“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have earned that much?”
“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”
“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you to that extent to get back home?”
“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into his more habitual speech.
This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.
These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store. Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were 48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices, because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This is a very large member of the sapote family, the bark of which the “bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough, yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata” concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.
Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170. Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years, he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the “bullet-tree.”
In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot, many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own, saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on, each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load, though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were considerably increased.
More trouble on the Essequibo