The Guiana Boundary 57 More fortunate was the inquiry into the doings of the Dutch on the Essequibo. Upon the earhest history of that settlement, it is true, no fresh light was thrown, unless one take seriously the Span- ish rumor ' that a part of the Dutch colonists expelled from Tobago in 1636 " finally settled on the river Essequibo, a hundred leagues off, a hundred and twenty in number with many negroes " — a rumor which, however unreliable in itself and discredited by the silence of Dutch records, gains a touch of plausibility from the " sap of sugar cane" sent home by the Essequibo commander in the following spring, but which, even if credible, loses all significance through the known return to Holland of the Essequibo colonists in the sum- mer of 1637. On the character and activities of the colony just at the end of the seventeenth century, however, a flood of knowledge is brought us by the discovery and the publication in full of an offi- cial diary of its administration covering the two years from July i, 1699, to June 14, 1 70 1 — a document filling more than a hundred printed pages. Yet this gossipy journal's yield for the history of the colony's civilization is much greater than for that of its boun- daries. As to the whereabouts of these it tells us nothing ; but no- where had we so vivid a picture of the part played in the life of the colony by its outrunners and postholders. From it we first learn of the existence somewhere above the rapids in the Cuyuni of a dye-store (/. c, a station for the bartering-in of annatto from the Indians) such as we already knew to have existed somewhere on the Mazaruni. To our knowledge of Dutch doings in the Pomeroon and the Moruca the new research was of especial profit. In the neglected archives of the old Dutch town of Veere the British searchers found a body of papers which nearly or quite doubles our know- ledge of the Guiana colony planted in 1658 by the Walcheren cities. Especially is this true as regards its obscure later years. From a long letter written in March of 1663 by the then Commandeur in the Pomeroon, J. De Fijn, we learn not only of the thrift and im- portance of the colonists settled on the Moruca, but furthermore of the maintenance in that river of a fort, known as the Hitis Nassau. The prosperity of this colony is confirmed by fresh Spanish testi- mony. Writing from Santo Thome in March, 1662, to the King of Spain, Don Pedro de Viedma reports that " he had sent a person to reconnoitre the settlements," and that "there are two founda- tions, one of 150 Dutch and another of 280, and to these are added 200 wealthy Indians, of those expelled from Brazil, and that in the two settlements they have introduced 1500 negro slaves for their ' In Don Juan Desologuren's memorandum of November 19, 1637, mentioned
