Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed down near a lightship marked Suriname Rivier to take on a pilot who looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or Cayenne. The Antilles manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed, almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights.

Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro, especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most ardently sensual.

The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners, chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially, the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians, whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy fatalists.

On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches. All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns, which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not apparent. The Predikant, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four sermons—four, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy.

The Reformed and the Lutheran churches of Paramaribo alternate in their Sunday night services, in order that competition shall not cut down still lower their congregations. From the church the crowd went, almost intact, to the “Kino,” as the “movies” are called in Surinam. The paternal government burdens these—there are three, all owned by Jews—with many stern rules. The films must be run by hand, not by motor; since the hard times incident to the World War only two performances a week were allowed; the show must be over by 10:30; and so on, until one became amply convinced that it was no happy-go-lucky Latin government that ruled over these sedate African Dutchmen. But there are limits to suppression. To me, fresh from Brazil and the blasé, drawing-room silence which prevails in its cinemas, the most striking part of this performance was the almost constant howling and screaming of the largely negro audience, now cheering on the doll-faced hero, now shrieking threats at the top-hatted villain.

Down at the market-place along the water front there was an incredible mixture of races, tongues, and customs each morning. Dirty, almost-naked Hindu beggars slunk in and out among buyers and sellers; Javanese paused to squander the single copper left from their gambling, and plodded noiselessly on in their bare feet, munching the mouthful it yielded; Chinese women, still in the cotton trousers of their homeland, but already wearing the gay starched bandana of their adopted country, bargained with a squatting Madrasee or a pig-tailed Mohammedan from northwestern India over a handful of green plantains. But most numerous of all were guffawing negro women, almost invariably carrying something on their heads, be it only a bottle of Dutch rum sitting bolt upright. The negroes, especially of the younger generation, to whom labor bears the stigma of the lowly Javanese or Hindu, consider themselves a kind of aristocracy in this conglomerate society. The negro girl working in a shop and dressing in modern finery is too nice to carry her own bundle; she is followed by her mother in the old native dress, bearing her daughter’s burden. A negro youth whom an American resident hired as a fireman on his launch appeared in a red tie and patent leather shoes, followed by his mother and his grandmother, carrying his baggage on their heads.

It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table. Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness, we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon “tea” that was a meal in itself, and Koud Avondeten—“cold evening eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage compartments, but those glorious days are gone.

Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called “taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: Niet Drinkbaar
No boen vo dringi All higher government officials speak English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies of the minister translated into English.

One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France, but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed, he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that tongue was eminently West Indian.

The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs, though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives, especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years; therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated, but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to Holland.

Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to combat it.

The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English, Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!” “Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style, quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber, called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff had been piled up for cordwood.

The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen. The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men, though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day.

Though their original cost is somewhat less, East Indian coolies, whom the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth, as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits, but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels, or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked.

I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots. They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese, however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help, but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful housekeepers.

When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow, his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more, receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away!

Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China. The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom worthy of the least confidence.

There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility, even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of “pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it, or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of its soil in time proved permanently injurious.

In the afternoon we came to the Suriname River again, here far narrower, but swift and deep. The buttresses of a bridge had been built, but the few remaining passengers crossed in a cable-car, like that to the top of the “Sugar Loaf” in Rio, a hundred feet or more above the water. Naturally, a weekly schedule that requires two trains and a cable station to make its run must charge fabulous passenger and freight rates. We spent more than an hour getting our cargo—largely oil products and flour from the United States—into the little three-car train on the other side; then the conductor put on a new kind of cap, and we were off again. Here the soil was reddish and looked more fertile, and we seemed to have risen to a slight savannah with a cooler wind, though for the most part we were surrounded by the same monotonous jungle that had hemmed me in almost incessantly for weeks past. But here it was enlivened by what to me was the most interesting of the many races that inhabit the Guianas,—the Boschneger, or “Bush Negroes.”

In the early history of the colony her African slaves, said to have come from more warlike tribes than most of those brought to the New World, revolted and, but for the help of the Caribs and a patched-up truce, would undoubtedly have driven the white planters into the sea. In British Guiana they were eventually conquered and driven out. The Dutch, on the other hand, made peace with them, not only acknowledging their independence, but promising to pay them tribute, which they do to this day. The descendants of these black insurgents, unlike the “maroons” of Jamaica, have gone completely back to savagery and live like wild Indians, or like their ancestors in the African bush, wearing only a loin-cloth, dwelling in grass huts, eating cassava and other jungle products, and talking a corruption of Dutch and several other languages with which they have come in contact, which the Dutch themselves cannot understand. It is estimated that there are eight thousand of these wild negroes in Dutch Guiana, divided into three principal tribes, Saramacca, Becoe, and Djoeka, each ruled over by its “gran man” (“a” always as in “far”), and its tribal elders, while several thousand more, known as “bonis,” inhabit French Guiana.

A few of these black children of nature had appeared before we crossed the Suriname; now they burst forth frequently from the surrounding bush. The only evidence of humanity, except the railroad, was an occasional sheet-iron station building; yet we halted now and then where the dark mouth of a path broke the dense wall of forest-jungle on either side to unload rice, flour, and oil for the placer miners and “balata bleeders” back in the bush. In some places wild negroes had come down to act as carriers. They were splendid physical specimens, tall and more magnificently built than any race I had yet seen in South America, fit to arouse the envy of any white Sandow—except that, being paddlers of dugouts rather than walkers, their shoulders and arms were overdeveloped in proportion to their legs. Erect and haughty as Indians, without a hint of the servility we commonly associate with negroes, they were proof that the African who has returned to his natural state in the wilderness is preferable to the negro who has reverted to his natural state in the cesspools of cities and the rags of civilization. Though noticeably smaller, the women and girls—naked except from waist to thighs—who came down to peer out of the forest and see the train pass were equally fine specimens of the human animal, the young ones with plump, protruding breasts, shapely waists, and more often than not a naked baby astride one hip. The men had earrings, bracelets, rings even on their forefingers, charms of shells and the like about the ankles, and so many adornments, in contrast to the females, as to suggest that they forcibly took them away from their weaker sisters. Such cloth as they wore was of gayest color and crazy-quilt pattern; their short hair was done up in “Topsy” braids sticking out in all directions and tied with many-colored ribbons; about arms and legs, just below the knees and above the elbows, they wore tight rings or cords, evidently believing, like the Indians of Amazonia, that these protect them from the ravenous piranha; and the abdomens of both men and women were tattooed, or, more exactly, pricked into relief figures resembling countless black warts. More superstitious than the wild Indians, and just wise enough to know a kodak by sight, they were not to be caught unawares for a “por-trait´,” as the word remains even in “taki-taki.”

Dam is most succinctly described by adding an “n” and an exclamation point. It consists of the end of the railroad line, which some day in the distant future hopes to go on to the Brazilian border. The only white men left since crossing the river were the little Dutch engineer and myself. I went with him and the rest of the train crew to a clean, well-screened little bungalow, where we pooled our lunches, but the assertion of the dusky conductor, whose English was “picked up,” that he was “snorking too much” proved only too true, and I soon carried my hammock out into the night. After some search I swung it from the switch-post to the back end of our first-class car, diagonally across the track, and turned in again. There was, of course, the danger that another train might dash around the curve into me, but as the company would have had to order it made in Holland, carry it piecemeal across the river by cable, set it up, and run the thirty miles from the cable station, the risk was not great.

At least there was a fine collection of “Bush Negroes” in Dam. A hundred or more of them, including whole families among whom there was not cloth enough for a single garment, had come down the river, which here forms a rocky falls, to carry back into the bush in their canoes the supplies brought by the weekly train, and they had hung their hammocks under a long sheet-iron roof on poles provided by the government. All of them had the air of being as ready to fight as Indians on the war-path; yet they were childish in many ways, too, jumping upon the train every time it moved a foot in switching and acting in general like boys of ten. They were the exact antithesis of Indians in showing, rather than hiding, their feelings, and had all the African’s gaiety and boisterous laughter. In their encampment now feebly lighted by weird torches, they were indulging in music, chatter, and apparently in dancing, until one might have fancied oneself in the heart of Africa. They seemed to be more contented with their lot than the Indians, as if they still had memories of the slave days of their ancestors and realized that much more fully what freedom means.

On the return trip we picked up much gold. At every station, and at some mere stops, negroes, clothed and usually English-speaking, handed the conductor small packages wrapped in scraps of paper, but sealed with a red seal, the name of the owner crudely written on each. I soon learned that these contained gold-dust, and for every one of them the conductor had to make out a report, which the negro certified with a seal he carried, after which the conductor put the package in his tin box. Some of them weighed several pounds. Before we were halfway in the conductor had more than $12,000 worth of gold, for all of which he was responsible, though he received not a cent extra for the trouble above his scanty wage of thirty dollars a month and a gulden as expense money on each trip. No wonder he said something about “one hand washing the other” and gave me no receipt for the fare I paid from Dam back to the cable-station.

When we came to Kwakoegron every person on the train had to get off to be searched for gold. All passengers and employees, carrying their hand-baggage, were herded into a big chicken-wire cage, where they were examined one by one by black policemen. Personally, whether out of respect for my nationality or because I looked too simple to think of smuggling, the officer who stepped with me into one of the alcove closets opening off the enclosure was satisfied with patting my pockets and making me open my kodak; but many travelers are compelled to strip naked while black policemen examine even the seams of their garments. There is a negress on hand for similar examinations of her own sex, and several times I heard of an English woman resident who, having once been caught smuggling gold, was forced to strip every time she passed through Kwakoegron on her way to town. Even minor surgical operations are sometimes performed on suspects, not always without results. Not merely the passengers and their bags, but the entire train from end to end was examined with meticulous care. Gold has been discovered hidden away in every imaginable place on the cars, even stuck on the trucks or inside the wheels. The packages in charge of the conductor are also examined, and if a seal is found broken he is held in jail until it is proved that none of the gold is missing. The negro policemen get a percentage and promotion for finding stolen gold, or for detecting attempts to smuggle it, and are said to be so proud of their jobs that they seldom succumb to temptation.

The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined, and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana, merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it. Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates.

I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam. Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro. All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters. Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas, and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies, his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven. They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws, punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing no intention of doing anything about it.

The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the “gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers, but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair, evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out, offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed myself out of Dutch quarters.

“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and “packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the “taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests, is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language, though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap, and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the “Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi” might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and “Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the “taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but “father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for “child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish pequeño or the Portuguese pequeno. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the “a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means “good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character; “Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25: