ON THE FKONTIER OF BRITISH GUIANA AND BRAZIL 



By Capt. H. Cabington Smith, R. E. 



tWitli 4 plates] 



British Guiana, between Venezuelan Guiana and Surinam, or Dutch 

 Guiana, on the Atlantic seaboard, has an area of about 90,000 square 

 miles, divided into the coastal alluvial plain, the central sand and clay 

 belt, and the mountain plateau. The coastal plain, from 10 to 40 miles 

 wide, contains practically all the towns, villages, population, and cul- 

 tivated land. It is flat and low, scarcely rising to 50 feet above sea 

 level, while along the coast much of it is actually below high-tide level, 

 necessitating sea defenses and intertidal drainage. The sand and clay, 

 or center, belt is covered with dense tropical forest, and has an average 

 elevation of about 200 feet above sea level. It is uninhabited except 

 for a few lumber camps and bauxite, gold, and diamond workings. 



The mountain region rises to the watershed of the Amazon, culmi- 

 nating in the southwest in the Roraima massif 8,600 feet high and in 

 the south in the Akarai highlands, which contain mountains touching 

 3,000 feet, though for the most part the land averages only 1,000 feet 

 above sea level. This belt is also covered with dense tropical forest, 

 except for some savannas or grasslands to the southwest, which 

 make fair cattle country and are sparsely inhabited. Wliile every 

 available cleared acre of the coastal plain is under cultivation, this 

 amounts to only a three-hundredth of the colony, the rest, except for 

 the small savanna lands, being impenetrable forest. Owing to this 

 unbroken extent of forest, the rivers form the only means of communi- 

 cation in the interior, or did so until the advent of the amphibian 

 airplane, the use of which is very limited owing to the scarcity of 

 stretches of river on which it is possible to alight. 



Until 1835 very little was known of the interior. In that year Sir 

 Robert Schomburgk, on a commission for the Royal Geographical 

 Society, made extensive river surveys. Among other journeys he 

 ascended the Essequibo to its source, crossed the watershed and trav- 

 eled down one of the tributaries of the Amazon and up another, re- 

 crossing the watershed near the source of the Courantyne, by which 

 he returned to the Atlantic coast. 



^ Reprinted by permission from The Geographical Journal, vol. 92, No. 1, July 1938. 



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