Stan Brock, Amazon bush pilot – My candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Stan Brock. Photo credit R.A.M.

This story is based on an entry I made in a journal in 1978. 

Stan Brock, was my number one hero when I was a teenager and I’m sorry I never met him. When I first heard of him British Guiana was now Guyana and he was the long gone ex-manager of one of the most remote and largest cattle ranches in the world; Dadanawa Ranch. During his time as a cowboy there some 4,000 of British Guiana’s 83,000 sq. miles were Dadanawa range. Lethem, the capital of the Rupununi today, was just one of its Out Stations. The ranch is  bordered to the South and East by the mostly unexplored Amazon jungle and to the West by the Guyana-Brazil border.

Dadanawa began as a remote trading post set up in 1865 and it was sold with 300 head of cattle to H.P.C. Melville in the late 1880s. He was a Scottish gold and diamond prospector who had struck it rich and was to become the founding patriarch of the famous Melville clan of the North and South Rupununi savannahs. This future legend was lost and nearly dead of malaria when he luckily wandered out of the dense Amazon jungle into the North Rupununi where some Macusi Amerindians found him. Sadly, this is not a story about Mr. Melville so, just let me say that when he sold his now world famous ranch in 1919 to investors, they established  themselves as the Rupununi Development Company to run Dadanawa  Ranch that Stan Brock was to manage.

This story is not all about Stan Brock either. It’s about how he influenced me, and predestined my future, becoming my role model hero when I was fifteen. He was THE Amazon cowboy. He rode bare foot like the Wapishana vaqueros that he led driving beef herds along the Rupununi Cattle Trail. From the savannahs into the dense amazon jungle towards the coast they rode. For days on end. Many heads of cattle were lost to jaguars or dissappeared in the treacherous, fast flowing, black water rivers they had to cross on the way to the Intermediate Savannahs and markets further North on the coast.

Stan Brock, Barefoot Vaquero Photo Credit "Jungle Cowboy"

Brock was also a fearless wild animal wrangler. He even tackled huge anacondas in the water as he collected specimens  for world famous zoos. His pet puma, Leemo  must have watched his antics in disbelief, not even pumas played around with those snakes. Vampyressa brocki or Brock's Yellow-eared Bat was discovered for science by him. Stan  is also a mostly self-taught Amazon bush pilot who could land his plane almost anywhere, it seemed. He was exactly the kind of real man the fifteen year-old me, himself with more than a speck of adventure inside, could hero worship.  He was nothing short of being my Guyanese John Wayne. Today, many people the world over know him as the founder of Remote Area Medical missions. Before that, he had been a hugely popular TV nature and wildlife presenter as co-host of the very popular ‘Wild Kingdom’ television series in the late 1960s and 70s.

It was 1977 and my summer holiday to Barbados that year was going to be a memorable one and not only for the culinary experience of being introduced to Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coleslaw salad! I was  so excited to be watching TV for the first time in my life! There was none of that back  in Guyana. No Stan Brock anchoring Mutual of Omaha's ‘Wild Kingdom’ to watch. I learnt two old words I knew now had a new meaning; 'commercial break'. I even found those attractive.

Barbados, 1977 was the time I discovered what it was like to fall madly in love. I became totally enraptured by the  powerful emotion they call puppy love! Her name was Sandy and she was a pretty Polish girl from Windsor  in Canada just over the border from Buffalo, NY.  My heart was truly owned for the first time by a female. One I didn’t call Gran or Mum; and in what a different way! We danced to ‘Red, Red Wine’ by Neil Diamond and held hands on the beach as we watched the spectacular Barbadian sunsets. The poolside band liked playing Harry Belafonte’s "Jump in the Line”, but it was his “Jamaica Farewell” and how we changed the lyrics to Barbados and Bridgetown that remains unforgettable. We exchanged weekly letters for almost a year afterwards and even today a tiny part of me reacts differently to Neil Diamond or Harry Belafonte. As if I were hearing a faint echo of Summer, 1977.

The clear blue Barbados sea! Ours was the Atlantic Ocean, an unattractive, East to West, turbid flow; an ugly sight mostly. It was always thick with silt from the Amazon and some of the other mighty rivers further East along the South American coast. The Guiana Current was a constant wash that seemed always in a big hurry. It taught us about the importance of using landmarks to 'anchor' ourselves to a point on the beach when we went swimming. The steady warm, current constantly pushed us to the West towards the Demerara River mouth every time we bobbed up and down in the waves.

Westwards went the roily flow; pressing against the wild and muddy Guyana coast on its way  towards the Orinoco river delta and Trinidad and Tobago, where the current meets the Caribbean Sea. Before reaching this blue sea of paradise, however, the Guiana Current would dump its grey and muddy silt onto our coast! Causing me and other Guyanese to curse our 'bad luck'. Ach! They called us “Mudheads” in Barbados because of it.  Our blue waters of paradise are only three to five kilometres off the coast! I know because a fisherman once took me out there in his sail boat to see it.

Author's uncle, cousin and aunt in a Guyana fishing boat early 1950s

Barbados was where I read Stan Brock’s book “Jungle Cowboy”. This book predestined my future! It describes his time and adventures as a teenage cowboy who became a man and manager of Dadanawa Ranch in the South Rupununi savannahs. I learnt he’d been a teenager like myself, when his father brought him to British Guiana from England to seek his fortune in the colony. His book so ignited my imagination that the following year I walked over from St. Stanislaus' College in Georgetown to the offices of the Rupununi Development Company. I had high hopes of getting a summer job at his Dadanawa.  It was the last day of school. Saints had broken up for the summer holidays and I wanted to get a job there just like Stan Brock had. I wanted to experience the same adventures he had had and had so fired up my own imagination.

Unannounced and up a dark and rickety flight of stairs, I entered the office and was lucky. Chairman of the Board, Diana McTurk, was in Georgetown and she would see me! I knew the buck stopped at her desk. She was THE COMPANY, the very ‘owner’ of Dadanawa Ranch. I introduced myself and bravely stated my mission. Diana listened to all I had to say about Stan Brock and shook her head negative. She was deadly serious.

“You’re much too young to be out there in the South Rupununi all by yourself, Hugh.” The tall, handsome woman enounced in her clipped Queen's English. “Besides it’s the middle of the rainy season and we don’t want you drowning in some horrible puddle now, do we?”

“But…, but…, I can swim like a fish”, I stammered. “My friends even call me White Shark!” My protests seemed to fall on deaf ears. Nothing. Silence. I was so disappointed. It seemed there was nothing else I could say to promote my dreams as I stood in front of this stern woman. Suddenly, her face lit up and a wonderful twinkle sparkled in her eye. “How about a summer job at Karanambo instead, Hugh?” She was beaming now. The delight on my face was clear to see. Karanambo Ranch! Another legendary place in the Rupununi. It belonged to the McTurks and had been founded by her father Tiny McTurk, the most famous angler in Guyana. The world’s largest fresh water fish, the arapaima was his speciality. I knew because I’d seen photographs of him and his exploits in the Guyana Museum!

“I can take better care of you there,” she said. “We leave on the morrow, so go get ready.”

That’s how I got to spend the next two and a half months living and working as a vaquero with the Macusi Amerindians on Karanambo’s 500 sq. kilometres of open savannah spotted with numerous islands of bush. Karanambo is in the North Rupununi savannahs  wedged between the Kanuku mountains in the South and the Pakaraima mountains to the North. It  is so huge it stretches from the banks of the Rupununi River all the way North to Toka, a Macusi village in the foothills of the Pakaraimas.

 It was at Toka village, where we had tracked some cattle rustlers to, that I heard mother nature's voice singing a tune that could have been the alluring sound of the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey. A bloodcurdling, yet hauntingly, beautiful, wailing sound that seemed to come from the very bowels of the mountain. A huge silhouette  that loomed in the moonlight behind Toka Village. The sound would come and go. On and off it wailed, scaring yet enchanting me until it stopped as abruptly as it had started. Was it water flowing inside the mountain? Was it the wind swirling through secret caves? I never found out what made the mountain sing. "Spirits", said one of the Macusi vaqueros.    "Kanaima", another muttered and they all nodded their heads, obviously scared.

Summer of ’78 at Karanambo was a time of adventure. Adventures that led to many of my later experiences in the mostly uninhabited and wild interior of Guyana.

Decades have passed since then but Stan Brock remains a remarkable man. In many ways he continues to inspire others. He sold everything he owned to create Remote Area Medical that would organise medical missions for people in remote areas of the world including the Rupununi and the surrounding jungle of the Amazon basin. Today, most of RAM’s missions actually help the large number of the underprivileged in the USA.

"We were 25-35 day's march to the nearest town with no health care." Is how he describes why he founded RAM. His devotion to helping other people is absolute. He has no family, earns no salary and lives in a disused school that the city of Knoxville, Tennessee lets his RAM use for a one dollar rent fee. Stan Brock is like a modern day Diogenes of Sinope who, himself living in a barrel, famously observed a child drinking water out of its hands and gave it his own cup saying "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

Stan Brock, according to the CBS TV program“60 Minutes” at seventy-two was taking showers in the courtyard of the school with a hose. He is as homeless and penniless as the Greek it seems to me. Meanwhile, and according to a report in The Independent (UK),he:

"...has no money, no income, and no bank account. He spends 365 days a year at the charity events, sleeping on a small rolled-up mat on the floor and living on a diet made up entirely of porridge and fresh fruit." Nevertheless, there are huge differences between him and the philosopher. Stan might sleep like him but in his seventies this intrepid  bush pilot is still flying a C-47 or Dakota, R.A.M. plane that flew on D-Day in World War  II. He continues to fly over the Amazon jungle bringing medical relief to the people of the Rupununi making him my firm candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. As for me, it is  the McTurks' Karanambo Ranch and not Dadanawa that I have fond memories of.

Stan Brock lassoing cattle at Dadanawa Ranch. Photo credit "Jungle Cowboy"