Chapter XX: Struggling Down to Georgetown (3)

Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170. Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years, he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the “bullet-tree.”

In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot, many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own, saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on, each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load, though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were considerably increased.

My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure. The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said, “By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle, unless you can lend him one.”

“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!”

Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by special messenger.

So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide.

In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.

We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to “communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed couples.

We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris” and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was “more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was “most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right, sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to hear.

Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word “negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.

A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad, and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a “scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it, putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must always call _me_ when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault, that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of the Brazilian mulatto or _cabra_ and the Englishness of these Guianese negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.

Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town, though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who had never set foot in the wilds. Our _farinha_ had run out, more’s the pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling; and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.

Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a “scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots, as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height, some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming, mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation, in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.

Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.

We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract, sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a _falls_!” The emphasis on the last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran, constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so, for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine; for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless, foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness, with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.

“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which “Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and, having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him. The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there, though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.

“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in, an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”

The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore, always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving “fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians” has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour, and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of which Langrey chanted as we approached them:

It’s go’n’ drownded me,
An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’,
EE-tah-nah-meeee!

For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls, and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid, yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me of sleep.

Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with any three average American boys of the same age, who would have considered such a trip a lark.

To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected. During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods, we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata” companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve, under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness. The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’ drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad, placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata” camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer, would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville.

Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a hint of news from it.

Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and “cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,” interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as “t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly more both in time and money.

Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but “Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to “go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man, but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door.

A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber. Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it, and the counties took their names from them. The _Lady Longden_, a river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared, though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves (here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down Chinamen lying about the “stellings.”

For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in British Guiana.

The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness.

As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail. Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman” desired hot water.

“_Hot_ water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence.

“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant.

Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization.