Author(s): John Gimlette

Travel

In this compelling and elegant travel memoir, John Gimlette returns to Guyana, the Wild Coast in South America, to discover his ancestral colonial history - one of brutal, cruel and often uncomfortable truths. Intrigued by the tale of a distant ancestor who perished on the Wild Coast in 1630, John Gimlette returns to South America to find out what has become of this primeval land. It is a journey that takes him through the old colonies of British, Dutch and French Guiana, through some of the most fantastic forests in the world and through four hundred years of shameless - and often horrifying - colonial history. Gimlette's ancestor, Robert Hayman died in agony on the Wiapoko River, where the Wild Coast comes to an end. In death, he realised something that other Europeans would take several centuries to discover: that Guiana, formed by slaving and civil conflict would exact a terrible price for its beauty, and would rarely share out its wealth.