Trade and Communications.—The commerce in 1885 amounted to £336,000 for imports and to £144,000 for exports; in 1897 the values were respectively £373,350 and £286,400, but in 1903, while imports had increased in value only to £418,720, exports had risen to £493,213. The imports consist of wines, flour, clothes, &c.; the chief are gold, phosphates, timber, cocoa and rosewood essence. Cayenne is the only considerable port. One of the drawbacks to the development of the colony is the lack of labour. Native labour is most difficult to obtain, and attempts to utilize convict labour have not proved very successful. Efforts to supply the need by immigration have not done so completely. The land routes are not numerous. The most important are that from Cayenne to Mana by way of Kourou, Sinnamarie and Iracoubo, and that from Cayenne along the coast to Kaw and the mouth of the Approuague. Towards the interior there are only foot-paths, badly made. By water, Cayenne is in regular communication with the Safety Islands (35 m.), and the mouth of the Maroni (80 m.), with Fort de France in the island of Martinique, where travellers meet the mail packet for France, and with Boston (U.S.A.). There is a French cable between Cayenne and Brest.
Administration.—The colony is administered by a commissioner-general assisted by a privy council, including the secretary general and chief of the judicial service, the military, penitentiary and administrative departments. In 1879 an elective general council of sixteen members was constituted. There are a tribunal of first instance and a higher tribunal at Cayenne, besides four justices of peace, one of whom has extensive jurisdiction in other places. Of the £256,000 demanded for the colony in the colonial budget for 1906, £235,000 represented the estimated expenditure on the penal settlement, so that the cost of the colony was only about £21,000. The local budget for 1901 balanced at £99,000 and in 1905 at £116,450. Instruction is given in the college of Cayenne and in six primary schools. At the head of the clergy is an apostolic prefect. The armed force consists of two companies of marine infantry, half a battery of artillery, and a detachment of gendarmerie, and comprises about 380 men. The penal settlement was established by a decree of 1852. From that year until 1867, 18,000 exiles had been sent to Guiana, but for the next twenty years New Caledonia became the chief penal settlement in the French colonies. But in 1885-1887 French Guiana was appointed as a place of banishment for confirmed criminals and for convicts sentenced to more than eight years’ hard labour. A large proportion of these men have been found unfit for employment upon public works.
History.—The Sieur La Revardière, sent out in 1604 by Henry IV. to reconnoitre the country, brought back a favourable report; but the death of the king put a stop to the projects of formal colonization. In 1626 a small body of traders from Rouen settled on the Sinnamary, and in 1635 a similar band founded Cayenne. The Compagnie du Cap Nord, founded by the people of Rouen in 1643 and conducted by Poncet de Brétigny, the Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale, established in 1645, and the second Compagnie de la France Équinoxiale, or Compagnie des Douze Seigneurs, established in 1652, were failures, the result of incompetence, mismanagement and misfortune. From 1654 the Dutch held the colony for a few years. The French Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, chartered in 1664 with a monopoly of Guiana commerce for forty years, proved hardly more successful than its predecessors; but in 1674 the colony passed under the direct control of the crown, and the able administration of Colbert began to tell favourably on its progress, although in 1686 an unsuccessful expedition against the Dutch in Surinam set back the advance of the French colony until the close of the century.
The year 1763 was marked by a terrible disaster. Choiseul, the prime minister, having obtained for himself and his cousin Praslin a concession of the country between the Kourou and the Maroni, sent out about 12,000 volunteer colonists, mainly from Alsace and Lorraine. They were landed at the mouth of the Kourou, where no preparation had been made for their reception, and where even water was not to be obtained. Mismanagement was complete; there was (for example) a shop for skates, whereas the necessary tools for tillage were wanting. By 1765 no more than 918 colonists remained alive, and these were a famished fever-stricken band. A long investigation in Paris resulted in the imprisonment of the incompetent leaders of the expedition. Several minor attempts at colonization in Guiana were made in the latter part of the century; but they all seemed to suffer from the same fatal prestige of failure. During the revolution band after band of political prisoners were transported to Guiana. The fate of the royalists, nearly 600 in number, who were exiled on the 18th Fructidor (1797), was especially sad. Landed on the Sinnamary without shelter or food, two-thirds of them perished miserably. In 1800 Victor Hugues was appointed governor, and he managed to put the colony in a better state; but in 1809 his work was brought to a close by the invasion of the Portuguese and British.
Though French Guiana was nominally restored to the French in 1814, it was not really surrendered by the Portuguese till 1817. Numerous efforts were now made to establish the colony firmly, although its past misfortunes had prejudiced the public mind in France against it. In 1822 the first steam sugar mills were introduced; in 1824 an agricultural colony (Nouvelle Angoulême) was attempted in the Mana district, which, after failure at first, became comparatively successful. The emancipation of slaves and the consequent dearth of labour almost ruined the development of agricultural resources about the middle of the century, but in 1853 a large body of African immigrants was introduced. The discovery of gold on the Approuague in 1855 caused feverish excitement, and seriously disturbed the economic condition of the country.
Authorities.—A detailed bibliography of French Guiana will be found in Ternaux-Compans, Notice historique de la Guyane française (Paris, 1843). Among more recent works, see E. Bassières, Notice sur la Guyane, issued on the occasion of the Paris Exhibition (1900); Publications de la société d’études pour la colonisation de la Guyane française (Paris, 1843-1844); H. A. Coudreau, La France équinoxiale (1887), Dialectes indiens de Guyane (1891), Dix ans de Guyane (1892), and Chez nos Indiens (1893), all at Paris; G. Brousseau, Les Richesses de la Guyane française (Paris, 1901); L. F. Viala, Les Trois Guyanes (Montpellier, 1893).
[1] The origin of the name is somewhat obscure, and has been variously interpreted. But the late Col. G. E. Church supplies the following note, which has the weight of his great authority: “I cannot confirm the suggestion of Schomburgk that Guayaná ‘received its name from a small river, a tributary of the Orinoco’, supposed to be the Waini or Guainia. In South America, east of the Andes, it was the common custom of any tribe occupying a length of river to call it simply ‘the river’; but the other tribes designated any section of it by the name of the people living on its banks. Many streams, therefore, had more than a dozen names. It is probable that no important river had one name alone throughout its course, prior to the time of the Conquest. The radical wini, waini, wayni, is found as a prefix, and very frequently as a termination, to the names of numerous rivers, not only throughout Guayaná but all over the Orinoco and Amazon valleys. For instance, Paymary Indians called the portion of the Purús river which they occupied the Waini. It simply means water, or a fountain of water, or a river. The alternative suggestion that Guayaná is an Indian word signifying ’wild coast,’ I also think untenable. This term, applied to the north-east frontage of South America between the Orinoco and the Amazon, is found on the old Dutch map of Hartsinck, who calls it ’Guiana Caribania of de Wilde Kust,’ a name which must have well described it when, in 1580, some Zealanders, of the Netherlands, sent a ship to cruise along it, from the mouth of the Amazon to that of the Orinoco, and formed the first settlement near the river Pomeroon. The map of Firnao Vaz Dourado, 1564, calls the northern part of South America, including the present British Guiana, ‘East Peru.’ An anonymous Spanish map, about 1566, gives Guayaná as lying on the east side of the Orinoco just above its mouth. About 1660, Sebastien de Ruesta, cosmographer of the Casa de Contractacion de Seville, shows Guayaná covering the British, French and Dutch Guayanás. According to the map of Nicolas de Fer, 1719, a tribe of Guayazis (Guyanas) occupied the south side of the Amazon river, front of the island of Tupinambará, east of the mouth of the Madeira. Aristides Rojas, an eminent Venezuelan scholar, says that the Mariches Indians, near Caracas, inhabited a site called Guayaná long before the discovery of South America by the Spaniards. Coudreau in his Chez nos Indiens mentions that the Roucouyennes of Guayaná take their name from a large tree in their forests, ‘which appears to be the origin of the name Guayane.’ According to Michelana y Rojas, in their report to the Venezuelan government on their voyages in the basin of the Orinoco, ‘Guyana derives its name from the Indians who live between the Caroni river and the Sierra de Imataca, called Guayanos.’ My own studies of aboriginal South America lead me to support the statement of Michelana y Rojas, but with the following enlargement of it: The Portuguese, in the early part of the 16th century, found that the coast and mountain district of Rio de Janeiro, between Cape São Thome and Angra dos Reis, belonged to the formidable Tamoyos. South of these, for a distance of about 300 m. of the ocean slope of the coast range, were the Guayaná tribes, called by the early writers Guianás, Goyaná, Guayaná, Goaná and, plural, Goaynázés, Goayanázes and Guayanázes. They were constantly at feud with the Tamoyos and with their neighbours on the south, the Carijos, as well as with the vast Tapuya hordes of the Sertão of the interior. Long before the discovery, they had been forced to abandon their beautiful lands, but had recuperated their strength, returned and reconquered their ancient habitat. Meanwhile, however, many of them had migrated northward, some had settled in the Sertão back of Bahia and Pernambuco, others on the middle Amazon and in the valley of the Orinoco, but a large number had crossed the lower Amazon and occupied an extensive area of country to the north of it, about the size of Belgium, along the Tumuchumac range of highlands, and the upper Paron and Maroni rivers, as well as a large district on the northern slope of the above-named range. In their new home they became known as Roucouyennes, because, like the Mundurucus of the middle Amazon, they rubbed and painted themselves with roucou or urucu (Bixa Orellana); but other surrounding tribes called them Ouayanás, that is Guayanás—the Gua, so common to the Guarani-Tupi tongue, having become corrupted into Oua. Porto Seguro says of the so-called Tupis, ‘at other times they gave themselves the name of Guayá or Guayaná, which probably means “brothers,” from which comes Guayazes and Guayanazes.... The latter occupied the country just south of Rio de Janeiro.... The masters of the Capitania of St Vincente called themselves Guianas.’ Guinila, referring to north-eastern South America (1745), speaks of five missions being formed to civilize the ‘Nacion Guayana.’ In view of the above, it may be thought reasonable to assume that the vast territory now known as Guayaná (British, Dutch, French, Brazilian and Venezuelan) derives its name from its aborigines who were found there at the time of the discovery, and whose original home was the region I have indicated.”
[2] This is the boundary generally accepted; but it is in dispute.
[3] See C. B. Brown and J. G. Sawkins, Reports on the Physical, Descriptive and Economic Geology of British Guiana (London, 1875); C. Velain, “Esquisse géologique de la Guyane française et des bassins du Parou et du Yari (affluents de l’Amazone) d’après les explorations du Dr Crevaux,” Bull. Soc. Géogr. ser. 7, vol. vi. (Paris, 1885), pp. 453-492 (with geological map); E. Martin, Geologische Studien über Niederländisch-West-Indien, auf Grund eigener Untersuchungsreisen (Leiden, 1888); W. Bergt, “Zur Geologie des Coppename- und Nickerietales in Surinam (Hollandisch-Guyana),” Samml. d. Geol. Reichsmus. (Leiden), ser. 2, Bd. ii. Heft 2, pp. 93-163 (with 3 maps); and for British Guiana, the official reports on the geology of various districts, by J. B. Harrison, C. W. Anderson, H. I. Perkins, published at Georgetown.