Pirates, smugglers, murderers

THE MORE one reads about that forlorn Western Isle, the more it appears that  Chacachacare would make the ideal setting for a best-selling, swashbuckling family saga of adventure, romance, mystery, and horror. Beginning in the late 18th century with slavery and smuggling (slaves on the cotton plantations, and planters smuggling cotton to Grenada to evade local taxes), the father of the fictional dynasty rents a small parcel of land from Don Gerardo Carry. He sees smoke and flames as Admiral Apadoca burns his ships rather than allow the British fleet to capture them. Meantime, the black sheep of the fictional family signs up for the exciting, dangerous business of whaling from pirogues.

Now that Trinidad and Chacachacare are British the island becomes the ideal base for revolution in Venezuela. Miranda’s failed invasion, Marino’s flight to his sister and his triumphant return with the “Immortal 45” (better make that 46 with another son of the fictional family) and Maria Concepcion sheltering refugees, smuggling arms and ammunition across the Gulf (with the help of a daughter of the fictional family) are the stuff of high adventure. I leave others who feel so inclined to fill in the rest of the novel. At all events, being so close to the mainland, a mere seven miles across the Gran Boca, to the Paria Peninsula, with only the lighthouse keepers to keep permanent watch on comings and goings, Chacachacare seems designed for piratical adventure, murder, mayhem, and smuggling — as well as romance by moonlight aboard pleasure craft in secluded bays.

The most famous pirate to sail into the Gulf was Black Beard, Edward Teach, who, in 1716, “liberated” a cargo of cocoa from a brig and set it on fire in full view of the few inhabitants of the village of Port-of-Spain (as it was then). Black Beard cruised around the Gulf looking for more prey for a day or two until a Spanish frigate appeared, whereupon he made his leisurely way past Chacachacare out of the Gulf through the Gran Boca. In the late 18th century, when war broke out between France and Britain, French privateers (armed merchantmen who seized both cargo and ships) lurked in secluded bays, waiting to pounce on British shipping leaving Port-of-Spain. Although Spain was neutral, Governor Chacon was only too happy to let a British frigate ambush and sink the privateers — as one can see in the painting by Adrian Camps-Campins.

It was in the late 18th century that smuggling became a profitable enterprise; the first coastguard was established in 1785. From all accounts it seems from that day to this smugglers, coastguards, Customs and Excise Officers play deadly games of hide-and-seek across the Gulf. The smuggling trade began with cocoa, cotton and vanilla pods, horses and cattle, tonca beans and feathers — and, of course guns and ammunition for those fighting for Venezuelan Independence. Anything in short supply on one side of the Gulf was smuggled to the other, as supply and demand dictated. Smugglers traded in tobacco and liquor, clothing, illegal immigrants and prostitutes (“white slaves”) — were smuggled across the Gran Boca to brothels in Trinidad. Today the trade is mostly in illegal drugs, in marijuana and, tragically, cocaine.

Douglas Archibald, president of the Historical Society in 1972, told the story of one smuggler, Noel, who was born on Chacachacare in 1864. Noel’s family hunted whales from the Second Boca, across the Gran Boca to the Paria Peninsula where some of the sons and daughters of many island families settled, squatting on State land or renting land from Venezuelan planters. Being so far removed from Caracas, many of the wealthy planters of Eastern Venezuela sent their crops to market and bought supplies in Port-of-Spain, which, of course, upset the authorities in Caracas who dispatched an elderly steam-powered coastguard vessel to catch the smugglers. The powers that be in Trinidad felt they should put a stop to free trade; Customs and Excise relied on a heavy eight-oared cutter to catch the lawbreakers. The fishermen-cum-smugglers played cat-and-mouse games with authority, it gave an extra spice and zest to the trade.

Noel was one of the most daring of the Chacachacare smuggler-fishermen. He seemed to bear a charmed life as he grew from youth to adult, married, fished, hunted whales and smuggled for his growing families (he seems to have been a ladies’ man) of sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters until one moonless night in 1920, now aged 56, he disappeared during a smuggling run across the Gran Boca. Had he drowned? Had the coastguard caught him at last? His family had no news, no one knew what had happened to him. The waters of the Bocas can be treacherous. They presumed he had drowned. However, in 1932 Juan Vicente Gomez, the President of Venezuela at that time, declared an amnesty for long-serving prisoners in some of the most notorious gaols in the country. One of the prisoners freed by Gomez was Noel of Chacachacare.

Somehow, Noel had survived 12 years in the dungeons of a Venezuelan gaol built on a sea shore. He was chained by the waist to the wall of his cell, his ankles shackelled, when the tide rose it flooded his cell waist deep. In all that time he was given only mouldy, grey bread, boiled, rotten plantain to eat and dirty water to drink. By the time he was freed he had lost all his teeth. Archibald describes the 68-year-old Noel in the following words: “Never a large man, Noel had become a shrivelled caricature of human life, more like a large monkey. His round head had shrunk and become completely bald; his eyes, once sharp and twinkling bright, were blurred and weak; one shoulder was twisted and hung forward; his entire body was scarred and covered with sores; the skin of his legs was stretched tight over the bone, like parchment; his ankles were permanently swollen out of shape, so that, for the remaining years of his life, he would always hobble rather than walk.”

Noel  swore he was innocent, demanding his right as a British citizen for some sort of compensation. He hoped for ten thousand pounds (a fortune in those days). His case attracted the attention of the young Anthony Eden who spoke in his defence in the House of Commons in London, but to no avail. Noel’s dreams of a fortune, and the young ladies attracted to a man of means, vanished. After his release from prison he hoped to spend the rest of his years with his family in his home on the island where he was born, but while he was in prison his family, and every other person living on the island, were forced to leave Chacachacare to make way for the Leprosarium. Short of catching leprosy himself (not an easy thing to do, despite the authorities’ fear of a spread of the disease) he was forbidden to return to his old home; only the lighthouse keepers, the nuns who cared for the lepers, the doctors who treated them and those who ministered to their spiritual needs were allowed to live on Chacachacare.

Noel’s large family was scattered, he knew not how to reach them, he might have lived the rest of his life as a vagrant hobbling around the streets of Port-of-Spain, harassed by the authorities, as none today are harassed for vagrancy. However, a fellow fisherman and acquaintance of his youth took pity on him and gave him a home and job as a caretaker for a holiday home on Gaspar Grande. There he lived the rest of his life in a two-room cottage on the edge of the sea, cared for, so Archibald relates, “by a plump, attractive and young ‘coz’,” Even so, the half-crippled Noel would, from time to time, disappear for a day or two. His old friend never asked where he went, he assumed that Noel still couldn’t resist crossing the Gulf with a cargo of contraband, chuckling to himself the while as he outsmarted the Coastguard and Excise Officers.

Archibald tells that Noel was a first-rate cook, that his fish broth was superb; he recalls lying beside the bath house on a moonlit night after a day spent fishing, passing the rum bottle from one to another while Noel told tall tales and, so he said, true, of smuggling goods across the Gulf and encounters with the authorities. While we may secretly admire the daring of smugglers the like of Noel, Trinidad’s most notorious pirate and smuggler deserves no such sympathy. The story of  pirate and smuggler Boysie Singh and the fate of the illegal immigrants he slaughtered en route to Venezuela in the 1950s is too long and tragic to tell here.

For weeks in the late 1980s, the case of the La Tinta “sting” operation was front-page news — together with shocking revelations of corruption in the Police Narcotics Squad at the subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the operation. Despite the Coastguards’ best efforts, smuggling continues to this day. Too besides, since the closure of the Leprosarium in the 1980s politicians on both sides of the House have allowed Chacachacare to become, in Fr de Verteuil’s words “a no-man’s-land,” an abandoned isle, a haven for drug smugglers . . . in other words, the perfect setting for a crime, horror, whodunit best-seller.