William Gifford Palgrave

“ I may remark by the way that in this respect every planter, every manager, Dutch, English, Scotch, or Irish, in the West Indies is exactly the same. None of them, in the intense and personal interest they take in every furrow, every cane, can understand how any one else can feel less; or how, to the uninitiated eye one acre of reed is very like another; one ditch resembles another ditch; just as the sheep in a flock are mere repetitions the one of the other to all but the shepherd; or as one baby resembles any baby to every apprehension except to that of the mother or, occasionally, the nurse. ”

“ It is a vast cocoa-grove, where you may wander at will under three hundred and fifty continuous acres of green canopy — that is, if you are ready to jump over any number of small brimming ditches, and to cross the wider irrigation trenches on bridges, the best of which is simply a round and slippery tree-trunk, excellently adapted, no doubt, to the naked foot of a negro labourer, but on which no European boot or shoe can hope to maintain an instant's hold. ”

“ Thus favoured, a Surinam cocoa crop is pretty sure to be an abundant one. Ever and anon, where the green labyrinth is at its thickest, you come suddenly across a burly creole negro, busily engaged in plucking the large pods from the boughs with his left hand, and holding in it so, while with a sharp cutlass held in his right he dexterously cuts off the upper part of the thick outer covering, then shakes the slimy agglomeration of seed and white burr clinging to it into a basket set close by him on the ground. ”

“ Have we not, while forbidding the further outpourings of the poison-stream that has for ages flowed in tears and blood from the ports of the east-African coast, driven back in a manner the hitter waters to eddy on themselves; and while stopping a recognized outlet of the unemployed and superabundant population, a wasteful and a wrongful one it is true, yet an outlet, created a novel surplus in the inland African labour-market, where violence and captivity are the only laws of exchange and supply? ”

“ Hence you may mount, but leisurely, in compassion for your guide if not for yourself, the central tower, till you reach the lantern-like construction that at a height of a hundred feet crowns the summit of the town hall. There stand, and look down far and wide over the most fertile plain that ever alluvial deposit formed in the new world, or the old either. On every side extends a green tree-grown level as far as the eye can reach, its surface just high enough raised above water-mark to escape becoming a swamp, yet nowhere too high for easy irrigation ”

“ Lucia, Trinidad, in almost all these western Edens, nay, even in flourishing Demerara itself, has the image of little unpicturesque Barbadoes, unpromising in show, unfavoured by nature, yet thriving, prosperous, overstocked, and therefore only prosperous because overstocked, recurred to my mind! Improved machinery, coolies, Chinese, are all of them excellent things each in their way, but they cannot make up for the absence of that one great requisite of all progress, material or social, a superabundant native population. ”

“ It was not afternoon, in fact it was forenoon, and the sun, though mounted high, had not yet throned himself in his meridian tower, when, accompanied by those who had come to meet and welcome my arrival, I mounted a red brick flight of steps, leading from the water's edge tip to the raised quay, and found myself on the threshold of the capital of Dutch Surinam. Yet there was something in the atmosphere that can only be described as post-meridian; an influence extending over everything around, town and people alike ”

“ A brisk wind was blowing, and the white cloud-drift scudding before the Atlantic trade-wind over the pale blue vault had in it something more akin to a Mediterranean than to a tropical sky, as we weighed anchor, and taking advantage of the seaward ebb, cleared out of the narrow channel alongside of the low bush-grown shoal that lies athwart the Berbice mouth, and bears, in common with countless other small islets and rocks of these latitudes, the name of Crab Island. ”

“ A night and a day have passed since we quitted the melancholy relics of Nikerie, and we are yet tossing on the turbid waves several miles from land. This grows monotonous, and great was my delight when on the second evening of our voyage, just as the brief twilight deepened into night, we at last sighted, though still at some distance, the dull gleam of the lightship, anchored several miles out to sea, off the mouth of the Surinam River. ”

“ The wind was high, and the roar of the waves, as they burst impatiently on the dwindling remnant of what was once the Nikerie promontory, sounded in the dusky evening air like a knell of doom.
There are many sad sights in this sad world, but few give the beholder so dreary a feeling of helpless melancholy as does a town in the act and process of being washed away by the sea. The forces are so unequal, the destruction so wasteful and so complete. ”

“ But soon night had risen, and with her had risen the white moon, near her full, and now the merry-makers who had dispersed to their evening meal reassembled on the gravel-walks and clean-kept open spaces of the garden in front of the dwelling-house to enjoy the sport of the hour for in the West Indies as in Africa, in Surinam no less than at Damascus, the night is the negro's own time ”

“ Our present business is, however, not with these last, but with the negro creoles, as they show themselves in the capital, where they muster five or six to one among the entire population. Cheerful contentment is, the prevailing expression of every dusky face, whether turned towards you in friendly morning greeting as the busy swarm presses on talking, laughing, jesting, along the highways to the market and quay; or in the afternoon gatherings on the parade-ground, under the avenues, and alongside of the river-banks. ”

“ And here on our way, almost opposite the cocoa-plantation with its modern and modest demesnes that we have just visited, appears the large sugar-estate of Voorburg, close behind Fort Amsterdam, at the junction point of the river. Let us land and gladden the heart of the manager — the owner is, like too many others, and the more the pity, an absentee — by a visit. Happy indeed would he be, in his own estimation at least, were we to comply with his well-meant request of riding round every acre and inspecting every cane on the grounds. ”

“ This it is that gives to Paramaribo its two-fold character, at once European and tropical, Dutch and creole; a blending of opposites, a dual uniformity, an aspect that when first beheld leaves on the mind an impression bordering on unreality, as if place and people were imaged in a hot picturesque dream. ”

“ The factory, where the canes, crushed into mere fibre as fast as the negroes can lift them from the canal-barge alongside on to the insatiable rollers close by, give out their continuous green frothy stream, to be clarified, heated, boiled, reboiled, tormented fifty ways, till it finds refuge in the hogsheads or rum-barrels; resembling in every stage of its course its counterpart in Demerara, or Jamaica, minus, however, except in one solitary instance, the expensive refinements of the centrifugal cylinder and vacuum-pan. ”

“ It is to transfer, not by compulsion, but by their own free consent, those who, if they remain at home, cannot by the nature of things be other than slaves or slave-makers, to the conditions of honourable labour, self-support, and security; to bring them into the full possession of whatever benefits organized society and equitable law can confer; to substitute, so far as their own former masters are concerned, a fair and beneficial for an unjust and cruel gain; to bestow on the lands of their destination advantages that no other means, no other colonists can equally secure. ”

“ And thus the ex-slave has, with a rapidity of change to which, I believe, no parallel can be found in the history of any other West-Indian colony, blended into national, and even, within certain limits, into social, unison with his masters; a unison so little impaired by the inevitable, however involuntary rivalry consequent on differences, some artificial indeed but some immanent, of caste and race, as to afford the best hopes for the future of the entire colony. ”

“ From the Orinoco to the Amazon the aqueous fringe of the South-American coast is a shallow, muddy, brackish, ochrey sort of composition, which overspreads an almost imperceptible downward slope of alluvial deposit, that reaches out seaward for ten, fifteen, twenty, or even more miles, and bears witness to the prodigious volumes of water poured unceasingly, with little difference of month or season, by the countless rivers of the great southern continent into the ocean beyond. ”

“ The preparations for the dance were soon made. Drums, fifes, a shrill violin, and a musical instrument some say of Indian, some say of negro invention, consisting of a notched gourd that when scraped by a small stick gives out a sound not unlike the chirping of a monster cricket, and accentuates time and measure after the fashion of triangles, were brought from heaven knows what repositories, and with them the tuneful orchestra was complete. The dancers ranged themselves; more than a hundred men and women, mostly young, all dressed in their choicest for the night's sport. ”

“ There is no reason, or, to put it better, no hindrance, either of climate or soil, to prevent the mainland Dutch settlement of the West from rivalling or excelling in this respect the once Dutch island of the East. Nor is much labour, nor much expense, beyond the first outlay of planting, required. Yet even for these, men and capital are alike wanting. Well, everything has its day; and Surinam, when her time comes, may be the garden of Guiana ”

“ And this is exactly what, not I only, but every landowner, every proprietor, every planter in the colony, would wish to see — namely, a greater abundance of villages and settlements like those just described, only to a wider purpose and on a larger scale. Certainly I have no desire to disparage the good qualities of the slave-descended black creoles, or to join in the vague outcries, contradicted everywhere by facts, that ignorance, and still more prejudice, have raised against them. ”

“ Hence the negro who has never been a slave, or who, at any rate, has never experienced that most crushing form of slavery, the organized taskmastership of a foreign and superior race, has a decided vantage-ground, not only over his enslaved fellow-countrymen, but over the descendants of such, on whom his father’s sins, and still more the sins of his father’s masters, are by hereditary law visited even to the third and fourth generation. ”

“ It is true that shade may be found even in the hottest hours of perpendicular noon; and when the sun has fairly beaten you, as he will in less than five minutes, from the field, you may take refuge, if you choose, under the broad-leaved, glistening, umbrella-like almond-trees, so called from a superficial resemblance between the kernels of their fruit and those of the almond, but neither in foliage nor growth having the most distant likeness to the European tree of that name, which Dutch forethought has kindly planted all along the river quay. ”

“ But when, at the opening of the present century, the British lion, jealous lest so choice a morsel as Dutch Guiana should fall into the jaws of the ravenous French republic and still more ravenous empire, temporarily extended a protective paw over these regions, a new order of things prevailed for a time, and an unwonted self-confidence took in more than one instance the place of prudential caution. ”

“ In general, one pattern comprehends the entire category of white colonists, men and women, gentle and simple; and it is an eminently self-contained, self-consistent pattern, the Dutch. Steady in business, methodical in habit, economical in expenditure, liberal in outlay, hospitable in entertainment, cheerful without flightiness, kindly without affectation, serious without dulness, no one acquainted, even moderately, with the mother country, can fail to recognize the genuine type of the Hague in the colonial official, and that of Maestricht or Amsterdam in the business population of Paramaribo. ”

“ Now assuming that of all races the negro is by physical constitution the best adapted to the South-American tropics, and that negro labour is of all others, not the cheapest merely, but also the most efficient in this soil — both of which are propositions that few experienced planters or overseers will dispute — why not organize migration from Africa to the West Indies after a regular and durable fashion? and as the east-African races are undoubtedly superior alike in mind and body to the western, why not establish an emigration agency on the east coast — why not fix a locality at Zanzibar? ”

“ It is a matter of more surprise, an agreeable surprise, when we find much that recalls to mind the Dutch peasantry and labouring classes, distinctly traceable among the corresponding classes of creole negroes throughout the delta of Surinam. By what influence is it — attraction, sympathy, or master-ship — that some nations so eminently succeed in transforming the acquired subjects of whatever race into copies, and occasionally caricatures, of themselves, while other nations not less signally fail in doing so? ”

“ From the outlet of the Corentyn, that acts as boundary between British and Dutch Guiana, to the mouth of the Surinam River itself, hardly anything beside these wide gaps in the forest margin, and the corresponding breaker patches out at sea, occurs to vary the monotony of yellow waves and level forest-line, that by its utter sameness wearies the eye and depresses the spirits of the voyager.
"What a contrast," may that same voyager not improbably say to himself, "is the Dutch shore to the coast of British Guiana!" There the view by sea or land is not particularly picturesque, to be sure ”