The Three Counties under the Dutch. 39 
asked why he did not kill himself, he replied ' dat no good, if I sail do 
dat, me go to hell.' Lying, swearing and drunkenness, he did not 
regard as crimes ; suicide and giving poison to any person were in his 
estimation the greatest and almost the only sins. These he considered 
as. certain of preventing any one from being received into heaven, of 
which his ideas were extremely vague and unintelligible. Hell he 
described as an immense cauldron of liquid fire into which the wicked 
were to be plunged." 
Allusion has more than once been made to the rela- 
tions which were common between planters and, proba- 
bly other, white slave owners, and their women slaves. 
This is an unpleasant subject, into the details of which 
it is impossible to enter ; and I should avoid it altogether 
but that these relations gave rise to what was even at 
that time an important class, and has since become 
one of the most important classes, of the population of 
Guiana. European women were still very scarce in the 
colonies ; and thus white men were induced to associate 
with women who were not only black but slaves. This 
strange association was recognised throughout the colo- 
nies. Next to the deterioration which it inevitably 
wrought in the white men who were parties to it, its 
most important result was the production of the hybrid 
class of coloured people. Occasionally, incredible as it 
seems, the child of the black slave woman and her white 
master was regarded as the slave of his father; but 
gradually, a somewhat better state of feeling intervening, 
such children were brought up by the fathers as free 
mechanics and tradesmen. Thus arose the free coloured 
population, which in the time of PlNCKARD chiefly 
formed the middle class,* between the slaves and their 
lords. 
* I take this opportunity to point out, as emphatically as possible, 
