One day while walking beside the lagoon, I found an old man standing in my path. Small and dark, he wore a pith helmet, a yellow shirt and a pair of stained, threadbare jeans tucked into rubber boots. He smiled at my approach and said, in English, ‘Mister, I waiting you.’ With that he beckoned me to follow him toward a modest bungalow surrounded by a prolific garden.

This man proved to be Old Jim Goff. I had often heard his name mentioned in the village, for he was regarded as a town father and an authority on the flora and fauna of the Mosquitia. Otho told me that once, years before, Old Jim Goff had walked the coastline all the way to La Ceiba and back – some 650 kilometres of difficult hiking. The old man was either the son or grandson (even he wasn’t sure which) of the first Goff, a Frenchman who came to the lagoon in the late nineteenth century and joined with Mr Wiley Wood of Texas to found the village of Brus. The European strain had long since been absorbed into the native bloodlines, but the names Wood and Goff were found all over the region.
Old Jim Goff brought two glasses of lemonade and invited me to sit on his porch. His English was passable – he had learned it from one of the missionaries years before – but limited to phrases like ‘God bless!’ and ‘Jesus good man!’, which he blurted out at intervals. We worked out a pidgin of our own using English, Spanish and the few Miskito phrases I had picked up.

A visit with Old Jim Goff could be quite entertaining. On several occasions over the next few days, I sat on his porch while he showed me some of the many objects in his possession. He would suddenly think of something and say, ‘Wait please!’, disappearing into his house – which looked like some extraordinary curiosity shop – to emerge with something for me to examine. Many of his precious objects were ordinary trinkets from the ‘civilised’ world: place mats with pictures of ducks in flight over a snowbound lake; a ceramic toad; and, of all things, a pliable Gumby toy.

But Old Jim Goff also showed me leaves and flowers and pieces of bark, describing how ‘in old time’ the Miskitos used plants to treat ailments. Nobody in Brus knew as much about the flora and fauna of the region, and yet he himself didn’t regard the information as valuable. ‘In old time’ meant that the natural remedies were no longer used, for everyone, including Jim Goff, relied on the medicines imported by missionaries. Jim Goff liked to show me the empty pill boxes the missionary doctor had given him – everything from antacids to antibiotics. He took especial delight in having me read the names of the different medicines, repeating after me as though I were giving him a language lesson. ‘Tums,’ we would say. ‘Tetracycline.’ To the Miskitos, the very words had potency, and I’d heard that they loved them so much that they had given the names to their children. Supposedly, somewhere in the Mosquitia lived people with the names Penicillin and Aspirin and Insulin.

Now over eighty years old, Jim Goff was one of the few villagers who could remember the time before the missionaries had arrived in the region. He was a repository of his culture’s knowledge and wisdom, one of the few left who knew the old lifeways, but even he depreciated the value of that knowledge and put his trust in the foreigners’ science. The knowledge of ‘old time’ would die with him.

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