Sugar and spies

These days, there are few countries as obscure and exotic as Suriname. Perched on the north-east coast of South America, it has the same population as Cornwall but is over 40 times the size. Ninety per cent of it is covered in jungle, and new species are always tumbling out of its darkness (mostly bugs and purple frogs). The current president, Desi Bouterse, is a convicted cocaine smuggler, and during his term in office he has stood trial for multiple murders. Meanwhile, in the country’s pretty little capital, Paramaribo, they speak 20 languages and maintain 15 Marxist parties, all saying something different. During my time there, a caiman would often creep out of the park at night and eat the city’s dogs.

Even stranger, all of this began with an English colony. The story of Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, and his curious private fiefdom, has never been fully told before. Now it has a champion in Matthew Parker, whose previous books include the much-admired Goldeneye. This time, he’s set himself a formidable task. The colony only lasted 16 years, ending in 1667; there are few records, and what remains of the infrastructure has long since been swallowed up by forest. But Parker has trawled the letters and literature, and travelled out to Suriname, and the result is a miniature masterpiece.

In many ways, colonisation of the ‘Wild Coast’, or Guiana, was an absurd idea. Back in 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh had published a glowing prospectus of the region (complete with a diamond mountain and headless men), but it would never match reality. By the mid-17th century, almost every English attempt at settlement had failed. One of the last colonies had collapsed in 1627, under a hail of poison arrows. It was a discouraging sight. According to survivors, many of the colonists had died ‘stark mad, with their bowels breaking out of their bodies…’