The launch Ella finally left for Springlands, across the boundary, with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty minutes ahead of its schedule.
To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday. Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures, speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday morning.
An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,” to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter, and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles, countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089 inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least one can telegraph anywhere.
A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections of the railroad to the interior
A Bush Negro family on its travels. Less than half the dugout is shown
A Bush Negro watching me photograph our engine
