Naipaul's view of Trinidad (or the Caribbean) as the culture of mimicry and England (or the West) as the mimicked culture is derived from his reading and assimilation of colonial experience and colonial history. The Middle Passage, as Naipaul explained in his first foreword, was written as the result of a trip to Trinidad and Tobago in 1960 on a government scholarship and at the suggestion of the then premier of Trinidad, Dr Eric Williams. It describes the author's passage to his home country amongst a motley crowd of tourists and his encounter with would-be West Indian émigres to Britain; his reflections on Trinidad; his explorations into the interior of British Guyana and his encounter with important political figures, particularly Dr. C. B. Jagan; his experiences thereafter in Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica, and his thoughts about miscellaneous subjects (ranging from history to local languages to Rastafarians); and concludes with an idyllic stay at a luxury hotel in Jamaica called Frenchman's Cove, where all the guests are given whatever they desire. The whole rambling account of the visit is interspersed with ‘documentary’ evidence of different sorts (usually newspaper cuttings; accounts by other, primarily European, visitors; and historical anecdotes), and the author's (generally damning) views. The Loss of El Dorado, on the other hand, is Naipaul's attempt to go back in time – it is an historical account of Trinidad and the surrounding area from 1592 to 1813. It is episodic in structure. The first part is devoted to descriptions of Antonio de Berrio's and Walter Raleigh's fruitless search for El Dorado (the mythical city of gold); then the narrative turns to the establishment of slave trade and plantations. A detailed account of the condition of Trinidad under the oppressive governorship of Picton (when the consolidation and institutionalization of slavery assumed its most grim aspect) follows; then there is an examination of the conflict between Picton and the later-appointed First Commissioner Fullarton (culminating in the trial of Picton's governorship over the Luisa Calderon case – i.e. the torture of a young slave girl to prove a trumped-up theft charge); and finally the historical narrative concludes with the moves towards abolition at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the appearance of the first Chinese indentured labourers.