An East Indian woman of Surinam
A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations
A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana
Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of rubber
Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki: Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina.
Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language.
A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood, stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September. The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie, where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate. Here a white déporté who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists, send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful gamalong floating by on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable of producing a hundred fold what it does now.