Giles Foden
WILD SHORE: LIFE AND DEATH WITH NICARAGUA’S LAST SHARK-HUNTERS by Edward Marriott (Picador)
It is commonplace to remark that the boom in travel-writing began in the 1980s, with the emergence of writers such as Bruce Chatwin, Redmond O’Hanlon and Jonathan Raban, and ended with the departure from Granta in 1995 of an editor who placed himself at the centre of that boom, Bill Buford.
These writers – along with three who had been longer at the game, Paul Theroux, Norman Lewis and Colin Thubron – drew considerably on the techniques of the novel for their power. In his introduction to Granta’s seminal Travel issue of 1983, Buford praised his writers for “sheer glee of storytelling … a narrative eloquence that situates them, with wonderful ambiguity, somewhere between fiction and fact”.
It is true that things have moved on; there is a sense of exhaustion about travel writing – about its casualness, its fancifulness, its sheer lack of depth. As the current editor of Granta, Ian Jack, pointed out in a recent essay for Cond Nast Traveller magazine: “The focus of curiosity has moved from ‘I wonder what Ruritania is like?’ … towards the question of why Ruritania came to be like it is.”
Narrative history, in other words (in forms as different as Dava Sobel’s Longitude and Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad), is the new boom. But the real point is that the edges of all genres are blurring. It is in this context that Edward Marriott brings us Wild Shore, his stirring, capacious tale of Nicaraguan shark-hunters. It has the wandering, slightly untrustworthy narrator of those Granta romps of old, but adds a wealth of fascinating information about the British pirates and imperialists of the 17th and 18th centuries, including a callow, malarial Horatio Nelson.
At that stage Nicaragua was being fought over by the British and Spanish. In 1780 the future hero of Trafalgar gathered his forces and set off to conquer the country. It did not go well. One of his men was taken by a jaguar, another bitten on the face by a tree-snake. “‘He was found dead,’ Nelson’s physician recorded, ‘with all the symptoms of putrefaction; a yellowness of body; and the eye, near to which he was bitten, all dissolved.'”
For mestizos – Nicaraguans of mixed Spanish and Native American extraction – Nelson is just one of the pirates, and the failure of his expedition (only eight out of an original 200 survived) a source of national pride. The Spanish garrison was eventually able to stroll back unhindered into the citadel – the same one in which, two centuries later, the Sandinistas kept captured Contra guerrillas.
It is in such links that Marriott’s approach excels: as the manicured lawns of El Castillo today give up the rough secrets of the past, you realise how much the travel writer has learned from the historian.
North-east of El Castillo, on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, lies the starting point for Marriott’s journey proper: the rusty town of Bluefields. Settled by British pirates in the 1630s, it has since been a melting pot for Creole, black and mestizo culture. From there, after a spell with dugout fishermen on the ocean, he makes a Heart of Darkness-style journey to the interior, on a coconut barge up the San Juan river to Lake Nicaragua. Marriott hopes to track the passage of Carcharhinus leucas, the bull shark.
Like all such subjects (such as Samantha Weinberg’s recent book about the coelacanth), the bull shark has the requisite ecological peculiarity: it can cross from saltwater to freshwater and hunt far upriver. And, for local inhabitants, it has totemic value. “The coastal and river people hunted the shark for its fins and for its oil, feared it and revered it; every village had had family taken in its jaws. It was shark where shark should not be – in freshwater, on human territory.”
The theme of territory runs through this exciting but thoughtful book, giving it coherence and allowing Marriott to associate depredations of varying orders: the imperialists and pirates of old; Cold War support for Sandinistas and Contras; the brutal lives of ordinary people; and, not least, the ever-diminishing stock of bull sharks, preyed on by fishermen and pesticides alike.
Ladysmith, Giles Foden’s novel about the Anglo-Boer War, is published by Faber & Faber