the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty
years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British
subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain
at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but
live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth,
as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and
superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot
be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits,
but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other
troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their
caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels,
or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it
away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their
peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their
enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more
effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated
people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by
disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year
which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and
a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a
complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his
crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked.
I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese
laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s
wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the
amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to
whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost
as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently
happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the
Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in
games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose
jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped
about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and
reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the
other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it
like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent
short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other
penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find
each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The
Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots.
They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any
slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly
chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time
before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with
the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to
the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife
in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The
manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter
would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband
attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and
both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but
severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never
able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out
the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese,
however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are
virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them
to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to
borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The
man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the
night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him
a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he
sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to
hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more
or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the
whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help,
but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful
housekeepers.
When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become
independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five
years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here
that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to
settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly
being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he
does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the
Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and
gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of
his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow,
his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary
and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that
in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more,
receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening
to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away!
Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races
in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the
British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes
are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail
fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare
exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the
stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner
speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers
have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal
government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge
the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly
what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the
inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for
examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of
flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw
Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store
rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China.
The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that
even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more
reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the
father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross
between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom
worthy of the least confidence.
There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to
mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the
price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road
of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of
fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on
hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and
lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every
Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of
the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing
more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned
to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated
huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility,
even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying
short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of
everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every
bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their
junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of
these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty
or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is
passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the
hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of
“pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by
law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called
because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come
knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or
anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted
one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was
more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it,
or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or
express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white
men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of
its soil in time proved permanently injurious.
In the afternoon we came to the Suriname River again, here far narrower,
but swift and deep. The buttresses of a bridge had been built, but the
few remaining passengers crossed in a cable-car, like that to the top of
the “Sugar Loaf” in Rio, a hundred feet or more above the water.
Naturally, a weekly schedule that requires two trains and a cable
station to make its run must charge fabulous passenger and freight
rates. We spent more than an hour getting our cargo—largely oil products
and flour from the United States—into the little three-car train on the
other side; then the conductor put on a new kind of cap, and we were off
again. Here the soil was reddish and looked more fertile, and we seemed
to have risen to a slight savannah with a cooler wind, though for the
most part we were surrounded by the same monotonous jungle that had
hemmed me in almost incessantly for weeks past. But here it was
enlivened by what to me was the most interesting of the many races that
inhabit the Guianas,—the _Boschneger_, or “Bush Negroes.”
In the early history of the colony her African slaves, said to have come
from more warlike tribes than most of those brought to the New World,
revolted and, but for the help of the Caribs and a patched-up truce,
would undoubtedly have driven the white planters into the sea. In
British Guiana they were eventually conquered and driven out. The Dutch,
on the other hand, made peace with them, not only acknowledging their
independence, but promising to pay them tribute, which they do to this
day. The descendants of these black insurgents, unlike the “maroons” of
Jamaica, have gone completely back to savagery and live like wild
Indians, or like their ancestors in the African bush, wearing only a
loin-cloth, dwelling in grass huts, eating cassava and other jungle
products, and talking a corruption of Dutch and several other languages
with which they have come in contact, which the Dutch themselves cannot
understand. It is estimated that there are eight thousand of these wild
negroes in Dutch Guiana, divided into three principal tribes, Saramacca,
Becoe, and Djoeka, each ruled over by its “gran man” (“a” always as in
“far”), and its tribal elders, while several thousand more, known as
“bonis,” inhabit French Guiana.
A few of these black children of nature had appeared before we crossed
the Suriname; now they burst forth frequently from the surrounding bush.
The only evidence of humanity, except the railroad, was an occasional
sheet-iron station building; yet we halted now and then where the dark
mouth of a path broke the dense wall of forest-jungle on either side to
unload rice, flour, and oil for the placer miners and “balata bleeders”
back in the bush. In some places wild negroes had come down to act as
carriers. They were splendid physical specimens, tall and more
magnificently built than any race I had yet seen in South America, fit
to arouse the envy of any white Sandow—except that, being paddlers of
dugouts rather than walkers, their shoulders and arms were overdeveloped
in proportion to their legs. Erect and haughty as Indians, without a
hint of the servility we commonly associate with negroes, they were
proof that the African who has returned to his natural state in the
wilderness is preferable to the negro who has reverted to his natural
state in the cesspools of cities and the rags of civilization. Though
noticeably smaller, the women and girls—naked except from waist to
thighs—who came down to peer out of the forest and see the train pass
were equally fine specimens of the human animal, the young ones with
plump, protruding breasts, shapely waists, and more often than not a
naked baby astride one hip. The men had earrings, bracelets, rings even
on their forefingers, charms of shells and the like about the ankles,
and so many adornments, in contrast to the females, as to suggest that
they forcibly took them away from their weaker sisters. Such cloth as
they wore was of gayest color and crazy-quilt pattern; their short hair
was done up in “Topsy” braids sticking out in all directions and tied
with many-colored ribbons; about arms and legs, just below the knees and
above the elbows, they wore tight rings or cords, evidently believing,
like the Indians of Amazonia, that these protect them from the ravenous
_piranha_; and the abdomens of both men and women were tattooed, or,
more exactly, pricked into relief figures resembling countless black
warts. More superstitious than the wild Indians, and just wise enough to
know a kodak by sight, they were not to be caught unawares for a
“por-trait´,” as the word remains even in “taki-taki.”
Dam is most succinctly described by adding an “n” and an exclamation
point. It consists of the end of the railroad line, which some day in
the distant future hopes to go on to the Brazilian border. The only
white men left since crossing the river were the little Dutch engineer
and myself. I went with him and the rest of the train crew to a clean,
well-screened little bungalow, where we pooled our lunches, but the
assertion of the dusky conductor, whose English was “picked up,” that he
was “snorking too much” proved only too true, and I soon carried my
hammock out into the night. After some search I swung it from the
switch-post to the back end of our first-class car, diagonally across
the track, and turned in again. There was, of course, the danger that
another train might dash around the curve into me, but as the company
would have had to order it made in Holland, carry it piecemeal across
the river by cable, set it up, and run the thirty miles from the cable
station, the risk was not great.
At least there was a fine collection of “Bush Negroes” in Dam. A hundred
or more of them, including whole families among whom there was not cloth
enough for a single garment, had come down the river, which here forms a
rocky falls, to carry back into the bush in their canoes the supplies
brought by the weekly train, and they had hung their hammocks under a
long sheet-iron roof on poles provided by the government. All of them
had the air of being as ready to fight as Indians on the war-path; yet
they were childish in many ways, too, jumping upon the train every time
it moved a foot in switching and acting in general like boys of ten.
They were the exact antithesis of Indians in showing, rather than
hiding, their feelings, and had all the African’s gaiety and boisterous
laughter. In their encampment now feebly lighted by weird torches, they
were indulging in music, chatter, and apparently in dancing, until one
might have fancied oneself in the heart of Africa. They seemed to be
more contented with their lot than the Indians, as if they still had
memories of the slave days of their ancestors and realized that much
more fully what freedom means.
On the return trip we picked up much gold. At every station, and at some
mere stops, negroes, clothed and usually English-speaking, handed the
conductor small packages wrapped in scraps of paper, but sealed with a
red seal, the name of the owner crudely written on each. I soon learned
that these contained gold-dust, and for every one of them the conductor
had to make out a report, which the negro certified with a seal he
carried, after which the conductor put the package in his tin box. Some
of them weighed several pounds. Before we were halfway in the conductor
had more than $12,000 worth of gold, for all of which he was
responsible, though he received not a cent extra for the trouble above
his scanty wage of thirty dollars a month and a gulden as expense money
on each trip. No wonder he said something about “one hand washing the
other” and gave me no receipt for the fare I paid from Dam back to the
cable-station.
When we came to Kwakoegron every person on the train had to get off to
be searched for gold. All passengers and employees, carrying their
hand-baggage, were herded into a big chicken-wire cage, where they were
examined one by one by black policemen. Personally, whether out of
respect for my nationality or because I looked too simple to think of
smuggling, the officer who stepped with me into one of the alcove
closets opening off the enclosure was satisfied with patting my pockets
and making me open my kodak; but many travelers are compelled to strip
naked while black policemen examine even the seams of their garments.
There is a negress on hand for similar examinations of her own sex, and
several times I heard of an English woman resident who, having once been
caught smuggling gold, was forced to strip every time she passed through
Kwakoegron on her way to town. Even minor surgical operations are
sometimes performed on suspects, not always without results. Not merely
the passengers and their bags, but the entire train from end to end was
examined with meticulous care. Gold has been discovered hidden away in
every imaginable place on the cars, even stuck on the trucks or inside
the wheels. The packages in charge of the conductor are also examined,
and if a seal is found broken he is held in jail until it is proved that
none of the gold is missing. The negro policemen get a percentage and
promotion for finding stolen gold, or for detecting attempts to smuggle
it, and are said to be so proud of their jobs that they seldom succumb
to temptation.
[Illustration: Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of
the Far East]
[Illustration: Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_
plantation in Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their
native musical instruments]
[Illustration: Wash-day in Dutch Guiana]
The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of
the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven
per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the
method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is
scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be
sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings
after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the
packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined,
and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his
gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it
to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle
the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said
for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana,
merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it.
Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates.
I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam.
Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the
Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch
Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The
government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring
them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state
and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for
example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no
schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the
Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly
they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro.
All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of
their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost
invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended
from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have
traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their
ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The
men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters.
Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to
town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet
long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different
patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas,
and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy
prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women
are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a
conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the
latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies,
his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day
the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so
called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own
strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven.
They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and
Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or
curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very
suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them
staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum
or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been
subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws,
punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government
interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush
Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to
his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians
returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the
river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his
village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves
farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of
the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government
was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing
no intention of doing anything about it.
The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as
they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of
French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes
or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an
outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the
“gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but
bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his
chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and
receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty
between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some
trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush
Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the
capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers,
but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about
their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit
of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in
Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a
whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the
wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to
one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on
condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair,
evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer
backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and
probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him
than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out,
offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put
in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued
indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical
comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed
myself out of Dutch quarters.
“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first
motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind
his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and
“packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the
“taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they
use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their
clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests,
is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that
have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered
history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a
childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my
privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the
wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the
congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a
similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on
alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language,
though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared
from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from
the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against
the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their
Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to
change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set
aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My
host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led
to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a
hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the
sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we
call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be
married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked
in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved
sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving
heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap,
and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the
church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long
service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the
mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to
time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of
sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church
expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at
stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect
used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which
is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the
“Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native
tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given
German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi”
might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in
understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are
simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and
“Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the
“taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one
bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but
“father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for
“child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish
_pequeño_ or the Portuguese _pequeno_. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the
“a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in
vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike
minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a
group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express
themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means
“good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character;
“Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have
made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25:
[Illustration: An East Indian woman of Surinam]
[Illustration: A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations]
[Illustration: A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in
which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of rubber]
Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki:
Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben
habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe
ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben
habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem
kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina.
Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught
crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth
in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang
forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently
the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the
faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble
of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language.
A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the
second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more
inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was
a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood,
stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms
and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded
streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of
both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be
empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep
out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the
river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes
and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a
battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first
cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September.
The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or
merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden
heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green
stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal
palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing
the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they
were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red
stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid
air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these
iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that
before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to
load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few
English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom
complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over
the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie,
where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and
retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal
tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate.
Here a white _déporté_ who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a
burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather
than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists,
send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of
Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu
fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut
out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could
see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I
passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the
children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they
reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were
dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful _gamalong_ floating by
on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had
already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the
slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding
them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam
had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable
of producing a hundred fold what it does now.
The launch _Ella_ finally left for Springlands, across the boundary,
with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed
in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the
yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded
shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of
distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew
toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were
eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed
in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous
British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality
about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an
Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but
carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a
document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in
Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I
should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward
along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie
boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came
to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed
out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile
called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in
this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable
negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the
track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the
road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty
minutes ahead of its schedule.
To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday
and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday.
Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but
to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted
mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British
manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of
fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in
getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was
in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the
blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the
laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half
holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in
hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer
Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the
streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of
link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures,
speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but
to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the
goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those
in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies
lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in
makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking
irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of
which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday
morning.
An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,”
to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along
a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the
country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old
negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before
she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter,
and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps
to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road
all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and
negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had
shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a
thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from
Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a
thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and
shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with
bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging
but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my
progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats
and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway
itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles,
countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South
America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the
pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of
Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089
inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety
per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its
British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed
even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least
one can telegraph anywhere.
[Illustration: A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections of
the railroad to the interior]
[Illustration: A Bush Negro family on its travels. Less than half the
dugout is shown]
[Illustration: A Bush Negro watching me photograph our engine]
[Illustration: A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush Negroes, returning
from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor of Surinam, with his
“commission” from Queen Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and
footsore valet]
Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British
Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark
from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite
greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South
America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a
glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep
from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on
almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their
real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with
such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not
that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an
advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African
chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous
travelers.
Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue
tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had
almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every
description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on
Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger
ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the
proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly
ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit
Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with
thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like
road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink
from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of
whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks;
but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I
stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent
of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a
draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze
from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I
could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of
it.
Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it
no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring
of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate,
“’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.”
“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which
extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a
cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally
became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It
seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal
we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of
nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it,
topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day
did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for
the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he
asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too
much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the
whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors.
“Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence.
“Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’
you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we
use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to
whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?”
meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su
gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most
imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and
excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn
demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many
detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law,
and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was
still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a
half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his
mongrel race.
The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered
huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough
sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From
mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the
landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and
there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting
to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched
together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in
them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a
patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time.
This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient
laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness,
stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for
themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in
Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long,
green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with,
“Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of
the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions
as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West
Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment
seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole.
I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate
of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were
the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing
bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on
legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married
employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered
away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter
of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman,
and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly
named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been
allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an
hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down.
Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face
when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation,
as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already
grasping him by the throat.
“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I
had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was
delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after
all.
Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar
plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage.
It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of
strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in
which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid
actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door,
and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving
to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense
and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the
piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed
children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess
without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager
himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in
life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such
occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of
the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he
descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog.
But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight.
Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what
they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to
risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways
until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was
not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him
that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and
once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent
to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably
good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his
generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that
of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a
tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though
explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see
the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal
business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town,
they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter
entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was
evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be
cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates.
I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along
the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun
was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the
head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’
barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be
allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as
soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I
would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared
in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no
way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took
far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable
person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a
judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject,
“By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The
head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at
length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial
history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour,
whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish
mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a
“swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush,
the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of
rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being
over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs,
where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age,
were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause.
Here we “swizzled” several times more, and then went in a body to a
dining-room on the ground floor under the manager’s house, where
fourteen of us sat down to dinner about a large table. The deputy
manager was at the head and the head overseer at the foot; the rules of
caste, of course, did not make it possible for them to eat with the
manager. It was not a luxurious meal, though plentiful and most formal.
During the course of it a ledger in which the manager, or his secretary,
had written out each man’s orders for the next day passed from hand to
hand. To an American, the rather faint and easily satisfied ambitions of
these not particularly prepossessing young men was striking. They gave
an impression of intellects of modest horse-power rarely speeded up into
high gear, with slight interests or knowledge outside their routine work
of bossing coolies in the fields, in which each had his particular task
or section, without opportunity, or apparently desire, for personal
initiative. Some of them might, indeed, almost have been suspected of
light-mindedness, except on the one point of keeping up the good old
English forms, prejudices, and social superstitions. Nearly all of them
had come out on three-year contracts. If they remained five years, they
got a six months’ trip home—at the company’s expense if and when they
returned; after ten years as overseers the more clean-cut ones might
become head overseers, and years later, deputy manager. Then, if the
latter made no slips on the glabrous British social ladder, he might
finally, in twenty or twenty-five years, work himself up into managerial
timber, a rank at which there are few openings compared with the number
who come out as overseers. The fixed rules of behavior were surprisingly
paradoxical. The overseer might, and it was tacitly implied that he
commonly did, “keep” a native woman—Hindus seemed to be
preferred—without jeopardizing his ascent, so long as he made no public
display of the fact; but he must not, of course, be without a dinner
jacket and evening dress, or ride second-class, or do any of those other
things which a Britisher of his class “simply doesn’t do, don’t you
know.” Yet this distant and uncertain goal seemed quite sufficient
incentive for these half-hearted chaps, many of them younger members of
“best families” and “public school” men, to whom the vision of perhaps
some day becoming manager of an estate, dwelling in the big bungalow
amid servants and secretaries and with stern authority over everything
in his immediate vicinity, seemed the nearest to paradise on earth to
which men of their class could aspire. In keeping with their general
point of view was the calm assurance, almost worthy of a Latin-American,
with which they waited for “the government” to win the war, without ever
dreaming of personally losing a meal or missing a “swizzle.” Contrasted
with the strenuous exertions of the young Germans I had seen trying to
get home from Brazil, the manner of these rather inane young gentlemen
toward a conflict that was just then going heavily against them, yet of
which they seemed almost as supremely indifferent and ignorant as of
geography, was astonishing.
The overseers get up at five o’clock, meet for “coffee” and instructions
from the manager, and at seven ride off on mules to their tasks,
generally an hour or two from the plantation center. Here they spend a
couple of hours superintending coolies, who for the most part work by
the “task,” and ride back for tiffin, or breakfast, at eleven. They are
out again at one o’clock, five days a week, and home soon after four, to
have tea and play tennis, or to prepare for the coming gymkhana, the
estate horse-races. There was a commodious billiard-room in the
barracks, though apparently no shower-bath. No doubt each man kept his
own private tub in captivity. All evening the head overseer was most
formally obliging, but seemed in constant fear of my contravening the
manager’s orders in some “cute Yankee” manner.
I was awakened at dawn by the Hindu “boy”—who was past forty—bringing me
“coffee”—which was tea ruined by the addition of milk and sugar—and two
diaphanous slices of bread. The autobus was not due for some hours, so I
abandoned the contested territory as soon as possible and rambled away
along the diked highway. There was somewhat less travel than the day
before, but the shops were open. So cool and constant was the sea breeze
that I did not have occasion to take off my coat during the whole
fifteen miles, everywhere flanked by canebrake. Men in flowing robes or
mere loin-cloths, with caste marks on their foreheads, coolie women with
arms laden with silver bracelets, their thin and silky, though not
always newly laundered, draperies wrapped gracefully about them, little
Oriental temples standing out against the flat horizon, all carried the
mind back to another land halfway around the globe. There was an amazing
contrast between the lithe, slender Hindus in their loose garb, some of
the younger girls almost beautiful, if one could overlook their
nose-rings and a certain hereditary dread of soap, and the gross,
rowdyish, tinsel-minded negresses. Yet though the East Indian was once
civilized and the negro never has been, the result is in some ways
astonishingly the same.
Coolies were “plowing” old cane-fields with pitchforks, their women, up
to their waists in slime and water, were cleaning out trenches and
irrigation ditches or turning up brush laid over newly sprouted shoots
of cane. This lasted until ten in the morning, when a procession
starting from the fields merged together and wended its way toward the
center of the estate, the Hindus disappearing in long communal,
barracks-like structures, the negroes squatting down to breakfast in the
shade of their makeshift hovels. The latter were greatly in the
minority, for they are prone to work a week and loaf two, or go to town
to squander their earnings in gay garments and automobile rides at the
height of the cutting season, and planters prefer the more dependable
race. The first laborers brought over after the freeing of the slaves
were Portuguese from the Madeira Islands. Then came the Chinese,
generally without a repatriation clause in their contracts, so that they
gradually drifted into shopkeeping, and to-day a few of them are among
the big business men of the colony. Finally the great reservoir of
British India was tapped, the coolies, male and female, coming out at
government and plantation expense, indentured for five years and
entitled to free passage home again. Many preferred to take a premium
and remain, some to rehire, some to plant their own plots, a few to
become men of importance, especially money-lenders with all the popular
traits of the Jew. There is no question that the Hindu coolie is better
off in British Guiana than he is at home, and that those born here are
in a much more favorable condition; yet the call of the fatherland is
strong in all races, and many return, taking with them enough to live in
what to them is comfort. Considerably more than half the population of
the colony are East Indians, but very recently all existing indentures
were cancelled, the Indian Government having forbidden the signing of
new ones some time before, and a scheme is now being worked out for
Hindu immigration and colonization.
During all my walk I did not see a white man, except the sheltered ones
at the estate. Many of the signs along the way were worth reading. “Dr.
Moses Fraser, Dentist and Veterinary Surgeon” made it unnecessary to ask
the “doctor’s” color. Ah Sing, Kandra Babu, and Percival Stuart
Brathwaite kept shop side by side, the importance of their
establishments decreasing in the order named. The autobus, resembling
those along New York’s Riverside Drive, passed me on its outward trip;
but if this packing above and below was typical, I preferred to walk.
Here were the same silly caste rules as in the street-cars of Chile, and
though it was infinitely finer on top, Englishmen had to swelter inside,
because the imperiale was second-class and therefore given over to
negroes and occasional Hindus. There were marsh birds by hundreds along
the flooded flatlands, flocks of pinkish flamingoes now and then rising
in flight. Before noon I had drifted into New Amsterdam, also known by
the name of the county of which it is the seat, Berbice, second city of
British Guiana and not much of a city at that. A chiefly negro
population, though with many Hindus, completely swamped the rare whites,
living in entirely shingled wooden bungalows amid luxuriant yards of
palms and mango-trees.
From New Amsterdam there is a daily ferry and train to Georgetown, sixty
miles away. To take the one across the River Berbice, distinctly wider
than the Hudson at its mouth, in time to catch the other, meant early
rising. For a time there was much bush along the track, the stations
generally being mere stopping-places. Bananas, cassava, corn, and
cocoanuts were the chief products. Then came Hindu men and women up to
their knees in reeking mud, which discolors their ragged nether
garments, setting out rice plants or kneading the soil about them. At
Abary a group of Americans had established a big rice plantation and
begun to work it by modern methods, but they were already in sad
straits. The old-fashioned coolie hand-labor seems to be the only one
offering sure returns. Here and there were rice-fields that had gone
back to pasture, the light and dark grasses still showing where the
paddy-dikes had been. As we neared Georgetown the rice plantations of
independent East Indians became numerous, with oxen as well as men and
women wading along in them, while the houses and sleek cattle showed
prosperity, however biblical might be their methods of husbandry.
[Illustration: The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana,
with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the background]
[Illustration: An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from
Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam plantation in order to
kill the ants that would destroy it]
[Illustration: Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will
eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and cocoa]
The settled portion of British Guiana extends from the west bank of the
Essequibo River to the east bank of the Corentyne, two hundred miles
distant, with a few islands at the mouth of the Essequibo and some ten
miles up the Berbice and Demerara Rivers. Of the hundred thousand acres
under cultivation—an area in proportion to the entire colony as is his
forefinger to a human being—eighty per cent. is planted in sugar. A
century ago the cultivation of cotton, coffee, and cacao gave way to
this, and even alternating of crops is unknown. Year after year, often
for half a century, sugar-cane has been produced on the same ground.
Behind the plantations, which rarely extend more than three miles from
the shore, the soil is a kind of peat, with here and there an island of
sand. In front is the seashore or river, with its protection of almost
impenetrable mangrove roots, then a dike with openings in it for
irrigation ditches, the great wheel-operated gates of which are opened
to let the water run out at low tide, but closed against the sea or
river at their height, for salt on the land is fatal. Back of this dam
is the public road, kept up at the expense of the plantation and, with
the two canals beside it, constituting a second dike. Here is a
mile-wide strip of land that is used as pasture, for the sugarmill, the
manager’s house, overseers’ quarters, laborers’ villages, behind which,
with a third dike, a draining engine, perhaps a little railway, and the
“kokers,” or sluices to let out surplus water, are the interminable
cane-fields, protected from the rainy season floods of the higher and
uncultivated interior by a “back dam.” Canals are everywhere used for
transportation—as well as irrigation—in iron punts drawn by mules. The
secrecy which hangs like a pall over all of the estates, however, I
never succeeded in penetrating. Perhaps it was merely to prevent some
“clever Yankee” from learning how cane is turned into sugar!
Nickerie was once washed away by the sea, and Georgetown is saved from a
like fate by a massive sea-wall. Down here where one must look up at the
ocean the only way to fill a hole is by digging another, and there can
be no real sewer-system where sewage would only float back into the city
at high tide. Various systems are used for getting rid of Georgetown’s
waste matter, none of them entirely satisfactory. Its water is brought
in from the savannahs by the Lahama Canal, but this is yellow with
vegetable matter and cannot be used for cooking, drinking, or even
laundry purposes. Every building of any importance has a rain-water
tank, some larger than those along our railroads, and as there is little
dust or smoke in the city, water thus stored is clear and of good taste.
Yet for all her natural handicaps, Georgetown is a comfortable and
sightly city of wide, well-shaded streets, often with a canal flanked by
rows of trees in the center, and broad green lawns so inviting after
years of grassless Latin-America that I was tempted to sit on each of
them in turn. From the sea-wall to the last negro shacks of the town is
a distance of some two miles, with ample elbow-room and light wooden
structures that make poor fire risks.
The city swarmed with hulking, ragged negroes leaning serenely against
the many posters bearing the appeal “Your King and your Country need
you. Enlist now!” In fact, it is unpleasant, at least for a white woman,
to walk down Water Street among scores of ragged black loafers who seem
to take pains to put themselves in one’s way. On the other hand, there
are cheap public carriages, which, I suppose, would be the British reply
to such a criticism. With plantains and eddoes plentiful, the mass of
negroes are of lazier temperament than their ancestors, the slaves, who
were forced to acquire the habit of work. They have so much power in the
colony, however, that the man who must live there permanently cannot
keep clear of them, and the visitor who inadvertently touches or even
threatens some impudent lounger may be “summoned” and fined. It should
be noted that in British colonies it is not so much the color-line as
the caste-line which divides society. A man drops out of the highest
class by having African blood in his veins, but so he does even when he
is pure white for many other reasons, such as poverty or violation of
any of the Englishman’s punctilios of social etiquette. Hindus are less
in evidence in the capital than on plantations; Indians one almost never
sees there. Every possible mixture of white, negro, Chinese, and East
Indian may be found in the average crowd, however, though as a whole
this has an Anglo-Saxon demeanor. Most of the pure whites are pale and
thin, the women angular; even the young men are sallow from lack of
exercise, manual labor being impossible and the principal
gathering-place a “swizzle” club. The death rate is decreasing, but was
still more than twice that of New York, thanks partly to the fact that
even the English doctors in many cases still believed that “this
mosquito theory is a lot of bally Yankee rot, don’t you know.”
The white population, exclusive of the Portuguese, who are not strictly
so, own about three-fourths of the property, and the Portuguese much of
the rest. Besides Chinese and unnaturalized Indians, there are 172,000
Hindus, nearly all of whom are alien or property-less non-voters. This
leaves the few negroes owning property as the real rulers, to a limited
degree, of the colony. In financial matters, including taxation, this is
largely autonomous. The governor is sent out from England and is one of
eight appointed members of the legislative Court of Policy; but there
are also eight elective members, and the governor has the deciding vote
only in case of a tie. Those who have had occasion to deal with it
complain that the government is smothered in red tape. “If you wish to
address the head of your department,” a man certainly in a position to
know put it, “you write a letter to the next man above you, he adds a
note and sends it on to the next, and so on up ten, or a dozen, or a
score of rungs of the official ladder, and the answer comes down again
the same way, so that when you get it back you buy a trunk and pack the
stuff away and save it to read during your vacation.”
But there are excellences in British government which offset some of its
precedent- and caste-loving stupidities. I went one day with the deputy
head of the Department of Lands and Mines, who is also “Protector of the
Indians,” to the recently established “Aboriginal Indian Depot.” The
aborigines are a simple, good-natured people whose chief fault is a
liking for rum, and not only do none of them live in town, but they
cannot cope with urban dangers during their rare visits there.
Principally by the use of liquor, laws to the contrary notwithstanding,
the riffraff of Georgetown made it their business to rob the Indian men
and lead the Indian women astray whenever they came to town; now the
visitors have an official refuge, surrounded by a sheet-iron wall, which
no outsider may enter without formal permission. There are one long and
two short rooms extending the length of the building, and the Indians
had swung their indispensable, home-woven hammocks side by side, just as
they do in their own wilderness shelters. The large room was for
ordinary Indian men, one of the smaller ones for married couples, and
the third for “captains,” certified river-pilots, and other personages
of importance—for your Englishman never forgets caste, even among
aboriginal tribes. Here any Indian has the right, and is expected, to
come and stay, free of expense, while in Georgetown, buying his own food
and cooking it himself in a simple kitchen behind the building. The
Depot was erected with funds accruing from “balata” gathered by the
Indians, one-third of which is turned into the colonial treasury and the
rest into an Indian reserve fund for just such purposes.
Not only in her grassy lawns and wooden houses, her stern morality and
her altruistic treatment of the aborigines, does Georgetown remind the
Anglo-Saxon wanderer that the differences between his own and
Latin-American civilization are many, significant as well as trivial.
Here he will find again that love of nature, or of outdoors, which is so
slight in the rest of South America. By seven in the morning even the
well-to-do are parading the sea-wall. Though there is no lack of
carriages and automobiles, all classes go much on foot—the mere sight of
well-dressed people habitually walking seems strange to the man more
familiar with the rest of the continent. Latin-Americans of that class
may stroll up and down a fashionable promenade of a block or two at a
certain hour of the evening, but it will be rather to indulge in mutual
admiration than for exercise. Here one will see again, with a start of
surprise, white women not only abroad at an early hour, but pushing
baby-carriages. In all the rest of South America it would be unseemly
for a lady to pass her threshold in the morning, except to go to church
and possibly to shop, or to be fully dressed and powdered before
mid-afternoon, and even if she knew of the existence of perambulators,
she certainly would not condescend to propel one herself. Another
English touch is the sight of all classes riding bicycles, from the
negro postman to dainty, veiled young white ladies—conduct which would
be instantly ruinous to any feminine reputation elsewhere on the
continent. People no longer hiss to attract attention; one is no longer
a sight to be stared at from one end of the street to the other; no
human wrecks come pestering one to buy sudden fortune in the form of a
dirty rag of a lottery ticket; money is worth its face value again and
is accepted at that rate without question—even though the newcomer may
get hopelessly entangled in a confusion of reckonings in shillings,
dollars, cents, and pence. It is true that traffic turns to the left and
that audiences sit stiff and motionless as wooden images at band
concerts, but this little patch of England in South America has fine big
school buildings, instead of droning choruses of children packed
together in noisome old hovels. Where there are many negroes there are
apt to be beggars, but they are by no means so numerous and certainly
not so pestiferous in Demerara as in Brazil. The street-cars are not
divided into classes, and one may ride irrespective of the shape or
condition of one’s collar; though castes are recognized in a different
way, for the negro-Hindu motormen and conductors, speaking what is
fondly supposed in the West Indies to be English, have a different
vocabulary for each class. To a black fellow-laborer they say in a
kindly, familiar tone, “Get off, mahn; heah yo street;” to a negro
market-woman, impatiently, “All right, get on, ef yo goin’!” but to a
white man of any standing, in a totally different tone and timbre, “Oh,
yes, sir; this street, sir; all right, thank you, sir.”
[Illustration: A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana]
[Illustration: Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday
before one of their barrack villages]
[Illustration: Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on
the Orinoco]
[Illustration: The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela]
Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees,
Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of
these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman
has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come
to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their
descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South
America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the
“pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef,
mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up
during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native
peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective
but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the
unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map
as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness
and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from
Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of
a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left
standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown.
In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the
automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to
come in the not far distant future.