August 1, .1911 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



399 



British Guiana and India-Rubber 



By the Ilditor of TiiK India Kihrer World. 



THIRD LETTER, 



Population of British Guiana. - Coolies, — The "Sea Devil" and the Hoatzin. — 

 Gold and Diamonds. — The "Deadly Climate." — Snake Stories. — Early Plantings 

 of Hevea. — Experimental Plantings by tlie Agricultural Department, — Rain- 

 fall, — Shipping Rubber, — Packing Seeds. — The Balata Syndicate, 



CIlXSIDIvRIXG its area British Gtiiana is very sparsely 

 populated. The latest census record is about 300.000 souls. 

 one-third of them East Indian Coolies. There are but two 

 cities of note, Georgetown and New Amsterdam. The country 

 is really new and so full of opportunities that one wonders at 

 the waV the world has passed it by. The coolies, who are brought 

 in as laliorers on the large estates, arc good workers and very 

 tractable and polite. The stranger passing through the coolie 

 quarters of Georgetown is quite likely to be greeted with : 

 "Salaam Papa" — not a claim of blood relationship, but just their 

 deferential way of saying "good day," 



Like Xiirthcrn llrazil, lirilish Guiana, has the jaguar, the tapir 

 and the manatee, it has the great bird eating spiders, its big rivers 

 swarm with tish, its forests with game, its jungles with snakes, 

 great and small. It also has strange creatures of its owil It 

 was on a Guianan river that one night I heard a "sea devil"' 

 cr.i^h down on the surface of the water, and thereafter listened 

 to tales of its enormous size, of its habit of enwrapping divers in 

 its great side fins and feeding on them as they drowned. Then 

 there is the Iloatzin, earth's only known link between bird and 

 reptile — a bird whose young are hatched out four footed, but 

 who turn into bipeds, their forelegs shedding claws and sprout- 

 ing feathers as they mature. There are the gold fields, the 

 diamond fields, and the great unexplored reaches of forest and 

 savannali that are full of fascination — a paradise for hunter. 

 b.'t"ni.'t, naturalist and yes hcaltli seeker. There has been no 



"S.^PIU^^ Jkn'.m.vxi" .\t RunBERTON, Lower B.\ri.\i,\ River, 



Their women are slender, black eyed, well mannered and gor- 

 geously dressed. For example, one wore a scarlet hat, pale pink 

 waist, deep pink belt, white skirt, green scarf, brown stockings, 

 black shoes. A "real lady," dressed just like the European as 

 she firmly believed. The other laborers are native and West In- 

 dian negroes, and they are a uniformly capable, willing lot of 

 men. 



yellow fever since '81 and then it was brought in from another 

 country. There is malaria, but one need not acquire it, if careful, 

 and this I would affirm even to the distinguished lecturer, who 

 addressing a Xew York audience on Brazil and the Guianas, 

 summarized the latter country thus: ".Mong here we pass the 

 country known as British Guiana, which has a climate so hot and 

 deadly that no white man can live there," As 1 pen these lines 



