This is the first in a two part series that explores the issues of climate change and the movement of people to Guiana. Historians agree that the movement of people to Guiana was inextricably linked to climate change. At the end of the fourth Ice age, about 12,000 years ago, humans arrived in the Western hemisphere. The severe climate had prohibited farming, hunting and fishing. The glaciers were left behind.
Scholars have suggested that the tribes who left Asia and, arrived in the Americas came in more than one migratory wave. The theory was that the tribes followed their herds of bison and other game across the land bridge that today is the Bering Straits, in search of pasture land, and to fish and hunt.
“In contrast, to the cold and snow of the Arctic, the thickly forested seacoast of the Pacific North West had a milder climate. Rainfall was plentiful and mild winters and warns ocean currents kept rivers and bays free of ice.”
In subsequent migratory waves, archaeologists have found that the early Amerindians or Americans travelled by boat along the Pacific Coast from Siberia to Alaska, then to South America. The Amerindians arrived in Guiana about 7,500 years ago. They were the first people to settle in the colony. The numerous rivers and creeks, marshes and lagoons, waterfalls, mountains, forests and the relatively flat and low lying coastal plain, often below sea-level, provided suitable accommodation for the newly arrived Amerindians. In fact, many of the first people in Guiana lived near the sea coasts and the river valleys. These tribes had travelled through the Greater Antilles, Mexico, Central America and Peru.
The Historian James Rodway had observed that there were 140,000 Caribs in Guiana in the sixteenth century. In quoting William Hilhouse, historian, Mary Noel Menezes, stated that there were eight different ‘Amerindian nations’ in the nineteenth century, while Sir Robert Schomburgh reported that there were thirteen Amerindian Tribes, in 1840.
During the 1830’s and 1840’s, the Amerindians population was distributed as follows:
Coastal Swamps – Warrau, Arawak
Lowland Forest – Carib, Accawaio, Darrina, Wai Wai, Arawak.
Low Land Savanna – Macusi, Wapisana
Upland Forest – Accawaio
Upland Savanna – Arecuna, Patamona
The contemporary number of Amerindian tribes is four, namely the
1. The Warrau
2. The Arawak
3. The Carib
4. The Wapisiana
The Warraus lived on the low lying coastlands between Barima and the Pomeroon and their boundaries. They were also expected fisherman, since the creeks abound in a variety of fish. The arrival of the Dutch colonists led many Warraus, to move out of the Orinoco delta and settle along the Guyana and Surinam coastlands.
The Arawaks inhabited the regions of the seacoasts and mouths of rivers. They were termed the “tiger-man” because of their ability to overcome the jaguars of the forests and the coasts.
The Caribs settled along the right bank of the Orinoco and also in the Upper Essequibo, in the Mazaruni, the Pomeroon, the Upper Cuyuni, the Barima and the Berbice rivers.
The Caribs did not settle down to agricultural pursuits, until the mid-nineteenth century. From around the 1590’s, the Caribs lived around the North-west. By 1596, the Caribs were sharing the Barima region with the Arawaks. They were in control of the lower Amakura and Waini rivers. In the 1680’s, their presence was reinforced by Caribs from the Coppename river. They had been evicted by Governor Sommelsdyke of Suriname. In 1613, the Caribs had been identified on the Corentyne. They remained in this location during the Dutch period.
There are two theories about Caribs immigration. One, is that all the Carib tribes reached Guiana by land, and that a certain branch crossed from there, to the islands, where they formed the ‘Island Caribs’, who inhabited the Antilles, at the time of their discovery by Europeans. The second theory is that all the Carib tribes in Guiana reached that part of the mainland from the islands.
The Wapisianas were first seen by the Dutch in the eighteenth century. During this period, the Wapisianas occupied all the Brazilian savannahs, south of the Takutu and the Uraracueria rivers. When Robert Schomburgh first explored southern British Guiana in 1835, he found the Wapisianas occupying the territory stretching from the forests of the Essequibo, on the east, to the Parima (Rio Branco) on the west. Their neighbours were the Macusis on the south and, the Paramauas on the west.
Their villages were comprised of a few houses grouped together without regularity, in the savannah, near the forests. The houses were rectangular, round or oblong with two doors at opposite sides or ends, one for men and one for women. A small third door was used for garbage. The walls were either made of thatched palm leaves or, of adobe, held in position by wattled poles. There was a small round house nearby which was used for making farina and cassava bread. Temporary shelters were erected on the river side for use, when fishing or hunting.
Although in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish and the English had reached the coast of Guiana, before any other European nation, the Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in Guiana. The Guiana territory became known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Dutch colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice.
In their quest for economic liberation, they pursued tropical agriculture, because of the commercial viability of such crops as cotton, tobacco, coffee, cocoa and sugar. The monetary value associated with the agriculture produce, cultivated in Guiana, induced European investors to settle in the colony, by the onset of the industrial revolution.
When the British gained the territory from the Dutch in 1803, it was ratified by the treaty of London in 1814. However, the unhygienic conditions in the tropics, took its toll on the physical and mental health of the administrators, planters and their families and the Europeans indentured labourers as they adjusted to the change from the temperate climate. It was during this period, that the alliances, which the Europeans had formed with the Amerindians, proved most beneficial. The Amerindians provided them with tropical medicines, to combat such diseases as malaria, yellow fever, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera and manic depression.
In his lecture, “ The Foundation and Development of “British Guiana”, on 8th May, 1911, J.A.J. de Villiers recounted the challenges and successes of the Dutch Governor Laurens Storm van’s Gravesande (1704-1775). He served as administrator of the colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo for the thirty four years (1738 – 1772). He laid the foundation for the colony of British Guiana. However, it was done at great personal sacrifice. His secretary, Mr. Spoors became blind in June 1764 and in August he wrote;
On July 20 it pleased the Almighty to take my son, Gerald Johan, from this temporal to His eternal kingdom, at the age of twenty-four; of my six sons,
I have therefore none left but the young who has gone to Europe in the country’s warship Zaphyr. Painful occurrances in my old age, and following, too, so closely upon each other; but we have to submit to the will of the Most High – who can ward off His hand or say to Him, ‘what does Thou?’
Henry Holmes, an American magistrate in Guiana, in the 1820s, observed that, there were white women who devised every measure to preserve their complexion. They kept out of the sunshine and, was whiter than those from Europe and, sometimes palled and sickly. There were few with lively and healthy complexion.
In Part II of this series, climate change and the movement of laboring classes to Guiana will be discussed.
