Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/699

Rh  for humid warmth to that of an accurately shut hothouse, assures the second; and the "coffee-mamma," a dense-leaved-tree, not unlike our own beech, guarantees the third. Thus favoured, a Surinam cocoa crop is pretty sure to be an abundant one. Ever and anon, where the green labyrinth is at its thickest, you come suddenly across a burly creole negro, busily engaged in plucking the large pods from the boughs with his left hand, and holding in it so, while with a sharp cutlass held in his right he dexterously cuts off the upper part of the thick outer covering, then shakes the slimy agglomeration of seed and white burr clinging to it into a basket set close by him on the ground. A single labourer will in this fashion collect nearly four hundred pounds' weight of seeds in the course of a day. When full the baskets are carried off on the heads of the assistant field-women, or, if taken from the remoter parts of the plantation, are floated down in boats or corials to the brick-paved courtyard adjoining the planter's dwelling-house, where the nuts are cleansed and dried by simple and inexpensive processes, not unlike those in use for the coffee-berry; after which nothing remains but to fill the sacks, and send them off to their market across the seas.

A Guiana cocoa-plantation is an excellent investment. The first outlay is not heavy, nor is the maintenance of the plantation expensive — the number of labourers bearing an average proportion of one to nine to that of the acres under cultivation. The work required is of a kind that negroes, who are even now not unfrequently prejudiced by the memory of slave days against the cane-field and sugar-factory, undertake willingly enough; and to judge by their stout limbs and evident good condition, they find it not unsuited to their capabilities. More than four millian pounds' weight of cocoa are yearly produced in Surinam, "which is a consideration," as a negro remarked to me, labourously attempting to put his ideas into English, instead of the Creole mixture of every known language that they use among themselves. Neither coolies nor Chinese are employed on these cocoa-estates, much to the satisfaction of the creoles, who though tolerant of, or rather clinging to, European mastership, have little sympathy with other coloured or semi-civilized races. Some authors have indeed conjectured that the West-Indian labourer of the future will be a cross-mixture of the African and the Asiastic; but to this conclusion, desirable or not, there is for the present no apparent tendency, either in Surinam or elsewhere. As to the Indians of these regions, they keep to themselves, and their incapacity of improvement, combined with hereditary laziness and acquired drunkenness, will, it seems, soon render them a mere memory, poetical or otherwise, of the past.

Soil, climate, and the conditions of labour, all here combine to favour the cocoa-plant; and accordingly, out of the thirty thousand acres actually under cultivation in Dutch Guiana, we find that a sixth part is dedicated to its production. More would be so, but for the time required before a fresh plantation can bear a remunerative crop; five or six years must, in fact, elapse during which no return at all is made, "which is a consideration" also, though in an opposite sense to that quoted above.

Cocoa prospers; but after all said and done, sugar, the one thing that for two centuries and more has been to the West Indies — Dutch, French, Spanish, or English — what cloth is to Manchester, cutlery to Sheffield, or beer to Bavaria, is even now, despite of emancipation, free-trade, beetroot, prohibitive regulations, American tariffs, and the whole array of adversities mustered against it for the last fifty years, the "favourite" of the agricultural racecourse, and holds with regard to other products, however valuable, the same position as the queen of the chessboard does when compared with the remaining pieces. Indeed in some — Demerara, for instance — sugar reigns, like Alexander Selkirk on his island, not only supreme, but alone; while in Surinam, where, more than in the generality of West-Indian regions, she has many and, to a certain extent, successful rivals to contend with, she vindicates a full half of the reclaimed soil for her exclusive domain. Previous to emancipation, four-fifths at least were her allotted share. No fuller evidence of her former sway need be sought than that which is even yet everywhere supplied by the aspect of the great houses, gardens, and all the belongings of the old sugar-plantations, once the wealth and mainstay of the Dutch colony. The garb is now too often, alas, "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of the present, but it witnesses to the time when it was cut to fitness and measure.

And here on our way, almost opposite the cocoa-plantation with its modern and modest demesnes that we have just visited,