CHAPTER XXI

ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS

The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves, unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks, with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people, rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again from their monthly excursion to the outside world.

Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced _apaches_ from Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies, already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we, too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own, including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony.

I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap. Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound; there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect. Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean, and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter. Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species.

Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town, whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central _Place des Palmistes_ unless I could find better than this. There were “Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy, worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls, bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities, and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them, it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it. Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to throw out when a new one was indispensable.

The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear, rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as umbrellas, but worn as hats.

The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and _libérés_, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best, considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room, including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss.

The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then. Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by influence and example.

Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky” (which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France.

I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress, as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black. The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes, it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene, with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that would not have been tolerated in an American community.

The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or less successful attempts were made during the next half century to establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and later the Directorate, sent out _déportés_ to take their place; but with Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to 1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.” Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since. Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of agriculture in French Guiana.

In 1891 the Czar of Russia established the boundary between French and Dutch Guiana at the Maroni and Awa Rivers, and in 1900 the Swiss president named the Ayapoc as the frontier of Brazil, leaving the French about one fourth the territory they had claimed. At that, they have no definite conception of its extent, most of it being virgin forest unexplored by civilized man. Though in theory it runs far back to the plateau and watershed of Tumac-Humac, France has no real hold over more than a comparatively narrow strip of coast. The colony claims 30,000 inhabitants, virtually all of whom live within cannon-shot of the sea. Alcohol has done for the aborigines, except a degenerate tribe called the Galibis back in the interior, estimated by the latest census as 534 in number, and there are some three thousand “boschs” or “bonis,” wild negroes descended from runaway slaves. The few towns besides Cayenne are insignificant, and in most cases have scarcely half as many inhabitants as a century ago. In those days of plentiful slave labor there were sugar plantations, spice trees, and prosperous estates along all the coast from the Ayapoc to the Maroni, and many ships carried to France sugar, rum, cacao, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Then there were more than 20,000 field laborers alone; to-day there are barely two thousand loafing tillers of the soil scattered about the colony, and agriculture in French Guiana is a blank. Once many cattle were introduced; now there are none left and even milk for babies comes from the North in tin cans. As a native editor puts it, “A country placed on a burning soil, swampy and unhealthful, where paludic fevers, plague, and elephantiasis abound, needs the patience of the Hollander to become such a prosperous colony as our neighbor on the west.” Ambitious projects for opening up the country have been formed, but there has been much promise and little accomplishment. Sixty kilometers of French highways stretch out in all directions from Cayenne, passing simple dwellings and careless gardens peering forth from the bush; but these are the only roads passable the year round and soon die out in the untamed wilderness. Even what were good roads a century ago have in many cases become mere paths, or have completely grown up to jungle again. The native inhabitants are content to live on cassava—which now suffers severely from a big red ant called the _fourmi-manioc_—and foreign capital shuns a Latin government and a penal colony; indeed, the negro inhabitants complain that the coming of the convicts ruined their “invaluable” country, though it would still be prosperous “if there were any arms to do the work,” they add, at the same time completely overlooking the idle arms hanging on either side of each of them.

Cayenne is known in France as the “dry guillotine.” In the middle of the last century, soon after the abolition of slavery, some French idealist, or practical joker, thought of a plan to kill two birds with one stone. Cayenne needed laborers; France was overrun with criminals. Jean Jacques Rousseau had asserted that “Every man was born good; it is society which inculcates in him the germ of all his vices and defects, and as he is also essentially corrigible, he must be offered means to redeem himself.” The betterment and regeneration of criminals by work was the panacea of the day, and this idea, “more or less modified,” inspired the establishment, in 1854, of the present penitentiary system. It is not likely that the hard-headed, materialistic statesmen of France took the prattle of theorists seriously; but it opened up to them a possible way out of certain troublesome perplexities. In 1851, therefore, the French president issued a decree prescribing the “use of convicts in the progress of French colonization,” and appointed a committee to decide to which colony six thousand _forçats_ in the crowded _bagnes_ of Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort should be sent. Guyane was chosen, with “Devil’s Island” as a landing-place, and the following year volunteers were called for among the inmates of those institutions. More than three thousand offered to go to Cayenne—and soon deeply regretted it. Way down under its superficial buncombe the chief purpose of the plan, of course, was to give the government a means of getting rid of its radical enemies and all those whose presence at home greatly worried the ruling powers, and to-day old J. J. Rousseau would be delighted to see how man, essentially good, is regenerated and recovers his manly dignity at Cayenne.

During the second year of the plan, volunteers became insufficient, and new decrees ordered all individuals sentenced to hard labor or reclusion, or criminals of African or Asiatic origin, to be sent to Guiana and used in “les traxaux les plus pénibles” of the colony and its public works. This last clause, at least, has been manfully carried out. At the same time a penal colony was established in Algeria, but the latter proved too strong to have its protests unheeded and the onus was transferred to New Caledonia. The first law of deportation was for not less than five and not more than ten years. Causes for such a fate included conviction of belonging to a secret society. Then New Caledonia was limited to those prisoners of European race sentenced to less than eight years. All others, of longer terms or of the negro or Arab race, as well as all _rélégués_ and recidivists, were to be sent to Cayenne. Of late years New Caledonia has become less and less popular with French judges, so that to-day the cream of the criminality of France, as well as of her other colonies, comes to end its days in French Guiana.

For years different convict camps were established within the colony, and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200 arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude. A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money after these churches were declared state property; another once high up in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude straw hat woven of the _awara_ palm-leaf, working at the same digging of sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted _apaches_ from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the Parisian _apache_ or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a clothes-pole.

The _déportés_ are divided into three classes,—_transportés_, merely sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; _rélégués_, serving life sentences; and _libérés_, former convicts free to live where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after serving a like term as _libéré_ and earning his own passage money honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes, it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the notorious case of Dreyfus.

Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking _rélégué_ was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the man sentenced to _travaux forcés_, imagined by the law of 1854, has become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners, unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken land far from their beloved France.

I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins, without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money, without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among the French is notorious.

Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore, still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire _libérés_, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well.

Though he cannot leave the colony, the _libéré_ can go where he chooses within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat, clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony. Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics, or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These are invariably _libérés_, some of whom have formed alliances with such females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the _libéré_ has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or decency during their bestial imprisonment, _libérés_ not only work at odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at least have something to eat again.

Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since 1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped; many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony, particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of _moco-moco_ stems, and a canoe made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely, or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward.

It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the “camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern “principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big keys, he led us into the prison in person.

It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France. There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and “stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an _infirmérie_ where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics, from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed, officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts; not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret identification system, and the prisoners a secret _argot_, or slang, which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison.

The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.”

In another room were a few trinkets, odds and ends, and covers of various origins for some of the canvas-strip beds. The “principal” explained that this was the room of trusties and turnkeys, several of whom were then standing at attention before him. Then, still pretending to give me information, but raising his voice to a bellow, he screamed, “Yes, these we allow a few extra privileges, and they are even greater pigs than the others—_Oui, ils sont les plus cochons de tous!_” There was not much visible sign of an opportunity to be anything else. I not only saw no bath anywhere within the “camp,” but no place where a prisoner could so much as wash his hands. Nothing but absolute brute necessities were recognized, and even then everything was of the crudest and coarsest.

“And do you treat educated men and those who have formerly lived in clean surroundings the same as you do the recidivists and the apaches?” I asked.

“Bah!” cried the captain, with his nastiest sneer, though maintaining his attitude of overdrawn courtesy toward me. “After a few days they become just like the others and you never see the slightest difference.”

Come to think it over, I suppose they would.

The prisoners get up at five o’clock, have coffee, and go to work at 6:30. A “breakfast” of thin soup, one vegetable, half a kilo of bread _de deuxieme qualité_, and what is supposed to be 250 grams of meat before it is cooked, but which boils down to about half that, is served at 10:30. Three hours later the famished convicts are marched out into the blazing sunshine again to complete their eight hours of daily toil. At night they get a slab of bread and a kind of vegetable hash, duly weighed on dirty scales. It is impossible that any grown man doing manual labor should not be habitually ravenous on such a diet. Not only was the stuff of the coarsest grade imaginable, and unsavory as food carelessly cooked in great bulk always is, but it was handled by guards, visitors, and any other chance passer-by exactly as one might handle the food of a dog, perhaps dropped underfoot and then tossed back into the pan, from which it may be doled out to a man who a year or two before ate in the best restaurants of Paris.

An old chapel, now full of cells, was a place of punishment for minor infractions of the rules, the inmates of which slept on boards and were given bread and water two days out of three. In another building were the _cachots_, or dungeons proper, stone rooms about four by six feet in size, with very low ceilings, solid doors, and only a hole some ten inches in diameter for ventilation. Here recaptured men awaiting trial were kept in solitary confinement, with a plank for bed, worn concave during many years of occupation, a block of wood as pillow, and bread and water one day out of three. For those who aroused still greater wrath among their guards there were cells in which a man could neither stand up nor lie down, and other underground horrors worthy of the Inquisition. I am not one of those who believe in making prison life a perpetual ball-game; but there are limits to the brutality which man should permit himself toward his fellow-man. After all, it did not look as if Hugo’s famous novel had done much to mitigate the lot of French prisoners. Things may have been alleviated in France itself, but in this tropical Hades there has certainly been no improvement over the _bagnes_ of Toulon of a century ago.

“Look at that dog!” cried the commander, as the occupant of one of these ovens rose to his feet when we entered. Then, with all the sarcasm he could throw into his voice, “_Vous êtes content, hein?_” The officials all seemed to try to impress me with the fact that they had a particularly dangerous and incorrigible lot of wild animals in their charge, and looked for applause at their ability to keep them under control by such methods as savage brutality and by taking every advantage of the helpless wretches to taunt them. Yet no owner of wild animals would have dreamed of keeping them in such airless, crowded and starved conditions. There was a den of _rélégués_, for instance, ex-convicts who had violated their parole as _libérés_ and were awaiting trial—nearly all white Frenchmen and as fine a collection of hopeless, helpless, careless, don’t-give-a-damn toughs as it has ever been my privilege to see. The atmosphere was exactly that of a den of savage beasts who considered all the outside world their implacable enemies and were ready to rend and tear anyone who was so careless as to come within reach without a weapon with which to cow them. There were between thirty and forty in each of the 12 by 16-foot rooms, and by no means space on the two wooden platforms, resembling those in the _aisles de nuit_ of French cities, for all to lie down at once.

To add to the joy of their lot, the prisoners are constantly robbed of their legal rations to fill the pockets of the officials and guards. There is a saying that officers arrive in Cayenne with half a trunk and leave with six. In theory, the men are entitled to wine, tobacco, and reading matter; practically, they never see any of those things unless they manage to get them from outside. At Albina, across from the chief penal station on the Dutch boundary, wine is always for sale at a song. The Indians or “boschs” who bring in an escaped prisoner get two of the five dollars paid by the French Government, the prison officials pocketing the rest. There is always an advantage in killing off prisoners, for their names are still kept on the books and the officials still draw their ration money, as they do that of un-captured fugitives. It has often been proved quite possible for a guard at least passively to bring about a prisoner’s death, merely for the few cents a day he can pocket for his rations. Naturally there is much underground favoritism, and the prisoner with money or powerful friends outside can usually get away. The guard is not only amenable to a bribe, but glad to have another dead man on his ration books. Such escapes are generally engineered from over the Dutch border. An expert American cracksman, well known to our police, “did a job” in Paris a few years ago and was sent to Cayenne; few who have been there will blame the perfectly respectable Americans of Paramaribo for helping him to escape. The German who attempted to get Morocco to revolt against French rule escaped while I was in the Guianas, and there were very persistent rumors to the effect that the German Moravian missionaries in Dutch Guiana knew quite well how it happened.

The prisoners themselves sometimes help their oppressors in the matter of ration money, for they have secret societies of bloodthirsty tendencies and private enmities are often settled while the prison camp lies in restless slumber. Sometimes it is merely a quick stab upward in the darkness through a stretched-canvas bed; sometimes a ring is formed by the other prisoners, and the two opponents, each armed with a knife and attended by a second who has no other right than to give his man another knife if his own is knocked from his hand, go at it, with no quarter asked or given. The guards will not risk their lives—and their probable “rake-off”—by entering and attempting to stop the fight in the dark, and when one combatant is killed he is left to lie where he has fallen until morning, when everyone in the room assures the investigating official that he slept soundly all night long. Death naturally has few terrors for these convicts, and it is impossible to punish them more than they are already being punished; hence there is no motive to restrain themselves. In short, Cayenne definitely proves the existence of a hell, though its geographical location does not exactly tally with the notions of old-fashioned theologians.

It took all day to get back on board the _Antilles_, silhouetted far out on the horizon beside the lighthouse of “Lost Child” Rock. For, with typical Latin disorder, the sailing was postponed as often as it was announced. At the customhouse outgoing baggage was examined by slovenly but pompous negroes as thoroughly as if it were being landed, mainly because it is illegal to take gold out of the colony. A rowboat carried us out to a small steamer which could not touch shore. Another brought out that month’s contingent of conscripts, in blue-jean uniforms and the familiar French army cap, their shining new cups, canteens, and the like hanging about them. With few exceptions they were negro youths, pale under their jet-black skins; and it was difficult to decide which looked the sadder—the white prisoner boatmen from France who had to stay behind, or the black “freemen” soldiers of Cayenne who had to go. Among them was a French priest already gray and heavily bearded, still in full priestly garb, but with a soldier’s kit and cap hanging over one shoulder. All the afternoon the Gallic chaos reigned, until at last we neared the _Antilles_ and were transferred to her again in rowboats, the soldiers descending into the third class and the canvas-clad convicts, who had come on board carrying the bags and bundles of negro passengers and the officers, meekly descending the gangway again, their manhood evidently so completely shattered that they dared not even attempt to stow themselves away. We were off about six; and as I looked back upon the dim, flat land dying away in the sunset, there came to mind an old slab of wood that had been removed from a prisoner’s grave to the museum of Cayenne, on which one can still make out the epitaph, crudely carved by some fellow-convict:

Qu’ avons nous besoin de savoir ton nom? N’étais-tu pas comme nous un compagnon d’exil? Dors en paix, maintenant que tes cendres réposent, Nouveaux exilés, nous vous souvenons Et t’offrons nos regrets. A bientôt.

Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed down near a lightship marked _Suriname Rivier_ to take on a pilot who looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or Cayenne. The _Antilles_ manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed, almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights.

Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro, especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most ardently sensual.

The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners, chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially, the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians, whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy fatalists.

On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches. All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns, which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not apparent. The _Predikant_, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four sermons—_four_, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy.

The Reformed and the Lutheran churches of Paramaribo alternate in their Sunday night services, in order that competition shall not cut down still lower their congregations. From the church the crowd went, almost intact, to the “Kino,” as the “movies” are called in Surinam. The paternal government burdens these—there are three, all owned by Jews—with many stern rules. The films must be run by hand, not by motor; since the hard times incident to the World War only two performances a week were allowed; the show must be over by 10:30; and so on, until one became amply convinced that it was no happy-go-lucky Latin government that ruled over these sedate African Dutchmen. But there are limits to suppression. To me, fresh from Brazil and the blasé, drawing-room silence which prevails in its cinemas, the most striking part of this performance was the almost constant howling and screaming of the largely negro audience, now cheering on the doll-faced hero, now shrieking threats at the top-hatted villain.

Down at the market-place along the water front there was an incredible mixture of races, tongues, and customs each morning. Dirty, almost-naked Hindu beggars slunk in and out among buyers and sellers; Javanese paused to squander the single copper left from their gambling, and plodded noiselessly on in their bare feet, munching the mouthful it yielded; Chinese women, still in the cotton trousers of their homeland, but already wearing the gay starched bandana of their adopted country, bargained with a squatting Madrasee or a pig-tailed Mohammedan from northwestern India over a handful of green plantains. But most numerous of all were guffawing negro women, almost invariably carrying something on their heads, be it only a bottle of Dutch rum sitting bolt upright. The negroes, especially of the younger generation, to whom labor bears the stigma of the lowly Javanese or Hindu, consider themselves a kind of aristocracy in this conglomerate society. The negro girl working in a shop and dressing in modern finery is too nice to carry her own bundle; she is followed by her mother in the old native dress, bearing her daughter’s burden. A negro youth whom an American resident hired as a fireman on his launch appeared in a red tie and patent leather shoes, followed by his mother and his grandmother, carrying his baggage on their heads.

It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table. Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness, we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon “tea” that was a meal in itself, and _Koud Avondeten_—“cold evening eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage compartments, but those glorious days are gone.

Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called “taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: {_Niet Drinkbaar_ / _No boen vo dringi_} All higher government officials speak English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies of the minister translated into English.

One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France, but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed, he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that tongue was eminently West Indian.

The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs, though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives, especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years; therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated, but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to Holland.

Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to combat it.

The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English, Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!” “Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style, quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber, called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff had been piled up for cordwood.

The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen. The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men, though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day.

Though their original cost is somewhat less, East Indian coolies, whom the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth, as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits, but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels, or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked.

I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots. They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese, however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help, but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful housekeepers.

When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow, his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more, receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away!

Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China. The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom worthy of the least confidence.

There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility, even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of “pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it, or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of its soil in time proved permanently injurious.

In the afternoon we came to the Suriname River again, here far narrower, but swift and deep. The buttresses of a bridge had been built, but the few remaining passengers crossed in a cable-car, like that to the top of the “Sugar Loaf” in Rio, a hundred feet or more above the water. Naturally, a weekly schedule that requires two trains and a cable station to make its run must charge fabulous passenger and freight rates. We spent more than an hour getting our cargo—largely oil products and flour from the United States—into the little three-car train on the other side; then the conductor put on a new kind of cap, and we were off again. Here the soil was reddish and looked more fertile, and we seemed to have risen to a slight savannah with a cooler wind, though for the most part we were surrounded by the same monotonous jungle that had hemmed me in almost incessantly for weeks past. But here it was enlivened by what to me was the most interesting of the many races that inhabit the Guianas,—the _Boschneger_, or “Bush Negroes.”

In the early history of the colony her African slaves, said to have come from more warlike tribes than most of those brought to the New World, revolted and, but for the help of the Caribs and a patched-up truce, would undoubtedly have driven the white planters into the sea. In British Guiana they were eventually conquered and driven out. The Dutch, on the other hand, made peace with them, not only acknowledging their independence, but promising to pay them tribute, which they do to this day. The descendants of these black insurgents, unlike the “maroons” of Jamaica, have gone completely back to savagery and live like wild Indians, or like their ancestors in the African bush, wearing only a loin-cloth, dwelling in grass huts, eating cassava and other jungle products, and talking a corruption of Dutch and several other languages with which they have come in contact, which the Dutch themselves cannot understand. It is estimated that there are eight thousand of these wild negroes in Dutch Guiana, divided into three principal tribes, Saramacca, Becoe, and Djoeka, each ruled over by its “gran man” (“a” always as in “far”), and its tribal elders, while several thousand more, known as “bonis,” inhabit French Guiana.

A few of these black children of nature had appeared before we crossed the Suriname; now they burst forth frequently from the surrounding bush. The only evidence of humanity, except the railroad, was an occasional sheet-iron station building; yet we halted now and then where the dark mouth of a path broke the dense wall of forest-jungle on either side to unload rice, flour, and oil for the placer miners and “balata bleeders” back in the bush. In some places wild negroes had come down to act as carriers. They were splendid physical specimens, tall and more magnificently built than any race I had yet seen in South America, fit to arouse the envy of any white Sandow—except that, being paddlers of dugouts rather than walkers, their shoulders and arms were overdeveloped in proportion to their legs. Erect and haughty as Indians, without a hint of the servility we commonly associate with negroes, they were proof that the African who has returned to his natural state in the wilderness is preferable to the negro who has reverted to his natural state in the cesspools of cities and the rags of civilization. Though noticeably smaller, the women and girls—naked except from waist to thighs—who came down to peer out of the forest and see the train pass were equally fine specimens of the human animal, the young ones with plump, protruding breasts, shapely waists, and more often than not a naked baby astride one hip. The men had earrings, bracelets, rings even on their forefingers, charms of shells and the like about the ankles, and so many adornments, in contrast to the females, as to suggest that they forcibly took them away from their weaker sisters. Such cloth as they wore was of gayest color and crazy-quilt pattern; their short hair was done up in “Topsy” braids sticking out in all directions and tied with many-colored ribbons; about arms and legs, just below the knees and above the elbows, they wore tight rings or cords, evidently believing, like the Indians of Amazonia, that these protect them from the ravenous _piranha_; and the abdomens of both men and women were tattooed, or, more exactly, pricked into relief figures resembling countless black warts. More superstitious than the wild Indians, and just wise enough to know a kodak by sight, they were not to be caught unawares for a “por-trait´,” as the word remains even in “taki-taki.”

Dam is most succinctly described by adding an “n” and an exclamation point. It consists of the end of the railroad line, which some day in the distant future hopes to go on to the Brazilian border. The only white men left since crossing the river were the little Dutch engineer and myself. I went with him and the rest of the train crew to a clean, well-screened little bungalow, where we pooled our lunches, but the assertion of the dusky conductor, whose English was “picked up,” that he was “snorking too much” proved only too true, and I soon carried my hammock out into the night. After some search I swung it from the switch-post to the back end of our first-class car, diagonally across the track, and turned in again. There was, of course, the danger that another train might dash around the curve into me, but as the company would have had to order it made in Holland, carry it piecemeal across the river by cable, set it up, and run the thirty miles from the cable station, the risk was not great.

At least there was a fine collection of “Bush Negroes” in Dam. A hundred or more of them, including whole families among whom there was not cloth enough for a single garment, had come down the river, which here forms a rocky falls, to carry back into the bush in their canoes the supplies brought by the weekly train, and they had hung their hammocks under a long sheet-iron roof on poles provided by the government. All of them had the air of being as ready to fight as Indians on the war-path; yet they were childish in many ways, too, jumping upon the train every time it moved a foot in switching and acting in general like boys of ten. They were the exact antithesis of Indians in showing, rather than hiding, their feelings, and had all the African’s gaiety and boisterous laughter. In their encampment now feebly lighted by weird torches, they were indulging in music, chatter, and apparently in dancing, until one might have fancied oneself in the heart of Africa. They seemed to be more contented with their lot than the Indians, as if they still had memories of the slave days of their ancestors and realized that much more fully what freedom means.

On the return trip we picked up much gold. At every station, and at some mere stops, negroes, clothed and usually English-speaking, handed the conductor small packages wrapped in scraps of paper, but sealed with a red seal, the name of the owner crudely written on each. I soon learned that these contained gold-dust, and for every one of them the conductor had to make out a report, which the negro certified with a seal he carried, after which the conductor put the package in his tin box. Some of them weighed several pounds. Before we were halfway in the conductor had more than $12,000 worth of gold, for all of which he was responsible, though he received not a cent extra for the trouble above his scanty wage of thirty dollars a month and a gulden as expense money on each trip. No wonder he said something about “one hand washing the other” and gave me no receipt for the fare I paid from Dam back to the cable-station.

When we came to Kwakoegron every person on the train had to get off to be searched for gold. All passengers and employees, carrying their hand-baggage, were herded into a big chicken-wire cage, where they were examined one by one by black policemen. Personally, whether out of respect for my nationality or because I looked too simple to think of smuggling, the officer who stepped with me into one of the alcove closets opening off the enclosure was satisfied with patting my pockets and making me open my kodak; but many travelers are compelled to strip naked while black policemen examine even the seams of their garments. There is a negress on hand for similar examinations of her own sex, and several times I heard of an English woman resident who, having once been caught smuggling gold, was forced to strip every time she passed through Kwakoegron on her way to town. Even minor surgical operations are sometimes performed on suspects, not always without results. Not merely the passengers and their bags, but the entire train from end to end was examined with meticulous care. Gold has been discovered hidden away in every imaginable place on the cars, even stuck on the trucks or inside the wheels. The packages in charge of the conductor are also examined, and if a seal is found broken he is held in jail until it is proved that none of the gold is missing. The negro policemen get a percentage and promotion for finding stolen gold, or for detecting attempts to smuggle it, and are said to be so proud of their jobs that they seldom succumb to temptation.

The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined, and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana, merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it. Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates.

I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam. Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro. All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters. Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas, and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies, his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven. They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws, punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing no intention of doing anything about it.

The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the “gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers, but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair, evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out, offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed myself out of Dutch quarters.

“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and “packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the “taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests, is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language, though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap, and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the “Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi” might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and “Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the “taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but “father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for “child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish _pequeño_ or the Portuguese _pequeno_. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the “a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means “good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character; “Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25:

Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki: Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina.

Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language.

A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood, stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September. The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie, where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate. Here a white _déporté_ who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists, send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful _gamalong_ floating by on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable of producing a hundred fold what it does now.

The launch _Ella_ finally left for Springlands, across the boundary, with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty minutes ahead of its schedule.

To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday. Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures, speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday morning.

An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,” to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter, and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles, countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089 inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least one can telegraph anywhere.

Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous travelers.

Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks; but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of it.

Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate, “’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.”

“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it, topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors. “Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence. “Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’ you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?” meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law, and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his mongrel race.

The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time. This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness, stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long, green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with, “Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole.

I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman, and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down. Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation, as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already grasping him by the throat.

“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after all.

Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage. It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door, and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog. But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight. Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town, they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates.

I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’ barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject, “By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour, whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a “swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush, the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs, where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age, were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause.

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 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.”

Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees, Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the “pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef, mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown. In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to come in the not far distant future.