Guyana Venture

  ‘It will afford a good idea of the proportion which imaginary danger from animals in Guiana bears to the real evils inflicted by these if we try to realise the possible thoughts of a nervous man when bathing in one of the rivers of that country. The nervous bather remembers that from the moment when he throws off his clothes, every part of his body not covered by water is exposed to the attack of mosquitoes, sandflies, and many other sharply stinging insects; but, on the other hand, that every part of his body covered by water may at any moment be bitten by perai, may receive a violent shock from an electric eel, or may be horribly lacerated by the poisoned spine of a sting-ray, or a limb may be snapped off by a passing cayman or alligator, or his whole body may be crushed, and thus prepared for swallowing by a huge water serpent; or, even if none of these pains come upon him, he may remember that the egg of a certain worm… may be deposited unnoticed on his flesh, there to develop an

  ‘Guyana lies on the north-east coast of the South American continent, between Venezuela on the west, Surinam on the east, with the Atlantic Ocean facing it on the north. It is as large as the combined areas of England, Scotland and Wales. It has pleasant climatic conditions for the greater part of the year. It is particularly so on the coastal area where it is sub-tropical. Columbus sailed along the Guyana coast in 1498, and later wrote about the great rivers of Guyana flowing down from an earthly paradise. Sir Walter Raleigh voyaged to the country in 1595. The task of shaping Guyana's history was shared among the Dutch, French and British. Both the Dutch and British made the greatest contribution, each holding the country for well over one hundred years, compared with the short two-year period of the French. As a consequence, the impact of the former had been the stronger. Between 1841 and 1931 some 433,643 immigrants arrived in Guyana on the basis of an indentureship system. Th

  Alan Knight was Bishop of Guyana from 1937 to 1979. ‘A robust Anglo-Catholic, he made the Church under his direction one of the great centres of traditional Catholic ritual and devotion in the Anglican Communion. A convinced Caribbeanist, he liked to say that the Anglican Province of the West Indies was a lesson to the West Indian States on how to create unity in diversity. There were times when his behaviour was almost Papal, and yet he saw himself as a dyed-in-wool democrat. He was never an easy man to categorise... but there were two areas in which he admitted no contradiction: his faith in God and his love of Guyana’ (Robert Moore). Those words are a summary of the man responsible in more than one sense for my own call to the Diocese of Guyana. This was linked to the Diocese being infected by his ‘robust Anglocatholicism’ with a momentum that was to reach after his passing into Guyana’s interior through his memorial, the Alan Knight Training Centre I came to serve in 1987. As an

  This golden sunset was captured travelling home to Yupukari on Guyana’s Rupununi river where Anne and I were married. I wear a wedding ring made with Guyana gold. Throughout my time in the Rupununi I came across miners drawn to Guyana’s interior by the lure of gold. The lost city of gold called El Dorado was associated with the parish I served which witnessed a flow of European treasure hunters from 1492 when Columbus came on the South American scene. Literally meaning ‘Golden Man’ El Dorado has also been associated with legendary kings of the Muisca people populating the northern Andes who were initiated by being covered in gold dust before leaping into Lake Guatavita. The gold lust impacts to this day the indigenous people of Guyana adversely caught up for centuries in the quest for gold and the conflicts associated with it.  This picture of Anne Twisleton in the Alan Knight Training Centre land rover recalls our service in Guyana 1987-1990 which was built on two centuries of missi