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.
The British public cannot be expected to be well acquainted with all the outlying parts of the immense empire which fortune or providence has delivered over to them, but, through their statesmen, they could, if they were so minded, bring about a much more constructive and energetic policy than that which the inaccessible and old-fashioned Colonial Office and Crown Colony officials consider does duty for government and development.
The population of this land is a handful of folk of about the size of a second-rate English town, notwithstanding that the extent of the country is equal to the whole of Great Britain. Its rich littoral is watered by large rivers, rising in a little-known interior. Sugar is produced, but might be produced in quantities to satisfy the British house-wife did British folk know anything about the subject. There are enormous timber resources and valuable minerals.
INDIANS AT HOME, GUIANA.
Vol. II. To face p. 52.
But in such development comes the cry for "labour." It is the first cry of all tropical possessions. Where is labour to come from? The remedy generally proposed is that of bringing in coloured labour from other parts of the empire, coolies and others. This policy has some fatal defects. Among these the practice of bringing in hordes of coloured men without their women or families is one of the most unwise. It is unnatural to condemn these folk to live without their female partners, and if persisted in will, sooner or later, bring serious evils upon the community that practises it. The existing labour should be more carefully fostered, and if labour be imported it should be as far as possible in the form of permanent settlers, with their wives and families, the condition of whose life and surroundings should be intelligently mapped out beforehand.[13]
Guiana brings back sad memories of Sir Walter Raleigh, he who by reason of his antagonism to Spain was a popular hero, and around whose figure much romance has centred.
Partly with the object of recouping his fortune, Raleigh sailed, in 1595, to Guiana, a voyage of exploration and conquest, with the main object of finding that El Dorado which was so strong an obsession of Elizabethan times, imagined to be hidden somewhere amid the Cordillera or forests of Spanish America. His book, recounting the incidents of this voyage, The Discoverie of Guiana, which he published upon his return home, is one of the most thrilling adventurous narratives of the period, although it has been said that it contains much that was romance rather than fact: and incredulity marked its reception. On his second expedition, after Elizabeth's death—an expedition which was perhaps one of the saddest of forlorn hopes, whereby Raleigh hoped, trusting perhaps to a chapter of accidents, to escape from the dreadful position of disfavour and threatened execution into which he had fallen in the reign of James I—he reached Trinidad and sailed up the Orinoco, fell sick of a fever and suffered many disasters in the endeavour to carry out his undertaking to find a vast gold mine upon territory not belonging to Spain. Should he fail, or trespass upon Spanish territory, he was to be executed as a pirate, a fate which practically befell him, though he was executed under his old sentence of conspiracy.