My attention was suddenly drawn to this by the pimpla hog, who shinned up my leg, and would, if I had let him, have gone right up to my head. I passed him back for Bob to hold, while I investigated the bows of the canoe to see what had frightened him. Looking down, I perceived the eel wiggling along the sloping canoe bottom towards my feet. I will always maintain that, next to a snake, an electric eel approaching your feet will produce the most astonishing muscular reaction the human body is capable of. How I got out of the way I don’t know, but when I landed in the canoe again the eel had wiggled past and was heading towards Bob.
‘Look out!’ I yelled, ‘the eel’s escaped.’
Clasping the pimpla hog to his bosom, Bob tried to stand up, failed, and fell flat on his back in the bottom of the canoe. Whether the eel had turned off its current, or whether it was too frightened to bother about electrifying my companion, I don’t know, but the fact remains that it slid past his wildly thrashing body as harmlessly and swiftly as a stream of water and headed for the first paddler. Evidently he also shared our aversion to coming into close contact with electric eels, for he gave every indication of abandoning ship as the creature approached him. Our combined attempts to get as far away from the eel as possible were making the canoe rock violently. Bob, in trying to sit upright, put his hand on the porcupine, and his yell of surprise and agony convinced me that the eel was returning and had attacked him in the rear. Apparently it convinced the porcupine as well for he hastily shinned up my leg again and tried to clamber on to my shoulder. If the first paddler had jumped over the side I am sure the canoe would have turned over. As it was, the situation was saved by the second paddler, who was obviously used to frolicking about in canoes with electric eels. He leant forward and pinned the creature down under the broad blade of his paddle. Then he made wild gestures at me until I threw him the wicker basket. This was now very much the worse for wear, as I had knelt on it by mistake while avoiding its occupant. The second paddler, by some ingenious means, pushed the eel back into the basket, and everyone felt better and started smiling at everyone else in a rather forced sort of way. The paddler handed the basket to his companion, who passed it hastily on to Bob, who, in turn, reluctantly accepted it. He was just passing it to me when the bottom fell out.
Bob was holding the basket as far away as possible from himself, so when the eel fell out it landed on the side of the canoe draped like a croquet hoop. It was unfortunate that its head should have been on the outside, for it needed no second chance: a quick wiggle, a splash, and it was gone into the dark depths of the creek.
Bob looked at me.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d rather say it went outside than in.’ I regret to say I agreed with him.
It was quite dark when we reached the last stretch of water. We paddled along a carpet of reflected stars that quivered and danced in the ripples of our wake. Crickets and frogs all around us wheezed, purred, and tinkled like a shop full of clocks. We rounded the last bend and saw before us the hut with a flood of yellow lamplight streaming from the windows. The canoe grounded in the sand with a soft, lisping sigh, as though it was glad to be back. Collecting our animals we made our way across the soft sand, ghostly in the moon-light, towards the hut. We were tired, hungry, and rather depressed, for we knew that we had just made our last voyage into the magical world of the creeks and that we were soon to leave.
Finale
In a tiny bar in the back streets of Georgetown four of us sat round a table, drinking rum and ginger beer and looking acutely depressed. On the table in front of us was a pile of papers, boat tickets, lists, travellers’ cheques, bills of lading and so on. Occasionally Bob would look at these papers with evident distaste.
‘Now are you sure you’ll remember all that?’ asked Smith, for the hundredth time.
‘Yes,’ said Bob gloomily, ‘I’ll remember.’
‘Don’t lose the bill of lading whatever you do,’ warned Smith.
‘No, I won’t,’ said Bob.
We were all depressed for different reasons. Bob was depressed because he was to leave Guiana the next day, taking with him a collection of our more bulky reptiles. Smith was depressed because he was quite sure that Bob would lose the bill of lading or some other equally important document. I was depressed because Bob’s departure meant that I would soon be leaving myself, for my passage was booked three weeks after Bob’s. Ivan seemed to be depressed for no reason except that we were.
In the tree-lined canals that ran through the streets of Georgetown the giant toads were starting to croak happily, a noise like hundreds of rather tinny motorbikes starting up. Smith dragged his mind away from the bill of lading with an effort and listened to the chorus.
‘We must catch some of those toads sometime before you go, Gerry,’ he said.
I had an idea.
‘Let’s go and catch some now,’ I suggested.
Now?’ said Smith doubtfully.
‘Why not? It’s better than sitting here like the cast of a Greek tragedy.’
‘Yes,’ said Bob enthusiastically, ‘it’s an excellent idea.’
So Ivan unearthed a sack and a torch from behind the bar, and we went out into the warm night for the last hunt that Bob would have.
Along the edge of Georgetown runs a broad esplanade, bounded on one side by the sea and on the other by an area of trees and grass, intersected by numerous canals. This was a favourite haunt for toads and courting couples. These toads are great putty-coloured beasts mottled with chocolate blotches. They are attractive creatures, with wide mouths set in a perpetual grin, large, dark pop-eyes that are shot with silver and gold., and a portly and well-fed appearance. They are, as a rule, rather lethargic, but, as we discovered that night, they were capable of an astonishing turn of speed.
These toads had hitherto led a tranquil life, meditating by day and singing part-songs by night, so they were amazed and affronted by the appearance in their midst of four people who chased them vigorously with a torch. No less amazed and affronted were the vast number of courting couples who littered the grass almost as thickly as the toads. The toads strongly objected to the torch being flashed on them, and so did the courting couples. The toads did not like being chased across miles of grass, and the courting couples were unanimous in their opinion of the four maniacs who leapt over their recumbent bodies in pursuit of the toads. However, in between tripping over courting couples and apologising to them, shining the torch on them and hastily turning it off again, we managed to catch thirty-five toads. So we returned home, hot and out of breath but in a much better frame of mind, leaving behind us a great many frightened toads and a number of indignant people of both sexes.
We saw Bob off the next day, and then Smith and I started the difficult job of preparing the collection for shipment when my ship left. I had decided to take the entire collection with me when I went, as this would leave Smith to make one or two short trips into the interior before starting a fresh collection. He had been confined to Georgetown during the whole of our stay in Guiana, maintaining the collection at the base, so I thought he thoroughly deserved a break.
We now had nearly five hundred specimens altogether. There were fish and frogs, toads, lizards, cayman and snakes. There were birds from the turkey-sized curassows down to the minute and fragile hummingbirds with bumblebee-sized bodies. There were fifty monkeys, the anteaters, armadillos and pacas, crab-eating raccoons, peccaries, margays and ocelots, sloths and uwaries. To crate up and ship such a formidable array of different creatures is no easy matter, and, as usual, one of your worst problems is food.
First you have to work out how much of everything you will want, and then you have to purchase it and get it on board the ship when she docks, making sure that the perishable stuff is carefully stowed away in the refrigerator. There were dozens of eggs, tins of dried milk, sacks of vegetables, corn and biscuit meal, crates of fresh fish pac
ked in ice and pounds of raw meat. Then there was the fruit, which was a problem in itself. Such things as oranges can be bought by the sackful and need no special care to keep them in good condition, but the soft fruits are a very different matter. You cannot start off on a voyage with fifty stems of ripe bananas, because by the time you are halfway to your destination you will find most of them have gone rotten. So you have to buy a quantity of ripe bananas, some just turning and some that are green and hard. Thus, as you use up one lot of fruit another lot has just ripened. Then there were some special items, the hummingbirds, for example, fed on a mixture that included such things as honey, Bovril, and Mellin’s Food, so all these ingredients had to be purchased and put on board. Last, but not least, you had to have an adequate supply of clean, dry sawdust to spread in the cage bottoms after they had been cleaned every day.
The next job was the crating, for every creature must have a cage that is neither too big nor too small, a cage that will keep it cool in the tropics and warm when you reach colder latitudes. The anteaters gave us our biggest crating problem, and it was a long time before we managed to find two boxes big enough to contain them. But at last the hundred and fifty-odd crates had been nailed, screwed, sawed, and hammered into final perfection, ready for shipment.
The long voyage home with your animals is always the most worrying part of any collecting trip, and my return from Guiana was no exception. I had been offered a choice of accommodation on board ship in which to put the collection, and rather unwisely I chose one of the holds. This was a bad mistake, as I soon found out to my cost, for in the tropics the hold was as hot as an oven (even with the hatch open), and little or no breeze found its way down to relieve the sweltering heat. When we struck cold weather we did so very suddenly, the temperature dropping ten degrees in one night when we were off the Azores; the hold promptly turned from something resembling a Turkish bath into a refrigerator. I was forced to keep the hatch closed owing to bad weather, and so the animals and birds had to live and feed by artificial light, a thing they did not take kindly to. Then came a very serious blow: my fruit supply was cut to a fraction by the sudden disintegration of some forty stems of bananas owing to the refrigerators going wrong. This combination of evils was responsible for the deaths of a number of lovely and valuable specimens, a thing that did not cheer me, for burials at sea are things that no collector likes. I had been expecting some losses, however, for these are inevitable in any collection; moreover I had been warned by some very experienced collectors that I would find the South American fauna more delicate and difficult to keep alive than animals from almost any other part of the world. I have heard this repudiated by some people (including one worthy who has never been to South America at all, let alone collected there), but on the whole I found the veteran collectors’ opinions to be correct.
But, in spite of the setbacks, the voyage had its amusing moments. There was the hatching of the pipa toads, as I have related, and there was the escape of a monkey who bit the ship’s carpenter. Both these episodes were enlivening. Then I had a prolonged struggle to keep a couple of macaws in their cage, for, with their great beaks, they had nibbled the wood so that their cage front fell out. Each time I repaired it they would eat their way out again, so in the end I gave up and allowed them the run of the hold. They would wander up and down on the tops of the crates, talking to me in their gruff, rather embarrassed voices, or carrying on conversations with the other macaws in the cages. These conversations were very amusing as a rule, because they were restricted to one word. In Georgetown all macaws are called Robert, just as most parrots in England are called Poll or Polly. So when you buy a macaw in Guiana you can be certain that it will be able to say its own name, as well as deafen you with its screams. So the two macaws would amble across the cage tops, and occasionally one would stop and say ‘Robert?’ in a pensive sort of way. Another would reply ‘Robert!’ in outraged tones, while a third would be muttering ‘Robert, Robert, Robert, Robert’, to itself. So the conversation would go on, and I have never heard such a variety of expression put into one word as those macaws managed to put into the rather dull name of Robert.
But, for once, I was really glad to see the grey and gloomy docks of Liverpool looming up at the ship’s sides. There was still a great deal to do, of course, unloading the collection and distributing the specimens to the various zoos, but I knew that the worst of the trip was over. Bob, looking very civilised, was waiting on the docks to meet me, and together we watched the unloading of the many cages. The last to go over the side were the two huge crates that housed the anteaters, revolving slowly in the net as the crane swung them on to the quay. Then, accompanied by Bob, I went down to my cabin to pack, feeling in better spirits than I had done for the past three weeks.
‘Dear old England,’ said Bob, as he sat on my bunk and watched me packing, ‘it’s been raining ever since I landed, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said; ‘England is an Amerindian word meaning Land of Perpetual Downpour.’
I was bundling my clothes into a trunk when I felt something hard in the pocket of a pair of trousers. Hoping it might be money I investigated. As I turned the pocket out three little green tickets fell out on to the floor of the cabin. I picked them up and looked at them and then passed them silently to Bob. Across each one, in bold black letters, was written:
Georgetown to Adventure
First Class
Afterword
by Dominic Wormell, Deputy Head, Mammal
Department, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
South America – what a wonderful continent, full of extreme beauty and glorious diversity But standing at the bottom of a tree in what little remained of Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest, with what seemed to be millions of sweat wasps crawling over my moist skin, the beauty of the place was wearing a bit thin. I was extremely irritable, hot, wet, skin shredded by vines and, dare I say it, bored, waiting for the little critters to appear. The tiny monkeys only found in these minute patches of forest were having a midday siesta, laying up in the top of an old cecropia tree. I was at the bottom of this particular tree because one of them was Marco, a black lion tamarin bred at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey, where I was in charge of caring for him and his relatives. It was 1999 and he was taking his first steps into the wild, the culmination of efforts begun by Gerald Durrell and carried on by conservationists he had inspired around the world.
Three Singles to Adventure was one of Gerald Durrell’s earliest books. Reading it, it is clear how the general view of the wild in the 1940s and 1950s was quite different to that held now Vast tracts of impenetrable forest teeming with life were relatively untouched then; how rapidly things have changed for the worse. The book describes Durrell’s trip to Guyana to collect animals for zoo collections. The irony is that, while his fascination and respect for the animals shines through, there is little indication that he realised then, in 1950, that so many of the species he saw would be in trouble not too far in the future.
But Durrell was quick to wake up to the fact that all was not well and was inspirational in his vision: that the removal of animals from their natural habitat was fundamentally wrong unless it was to save them from extinction. And from his zoological collection in Jersey, now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, he strove to put animals back into the habitats that they came from and restore the fragile wild places of this wonderful world.
My connection with the Trust began in the late 1980s in a way that I like to think Geny would have appreciated. Growing up in London, I had heard of Durrell and his zoo, and a fortuitous win on the horses gave me the funds to attend a summer course at Durrell’s International Training Centre — his mini-university — which led to the offer of a job in the mammal department. Almost by accident I ended up working with the South American marmosets and tamarins, the smallest monkeys in the world. Jersey had been specialists in breeding them in captivit
y for some time, and a group of golden lion tamarins had been sent back to their original home in Brazil, becoming the first captive-bred tamarins to breed in the wild. Durrell’s dream was becoming a reality, and I was hooked.
Not long after I started work in Jersey, I made my first trip to South America, travelling to Bolivia in search of Goeldi’s monkeys: small, black and extremely elusive relatives of the tamarins. They were breeding happily in Jersey but had rarely been studied in the wild. Like Durrell in Guyana, I had to travel by river.
On the Rio Acre in the small outpost town of Cobija, I climbed on to a small boat. I noticed two very large spiders in the thatching of the small shelter that spanned the middle portion of its length. However, although the fifteen hours we spent on the boat were not without their alarm, it was not from the spiders.
Eight hours of snaking river later we were rounding a large bend, the little engine clacking away, struggling against the current, when suddenly through the din we heard gunfire. Birds shot skyward from the quiet forest banks with a flurry of squawks and alarms. Frozen to the spot, looking at the river bank to the north as a cold sweat crept over my already soaked skin, I thought, surely it can’t be my worst fears realised — Shining Path guerrillas. This area of Bolivia was a narrow wedge that squeezed up between Brazil and Peru, and the Bolivian army had warned us that there were those who would not take kindly to us asking questions, even if it was about little monkeys.
Five deeply introspective minutes passed before a small boat, very similar to our own, appeared in the bright light that shone round the broad bend. A man stood up in it and waved with one hand while in the other holding a rifle that he fired periodically in a manner that I hoped meant ‘Hello’. I looked to the young man at the helm, who had a broad smile across his face. I physically slumped as the tension left my body, while our guide looked over with a dismissive grimace on his face and carried on reading his book. Apparently, it was the norm to let off a couple of rounds in greeting while up river. Stupid me — and I thought I was about to be the latest gringo on the Bolivian kidnap list. The man and his rifle pulled up alongside and greeted us. His boat was full of chickens in small cages — he was off to Cobija to market.