The Old Dutch Days. 
193 
the Established. Church, is situate on the point of land formed by the 
Arapiacro and Poineroon, which now came from the southwest: tue 
pretty little church is visited by the Caribs of the romeroon, the Arawaks 
of Tapacuma and Arapiacro, and the Negroes settled around the neigh- 
bourhood. Immediately opposite the mission upon the western bank of 
the Poineroon is a charming house surrounded by a still inure charming 
garden with ornamental plants and orange trees. It bears the name 
Pomeaco and belongs to a storekeeper, Mr. Pickersgill, who supplies the 
Europeans, coloured people, Negroes and Indians living on the river with 
everything that the isolation and distance from Georgetown denies the 
former, and that the stage of civilisation already won makes desirable 
for the latter: at the same time he carries on an extremely lucrative 
business in timber and truli leaves. After a short stay with the cultured 
trader whom I subsequently learnt to know more intimately and in 
whose company as well as in that of his sweet wife I spent many a 
pleasant hour, we said good-bye to him and the Poineroon and made our 
way into the Arapiacro. The banks of this tributary are also swampy 
and liable to be flooded, but their vegetation, except for the palms, is 
very different from that of the main stream. Where at certain spots they 
were somewhat raised, we were faced by rapidly decaying elegant resi- 
dences up to which some glorious avenues of Cocos and Oreodoxa that 
generally ended in thick columns of Oleander, Hibiscus, Gardenia, and 
Rose-bushes, were to be seen leading from the waterside. The builders 
had left their work behind but they themselves were gone. In the broad 
porch where once upon a time the rich Dutch owner, comfortably 
smoking his pipe, gazed in satisfaction upon the stream below, along 
which his harvest of sugar and coffee was being transported to Mother 
Ocean, and upon the flourishing rose-bushes that he had transplanted 
from Europe, as well as upon his thriving plantation beds, we now saw 
the sly face and dirty figure of a Negro, or the gloomy features of a 
coloured man who little worried that the huge posts were threatening to 
fall. It was only the flowers of the ornamental trees surrounding the 
beautiful ruins that still made a show in the same finery and same play 
of colour as they did in those times. Many of these buildings had been 
Orlean or Arnatto factories, but with the falling price of the article, the 
buildings also fell: for a pound of t he pigment which formerly cost a 
dollar can now be bought for a twelfth of that amount, a bitt.* 
(ill. After following the Arapiacro for a considerable distance to 
the south-east, we reached the mouth of the Tapacuma, and made our 
way in. The farther we went up the narrower it became, until finally 
the trees from both sides clasped arms like brothers and formed a thick 
leafy roof. At last an enormous dam with a lock of corresponding size, 
barred our further progress, and led us at the same time into the roomy 
dwelling of a friendly timber-igetter who offered us the long wished-for 
camp. As we had got here after dark I was not a little astonished next 
morning to see, spread out at my feet, the smooth waters of a huge 
The local term for a fourpenny piece, or its equivalent value, (fid.) 
