58 G. L. Butn- plantations ; and that besides these there is the fort of Essequibo, which has been founded more than thirty years, and that " the per- son who was sent to reconnoitre was told by the Dutch that they were expecting more people for the purpose of completing the set- tlement of those rivers, and two shiploads of negroes." And in a later letter of the same month he is able to state that the Dutch in the Pomeroon and the Moruca now number " more than a thousand men, with four hundred Indians and a greater number of negroes, founding a new Brazil." Similar in purport are the sworn state- ments of one Clement Gunter, a member of the Dutch colony, who in 1655, on a trading expedition into the Orinoco, was arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish authorities. Of the history of the second Dutch colony in Pomeroon and Moruca (1686-1689) nothing new is told us; nor is our know- ledge of the later Dutch occupancy of those rivers materially in- creased by the later researches. The British searchers seem even to have overlooked or underrated a land-grant of whose existence I have knowledge through another channel and which it can now be no breach of faith to publish for the behoof of history — it is the grant to Frederic Beissenteufel, on January 6, 1760, of a thousand acres on the west side of the Moruca at its mouth.' Of the exist- ence of this plantation we had known, and that it was at the mouth of the river, but not on which side ; and the grant is interesting, not alone as our one proof of Dutch settlement west of that river, but because it fixes as well the site of the Dutch lookout estab- lished here in 1757 and of the fortified post maintained on the same spot from 1 784 onward. As we know these to have been on Beis- senteufel's land, they too must have been at the west of the Moruca. But, if British search missed this at home, it unearthed in Spain a precious paper which had eluded the search of the Venezuelans — the lost diary of Inciarte, the young Spanish officer who in 1779 made, as " Commissioner of Settlements on the Eastern Side of the Lower Orinoco," an elaborate reconnoissance of the whole re- gion from Orinoco to Pomeroon, and whose summary report had alone been hitherto known. Interesting especially is his minute de- scription of the Moruca post — " an ordinary house, roofed with thatch and barred with large beams, without mud and wattle," its means of defense consisting of " two four-pounders and sundry swivel-guns, all dismounted." Other evidence of Dutch occupa- tion, whether in the Moruca or the Pomeroon, he seems to have ' " Aen Fredrik Bysenteufel syn toegestaen een duysent akkers aen de Westsyde van Moroca van de nieuwe brandwagt de kreek opwaarts, als mede eenige broodgronden, mits de Indiaenen geen hinder doende."
