The Gold Machine: Walking in the footsteps of my Victorian adventurer ancestor

As a boy, author Iain Sinclair discovered on a shelf at home a thrilling book called In Tropical Lands written by his own great grandfather Arthur.

It told the story of Arthur’s adventures through the Peru, including crossing the Andes by mule and enduring the heat of the jungle to come to the Perene river.

Since first reading the memoir, Iain has come to understand the complicated legacy of his ancestor – a Victorian botanist sent to Peru to scout for coffee growing land.

Now a film titled The Gold Machine tells the story of Iain’s own 2019 trip to Peru that retraces his great grandfather’s colonial adventures and examines the consequences for the native Asheninka people, their traditional way of life and even their language.

The journey, made with his daughter Farne, British film-maker Grant Gee and a local translator, Lucho, follows the trip Arthur took in the heyday of Victorian exploration and ends up revealing the brutal reality of a major land grab from the Asheninka people who try to wrest their land and story back.

Iain said: “When I first read Arthur’s book, I kind of admired his adventurous spirit, and I tracked his background from being pretty much thrown off smallholding lands in Scotland and leaving home at a young age, without much education. He was sent out to Sri Lanka, Ceylon, first of all before travelling to Australia and Peru and I appreciated his writing style. Later, I was particularly interested because I wondered where the germ of being a writer myself came from, it seemed to come from him, because there was nobody else in the family doing it. And then I found out consequences of this expedition, which was setting up a whole lot of coffee colonies that were something close to slavery for the indigenous people. And I started to look at his book in a different way. Arthur was obviously a person of his own time and, by the measures of colonialism, he was reasonably liberal. For instance, in Australia, he stopped an attack on a Chinese person. So it was a difficult and conflicted story. These days I wonder, if were there a statue of Arthur, would people try to topple him into a river!”

The resulting film is not a straightforward documentary. Instead, director Grant Gee has worked with Iain’s original book about his trip - also called The Gold Machine - and used a semi-fiction in which a character called Andrew Norton is stuck at home while his daughter researches his great grandfather’s journey through Peru. Although Iain went with his daughter Farne on the real research trip, he does not feature in the film but was instead credited as the writer.

Ian, 78, whose novels include Downriver and London Orbital, said: “I read Arthur’s book when I was 10 years old as it was on a shelf in my family home, and it seemed to me like Conan Doyle’s Lost World. It had a sense of adventure with them crossing the Andes on the mules and collapsing and being led by duplicitous priests who abandoned them in the jungle and it described them making rafts and traveling with a group of Asheninka people down to the rapids. All of that made it a phenomenal adventure story. I'd never registered the implications until later when I compared it to Joseph Conrad because Arthur got his contract to go to Peru, from the Peruvian Corporation in London, at exactly the same time as Joseph Conrad was getting his one in Brussels to go up to Congo. What went on in Peru was nothing like as extreme as what went on in the Congo. There was awful behaviour on the rubber plantations but the coffee colonies were not as bad at all. However, they still meant defying the traditions of local people and persuading them that if they wanted to get access to hospitals and schools, they had to work in these colonies. And the other side of it was then the Seventh Day Adventist missionaries were able to set up. They are still supposedly ‘civilising’ the people and getting them to agree to work and to give up using ayahuasca and having drunken festivals.”

Iain’s great grandfather Arthur Sinclair, a geographer and botanist from Scotland was commissioned in 1891 by the Peruvian Corporation to check whether it was suitable for coffee cultivation. He found a land rich in resources, a veritable “Gold Machine” that had not yet been tapped by the people who lived there. In his subsequent book, he wrote of the native Ashkeninka people he met in Peru: “Poor Chuncho! The time seems to be approaching when, in vulgar parlance, you must take a back seat; but it must be acknowledged you have had a long lease of those magnificent lands, and done very little with them… The world, indeed, has been made neither better nor richer by your existence, and now the space you occupy — or rather wander in — to so little purpose, is required, and the wealth of vegetation too long allowed to run waste, must be turned to some useful account.”

Iain and his daughter travelled to the exact same places Arthur had visited and saw for themselves the effects on the Askeninka people. They even spoke to one man who had worked to the Peruvian Corporation who told them he had been whipped with a belt if he did not work hard enough. The trip ends just before the start of the pandemic and soon the Asheninka people are ravaged by the virus.

“Grant’s idea was to use the trip as a recce and then to return later to do more filming. And that just couldn't happen because COVID came,” said Iain.

“There was nobody coming in nobody coming out of the area. Instead of relying for tourism to keep their economy going they went back to growing beans and vegetables. The shaman we from the village where we had been who hadn't was cultivating Ayahuasca for tourist ceremonies any more actually started to do online reports in which he claimed to have a cure for COVID and people would come to see him to take the medicine.

“Quite a number of the older people we talked to died, the whole whole area was completely sealed off. A couple of wonderful witnesses just didn't survive it.”

At the end of the film there is some closure to the story when Farne discovers some papers relating to the sale of mative land by the Peruvian government to the Peruvian Corporation, showing how it was stolen away from the local people. She is able to hand these documents back to the village leaders in the hope they can be used to document this shady part of the country’s history.

The Gold Machine is being screened at the Arts Picturehouse on September 13 where Iain Sinclair will also be present for a Q&A. Visit www.picturehouses.com/cinema/arts-picturehouse-cambridge