# Littell's Living Age/Volume 190/Issue 2454/Before Emancipation in the Dutch West Indies

Originally published in the Gentleman's Magazine.
"The poet," said somebody recently, "is more than man; the gipsy, less." The world outlives both, so it's hard to say which has the advantage. The laws anent vagabondism are daily being more strictly enforced in both hemispheres; and we elder Bohemians look back somewhat regretfully on the old days when we roamed pretty well at our own sweet will over certain parts of the newer continent; when we did not do the herring-pond in six days; when alien legislation was as yet unborn and when the British public still consumed sugar which was not conjured out of rags and bones and all their next of kin. We did things perhaps more lethargically then; or, at least, a little less electrically. The "Ocean Sea" that chilled the hearts of the little Huelvan expedition in the sixteenth century, had a few terrors still for us. We traversed it in six weeks. But I think we had our compensations. We had time to look upon the ever-marvellous sea; one day sweet, and calm, and gently blue, like the eye of an English child; the next green, deep, and strong, panting with heaving bosom, or moaning like a colossal soul in sorrow; or, in the grey moonlight, rocking itself to and fro in the clear starlit air, keeping time with faultless, unmerciful beat to the death chant of its victims. Seeing day by day this mighty ocean, the feverish earnestness of its upheavings, the pure dispassion of its calm, one felt strength come unto one from that almighty symbol of the strong. One was, I think, prepared to wend on the worldly way, not unconscious of the mystery nor of the holiness of living.
I was a very young fellow when I first went out to Surinam. I have not been what I call "a very young fellow" for, anyhow, fifty years now, so that the survey I am taking is a fairly comprehensive one. Plantation life did not then hold out anything very seductive to my imagination. I considered cotton one of the planet's least romantic necessities. But it had been decided in family council, firstly, that some one ought to go out and work the place; secondly, that this some one ought to be myself. So I shipped from Hull to Rotterdam, and thence, per Hollander to Paramaribo.
Though I had left home with much the air of a new Alexander, I believe I had a frightful "heimweh." But that had time to wear off on board, so that only a violent curiosity was in the ascendant when, after about a day and a half's "pea-soup," we sighted the monotonous shores of Dutch Guiana. Paramaribo in those days was rather different from now. The wharves were in appearance much the same as at present; and the smoothly sanded streets, with their rows of orange and lime trees, were grateful then as now. But, except that Grav Straat was adorned with some large and not untasteful wooden mansions, very few of the modern private streets of the capital were in existence fifty years ago. In my early days planters lived more on the plantations than they do now. One feature of the Paramaribo of half a century ago has almost disappeared from the scene — the stores, which used to fringe the plain for a considerable distance. Of course we had to have big supplies on hand on plantation, both for the gang and for the house; and all our wants were supplied from those stores. They were "universal providers." As the wife of a long-dead governor told me when I was new to it, they sent out "everything from a ball-gown to a coffin." All the tools, requisites for machinery, and medicines; all our provisions — kegs of salt beef and dried fish, barrels of biscuit, casks of brandy, flour, tobacco, and cigars; our gunpowder and our Canadian ice; our white drill and flannels, and Panama hats, and the regulation strips of colored calico, of which the gang's rather scrimp "get up" consisted, came to us through these stores. (Parenthetically let it be understood that our house servants were completely and gaily attired, although the field hands were very nearly in puris naturalibus.) Nowadays big planters get such supplies as they want direct from the States and Europe; the ladies' millinery comes out from Amsterdam and Paris; and the few stores are but relics of the past. Government House, one of the first conspicuous objects that meets the eye from the river, is little changed. It is a fine structure of the kind, with, perhaps, more of an English than a Dutch look. A pleasant, airy ballroom has been added to it. The other houses in the neighborhood were and are mostly owned by planters down river, and by official people.
I can remember wondering, as we neared, which roof it was that should have the honor of sheltering me for the time I should be in town before going down coast. Presently, our manager, Fles, boarded, and greeted me in atrocious English. Possibly guessing that my Dutch would have been more atrocious still had I been obliged to attempt it, the Dutch friends of my people had considerately sent along with him a clerk from the lawyer's office, whose business had necessitated his picking up a slight knowledge of the British tongue. This knowledge appeared to me to be of the schoolgirl French type, which is generally found impossible on reaching Calais. With them was the mulatto boy, George, who was to be my servant. While Fles, the clerk, and I aired our linguistic attainments, George did interpreter every now and then in Negro-English, until I found I understood him better than anybody, and that he and I got along beautifully. At home I had picked up a smattering of several languages, and this Negro-English, so simple in its delicious jumble of all tongues under the sun — Spanish, English, Dutch, French, African, and Tamil, all beautifully grammarless and inflectionless — charmed me as the very language of vagabondism. To the end of my connection with the colony, people who could not talk English or French with me had just to put up with Negro-English, which was understood by everybody, black and white. Even the governor's wife, whose eyes and diamonds rivalled each other, did me that gracious condescension. She had forgotten her French verbs and had never learnt English ones, and Dutch — that language of the pigsty — I neither could nor would talk.
This George of whom I speak, had a history and an uncommonly fine figure. By some chance or other his father was a white man who had been captain of a coaster between Cayenne and the Essequibo. This person had several times seen his son, and was industriously saving enough to buy him of our manager, when his ship went down one dark night on the reefs at the mouth of the Saramaca. In accordance with the Dutch West Indian custom with regard to mulattoes, George was not put in the field, but trained as a house servant. A more perfect valet and waiter was not to be found in Europe. It is a pleasant feeling to me now to remember that George had not to wait for emancipation to get his free papers.
One of the many things that surprised me a good deal that first week in Paramaribo happened one evening after dinner. My host and I were smoking in the gallery, when up rushed three or four young men, pushed unceremoniously aside the glass swings, helped themselves liberally to cigars and tobacco, and laughingly decamped. These, I was informed, were the patrols — gentlemen of Paramaribo who, in relays, guarded the streets a certain number of hours in the night. I began to see that a slave colony had its drawbacks. Precaution of that sort is troublesome. A few days later I had another surprise — a more revolting one. I had gathered from stray gossip an inkling of what I guessed to be a sort of tragedy coming off. But my bad Dutch misled me. Early one morning, however, an appalling din of drums, tom-toms, and kettles awoke me and my curiosity together. My boy informed me: " One ningere be raati, inasra." After a deal of misunderstanding I arrived at the fact that a negress was about to be burnt alive. For a minute or two I was horror-struck. The din grew apace. From the quarter whence came the frightful row, I concluded that the miserable creature was to be immolated on the Savannah. George, with a more than usually extended grin, announced that, "if masra no wantee him, him courree see and daree (tell) masra." "Oh! go and be hanged, you brute," I shouted, pitching at his handsome head the first thing within reach. He was outside like a lightning-flash. A minute later a large smile irradiated the threshold of the apartment, and with a "gran tangee, mi masra," he vanished. Thereafter, from my window I could see him and some of the house servants escorting with much gallantry three or four of my hostess's dusky, turbaned handmaids to the scene of entertainment. Shortly before breakfast George reappeared in my room. His grins were most persuasive, but I would not be wheedled into open inquisitiveness. At last, putting a few deftly finishing touches to the smoothing out of a pair of white unmentionables, he ejaculated with a frenzied roll of the eyes: "Her raati, masra, done raati. Her todo (killed) one pekin ningere and madee brafo" — then disappeared, probably in anticipation of a collision with the book I held in my hand. I afterwards learned that the woman had been a plantation slave a little way down river. She was a pure African, of a tribe addicted to cannibalism. This tendency had so far overcome the wretch, that she decoyed the infant of another negress a little way into the bush, killed it, and brought home and cooked the little body. She invited the mother, among others of the women, to share the soup, and it was asserted that the poor mother was the first to suspect. The infamous woman was brought up to town, tried, and condemned to be burnt alive.
The Dutch government was formerly very severe in its sentences. These are now, of course, very much moderated, emancipation having put an end to much of the necessity for the old condition of things. Shortly before my arrival in the colony, three men were condemned to be burnt in presence of the governor and suite. They were the ringleaders of a band of colored conspirators who had attempted to set fire to some stoves on the plain with the object of putting Paramaribo in conflagration, and had thus earned the penalty imposed by the Dutch law against incendiaries. With the last movement of their swollen tongues they mingled their curses on the white men with the rattling tattoo of the government drums.
I was not sorry to find myself, after a considerable stay in town, in a tent-boat on the Saramaca, en route for plantation. The country watered by the Saramaca is generally flat, and the landscape possesses few objects of interest. But the glory of the scene is supplied by the gorgeous vegetation. All along the river-course its shores are lined with brilliant labyrinths of cacti and algaroba, while high above their masses of glowing color floats the delicious green shade of the palm-branches, whose graceful shafts shoot up, glistening and straight, amid the huge trunks of a multitude of forest giants. Every here and there a vista of canal opens up a fresh avenue of floral magnificence and variety of foliage. Through the tropical haze of the lime-perfumed atmosphere the brilliant bodies of the scarlet flamingoes rock and sway in the marshy shallows amid the blinding sunshine, for in the distance their legs are discernible. In the radiance of the shafts of golden light that penetrate the green forest fastnesses, myriads of birds, great and small, dart and gyrate their dazzling forms in the scintillating ray-stream. Only now and then the rippling trail of a water-snake is cast alongside the boat, or the lily-laden surface of the river is disfigured by the hideous jaw bone that belongs to nothing in the world but the alligator.
We were about half a day's journey down river, when, suddenly, and with great alacrity, the negro boatmen put about and backed into the nearest creek. This, I found, was to avoid the passing of the leprosy-boat — with its heavily flapping white sails and black awnings — on its way from town to the leprosy grounds. On a future occasion I was to have the privilege of visiting that beautiful abode of loathsomeness, and receiving the hospitality of the devoted fathers who had retired there. The work of the priest in charge of this Dutch leper asylum was hardly such as that of father Damien at Molokai, for here the clergyman had his own residence, apart in a certain degree from contagion, although within the grounds. Cure of a disease, then universally supposed to be incurable, was never attempted. But the comfort of the unhappy creatures was carefully and kindly ministered to, and the pastor preached to them from the flower-enwreathed terrace. Direct contact with his afflicted flock was not desired — nor even sanctioned — by his authorities. Yet I have heard of many cases of true heroism on the part of those brave sons of the Church who have voluntarily chosen such a pastorate. We had more than once our own contribution of putrefying living humanity to send to that lovely garden land. On one occasion I noticed one of the women of the gang lounging about the quarters with her hand wrapped in raw cotton, and remarked upon it to one of the overseers. He nodded gravely; feared she'd have to go; and so in a day or two she did. I was really grieved at the loss in the same way of a bright little mulatto of fourteen, who used to be in the cookery. He was such a funny little chap; had taught my monkeys and parrots enough tricks to have made my fortune had I turned showman, and with his inimitable mimicry used to keep in fits the men who came down from town to see me. I noticed the lobes of his ears begin to swell; presently other symptoms followed, and Chicory had to go.
Strangely enough, however, I never felt the loathing of this disease — possibly because I am unacquainted with it in the advanced stage — that I did of that horrible elephantiasis. This is peculiar to mulattoes; pure blacks rarely get it. Surinam people insisted that it was commoner in Demerara than anywhere else. As to that I cannot positively say. Certainly the worst case I ever saw was in Demerara; and it is associated in my memory with the biggest act of cowardice I have ever committed. I had been out about three years when business took me to Curaçoa and to a place on the Venezuelan coast. The ship by which I returned had Georgetown for her destination. As I could do business there also, that suited me well enough; and I trusted to finding an early vessel going down coast. When we put in at Georgetown, the place looked as if everybody was dead. Closed jalousies, silent streets, hardly a soul, black or white, to be seen. I went to the hotel I always had put up at when there. My hostess, a mulatto woman (freed mulatto women used to be great at hotel-keeping in the three Guianas) at once let me know the reason. There was a plague of smallpox in the town. People had it by hundreds and were dying by scores. I ruminated a little while in the shade of the hotel gallery. Presently the clinking of a glass or something drew my attention to the verandah opposite. There, seated at one of the small tables, rum-besotted and repulsive, was the most fearful case of elephantiasis I ever saw. The limbs were of an awfulness beyond description; the trunk a bloated mass. A scare took hold of me. Remember, these were the days before the very strict enforcement of vaccination; and I had seen a victim or two in England. My mirror and my common sense told me I was not an Adonis. But I was a fresh English lad, upon whom even the climate of Guiana had had comparatively little effect, and — well, I had my hostess in again. She had a grievance, I remember. In a depressing state of things she had forgotten she lived in a British colony, had struck a saucy negress, and was now herself smarting under the consequent five-dollar fine. However, she was able to tell me of the captain of a little coaster who might be persuaded to drop me down at our creek as fast as could be, and next afternoon saw me on Santa Sarita. Months after I looked rather ruefully at the detailed item chronicled in the plantation books.
While on the subject of mulatto hostesses — we had a treasure in our Miss Susie at Paramaribo. The most surprising dinners in the most surprisingly short time could that talented manageress send you in. Her house was perfect. The polished floors were an invitation to vanity. The huge beds, with their multitudinous down pillows and ample mosquito-net, were castles of indolence. No doctor could surpass Miss Susie in the knowledge and treatment of diseases peculiar to the colony. The colored women used to be vastly learned in simples. I have known many of them who, as herbalists, deserved diplomas. Rare was the case of snake-poisoning, sunstroke, or fever, to which Miss Susie was unequal. I myself owe much to her of a magnificent recovery from an attack of that fiend of the Guiana coast — Yellow Jack. Still my case retires before the experience of a young Englishman fresh out from Dorsetshire some forty-five years ago. His people owned an estate in the colony, and, like myself, on him had fallen the lot of representing his family among the Hollanders. He had only been a week or two in Paramaribo when he took malignant fever. We were then atrociously off for doctors — not so much as to number — for I can recollect two or three impecunious Dutchmen, and a clever but coca-eating Spaniard. An American, however, Sladen by name — about the coarsest piece of human nature you can imagine, and of heathenish ignorance — had contrived to secure the practice of the town. He was called in to see young Fielding, whose fever by this time had reached, as is not uncommon in the tropics, the coma stage. Sladen tramped up to the bed, looked at the poor young fellow lying there far from a loving home, and interjected, amid the frequent results of tobacco-chewing, "There's a gone coon! I'll just tell them to send up 'is box fur ye, Miss Susie." The box, alias coffin, soon arrived; they keep such things on hand in lands where Yellow Jack unfurls his flag. But, meanwhile, Miss Susie and a couple of negro women had shut themselves into that chamber which Sladen had thought the chamber of death. Three hours after they came out, wearied but radiant, and in a few days more Fielding sent back that box to the store. What the remedial measures were we never knew, Fielding could only recollect drops being forced between his teeth, and submitting dreamily to a vigorous massage. But I do know that the next time Fielding and I came home we hunted through Regent Street and Bond Street, and found no finery too good for Miss Susie's black but comely face and figure.
When I got settled on the plantation I found several arrangements which occupied my attention considerably — and which were very different from the present order of things — though plantation life is a stagnant enough form of existence under any government or code. In these pre-emancipation days we had no coolies to deal with, and no petty courts to hold us in awe if we were tempted to slap an insolent nigger. In justice to the Dutch one must add that wanton cruelty on the part of a slave-owner was promptly punished whenever it came to the ears of government. Apart from all reasons of humanity, I never could understand a man's deliberately damaging his own property. Certainly the annals of slavery prove that brutality could reach that insensate degree. Personally, I met with very little occasion for severity. When I went down I found a contented, well-fed gang of over two hundred in the fields, and a better set of house servants than I have ever been served by at home. In addition to those there were a few superannuated negroes who eked out their days in the capacity of huntsman, fisherman, poultryman, sick-houseman, and such like — for we never sold our aged hands on Santa Sarita. There were also some half score watchmen, whose duty it was to attend to the sluice-gates which regulated the irrigation of the cotton-fields and held in check the stealthy waters of the vast mud-flats of the Surinam coast; those slow, hungry waters that creep onward and onward, and rise ever higher and higher with the incoming tide, longing to lave all vegetation with their brackish, weedy waves.
And then the babies! an army of them. Yellow, sandy babies all over the quarters; fluffy babies in the cotton-drying houses; slimy babies in the duck pond; sticky babies, all over molasses, in the cookery; shrieking, laughing babies in the verandahs and galleries; babies everywhere, sable studies of the nude, fattened up and Nixey-polished and slippery-bodied like eels. To a youngster as I was then, their little crops of curls, not unlike the wool of a black highland lamb, were the queerest things to finger. Perhaps it was that the place had been so long without a resident master, or perhaps that other masters did not find the fascination I did in these infantile African heads; but the mothers vastly appreciated my attention to the "pekininnies" as being a rare compliment.
By and by I got used to babies all over the place; but there was one sight I never did get used to — three poor black wretches in chains; great, heavy iron chains, riveted solidly on ankles and wrists; two men and one woman. About a year before my going out a very cleverly laid scheme of flight had been put in practice by nine negroes along shore — three of ours, four of the neighboring plantation gang, and two from a cocoa estate further southward. The runaways had neither compass to guide them nor any geographical instinct as to the "lay" of the land. They made their bold effort with the intention of making for "Freeman's Ground," Demerara; but took just the opposite direction, got caught in Cayenne, and handed over to the Dutch government, who restored them, chained for life, to their owners. Now, these chains I dared not, by the law under which I lived, strike off. How I hated the sight of the mute misery of these unhappy slaves as they toiled up and down the long rows of the cotton-field, under a Surinam sun, mind, and did day after day the same work that their unshackled companions found heavy enough. Many a time have I shirked the morning ride round the fields, and sorely tried Fles's patience, by insisting instead on going over mechanically some details in the books that weeks before I had mastered. Or I would try to delude myself into the belief that a Dutch paper must be revised before being despatched for town, although I knew that I wrote Dutch intelligible enough, notwithstanding my conversational escapades. At last a charming visitor I had down from town helped me. She was a lovely girl, of Spanish family settled in Cayenne, and she had just married my particular chum in Paramaribo—an Englishman holding official position under Dutch government, and a persona grata with both the governor and his delightful wife. They had come to pass a little time with me. I could not prevent her seeing the unfortunates. She was a brilliant, energetic girl, bent on seeing everything, very different from the heavy Dutch women who were my neighbors. As I had expected, she was horror-struck. She vowed to help me devotedly — notwithstanding that her husband would only see the legal side of the thing. The landrost, or deputy-governor, of our district lived just up coast a bit. He and I were on friendly enough terms. He was still garçon, and nothing if not gallant. My fair visitor and I joined our diplomatic heads in blackest conspiracy. We called upon the landrost, and had him down at dinner and to breakfast; on which occasions I took my solemnest oath to George to suspend him instantly from the tallest cocoanut-tree if everything was not fit for Epicurus himself. When we considered that the Dutchman had arrived at a sufficiently advanced state of infatuation, my sweet abettor approached business. What was even a Dutchman to do? He could not refuse the lady to unfetter at least the woman; and before my Vivien unloosed him from her spell, he had been lured into promising his intercession with the governor with regard to the men. One month thereafter I had the magnificent pleasure of standing within the torrid zone of the sooty plantation smithy, and seeing filed asunder the manacles those three human beings had worn day and night for nearly six years. As the horrid gyves fell with resonant clanking on the floor, the tears flowed in torrents down the negroes' dusky cheeks; their lips trembled so that articulate words could not come. I told them I could never have done it for them; and when Mrs. Palgrave next came down, the whole gang gave her such an ovation we feared the military would turn out from the nearest outpost thinking we had an émeute.
Once we ourselves had a runaway to shelter. Old Tonio, our huntsman, found him half dead on the edge of the hush, and with the help of some of the others got him up to the sick-house. He was in a fearful condition; but we had him fed up a bit, and, when better, he told me that he had run away from a bad overseer in Cayenne, but that his strength had failed him and he had only managed to reach us on his way to British Guiana. Slave-owner though I was myself, it did make a man feel proud to think that his was the country under whose flag every human creature was free. I was thinking how I should tell this luckless negro that, by the laws under which I held my land, I was bound to give him up to the authorities, when George appeared, looking savage enough, and wanting to speak to masra. Three government servants had come to take our refugee to town. Negroes going and coming from neighboring properties must have carried the news of his being with us until it reached the ears of some official. Discretion is the last virtue of the black man. I saw the men, freed mulattoes, and enjoined merciful treatment of the fugitive, who was most grateful for the kindness he had received. He told me that when he got back to his place he would be very shamefully entreated. Starvation used, I believe to be a feature of the French system of slave punishment. But it had not been such a good year with us, and I could not accede to his request to buy him, for I was still much under supervision financially.
That the negro loves a dance is to every one a fact of ancient history. Our people were given a grand one to celebrate my first arrival on plantation; and that dance so delighted my own youthful heart with its juggernaut music of fiddles, banjos, pot-lid cymbals, and ear-splitting drum (improvised out of the hollow stump of a tree with a sheepskin stretched across) that I hardly ever had friends down from town without treating them to a gang dance. The scene was not without its own beauty as, in the clear tropical night we sat in the galleries, fanned by a soft breeze from the shore, and watched the not ungraceful evolutions of the sable bodies, treading, torch in hand, their, to us, bewildering mazes. A bonfire of the torches and a dole of rum finished off the treat — always before it became too prolonged. I don't think we ever caused any one trouble through these little festivities — although, regarding them, a surly neighbor who was notorious for his difficulties with his gang, used to remonstrate more forcibly than politely with me. On one occasion we narrowly escaped getting ourselves into a mess. I had a good many people, nearly all English, visiting me, when, just before dinner, somebody remembered that it was the birthday of our good and gracious, and then youthful queen. In accordance with plantation law a couple of big guns stood mounted on carriages outside the portico, ready in case of an insurrection of the slaves. It was proposed to fire three salvos in our sovereign lady's honor. No sooner said than done. Amid much effervescence of British loyalty the three volleys resounded far and wide through the still air of the quickly fading West Indian twilight. In another moment George was at my side. "Masra, three guns a signal; quick, masra, another!" A minute more, and another shot was echoing along the coast, assuring the soldiers of the barracks some miles up that there was no rising on Santa Sarita.
It was not until some four years after this that the famous Wyaba revel took place. A rich and grabbing old cocoa-planter further in the interior died, leaving all the property of which he was possessed to three nephews at home in "Ould Ireland "— all cousins — whom he had never seen. After some time the three heirs — O'Hara, Grady, and Hannan — came out to view their inheritance, resolved on having a rattling good time. I met them first in town, where they had got to know everybody; went to the ball at Government House on the king of Holland's birthday, and by the fascination of their dare-devil "go," had sent all the nicest girls in Paramaribo off their heads. When they had done about enough outré things there, they got tired of town and came down to formally talk over their estate. It was quite in accordance with colonial custom, seeing that they had received so much hospitality, for them to have a big gathering on this occasion, and invite all the jolliest people they had met. And I will say the Irishmen entertained us royally. Theirs was a very big plantation, working a gang nearly double ours — but a dull, underfed, scurvy lot. It was part of the programme that these people were to have a dance. Such a thing had never been heard of in "old masra's" time, and I don't believe a single pair of legs in that black company knew how to set about kicking out — nigger legs though they were. Poor souls! their days, as long as they could remember, had been passed from earliest morn till latest eve, dragging everlastingly across and across these monotonous cocoa-grounds, in constant dread of the cut of the overseer's whip. It was plain the dance would have to be set going for them. Meanwhile Hannan shouts from the gallery: "I say, haven't you blacks ever had a dance before?" Chorus: "No, masra." "Wasn't the sainted old party good to you?" Fortissimo chorus: "No, masra." "Did he often have you lashed?" Chorus, con fuoco: "Yes, masra." O'Hara steps forward: "Here you niggers, wouldn't it do you good to have a dance over the old fellow's grave — just to have it out? Isn't he buried here somewhere?" Sensation; and Wagnerian chorus, ad libitum, and incapable of interpretation. Here was a thunderbolt fallen in the midst of us slave-owners. One white man — slave owner, too, jointly, to the tune of some five hundred souls, proposing a negro dance over the grave of another white man; not to mention relationship and obligation. There was a stampede to the quiet green spot beyond the quarters, where, within the tall, thick lime-hedge, lay the bones of the former master of the place. In the rush none of the excited Irishmen took note of who went or who stayed; and several of us quietly left our apologies with a frightened-looking elderly negress, who was serving at the buffet. But for the intercession of good-natured acquaintances our Hibernian friends would have had a mauvais quart d'heure with the government. As it was, O'Hara and Hannan got forty-eight hours in which to quit the colony forever. Grady, against whom there was not the charge of active incitement (simply because he hadn't a chance) on payment of a fine was allowed to remain to conclude the legal formalities; a concession which — on his speedy marriage with a Dutch lady — was extended to permission to take up residence.
Being on an early occasion after that up in town I got a friendly hint from officialdom that perhaps, for a time, it might be better to discontinue small negro festivities. Some of my Dutch neighbors had preferred growling to speaking frankly to me. For a year or two thereafter I worked very hard, carried out various improvements and extensions, and introduced some newer machinery, so that entertaining was less in my head. At home in England many years after, a lady, also on furlough, told me she had not forgotten the shock she had received once at my table in the earlier days, when in reply to my question, "How many wives have you, George?" — the grave reply came prompt from behind my chair, "Seven, sah." George had, of course, been always quite above the gang dances. But when, in later years, I used to come to town periodically, he set me up in quite an establishment, bringing along some dozen male and female servants under his command; and they did have high times. After a liberal appropriation of my garments — including my freshest tie and pair of gloves — and equipped with my calling cards and best cigarette-case, George was really far more irresistible than I could ever dream of becoming. With all the heroism of mute resignation, I used to watch him set off to a colored party, escorting the ladies of our family — for in town the whole household owned my patronymic. I once broached the subject of matrimony to George, but he assured me that his good breeding would not permit of anything in such bad form as his taking precedence of me in entering the holy estate. So I could only be silent — and sorry for a pretty little mulatto girl up street.
A few years before emancipation was really declared, when, as yet, the States-General at the Hague held it over our heads like the sword of Damocles, inasmuch as they did not seem to assure us of anything like adequate compensation, the faint tones of the not far-distant jubilee were wafted on the breeze into the quarters of every plantation in Surinam. We had very little trouble indeed. A weaker head got frenzied in anticipation now and then. But after the great day had come and gone, the majority of our people stayed with us as trusted servants. Very occasionally, while emancipation was yet ahead, evil communications from the negroes of other plantations would corrupt the good manners of one or two of the gang. Once, on my way from the canal jetty to the house, after a few days' absence, I encountered a much bedizened big toad, a very loudly got-up creature, indeed, gay in old ribbon and many-hued calico rags. From very early times this has been a danger signal amongst the negroes, generally a warning that your life was to be attempted. As I had returned some days before I was expected, I could not be sure whether the thing had been laid in my path or in that of Fles. However, Fles would not be so likely to be coming from the jetty. I passed by the object and went straight to the manager's rooms. He and I were the only white men on the place. He told me he had recently, without thinking, committed an indiscretion rare for him. About the grounds near the quarters he had one day come upon a tub turned up; it was an untidy object, and he told the mulatto overseer who was with him to have it removed. Next day he found it had not been touched, and he commanded one of the negroes, under threat of the lash, to take it away. The boy, trembling, turned the thing over, and thence began slowly to uncoil itself a huge aboma, which, luckily for Fles and the boy, was half asleep, and glided away listlessly into the guava-grove. The serpent was, of course, a fetish, and the gang were no doubt furious against Fles. I, too, recollected that I had been wanting in consideration for the religious opinions of my people. One sultry evening, a week or two before the occurrence of the toad episode, I was riding up coast and had one of the boys with me, with bow and arrow, to bring down some birds whose wings I wanted. We passed a magnificent cocoanut palm, and I told the boy, who was an unrivalled marksman, to shoot me down some of the refreshing fruit. He entreated me not to ask him, became very nervous and excited, and finally said he should "get masra some much finer ones further on." Insubordination had for some time been very general on plantations throughout the colony. I had determined to put down with an iron hand the first signs of it on our place. I compelled the boy to get me down the fruit. Only when he had shot down as much as we could take along did the idea of a fetish dawn upon me; and as nothing then followed I had thought no more of the matter. Fles and I were both very vigilant during the following days, but nothing unpleasant occurred. The Indians, too, were about us much during that spring. They were staunch friends of the government, and I think Fles must have given a hint to old Pedro, the leader of the tribe, for groups of them seemed to be constantly squatting on the verge of the bush, or paddling up our canals with canoes full of basket-work, and their often not inartistic pottery, for me to inspect. Old Pedro, terra-cotta as to skin, black and lank as to hair, and possessed of broad but intelligent features lit up by marvellous eyes, was a sleuth hound where a runaway negro was concerned. When he could not bring the fugitive back alive, he did not fail to bring his scalp to the governor, for which he received a stipulated sum. To see these Indians, with their firmly knit but most agile figures, walk along the streets of Paramaribo, you would have imagined them the lords of the place. Not so much as by a glance, not even by the shadow of a consciousness of their existence, would an Indian acknowledge a negro. In the calm imperturbability of his loathing, to the red man the black man was as if he were not. These children of the forest, unconquered, untamed, are the friends of the white man, and can be deferential to the dominant race. But the slave the Indian spurns and contemns, holding him infinitely less than the worm wriggling in the clay out of which he moulds his water-bottles and melon-plates.
Perhaps it was because of small incidents of the sort mentioned that I remained so very apathetic after listening to a tale related to me by one of the watchmen. He had been on some errand a considerable way into the interior; and he came to me, hot and elated, immediately on his return, and with gleaming eyes told me that he had seen gold — real, glistening, yellow gold — "over dar by ria" (river). His geography was most elementary, but, from what I could gather, his "find" lay some little way within the bush, between a tributary of the Surinam River and the coast. I cannot very well, at this remote time, define or even exactly recall my feelings on receiving his information. Possibly I was much pre-occupied. At any rate I must have felt exceedingly little interest; may have been suspicious, or have utterly disbelieved the story; or supposed that the negro had seen, as is not infrequent in the interior, some gold-dust in the river-bed. I may have had doubts whether it was not a decoy. Certainly I might have organized an equipped expedition; but I troubled no more about the matter. It is at least a coincidence that the Surinam gold-field — of which people connected with the colony have heard so much talk and seen so little result — lies in the exact neighborhood my negro described to me as the scene of his discovery. It might be worth the while of either the colonial government or an influential company to turn its attention to those mines. Until now, through a bad working system and lack of capital, they have not had a fair chance. Possibly something more gratifying might result than the tiny nuggets, which do certainly make pretty lace-pins for the wives and daughters of subscribers, but do as certainly not induce a rush of shareholders.
Echoes of the sea-depths of that familiar South American coast are borne in upon me as I write. The accents of ocean's eternal tongue play through the banana-forests, and, traversing the zones, resound dimly in my ears; and with them come memories of the dull avalanche-roar of a tropical thunderstorm, and of the quivering gleam of a West Indian moon amid the tamarinds. I go down to the beach by my northern home. Instead of the weedy surf drifting slowly over the oozy cotton-fields, I see the great green and white waves fling themselves high and higher upon the mighty quartz rocks; but it is everywhere the same cadence, beneath the English cliffs or upon tropical flats. It is the same refrain that Sophocles heard on the Ægean, that sad Hero heard by the Hellespont, that Byron heard everywhere nigh or on ocean, the same that age after age hears as the waves of human life flow and ebb "down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world." Ever and always they "bring the eternal note of sadness in." The last time I saw Santa Santa it had become a wilderness whereon the foot of man never trod. The estate had been abandoned some years previously, the hands being wanted for a more money-bringing cocoa plantation; a new acquisition, and an undertaking not so subject to the serious delays caused by excessive rains or overflow of bottom-lands, and not involving the frequent necessary replanting. And so nature had been left sole ruler of the old place. At the touch of her sceptre had sprung up all the pomp and splendor of the tropics. From out of the brine that gloated over all, the golden and crimson, and bronzen and empurpled orchids broke forth in wanton luxuriousness. Great gold-dusted sunflowers, water-lilies that shone afar in their pearly radiance; the white gleaming of the lotus and the glistening eau-de-nil of the trembling pitcher-plant; the great scarlet cacti and the star-like blossoms of the myrtle; the sweet, delicate purple or conch-shell pink of the passion-flower; the sheeny green of the huge dracænas and castor-plants and deeper-hued masses of ferny undergrowth — all mingled and repeated themselves in brilliant carnival, while over everything lingered the fragrance of the young limes. Gorgeous butterflies coquetted in their prettiness with those regal floral beauties swaying in the salt surf. A million birds wheeled and flittered and plunged, screaming their shrill, vext cries as they hovered and grouped and darted again across the dream landscape that quivered through the shimmer of the hot, vaporous haze. To me it was as the border tract that lay without the hedge which guarded the enchanted land of Sleeping Beauty. Only, I no more, but the tossing, trembling sea waves from beyond, were to penetrate this mystic garden of sleep.
It felt chill. The awakening night wind began to moan softly. I turned my face towards the quickly setting sun, and retraced my steps riverwards to where my boat was slowly rocking in the shallow, with muffled gurgle and rippling monotone.