Qu’ avons nous besoin de savoir ton nom?
N’étais-tu pas comme nous un compagnon d’exil?
Dors en paix, maintenant que tes cendres réposent,
Nouveaux exilés, nous vous souvenons
Et t’offrons nos regrets.
A bientôt.
Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed down near a lightship marked Suriname Rivier to take on a pilot who looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or Cayenne. The Antilles manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed, almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights.
Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro, especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most ardently sensual.
The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners, chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially, the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians, whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy fatalists.
On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches. All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns, which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not apparent. The Predikant, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four sermons—four, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy.