Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/426

418 and thence turned off southward to explore the upper branch of the Commeweyne, which we had on our way up passed by unvisited. Deep black, and much more rapid than the Cottica, its current flowed between noble forest scenes, alternating with cultivated spaces on either bank; but few large sugar-estates came in view; plantains, cocoanuts, cassava, with cocoa-bushes intermixed, seemed the more favourite growths. The yearly amount of sugar manufactured in this district does not exceed one thousand hogsheads; the mills are all of the simplest kind, and moved by water-power. In general character, the scenery and water-side objects of the upper Commeweyne nearly resemble those of the upper Cottica, and have been sufficiently described before; a gradual diminution of underwood, an increase of height and girth in the forest trees, and a greater variety in them and in the flowering creepers that interlaced their boughs, being for many miles up country almost the only distinct indications of approach to the higher lands beyond, though the practised eye of a naturalist might doubtless detect many significant varieties in the insects or plants of the region.

And now, as we slowly stem the liquid glass, black as jet yet pure as crystal, of the strong-flowing Commeweyne, we remark (the governor and I) the evident and recent increase in the number of small plantations, to the detriment — though a temporary one only, if events run their regular course — of the larger properties. This is a necessary phase of free labour, and through it the Surinam colony, like every other of like kind, must pass before it can reach the firm ground of self-sustaining prosperity. Till then, nothing is solid, nothing sore. Giant sugar-estates — propped up or absolutely maintained by extraneous capital, and excluding or dwarfing into comparative nullity the varied parcel cultivation of local ownership and resources, are at best magnificent gambling-speculations, most so when the price of their produce is not stored up, but at once applied to widening the enclosures, or purchasing some costly refinements of improved machinery. Establishments like these are every instant at the mercy of a sudden fluctuation of the market, of a new invention, of a tariff — in a word, they lie exposed to every accident of fortune's caprice; and, capricious as she is throughout her whole domain, nowhere is the goddess more so than in the commercial province. Hence it follows that they who repine at the lengthening catalogue of five-acre and ten-acre lots -—- railing at their cultivators as idle pumpkin-eating squatters, and raising a desponding moan, occasionally an indignant howl, over the consequent withdrawal of labour from the five-hundred or thousand acre estates — are not more reasonable in their complaints than he who should fall foul of the workmen employed in digging and laying the foundations of the house, and declare them to be lazy loons, and their labour valueless, because they do not at once bestow it on raising the second story and furnishing the drawing-room.

In Dutch Guiana, taking Paramaribo, the capital, for its centre, we may regard the rest of the territory as made up, after a rough fashion, of three concentric circles. The circumference of the innermost one would, for what concerns the east and the districts we have now been visiting, pass through the confluence-point of the Commeweyne and Cottica Rivers at Sommelsdyk Fort; the second would intersect through the estate of La Paix on the upper Cottica, and the corresponding estate of Abendsrust on the, upper Commeweyne; the external limits of the third would be correlative with those of the colonial frontier itself. Within the first circle, large estates, mostly owned by Europeans, or at any rate European creoles, predominate. Throughout the second or intermediate circle, smaller properties, mostly in the hands of coloured or black creoles, are more common. In the outermost space are the villages and provision-grounds, few and far between, of the bush-negroes, between whom and the European landholders the dark creoles thus form a sort of link, social as well as territorial; or, to vary the phrase, a connecting medium, destined, if our conjectures be true, to become ultimately an absorbing one, not only of the more savage but of the more civilized element also.

But we are forgetting his Excellency. "In the labourers of Munnikendam," he continued, "you have a fair sample of our black creoles; throughout the colony they are everywhere essentially the same. Fond enough, as you have seen, of pleasure and amusement, when they can get them; but when at work steady, sober, willing, and, what is a fortunate thing for all parties, without a trace of social or political restlessness in any direction. Their