Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/171

Rh like, commanded widows rather to marry than to burn, would doubtless have erected a graceful temple, and consecrated the spot to the decorous performance of suttee. Dutch governors, a more practical style of men, utilized the spot by erecting on it the fortress of New Amsterdam. Its first stone was laid in 1734, shortly after the plundering exploits of Cassard and the French squadron; its object was evidently the protection of the capital from any repetitions of the like visits in future. But though Paramaribo, and New Amsterdam too, have since that date twice received French, twice English masters within their walls, it has so happened that the fort guns have never had occasion to pour forth any more deadly fire than that of a signal or a salute; treaties having in later times subjected the colony to those changes that hard fighting brought about in former days. However, the position of New Amsterdam is well chosen, the works strong; and should any future age raise up against the Dutch colonies a new Cassard, he would find in the batteries enough, and more than enough, to render a buccaneering excursion up to Paramaribo by no means so easy a business as of yore.

We saluted the national flag, and passing close under a very respectable battery, exchanged a few words of amicable Dutch with a subaltern, who, at the sight of our government pennon, had hastened down for inquiry to the water's edge. Exempted by his courtesy — a courtesy I have never found wanting in any of his Batavian comrades — from the delays of an inspectorial visit, we continued our course due south, up the Surinam River; but the breeze had died away, and it was near noon when, after about eight miles of slow progress between banks and scenes much like those already described, but with a continually increasing denseness of estates and cultivation on either side, we approached the capital. Gardens, too, small dwelling-houses, and crowded cottages rose thicker and thicker into view, a tall Flemish-looking tower glittered in the sun, and at last, rounding an abrupt fort-crowned promontory on the left river-bank, we cast anchor opposite the river quay and town-hall of Paramaribo.

   

was not afternoon, in fact it was forenoon, and the sun, though mounted high, had not yet throned himself in his meridian tower, when, accompanied by those who had come to meet and welcome my arrival, I mounted a red brick flight of steps, leading from the water's edge tip to the raised quay, and found myself on the threshold of the capital of Dutch Surinam. Yet there was something in the atmosphere that can only be described as post-meridian; an influence extending over everything around, town and people alike; nor post-meridian only, but distinctly lotophagous, befitting the lotus-eating capital of a lotus-eating land, very calm and still, yet very comfortable and desirable withal.

For what regards the material atmosphere, its heavy warmth even at so early an hour as ten or eleven of the morning need excite no surprise. Paramaribo stands on the South-American map at little more than five and a half degrees north of the equator, and the equator here crosses the immense breadth of the moist plains, brimming river-meshes, and dense forests, that constitute nine-tenths of the Guianas and Brazil. Fifteen miles at least, in a straight line, removed from the nearest coast, and cut off from the very limited sea-breeze of the tropics by intervening belts of plantation and thick wood the air of Paramaribo is not that of wind-swept Barbadoes, or dry Antigua, but that of the moistest among all equatorial continents; and may best be likened to the air of an orchid-house at Kew and that of a Turkish bath combined. Not, be it well understood, a dry-heated pseudo-Turkish bath of the European kind, but a genuine hammam of Damascus or Constantinople. In such an atmosphere Ulysses himself and his crew must, after a very short stay, have betaken themselves, in company with the natives, to lotus-eating; it is a duty imposed by the climate, and there are many less agreeable duties in the world elsewhere.

Not that the climate is unhealthy; quite the reverse. That tall, large-made, elderly European gentleman, in a light grey suit, who, parasol in hand, grandly saunters by, evidently does so not from any want of vigour either in mind or limb, but because a sauntering step is more congenial to the place than a brisk one. Those sleek, stout, comfortable, glossy negroes loitering in sun or shade appear, and are in fact equal, did the occasion require it, to any exertion of which human muscle is capable: they are doing nothing in particular, because nothing in particular is just now the proper thing to do. The town itself, its tall houses, its wide streets, its gardens,