Colonial Victims

...Soon after, the British seized the island and General Picton became military governor...

...Among Raleigh's Spanish rivals, affairs went no better...

...In his cabin hung with green silks, Sir Walter Raleigh dreamed of himself as a Jason pursuing the Golden Fleece while his Argonauts died "starke rnad*' on the deck from the poison of Indian arrows...

...Illusion persisted: a century later the island became the forward base camp in the quest for El Dorado, the city of gold of an ancient Indian legend...

...Trinidad is independent and ruled by men with black skins...

...Picton's assignment—to maintain law, order, and existing property arrangements under the old Spanish codes while fomenting a revolution on the mainland to open the Spanish-American empire to English commerce —would have challenged the ablest colonial administrator...

...He is a former consultant on Russian affairs for the State Department...

...His books include "U.S...

...its enemies are out of reach in the dead past...

...Picton's reign of terror, his failure to advance the cause of English commerce, and his eventual recall and trial for the torture of a teenage mulatto, Luisa Calderon, are the materials for the second half of Naipaul's story...

...Trinidad and its people were, and remain, the victims of colonialism, and to be a victim in the culture Trinidad has inherited from its past is, as Naipaul has written elsewhere, to be absurd...

...Always tola what they wanted to hear by the Indians, the Spanish and English wasted decades paddling up the uncounted channels of the Orinoco estuary and hacking their way through the clinging tropical forest, certain that another day or two of effort would be rewarded by a hoard of wealth equal to that of the Aztecs or Incas...

...It is a novelist, V. S. Naipaul, who, by applying the analytical tools of his own craft to the evidence of the historians, has produced in The Loss of El Dorado the most subtle and valuable study yet written on the formation of a Third World culture...

...Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union" and "Yugoslavia and the New Communists...

...The interpretation of the new hybrid cultures developing in the colonies was left to those with a wider and more subjective definition of significance, to novelists such as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and George Orwell...

...The cynical brutality, the sense of isolation, and the intricate status distinctions of the colonists echo in the culture of those they oppressed...

...They assumed that little of consequence and less of drama could be found in the details of provincial administration or the petty squabbles of colonial society...

...For Picton, in Wellington's words "as rough, foul-mouthed devil as ever lived," it was impossible...

...Reviewed by Edward W. Knappman Historians of imperialism—at least those whose books were or are read—have always reported on the subject from a comfortable distance...

...ANTHEA LAHR and EDWARD W. KNAPPAAAN are free lance writers...

...Probing personalities warped and corrupted by the attempt to rule over men of different races, cultures, and religions, they discovered that the hermetic colonial existence brought out the worst in both rulers and ruled, snapping the former's link with the present and dispossessing the latter of the past...

...STEPHEN E. AMBROSE is Eisenhower professor of war and peace at Kansas State University and the author of six books on military history...

...Recreating this story out of the Spanish Archive of the Indies and Hakluyt's English Voyages, Naipaul captures both the glittering fantasy that lured the conquistadors onward and the nightmarish reality that defeated them...

...Its tiny garrison of soldiers, missionaries, and officials were marooned and forced to live off the land...

...His method was terror: impartial at first, maintenance of slavery dictated that it become the exclusive instrument of the planters...

...Naipaul resumes his story at the end THE REVIEWERS FRED WARNER NEAL is professor of international relations and government at Claremont Graduate School in California...

...Finally, the dreamers died off, the quest was abandoned, and Trinidad became another ghost province in the over-extended Spanish empire...

...Nearly blind, the old explorer insisted that here he had found the outer approaches to the Garden of Eden...

...Indeed, novelists, with their focus on personal character development, are better equipped than historians to chronicle this aspect of colonialism...

...Small, underfed, and ill-equipped expeditions were swallowed up by the jungle...

...of the Eighteenth Century when the French and Haitian revolutions drove plantation-owners from the French islands to seek refuge with their black chattel in still tranquil Trinidad...

...Balancing the contending racial and economic forces on the island required a political tact foreign to his nature...

...From within the compass of these two periods of Trinidad's discovery and colonization, Naipaul has uncovered the psychological origins of the Third World...

...In Trinidad today there is a vocifer- ous black power movement...

...Unfortunately, there is not much to rule: the island buys little and sells less...

...The^ liberal English businessmen arriving in Trinidad fresh from London became more and more estranged from Picton and his methods...

...Trinidad, NaipauFs subject and native island, first came to the world's notice through the logbook of Columbus' third voyage...