: "This hammock not a jungle hammock, boy," a miner hanging to my left said.

He was only a few inches away but it was night and the shelter was very dark. Even when I shined a flashlight he was impossible to see through his hammock; rather than a net a miner's hammock is a large cloth rug, usually decorated with a colorful design, and the fabric obscured his head. He had a low, disinterested voice and his body was long and hung heavily.

"You want? Tie up higher, boy?" he said from the depths of his hammock.

"It's okay." I didn't want to interrupt his rest.

He rolled onto one shoulder, the ropes strained and he stuck his head over the edge of the fabric. I shined the flashlight. He was a young man sporting a wild pile of dreadlocks that pointed in many directions.

"Lot of snakes in Frenchman," he said. Frenchman was the camp's name, the legacy of two French prospectors said to have died in a cave collapse nearby.

People sleep tied to poles in a tropical forest rather than on the ground in tents because the forest floor is damp and filled with alarming creatures. It is preferable to hang at least a few feet out of reach.

"Okay. Okay," I said.

He got out of bed and showed me how to tie the ropes so they stayed as high as possible. He was a muscular young man wearing only some jockey shorts; he seemed sleepy and did not say much. He tied some loops into the ropes securing the hammock and nodded with satisfaction when it was hanging higher, then sat back into his own hammock and gave a two-fingered wave good night over the edge.

I had come to be in a gold miner's camp in Guyana as the result of a chance encounter.

A little over a year prior I had been living in a family cabin in New York's Catskill foothills when a storm hit. This was in 1994. Seven feet of snow fell, the furnace failed and my car died. By the end of the week it grew so cold in the cabin the water in the toilet bowl froze. It proved to be a long week.

But the previous Sunday's paper, which I dug from the snow and borrowed from the house next door included a chart of "lowest airfares." I scanned flights to the equator where it was warm. Venezuela's national carrier offered to fly from Miami, Florida, to Caracas, Venezuela, for only two hundred dollars. I had not planned to flee the cabin but suddenly it seemed like an ideal option. I had just left the first job I had gotten after graduating college and had yet to find a new one. Two days later I climbed over a snowbank that surrounded the house, walked down the hill, hitched a ride to the train station and as soon as possible connected with a bus to Miami.

From there I was in balmy, dirty Caracas the next day. Because in most of the world life is easy if you hold American currency, I figured I could afford to wait out the winter on Venezuela's Caribbean coast playing soccer and lying on the beach. That's roughly what happened in the end.

But.

Late in my trip I decided to head south by bus on a vague plan to see the Amazon forest. In North America the Amazon is associated most often with Brazil, sometimes Ecuador and Peru. However its north edge reaches into Venezuela and Guyana as well. Some of the jungle's least-known corners are across those borders. The first paved road from Venezuela to Brazil only went through as recently as 1991 and no road to speak of exists from either country through Guyana even today. Three days later I got off the bus at a town named for its milepost: Kilometro Ochenta y Ocho, Kilometer 88. I debarked to a clearing by the road's shoulder to get some lunch.

Halfway through lunch a man and a woman walked out of the trees. The man was large and white. He looked bad: his shirt was covered in mud; a potbelly strained it; he wore a two-week beard and his hands were pink with abrasions. He had not bathed in some time. His shoes were foam shower sandals, and insect bites and welts covered his feet. He was one of those men whose age could have fallen anywhere ten years to either side of forty-five.

The woman who walked with him was young enough to be a daughter but seemed by their manner to be his girlfriend. She was Latin, presumably Venezuelan. I said hello to them in my halting Spanish. The young woman appeared not to notice. The man said hello but was unfriendly. He wouldn't give his name.

They ordered lunch from the tin-roofed barbecue where I was eating; a tired-looking young woman on the other side of the restaurant was cooking chickens over a fire in an oil drum. While the couple waited for their food I asked what they were doing in Km 88.

The man said--reluctantly, and in English--that he was a gold miner in Guyana. The border was across the street behind some low buildings, he said.

Km 88 was obviously not an official border crossing. It consisted of a hotel with an aggrieved toucan shrieking in a cage, a small dry-goods store and a cinder-block garage. The town seemed too small to be more than a highway stop, but the man said it was a supply outpost for a few thousand gold prospectors. The surrounding forest was full of them he said. A gold rush was underway in that part of the forest. One of the world's largest gold mines was under construction in the trees a few miles east of town and another was scheduled to open within a few months on Guyana's side of the border.

He leaned on the card table where I sat. It strained. The young woman with him had wandered off to gossip with the chicken cook in Spanish.

The forest around us held five, ten, twenty, maybe fifty billion dollars in gold he said. Thousands of people local and foreign were looking for it. His camp had only a few men digging so far. He had been there a few months. But if they discovered enough traces of gold he planned to head north to the United States, talk to bankers and find backing to return with larger tools. Then he could hire more employees and mount a proper exploration effort. When he found enough gold he would make a claim with the government, sell the claim to an international gold company for millions of dollars and retire to the Bahamas. That was his plan.

After a few minutes he took a paper plate of chicken from the woman cooking over the oil-drum fire, paid her a dollar in local bills and walked back across the road with his companion. They disappeared around the hotel and into the forest and crossed back over the border to Guyana.

When I got back to the United States a few weeks later I went to a library. It took about an hour to confirm the prospector's story. Geology journals and stock market reports--not anything in a respected newspaper, but those breathless newsletters Wall Street fetishists read for investing tips--were full of articles on gold discoveries in that part of the northern Amazon.

It took longer to find out how outsiders had even known of the gold there. It turned out they had followed a very old trail. History books said that four hundred years ago the part of the forest where gold was turning up was also the last presumed location of El Dorado: the city of gold from conquistador myths.

How a golden city came to be located in an obscure patch of rain forest on the Guyanese border appeared to be a matter of some argument.

The story was five centuries old. El Dorado had been a person at first, not a place. A few years after Columbus a story had emerged in South America of what was likely a Chibcha or Muisca Indian king living in what is today Colombia. This king would cover himself in sap or oil to which he adhered a layer of golden dust. Thus the name El Dorado--"the gilded one" or "the golden man."

All aglitter, El Dorado would be the image of a god walking the earth. On ceremonial occasions he would hurl gold and sometimes himself into a lake. The gold would wash away and the next morning he would cover himself in more from an apparently inexhaustible supply.

The Spanish heard the story and decided Lake Guatavita in Colombia was the site of the ritual. They tried to drain a number of Andean lakes; to do this required cutting away the stone on one side at great effort with hand tools, perhaps the first foreign attempt to excavate a piece of South America to recover something valuable. This was in the 1520s. Nothing came of it. (Modern archaeologists, however, have found gold artifacts at the bottom of some of the same lakes.)

The Spanish were happy for their agents to start looking elsewhere for the gold. Indians in Colombia had many golden objects, so the Spanish presumed there had to be a gold...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Doubleday
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0385502524
• ISBN 13: 9780385502528
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 253