ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS
The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two
leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing
up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so
soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation
between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent
enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen
of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white
toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive
than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves,
unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when
there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks,
with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted
with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the
more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly
belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very
deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people,
rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of
Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few
passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the
commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again
from their monthly excursion to the outside world.
Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock
called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather
insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already
yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to
draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with
the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed
crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight
prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced _apaches_ from
Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his
shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies,
already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what
seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by
trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the
Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal
palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch
could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by
impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be
set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing
jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had
not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we,
too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own,
including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could
not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony.
I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but
the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go
back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find
anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed
at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not
Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone
and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave
the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans
came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our
cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore
among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly
disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with
unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap.
Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip
of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have
turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound;
there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so
that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows
are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two
decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors
is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so
that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect.
Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or
importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean,
and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span
surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter.
Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed
with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are
frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the
native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or
marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species.
Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man
with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro
boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave
me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a
miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by
negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted
that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible
person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to
be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of
ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a
century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide
assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town,
whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in
the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central
_Place des Palmistes_ unless I could find better than this. There were
“Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed
anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro
woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome
stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one
could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European
style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered
with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy,
worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls,
bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without
knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with
paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities,
and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down
or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked
clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the
Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under
things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real
cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be
mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them,
it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the
bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it.
Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of
rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various
mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to
throw out when a new one was indispensable.
The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all
sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over
oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be
between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the
request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the
hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an
old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a
dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the
incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was
a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never
talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression
that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to
bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of
the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and
colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always
distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear,
rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every
day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on
a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the
gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as
umbrellas, but worn as hats.
The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true
before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the
exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and
_libérés_, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so
eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official
one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to
the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or
less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset
and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to
thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and
influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class
assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be
lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but
forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose
upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over
them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and
equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty
colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent
air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily
newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with
advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of
negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored
aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a
patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I
might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best,
considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly
there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang
to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been
borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro
wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room,
including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss.
The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to
be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial
French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red
tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a
post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails
rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no
bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid
tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open
only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then.
Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate
fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of
statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place
makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their
calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose
passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in
general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full
control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by
influence and example.
Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were
putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go
and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer
who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so
that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to
Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of
her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it
has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and
a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of
centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that
at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is
high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five
francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky”
(which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the
illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say
coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used
interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France.
I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like
board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local
talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had
gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was
nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain
finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with
the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro
ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as
haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress,
as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing
in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was
hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see
dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men
of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black.
The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent
left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely
eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried
herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she
played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure
of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes,
it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene,
with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand
lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the
ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth
in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French
residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind
at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been
given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never
before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of
Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the
French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that
would not have been tolerated in an American community.
The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition
financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or
less successful attempts were made during the next half century to
establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she
did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the
claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present
insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists
stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established
African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but
no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and
only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The
slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and
later the Directorate, sent out _déportés_ to take their place; but with
Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to
1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken
by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.”
Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French
America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French
congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the
colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since.
Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built
themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca
and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of
quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared
to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of
agriculture in French Guiana.
[Illustration: A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a
negro boss]
[Illustration: Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the
negroes of the French possessions in America]
[Illustration: The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the
vultures]
[Illustration: In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is
cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves]
In 1891 the Czar of Russia established the boundary between French and
Dutch Guiana at the Maroni and Awa Rivers, and in 1900 the Swiss
president named the Ayapoc as the frontier of Brazil, leaving the French
about one fourth the territory they had claimed. At that, they have no
definite conception of its extent, most of it being virgin forest
unexplored by civilized man. Though in theory it runs far back to the
plateau and watershed of Tumac-Humac, France has no real hold over more
than a comparatively narrow strip of coast. The colony claims 30,000
inhabitants, virtually all of whom live within cannon-shot of the sea.
Alcohol has done for the aborigines, except a degenerate tribe called
the Galibis back in the interior, estimated by the latest census as 534
in number, and there are some three thousand “boschs” or “bonis,” wild
negroes descended from runaway slaves. The few towns besides Cayenne are
insignificant, and in most cases have scarcely half as many inhabitants
as a century ago. In those days of plentiful slave labor there were
sugar plantations, spice trees, and prosperous estates along all the
coast from the Ayapoc to the Maroni, and many ships carried to France
sugar, rum, cacao, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Then there were more than
20,000 field laborers alone; to-day there are barely two thousand
loafing tillers of the soil scattered about the colony, and agriculture
in French Guiana is a blank. Once many cattle were introduced; now there
are none left and even milk for babies comes from the North in tin cans.
As a native editor puts it, “A country placed on a burning soil, swampy
and unhealthful, where paludic fevers, plague, and elephantiasis abound,
needs the patience of the Hollander to become such a prosperous colony
as our neighbor on the west.” Ambitious projects for opening up the
country have been formed, but there has been much promise and little
accomplishment. Sixty kilometers of French highways stretch out in all
directions from Cayenne, passing simple dwellings and careless gardens
peering forth from the bush; but these are the only roads passable the
year round and soon die out in the untamed wilderness. Even what were
good roads a century ago have in many cases become mere paths, or have
completely grown up to jungle again. The native inhabitants are content
to live on cassava—which now suffers severely from a big red ant called
the _fourmi-manioc_—and foreign capital shuns a Latin government and a
penal colony; indeed, the negro inhabitants complain that the coming of
the convicts ruined their “invaluable” country, though it would still be
prosperous “if there were any arms to do the work,” they add, at the
same time completely overlooking the idle arms hanging on either side of
each of them.
Cayenne is known in France as the “dry guillotine.” In the middle of the
last century, soon after the abolition of slavery, some French idealist,
or practical joker, thought of a plan to kill two birds with one stone.
Cayenne needed laborers; France was overrun with criminals. Jean Jacques
Rousseau had asserted that “Every man was born good; it is society which
inculcates in him the germ of all his vices and defects, and as he is
also essentially corrigible, he must be offered means to redeem
himself.” The betterment and regeneration of criminals by work was the
panacea of the day, and this idea, “more or less modified,” inspired the
establishment, in 1854, of the present penitentiary system. It is not
likely that the hard-headed, materialistic statesmen of France took the
prattle of theorists seriously; but it opened up to them a possible way
out of certain troublesome perplexities. In 1851, therefore, the French
president issued a decree prescribing the “use of convicts in the
progress of French colonization,” and appointed a committee to decide to
which colony six thousand _forçats_ in the crowded _bagnes_ of Toulon,
Brest, and Rochefort should be sent. Guyane was chosen, with “Devil’s
Island” as a landing-place, and the following year volunteers were
called for among the inmates of those institutions. More than three
thousand offered to go to Cayenne—and soon deeply regretted it. Way down
under its superficial buncombe the chief purpose of the plan, of course,
was to give the government a means of getting rid of its radical enemies
and all those whose presence at home greatly worried the ruling powers,
and to-day old J. J. Rousseau would be delighted to see how man,
essentially good, is regenerated and recovers his manly dignity at
Cayenne.
During the second year of the plan, volunteers became insufficient, and
new decrees ordered all individuals sentenced to hard labor or
reclusion, or criminals of African or Asiatic origin, to be sent to
Guiana and used in “les traxaux les plus pénibles” of the colony and its
public works. This last clause, at least, has been manfully carried out.
At the same time a penal colony was established in Algeria, but the
latter proved too strong to have its protests unheeded and the onus was
transferred to New Caledonia. The first law of deportation was for not
less than five and not more than ten years. Causes for such a fate
included conviction of belonging to a secret society. Then New Caledonia
was limited to those prisoners of European race sentenced to less than
eight years. All others, of longer terms or of the negro or Arab race,
as well as all _rélégués_ and recidivists, were to be sent to Cayenne.
Of late years New Caledonia has become less and less popular with French
judges, so that to-day the cream of the criminality of France, as well
as of her other colonies, comes to end its days in French Guiana.
For years different convict camps were established within the colony,
and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would
not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same
fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200
arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal
stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big
stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne
are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners
and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all
the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the
rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white
men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of
them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude.
A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray
and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money
after these churches were declared state property; another once high up
in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own
nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their
clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not
assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in
exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest
canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude
straw hat woven of the _awara_ palm-leaf, working at the same digging of
sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public
streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted
_apaches_ from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former
habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing
tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort
of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in
bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and
the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed
appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the
Parisian _apache_ or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt
with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a
clothes-pole.
The _déportés_ are divided into three classes,—_transportés_, merely
sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; _rélégués_,
serving life sentences; and _libérés_, former convicts free to live
where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers
make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any
one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most
miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are
no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in
charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch
Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned
to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of
from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any
man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even
if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after
serving a like term as _libéré_ and earning his own passage money
honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one
considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French
cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence
under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges
in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes,
it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there
are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the
notorious case of Dreyfus.
Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without
shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his
mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference
between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I
was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn
and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the
case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive
minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes
made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard
labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking _rélégué_
was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my
visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the
administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with
the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the
man sentenced to _travaux forcés_, imagined by the law of 1854, has
become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated
themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place
where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and
temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an
occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life
anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The
officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their
treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it
is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many
splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for
their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners,
unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the
hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a
way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the
story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what
society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the
particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months
or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken
land far from their beloved France.
I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but
even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict
of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to
reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins,
without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money,
without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the
thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who
deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine
yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming
temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public
funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to
dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city
beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison
rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the
whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most
degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often
under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the
primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince
them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two
Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men
doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put
them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among
the French is notorious.
Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners
were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire
them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day
each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome
and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between
departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays
the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than
the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident
in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their
meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and
other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the
end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer
workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an
expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore,
still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro
freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire
_libérés_, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well.
Though he cannot leave the colony, the _libéré_ can go where he chooses
within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his
sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat,
clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to
report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an
avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years
or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony.
Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least
after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European
race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics,
or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These
are invariably _libérés_, some of whom have formed alliances with such
females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro
trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the
_libéré_ has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty
years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees
strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking
with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters
of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or
decency during their bestial imprisonment, _libérés_ not only work at
odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the
sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the
negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming
from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of
them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit
new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at
least have something to eat again.
Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since
1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony
remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to
eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped;
many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while
great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and
virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense
jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being
mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they
have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to
take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel
might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible
and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not
infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in
Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in
theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they
make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their
old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony,
particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now
as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of _moco-moco_ stems, and a canoe
made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners
to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are
free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the
Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely,
or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but
dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward.
It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the
“camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly
since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French
Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws
nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I
had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who
had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire
to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them
who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed
him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s
least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern
“principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried
refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big
keys, he led us into the prison in person.
It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of
the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here
they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc
twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their
wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France.
There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen
well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could
afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner
turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and
“stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an
_infirmérie_ where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking
place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics,
from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they
are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of
courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always
addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed,
officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts;
not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly
the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret
identification system, and the prisoners a secret _argot_, or slang,
which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and
incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to
grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which
increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a
book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their
present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have
never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous
phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the
monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of
Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison.
The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small
barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are
confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men
from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no
concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of
simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four
parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two
feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that
even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of
sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was
allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag
the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice
such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the
cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly
replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to
turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your
hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated
wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and
force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was
not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to
shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.”
In another room were a few trinkets, odds and ends, and covers of
various origins for some of the canvas-strip beds. The “principal”
explained that this was the room of trusties and turnkeys, several of
whom were then standing at attention before him. Then, still pretending
to give me information, but raising his voice to a bellow, he screamed,
“Yes, these we allow a few extra privileges, and they are even greater
pigs than the others—_Oui, ils sont les plus cochons de tous!_” There
was not much visible sign of an opportunity to be anything else. I not
only saw no bath anywhere within the “camp,” but no place where a
prisoner could so much as wash his hands. Nothing but absolute brute
necessities were recognized, and even then everything was of the crudest
and coarsest.
“And do you treat educated men and those who have formerly lived in
clean surroundings the same as you do the recidivists and the apaches?”
I asked.
“Bah!” cried the captain, with his nastiest sneer, though maintaining
his attitude of overdrawn courtesy toward me. “After a few days they
become just like the others and you never see the slightest difference.”
Come to think it over, I suppose they would.
The prisoners get up at five o’clock, have coffee, and go to work at
6:30. A “breakfast” of thin soup, one vegetable, half a kilo of bread
_de deuxieme qualité_, and what is supposed to be 250 grams of meat
before it is cooked, but which boils down to about half that, is served
at 10:30. Three hours later the famished convicts are marched out into
the blazing sunshine again to complete their eight hours of daily toil.
At night they get a slab of bread and a kind of vegetable hash, duly
weighed on dirty scales. It is impossible that any grown man doing
manual labor should not be habitually ravenous on such a diet. Not only
was the stuff of the coarsest grade imaginable, and unsavory as food
carelessly cooked in great bulk always is, but it was handled by guards,
visitors, and any other chance passer-by exactly as one might handle the
food of a dog, perhaps dropped underfoot and then tossed back into the
pan, from which it may be doled out to a man who a year or two before
ate in the best restaurants of Paris.
An old chapel, now full of cells, was a place of punishment for minor
infractions of the rules, the inmates of which slept on boards and were
given bread and water two days out of three. In another building were
the _cachots_, or dungeons proper, stone rooms about four by six feet in
size, with very low ceilings, solid doors, and only a hole some ten
inches in diameter for ventilation. Here recaptured men awaiting trial
were kept in solitary confinement, with a plank for bed, worn concave
during many years of occupation, a block of wood as pillow, and bread
and water one day out of three. For those who aroused still greater
wrath among their guards there were cells in which a man could neither
stand up nor lie down, and other underground horrors worthy of the
Inquisition. I am not one of those who believe in making prison life a
perpetual ball-game; but there are limits to the brutality which man
should permit himself toward his fellow-man. After all, it did not look
as if Hugo’s famous novel had done much to mitigate the lot of French
prisoners. Things may have been alleviated in France itself, but in this
tropical Hades there has certainly been no improvement over the _bagnes_
of Toulon of a century ago.
“Look at that dog!” cried the commander, as the occupant of one of these
ovens rose to his feet when we entered. Then, with all the sarcasm he
could throw into his voice, “_Vous êtes content, hein?_” The officials
all seemed to try to impress me with the fact that they had a
particularly dangerous and incorrigible lot of wild animals in their
charge, and looked for applause at their ability to keep them under
control by such methods as savage brutality and by taking every
advantage of the helpless wretches to taunt them. Yet no owner of wild
animals would have dreamed of keeping them in such airless, crowded and
starved conditions. There was a den of _rélégués_, for instance,
ex-convicts who had violated their parole as _libérés_ and were awaiting
trial—nearly all white Frenchmen and as fine a collection of hopeless,
helpless, careless, don’t-give-a-damn toughs as it has ever been my
privilege to see. The atmosphere was exactly that of a den of savage
beasts who considered all the outside world their implacable enemies and
were ready to rend and tear anyone who was so careless as to come within
reach without a weapon with which to cow them. There were between thirty
and forty in each of the 12 by 16-foot rooms, and by no means space on
the two wooden platforms, resembling those in the _aisles de nuit_ of
French cities, for all to lie down at once.
To add to the joy of their lot, the prisoners are constantly robbed of
their legal rations to fill the pockets of the officials and guards.
There is a saying that officers arrive in Cayenne with half a trunk and
leave with six. In theory, the men are entitled to wine, tobacco, and
reading matter; practically, they never see any of those things unless
they manage to get them from outside. At Albina, across from the chief
penal station on the Dutch boundary, wine is always for sale at a song.
The Indians or “boschs” who bring in an escaped prisoner get two of the
five dollars paid by the French Government, the prison officials
pocketing the rest. There is always an advantage in killing off
prisoners, for their names are still kept on the books and the officials
still draw their ration money, as they do that of un-captured fugitives.
It has often been proved quite possible for a guard at least passively
to bring about a prisoner’s death, merely for the few cents a day he can
pocket for his rations. Naturally there is much underground favoritism,
and the prisoner with money or powerful friends outside can usually get
away. The guard is not only amenable to a bribe, but glad to have
another dead man on his ration books. Such escapes are generally
engineered from over the Dutch border. An expert American cracksman,
well known to our police, “did a job” in Paris a few years ago and was
sent to Cayenne; few who have been there will blame the perfectly
respectable Americans of Paramaribo for helping him to escape. The
German who attempted to get Morocco to revolt against French rule
escaped while I was in the Guianas, and there were very persistent
rumors to the effect that the German Moravian missionaries in Dutch
Guiana knew quite well how it happened.
The prisoners themselves sometimes help their oppressors in the matter
of ration money, for they have secret societies of bloodthirsty
tendencies and private enmities are often settled while the prison camp
lies in restless slumber. Sometimes it is merely a quick stab upward in
the darkness through a stretched-canvas bed; sometimes a ring is formed
by the other prisoners, and the two opponents, each armed with a knife
and attended by a second who has no other right than to give his man
another knife if his own is knocked from his hand, go at it, with no
quarter asked or given. The guards will not risk their lives—and their
probable “rake-off”—by entering and attempting to stop the fight in the
dark, and when one combatant is killed he is left to lie where he has
fallen until morning, when everyone in the room assures the
investigating official that he slept soundly all night long. Death
naturally has few terrors for these convicts, and it is impossible to
punish them more than they are already being punished; hence there is no
motive to restrain themselves. In short, Cayenne definitely proves the
existence of a hell, though its geographical location does not exactly
tally with the notions of old-fashioned theologians.
It took all day to get back on board the _Antilles_, silhouetted far out
on the horizon beside the lighthouse of “Lost Child” Rock. For, with
typical Latin disorder, the sailing was postponed as often as it was
announced. At the customhouse outgoing baggage was examined by slovenly
but pompous negroes as thoroughly as if it were being landed, mainly
because it is illegal to take gold out of the colony. A rowboat carried
us out to a small steamer which could not touch shore. Another brought
out that month’s contingent of conscripts, in blue-jean uniforms and the
familiar French army cap, their shining new cups, canteens, and the like
hanging about them. With few exceptions they were negro youths, pale
under their jet-black skins; and it was difficult to decide which looked
the sadder—the white prisoner boatmen from France who had to stay
behind, or the black “freemen” soldiers of Cayenne who had to go. Among
them was a French priest already gray and heavily bearded, still in full
priestly garb, but with a soldier’s kit and cap hanging over one
shoulder. All the afternoon the Gallic chaos reigned, until at last we
neared the _Antilles_ and were transferred to her again in rowboats, the
soldiers descending into the third class and the canvas-clad convicts,
who had come on board carrying the bags and bundles of negro passengers
and the officers, meekly descending the gangway again, their manhood
evidently so completely shattered that they dared not even attempt to
stow themselves away. We were off about six; and as I looked back upon
the dim, flat land dying away in the sunset, there came to mind an old
slab of wood that had been removed from a prisoner’s grave to the museum
of Cayenne, on which one can still make out the epitaph, crudely carved
by some fellow-convict:
Qu’ avons nous besoin de savoir ton nom?
N’étais-tu pas comme nous un compagnon d’exil?
Dors en paix, maintenant que tes cendres réposent,
Nouveaux exilés, nous vous souvenons
Et t’offrons nos regrets.
A bientôt.
Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed
down near a lightship marked _Suriname Rivier_ to take on a pilot who
looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two
hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story
wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved
shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or
Cayenne. The _Antilles_ manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were
free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the
outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not
allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run
away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to
the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed,
almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and
government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as
ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to
Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one
began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering
over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by
the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a
beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights.
Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward
cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even
those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that
moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though
less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore
gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the
two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was
evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched
up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving
the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched
grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has
produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental
Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly
both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two
Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently
suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent
physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly
attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In
the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had
seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest
of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms
with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese
from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress
and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women
and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many
Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one
of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red
perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were
there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and
the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore
unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat
and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore
starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under
the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap
and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the
throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews
are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in
the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry
chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the
colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white
Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese
and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or
Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro,
especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most
lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most
ardently sensual.
The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners,
chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great
liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from
Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the
Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of
Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually
exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North
America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the
trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam
slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always
been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese
coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the
whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began
importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of
Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially,
the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians,
whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to
keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name
is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work
to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan
asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a
friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran
schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and
Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of
town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold
service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the
dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy
fatalists.
On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church
in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the
worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the
impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the
church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd
had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months
in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his
sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was
merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should
know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch
Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women
separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the
minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church
were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other
important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The
majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at
least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all
the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the
gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a
noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches
habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to
the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went
to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches.
All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas
evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood
and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really
black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other
hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from
the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty
blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes
seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as
possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of
service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns,
which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing
audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether
because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not
apparent. The _Predikant_, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day
air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four
sermons—_four_, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed
ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old
white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand
boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints
of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy.
The Reformed and the Lutheran churches of Paramaribo alternate in their
Sunday night services, in order that competition shall not cut down
still lower their congregations. From the church the crowd went, almost
intact, to the “Kino,” as the “movies” are called in Surinam. The
paternal government burdens these—there are three, all owned by
Jews—with many stern rules. The films must be run by hand, not by motor;
since the hard times incident to the World War only two performances a
week were allowed; the show must be over by 10:30; and so on, until one
became amply convinced that it was no happy-go-lucky Latin government
that ruled over these sedate African Dutchmen. But there are limits to
suppression. To me, fresh from Brazil and the blasé, drawing-room
silence which prevails in its cinemas, the most striking part of this
performance was the almost constant howling and screaming of the largely
negro audience, now cheering on the doll-faced hero, now shrieking
threats at the top-hatted villain.
[Illustration: A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread]
[Illustration: Homeward bound from market]
[Illustration: French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne]
[Illustration: White French convicts who would like to go to France,
rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who would rather stay at
home]
Down at the market-place along the water front there was an incredible
mixture of races, tongues, and customs each morning. Dirty, almost-naked
Hindu beggars slunk in and out among buyers and sellers; Javanese paused
to squander the single copper left from their gambling, and plodded
noiselessly on in their bare feet, munching the mouthful it yielded;
Chinese women, still in the cotton trousers of their homeland, but
already wearing the gay starched bandana of their adopted country,
bargained with a squatting Madrasee or a pig-tailed Mohammedan from
northwestern India over a handful of green plantains. But most numerous
of all were guffawing negro women, almost invariably carrying something
on their heads, be it only a bottle of Dutch rum sitting bolt upright.
The negroes, especially of the younger generation, to whom labor bears
the stigma of the lowly Javanese or Hindu, consider themselves a kind of
aristocracy in this conglomerate society. The negro girl working in a
shop and dressing in modern finery is too nice to carry her own bundle;
she is followed by her mother in the old native dress, bearing her
daughter’s burden. A negro youth whom an American resident hired as a
fireman on his launch appeared in a red tie and patent leather shoes,
followed by his mother and his grandmother, carrying his baggage on
their heads.
It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table.
Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but
it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where
nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of
a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness,
we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we
descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon
“tea” that was a meal in itself, and _Koud Avondeten_—“cold evening
eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once
upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage
compartments, but those glorious days are gone.
Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been
tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every
educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the
street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to
know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of
all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called
“taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes
in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: {_Niet
Drinkbaar_ / _No boen vo dringi_} All higher government officials speak
English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in
Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of
finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played
cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one
of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a
frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official
presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies
of the minister translated into English.
One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were
on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of
a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France,
but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had
been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of
the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen
in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid
faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with
good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular
table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief
justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a
case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the
similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All
five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads
of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the
coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen
Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was
summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court
spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted
by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by
law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered
back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired
of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed,
he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the
clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as
to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the
interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know
was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch
before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes
another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French
as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that
tongue was eminently West Indian.
The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the
governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the
mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the
people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally
gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence
Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for
political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they
serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a
pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such
circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never
acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying
a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest
in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs,
though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors
the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives
themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest
complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge
of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as
easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few
charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives,
especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never
tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their
contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity
a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got
an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years;
therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no
wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public
building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated,
but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with
electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that
there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the
former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a
friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to
Holland.
Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American
corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the
Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The
country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots
uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums
had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation
of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many
others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under
him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or
Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one
for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast
belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the
cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps
the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to
combat it.
The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the
landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English,
Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely
enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many
kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six
hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and
some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped
from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping
incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid
heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!”
“Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good
mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation
shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with
small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the
waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after
which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large
as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style,
quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into
balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after
which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber,
called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an
important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to
clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war
and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia
in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff
had been piled up for cordwood.
[Illustration: Along the road in Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native
headdress]
[Illustration: A lady of Paramaribo]
The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading
the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will
do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen.
The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a
population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town
and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a
five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced
to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this
brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who
wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden
for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five
years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor
five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any
medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each
laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the
government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or
more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a
nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child
twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the
children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a
teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds
for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified
diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes
to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have
been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired
from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total
loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he
can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss
in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men,
though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a
day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay
them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day.