British Policy Towards the Amerindians in British Guiana 1803-1873

BRITISH POLICY TOWARDS THE AMERINDIANS IN BRITISH GUIANA 1803-1873 1 Mary Noel Menezes, R.S.M. BRITISH POLICY TOWARDS THE AMERINDIANS IN BRITISH GUIANA, 1803-1873 With an Introduction by Dimitar Angelov First published in 1977 This edition © The Caribbean Press 2011 Series Preface © Bharrat Jagdeo 2010 Introduction © Dimitar Angelov 2010 Cover design by Cristiano Coppola Cover image: Annette Arjoon-Martins All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission. This publication was made possible by the support of the Peepal Tree Press (Leeds), the University of Warwick Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, and the Government of Guyana. ISBN 978-1-907493-26-3 2 THE GUYANA CLASSICS LIBRARY Series Preface by the President of Guyana, H. E. Bharrat Jagdeo General Editors: David Dabydeen & Lynne Macedo Consulting Editor: Ian McDonald 3 4 SERIES PREFACE Modern Guyana came into being, in the Western imagination, through the travelogue of Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of Guiana (1595). Raleigh was as beguiled by Guiana’s landscape (“I never saw a more beautiful country...”) as he was by the prospect of plunder (“every stone we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion”). Raleigh’s con- temporaries, too, were doubly inspired, writing, as Thoreau says, of Guiana’s “majestic forests”, but also of its earth, “re- splendent with gold.” By the eighteenth century, when the trade in Africans was in full swing, writers cared less for Guiana’s beauty than for its mineral wealth. Sugar was the poet’s muse, hence the epic work by James Grainger The Sugar Cane (1764), a poem which deals with subjects such as how best to manure the sugar cane plant, the most effective diet for the African slaves, worming techniques, etc. As John Sin- gleton confessed (in his General Description of the West Indies, 1776), there was no contradiction between the manufacture of odes and that of sugar: “...a fine exuberant plant, which clothes the fields with the richest verdure. There is, I believe, scarcely any cultivation which yields so lucrative a return per acre as under favourable circumstances, than that of the sugar cane. So bountiful a gift of Providence seems not only calcu- lated to call forth the activity and enterprise of the agricultur- alist and merchant, but to awaken also feelings of a higher and more refined enthusiasm.” The refinement of art and that of sugar were one and the same process. The nineteenth century saw the introduction of Indian indentureship, but as the sugar industry expanded, literary works contracted. Edward Jenkins’ novel Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877) was the only substantial fiction on Guiana, and whilst it was broadly sympathetic to the plight of Indian labourers, it was certain of Britain’s imperial destiny, and rights over mineral resources. It was not until the period leading up to 5 Guiana’s Independence from Britain (1966) and the subse- quent years, that our own writers of Amerindian, African, Asian and European ancestry (A. J. Seymour, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Edgar Mittelholzer, Martin Carter, Rajkumari Singh et al.) attempted to purify literature of its commercial taint, restoring to readers a vision of the complexity of the Guyanese character and the beauty of the Guyanese landscape. The Guyana Classics Library will republish out-of-print poetry, novels and travelogues so as to remind us of our literary heritage, and it will also remind us of our reputation for scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and politics, through the reprinting of seminal works in these subjects. The Series builds upon previous Guyanese endeav- ours, like the institution of CARIFESTA and the Guyana Prize. I am delighted that my government has originated the project and has pledged that every library in the land will be fur- nished with titles from the Series, so that all Guyanese can appreciate our monumental achievement in moving from Exploitation to Expression. If the Series becomes the founda- tion and inspiration for future literary and scholarly works, then my government will have moved towards fulfilling one of its primary tasks, which is the educational development of our people. President Bharrat Jagdeo 6 BRITISH POLICY TOWARDS THE AMERINDIANS IN BRITISH GUIANA, 1803-1873 MARY NOEL MENEZES, R.S.M. Introduction by Dimitar Angelov The Guyana Classics Library 7 8 INTRODUCTION The origins of the present book can be traced back to 1969 when the author, Mary Noel Menezes, R.S.M., was conduct- ing research on the Guyana-Venezuela Boundary Dispute. Briefly jotted down in the margins of her notes, the idea for a study on the British-Amerindian relations grew and devel- oped over the following few years to reach its successful com- pletion in 1977, when the first edition of British Policy towards the Amerindians in British Guiana, 1803-1873 was published. When first released, Menezes’s work addressed a significant gap in the historiography of the young South American country, whose scholars had hitherto focused mostly on the history of the sugar industry, slavery and post-abolition immi- gration. It covered a period of seventy years of British rule commencing with the Dutch handover in 1803 and ending with the administrative reform of 1873 whereby the office of Superintendent of Rivers and Creeks, which had special pre- rogatives over the Amerindians, was abolished. Menezes’s account of the relationship between the British and the indigenous population of Guyana opens with a brief historical overview of the years prior to 1803. After Raleigh’s dream of El Dorado failed to materialise, the European ex- plorers, especially the Dutch, began to grasp the real poten- tial of the land between the Corentyne and the Orinoco rivers. Unlike their European rivals - the Spaniards - the Dutch were not interested in imposing the Christian faith, with all its social and cultural corollaries. Instead, their relations with the Amerindians were based on mutually beneficial trade in products such as annatto dye, oil of maaran, indigo, raisins, balsams and letterwood. By the end of the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants had established settlements along the Essequibo, Pomeroon and Moruka rivers, which thrived on the strength of their commercial ties with the native people. However, with the growth of plantation slavery in the colony, the alliance between the Dutch and the Amerindians acquired a new dimension and urgency. With an increasingly disproportionate number of African slaves and hostile Span- ish neighbours, west of the Orinoco, the position of the Dutch 1 settlers was growing ever more precarious. Their continuous hold on power could only be maintained through a strategic ally who could help them suppress any resistance on the part of the plantation workforce whilst keeping the Spanish at bay. The Amerindians were perfectly suited for both these roles. With their detailed knowledge of the local terrain and superb orientation skills they proved indispensable in tracking down and capturing runaway slaves. Deeply resentful against the Spanish policy of religious and cultural assimilation, they were naturally drawn to the far more noninterventionist approach of the Dutch. It was out of these two preconditions that the Dutch-Amerindian alliance was born, an alliance which the Dutch would make every effort to strengthen and prolong. They would sign official treaties of friendship with the Amer- indian chiefs; bestow gifts such as small objects and foodstuffs to all members of the tribes; and appoint especially designated officials known as uitleggers, or “postholders”, who were stationed at different places in the Interior and were entrusted to maintain close contact with the aboriginals. The postholders were the key players in the implementa- tion of the Dutch policy towards the Amerindian population. Their efforts to attach the Indians to their respective “posts”, i.e. the places to which they were designated, created obvi- ous advantages for further development and expansion of trade. Furthermore, the presence of a sedentary Amerindian population close at hand, served Dutch interests in a sphere very different from commerce. Living in close proximity to the posts, the Indians could be easily summoned and deployed as reinforcement in slave-catching expeditions. They proved themselves trusted allies during the 1763 Berbice Slave Re- bellion as well as during the 1772 Black revolt. For their loyal service in 1772, the Amerindians were granted presents by the colonial authorities and in 1774 the Court of Policy pro- posed that special staves of office should be presented to the chiefs as tokens of respect. As the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, the Dutch found themselves increasingly reliant on Amerindian support for capturing runaway slaves, which gave rise to a policy of regular gift distribution among the tribes. When the British took over the colony, in 1803, the Indians were quick to ac- 2 cept their authority and demand the same preferential treat- ment they had received under the Dutch. The new European rulers deemed it wise to comply. Since they also required Amerindian assistance in policing the borders of plantation society, the British continued their predecessors’ strategy of cajoling and bribery. In 1806, the Court of Policy decreed that “a premium of Two [sic] hundred guilders” be divided among the Indians participating in a slave-hunting expedition “[f]or every Bush Negro who [was to be] taken and secured alive and who [would] have been less than two years in the Bush” ( qtd. in Menezes 53). Alternatively the sum of one hundred guilders was to be paid “for the right hand of every runaway Negro that [was to be] killed during the Expedition [sic]” (qtd. in Menezes 53). However, although the British took frequent recourse to Amerindian slave hunters, the latter did not always receive the remuneration they had been promised.

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