It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table. Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness, we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon “tea” that was a meal in itself, and Koud Avondeten—“cold evening eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage compartments, but those glorious days are gone.
Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called “taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: Niet Drinkbaar
No boen vo dringi All higher government officials speak English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies of the minister translated into English.
One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France, but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed, he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that tongue was eminently West Indian.
The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs, though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives, especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years; therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated, but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to Holland.
Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to combat it.
The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English, Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!” “Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style, quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber, called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff had been piled up for cordwood.
Along the road in Dutch Guiana
A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana