on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into
whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little
distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so
troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean
Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow,
where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many
cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also
given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the
predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism
in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning
personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath
of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild
commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did
not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their
mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to
writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its
grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English;
but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward
counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other
hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he
had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what
it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with
negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their
greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a
thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be
done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that
they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back
into the ways of their ancestors.
Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked
about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as
well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were
concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as
rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and
the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing
he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that
five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a
fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from
Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come
up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box,
well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go
down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail
Train.
[Illustration: The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills,
and paddled us down to Rupununi]
[Illustration: Two of my second crew of paddlers]
[Illustration: One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout]
[Illustration: “Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo]
It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl
under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not
been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The
Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red
breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this
seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs,
full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca,
they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness
people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are
patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting
are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated
throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of
the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude.
When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next
opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious
mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question
“Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean
Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took
the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West
Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as
“sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat,
which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for
the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve
paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with
dry _farinha_, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on.
During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point
of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here,
though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees.
Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the
boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two
boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling
appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as
possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous
scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort.
Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled
considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the
Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold
their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster
and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than
usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured
stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did
very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough.
“Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a
scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like
circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely
ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers
were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,”
with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But
under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each
wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout
white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were
indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not
to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men.
I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred
to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make
sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off
again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken
even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the
occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in
the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much
sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys
went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the
clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began
again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have
been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes
while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a
place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense
darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my
hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good
clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own
hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce
them to make themselves nets.
I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose
English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one
another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh
word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat
and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and
were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical
dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that
pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in
the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black
birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little
singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a
heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable
kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes”
galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of
the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big
dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of
life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The
river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and
our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from
sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had
burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect
which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the
nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are
cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or
whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could
not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a
site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where
the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my
net while supper was cooking.
Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very
little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest
walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed
the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian
family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible
clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale.
They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated
between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal
ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to
ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on
such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild
places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook
dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the
first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving
Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut,
or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or
three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched
roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead
bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often
they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the
fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller
apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women
confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and
ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of
everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery.
It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of
forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building
with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was
“The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the
only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are
professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We
halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes,
just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo.
[Illustration: We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old
dugout]
[Illustration: “Harris” and his wife at one of their evening camp fires]
[Illustration: Battling with the Essequibo]
The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter,
was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and
Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all
three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the
stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation.
I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians
should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The
place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that
utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it
hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a
supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in
such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese
closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the
dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When
breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had
been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by
the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut
out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in
British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this
one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven
retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause
even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be
thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too
comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed
room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight
gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it,
the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch
beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready
for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if
fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to
suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I
moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing
astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide
open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After
I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour
looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing
all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to
listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced
clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks,
perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness.
I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and
actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long
before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across
the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and
everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for
anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his
invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or
keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but
because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused
them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the
neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the
resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his
own individuality.
Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies
to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who
gather a cheap rubber similar to the _caucho_ of Brazil. “Balata” boats
had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no
one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty
in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the
Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over,
as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead
of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is
a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s
trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain
seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My
host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the
price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks;
and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came
back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It
was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going
over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.
Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the
trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as
well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of
American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been
drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not
seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as
the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the
law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom
there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of
the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the
Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to
it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off”
year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their
gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to
working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with
legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a
larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several
hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who
would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in
which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic
position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.
We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys
augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to
Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All
five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great
forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move,
and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of
rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch
the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again.
We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong,
good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal
color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on
legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving
the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot
pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the
interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working
this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English,
which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest
remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed
a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but
silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is
wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward
antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an
elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old
and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his
next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later,
lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris”
wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put
forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to
name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at
that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not
know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars
would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if
she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are
downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been
digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on
her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her
forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs.
Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might
have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles
and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely
concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far
above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The
missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and
their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men,
but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.
Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while
“Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and
stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots,
washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into
the open end of a snake-like _matapi_, or press made of woven flat
fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a
weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is
deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but,
being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then
dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava
bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like
sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though
similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach
than the bran-like _farinha_ of Brazil.
Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely
price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even
including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a
dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we
struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had
brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that
the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The
Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not
going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the
convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to
them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would
pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up
trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the
missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their
thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I
was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no
doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a
boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of
the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward
incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if
these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all
the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it
would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have
given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in
their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic
conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning
with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to
furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and
to advance him five dollars upon his arrival.
All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts,
purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at
peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age,
coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral
pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually
cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the
huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those
about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for
them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I
called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might
use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when
you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to
cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own
appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most
important ally.
The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was
chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as
well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the
unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he
agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a
justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed
them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you
see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on;
after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river.
But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset,
having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided
to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch
protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more
cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt
respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of
my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the
storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children.
But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more
paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not
let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who
never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed
with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed
authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the
air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one
of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the
kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I
found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the
rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or
forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a
pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish,
two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to
mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris”
and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on
all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on
full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a
bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound
note, instead of in gold.
When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears
struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so
_interested_ in this trip. But I can’t go.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to
Georgetown.”
“How much will that be?”
“$2.08, second-class, sir.”
“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have
earned that much?”
“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”
“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you
to that extent to get back home?”
“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into
his more habitual speech.
This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of
what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid
negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the
perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.
These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the
natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the
rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a
loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven
years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in
Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store.
Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the
former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts
and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were
48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they
must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices,
because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown
and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see
that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future
wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This
is a very large member of the _sapote_ family, the bark of which the
“bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps
thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and
cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough,
yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or
nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run
into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half
inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in
making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its
circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six
inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear
through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five
years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata”
concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that
are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as
well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.
Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and
mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes
build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women
with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap
resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon
and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of
the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This
hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and
folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and
the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds
of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the
river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds
of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170.
Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he
has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is
sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no
wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for
his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by
lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately
earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years,
he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short
time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to
town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months
to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out
his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at
two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a
day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for
loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more
enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the
“bullet-tree.”
In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot,
many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small
tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region
carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from
neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own,
saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new
boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my
astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s
decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This
might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of
the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short
rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the
wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to
load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I
protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My
delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required
that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on,
each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be
drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the
fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load,
though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official
capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and
that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already
excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were
considerably increased.
[Illustration: More trouble on the Essequibo]
[Illustration: High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana]
[Illustration: Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea]
[Illustration: The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne have
soft jobs and often wear shoes]
My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure.
The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained
in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one
would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have
bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said,
“By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle,
unless you can lend him one.”
“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial
Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and
I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!”
Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the
size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by
special messenger.
So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three
now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey
and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the
tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between
them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It
seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight
were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the
laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and
at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide.
In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as
the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of
British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with
the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that
constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a
time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so
after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we
came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less
safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.
We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along
steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his
lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to
pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long
and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s
pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the
monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was
the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my
lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a
skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly
ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her
knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and
three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt
ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and
she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was
strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her
husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she
knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of
her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their
better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering
their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized
husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock
while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen
a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and
baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to
“communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed
couples.
We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke
it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris”
and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and
superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive
rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was
“more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was
“most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though
both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could
induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they
never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could
possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or
to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right,
sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out
what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by
carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of
the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they
could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to
hear.
Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any
news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in
Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah
sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he
winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced
that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word
“negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and
spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such
assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more
examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the
blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white
men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do
the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in
the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and
position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.
A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it
split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks
protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids
beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad,
and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a
“scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a
time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of
trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above
another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First
they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it,
putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey
called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social
scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and
boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me
the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a
respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from
the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians
themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate
fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the
three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the
caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the
wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death
with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped
whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was
cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at
attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a
mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had
finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with
the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must
always call _me_ when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have
kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault,
that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from
Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I
must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a
manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of
Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon
style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which
incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation
over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the
Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness
just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with
himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of
the Brazilian mulatto or _cabra_ and the Englishness of these Guianese
negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners
were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people
and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.
Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town,
though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed
anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the
fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians
did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The
fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so
moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of
brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many
another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who
had never set foot in the wilds. Our _farinha_ had run out, more’s the
pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling;
and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the
same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great
advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.
Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a
“scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get
out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the
shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do
likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the
rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the
second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I
strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by
mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots,
as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with
room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any
two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height,
some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight
far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at
frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in
the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour
when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence
of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a
cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled
with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming,
mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying
to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little
sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many
Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of
isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation,
in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.
Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason
we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon
the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of
polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A
cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the
growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it
drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning
aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we
passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which
tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of
monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant
crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The
river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large
in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the
wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that
one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of
huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as
immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.
We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low
gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his
wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or
was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled
all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey
disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract,
sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a _falls_!” The emphasis on the
last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several
feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran,
constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming
to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way
hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain
a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of
all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from
submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they
did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so,
for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very
middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say
good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in
the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as
the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an
hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river
split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth
and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn
back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of
course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine;
for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless,
foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness,
with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a
life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at
last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information
that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days
farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get
down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic
center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.
“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure
enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless
procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most
magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which
“Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried
the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to
Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an
American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and
therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of
the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across
from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and,
having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he
wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until
half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then
in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many
collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know
nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often
unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the
belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth
of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve
his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a
German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do
other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him.
The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there,
though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most
of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported
serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some
thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row
a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.
“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in,
an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”
The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the
sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during
which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and
cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging
down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the
boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore,
always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily
I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I
shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving
“fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their
teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians”
has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we
guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour,
and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of
water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which
there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of
which Langrey chanted as we approached them:
It’s go’n’ drownded me,
An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’,
EE-tah-nah-meeee!
For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through
the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls,
and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when
we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the
woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we
finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed
the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in
one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of
wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I
had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the
expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to
know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme
vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much
trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times
thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian
who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best
accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was
augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out
to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian
jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to
Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and
though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the
eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid,
yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me
of sleep.
Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from
the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting
the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my
three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of
the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to
the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding
the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing
water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian
voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five
seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was
luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed
savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most
unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with
any three average American boys of the same age, who would have
considered such a trip a lark.
To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected.
During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad
rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods,
we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata”
companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve,
under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes
sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town
clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness.
The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on
the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro
under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently
new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’
drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than
upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad,
placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata”
camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from
me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer,
would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of
thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut
considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville.
Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the
end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into
the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the
sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching
away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over
again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy
at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent
of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages
behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other
world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a
hint of news from it.
Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally
preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that
even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and
“cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own
complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,”
interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as
“t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a
deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to
have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as
two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more
comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks
it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in
anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from
Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly
more both in time and money.
Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred
feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their
width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by
Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along
in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have
viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed
Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in
British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the
ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that
came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen
was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs
daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but
“Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to
“go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of
our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful
to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for
nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I
should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the
placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the
afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts
surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real
meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three
days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the
star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man,
but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived
without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity
as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are
the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door.
A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car
rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the
charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines
pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber.
Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream
compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and
barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the
mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British
Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the
capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is
completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The
colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it,
and the counties took their names from them. The _Lady Longden_, a
river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness
travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most
of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared,
though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides
the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their
childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so
Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely
could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves
(here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from
their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born
in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly
as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer
strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest
cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken
around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak
Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who
carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down
Chinamen lying about the “stellings.”
For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns
breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of
bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an
unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the
Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few
miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back
in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick
up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu
coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of
these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as
sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some
were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had
undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of
green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not
float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the
center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen
more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in
British Guiana.
The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less
inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of
the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since
leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack
of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated
continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten
miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and
yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden
shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually
turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown
burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it
seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a
plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to
it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the
past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the
picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness.
As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed
so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief
that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and
one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay
several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a
negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the
color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came
to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail.
Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a
chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned
on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman”
desired hot water.
“_Hot_ water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence.
“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant.
Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of
Anglo-Saxon civilization.