THE DEMERARA RIVER
CHAPTER I
THE DEMERARA RIVER
Men travel far to see a city, but few seem curious about a river. Every river has, nevertheless, its individuality, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its influence over the people who pass their lives within sight of its waters.—H. S. Merriman: The Sowers, chap. ii.
British Guiana, as first seen from the shoal-water near the Demerara lightship, is a mournful and monotonous picture. Mud flats, fringed with courida and mangrove, stretch endlessly along the shore. Never a hill is to be seen. The coastal flats are four feet below the level of high spring tides, and the Atlantic slops over the sea dams in yellow waves of muddy water. The wide expanses of rich sugar-fields and smiling rice lands begin about a mile from the seaside and stretch “aback” to the “wet savannahs,” by means of which they are irrigated. These wet savannahs are vast natural swamps converted artificially into shallow lakes by “stopping off” their seaward outlets. South of them spreads “the bush,” that great primeval forest so hostile to man, but sheltering in its mysterious recesses a million varieties of insects, a multitude of beasts and reptiles, and a wealth of bird life unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of the world.
Little, however, does the average colonist or the chance visitor to British Guiana see of the wonder and beauty of South America. The forest builds an impenetrable barrier, keeping him a close prisoner upon seaside mud flats, which are in the main a dreary waste of uncultivated land. Lack of labour renders it impossible for more than a small fraction even of the coastal fringe to be made to yield its increase. A land the size of England, Scotland, and Wales combined; a population equal to that of Hertfordshire, and a cultivated area less than one-fifth the size of Kent; a land for the greater part unknown and unsurveyed, whose only roads extend along the seaboard and for a few miles up the banks of its main rivers—such is British Guiana, ever since the close of the Napoleonic Wars a possession of the British Crown, the only one in South America, and rich in unexplored possibilities.
But the colonists of British Guiana have never made any serious attempt to investigate the interior of their heritage. Their revenue has always been spent upon coastal development; and a conviction exists that the interior is not only a death-trap, but also a wilderness of useless jungle and sandy deserts. Many attempts were made to dissuade me from venturing into it with my husband, and I was assured that I was risking my health—nay, my life. But the call of the wild was too strong, and I shall always be glad that I decided to go; for the fact that a woman has traversed these forests and the highland prairies beyond during many strenuous weeks and came back with health and vigour renewed may perhaps dispel the legends accumulated about the horrors of “the bush,” and induce people to investigate for themselves the charms and opportunities of this neglected land, or at least to travel with us in spirit into those great expanses of sleeping Nature which await the day of man’s occupation. British Guiana lies, like the princess of the fairy-tale, in an enchanted sleep. One day, surely, the fairy prince will come, mounted upon an iron horse, and bid her awake!
Two long years my husband and I lived continuously in Georgetown, at the mouth of the Demerara River. Then, exhausted in mind and body by the enervating atmosphere and dismal monotony of a tropical coast, near the equator and below sea-level, we decided to spend a brief holiday in exploring a part of the Colony’s interior hitherto blank upon the map, hoping to find there some of that strength which cometh from the hills. A journey up cataract-barred rivers and through primeval forests by Indian trails was in itself an attractive prospect; but we had a still more potent lure. On the 21st March, 1914, my husband had spent a day at the Kaietuk Fall, and had gazed from the brink of the great chasm into which the Potaro River there plunges, up its dreamy reaches towards the forest-clad ridges that stand above the Arnik creek and away to the towering, cliff-faced mass of Mount Kowatipu. It was then that he resolved to visit some day the wonders which Nature might hold in the forests and savannahs farther to the west and the south-west, and perhaps even to make his way to that famous Mount Roraima, of which the residents in British Guiana hear so much and see so little. Then, in October, 1915, he made the acquaintance of Mr. J. C. Menzies, whose occupation as a diamond and gold prospector had carried him into distant parts of our Colony’s interior. Mr. Menzies’ account of prairie tablelands at high altitudes, to be reached by travelling a few days beyond Kaietuk, and affording a view of Mount Roraima, where the boundaries of British Guiana, Brazil, and Venezuela meet, and whence streams flow to the Amazon, Orinoco, and Essequebo, determined us to attempt the journey across those tablelands to that mountain of mystery. During the previous seven years Mr. Menzies had frequently traversed the little-known and unsurveyed part of the Colony that lies between the Potaro River and our frontier with Brazil, and he had been greatly struck by the opportunities for cattle-ranching afforded on its highland savannahs. He had, moreover, bought and driven cattle from Brazil over the Ireng River into British territory, where they wander freely under the nominal guardianship of a tribe of Makusi Indians. He was therefore well qualified to make the preliminary arrangements for the expedition which we had in mind, and he very kindly agreed to place his experience unreservedly at our disposal and to accompany us. His knowledge of our proposed route did not extend beyond the Colony’s boundaries; but he felt sure that an Indian guide could be found in one of the villages near the Ireng, who would be able to lead us on to the goal of our hopes, Mount Roraima.