"King William's People." 105 



blacksmiths, masons, bricklayers (and perhaps brick-makers), coopers and 

 carpenters of the old Dutch Colony, and later British Colony, of Eerbice 

 lived. 



They were Negroes, taught trades, and employed for the most part 

 on the Public Works. 



Of course the early Winkels — the first artizans — were white men. 

 They were indented servants — the Christian servants of the 17th Cen- 

 tury — blacksmiths and masons in the Netherlands, brought to the Wild 

 Coast, to ply their trade in the forests and by the great rivers of South 

 America. It must have been quite a number of years before the idea 

 occurred to anybody that the Negro could be taught a trade. The 

 Negro's head was wonderful for carrying things on, but not in. And 

 then (no doubt) a Government Planter, up the river, noticed a 

 Koromanti black trying to fashion something for himself out of a bit of 

 old iron, and it struck him — it must have been like a flash of inspiration 

 — ' How would it do if I tried to teach this man to be a blacksmith ? ' 

 Perhaps, after all, Kwasi had done a little rough iron-work in his own 

 country, but Mynheer Mittelholzer — who had just picked him up 

 from a ship sent by the West India Company — could not be expected 

 to know this, and — being a prosaic, unimaginative man — he had never 

 dreamt it. And so he bade his white blacksmith try him, and he tried 

 him, and the black man made an apt pupil. Such was the origin — I make 

 no doubt — of the first black Winkels. 



In the beginning the Winkel Department — together with the 

 Governor, his Secretary and the entire Administration — bar a lonely 

 Sergeant with a soldier or two in a Braudwagt at the mouth of the 

 river — was to be found in the vicinity of Fort Nassau, fifty miles up the 

 Berbice. They were difficult to get at fropi the sea, and this was part of 

 the idea, it was well in those days when privateers were about to be diffi- 

 cult to get at from the sea ! Towards the end of the eighteenth century — 

 after much bilk — they descended to the coast. The second New Amster- 

 dam — the town as we know it to-day — dates from about 1790. It was 

 just about that year that axe and fire began their work at the junction of 

 the Canje with the Berbice river. Dr. Pinckard — as we are told in his 

 " Notes on the West Indies " (London, 1806) visited Berbice in May, 1796. 

 "The town is yet in embryo," he observes. "According to a. plan, 

 formed for its construction, it is to be built upon the angle, or peninsula, 

 between the rivers Berbische and Kannye extending along the bank of 

 the former. The land on which it is to be erected is in part cleared of 

 its wood, and divided into lots ready for building, but, at present, only 

 here and there a scattei-ed house is to be seen. Beyond the prepared 

 land, and not half a mile from the Government-house, the bush still 

 overhangs the river Kannye. Government House, Pinckard thought, 

 " beyond all comparison, the handsomest and most spacious edifice I 

 have yet seen in South America. It is built near the river, with one front 

 commanding the water ; the other the town.'' 



And just about this time — and just about the site of the Winkel 

 Village to-day — there must have been built — although ' built ' is prob- 



