Tropics

Greed, Passion & Deceit in the Tropics

Image
Image
Illustration by Kari Brownlie, photograph by Magali Moreau

Grove Koger

Although he studied law and worked for a dozen years as a lawyer, Miguel Sousa Tavares has made his name as a writer, particularly for the 2003 novel Equator, which became a best seller in Portugal and won the Times Literary Supplement / Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation prize for translation (in this case, by Peter Bush) in 2010.

Image
Portrait of Tavares on canvas by Bottelho

Now an independent nation, the small African islands of São Tomé and Príncipe are part of the Cameroon line, a chain of volcanic peaks that stretches southwestward toward the equator from the mainland nation of Cameroon. They were uninhabited until discovered toward the end of the fifteenth century by Portuguese explorers, who anticipated that they would be handy posts for trading with the mainland. Over time, they also proved to be ideal for growing sugar cane and, beginning  in the early nineteenth century, coffee and cacao. Aside from fertile soil, these crops also required slave labor—and there lies the crux of the issue that Tavares explores.

Equator follows the experiences of newly appointed governor Luís Bernardo Valença, a well-meaning businessman who accepts the position from King Dom Carlos in late 1905 almost on a whim. Aside from his other duties, his job will be to convince newly appointed British consul David Jameson that slavery, which both Britain and Portugal have officially abolished, doesn’t exist on the islands. Since it certainly does exist, in the guise of “contract labor” involving workers forcibly “recruited” from the mainland, the job will be a challenging one. But if Valença doesn’t succeed, the British firm of Cadbury Brothers will boycott the islands’ cocoa beans, a step that would be a serious blow to the colony’s—and Portugal’s— tenuous economy.

Image
Cameroon line, reproduced courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Aside from the moral dilemma that Valença faces, he finds himself involved with Jameson and Jameson’s beautiful wife, Ann—a knot of relationships that he finds himself unable to untangle.

Although Equator is fiction and Luís Bernardo Valença never existed, Equator is based closely on fact. Reporting for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1905 and 1906, English journalist Henry Nevinson revealed how Africans from another of Portugal’s colonies, Angola, were taken from their homes to work on São Tomé, where conditions were so dreadful that twenty percent of them died each year. Nevinson’s account was subsequently published as A Modern Slavery. After further investigations, Cadbury finally stopped buying cocoa beans from São Tomé and Príncipe in 1909.

If you’d like to subscribe to World Enough, enter your email address below:

And if you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!

Wintering with Winslow Homer in the Bahamas

Image

Grove Koger

Massachusetts native Winslow Homer had learned to paint watercolors from his talented mother when he was a child, and went on to serve an apprenticeship as a lithographer before turning to freelance illustration. Subsequently, he began working in oils, and by the time Century Magazine commissioned him to provide illustrations for an article about the Bahama Islands by William C. Church, he was a well-known artist. Homer visited the islands, as well as Florida and Cuba, in the winter of 1884-85, but “A Midwinter Resort,” which featured black-and white engravings based on his watercolors, appeared quite a bit later, in February 1887.

Image

The artist spent much of the winter of 1898-99 in the Bahamas again, and this trip was to result in some of his finest works, freer in style than those dating from his earlier visit and vibrant with the intense colors of the tropics. He stayed for the most part on New Providence Island in the colony’s capital of Nassau, but he also visited St. George’s Cay, Eleuthera Island, and Harbour Island.

Image

As Lloyd Goodrich explains in his study Winslow Homer (1944), “As before, Nassau was a liberating experience. The paganism that had tentatively appeared in his earlier Bahaman work found its fullest expression in his new watercolors.” Goodrich goes on to point out that when he was “confronted with the sunlight and color and primitiveness of the Bahamas, [Homer] revealed an unexpected strain of barbaric brilliancy.”

Image

Homer himself wrote prominent collector Thomas B. Clarke in early 1899 that he “had a most successful winter at Nassau” and that he had “many things to work up” into two paintings that he “had in mind.” One of those works seems to be The Gulf Stream, a large oil that he completed later that year. By that time, as he would point out, his voyages had taken him across the famous current ten times.

Image

The germ for The Gulf Stream seems to be an 1885 watercolor from Cuba called Sharks (or The Derelict). There’s general agreement that the final painting itself is one of Homer’s major works, but when I compare it to his modest watercolors of the Bahamas, it seems overloaded with meaning. The Gulf Stream shows a forlorn sailor sprawled on the deck of a boat that’s lost its mast and its rudder and its bowsprit. A waterspout tears through the water in the background, while sharks—Are there two of them? Three?—thrash frenziedly in the foreground. If we look carefully, we can just make out a ship on the horizon on the left, but it’s hopelessly far away.

It’s safe to say that The Gulf Stream is an indication of Homer’s ambitions, but the seemingly effortless watercolors that he painted in the Bahamas (and, later, Bermuda) are better measures of his talent.

□□□

The image at the top of today’s post is Along the Road, The Bahamas (Near the Queen’s Necklace), from 1885, and the second is an engraving from Century Magazine based on one of Homer’s “water-color studies in Nassau” The third image is Nassau (1899), and the fourth is Hurricane, Bahamas, from 1898. The final image is The Gulf Stream.

□□□

If you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!