Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/739

Rh river, coffee is still grown. It was for many years one of the main articles of cultivation in these districts, though now it has fallen into unmerited neglect; whence it will doubtless be rescued whenever a better-proportioned labour-supply shall allow the colonists to re-occupy and extend the narrow limits within which their activity is at present restricted. Several creeks, as all lesser watercourses are here called, fall into the main stream, or from distance to distance connect it, by the aid of canals, with the sea. On the banks of one of these flourished, in days gone by, the still famous Helena, a mulatto syren, whose dusky charms are said to have rivalled in their mischievous effects, if not in other respects, those of her Grecian namesake. These creeks, with the canals and ditches dependent on them, complete the water-system alike of irrigation and traffic throughout this wonderful land, where nature has done so much, and art and skill yet more. But whatever the sea-communication through these occasional openings, no brackish taint ever finds its way to the higher level, through which the Cottica flows; and the freshness of the water is betokened by the ever-increasing loveliness and variety of the riverside vegetation. Lowest down hangs the broad fringe of the large-leaved moco-moco — a plant that has, I suppose, some authentic Latin name, only I know it not; nor would it, however appropriate, give thee, perhaps ,gentle reader, any clearer idea of the plant than may its Indian one, — dipping its glossy green clusters into the very stream. Above tower all the giants of West-Indian and South-American forests, knit together by endless meshes of convolvulus, liane, creeper, and wild vine, the woorali, I am told, among the rest; and surcharged with parasites, till the burden of a single tree seems sufficient to replenish all the hothouses of England and Wales from store to roof. Piercing through these, the eta-palm — it resembles in growth the toddy-palm of the East Indies, and, for aught my ignorance can object to the contrary, may be the very same — waves its graceful fans high against the steady blue; and birds innumerable — black, white, mottled, plain, blue, yellow, crimson, long-billed, parrot-billed, a whole aviary let loose — fly among the boughs, or strut fearless between the tree-trunks, or stand mid-leg deep, meditative, in the water. Large lizards abound on the banks, and snakes too, it may be, but they have the grace to keep out of sight, along with the jaguars and other unpleasant occupants of the Guiana jungle. In their stead light corials, sometimes with only a woman to paddle, sometimes a man or boy, dart out of the harbour-like shelter of the creeks; bush-negro families peer curiously from the doors of their floating cottages ,or guide their timber-rafts down the stream. Ever and anon a white painted barque, conveying an overseer, a book-keeper, or some other of the white or semi-white gentry, rows quickly by, for the river is the highway, and the wayfarers along it many: so that even where its banks are at the loneliest, the stream itself has life and activity enough to show. More often, however, it passes between cultivated lands: for while the factories and sugar-estates diminish in number as we go further up, the small creole properties increase; and comfortable little dwellings, places, cottages, sheds, and out-houses, amid every variety of "provision ground" cultivation, multiply along the bank. Here, too, even more than along the Commeweyne, men in every variety of costume — from the raggedest half-nakedness that in this climate betokens, not exactly want, but rather hard out-door work, to the white trousers and black coat, the badges of the upper-class negro Creole — and a yet greater number of women, who have fortunately not learned to exchange the becoming and practical turban of their race for the ridiculous hat and bonnet of European fashion, come down to honour the governor’s passage; nor does the blazing afternoon sun, now at his hottest, seem to have the least effect on the energy of their welcome. And I may add that not here only, and in the more secluded districts of the colony, but throughout its entire extent, I neither saw nor heard of anything indicating, however remotely, the duality of feeling that in so many other West-Indian settlements — the Danish most — draws a line of separation, if not hostility, between the black and the white inhabitants of the land. The creoles of Surinam are not less loyal to the Dutch tricolor than the burghers of Leyden, and King William himself could hardly expect a more affectionately enthusiastic greeting, were he to make a tour through the seven provinces, than his representative receives when visiting his transatlantic subjects of the same rule. And in this matter, observation is confirmed by history; nor since the conclusion, in 1777, of the long and bloody maroon wars, has a single outbreak or show of insubordination disturbed the interior harmony of Dutch Guiana.