Senor Nice: Straight Life From Wales to South America

  We talked for a while, during which time I could do little else but laugh. He is as funny as fuck, one of this country’s cleverest raconteurs, and we became and remain very good friends. Shortly afterwards Dave asked if I would join him in a double act at a venue in Tenerife. The almost exclusively British expatriate audience loved the show, but apparently a knife fight had broken out during the second half. After the show Dave, with his considerable entourage, my manager Giles Cooper and I went to a bar to sign autographs, pat one another on the back and get drunk. All seemed amicable until suddenly a group of about twenty men with Middle Eastern and Spanish features poured in wielding baseball bats. The bar erupted. Giles and I scarpered and sought the sanctuary of our hotel rooms.

  ‘What was all that about, Dave?’

  ‘It happens every time, Howard. There’s always a ruck between us and the Lebanese mob when I’m there. Never really understood it. Lucky no one got hurt, as it happens.’

  ‘I thought someone got knifed?’

  ‘That was at the show, not the bar. Nothing to do with us. Some domestic squabble from what I could make out. Anyway, next time we team up you can have my knuckleduster and I’ll smoke the joint.’

  Bernie Davies joined us. ‘All right, butt? You going to Glastonbury next month? It’s a first-class line-up they’ve got – Rod Stewart, Coldplay and of course our lads from the valleys, the Stereophonics and Alabama 3.’

  ‘Not this year, Bernie. Funnily enough, I’m off to Brazil – doing some more research on the Welsh.’

  ‘Old Henry Morgan got out there too, did he?

  ‘I don’t think he did, but I’ll check. I’m giving Henry Morgan a break. The reason I’m going to Brazil is I found out the Welsh had a colony there.’

  ‘I never knew Patagonia was in Brazil.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s not; it’s in Argentina. So you know about Patagonia then?’

  ‘Of course, butt. My ancestors on my father’s side were the first ones there, apparently. I was thinking of going out myself to try to track down some rich relatives.’

  ‘I’ll be going there sometime, too, for sure. We could go together. We must talk about this.’

  ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ said a soft voice, ‘but did I hear you say you were going to Brazil? My name’s Jim Shreim, a friend of Nick Reynolds. And this is Michael Biggs, Ronnie’s son.’ I shook hands with them and offered my sympathy to Michael. Jim had a warm smiling face with a hint of the Middle East. Michael too seemed pleasant but also burdened with concern. ‘Because if you are going,’ continued Jim, ‘you must look me up. I live in Rio, in Santa Teresa, right around the corner from Ronnie’s house. I’ll give you a great time, I promise.’

  The previous week I had filed my article on Panama with the Observer. It was well reviewed and some time later won a prize in the Latin America Travel Association’s competition for travel writer of the year. The piece had taken me a long time to finish, and I had let socialising and my research into the Welsh slip. London was a bad place to focus on writing; there were far too many distractions. It was just as well I was moving.

  The next evening, equipped with a massive hangover, I settled myself into my newly rented apartment in Piccadilly Plaza, York, where essential conveniences such as electricity, telephone and broadband had just been installed. I had chosen York to be near my mother, now in worsening health and living with my sister in Richmond, Yorkshire. My belongings, hastily jammed into a rented van in Shepherd’s Bush that morning, arrived safely. I unpacked my books on Wales and the Welsh and the notes I had made, and over the next few days tried to come to grips with what I knew.

  My mother had always said that before the Roman invasion all Britain was Welsh from top to bottom and that after the collapse of the Roman empire, the Welsh reigned again through King Arthur. The ages darkened, and hordes of Teutonic Angles, Saxons and Vikings did their best to destroy the Welsh. Merlin said not to worry; a Welsh king riding a red dragon would be back on Britain’s throne within the next millennium.

  In 1066 England was invaded by the Normans, who under William the Conqueror then slowly pushed the troublesome Welsh into the mountains of the west, trying to contain them with an impressive chain of castles. The Welsh refused to give up and after two centuries of fighting the Plantagenet King Henry III granted Llewelyn ap Gruffudd the title of prince of Wales. Once again the Welsh were able to govern their territories under their own laws and conduct affairs in their own language, but this lasted just a few years. Edward I, determined to unite all the islands of Britain, sought to destroy the prince of Wales. At first Llewelyn did well: castles fell into his hands, and he routinely beat off or destroyed large English forces, who had to devote all their resources to dealing with the malicious, accursed Welsh. Late one lonely night a mugger who had no idea of the prince’s identity robbed and killed Llewelyn. The English took control of Wales, attempting to conciliate the Welsh by awarding the title of prince of Wales to the sovereign’s first-born son. Challenges to English rule occasionally occurred, most notably the revolt of Owain Glyndwr, but for the next two centuries Wales lived under an alien political system as a subordinate and integral part of the kingdom of England.

  White-rosed Yorkist Richard III was the last of the 300-year-old Plantagenet dynasty. He lost his life and the last battle of the Wars of the Roses in 1485 at Bosworth Field, killed by red-rosed Lancastrian Henry Tudor, grandson of Owen Tudor, a Welshman. Henry was duly crowned and Merlin’s prophecy had been fulfilled: the red dragon had killed the white and a Welsh king was on Britain’s throne. And so the Welsh, represented by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, presided over a unique century of literary genius, scientific discovery, naval victories, colonisation, exploration and piracy. However, despite Henry VIII’s heroic efforts to continue the line, Elizabeth I’s virginity resulted in the extinction of the house of Tudor and Wales declined into the status of a region of England with a funny forgotten past, occasionally visited by culture-vulture nationalists playing dirges on harps in draughty pavilions.

  Many Welsh families, convinced that England was intent on destroying their religious, cultural and economic freedom, turned their backs on the country and looked west, beyond Ireland, beyond the Atlantic, to America. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Welsh settlements spread on the west side of the Schuylkill River around Philadelphia, where Welsh became the major tongue in the streets and Welsh names adorned large tracts of land. Today, the still very-active Welsh Society of Philadelphia is the oldest ethnic society of its kind in the United States. Welsh emigration to the Americas continued, and during the nineteenth century extended to Australia and South America.

  Optimistically, I surfed the Net. Using the keywords Wales and Brazil, I ploughed through several hundred accounts of football matches and entries about a samba class in Cardiff before finding out that in 1850 a group of 200 Welsh people from Glamorgan gathered by Evan Evans of Nantyglo had settled in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul intending to establish a Welsh colony. As far as I could discover, this was the first attempt by the Welsh to settle anywhere in South America, but there was no further information. Further surfing provided the following reference: A volume from the library of H. Tobit Evans, Llanarth, comprising reports by Captain W. R. Kennedy on the Welsh Colony of Chupat, Brazil. I keyed ‘Chupat Brazil’ into a score of different search engines but came up with nothing other than this same item. I would have to wait until I got to Brazil; leaving matters to chance continues to be the favoured alternative of risk-takers. It was time I made travel plans.

  Several times in Panama and Jamaica I had found myself regretting not having a video camera. There had also been times when a mosquito net, Swiss army knife, and sunprotection lotion would have come in handy. On this trip I would ensure I was well equipped. Unpacking my possessions in York provided the ideal opportunity to ensure I overlooked nothing essential. I opened a large box full of useless travelling accessories and so-called requisites: a receiver c
apable of eavesdropping on pilots’ conversations, radio alarm clocks, currency converters, pocket translators, scientific calculators and various other gadgets which either had never worked, stopped working or been condemned to the graveyard of objects no longer in style. I once bought a professional-looking box of about fifty telephone adaptors and short cables, meant to enable me to download emails from any hotel room in the world, and then stayed for almost two weeks in hotel chains that had their own incomprehensible switchboard systems. First I assembled the adaptors, SIM cards and chargers for my mobile, personal organiser and other electronic crutches. I usually forget or lose at least one accessory and often bring a couple more for gadgets lost on my previous trip. I tested them all but few of them passed, so the next day I familiarised myself with the city of York’s retail outlets by buying a top-of-the-range digital video camera, more chargers and adaptors, a mosquito net and a traveller’s first aid kit. Then I got a bit carried away and bought a compass, torch, mountain boots, sunhat, sleeping bag and rucksack. Guidebooks, toiletries and clothes filled the rest of my suitcase.

  I knew from my schooldays that the Portuguese had colonised Brazil. Although Panama was close, I had never been to South America and never anywhere Portuguese-speaking. I reasoned it might make some perverse sense to go to Brazil via Portugal. To recapture the age of exploration, I would travel the same route – although five miles higher and fifty times faster – as Pedro Álvares Cabral, who had sailed from Lisbon in an attempt to reach India. He gave the deadly calm waters off the coast of west Africa a wide berth and landed at Bahia, a province of today’s Brazil.

  Some 500 years later, on the hottest day of August 2002, I flew from London to Lisbon and stayed there a couple of days to practise using my video camera and visit the museums of Portuguese navigation. The extraordinary success of fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration and later colonisation is credited to the country’s pivotal position on the Atlantic and the work of Prince Henry the Navigator. Adviser to King Alfonso V, Henry persuaded him to invest in shipbuilding, discovery, navigation and cartography. Portugal first colonised the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores then went on, led by Vasco da Gama, to round the Cape of Good Hope and grab a chunk of India. Then Cabral discovered Brazil.

  I went to a travel agency in the city centre. As I expected, I had the choice of flying with either the Portuguese or Brazilian national airlines. The flights were the same price. Usually when faced with such a choice, I opt for the airline of the country to which I’m travelling to experience the flavour of my destination as soon as possible. On this occasion, however, I thought it more in keeping with my theme of following fifteenth-century exploration routes to hold on to Portugal as long as possible. I caught a TAP flight to Salvador, the capital of Bahia.

  Back in 1500 Cabral had landed in a mountainous paradise whose riverbanks yielded a hardwood of a reddish colour reminiscent of glowing coals or brasa. The land eventually became known as Brazil, but others, who in those times of massive navigational errors were referred to as Indians, had got there first. The Indians had not discovered the wheel and were technologically primitive. When one of them died, the corpse was hung from a tree until dry and then burned. The ashes were mixed with bananas and eaten by friends and family to preserve the spirit. Enemies were eaten without cremation.

  But this cannibalism had nothing to do with hunger; there was always plenty of food. The land was ideal for growing sugar cane, and Indians were captured to slave on the plantations established by the Portuguese. Some fled to the vast interior, more died through brutality and disease, but enough took an ‘If you can’t beat them join them’ attitude. The Portuguese settled comfortably at the river mouths, had frequent and varied types of intercourse with the Indians, and supported themselves magnificently by exporting sugar, liquor and tobacco, and importing slaves from Africa and guns and luxury goods from Europe. Gold, diamonds, coffee and rubber were then discovered; these required a larger slave workforce from Africa and the total number of slaves reached four million.

  In 1808 the Portuguese prince regent, hearing that Napoleon was on his way to Lisbon, gathered his gang together, fled to Brazil, loved it, and decided to stay, making Brazil the only colony with a resident European monarch. The kingdom became an empire, but despite its prosperity and the eventual abolition of slavery, the monarchy was replaced by a federal republic in 1889. Its citizens inherited a country that produced every mineral, a climate that could grow any crop, and a population drawn from Amerindians, Portuguese and other Europeans and Africans.

  At least Cabral had had the advantage of arriving at Salvador, the capital of Bahia and for over 200 years that of Brazil, without suffering the exhausting and disorienting effects of jet lag, nicotine withdrawal and a hangover. I arrived at the Hotel di Roma knackered. Within minutes of checking in, I fell asleep, but an impatient cock’s crow woke me long before dawn.

  I grabbed my cigarettes. Palm leaves scratched the wall outside in a disturbing rhythm. The moon still shone weakly through the shutter slats and threw its light on a transparent lizard hunting a spider the size of a small saucer. Despite usually championing the underdog, I wanted the lizard to eat that spider. I wondered why I was more disturbed by insects than reptiles. I lit a cigarette. The lizard and spider immediately disappeared. Cats padded across the roof, each step pregnant with anticipated conflict.

  Fading moonlight gave way to bright sunshine as a chorus of roosters squawked raucously. A tropical rainstorm wiped out their din and the rhythm of the scratching palm. Ripe fruit thudded on the roof while dogs barked and children laughed as flash floods of sunshine punctuated the torrential downpour. I opened the shutters and blinked at a narrow irregular dusty street of tall colonial houses and villas with red-tiled roofs and walls painted in pink, green, blue and yellow washes. It looked like Lisbon. Joggers criss-crossed the cobbles on their way to the sandy waterfront, where fishermen mended nets and bikinied beauties drank from coconuts. Nearby were ornate places of worship, shopping malls and brick-built shanty towns. Distant high-rises sparkled like sugar cubes above opulent baroque facades, spires and domes. A fifteenth-century whitewashed church stood out like a cardboard silhouette. Salvador, a bit too dangerous and decadent, used to be the place for tourists to avoid, but was now beginning to reap the benefits of travellers’ appetites for something different and well away from terrorist targets. Scantily clad holidaymakers were already packing the bars, from which samba blasted and where the booze, particularly cachaça, is dirt cheap and always available.

  Downstairs, the bounty of Brazilian nature overflowed from the breakfast buffet trays. There were pitchers of freshly squeezed fruit juice, plates of papaya, mangoes and pineapples, bowls of warm tapioca, sweet milk and cinnamon, cakes, rolls, jam and coffee. I ate until exhausted, then sat in the sun to finish my coffee, smoke a cigarette and possibly drop off.

  A man with a gentle manner and a face full of smiles came to my table. ‘Excuse me, but I know you are the one who wrote Mr Nice, which I very much enjoyed despite my poor English. My name is Gilberto. I am a photographer and often work for British publications. If you need anyone to help show you around Salvador, it would be my pleasure. In fact, tomorrow I am driving to Cachoeira. You are welcome to join me.’

  I had read about Cachoeira, which means waterfall. A river port not far from Salvador where, 200 years ago, gold prospectors and merchants disembarked to load their possessions on to ox carts for exploration further inland. Ships sailing back direct into Lisbon took away their valuable finds.

  ‘Thank you, Gilberto, that’s kind of you. I would love to come. Perhaps you could also help me in another way.’

  ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the existence here of a Welsh community?’

  ‘I know you are Welsh, of course, but you are probably the only one here in Salvador. There is certainly no Welsh community in this city, and I don’t think in the whole Bahia province.’
r />   ‘What about in Brazil?’

  ‘Well, Brazil is so big, anything is possible, but I have never heard of one. When did the Welsh come here and why? To be missionaries and compete against the Catholics?’

  ‘There might well have been a bit of that, but their main motive was to get away from the English and set up their own colony with their own religion, language and culture. The Welsh seemingly set one up in Brazil a hundred and fifty years ago.’

  ‘How would they have supported themselves?’

  ‘Either by tilling the land or digging holes in it to mine minerals, I suppose.’

  ‘It is true that many miners came from Europe to Bahia looking for work around that time, mainly to Lencóis to the diamond mines.’

  ‘How far away is that?’

  ‘At least a day’s drive. I can’t take you myself, I’m afraid; I have to be at my office every day. But there is a bus that goes there a few times a week.’

  The next afternoon Gilberto picked me up from the hotel and drove off at a pace worthy of Ayrton Senna. We were quickly on the old plantation road to Cachoeira.

  ‘I love this place: the colours, the river, the mountains, the light and the people. Cachoeira is my second home and the only home of Irmandade da Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte – the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death.’

  ‘Sounds a bit heavy, Gilberto.’

  ‘It is. African religions are best preserved far away from suntan oil, beaches and volleyball games. Supporting them is my greatest passion, my life’s work.’

  At Cachoeira’s bustling market goats anxiously hoped to evade sacrifice; cotton-stuffed voodoo dolls in colourful costumes dangled next to displays of vegetables, fruits, cheeses, spices, oils, juices, bulls’ brains and unidentified pigs’ organs. In the old days, the slave owners ate the meat and left their slaves with balls, offal and brains, resulting in a national cuisine now served everywhere, including the country’s most expensive restaurants. Wearing billowy cotton skirts and a lacy turban and tunic, an imperious mahogany lady with dancing eyes, high rouged cheekbones, an aquiline nose and languid hands covered a makeshift table with a white fringed cloth and set out several shiny tin pans of prawns, batter, dried beans, nutmeg, coconut milk, cashews and peanuts. By her side a cauldron of palm oil, heated by burning coconut shells, bubbled erratically. Beads, crosses and chains swung from her neck, and silver and wooden bracelets weighed down her arms as she fashioned batter and beans into pretty lumps of cholesterol and nectar.