British Guiana

“ British Guiana is one of the neglected outposts of the British Empire, the only foothold of England on the mainland of South America, a place of considerable interest, beauty and utility, but about which the good folk of Great Britain know and perhaps care little. ”

“ A land the size of England, Scotland, and Wales combined; a population equal to that of Hertfordshire, and a cultivated area less than one-fifth the size of Kent; a land for the greater part unknown and unsurveyed, whose only roads extend along the seaboard and for a few miles up the banks of its main rivers—such is British Guiana, ever since the close of the Napoleonic Wars a possession of the British Crown, the only one in South America, and rich in unexplored possibilities. ”

“ When I settle out of England, and take to the colonies for good and all, British Guiana shall be the land of my adoption. If I call it Demerara perhaps I shall be better understood. At home there are prejudices against it I know. They say that it is a low, swampy, muddy strip of alluvial soil, infested with rattlesnakes, gallinippers, and musquitoes as big as turkey-cocks; that yellow fever rages there perennially; that the heat is unendurable; that society there is as stagnant as its waters; that men always die as soon as they reach it ”

“ The three Guianas, British, French, and Dutch, represent one of the least attractive parts of South America in almost every way.
British Guiana has 300,000 inhabitants of whom one-third are Negroes, another third Orientals, mostly Hindu, and the remainder is largely made up of crosses between these two elements, of a few thousand native Indians, and of a handful of Whites.
Dutch Guiana has a population well under a hundred thousand, largely Orientals imported to furnish coolie labor and including Hindus, Javanese, and Chinese. There are many Negroes and a couple of thousand Whites. ”

“ British Guiana is an undeveloped country with a high commercial value and a delightful climate: a land where the holiday-maker can explore unbeaten tracks without discomfort and enjoy to the full the fascination of unique surroundings. ”

“ Great Britain owns the three settlements at Demerara, Berbice, and Essequibo, captured in 1803 from the Dutch and afterward ceded to her by the treaty of 1814, and which now constitute British Guiana, and, lastly, Venezuela, as successor to the title of Spain, owns the rest of the highlands, south of Parima and Pacarima, the territory formerly known as Spanish Guiana until the revolution of the Venezuelan colonists. ”

“ For throughout the whole, or very nearly the whole, breadth of British Guiana, a wide swamp district, lower itself than the average sea-level, and in consequence very difficult if not impossible to drain, cuts off the available land-strip of the coast itself from the firm but distant high lands of the interior, and by so doing confines the choicest sugar-producing tracts of the colony to the immediate vicinity of the shore, where they are all arranged side by side in a long, but narrow strip, hemmed in between the ocean to the north and the almost equally unmanageable morass on the south. ”

“ A branch line, also made up as a bridle track, goes off from this trail to St. Mary’s, on the Konawaruk River, where the British Guiana Gold Mining Company have dredges at work. The ride is delightful, if one be mounted on a sure-footed mule. The forest trees are veritable giants, and their deep [53] shadow prevents the suffocating undergrowth from springing up. The line, when we rode over it, was clean, and all bridges were in good repair. It is absolutely cool even at midday in the exquisite shade, and we enjoyed charming little views, where the path wound pleasantly up and down small hills. ”

“ There is the history of British Guiana in a nutshell! A ceaseless struggle to people from overseas an empty land! The Portuguese came from Madeira. The blacks are descended from negro slaves brought here from Africa by the Dutch West India Company. No black slaves were ever brought to Demerara under British rule; for the slave trade was abolished by Parliament in 1807, and this Colony did not become definitely British until seven years later. The East Indians have all been introduced as indentured [22] labourers under a system of immigration which began in 1845 and ended in 1917. ”

“ H. G. Dalton, History of British Guiana, volume 1, chapter 1.
E. F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, chapter 6.
"Recent researches have shown that the original home of the stock was south of the Amazon, and probably in the highlands at the head of the Tapajoz river. A tribe, the Bakairi, is still resident there, whose language is a pure and archaic form of the Carib tongue."
D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, page 268.
"Related to the Caribs stand a long list of small tribes ... all inhabitants of the great primeval forest in and near Guiana. ”

“ It is difficult and almost impossible for a citizen of the United States, educated in the midst of distinctions and prejudices, to realize the state of things so entirely different which prevails in British Guiana. ”

“ British Guiana, extending from Venezuela to the left bank of the Corentyn river; Dutch Guiana 675 (or Surinam) , from the Corentyn to the Maroni river; French Guiana (or Cayenne) , from the Maroni to the Oyapock river;2 Brazilian (formerly Portuguese) Guiana, extending from the southern boundaries of French, Dutch, British and part of Venezuelan Guiana, to the Amazon and the Negro. Of these divisions the first and last are now included in Venezuela and Brazil respectively; British, Dutch and French Guiana are described in order below, and are alone considered here. ”

“ These three European colonies, the only ones by the way, in South America, British Guiana being the most westerly, French Guiana the eastern and Dutch Guiana between the others, have for their northern boundary the Atlantic Ocean. Venezuela is the western neighbor of British Guiana. Brazil touches each of these colonies as their 193southern border, also forming the western boundary of French Guiana. ”

“ Knowing the great want of laborers in British Guiana, and the strong disposition, existing there, to encourage immigration, it immediately occurred to him, that by the transfer of a certain portion of the free colored people of the United States to Guiana, not only might a great benefit be done to that colony, but what all must regard as of still greater importance, a boon of vast value might be conferred upon the free colored people themselves. ”

“ For instance, it is the Essequebo and its tributary the Rupununi which ought to form a natural highway across British Guiana to Brazil. But the cattle-track, just opened to Georgetown from the Colony’s lowland savannahs near the Brazilian border, studiously avoids the Essequebo, which it touches only at Kurupukari, there crossing the river and leaving it for good. Again, the Essequebo and its tributary the Cuyuni should form the main avenue of approach from British [30] Guiana to Ciudad Bolivar on the Orinoco, in the heart of Venezuela. ”

“ In days to come it is to be hoped that one of the main roads of British Guiana may lead up to this plateau; and, when the time is at hand for building such a road, its trace will probably be carried from the watershed of the Sirani-baru into the Kowa valley by easy gradients, and thence round hill contours, without ascending the Baramaku [127] or Quaibaru savannahs up to the high-level tableland. But the existing trail could with a few détours at small expense be made into a bridle track suitable for pack animals and for cattle ”

“ Many West Indians came to England and enlisted in the new army. Though the tide of war did not reach our possessions in the Caribbean and the Guianas, the fact that Germany was at war with France and Great Britain opened up new possibilities in the Western [Pg 488] world south of the United States, in the event of German success. So far as can be judged the normal life of the colonies was pursued, but the war checked development projects. Thus no progress has been made with the scheme for opening up the hinterland of British Guiana by a railway. ”

“ In 1902 the delimitation of the boundary between British Guiana and Brazil was referred to the arbitration of the king of Italy, and by his reward, issued in June 1904, the substantial area in dispute was conceded to British Guiana. The work of demarcation has since been carried out.
Towns, &c.—The capital of British Guiana is Georgetown, at the mouth of the Demerara river, on its right bank, with a population of about 50,000. New Amsterdam, on the right bank of the Berbice river, has a population of about 7500. Each possesses a mayor and town council, with statutory powers to impose rates. ”

“ Rivers.—The principal physical features of British Guiana are its rivers and their branches, which form one vast network of waterways all over it, and are the principal, indeed practically the only, highways inland from the coast. Chief among them are the Waini, the Essequibo, and its tributaries the Mazaruni and Cuyuni, the Demerara, the Berbice and the Corentyn. The Essequibo rises in the Acarai Mts., in 0° 41′ N. and about 850 ft. above the sea, and flows northwards for about 600 m. until it discharges itself into the ocean by an estuary nearly 15 m. ”

“ At Baramaku-toy our forest trek ended, and we never again spent a whole day in the forest during the remainder of our journey to Roraima, although frequently we passed through belts of woodland fringing a river course between one savannah and the next. The British Guiana jungle is certainly a place where you cannot see the wood for the trees. The effort of getting along quickly without catching your feet absorbs the attention, and I am afraid that I have laid much emphasis on the damp and gloom. ”

“ There is an Emigration Agent in British Guiana, who is a stipendiary magistrate, and whose duty it is to furnish emigrants, arriving in the colony, with every information, and to prevent any imposition from being practiced upon them. It will appear, from an examination of the above provisions, that all those colored persons from the United States who may emigrate to Guiana, will go out perfectly free and unshackled. On their arrival in the colony, they will be perfectly their own masters, at full liberty to choose any kind of employment which the colony offers ”

“ Although so close to the equator, the sun in British Guiana has little of its eastern fierceness and the climate is wonderfully healthy, if elementary principles of hygiene and sanitation are observed. ”

“ It may be well to observe here that land in the colony is abundant and cheap; and every laborer who is industrious, and will lay by his wages, has it in his power to become a proprietor within a short period.
That there is no danger of overstocking British Guiana with emigrants will appear by the following extract from an address of Mr. John Scoble, delivered at Albany Tuesday evening, Aug. 1st, 1839. He spoke of "British Guiana, a colony on the coast of South America, and one which some think will ere long rival in its wealth and population the State of New York. ”

“ 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. ”

“ British Guiana, the land which seems so strongly inclined to extend its borders at the expense of Venezuela, is as yet very far from being the active and well-developed settlement which might be imagined from the aggressiveness of its rulers. Mr. Brown’s story of it indicates a land of which nature is still largely the lord, and which is so little known that he, as late as twenty years ago, was able to discover a river and a cataract not previously heard of. The selection we append, descriptive of the wild animals of the country, is significant of an undeveloped land. ”

“ Bland's theory needs, we shall have to conceive a junction, reaching over at least five degrees of latitude, between the north of British Guiana and Barbados; and may freely indulge in the dream that the waters of the Orinoco, when they ran over the lowlands of Trinidad, passed east of Tobago, then northward between Barbados and St. Lucia, afterwards turning westward between the latter island and Martinique, and that the mighty estuary—for a great part at least of that line—formed the original barrier which kept the land shells of Venezuela apart from those of Guiana."* (* Loc cit page 306.) ”

“ British Guiana is 109,000 square miles in area—larger than the United Kingdom—and has a population of about 300,000, made up of 150,000 negroes, 100,000 East Indians, 15,000 Portuguese, 10,000 British and Europeans, and the balance of mestizos. ”

“ The eastern part is generally forested; the western is an almost level savannah, with woodlands along the rivers. The 677 northern portion of British Guiana, the alluvial flats alluded to already, consists of a fluviomarine deposit extending inland from 25 m. to 30 m., gradually rising to about 12 ft. above high-water mark and ending against beds of sandy clay, the residua of igneous rocks decomposed in situ, which form an extensive undulating region rising to 150 ft. ”

“ The colored classes in British Guiana are wealthy, influential, and highly respectable. Many of them are magistrates, proprietors, merchants with large establishments, and managers of estates receiving liberal salaries. The collector of customs at one of the principal ports, is a person of color, and many others hold public stations. It is evident from these facts that color is no obstacle to advancement or distinction. ”