Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/418

410 kinsmen around. There was no lack of that general good feeling and willing subordination that characterized the more civilized population nearer the capital; all were cheerful — the coolies, perhaps, excepted, but cheerfulness is not a Hindoo virtue either at home or abroad — and courteous, after a fashion, but somewhat wild.

A painted four-oar boat, with its commodious stern-cabin — the overseer’s conveyance — lay alongside the wharf; two broad, flat-bottomed barges were moored some way up the main creek that leads to the interior of the estate; and besides these were a dozen maroon corials, mere hollow tree-trunks, the simplest forms of barbaric invention — survivals, to borrow Mr. Tylor’s excellent nomenclature, of a pre-civilized era in river-navigation.

The owners of the corials — tall, well-shaped men of colour, ranging between dark brown and inky black, with a rag at most bound turban-fashion round their bullet heads, and another of scarce ampler dimensions about their loins — muster on the landing-place, and salute the governor with a courteous deference to which the fullest uniform could add nothing. The women, whose dress may best be described as a scanty kilt, and the children, boys and girls, who have none to describe, keep somewhat in the background — laughing, of course; all seem perfectly at home, without strangeness, or even shyness of any kind. Nor, indeed, are they strangers from far off; their villages on the banks of the upper Cottica itself, and of its tributary stream, the Coermotibo, are almost contiguous to the European estates. The main body of the tribe is, however, far away on the banks of the Saara River to the south, where their chief resides, and along the west bank of the Marowyne, the boundary river between Dutch and French Guiana. All this vast region, said by the few explorers who have visited it to be in no respect inferior for its fertility and the variety of its products to the best lands of Surinam, has been made over, partly by express treaty, partly by custom, to the maroons, commonly known as the bush-negroes, the first who in 1761 obtained a formal recognition of freedom and independence from their European masters. Of the entire district they are now almost the sole occupants, undisturbed even by dark-skinned competitors; for the Indian aborigines, believed to have been once numerous throughout these wooded valleys, have wasted away and disappeared, unable not merely to compete but even to co-exist with their African any better than with their European neighbours. A small Dutch settlement — that of Albina, on the banks of the Marowyne — alone varies the uniformity of negro possession in these lands.

Their mode of life is agricultural; their labour is partly bestowed on the field-produce sufficient to their own personal wants, partly on the growth and export of rice, with which they supply the estates and the capital. But their chief occupation is wood-cutting, and their skill in this department has secured them an almost absolute monopoly of the timber-supply that forms a considerable item in the trade-lists of Surinam. They hew, trim, divide the planks, and do whatever is requisite for preparing the wood for shipment; then bring it down in the form of rafts or boat-loads to Paramaribo, where they exchange it most commonly for arms, powder, cooking-utensils, and other household necessaries. Fortunately for themselves, strong drink is not a favourite article of barter among these unregistered and unbaptized disciples of Father Mathew and Sir Wilfrid Lawson. Indeed, in this, as in many other respects, they present an advantageous contrast with the besotted Indians, whose diminution and almost disappearance from the land has been occasioned by intemperance much more than by any of the numerous causes assigned on philo-indigenous platforms. With the negro, on the contrary, drunkenness is an exotic vice, and even where it has been implanted it does not flourish largely on his soil.

Their settlements, far up among the rivers, and in regions said to be admirably adapted for cultivation, though as yet rarely favoured by European visitors, are grouped together after the fashion of small villages, resembling, I am told, in their principal features the more accessible hamlet inhabited by emancipated Congo Africans, and called “Bel Air,” near Berbice. Their dwellings are reported to be neat and comfortable enough after a fashion. About fifty of these villages are recorded by name; the average number of souls in each equals three hundred, or thereabouts. The census of the entire bush-negro population is almost conjectural; some bring their numbers down to eight thousand, others raise them to thirty. Of the two extremes the latter is, I believe, the nearest to the truth. Negroes, like other Eastern tribes, when required to give an account of themselves,