The Gap

Still following ‘Pluribus’ but this is interesting way beyond that. First of all, an introduction. The Darién Gap is a hundred kilometre stretch of land straddling the more or less irrelevant border between Colombia and Panama, and its presence is what makes that border irrelevant. It’s inhospitable in various ways. Where to start?

Well, the longest road in the world stretches from southern Argentina to Northern Alaska and is thirty thousand kilometres long, meaning that flattened out it would go three-quarters around the planet. Except it doesn’t, because of this gap. It’s almost impossible to get between Colombia and Panama, at least for humans, even with high-tech transport methods such as ships and motor vehicles. As can be seen from this map, the roads run out either side:

As you can see, there are no railways, canals or roads between them. It is, however, occupied by people traffickers and drug smugglers, and there are two peoples, the Guna and the Emberá. Remarkably, the Guna flag looks like this:

The swastika needs some explanation. It’s a local sigil called Naa Ukuryaa symbolising the four corners of the world whence the Guna hail, so in other words it’s practically the opposite of the Nazi use. Olaf Stapledon once claimed that Homo sapiens would use this symbol with varying significance throughout our history. But a people is more than a flag. They mainly live on coastal islands and moved westward into Panama. Some of them are white and have a special role defending the Moon against a dragon. The Emberá have a larger population and like several other indigenous peoples have a tradition of FGM although they’re working to eliminate it. They traditionally live on river banks but then the same applies to the West. They’re an egalitarian society whose shamans are however revered. I just thought I’d mention these peoples because the rest of this post is going to be about other things.

Immigrants are constantly attempting to travel through the area, often ending up dead as a result. Even by the time they start, they’re not in good condition and are unlikely to have the equipment needed to survive. The situation is similar to the “small boats” plight in the Manche/English Channel, with many deaths and a lot of corruption, but the drug trade, currently illegal, makes it even worse. The transit of people from more Westernised conditions through the gap has led to economic interactions with the indigenous people which pulls them toward the money economy and there is also, quite startlingly, tourism in the region which has the same effect.

Another situation which comes to mind here is the one in the DMZ of Korea and around Chernobyl. These places deny access to most humans and consequently have gone back to a less interfered with condition, which for Chernobyl is deeply ironic. The ionising radiation in the latter also makes the situation less straightforward, with for example black frogs using it to warm their bodies and increase metabolic rate and fungi with high levels of melanin being favoured by the environment, but in the DMZ between the two Koreas the situation is more similar, since it’s human activity which has stopped the strip from being interfered with. In the Darién Gap, humans do things but not in a manner similar to the organised centres of many territories. The way international and smaller scale borders often exist, good ones at least, is that they’re placed in relatively inaccessible places. For instance, Loughborough, where I used to stay, is on the northern edge of Leicestershire and if you try to walk thence into Nottinghamshire through fields, you’re confronted not only by the unsurprising river which often forms a border but also by rather boggy, wet ground, which makes it a good place to put a border as nobody wants to argue over it. Likewise the border between Scotland and England runs through high, rocky heathland and is sparsely populated compared to, say, the Central Belt or the large cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Darién Gap is the same. Humans do live there but they have difficulty doing so unless they’re hunter-gatherers. Agriculture would be hard and the heavy rainfall is the cause of frequent flooding. It’s also mountainous, like much of Central America.

The wider political structure of the region shows the relatively large territory of Mexico to the northwest becoming the increasingly fragmented area to the southeast, and in fact this already existed in pre-Columbian times. This is associated with the volcanic, mountainous and also increasingly humid nature of the isthmus as one goes south. It’s also remarkable to consider that the area is also a bottleneck for the human population, as the descendants of the humans who entered the Americas via Beringia between Siberia and Alaska to the far north and most, though possibly not all, of the population of South America before 1500 CE were descended from people who had come through the Gap. I say not all because there may have been some between Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of South America, as can be seen in the cultivation of the sweet potato, human genomes on Easter Island and chicken bones dating from the fourteenth Christian century in the Inca Empire, or at least that area. But apart from that, everyone came through the Gap.

If you go a bit further west from Darien, nowadays you’ll come across the Panama Canal. This is of course economically very important and necessary due to the closure of the Isthmus of Panama, which I’ll mention again. Of course, this does depend on long-distance trade being considered important, which is probably not ecologically sound. There was a time before it was practically to dig canals of that scale, and in the late seventeenth century, before the Union, Scotland attempted to exploit this with the Darien Scheme, the establishment of the colony of New Caledonia, where the idea was to transport goods across the Gap from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and charge for each transaction there. Apart from the obvious colonialism (“A big boy did it and ran away”, but this is before the big boy), this might sound like a good idea, particularly when you consider that it’s a mountainous and rain-soaked area like a certain other country thousands of kilometres to the northeast, but it didn’t work. Scotland invested a heap of money in the scheme, taken from the purses of Scots of fairly limited means who invested their life savings. I’m going to try to summarise what happened.

William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, began a company known as The Company of Scotland Trading To Africa And The Indies. Lionel Wafer talked Darien up to him and he decided to found a unique type of colony which would neither exploit the land or people on it nor produce goods for international trade, but simply move items between the oceans for a fee. The East India company unsuccessfully lobbied the English parliament to impeach the new company and then threatened to boycott anyone who traded with Paterson, who raised £400 000 from the Scottish people for the colony, to be called New Edinburgh. He took five ships which carried various items useful for the colony but also three carriages without horses to transport them, a large quantity of garments and also many combs and mirrors which he planned to use to trade with the Guna. Leaving without telling the settlers or anyone else where they were going until they were well on the way to avoid word getting to the East India company, they arrived having lost a remarkably small number of the initial 1200 settlers. Their initial attempt to build a settlement was hampered by the unsuitability of the land and the recalcitrant nature of the jungle, whose trees would need to be felled and cleared for it to work, so they moved to another site and tried again. In Spring 1699, torrential rain and tropical diseases killed two hundred within a month and they were losing ten a day at one point. The Guna were also not interested in the mirrors and combs and the land was unsuitable for farming, so they were forced to eat less than a pound of mouldy flour boiled in water each per week, skimming off the infesting maggots and worms in the process. They then attempted to trade with other nearby English colonies but William of Orange, English king at that point, forbade trade with them, and they also got wind of an imminent Spanish attack so they abandoned the colony and went back to Scotland. Only two hundred of them made it there. In August 1699, Paterson tried again with two thousand settlers who hadn’t heard about the disastrous first attempt. They once again suffered disease and malnutrition, accompanied by rebellion against the leaders and a local pastor blamed their misfortune on their revolt, which was seen as deeply sinful by the leaders. However, they then united with the Guna in an alliance against another threatened attack by the Spanish, who blockaded them by land and sea with cannons and ships until they surrendered in March 1700. The Spanish were gracious enough to let them leave for Scotland, but by the time they got back everyone hated them, they’d lost everyone’s life savings, they got disowned and ostracised and Scotland had lost all of its money. And of course a lot of them died. As a result, the English parliament agreed to bail the Company out to the tune of £398000 in return for the Union, which became known as the Price Of Scotland, because although they had enough money to pursue the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, they also needed bodies and there were more men available as cannon fodder in Scotland than in England, so that’s what they did. Scots were also soon involved in running the Empire and keep the British economy going. Many Scots saw the money as a bribe and the Union as the result of corruption and incompetence. So that’s a rough sketch of the role of the Darien Gap in the downfall of Scotland and the Act of Union’s success, which as well as everything else was partly the result of the inhospitality of the region to European-style human settlement, and it also means that Scotland is morally compromised to some extent by being instrumental in keeping the British Empire going. Had this not happened, it isn’t clear that the Empire would’ve been as victorious as it turned out to be, so whereas Scotland has every right to gripe about its position, the rich and powerful of this nation played their part in putting it in that predicament although the relatively modestly off also had a role. The likes of crofters and fishing families, of course, got the short straw and can’t be blamed at all for it, as usual.

There’s one further aspect to the Darien Gap I want to cover, which is connected to climatic and other changes which led to the ice ages and also, in my opinion, the Biblical Fall of Man. You can ignore the last bit for now if you find it too off-putting, but this is how things went. Right now the Southern and Arctic Oceans alone stretch all the way around the world and in the case of the latter it isn’t bordered by land on both north and south, since there is by definition nothing north of the North Pole. The Southern Ocean, however, provides a vast swirl of current all the way round the planet. There also used to be another such ocean in prehistoric times, known today as the Tethys, which separated the northern and southern continents, and like the Southern Ocean it had an uninterrupted current passing all the way round Earth flowing east to west. Its remnants today are present as the Caribbean, parts of the Atlantic and Pacific, the Med, Black Sea, Caspian and certain other lakes through central Eurasia. Three million years ago, this ocean finally closed for the time being at least when the Americas collided. This had immediate effects on the wildlife of the two continents, with exchanges such as camels, armadillos, opossums and the extinction of much of the life on the southern continent in particular. It also caused the current passing across what was now the Atlantic to be blocked by the Gulf of MEXICO and the warm water to be redirected north, where it increased precipitation and warmed the lands around the North Atlantic. Snowfall also increased due to the humidity, which did two things: it increased the reflectivity of the planet overall, bouncing heat and light back into space, and it locked up a lot of the planet’s water in ice, making it drier and increasing the spread of grassland and desert while causing the rain forests to shrink. It also lowered sea levels, exposing continental shelves, ultimately making it possible for fauna, including humans in the end, to move between North America and Eurasia. However, all of this was less significant than Milankovitch cycles, which are beyond the scope of this post.

It’s also possible that the shrinkage of rain forests led to our ancestors having to leave them for harsher environments such as the savannah, where less food was available, threat from predators was greater and water was harder to come across. This is where the “Fall Of Man” comes in. I believe it’s possible that this harshness led to different, for instance more aggressive, behaviour in and between our communities due to having to compete for fewer resources and various deficiencies in our diets and the ability to deal with health problems, which led to two things: stressed out malnourished pregnant people giving birth to babies who were less than optimally behaved, and parenting and other activities which tended to traumatise them and lead to poor behaviour. In other words, the Fall. We’re all the victims of this and it’s handed down by the rather dystopian flavour of society. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is actually the absence of fruit, not its presence, and the serpent is our base desires and impulses being brought to the surface by these harsh conditions. I realise this sounds nuts, and the questions of free will and a benevolent God are compromised by this line of thought.

I want to end with Keats’s ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I realise there’s a lot going on in this poem, but there’s one thing which I don’t think is at all and want to mention the unfairness of the criticism. I think Keats was fully aware that Cortez never went to Darien (which is not surprising since he had a successful career destroying the Aztec Empire and so on before going back to Spain to end his life in his early sixties as opposed to being bitten and killed by a puff adder or dying of dysentery) and was attempting to convey that he had vision enough to “see” the Pacific. It’s not erroneous at all to my mind. I just wanted to get that in.

In the meantime, this has given me a Thompson Twins earworm even though that song has nothing at all to do with Panama, and I haven’t thought about the fashion chain at all.