The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

There are many such villages in Guiana, and I was told that when the arrangements for the purchases were made the dollars were subscribed by the negroes so quickly and in such quantities that they were taken to the banks in wheelbarrows. At any rate, the result has been that tracts of ground have been bought by these people and are now owned by them in fee simple.

It is grievous to me to find myself driven to differ on such points as these from men with whose views I have up to this period generally agreed. But I feel myself bound to say that the freeholding negroes in Guiana do not appear to me to answer. In the first place it seems that they have found great difficulty in dividing the land among themselves. In all such combined actions some persons must be selected as trustworthy; and those who have been so selected have not been worthy of the trust. And then the combined action has ceased with the purchase of the land, whereas, to have produced good it should have gone much further. Combined draining would have been essential; combined working has been all but necessary; combined building should have been adopted. But the negroes, the purchase once made, would combine no further. They could not understand that unless they worked together at draining, each man's own spot of ground would be a swamp. Each would work a little for himself; but none would work for the community. A negro village therefore is not a picturesque object.

They are very easily known. The cottages, or houses—for some of them have aspired to strong, stable, two-storied slated houses—stand in extreme disorder, one here and another there, just as individual caprice may have placed them. There seems to have been no attempt at streets or lines of buildings, and certainly not at regularity in building. Then there are no roads, and hardly a path to each habitation. As the ground is not drained, in wet weather the whole place is half drowned. Most of the inhabitants will probably have made some sort of dyke for the immediate preservation of their own dwellings; but as those dykes are not cut with any common purpose, they become little more than overflowing ponds, among which the negro children crawl and scrape in the mud; and are either drowned, or escape drowning, as Providence may direct. The spaces between the buildings are covered with no verdure; they are mere mud patches, and are cracked in dry weather, wet, slippery, and filthy in the rainy seasons.

The plantation grounds of these people are outside the village, and afford, I am told, cause for constant quarrelling. They do, however, also afford means of support for the greater part of the year, so that the negroes can live, some without work and some by working one or two days in the week.

It may perhaps be difficult to explain why a man should be expected to work if he can live on his own property without working, and enjoy such comforts as he desires. And it may be equally difficult to explain why complaint should be made as to the wretchedness of any men who do not themselves feel that their own state is wretched. But, nevertheless, on seeing what there is here to be seen, it is impossible to withstand the instinctive conviction that a village of freeholding negroes is a failure; and that the community has not been served by the process, either as regards themselves or as regards the country.

Late at night we did reach New Amsterdam, and crossed the broad Berbice after dark in a little ferryboat which seemed to be perilously near the water. At ten o'clock I found myself at the hotel, and pronounce it to be, without hesitation, the best inn, not only in that colony, but in any of these Western colonies belonging to Great Britain. It is kept by a negro, one Mr. Paris Brittain, of whom I was informed that he was once a slave. "O, si sic omnes!" But as regards my experience, he is merely the exception which proves the rule. I am glad, however, to say a good word for the energies and ambition of one of the race, and shall be glad if I can obtain for Mr. Paris Brittain an innkeeper's immortality.

His deserts are so much the greater in that his scope for displaying them is so very limited. No man can walk along the broad strand street of New Amsterdam, and then up into its parallel street, so back towards the starting-point, and down again to the sea, without thinking of Knickerbocker and Rip van Winkle. The Dutchman who built New Amsterdam and made it once a thriving town must be still sleeping, as the New York Dutchman once slept, waiting the time when an irruption from Paramaribo and Surinam shall again restore the place to its old possessors.

At present life certainly stagnates at New Amsterdam. Three persons in the street constitute a crowd, and five collected for any purpose would form a goodly club. But the place is clean and orderly, and the houses are good and in good repair. They stand, as do the houses in Georgetown, separately, each surrounded by its own garden or yard, and are built with reference to the wished-for breeze from the windows.

The estates up the Berbice river, and the Canje creek which runs into it, are, I believe, as productive as those on the coast, or on the Demerara or Essequibo rivers, and are as well cultivated; but their owners no longer ship their sugars from New Amsterdam. The bar across the Berbice river is objectionable, and the trade of Georgetown has absorbed the business of the colony. In olden times Berbice and Demerara were blessed each with its own Governor, and the two towns stood each on its own bottom as two capitals. But those halcyon days—halcyon for Berbice—are gone; and Rip van Winkle, with all his brethren, is asleep.

I should have said, in speaking of my journey from Demerara to Berbice, that the first fifteen miles were performed by railway. The colony would have fair ground of complaint against me were I to omit to notice that it has so far progressed in civilization as to own a railway. As far as I could learn, the shares do not at present stand at a high premium. From Berbice I returned in a coasting steamer. It was a sleepy, dull, hot journey, without subject of deep interest. I can only remember of it that they gave us an excellent luncheon on board, and luncheons at such times are very valuable in breaking the tedium of the day.