Here we “swizzled” several times more, and then went in a body to a dining-room on the ground floor under the manager’s house, where fourteen of us sat down to dinner about a large table. The deputy manager was at the head and the head overseer at the foot; the rules of caste, of course, did not make it possible for them to eat with the manager. It was not a luxurious meal, though plentiful and most formal. During the course of it a ledger in which the manager, or his secretary, had written out each man’s orders for the next day passed from hand to hand. To an American, the rather faint and easily satisfied ambitions of these not particularly prepossessing young men was striking. They gave an impression of intellects of modest horse-power rarely speeded up into high gear, with slight interests or knowledge outside their routine work of bossing coolies in the fields, in which each had his particular task or section, without opportunity, or apparently desire, for personal initiative. Some of them might, indeed, almost have been suspected of light-mindedness, except on the one point of keeping up the good old English forms, prejudices, and social superstitions. Nearly all of them had come out on three-year contracts. If they remained five years, they got a six months’ trip home—at the company’s expense if and when they returned; after ten years as overseers the more clean-cut ones might become head overseers, and years later, deputy manager. Then, if the latter made no slips on the glabrous British social ladder, he might finally, in twenty or twenty-five years, work himself up into managerial timber, a rank at which there are few openings compared with the number who come out as overseers. The fixed rules of behavior were surprisingly paradoxical. The overseer might, and it was tacitly implied that he commonly did, “keep” a native woman—Hindus seemed to be preferred—without jeopardizing his ascent, so long as he made no public display of the fact; but he must not, of course, be without a dinner jacket and evening dress, or ride second-class, or do any of those other things which a Britisher of his class “simply doesn’t do, don’t you know.” Yet this distant and uncertain goal seemed quite sufficient incentive for these half-hearted chaps, many of them younger members of “best families” and “public school” men, to whom the vision of perhaps some day becoming manager of an estate, dwelling in the big bungalow amid servants and secretaries and with stern authority over everything in his immediate vicinity, seemed the nearest to paradise on earth to which men of their class could aspire. In keeping with their general point of view was the calm assurance, almost worthy of a Latin-American, with which they waited for “the government” to win the war, without ever dreaming of personally losing a meal or missing a “swizzle.” Contrasted with the strenuous exertions of the young Germans I had seen trying to get home from Brazil, the manner of these rather inane young gentlemen toward a conflict that was just then going heavily against them, yet of which they seemed almost as supremely indifferent and ignorant as of geography, was astonishing.
The overseers get up at five o’clock, meet for “coffee” and instructions from the manager, and at seven ride off on mules to their tasks, generally an hour or two from the plantation center. Here they spend a couple of hours superintending coolies, who for the most part work by the “task,” and ride back for tiffin, or breakfast, at eleven. They are out again at one o’clock, five days a week, and home soon after four, to have tea and play tennis, or to prepare for the coming gymkhana, the estate horse-races. There was a commodious billiard-room in the barracks, though apparently no shower-bath. No doubt each man kept his own private tub in captivity. All evening the head overseer was most formally obliging, but seemed in constant fear of my contravening the manager’s orders in some “cute Yankee” manner.
I was awakened at dawn by the Hindu “boy”—who was past forty—bringing me “coffee”—which was tea ruined by the addition of milk and sugar—and two diaphanous slices of bread. The autobus was not due for some hours, so I abandoned the contested territory as soon as possible and rambled away along the diked highway. There was somewhat less travel than the day before, but the shops were open. So cool and constant was the sea breeze that I did not have occasion to take off my coat during the whole fifteen miles, everywhere flanked by canebrake. Men in flowing robes or mere loin-cloths, with caste marks on their foreheads, coolie women with arms laden with silver bracelets, their thin and silky, though not always newly laundered, draperies wrapped gracefully about them, little Oriental temples standing out against the flat horizon, all carried the mind back to another land halfway around the globe. There was an amazing contrast between the lithe, slender Hindus in their loose garb, some of the younger girls almost beautiful, if one could overlook their nose-rings and a certain hereditary dread of soap, and the gross, rowdyish, tinsel-minded negresses. Yet though the East Indian was once civilized and the negro never has been, the result is in some ways astonishingly the same.
Coolies were “plowing” old cane-fields with pitchforks, their women, up to their waists in slime and water, were cleaning out trenches and irrigation ditches or turning up brush laid over newly sprouted shoots of cane. This lasted until ten in the morning, when a procession starting from the fields merged together and wended its way toward the center of the estate, the Hindus disappearing in long communal, barracks-like structures, the negroes squatting down to breakfast in the shade of their makeshift hovels. The latter were greatly in the minority, for they are prone to work a week and loaf two, or go to town to squander their earnings in gay garments and automobile rides at the height of the cutting season, and planters prefer the more dependable race. The first laborers brought over after the freeing of the slaves were Portuguese from the Madeira Islands. Then came the Chinese, generally without a repatriation clause in their contracts, so that they gradually drifted into shopkeeping, and to-day a few of them are among the big business men of the colony. Finally the great reservoir of British India was tapped, the coolies, male and female, coming out at government and plantation expense, indentured for five years and entitled to free passage home again. Many preferred to take a premium and remain, some to rehire, some to plant their own plots, a few to become men of importance, especially money-lenders with all the popular traits of the Jew. There is no question that the Hindu coolie is better off in British Guiana than he is at home, and that those born here are in a much more favorable condition; yet the call of the fatherland is strong in all races, and many return, taking with them enough to live in what to them is comfort. Considerably more than half the population of the colony are East Indians, but very recently all existing indentures were cancelled, the Indian Government having forbidden the signing of new ones some time before, and a scheme is now being worked out for Hindu immigration and colonization.
During all my walk I did not see a white man, except the sheltered ones at the estate. Many of the signs along the way were worth reading. “Dr. Moses Fraser, Dentist and Veterinary Surgeon” made it unnecessary to ask the “doctor’s” color. Ah Sing, Kandra Babu, and Percival Stuart Brathwaite kept shop side by side, the importance of their establishments decreasing in the order named. The autobus, resembling those along New York’s Riverside Drive, passed me on its outward trip; but if this packing above and below was typical, I preferred to walk. Here were the same silly caste rules as in the street-cars of Chile, and though it was infinitely finer on top, Englishmen had to swelter inside, because the imperiale was second-class and therefore given over to negroes and occasional Hindus. There were marsh birds by hundreds along the flooded flatlands, flocks of pinkish flamingoes now and then rising in flight. Before noon I had drifted into New Amsterdam, also known by the name of the county of which it is the seat, Berbice, second city of British Guiana and not much of a city at that. A chiefly negro population, though with many Hindus, completely swamped the rare whites, living in entirely shingled wooden bungalows amid luxuriant yards of palms and mango-trees.
From New Amsterdam there is a daily ferry and train to Georgetown, sixty miles away. To take the one across the River Berbice, distinctly wider than the Hudson at its mouth, in time to catch the other, meant early rising. For a time there was much bush along the track, the stations generally being mere stopping-places. Bananas, cassava, corn, and cocoanuts were the chief products. Then came Hindu men and women up to their knees in reeking mud, which discolors their ragged nether garments, setting out rice plants or kneading the soil about them. At Abary a group of Americans had established a big rice plantation and begun to work it by modern methods, but they were already in sad straits. The old-fashioned coolie hand-labor seems to be the only one offering sure returns. Here and there were rice-fields that had gone back to pasture, the light and dark grasses still showing where the paddy-dikes had been. As we neared Georgetown the rice plantations of independent East Indians became numerous, with oxen as well as men and women wading along in them, while the houses and sleek cattle showed prosperity, however biblical might be their methods of husbandry.
The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the background
An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam plantation in order to kill the ants that would destroy it