SECTION as freeholders or as metayers.

II.

General

The Church of England claims about half the population, and the rest are for the most part either Moravians or Wesleyans. The schools connected with these bodies are subsidised by grants in aid from the government, but the progress of education is checked by want of funds and want of regular inspection.

There is nothing in the present condition of Tobago to Summary call for special remark, and its past is mainly interesting for the variety of nationalities which took part in colonising it. It is difficult to understand why it should have been selected by the prince of a Baltic state for the site of a settlement, but its neighbourhood to Grenada would be enough to invite French interference, and the English from Barbados might be attracted to an island which, like Barbados, lies as an out-post on the ocean side of the Caribbean archipelago. Still more intelligible is its Dutch connexion, for the Netherlanders, intent on trade alone, looked for footholds near the large islands and the continent; and as in Santa Cruz and St. Eustatius they planted themselves as near as they could to the greater Antilles, so in Tobago they found a resting-place near Trinidad and the coast of Guiana. To understand the history of Tobago, its neighbourhood to a large island and the continent must be borne in mind, and it must be remembered that the people, into whose hands this colony finally passed, were the same who took Trinidad from the Spaniards and Demerara from the Dutch.

BOOKS, PUBLICATIONS, ETC., RELATING TO TOBAGO.

Reference should be made to the following:

1. A History of Tobago (1867), by H. I. WOODCOCK, then Chief Justice of the island.

2. A_Handbook of the Colony of Tobago (1884), by L. G. HAY, then Treasurer and now Commissioner of the island-very full and well compiled.

3. HOOPER'S Report upon the Forests of Tobago (1887).

CHAPTER VIII.

BRITISH GUIANA.

VIII.

In addition to her West Indian islands, Great Britain CHAPTER possesses two mainland dependencies on or near the Caribbean Sea, viz. British Honduras in Central America, and British Guiana in South America. They are neither of them peninsulas, all-but-islands, such as she owns in the Old World1, but blocks of land cut out of the continent, ill-defined and of large extent.

British Guiana lies outside and to the south-east of the General Caribbean islands, and the story of its colonisation is a description of Guiana.

record of settlement at the mouths and on the banks of great rivers as opposed to the island colonies of which a sketch has been given in the preceding pages. Guiana, which the early Dutch settlers knew as the Wild Coast, is the vast district of South America lying between the Orinoco and the Amazon, cut off from the rest of the continent by the interlacing of their tributaries, and often spoken of as an island. The courses of these two great rivers in their relation to each other are somewhat analogous to those of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi in North America. In either case the headwaters of the two rivers or their feeders 3

3

1 See the author's Introduction to a Historical Geography of the British Colonies, p. 112.

2 The derivation of the name Guiana is doubtful. Sir R. Schomburgk in his Description of British Guiana says: 'It is said to have received its name from a small river, a tributary of the Orinoco.' He is probably referring to the Waini or Guainia river, but the explanation does not carry any further, and it can only be said that the name would seem to denote water in some form. Guiana is sometimes called in old works the Arabian coast, the word being a corruption of Arabisci, perhaps itself a corruption of Carabisci, i.e. Caribbean.

3 The Rio Negro, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon, is actually joined to the Orinoco by a natural canal, the Casiquiari.

II.

SECTION are not far distant from each other, and, flowing in different directions, they enclose between them a large stretch of continent and a long line of coast marked out as a distinct sphere of European colonisation, while each great stream is a water highway leading into the heart of the continent. It may be said broadly that the Orinoco formed the boundary of Spanish dominion, though not of Spanish claims, on the north coast of South America, while the Amazon was the limit of the Portuguese in Brazil. Between them Dutch, French, and English found room to trade and to settle, and at the present day all three nations own provinces side by side, each of which bears the name of Guiana. Many rivers small in comparison with the Orinoco and Amazon, but still in themselves great and noble streams, flow to the sea along this northern coast, among others the Essequibo, the Demerara, the Berbice, the Corentyne, the Surinam, the Maroni, and the Oyapok. The first three of these are the chief rivers of what is now called British Guiana; the Corentyne separates British Guiana from Surinam or Dutch Guiana; the Maroni separates Dutch from French Guiana; and the Oyapok is commonly taken as the eastern limit of French Guiana.

Discovery

In 1498, as has been already seen 1, Columbus came to of Guiana. the mouth of the Orinoco and landed on the coast of the Gulf of Paria. In the following year, 1499, Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci, reached South America somewhere about Surinam, and coasted westward along Guiana and the Spanish main to the further side of the Gulf of Venezuela. In January 1500 Pinzon crossed the line of the equator, sighted Brazil near Pernambuco, and then sailing northwest discovered the mouth of the Amazon, whence he passed on along the whole coast of Guiana to the Orinoco. Thus in less than three years the main outline of the shores of Guiana was traced by Spanish sailors.

See above, pp. 231-2.