History.—The coast of Guiana was sighted by Columbus in 1498 when he discovered the island of Trinidad and the peninsula of Paria, and in the following year by Alonzo de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci; and in 1500 Vincente Yañez Pinzon ventured south of the equator, and sailing north-west along the coast discovered the Amazon; he is believed to have also entered some of the other rivers of Guiana, one of which, now called Oyapock, is marked on early maps as Rio Pinzon. Little, however, was known of Guiana until the fame of the fabled golden city Manoa or El Dorado tempted adventurers to explore its rivers and forests. From letters of these explorers found in captured ships, Sir Walter Raleigh was induced to ascend the Orinoco in search of El Dorado in 1595, to send Lawrence Keymis on the same quest in the following year, and in 1617 to try once again, with the same intrepid lieutenant, an expedition fraught with disaster for both of them. As early as 1580 the Dutch had established a systematic trade with the Spanish main, but so far as is known their first voyage to Guiana was in 1598. By 1613 they had three or four settlements on the coast of Demerara and Essequibo, and in about 1616 some Zeelanders settled on a small island, called by them Kyk ober al (“see over all”), in the confluence of the Cuyuni and Mazaruni rivers. While the Dutch traders were struggling for a footing in Essequibo and Demerara, English and French traders were endeavouring to form settlements on the Oyapock river, in Cayenne and in Surinam, and by 1652 the English had large interests in the latter and the French in Cayenne. In 1663 Charles II. issued letters patent to Lord Willoughby of Parham and Lawrence Hyde, second son of the earl of Clarendon, granting them the district between the Copenam and Maroni rivers, a province described as extending from E. to W. some 120 m. This colony was, however, formally ceded to the Netherlands in 1667 by the peace of Breda, Great Britain taking possession of New York. Meanwhile the Dutch West India Company, formed in 1621, had taken possession of Essequibo, over which colony it exercised sovereign rights until 1791. In 1624 a Dutch settlement was effected in the Berbice river, and from this grew Berbice, for a long time a separate and independent colony. In 1657 the Zeelanders firmly established themselves in the Pomeroon, Moruca and Demerara rivers, and by 1674 the Dutch were colonizing all the territory now known as British and Dutch Guiana. The New Dutch West Indian Company, founded in that year to replace the older company which had failed, received Guiana by charter from the states-general in 1682. In the following year the company sold one-third of their territory to the city of Amsterdam, and another third to Cornelis van Aerssens, lord of Sommelsdijk. The new owners and the company incorporated themselves as the Chartered Society of Surinam, and Sommelsdijk agreed to fill the post of governor of the colony at his own expense. The lucrative trade in slaves was retained by the West Indian Company, but the society could import them on its own account by paying a fine to the company. Sommelsdijk’s rule was wise and energetic. He repressed and pacified the Indian tribes, erected forts and disciplined the soldiery, constructed the canal which bears his name, established a high court of justice and introduced the valuable cultivation of the cocoa-nut. But on the 17th of June 1688 he was massacred in a mutiny of the soldiers. The “third” which Sommelsdijk possessed was offered by his widow to William III. of England, but it was ultimately purchased by the city of Amsterdam for 700,000 fl. The settlements in Essequibo progressed somewhat slowly, and it was not until immigration was attracted in 1740 by offers to newcomers of free land and immunity for a decade from taxation that anything like a colony could be said to exist there. In 1732 Berbice placed itself under the protection of the states-general of Holland and was granted a constitution, and in 1773 Demerara, till then a dependency of Essequibo, was constituted as a separate colony. In 1781 the three colonies, Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice, were captured by British privateers, and were placed by Rodney under the governor of Barbados, but in 1782 they were taken by France, then an ally of the Netherlands, and retained until the peace of 1783, when they were restored to Holland. In 1784 Essequibo and Demerara were placed under one governor, and Georgetown—then called Stabroek—was fixed on as the seat of government. The next decade saw a series of struggles between the colonies and the Dutch West India company, which ended in the company being wound up and in the three colonies being governed directly by the states-general. In 1796 the British again took possession, and retained the three colonies until the peace of Amiens in 1802, when they were once again restored to Holland, only to be recaptured by Great Britain in 1803, in which year the history proper of British Guiana began.

I. British Guiana, the only British possession in S. America, was formally ceded in 1814-1815. The three colonies were in 1831 consolidated into one colony divided into three British Guiana. counties, Berbice extending from the Corentyn river to the Abary creek, Demerara from the Abary to the Boerasirie creek, Essequibo from the Boerasirie to the Venezuelan frontier. This boundary-line between British Guiana and Venezuela was for many years the subject of dispute. The Dutch, while British Guiana was in their possession, claimed the whole watershed of the Essequibo river, while the Venezuelans asserted that the Spanish province of Guayana had extended up to the left bank of the Essequibo. In 1840 Sir Robert Schomburgk had suggested a demarcation, afterwards known as the “Schomburgk line”; and subsequently, though no agreement was arrived at, certain modifications were made in this British claim. In 1886 the government of Great Britain declared that it would thenceforward exercise jurisdiction up to and within a boundary known as “the modified Schomburgk line.” Outposts were located at points on this line, and for some years Guianese police and Venezuelan soldiers faced one another across the Amacura creek in the Orinoco mouth and at Yuruan up the Cuyuni river. In 1897 the dispute formed the subject of a message to congress from the president of the United States, and in consequence of this intervention the matter was submitted to an international commission, whose award was issued at Paris in 1899 (see [Venezuela]). By this decision neither party gained its extreme claim, the line laid down differing but little from the original Schomburgk line. The demarcation was at once undertaken by a joint commission appointed by Venezuela and British Guiana and was completed in 1904. It was not found practicable, owing to the impassable nature of the country, to lay down on earth that part of the boundary fixed by the Paris award between the head of the Wenamu creek and the summit of Mt. Roraima, and the boundary commissioners suggested a deviation to follow the watersheds of the Caroni, Cuyuni and Mazaruni rivers, a suggestion accepted by the two governments. In 1902 the delimitation of the boundary between British Guiana and Brazil was referred to the arbitration of the king of Italy, and by his reward, issued in June 1904, the substantial area in dispute was conceded to British Guiana. The work of demarcation has since been carried out.

Towns, &c.—The capital of British Guiana is Georgetown, at the mouth of the Demerara river, on its right bank, with a population of about 50,000. New Amsterdam, on the right bank of the Berbice river, has a population of about 7500. Each possesses a mayor and town council, with statutory powers to impose rates. There are nineteen incorporated villages, and ten other locally governed areas known as country districts, the affairs of which are controlled by local authorities, known as village councils and country authorities respectively.

Population.—The census of 1891 gave the population of British Guiana as 278,328. There was no census taken in 1901. By official estimates the population at the end of 1904 was 301,923. Of these some 120,000 were negroes and 124,000 East Indians; 4300 were Europeans, other than Portuguese, estimated at about 11,600, and some 30,000 of mixed race. The aborigines—Arawaks, Caribs, Wapisianas, Warraws, &c.—who numbered about 10,000 in 1891, are now estimated at about 6500. In 1904 the birth-rate for the whole colony was 30.3 per 1000 and the death-rate 28.8.

Physical Geography.—The surface features of British Guiana may be divided roughly into four regions: first, the alluvial seaboard, flat and below the level of high-water; secondly, the forest belt, swampy along the rivers but rising into undulating lands and hills between them; thirdly, the savannahs in and inland of the forest belt, elevated table-lands, grass-covered and practically treeless; and fourthly, the mountain ranges. The eastern portion of the colony, from the source of its two largest rivers, the Corentyn and Essequibo, is a rough inclined plain, starting at some 900 ft. above sea-level at the source of the Takutu in the west, but only some 400 at that of the Corentyn in the west, and sloping down gradually to the low alluvial flats about 3 ft. below high-water line. The eastern part is generally forested; the western is an almost level savannah, with woodlands along the rivers. The northern portion of British Guiana, the alluvial flats alluded to already, consists of a fluviomarine deposit extending inland from 25 m. to 30 m., gradually rising to about 12 ft. above high-water mark and ending against beds of sandy clay, the residua of igneous rocks decomposed in situ, which form an extensive undulating region rising to 150 ft. above the sea and stretching back to the forest-covered hills. Roughly parallel to the existing coast-line are narrow reefs of sand and sea-shells, which are dunes indicating the trend of former limits of the sea, and still farther back are the higher “sand hills,” hills of granite or diabase with a thick stratum of coarse white sand superimposed. From the coast-line seawards the ocean deepens very gradually, and at low tide extensive flats of sand and of mixed clay and sand (called locally “caddy”) are left bare, these flats being at times covered with a deposit of thin drift mud.

Two great parallel mountain systems cross the colony from W. to E., the greater being that of the Pacaraima and Merumé Mts., and the lesser including the Kanuku Mts. (2000 ft.), while the Acarai Mts., a densely-wooded range rising to 2500 ft., form the southern boundary of British Guiana and the watershed between the Essequibo and the Amazon. These mountains rise generally in a succession of terraces and broad plateaus, with steep or even sheer sandstone escarpments. They are mostly flat-topped, and their average height is about 3500 ft. The Pacaraima Mts., however, reach 8635 ft. at Roraima, and the latter remarkable mountain rises as a perpendicular wall of red rock 1500 ft. in height springing out of the forest-clad slopes below the summit, and was considered inaccessible until in December 1884 Messrs im Thurn and Perkins found a ledge by which the top could be reached. The summit is a table-land some 12 sq. m. in area. Mt. Kukenaam is of similar structure and also rises above 8500 ft. Other conspicuous summits (about 7000 ft.) are Iwalkarima, Eluwarima, Ilutipu and Waiakapiapu. The southern portion of the Pacaraima range comprises rugged hills and rock-strewn valleys, but to the N., where the sandstone assumes the table-shaped form, there are dense forests, and the scenery is of extraordinary grandeur. Waterfalls frequently descend the cliffs from a great height (nearly 2000 ft. sheer at Roraima and Kukenaam). The sandstone formation can be traced from the northern Pacaraima range on the N.W. to the Corentyn in the S.E. It is traversed in places by dikes and sills of diabase or dolerite, while bosses of more or less altered gabbro rise through it. The surface of a large part of the colony is composed of gneiss, and of gneissose granite, which is seen in large water-worn bosses in the river beds. Intrusive granite is of somewhat rare occurrence; where found, it gives rise to long low rolls of hilly country and to cataracts in the rivers. Extensive areas of the country consist of quartz-porphyry, porphyrites and felstone, and of more or less schistose rocks derived from them. These rocks are closely connected with the gneissose granites and gneiss, and there are reasons for believing that the latter are the deep-seated portions of them and are only visible where they have been exposed by denudation. Long ranges of hills, varying in elevation from a few hundreds to from 2000 ft. to 3000 ft., traverse the plains of the gneissose districts. These are caused either by old intrusions of diabase and gabbro which have undergone modifications, or by later ones of dolerite. These ranges are of high importance, as the rocks comprising them are the main source of gold in British Guiana.

Rivers.—The principal physical features of British Guiana are its rivers and their branches, which form one vast network of waterways all over it, and are the principal, indeed practically the only, highways inland from the coast. Chief among them are the Waini, the Essequibo, and its tributaries the Mazaruni and Cuyuni, the Demerara, the Berbice and the Corentyn. The Essequibo rises in the Acarai Mts., in 0° 41′ N. and about 850 ft. above the sea, and flows northwards for about 600 m. until it discharges itself into the ocean by an estuary nearly 15 m. in width. In this estuary are several large and fertile islands, on four of which sugar used to be grown. Now but one, Wakenaam, can boast of a factory. The Essequibo can be entered only by craft drawing less than 20 ft. and is navigable for these vessels for not more than 50 m., its subsequent course upwards being frequently broken by cataracts and rapids. Some 7 m. below the first series of rapids it is joined by the Mazaruni, itself joined by the Cuyuni some 4 m. farther up. It has a remarkable course from its source in the Merume Mountains, about 2400 ft. above the sea. It flows first south, then west, north-west, north, and finally south-east to within 20 m. of its own source, forming many fine falls, and its course thereafter is still very tortuous. In 4° N. and 58° W., the Essequibo is joined by the Rupununi, which, rising in a savannah at the foot of the Karawaimento Mts., has a northerly and easterly course of fully 200 m. In 3° 37′ N. the Awaricura joins the Rupununi, and by this tributary the Pirara, a tributary of the Amazon, may be reached,—an example of the interesting series of itabos connecting nearly all S. American rivers with one another. Another large tributary of the Essequibo is the Potaro, on which, at 1130 ft. above sea-level and in 5° 8′ N. and 59° 19′ W., is the celebrated Kaieteur fall, discovered in 1870 by Mr C. Barrington Brown while engaged on a geological survey. This fall is produced by the river flowing from a tableland of sandstone and conglomerate into a deep valley 822 ft. below. For the first 741 ft. the water falls as a perpendicular column, thence as a sloping cataract to the still reach below. The river 200 yds. above the fall is about 400 ft. wide, while the actual waterway of the fall itself varies from 120 ft. in dry weather to nearly 400 ft. in rainy seasons. The Kaieteur, which it took Mr Brown a fortnight to reach from the coast, can now be reached on the fifth day from Georgetown. Among other considerable tributaries of the Essequibo are the Siparuni, Burro-Burro, Rewa, Kuyuwini and Kassi-Kudji. The Demerara river, the head-waters of which are known only to Indians, rises probably near 5° N., and after a winding northerly course of some 200 m. enters the ocean in 6° 50′ N. and 58° 20′ W. A bar of mud and sand prevents the entrance of vessels drawing more than 19 ft. The river is from its mouth, which is nearly 2 m. wide, navigable for 70 m. to all vessels which can enter. The Berbice river rises in about 3° 40′ N., and in 3° 53′ N. is within 9 m. of the Essequibo. At its mouth it is about 2½ m. wide, and is navigable for vessels drawing not more than 12 ft. for about 105 m. and for vessels drawing not more than 7 ft. for fully 175 m. Thence upwards it is broken by great cataracts. The Canje creek joins the Berbice river close to the sea. The Corentyn river rises in 1° 48′ 30″ N., about 140 m. E. of the Essequibo, and flowing northwards enters the Atlantic by an estuary some 14 m. wide. The divide between its head-waters and those of streams belonging to the Amazon system is only some 400 ft. in elevation. It is navigable for about 150 m., some of the reaches being of great width and beauty. The upper reaches are broken by a series of great cataracts, some of which, until the discovery of Kaieteur, were believed to be the grandest in British Guiana. Among other rivers are the Pomeroon, Moruca and Barima, while several large streams or creeks fall directly into the Atlantic, the largest being the Abary, Mahaicony and Mahaica, between Berbice and Demerara, and the Boerasirie between Demerara and Essequibo. The colour of the water of the rivers and creeks is in general a dark brown, caused by the infusion of vegetable matter, but where the streams run for a long distance through savannahs they are of a milky colour.

Climate.—The climate is, as tropical countries go, not unhealthy. Malarial fevers are common but preventible; and phthisis is prevalent, not because the climate is unsuitable to sufferers from pulmonary complaints, but because of the ignorance of the common people of the elementary principles of hygiene, an ignorance which the state is endeavouring to lessen by including the teaching of hygiene in the syllabus of the primary schools. The temperature is uniform on the coast for the ten months from October to July, the regular N.E. trade winds keeping it down to an average of 80° F. In August and September the trades die away and the heat becomes oppressive. In the interior the nights are cold and damp. Hurricanes, indeed even strong gales, are unknown; a tidal wave is an impossibility; and the nature of the soil of the coast lands renders earthquakes practically harmless. Occasionally there are severe droughts, and the rains are sometimes unduly prolonged, but usually the year is clearly divided into two wet and two dry seasons. The long wet season begins in mid-April and lasts until mid-August. The long dry season is from September to the last week in November. December and January constitute the short rainy season, and February and March the short dry season. The rainfall varies greatly in different parts of the colony; on the coast it averages about 80 in. annually.

Flora.—The vegetation is most luxuriant and its growth perpetual. Indigenous trees and plants abound in the utmost variety, while many exotics have readily adapted themselves to local conditions. Along the coast is a belt of courida and mangrove—the bark of the latter being used for tanning—forming a natural barrier to the inroads of the sea, but one which—very unwisely—has been in parts almost ruined to allow of direct drainage. The vast forests afford an almost inexhaustible supply of valuable timbers; greenheart and mora, largely used in shipbuilding and for wharves and dock and lock gates; silverbally, yielding magnificent planks for all kinds of boats; and cabinet woods, such as cedar and crabwood. There may be seen great trees, struggling for life one with the other, covered with orchids—some of great beauty and value—and draped with falling lianas and vines. Giant palms fringe the river-banks and break the monotony of the mass of smaller foliage. Many of the trees yield gums, oils and febrifuges, the bullet tree being bled extensively for balata, a gum used largely in the manufacture of belting. Valuable varieties of rubber have also been found in several districts, and since early in 1905 have attracted the attention of experts from abroad. On the coast plantains, bananas and mangoes grow readily and are largely used for food, while several districts are admirably adapted to the growth of limes. Oranges, pineapples, star-apples, granadillas, guavas are among the fruits; Indian corn, cassava, yams, eddoes, tannias, sweet potatoes and ochroes are among the vegetables, while innumerable varieties of peppers are grown and used in large quantities by all classes. The dainty avocado pear, purple and green, grows readily. In the lagoons and trenches many varieties of water-lilies grow wild, the largest being the famous Victoria regia.

Fauna.—Guiana is full of wild animals, birds, insects and reptiles. Among the wild animals, one and all nocturnal, are the mipourrie or tapir, manatee, acouri and labba (both excellent eating), sloth, ant-eater, armadillo, several kinds of deer, baboons, monkeys and the puma and jaguar. The last is seen frequently down on the coast, attracted from the forest by the cattle grazing on the front and back pasture lands of the estates. Among the birds may be mentioned the carrion crow (an invaluable scavenger), vicissi and muscovy ducks, snipe, teal, plover, pigeon, the ubiquitous kiskadee or qu’est que dit, a species of shrike—his name derived from his shrill call—the canary and the twa-twa, both charming whistlers. These are all found on the coast. In the forest are maam (partridge), maroudi (wild turkey), the beautiful bell-bird with note like a silver gong, the quadrille bird with its tuneful oft-repeated bar, great flocks of macaws and parrots, and other birds of plumage of almost indescribable richness and variety. On the coast the trenches and canals are full of alligators, but the great cayman is found only in the rivers of the interior. Among the many varieties of snakes are huge constricting camoudies, deadly bushmasters, labarrias and rattlesnakes. Among other reptiles are the two large lizards, the salumpenta (an active enemy of the barn-door fowl), and the iguana, whose flesh when cooked resembles tender chicken. The rivers, streams and trenches abound with fishes, crabs and shrimps, the amount of the latter consumed being enormous, running into tons weekly as the coolies use them in their curries and the blacks in their foo-foo.