Adventures in Research: Chasing the Past in Guyana

Jolting along at sixty miles an hour in the 4x4, I glanced over at Alex, hoping he wouldn't take the truck into one of the deep gullies pitting the road. We were on the Ituni highway, the main road from Guyana's capital, Georgetown, to Brazil. The pavement gave out after twenty-five miles and descended into a red-sand, rutted path through bauxite mines, bush, savannah, and lowland rainforest. Alex Mendes has driven this route hundreds of times. Every year he brings researchers into his 17,000-acre cattle ranch, ninety miles up the Berbice River, in remote, unpopulated bush country. The scientists come to study plants and animals in Guyana's great untrammeled wilderness. One scientist counted forty-one species of bats on the ranch, and a team of researchers named a newly discovered species of lizard after Alex.1 A large U.S. farming concern runs a research station at Dubulay Ranch to experiment with hardier species of corn.2 I was the first historian to visit.

If Dubulay is a haven for biologists, it is even richer for historians. Almost four hundred years ago, Dutchman Abraham van Peere obtained a patroonship on the Berbice River in northern South America. He built a house and traded with Indians on the very spot now occupied by Dubulay. Over time, Van Peere's farm, the Peereboom (Pear Tree), evolved into a large sugar plantation. Early in the eighteenth century, a group of Amsterdam investors bought the colony from the Van Peere family, and the Peereboom became one of eleven plantations belonging to the Company of Berbice. Early in 1763, slaves in Berbice revolted. The subsequent rebellion dissolved into a bloody civil war that lasted more than a year and drew in nearly the entire enslaved population of about five thousand, spread over 150 estates. Having researched this rebellion for the past few years, I knew the Peereboom figured prominently in these events. It was the scene of a horrific massacre when rebels executed, despite promises of free passage, forty-two European men, women, and children who had sought refuge on the Peereboom at the outbreak of the revolt. Later on, a group of Africans accused by fellow rebels of cannibalism built a village in the savannah behind the plantation. No one has studied this massive uprising in depth. This isn't surprising, I am beginning to think, not only because most of the documents are in archaic Dutch but also because the area is so darn hard to get to.

My friend and I had arrived in Georgetown early that morning after an all-nightlayover in theTrinidad airport. Blurry-eyed, we had only the vaguest idea of how to proceed. My wish had been to travel up the Berbice River to get to know the terrain. But there is no bus route or train up the Berbice, or even a direct road, and there are no hotels (Guyana's tourist industry is, to put it mildly, in its infancy). A month of emailing with a well-known wilderness outfit had resulted in an itinerary, and a budget, geared more toward a boutique "adventure" tourist than a historian on a modest grant. On the eve of our departure, I still had no definite plan or reservations, just the assurance of a longterm Guyana resident, a Scottish woman I had contacted at the last minute, that she'd have a driver ("Waja") pick us up at the airport at 5:00 a.m. and bring us to her house. Margaret Chen-A-Sue turned out to be an energetic woman in her sixties experienced in organizing research visits for scientists interested in Guyana's vast biodiversity. She knew all about Dubulay. Alex was an old school friend of her son. Turned out Alex was leaving Georgetown for Dubulay in an hour, just enough time for us to stock up on snacks at the local Shell station. We left our passports, travelers' checks, and extra cash with Margaret, our acquaintance of forty-five minutes, for safekeeping and wedged ourselves into the cab of Alex's truck as he wedged his rifle behind the seats. My eyebrows went up. Alex's wife, Adriana, explained that highway robbery isn't just a euphemism in Guyana.

Guyana, comparable in size to the U.K. or Idaho, lies on the Atlantic Ocean in northern South America, bordered by Surinam, Venezuela, and Brazil. Half of its estimated 760,000 inhabitants are immigrants from India whose ancestors came as indentured servants in the nineteenth century after the abolition of slavery. The descendants of former slaves comprise 36 percent of the population. Another 7percent is Amerindian, and whites and Chinese make up the remaining 7 percent, according to the latest CIA figures.3 Most Guyaneselive in the low coastal plain, leaving the rest of the country, vast savannahs and rainforests, virtually empty of people. Of Guyana's mere eight thousand kilometers of roadways, less than 10 percent are paved. One travels into the interior by jeep or by boat. Locals use dugout canoes on the Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo rivers, which run like parallel ribbons toward the coast. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch built settlements on each of these big rivers. Those colonies passed into English hands in the early nineteenth century. In 1966 British Guyana gained its independence.

We turned off the highway onto a dirt road so narrow that tree branches swept the truck windows. Water splashed in from deep muddy puddles not yet evaporatedafter the end of the rainy season.The trail ended at Dubulay, the house with its grand upstairs porch gloriously situated atop a low hill (visible on seventeenth-century Dutch maps) overlooking the Berbice River, languid, like chocolate, below. Sheep and steer chewed the tough savanna grass. Macawsand monkeys heckled us from the colorful trees, a couple of dogs ran around excitedly, and lizards darted away before our feet. It was hot and humid and I couldn't wait to go exploring.

I had come to get a sense of the place, the landscape, the bewildering "jungle" that the frightened mercenary soldiers described, and the river that was the lifeblood of the colony. I did not expect to find any trace of the uprising more than three hundred years earlier, or even of Dutch colonization. Yet to my great surprise, remnants of that past were everywhere: buried in the sediment of the riverbank, hidden in the verdancy of the bush. That afternoon Alex cut a path with his cutlass through the rainforest to show me the grave of a Dutchman, Moses Heyn. Alex didn't know anything about the man but what the stone reveals: born in 1636 and buried in 1715.4 Above the riverbank, we found shards of ceramic ware and pipe stems poking from the mud. The next day, Tedroy, Alex's manager, led us to a rain-washed slope above the river. In a half hour, we filled a small bucket with intriguing pieces of china painted with colorful flowers and blue pagodas. On other pottery shards we could see the indentations of the fingers that crafted them, their mysterious patterns suggesting African or Amerindian origin. We even found a few of the tiny glass beads the Dutch at one time traded with the Amerindians. I wished I could read the past stored in these bits of discarded trash.

Between the coast and Dubulay, some two thousand people live along the Berbice River, fewer than on the eve of the 1763 slave rebellion. Their small shuttered houses, built on stilts to capture the winds off the river, lack electricity and running water. Locals use the river for drinking, laundry, bathing, fishing, and moving about in their small boats and dugouts. The river serves as the spine of the community. All the coming and goings happen up, down, or across the water. One of our guides, Bob Sampson, told me he knows all the people ("but not the small ones") along the river between Dubulay and Fort Nassau, thirty-five meandering miles away. A small, slow ferry travels from New Amsterdam on the coast up the Berbice every few days, but it is relatively expensive for most river dwellers. People support themselves with a variety of odd jobs. Every few miles someone adds to the family income by running a small bar or a store consisting of a few shelves of canned and boxed goods. As in slavery times, Dubulay is the largest employer for many miles.

Over the next days, we explored this riverine world where signs of Dutch colonization are ubiquitous. While Dutch plantation buildings are no longer standing, different plots of land are still referred to by their former Dutch names. The 1764 Berbice map I carry with me, made for the soldiers sent to defeat the rebelling slaves,serves just as well as the modern one Margaret gave me. When I put them side by side, half of the 1764 plantations are on the recent map. People refer to these plantations when they explain where they were born. For instance, Mrs. Drimmond, the caretaker at Fort Nassau, was born at nearby Stadt Danzig, as was Bob's father-in-law. People point out the Silk Cotton tree, under which the Dutch allegedly buried their silver. The height of these trees made it impossible to forget where the valuables had been hidden. The Dutch bewitched these trees to keep their coins safe from their slaves. Wherever one sees such a tree rising above the bush, my guides relate, there had been a Dutch plantation.5 Indeed, I am told, many Afro-Guyanese still believe these trees are jinxed.6

Berbicians actively use the relics history has left behind. Even twenty or thirty years ago there were still some Dutch ruins, they told me. By now they have been dismantled by neighbors who make use of everything. They have opened the graves looking for treasures. They have carried off the gravestones to use in foundations or as sharpening stones. The Amerindians on the Wikki Creek have used the old bricks they found neatly stacked in rows on the former Hardenbroek plantation. Most people own a few colonial bottles, bowls, or pots, dug up from the mud, retrieved from the river, or bought from treasure hunters who sell them in Berbice and abroad.

In spite of the dailiness of the past, or perhaps because of it, it is fast slipping away. The Guyana authorities lack the resources or the political will to engage in much historic preservation on the Berbice, and the rainforest reclaims any lost ground quickly. At the site of the former Fort Nassau, headquarters of the Dutch colonizers, the newly installed historical markers have already become illegible in the relentless sun. The eighteenth-century graves are cracking and filling with water. The foundations of the government building where the Dutch governor met with his council, courts tried lawbreakers, and Governor Coffij coordinated his attacks are overgrown. The so called talking tree, an enormous tree some twenty-five feet around at its base, can only be reached by hacking the undergrowth with a machete. Slave rebels used this tree, so the story goes, to bang out messages to allies on the nearby Canje River. The sound made by hitting the roots of this tree can be heard for miles.

Not only in the rainforest is the past slipping into oblivion. In Georgetown, the edgy postcolonial capital of Guyana, researchers in the National Archives sweat over documents in one-hundred-degree heat with the central air conditioning broken and fragile pages blowing in the breeze from a powerful fan. A new building is under construction, but its completion date is uncertain. Time and politics have damaged many of the colonial documents. Much has disappeared. And yet much is still there. The strange thing is that the places where the past is normally preserved, the archives and the living history site at Fort Nassau, yielded little history. On the other hand, talking to Uncle Ben at the Amerindian village on the Wikki, rooting in the muddy riverbank, and watching the sun rise and set again on the Berbice served up exactly what I hadn't dared hope to find-a sense of the past as real as if history, which until then had been confined to the nattering old documents, had walked on stage.

Marjoleine Kars

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Notes
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1 For a report and pictures of this lizard, Gonatodes alexandermendesi, see Charles J. Cole and Philippe J. R. Kok, “A New Species of Gekkonid Lizard (Sphaerodactylinae: Gonatodes) from Guyana, South America,” American Museum Novitates, no. 3524 (July 31, 2006), 1–13. This article may be consulted at http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/bitstream/2246/5801/1/n3524.pdf.

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2 For pictures of Dubulay, see http://mypeoplepc.com/members/asham/alanjillinguyana/index.html.

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3 https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/gy.html.

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4 Once back home I found out that Moses Heyn was a government official, but that is all I have managed to discover about him so far. Few records exist for Berbice in the seventeenth century.

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5 Ben ter Welle, a wood anatomist living in Georgetown, told me the Silk Cotton tree is native to Guyana so its presence does not indicate former cultivation, though other plants and trees do. He did confirm that silver melts more easily than other metals, so Dutch planters buried their silver in pots under trees to keep their wealth from melting in house fires.

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6 See www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/ceiba.htm for similar Afro-Jamaican beliefs about Silk Cotton trees.