bice, Demerara, and Essequibo, was, till a comparatively recent period, Dutch also. Now I had often heard it affirmed that the immense superstructure of prosperity raised by British energy on the shores of Demerara owed its oft-tried solidity, if not in whole, at least in no inconsiderable part, to the well-devised foundation work bequeathed us as a parting legacy by our Batavian predecessors. Our form of administration is Dutch, so said my informants, our local institutions Dutch, our seawalls are Dutch, our canals, our sluices, the entire system of irrigation and drainage from which the land derives its unparalleled fertility and we our wealth, all are Dutch; we have made English use of these things, no doubt, and the merit of that use is ours; but the merit of the things themselves is not all our own, it belongs rather to those who first created them and gave them to the land.
How far might this be true? Colonial success amid the many failures recorded and yet recording in these very regions must be, every one will admit, a phenomenon, the sources of which would be well worth discovery; and here before me was an instance ready to hand, and a cause assigned. Why not investigate its correctness? There was time at disposal, and from Georgetown to Paramaribo is no great distance. Besides, I had already received assurance of a hearty welcome from his Excellency Van Sypesteyn, the representative of Dutch majesty in Surinam; and an invitation of the sort, when combined with that chiefest of all factors in life's calculations, neighbourhood, made the present occasion doubly favourable. So I readily determined to follow up my Demeraran visit by another to a region which, while in natural respects hardly differing for good or evil from British Guiana, had all along remained under Batavian mastership; and where consequently the original institutions of our own acquired colony might be conveniently studied unmodified, or nearly so, by foreign influences and change of rule.
From Georgetown eastward, an excellent carriage-road runs parallel to the coast, though at some distance from it inland; the drive is a pleasant one, traversing a varied succession of large estates and populous villages, interrupted here and there by patches of marsh and wood, till the journey ends on the western bank of a full-flowing river, the Berbice; beyond which lies the small town of the same name, not far from the Anglo-Batavian frontier. Here official kindness had arranged for my further progress, by putting at my disposal the trim little revenue schooner "Gazelle," that now lay at anchor off the lower town-wharf, waiting to take me for a cruise of a hundred and fifty miles; such being the distance interposed between the harbour of Berbice and the mouth of the Surinam River, where rises the capital of Dutch Guiana. A sailing-craft, however small, if in good trim, clean, possessed of a comfortable cabin, and under a steady beam-wind, all which advantages were combined in the present instance, is a welcome change from the inevitable smoke, crowding, noise, oily smell, and ceaseless roll of the largest and finest steamer ever propelled by engine. In the present instance, the crew of the "Gazelle" was to a man composed of creole, that is, colonial-born, negroes; indeed the pilot's memory reached back to the time when the terms negro and slave were identical in his own person, as in the majority of his Guiana brethren. Civil, cheerful, and obliging, as the descendants of Ham, despite of their ill-conditioned father's bad example, usually are, they were also, what for a voyage like this amid sand-banks and shoals was of more importance, good seamen, and the captain in charge a good navigator, though a black one.
"I would rather by any amount have a black crew than a white one under my orders," is a remark which I have heard made by many and many a West-Indian sea-captain, lamenting over the insubordination, drunkenness, and other offences of his men. And in fact negroes, like their half-cousins the Arabs, have naturally in themselves the making of excellent seamen, active, handy, and daring, besides being far more amenable to the restraints of discipline, and less so to the seductions of the brandy or rum bottle, than the average material of which white crews are nowadays formed. And should our own strangely scattered and disunited West-Indian possessions ever realize among themselves the ideal "cluster of small states," the not unreasonable hope of other statesmen besides the romantic descendant of the Contarinis, such a confederacy might even more easily recruit her indispensable navy than her less necessary standing army from among the black creoles of her own islands and coasts.
A brisk wind was blowing, and the white cloud-drift scudding before the Atlantic trade-wind over the pale blue vault had in it something more akin to a Mediterranean than to a tropical sky, as we
