106 Timehri. 



ably too big a word for the putting up of such rude walls of sticks and 

 clay and roofs of grass or troolie (mere benabs 8 ime of them) the huts 

 that sheltered the first Government Negroes (slaves) in New Amsterdam. 

 Dr. Pinckar i visited a few of the Government negroes who were employed 

 at the fort — Fort Andries, or St. Andrew's, on the other bank of the 

 Canje, facing Crab Island Their huts called to his remembrance the 

 " cottagers' cabins in the Highlands of Scotlands." Just similar must 

 have been the huts of the Negroes attached to Government House, 

 who did the other work of the Colony at New Amsterdam. 



" Queenstown " — the pleasant, ample, and quiet (albeit, at dusk, 

 sandfly-haunted) " West End " of New Amsterdam — is certainly the oldest 

 part, by far, of that borough. It is to New Amsterdam what the Brick 

 Dam — which Pinckard describes, too : " a narrow causeway, paved with 

 small bricks put edgewise into the ground "— is to Georgetown. It repre- 

 sents the — always interesting — " beginning of things." A few old land- 

 marks may yet be noted in Queenstown. Perhaps the oldest is the 

 ' Brick House " (also called the " Bed House ") now belonging to Mr. C. 

 H. Jones. The thick brick walls of this building — eighteen inches of 

 small, red Dutch bricks — massive as the ramparts of some storm-beaten 

 castle : the iron-hard twelve-inch-square bullet-wood sills — the very, very 

 heart of the tree — impervious to time or termites : all tell of the good 

 old days when Abraham Van Batenburg was King of Berbice, and 

 Wolfart Katz could boast, probably with justice, that he had more slaves, 

 and better ones, than any other from the Devil's Creek to the Abary. 



Ancient — as antiquity goes in Guiana — is the building now All 

 Saints' Manse. Ancient too — in keeping with the abode of its Minister — 

 is All Saints' Scots Church, the old " Colony Church.'' It was opened in 

 May, 1820, and Governor Bentinck — another " harbitrary gent" — who 

 died six months after, lies buried in the chancel. 



And then — behind Kirk and Manse and the " Brick House " — is the 

 Winkel Village. There are no old buildings here — no old ruins, or 

 tumbledown tombs, or other footprints of humanity" — but the site, the 

 soil, the ground in this locality, as the h lunt and home of human beings, 

 and those of a particular type, is as old as anything here and hereabouts . 



It may be asked : How did the British Government come to own 

 slaves ? " The private planter we can understand — the expatriated 

 Hollander or Scot — ; no doubt without slave labour it would have been 

 impossible for him at the time to plant and pick his coffee, to bill and boil 

 his sugar. But His Britannic Majesty's iJoverument, the emblem of 

 Liberty, as a slave-holder ! — the thing is odd. How did it come to be? 



\\ ill, as regards the Colony of Berbice, His Britannic Majesty be- 

 came a slave-holder as the result of war. When 'he British Forces, for 

 the third and last time, demanded the surrender <>f Berbice on September 

 23, 1803, the provisional government, feeling they could do nothing to 

 defend the colony, drew up a series of articles which were concluded and 

 signed the following day. The second of these reads as follows : — 



" The plantations, lands, manufactories, workshops, slaves, effects, 

 and possessions of the Berbice Association, of w hatsoever nature, 



