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Updated: June 1, 2025
Before the signature of the preliminaries of peace at London on October 1st, 1801, our Government had given up its claims to the Cape, Malta, Tobago, Martinique, Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice, and Curaçoa, retaining of its conquests only Trinidad and Ceylon. A belated attempt had, indeed, been made to retain Tobago.
Our next cruise was on the coast of Guinea and Gulf of Mexico where we were running up and down for three months, without falling in with anything but West Indiamen bound to Demerara, Berbice, and Surinam, and occasionally chasing a privateer; but in the light winds they were too fast for us.
For centuries cotton had been among the world's materials for cloth, though the dearth of supply kept it in smaller use than wool or flax. This continued to be the case even when the original sources in the Orient were considerably supplemented from the island of Bourbon and from the colonies of Demarara, Berbice and Surinam which dotted the tropical South American coast now known as Guiana.
The colonial produce of Demerary, Essequibo, and Berbice, chiefly consists in sugar, coffee, cotton, rum, and molasses; but the richness and fertility of the soil is capable of raising any tropical production; new sources being daily unfolded, of the immense wealth derivable from these colonies, and their great importance to Great Britain.
In addition to the foregoing enumeration of commerce, indigo, pepper, cacoa, or chocolate nut, &c. may be raised to great amount. Of the latter, an individual planter at Berbice, from a nursery of 500,000 trees had 138,000 bearing ones in 1806, which when gathered in, calculating 5lb. to each tree, will reimburse him in the sum of £32,000.
When you have passed this river there is a good public road to New Amsterdam, the capital of Berbice. On viewing New Amsterdam, it will immediately strike you that something or other has intervened to prevent its arriving at that state of wealth and consequence for which its original plan shows it was once intended.
What has caused this stop in its progress to the rank of a fine and populous city remains for those to find out who are interested in it; certain it is that New Amsterdam has been languid for some years, and now the tide of commerce seems ebbing fast from the shores of Berbice. Gay and blooming is the sister colony of Demerara.
Surinam and Curaçoa received warning and were able to put themselves into a state of defence, but the colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo were taken, also St Martin, Saba and the Dutch establishments on the coast of Guinea.
Christopher's, Nevis, the Virgin Islands, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Vincents, Grenada, Berbice, Tobago, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Honduras, Demarara, and the Cape of Good Hope, on the 1st of August, 1834.
Feasting and dancing, kept up by the natives thus dressed, lasted the whole night; and the constantly-repeated burden of their song was "Roraima of the red rock, wrapped in clouds, the ever-fertile source of streams." Eastward of the Berbice, and greatly inferior in size to the Essequibo, is the Corentyn, which has its source near the equator, and forms the boundary of the British colony.
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