Javanese workmen opening pods of cacao that will eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and cocoa
The settled portion of British Guiana extends from the west bank of the Essequibo River to the east bank of the Corentyne, two hundred miles distant, with a few islands at the mouth of the Essequibo and some ten miles up the Berbice and Demerara Rivers. Of the hundred thousand acres under cultivation—an area in proportion to the entire colony as is his forefinger to a human being—eighty per cent. is planted in sugar. A century ago the cultivation of cotton, coffee, and cacao gave way to this, and even alternating of crops is unknown. Year after year, often for half a century, sugar-cane has been produced on the same ground. Behind the plantations, which rarely extend more than three miles from the shore, the soil is a kind of peat, with here and there an island of sand. In front is the seashore or river, with its protection of almost impenetrable mangrove roots, then a dike with openings in it for irrigation ditches, the great wheel-operated gates of which are opened to let the water run out at low tide, but closed against the sea or river at their height, for salt on the land is fatal. Back of this dam is the public road, kept up at the expense of the plantation and, with the two canals beside it, constituting a second dike. Here is a mile-wide strip of land that is used as pasture, for the sugarmill, the manager’s house, overseers’ quarters, laborers’ villages, behind which, with a third dike, a draining engine, perhaps a little railway, and the “kokers,” or sluices to let out surplus water, are the interminable cane-fields, protected from the rainy season floods of the higher and uncultivated interior by a “back dam.” Canals are everywhere used for transportation—as well as irrigation—in iron punts drawn by mules. The secrecy which hangs like a pall over all of the estates, however, I never succeeded in penetrating. Perhaps it was merely to prevent some “clever Yankee” from learning how cane is turned into sugar!
Nickerie was once washed away by the sea, and Georgetown is saved from a like fate by a massive sea-wall. Down here where one must look up at the ocean the only way to fill a hole is by digging another, and there can be no real sewer-system where sewage would only float back into the city at high tide. Various systems are used for getting rid of Georgetown’s waste matter, none of them entirely satisfactory. Its water is brought in from the savannahs by the Lahama Canal, but this is yellow with vegetable matter and cannot be used for cooking, drinking, or even laundry purposes. Every building of any importance has a rain-water tank, some larger than those along our railroads, and as there is little dust or smoke in the city, water thus stored is clear and of good taste. Yet for all her natural handicaps, Georgetown is a comfortable and sightly city of wide, well-shaded streets, often with a canal flanked by rows of trees in the center, and broad green lawns so inviting after years of grassless Latin-America that I was tempted to sit on each of them in turn. From the sea-wall to the last negro shacks of the town is a distance of some two miles, with ample elbow-room and light wooden structures that make poor fire risks.
The city swarmed with hulking, ragged negroes leaning serenely against the many posters bearing the appeal “Your King and your Country need you. Enlist now!” In fact, it is unpleasant, at least for a white woman, to walk down Water Street among scores of ragged black loafers who seem to take pains to put themselves in one’s way. On the other hand, there are cheap public carriages, which, I suppose, would be the British reply to such a criticism. With plantains and eddoes plentiful, the mass of negroes are of lazier temperament than their ancestors, the slaves, who were forced to acquire the habit of work. They have so much power in the colony, however, that the man who must live there permanently cannot keep clear of them, and the visitor who inadvertently touches or even threatens some impudent lounger may be “summoned” and fined. It should be noted that in British colonies it is not so much the color-line as the caste-line which divides society. A man drops out of the highest class by having African blood in his veins, but so he does even when he is pure white for many other reasons, such as poverty or violation of any of the Englishman’s punctilios of social etiquette. Hindus are less in evidence in the capital than on plantations; Indians one almost never sees there. Every possible mixture of white, negro, Chinese, and East Indian may be found in the average crowd, however, though as a whole this has an Anglo-Saxon demeanor. Most of the pure whites are pale and thin, the women angular; even the young men are sallow from lack of exercise, manual labor being impossible and the principal gathering-place a “swizzle” club. The death rate is decreasing, but was still more than twice that of New York, thanks partly to the fact that even the English doctors in many cases still believed that “this mosquito theory is a lot of bally Yankee rot, don’t you know.”
The white population, exclusive of the Portuguese, who are not strictly so, own about three-fourths of the property, and the Portuguese much of the rest. Besides Chinese and unnaturalized Indians, there are 172,000 Hindus, nearly all of whom are alien or property-less non-voters. This leaves the few negroes owning property as the real rulers, to a limited degree, of the colony. In financial matters, including taxation, this is largely autonomous. The governor is sent out from England and is one of eight appointed members of the legislative Court of Policy; but there are also eight elective members, and the governor has the deciding vote only in case of a tie. Those who have had occasion to deal with it complain that the government is smothered in red tape. “If you wish to address the head of your department,” a man certainly in a position to know put it, “you write a letter to the next man above you, he adds a note and sends it on to the next, and so on up ten, or a dozen, or a score of rungs of the official ladder, and the answer comes down again the same way, so that when you get it back you buy a trunk and pack the stuff away and save it to read during your vacation.”
But there are excellences in British government which offset some of its precedent- and caste-loving stupidities. I went one day with the deputy head of the Department of Lands and Mines, who is also “Protector of the Indians,” to the recently established “Aboriginal Indian Depot.” The aborigines are a simple, good-natured people whose chief fault is a liking for rum, and not only do none of them live in town, but they cannot cope with urban dangers during their rare visits there. Principally by the use of liquor, laws to the contrary notwithstanding, the riffraff of Georgetown made it their business to rob the Indian men and lead the Indian women astray whenever they came to town; now the visitors have an official refuge, surrounded by a sheet-iron wall, which no outsider may enter without formal permission. There are one long and two short rooms extending the length of the building, and the Indians had swung their indispensable, home-woven hammocks side by side, just as they do in their own wilderness shelters. The large room was for ordinary Indian men, one of the smaller ones for married couples, and the third for “captains,” certified river-pilots, and other personages of importance—for your Englishman never forgets caste, even among aboriginal tribes. Here any Indian has the right, and is expected, to come and stay, free of expense, while in Georgetown, buying his own food and cooking it himself in a simple kitchen behind the building. The Depot was erected with funds accruing from “balata” gathered by the Indians, one-third of which is turned into the colonial treasury and the rest into an Indian reserve fund for just such purposes.
Not only in her grassy lawns and wooden houses, her stern morality and her altruistic treatment of the aborigines, does Georgetown remind the Anglo-Saxon wanderer that the differences between his own and Latin-American civilization are many, significant as well as trivial. Here he will find again that love of nature, or of outdoors, which is so slight in the rest of South America. By seven in the morning even the well-to-do are parading the sea-wall. Though there is no lack of carriages and automobiles, all classes go much on foot—the mere sight of well-dressed people habitually walking seems strange to the man more familiar with the rest of the continent. Latin-Americans of that class may stroll up and down a fashionable promenade of a block or two at a certain hour of the evening, but it will be rather to indulge in mutual admiration than for exercise. Here one will see again, with a start of surprise, white women not only abroad at an early hour, but pushing baby-carriages. In all the rest of South America it would be unseemly for a lady to pass her threshold in the morning, except to go to church and possibly to shop, or to be fully dressed and powdered before mid-afternoon, and even if she knew of the existence of perambulators, she certainly would not condescend to propel one herself. Another English touch is the sight of all classes riding bicycles, from the negro postman to dainty, veiled young white ladies—conduct which would be instantly ruinous to any feminine reputation elsewhere on the continent. People no longer hiss to attract attention; one is no longer a sight to be stared at from one end of the street to the other; no human wrecks come pestering one to buy sudden fortune in the form of a dirty rag of a lottery ticket; money is worth its face value again and is accepted at that rate without question—even though the newcomer may get hopelessly entangled in a confusion of reckonings in shillings, dollars, cents, and pence. It is true that traffic turns to the left and that audiences sit stiff and motionless as wooden images at band concerts, but this little patch of England in South America has fine big school buildings, instead of droning choruses of children packed together in noisome old hovels. Where there are many negroes there are apt to be beggars, but they are by no means so numerous and certainly not so pestiferous in Demerara as in Brazil. The street-cars are not divided into classes, and one may ride irrespective of the shape or condition of one’s collar; though castes are recognized in a different way, for the negro-Hindu motormen and conductors, speaking what is fondly supposed in the West Indies to be English, have a different vocabulary for each class. To a black fellow-laborer they say in a kindly, familiar tone, “Get off, mahn; heah yo street;” to a negro market-woman, impatiently, “All right, get on, ef yo goin’!” but to a white man of any standing, in a totally different tone and timbre, “Oh, yes, sir; this street, sir; all right, thank you, sir.”
A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana