Mary N. Menezes British Policy Towards Amerindians

388 Pages·2011·3.59 MB·English

BRITISH POLICY
TOWARDS THE
AMERINDIANS IN
BRITISH GUIANA
1803-1873
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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
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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
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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 prom-
ised 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
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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 land-
scape.
The Guyana Classics Library will republish out-of-print
poetry, novels and travelogues so as to remind us of our liter-
ary 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
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BRITISH POLICY
TOWARDS THE
AMERINDIANS IN
BRITISH GUIANA,
1803-1873
MARY NOEL MENEZES, R.S.M.
Introduction by
Dimitar Angelov
The Guyana Classics Library
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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 coun-
try, whose scholars had hitherto focused mostly on the his-
tory 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 riv-
ers. 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 cen-
tury, 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
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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 desig-
nated 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-
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