Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/168

158 But wisdom was before long justified of her Batavian children; and the failure of the foreign experiment — a woeful failure — is now almost complete. It was afternoon when we made the port; as we cautiously threaded our way between sand-bank and shoal, before coming to anchor, we passed a broad triangular space of shallow water, lashed into seething waves by wind and current, where, a few feet under the surface, lies what was once the busy area of populous streets. Meanwhile the breakers, not content with the mischief already done, continue ceaselessly tearing away the adjoining land bit by bit. Right in front, a large house, left an empty shell without doors or window-frames by its fugitive inhabitants, is on the point of sinking and disappearing among the waters that unopposed wash to and fro through the ground-floor. Close by the victorious sea has invaded the gardens of the neighbouring dwellings, and will evidently soon take possession of the buildings themselves; their basement-work is rotten with the salt spray. Farther on, a few isolated fragments of what was once a carefully-constructed sea-dam rise like black specks among the yeasty waters; and the new earth-wall built to protect what yet remains of Nikerie has a desponding make-shift look, as if aware that it will not have long to wait for its turn of demolition. Within its circuit a large, handsome, and solidly-built church, now perilously near the water's edge; a commodious court-house, where the magistrate of the district presides; a few private dwelling-houses, and three or four grog-shops — stand ranged like the Maclachlans and Wilsons of the famous Solway martyr-roll, resignedly awaiting the steady advance of the tide. The wind was high, and the roar of the waves, as they burst impatiently on the dwindling remnant of what was once the Nikerie promontory, sounded in the dusky evening air like a knell of doom.

There are many sad sights in this sad world, but few give the beholder so dreary a feeling of helpless melancholy as does a town in the act and process of being washed away by the sea. The forces are so unequal, the destruction so wasteful and so complete. Fortunately at Nikerie, however, except for the loss, such as it is, of some acres of sand-bank, and as much building-material as the inhabitants do not think it worth their while to carry away, no great harm is being done. Already the situation of a new emporium for the sugar and other produce of the estates has been marked out farther up the river, and the rise of the level ground, which is here more rapid than to the west along the Demerara coast, will insure it, with the adjoining cultivated land, from any serious risk of Neptunian invasion, for several years to come. Meanwhile the spectacle now presented by Nikerie is undoubtedly a depressing one to the imagination, if not to the mind; and I was glad to learn that it was the only one of its kind on the Surinam coast.

Here first I heard negroes speaking Dutch; and I have no doubt that they murdered it as ruthlessly as they do the queen's English or the republic's French elsewhere. But I will not detain my readers with a minute account of the ways and fashions of the inhabitants in this Nikerie district, as we shall have the opportunity of studying Dutch Guiana life in all its aspects, black, white, or coloured, to better advantage farther on. This, however, need not hinder our availing ourselves in the mean time, where convenient, of the information copiously supplied by his Excellency Van Sypesteyn, who was in youth the talented historian, as now in middle age he is the active and intelligent governor, of Dutch Guiana. From official documents it appears that the number of sugar-factories in the district of Nikerie is five, all of them worked by steam, and giving an annual result of five or six thousand hogsheads of sugar, besides sixty thousand gallons of molasses, and about as many puncheons of rum; to which must be added nearly fourteen thousand pounds' weight of coffee, and three hundred thousand of cocoa; from all which data, we may safely conclude that the 2,832 acres of its reclaimed land are neither unfruitful nor badly cultivated. Yet the total number of inhabitants only reaches 2,346, more than six hundred of whom are coolie or Chinese emigrants, the remainder are negroes; here as elsewhere under-population is the great stumbling-block in the way of progress.

It is pitiful to think that out of the ten thousand and more acres, all excellent land, conceded by the Dutch government to the occupation of the Nikerie proprietors, hardly more than a fourth has been, as the preceding numbers show, brought into actual use. Yet it is neither the climate nor the soil that is here in fault. How often, not in Nikerie and the remaining districts of Surinam, but in St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Trinidad, in almost all these western Edens, nay, even in flourishing Demerara itself, has the image of 