INTERIOR COMMUNICATIONS FOR BRITISH 



GUIANA. 



By Stafford X. Comber, H.Am.Soc.C.E. 



When, as a result cf my having made a report to* the Government 

 upon certain proposed highway construction in the interior of British 

 Guiana, the Editor of " Timehri," Dr. Nunan, asked me for a contribution 

 to these columns, I was somewhat dubious of being able to contribute 

 an article concerning British Guiana that would be of interest to the 

 layman. The position in this regard will be better understood when it is 

 explained that except for the stereotyped information contained in the 

 English school books I had a very faint notion of British Guiana, 

 prior to 1916. 



In that year I engaged to come to this colony in connection with the 

 permanent scheme of coast protection then about to be undertaken by the 

 Government, and when in considering the taking up of such work, I 

 sought information from the New York Public Library and the Congres- 

 sional Library at Washington, I found practically all books that had been 

 published concerning the colony as well as the annual Administration 

 reports. 



To one like myself, the greater part of whose life had been spent in 

 the highly developed industrial areas of England and the Eastern United 

 States, the impression created on " reading up " British Guiana, as 

 regards its development, or rather lack of development was very great. 



I learned that here was a healthy land of equable climate, comparable 

 in area and date of discovery and settlement with the State of New York 

 but with only a tiny fri:;ge of part of the relatively uncongenial flat coast- 

 lands inhabited, the development being of the crudest. I learned of the 

 pioneering of Schomburgk, Brown and Sawkins, Im Thurn and others, 

 and their descriptions of the magnificence of the Interior ; magnificence 

 not only in the aesthetic sense but magnificence of potential wealth, of 

 opportunity, of climate, and of all that goes to make a country great. 

 Yet this land was practically uninhabited and its natural wealth untouched. 

 Strangest of all, the slender financial resources of the country were about 

 to be heavily taxed by the expenditure of millions upon the salvage of 

 small portions of the muddy, flat coastlands, while nothing at all appeared 

 to be in reasonably immediate prospect in the matter of getting into the 

 heart of the country by modern means of communication and transport. 



To what must this condition be attributed, this seeming strangulation 

 of the country to the benefit of the coastal fringe ? Verrill, the American 

 writer, tells us that sugar is to blame. Others blame the climate, the 

 form of Government, the archaic methods of the Colonial Office, and other 

 factors, and not a fevv put the Colony's backwardness down to what they 

 are pleased to term the inherent laziness, lack of initiative, and general 



