MR. PALGRAVE ON DUTCH GUIANA.* MR. PALGRAVE looks back with
pathetic regret to old days in the East. Those who recollect—and who that has once read does not recollect ?—his book on Arabia will share that regret. Nor does this mean any disrespect to the volume before us, which is indeed a vivid, striking picture of the country which the writer visited. But the difference between the two may be thus expressed. Mr. Palgrave has visited Dutch Guiana, but he lived in the East. Let us be thankful, however, for what we have. The rapid im- pressions of so practised an observer are valuable, not to speak of the literary merit which is sure to be found in what comes from Mr. Palgrave's pen.
Dutch Guiana is not, indeed, a country of which it is difficult to get a fairly satisfactory idea in a short time. There is but a small part which there is any practical utility in visiting. The cultivated land bears but a small proportion to the area of the whole :—
"Out of a million and a half of acres, the rough estimate 'of land superficies in Dutch Guiana, about four hundred thousand acres appear on the public records as having been, not simultaneously, but at different times granted out for cultivation, and of these, again, not quite thirty thousand are actually occupied ; so that the cultivated land stands in proportion to that granted as about one-thirteenth ; to the total, of one-fiftieth only. Of this small oasis amid an ocean of forest, hardly an acre but is situated in the close neighbourhood of the capital, or along the lower courses of the rivers; not a single estate is to be found at a distance of more than forty miles in a straight line from the sea."
We may compare the country to Egypt. It lies almost wholly about the river. Whatever attraction for the naturalist and sportsman the almost unknown forests may have, for the traveller who seeks to estimate the social and economical condition of the colony they have no importance. And just as any one who has visited Cairo, and sailed up the Nile, may claim with much truth to have seen Egypt, so the traveller who has spent a few weeks in Paramaribo, the capital, and made a voyage of about forty miles up the Surinam, has not much more to learn about Dutch Guiana, except, indeed, that intimate knowledge of the people which comes only after long residence, and not always after that.
Mr. Palgrave visited the country in order to satisfy himself by
• Dutch Guiana. By W. G. Palgrave. Author of " A Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia." With Plan and Map. London: Macmillan and Co. 1ST6. personal inquiry whether it is really true, as is often said, that the prosperity of British Guiana itself, once a possession of Holland, is built on a foundation of Dutch institutions and Dutch industry. It would be well, it occurred to him, to find out how the colony that was still under the same rule was going on. He found it, indeed, in a condition that could scarcely be called prosperous :— "Though a comfortable, and so far at least as the majority of its in- dwellers are concerned, a contented town, Paramaribo cannot, if com- pared, say, with Georgetown or Bridgetown, Kingston or even Port d'Espagne, take rank as exactly prosperous or progressive. True, the streets of the Creole quarters of the city are constantly extending themselves; there, now rows of small, neat dwellings, each with its gay garden and well-stocked provision-ground, spring up year by year, but in the commercial and what may, in a general way, be termed the European quarter of the town, large, half-empty stores, tall, neglected- looking houses, a prevailing want of fresh repair—here deficient paint, there broken wood-work—besides a certain general air of listlessness, verging on discouragement, and an evident insufficiency of occupation, not from want of will, bat of means, all combine to give an appearance of stagnation suggestive of better days,' for the European colonists at least, in the past, and contrasting almost painfully with the more thriving back streets and suburbs beyond. If any of my readers have visited Italy in the sad, bygone years when Italy was a geographical name only, and there compared, as they may well have done, the trim ' Borghi ' of Grand-Ducal Florence with hor stately but dilapidated Lungarno, or have, at Genoa, seen the contrast of those times between the palatial loneliness of Strada Balbi and the pretty, grove-embosomed villas of recent commercial date, they might, under all local differences of circumstance and colouring, recognise something not dissimilar, both is the meaning implied and,effect produced, in this Transatlantic capital of Dutch Guiana."
Mr. Palgrave can account for this state of things without im- puting blame to the colonists. The chief cause, he thinks, is want of capital, which is attracted, for the most part, to the promising region of Java. Then there has been the frequent change of masters, and that which has tried all European colonies so severely,—emancipation, not the less depressing because it was unwisely deferred. There have been fearful outbreaks of fever and more than one destructive conflagration. On the whole, Mr. Palgrave thinks that the Dutch have managed their colony well. As to their dealing with the negro population, he is very emphatic :— ".And thus the ex-slave has, with a rapidity of change to which, I believe, no parallel can be found in the history of any other West Indian colony, blended into national and even, within certain limits, into social unison with his masters,—a unison so little impaired by the inevitable, however involuntary, rivalry consequent on differences, some artificial, indeed, but some immanent, of caste and race, as to afford the best hopes for the future of the entire colony."
This testimony is the more remarkable, because the Dutch are commonly believed to be very hard in their dealing with subject- races. What Mr. Palgrave has to say on these and other social topics is interesting in the highest degree. As to the plan by which he proposes to recruit the insufficient population of the colony, viz., the importing of negroes from the East Coast of Africa, it has, we must own, a dangerous look, nor is it improved by his proposal to abolish as useless the stipulation for a return passage. Where are the negroes to come from? Not from the coast,—there they are ready to trade, but not to emigrate. And how can they be brought from the interior except by force ? It is only among an intelligent people, like the Hindoos and the Chinese, that labour-emigration can be carried on without degenerating into slavery.
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