Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/173

Rh the town in every direction, the neat bridges, the broad river-side quays, the trim gardens, the decent cemeteries, the entire order and disposition of the place, tell the same tale; witness to the same founders; reflect the same image, true to its original on the north seacoast; all tell of settled order and tasteful method.

The site was well chosen. The Surinam, here a tidal river of nearly a mile broad, flows past a slightly raised plateau of sand and gravel mixed with "caddy," a compound of finely broken fragments of shell and coral, extending for some distance along the left or west bank. The general elevation of the ground is about sixteen feet above low-water level, enough to insure it from being overflowed in the rainy seasons, or by the highest tides. Several streams, improved by Dutch industry into canals, intersect this level; one of them connects the waters of the Surinam with those of the Saramacca farther west; all are tidal in their ebb and flow. Drainage is thus rendered easy; and now that the low bush and scrub, the natural growth of every South-American soil, however light, has been cleared away, the citizens of Paramaribo may securely boast that throughout the entire extent of Guiana, from the Orinoco to the Amazon, no healthier town than theirs is to be found.

This healthiness is, however, in great measure due to their own exertions; and above all to the good sense that presided over the construction of the town. When the true founder of town and colony alike, Cornelius van Aerssen, lord of Sommelsdyk, and the fifth governor of Dutch Guiana, landed on these shores in 1683, Paramaribo, so he wrote, consisted of only "twenty-seven dwellings, more than half of which were grog-shops," and close to it the Fort of Zeelandia, so named after its builders, the intrepid Zeelanders, who had already repelled more than one Indian or English assault from its walls. But under the vigorous administration of Sommelsdyk the rapidly rising prosperity of the colony was reflected in the town itself, that henceforth grew and prospered year by year. Its records describe it in 1750 as already covering one-half of its present extent; and in 1790 the number of houses within its circuit exceeded a thousand; till about the beginning of the present century, the addition of the extensive suburb of "Combe," on the north side, brought it up to its actual limits. Then followed a long and dreary period of colonial depression, general indeed throughout the West Indies, but nowhere, Jamaica perhaps excepted, greater than in Surinam; where the uncertainty consequent on a reiterated change of masters, French, English, and Dutch, helped to depreciate the already declining value of estates and produce in this part of the world. Misfortunes never come singly; and while the colony at large suffered, Paramaribo in particular, ravaged by two severe conflagrations, the one in 1821, and the other in 1832, presented a melancholy spectacle of unrepaired ruins, and abandoned suburbs. Between 1840 and 1860 things were at their worst, both for colony and capital. Then came the turn; the shock of emancipation passed, its benefits remained, town and country alike revived together; houses were rebuilt; suburbs re-populated; and of her past wounds the Paramaribo of our day now scarcely shows a scar. The number of her inhabitants, reckoned at barely sixteen thousand in 1854, at present exceeds twenty-two thousand; thus showing an increase of six thousand in the course of the last twenty years only.

"A goodly city is this Antium;" but during the hot hours of the day, that is, from eight or at latest nine in the morning till pretty near sunset, I would not willingly incur the responsibility of sending a friend or even an enemy, unless he happened to be a mortal one, on a sight-seeing stroll through the streets of Paramaribo. Carriages or riding-horses there are few to be found in the town, and none at all for hire; negro carts are plenty, to be sure, and negro mules too, but the former, independently of other considerations, are jolting conveyances, the latter a hard-mouthed, stiff-necked generation; and neither adapted to the furtherance of European locomotion, whether on pleasure or business. As to walking-exercise under this equatorial sun, it might possibly be an agreeable recreation for a salamander, but hardly for any other creature. It is true that shade may be found even in the hottest hours of perpendicular noon; and when the sun has fairly beaten you, as he will in less than five minutes, from the field, you may take refuge, if you choose, under the broad-leaved, glistening, umbrella-like almond-trees, so called from a superficial resemblance between the kernels of their fruit and those of the almond, but neither in foliage nor growth having the most distant likeness to the European tree of that name, which Dutch forethought has kindly planted all along the river quay. There, in company with any 