Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/701

Rh  are ranged two, four, or even six more pieces, some shaped like cannon, others like mortars; and these too are crammed up to their very mouths with powder and improvised wadding, and exploded on festive occasions; when, as ill-hap will have it, their over-repletion often results in bursting, and their bursting in the extemporized amputation of some negro arm, leg, or head, as the case may be. But though I heard of many a heartrending or limb-rending event of the kind, I am thankful to say that I witnessed none during our tour; though of explosions many.

Next a flight of steps, stone or brick, guarded by a handsome parapet in the Dutch style, and surmounted by a platform, with more or less of architectural pretension, leads up to the wide front door; by this we pass and find ourselves at once in the large entrance hall, that here, as formerly in European dwellings, serves for dining-room and reception-room generally. The solid furniture, of wood dark with age, gives it a quasi old-English look; and the gloom, for the light is allowed but a scanty entrance, lest her sister heat should enter too, is quasi English also. But the stiff portraits on the wall, ancestors, relatives, Netherland celebrities, royal personages, governors, etc., etc., are entirely Dutch and belong to the wooden school of art. The central table is of any given size and strength, and has been evidently calculated for any amount of guests and viands. We shall partake of the latter before leaving, and bestow well-merited praise on cook and cellar. Besides the hall are other apartments, counting-rooms, and so forth; above it is a second story, above it a third, for the brick walls are strong, and hurricanes are here as in Demarara unknown; over all rises a high-pitched roof; the wolf, or griffin, or lion, or whatever crest the original proprietor may have boasted, figures atop as gable-ornament or vane. The whole forms a manor-house that might have been transported, by substantial Dutch cherubs of course, as the Loretto bauble was by slim Italian angiolets, from amid the poplars of Arnheim or Bredvoort, and set down on the banks of Commeweyne. Only the not unfrequent adjuncts of a trellised verandah, and a cool outside gallery, are manifestly not of extra-tropical growth.

We have received our welcome, and drunk our prelusory schnapps. And now for the sight-seeing. The factory, where the canes, crushed into mere fibre as fast as the negroes can lift them from the canal-barge alongside on to the insatiable rollers close by, give out their continuous green frothy stream, to be clarified, heated, boiled, reboiled, tormented fifty ways, till it finds refuge in the hogsheads or rum-barrels; resembling in every stage of its course its counterpart in Demerara, or Jamaica, minus, however, except in one solitary instance, the expensive refinements of the centrifugal cylinder and vacuum-pan. But for mere delectation, unless heat, vapour, noise, and an annihilation of everything in general be delectation, which I hardly think, no man need linger in a factory, nor, unless he desires premature intoxication on vapour, in a rum-distillery either. Worth attention, however, and admiration too, is the solidity of construction by which the huge mass of building, doubly heavy from the ponderous machinery it contains, besides its clustering group of out-houses, megass-sheds, tall chimneys, store-places, and the rest, is enabled to support itself upright and unyielding on a soil so marshy and unstable. The foundations in many instances, I am told, exceed by double in dimension the buildings above.

Ingenious bees these sugar-making ones. Let us next look at the hives of the workers. These workers, or, metaphor apart, labourers, are here, at Voorburg I mean, and on not a few other estates, of three kinds, coolie, Chinese, and creole. And, should any one, smitten with a desire for accuracy and statistics, wish to know their exact numbers in this particular instance, the coolies at Voorburg are ninety all told, the Chinese one hundred and eighty-one, the creoles or colonial-born negroes, two hundred.

First to the coolies. Their introduction into Surinam is of recent date, little over two years, in fact; but everything has been organized for them on exactly the same footing as in Demerara or Trinidad. They have their agents, here and in India, their official protector, a very efficient one in the person of Mr. A. C———, her Majesty's consul; their labour and pay regulations are textually identical with those of Demerara; they are duly provided with a medical staff and hospitals; in a word, they are, if anything, more fenced in here from every shadow of a grievance than even in an English colony; Mr. Jenkins himself could not ask more for his protégés. The eye recognizes at once the regulation cottages, all like pretty maids — but here the similarity ceases — of a row, with garden spaces attached, back