in Palace Yard. With his death England's association with Guiana came to an end, not to be renewed, and then only as an incidental consequence of European wars, until 1781, save for a small settlement established by Lord Willoughby, in the reign of Charles the Second, at Surinam, which was bought back by the Crown and given to the Dutch in exchange for what is now the State of New York. From 1580, however, the time of the first Dutch settlement on the Pomeroon, until 1781, the Zeelanders established small colonies along the rivers which break the coast line of what is now British, Dutch, and French Guiana, and ascended the highways into the interior. Two facts as regards the section of Guiana which is now British are quite clear. These are, that the Dutch held a mart for slaves at the mouth of the Orinoco, at Barima Point; and that they penetrated into the basin of the Cuyuni River in the north-west, for the sites of their forts may still be seen. In 1781 Great Britain took possession of all the Dutch colonies in the West Indies and on the mainland of South America, but restored them at the Peace of Versailles two years later. Henceforward up to 1803 Guiana was in a perpetual state of transition, now Dutch, now French, now English, and never long under either flag. But when the great war broke out in 1803 the Dutch ceded the three counties of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo to the British, in whose hands they have since remained, the last transfer being finally ratified by the treaty with Holland in 1814. The practical result of all these wars and treaties has been that the country now is, and has been during this century, held in three sections, British Guiana from the Orinoco to the Corentyn, Dutch Guiana from the Corentyn to the Mariwini, and French Guiana from the Mariwini

to the debateable land where Captain Lunier was shot down last year when sent to restore order among the Brazilian desperadoes who follow the leadership of Cabral. Mention of this last circumstance reminds us of the fact that France has a boundary dispute with Brazil, closely analogous to that of Great Britain with Venezuela; a dispute, too, in which the Monroe doctrine, as it appears to be understood by President Cleveland, is equally at stake. But that is not a matter which can now be discussed. In concluding this brief historical summary two points should be particularly remembered: first, that when Great Britain finally took over the three counties of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, she necessarily acquired all the country which the Dutch held; and secondly, that as the Republic of Venezuela did not come into existence until 1836 (that at least was the year of its diplomatic recognition by Great Britain), the British title to the area in dispute is long antecedent to any advanced by Venezuela. Venezuela's claim is only tenable on the assumption that the successful rebels were the inheritors of what Spain had possessed, and not merely of the territory which the rebels then actually commanded by occupation. Now, as to how far Spain had possessed land lower down the shoulder of South America than the Orinoco, and as to how far the Dutch had pushed their way north-westward to the Orinoco, are matters of fact too complex for brief elucidation. The curious reader cannot do better than study them, and the accompanying maps, in the aforesaid Blue Book.

Guiana is a country of mountain and valley, of rolling downs and limitless savannahs, of broad belts of primeval forest, of noble rivers and innumerable rivulets and creeks, the interior sparsely inhabited by nomadic

and peaceful tribes of red men now fast becoming extinct. That part of the country which has been in British possession since the final surrender by the Dutch lies between the Orinoco and the Corentyn, the latter being the boundary of Surinam, or Dutch Guiana. Its extreme north-westerly limit starts at a point at the mouth of the Orinoco, strikes southward along the course of the Amacura, then in a north-westerly direction runs parallel with the Orinoco, leaving a wide belt between it and the riverbank. Before it strikes the Caroni, which flows into the Orinoco, the line makes a sharp bend southward until it reaches a range of mountains culminating in the famous Roraima. Thence it follows the river Cotinga and Takuta until it takes in the headwaters of the Essequibo; this done, an eastward line to the head-waters of the Corentyn concludes the interior boundary. The line thus traced from the British frontier station at the mouth of the Orinoco to the Roraima range represents the extreme limit of the British claim. The true limit (what Lord Salisbury calls the "irreducible minimum ") follows the Amacura river and the Imataka range until it strikes the Cuyuni, thence following the course of that river and the Yuruan until it touches the range which ends in Mount Roraima. large pear-shaped area is thus left between the irreducible minimum and the extreme British claim; and this is the area which the British Government admits is so far open to dispute that it may fairly form the subject of arbitration. It is the area within the irreducible minimum, or the Schomburgk line, which Lord Salisbury has so far declined to submit to arbitration, for the reasons set forth in his second despatch to Mr. Olney. Now the Venezuela claim follows the coast from the mouth of the Orinoco to

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Cape Nassau, creeps behind the settled districts unquestionably cultivated by the Dutch as far back as the end of the sixteenth century, and thence marches with the Essequibo to its source. This claim, if held to be good, would deprive British Guiana of more than two-thirds of its area, and would reduce the colony to a relatively insignificant strip between the rivers Essequibo and Corentyn. The country within the line of the irreducible minimum, and excluding the pear-shaped tract with respect to which Great Britain is alone willing to arbitrate, is, roughly, as large as Great Britain and Ireland. It will thus be seen that Venezuela claims not only the pear-shaped tract but the area as large as Great Britain, leaving us a strip no larger than Ireland. This explanation will reveal the real magnitude of the issues at stake. From the point of view of the United States, assuming that the Presidential message implies a belief in the validity of the Venezuelan claim, it seems that Great Britain has extended her dominion in South America by an area as large as herself. And from the British point of view it seems that the United States are siding with Venezuela in seeking to deprive Great Britain, not only of the pear-shaped tract which she is willing to throw into the crucible of arbitration, but of the largest and richest part of her colony. Now if, on the one hand, there is any virtue in the new reading of the Monroe doctrine, and if, on the other, Great Britain is determined to maintain the integrity of her Empire and not to allow the dismemberment of Guiana in the interest of the neighbouring State of Venezuela, it will be obvious that the political situation is one of great difficulty and danger. At present, however, it would be unwise to say more than that. In the absence of definite informa

tion as to the course of negotiations, and in obedience to the strong desire expressed by Government that nothing should be written calculated to revive the feeling of hostility in the United States, it is not permissible to do more more than express a hope that the diplomatists will find a means of settlement which will leave British Guiana intact, at least as to the whole of the territory within the irreducible minimum.

The country is roughly divisible into three zones. First comes the level mud flat, twenty miles or more in width, formed by the soil brought down from the great rivers and edged with a thick belt of tall courida bush and mangrove. This belt is the natural sea-wall of the country. It extends in almost unbroken line from the Amazon to the Orinoco, and against its matted frontage the Atlantic rollers are beaten into foam and spray. Beyond the mud flats are long, low, irregular reefs of white quartz sand, sometimes rising into hillocks of from fifty to eighty feet high. These formed the original coast-line. The intervening stretch of rich black soil, sand and clay and vegetable deposit brought down by the rivers, represents the encroachment of the earth upon the sea. The process goes on incessantly. The rivers are so surcharged with alluvial that the sea for fifty miles from the coast is dark and turbid; and as the alluvial settles and the mud banks are extended, so the courida bush moves forward, ever reclaiming the new foreshore and waging war with the incoming tide. and again, in times of gale, the rollers tear up the matted roots and make a great gap in the natural fascines; but, though there may be isolated defeats, the general tendency is that of victory for the land. Thus have the mud flats been formed, the deposit a hundred feet or more in thick

Now

ness; a wondrously rich soil for the sugar-cane, a poor foundation for heavy buildings, but a perfect buffer during seismological disturbances. Beyond the sand-reefs come the formations of primary and metamorphic rocks, granitic rocks and ranges of sandstone mountains, rising by terraces into an elevated tableland of savannah. Where the mud flats end the great belts of forest begin, stretching for a hundred and fifty miles or more inland and forming towering walls of timber and foliage along the great waterways. The river system is on the grand scale peculiar to tropical America. The country, in fact, is cut up into innumerable islets grouped about the courses of the largest streams, the Essequibo, the Demerara, the Berbice, and the Corentyn. The finest river is the Essequibo, into which flow the magnificent waters of the Cuyuni and the Mazaruni, forming a confluence at Bartica Point over four miles broad, the stream then widening out through its subsequent course of sixty miles into an estuary twenty miles from bank to bank. The Essequibo rises in the Acaroi mountains, forty miles north of the Equator, and tears a sinuous way through and down the terraced surface for a distance of over six hundred miles. It is not navigable for steamers much beyond Bartica Point, and the farther it is explored the higher, grander, more beautiful, and more dangerous become the rapids. One of its tributaries, the Potaro, which joins it about one hundred and fifty miles from the coast, has a waterfall surpassing Niagara in height. This is the Kaieteur Fall (the Old Man's Fall, to translate the Indian name), which was discovered by Mr. Brown, who made a geological survey for the Government a quarter of a century ago. At this point the Potaro falls over a sandstone tableland pre

cipitously for seven hundred and fortyone feet, and then over a sloping cataract of eighty-one feet into a great rocky basin. In flood-time the width

of the fall is about three hundred and seventy feet, and in the dry season two hundred and forty feet or less. 'If," says Mr. im Thurn, "the whole valley of the Potaro is fairyland, then the Kaieteur ravine is the very penetralia of fairyland. . . . Crossing the savannah we soon reached the Kaieteur cliffs. Lying at full length on the ground, head over the edge of the cliff, I gazed down. Then, and then only, the splendid and, in the most solemn sense of the word, awful beauty of the Kaieteur burst upon me. Seven hundred and fifty feet below, encircled in black boulders, lay a black pool into which the column of white water, graceful as the ceaseless flight of innumerable rockets, thundered from by my side. Behind the Fall, through the thinnest parts of the veil of foam and mist, a great black cavern made the white of the water still more white." The renowned traveller saw it some years afterwards and in time of flood. An indescribably vast curtain of waters, he says (some four hundred feet wide), "rolled over the top of the cliff, retaining its full width until it crashed into the boiling water of the pool which filled the whole space below; and at the surface of this pool itself only the outer edge was visible, for the greater part was beaten and hurled up in a great high mass of surf and foam and spray.' The Berbice comes next in size to the Essequibo; it is tidal, and navigable for vessels of a twelve feet draught to a distance of over a hundred miles. From its source it runs for many leagues almost parallel with the upper Essequibo, now confined between high gorges, now spreading

" 1

1 AMONG THE INDIANS OF GUIANA, by E. F. im Thurn (1883).

out into broad expanses, now racing over cataracts as it crosses the great bed of rock that runs athwart the shoulder of the continent. The Demerara divides the section of the country between the Berbice and the Essequibo. It is nearly two miles wide at the mouth, a dark muddy volume of water, running like a millstream as the tide goes out. This river is navigable for large vessels for over seventy miles, and its upper course is scarcely known to any but Indian boatmen and a handful of adventurous miners who have found gold beyond the Mora rapids. The Dutch boundary river, the Corentyn, takes its rise about twenty-five miles east of the headwaters of the Essequibo, and flows over a series of splendid cataracts whose supremacy in point of grandeur and beauty was unchallenged until the discovery of the Kaieteur. It is navigable for about one hundred and fifty miles. Besides these there are the Rupununi, whose white waters thread their way over the elevated tableland and through the vast savannahs, and fall into the Essequibo at a point over two hundred and fifty miles from the sea; the Barima and the Barama, making easily navigable highways from the coast to the northwest; the Pomeroon, the Mahaica, the Mahaicony, and the Abary, all rivers compared with which our island streams are insignificant.

Of the High Woods, the dense primeval forests of tropical America, many, from Humboldt downwards, have written, and written well; yet mere words can never adequately render their grand, mysterious beauty. The brush, in the hand of genius, might succeed; the pen must inevitably fail. It is of little service to tell of giant stems rising to a height of two hundred feet or more before they put forth their strong interlacing branches. The bare statement of the

fact conveys no idea of the massive nobility, the columnar dignity and grace of their trunks. They shoot straight upwards in grand and crowded array, the pillars of a dense roof of dark green foliage; and from their branches hang festoons of bush rope, in strenuous, though invisible combat, one with the other, to reach the soil, even as the great trees are in similar combat to force their way up into the sunlight and the air. So thickly matted is the roof of branch and leaf, of pendulous rope and ivy, that the light is dim. You may travel for days and never see the sun save for slanting shafts of burnished gold that pierce the interstices of this natural ceiling; or for occasional clearances where some old giant of the forest has fallen, crashing down all the weaker trees that could not withstand its weight. The atmosphere is almost intolerably hot and dank. The ground is encumbered with a dense undergrowth of bush, making progress painfully slow, even over an Indian trail. The silence, too, is as oppressive as the heat. Just before daybreak, in the ten minutes or so of half light, the forest will resound with the cries of monkeys and the notes of birds. As the sun rises over the woodland golden-breasted marmosets will leap from tree to tree; now and again a red-plumaged bird may dart like a flame through the leaves; a labba, a peccarie, a tapir, or possibly a puma, will crash through the undergrowth; but as the day wears on and the heat grows less endurable, these sights and sounds cease. All is still and silent. A large bright-hued butterfly may float lazily past; the solemn note of the bell-bird may echo in the groves; but these rare incidents of the forest noon-day seem but to intensify the motionless character of the scene, and deepen the sense of perfect solitude

and silence. It is much the same when travelling on the rivers and creeks. Rarely does the traveller on these winding streams get a clear stretch in front of him. He is on a wide avenue of water with high forest banks to right and left, with a great wall of trees behind him and another in front, a wall that gives way as the boat approaches the bend, and resolves itself into new forest banks with another wall of trees at the next turn of the stream. Not a sign of life will be seen, not a sound heard but the rhythmic stroke of the paddles. The creeks are of equal stillness and of unsurpassable loveliness, the cool brown waters covered with the queen of water lilies and over-arched with trees, festooned with lianas, creepers, and orchids. Often does a passage have to be forced with cutlasses through these meandering waterways. Every stroke of the paddles gives a new view and reveals a still more entrancing scene. It is toilsome work, no doubt, to get through these arched highways of the forest; but great is the reward to the lover of natural beauty. Splendidly is he compensated for his labour when the boat shoots out from beneath the interlaced roof of foliage and flowers into the sunlight that streams upon a wide lake in the open savannah, fringed by the forest belt, and with mountains mantled in blue haze, softly outlined against the horizon.

And what of the people of this interesting country? They number but two hundred and eighty-seven thousand, an infinitesimal proportion of what the area could support. When the Dutch went there in the sixteenth century, the forests were the home of large tribes of red Indians, who had probably found their way from the northern part of the continent along the chain of islands across the Caribbean sea. Now, however, there