Occasional Notes. 211 



they were less educated and polished than the black aristocrats of old 

 Berbice ; they had no Rev. and Mrs. Wray specially brought from 

 England to work among them and take an interest in them. One may 

 suppose that they were good workmen, nevertheless — better taught than 

 many an one who botches a job to-day and calls himself a " carpenter." 

 Fort Zeelandia, no doubt, was put up in part by black Winkels. The 

 Church may be another job of theirs and the old landing-place whose 

 small Dutch bricks, half-buried in mud, are lapped all day and all night 

 by the brown waters of the Essequebo. 



It is probable that the Winkels of Essequebo were freed in 1831, 

 simultaneously with the Winkels of Berbice. In 1905 free grants of 

 land were issued to several people in the island who claimed to be 

 descendants of the old Crown Slaves. Some of them had been in 

 uninterrupted occupancy of their land for very many years. 



Are any direct descendants of the old Winkels of Fort Island yet 

 alive ? It may be, " one-one." If you meet an old black man in Fort 

 Island, with a little air of natural and unaffected dignity about him ; or 

 an old lady whose white hair is like a cotton wig above a black, seamed, 

 shrewd and kindly face ; make some little investigation. It may be that 

 they are the last direct survivors of the (Essequebo) " King William's 

 People."— J.G.C. 



Adam Lindsay Gordon's Grandfather. — In his brochure, " The 

 Making of the West Indies : the Gordous as Colonists," Mr. 

 J. M Bullock — an authority on the Clan Gordon — mentions 

 Robert Gordon who was a Governor of Berbice in the good old days, 

 justly lamented, when Berbice was a separate colony. He notes the 

 interesting fact that Robert Gordon was the maternal grandfather of 

 Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. His daughter, Henrietta, 

 married Adam Duruford Gordon in 1829. Their son became the author 

 of many haunting lines that are likely to live in " Bush Ballads and Gal- 

 loping Rhymes." 



Robert Gordon was a planter in Berbice who was appointed Gov- 

 ernor on the death of William Woodley, in December, 1810, He was a 

 character. Dalton (" History of British Guiana " : I, 379) tells us his 

 fellow-colonists dubbed him " Mad Gordon." He was clever but eccen 

 trie. He was of a firm and decided nature, acting with impartiality and 

 fearlessness towards both friends and foes. On one occasion he suspended 

 two of his most intimate friends, members of the Court of Policy, in 

 consequence of some subterfuge attempted to be practised on him iu 

 connection with the boedel of an estate. He abruptly resigned in Decem- 

 ber, 1813, as the result of a brush with Downing Street, and died in the 

 West Indies the following year. 



The psychologist will trace in Adam Lindsay Gordon the ability and 

 fearlessness, unhappily united with a want of balance, which marked 

 Robert Gordon when he ruled Berbice upwards of a huudred years aco 



—J.G.C 



