To Dream No More

THE LOSS OF EL DORADO by V.S. Naipaul. 335 pages. Knopf. $7.50.

Shortly before Venezuela's Orinoco River reaches the Atlantic, it blossoms into estuaries. Just above them on the map, like a bee frozen over a skeletal rose, is Trinidad--an island with a history of frustrated dreams.

To the latter-day Spanish conquistador Antonio de Berrio, Trinidad was a staging point for futile Orinoco expeditions in search of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold. To Berrio's English rival, Sir Walter Raleigh, Trinidad was to be the beginning of a South American empire, where Indians and true-born Englishmen would unite to destroy the power of Spain. In his excessively romantic chronicle, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, Raleigh describes an Arcadia whose wealth and spaciousness would give new dimension to Renaissance European man.

No one ever found El Dorado. And Raleigh's dream of a New World foundered on the crass realities of exploitation. After Raleigh, Novelist V.S. Naipaul writes, in this extraordinary evocative re-creation of the history of his native Trinidad: "The ships from Europe came and went. The plantations grew. The brazilwood, felled by slaves in the New World, was rasped [the bark scraped off] by criminals in the rasp houses of Amsterdam. The New World as medieval adventure ended; it had become a cynical extension of the developing old world, its commercial underside."

Stagnant Empire. In addition to exotic woods, there were cacao and tobacco, the latter actually called "Trinidad" in early 17th century Europe. Nations had strict trade regulations, but they meant little in the face of raw opportunism. The Spanish had a saying: "The law is to be obeyed but not always followed."

Trinidad's Indian population was virtually exterminated and replaced by African slaves. As years passed, bloods mixed, profits dwindled, and Trinidad became little more than a backwater of the stagnant Spanish empire. In 1797, the British occupied the island, with plans for launching a revolution in South America. They even went so far as to draft a British-style constitution for an independent Spanish-American country. But such grandiose dreams were lost in the swamps of political and logistical reality.

Far from the reach of authority and egalitarian ideals, hatred and cruelty flourished unchecked. French emigres from Guadaloupe and Martinique came to Trinidad with slaves and a system of savage punishment. Blacks had their noses split and their ears slashed off for minor offenses. Hangings, quarterings and decapitations were common occurrences. A simple method of extracting information was to truss up a suspect in a particularly unnatural position and then suspend him so that his weight was supported where the ball of his foot met a wooden stake.

In 1801, Trinidad's Governor Thomas Picton applied the torture to a young mulatto girl who had been implicated in a theft. The episode, with a number of other abuses of power, led to a far-reaching scandal and intrigue. Picton's principal opponent was his first commissioner, Colonel William Fullarton, who wanted to create a Trinidad of small multiracial landowners whose basic human rights were assured.

Underground Kingdoms. A considerable part of the book is devoted to the savage General Picton, who was later to die a hero at Waterloo. Episode and consequence interlock in an unusually complex and compact narrative. But Naipaul's purpose is not to inundate the reader with details about a very minor historical figure in an almost forgotten part of the world. He seeks, rather, to create from the lava flow of facts a sense of the essential ambiguity that prevailed--between the dreams men brought to Trinidad and the brutal awakenings they created there.

V.S. Naipaul, a novelist whose grandfather emigrated to Trinidad from India, succeeds brilliantly. He is particularly effective when describing the fantasy life that resulted from the island's plantation culture. By day the white man, believing himself to be the lord of creation, strutted in his brass buttons and barked orders to usually compliant blacks. At night, however, many of the very same blacks would don cast-off uniforms and preside over underground kingdoms complete with royal titles and secret songs. One of those songs ended with the chorus, "Bread is white man flesh; wine is white man blood. We going to drink white man blood." Trinidad's recent outbreak of violence by Black Power advocates would indicate that the long night of fantasy may be almost over.

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