Marjoleine Kars - Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast

BLOOD ON THE RIVER

Also by Marjoleine Kars

Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion
in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina

BLOOD ON THE RIVER

A CHRONICLE OF MUTINY AND FREEDOM ON THE WILD COAST

Marjoleine Kars

For Kate

Contents

BLOOD ON THE RIVER

The Atlantic world. (Map designed and produced by the UMBC Cartographic Services.)

The Wild Coast. (Map designed and produced by the UMBC Cartographic Services.)

The Berbice River. (Map designed and produced by the UMBC Cartographic Services.)

Leupe 1571, Map of the Berbice Colony, 1764. (Nationaal Archief, The Hague.)

The Canje River. (Map designed and produced by the UMBC Cartographic Services.)

Prologue

Jolting along at sixty miles an hour in the four-by-four, I glanced over at Alex, hoping he wouldnt take the truck into one of the deep gullies pitting the road. We were on the Ituni highway, the main road from Guyanas capital, Georgetown, to Brazil. It was a highway in name only. The pavement gave out after twenty-five miles to become a rutted, sandy path through bauxite mines, savanna, and lowland rain forest. Alex had driven the route hundreds of times. Every year he brings scientists to his seventeen-thousand-acre cattle ranch, Dubulay, ninety miles up the Berbice River, in remote, thinly populated bush country. They come to study plants and animals in Guyanas vast, untrammeled wilderness. One biologist counted forty-one species of bats on the ranch; another named a newly discovered species of lizard after Alex. A large U.S. farming concern runs a research station at Alexs ranch to experiment with hardier species of corn. I was the first historian to visit, the result of an unexpected archival discovery.

A few years before, in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague, I had happened upon a cache of records about a massive slave rebellion. It took place in Dutch Berbicetodays Guyanaon the Wild Coast, the northern edge of South America, in 176364. The documents perplexed me. I had never heard of Berbice or of the 1763 slave rebellion. Few have: no one has studied the uprising in depth.

As a historian of the Atlantic world, I was well aware that most major slave rebellions were suppressed in a matter of days or even hours, leaving few traces of their organization or how people shaped their freedom. Yet in Berbice, to my astonishment, the insurgents took over the entire colony and held off the Dutch for more than a year. How did they pull this off? What were they after? From prior research on the American Revolution, I knew that during that era, popular myths notwithstanding, colonial Americans did not agree on the meaning of liberty or on their future after independence. Not only did colonists divide into patriots and loyalists, but many refused to support either side or oscillated between them. I resolved to find out whether the Berbice uprising had the same complexities.

If the Dubulay ranch is a haven for biologists, it is even richer for historians. Almost four hundred years ago, Dutchman Abraham van Pere started a colony on the Berbice River. He built a house and traded with Indians on the very spot now occupied by Dubulay ranch. Over time, Van Peres farm, the Peereboom (Pear Tree), evolved into a large sugar plantation. Early in the eighteenth century, a group of Amsterdam investors bought the colony from the Van Pere family, and Peereboom became one of eleven plantations belonging to the Society of Berbice. Early in 1763, slaves in Berbice revolted. The subsequent rebellion lasted more than a year and involved nearly the entire enslaved population of about five thousand people spread over 135 estates. Having researched this rebellion, I knew the Peereboom figured prominently in these events. It was the scene of a massacre where rebels executed, despite promises of free passage, forty-two European men, women, and children who had sought refuge on the Peereboom at the outbreak of the revolt. Later on, a group of Africans accused by fellow rebels of cannibalism built a village in the savanna behind the plantation.

I had arrived in Georgetown after an all-night layover in the Trinidad airport. Bleary-eyed, I had only the vaguest idea of how to proceed. My wish had been to travel up the Berbice River to get to know the terrain. But there is no bus route or train up the Berbice, or even a direct road, and there are no hotels (Guyanas tourist industry is still developing). A month of emailing with a well-known wilderness outfit had resulted in an itinerary and price tag geared more toward a boutique adventure tourist than a historian on a modest grant. So on the eve of my departure, I still had no definite plan or reservations, just the assurance of a long-term Guyana resident, a Scottish woman I had contacted at the last minute, that shed have a driver pick me up at the airport at five a.m. and bring me to her house. Margaret turned out to be an energetic woman in her sixties, experienced in organizing research visits for scientists interested in Guyanas vast biodiversity. She knew all about Dubulay. Alex was an old school friend of her son. As luck would have it, Alex was leaving Georgetown for Dubulay in an hour, just enough time for me to stock up on snacks at the local Shell station. For safekeeping, I left my passport and extra cash with Margaret, my acquaintance of forty-five minutes, and clambered into the cab of Alexs truck. As he wedged his rifle behind the seats my eyebrows went up. Alex explained that highway robbery isnt just a euphemism in Guyana.

Guyana, comparable in size to Idaho or Kansas, faces the Atlantic Ocean in northern South America and shares borders with Suriname, Venezuela, and Brazil. Forty percent of its estimated 773,000 inhabitants are immigrants from India whose ancestors came as indentured servants in the nineteenth century after the abolition of slavery. The descendants of former slaves comprise about 30 percent of the population, and another 20 percent are of mixed descent. Amerindians make up almost 10 percent of the population, and whites and Chinese 0.5 percent.English-speaking country in South America. In 1966, British Guiana gained its independence.

Many of the countrys earliest historical records are housed in the Netherlands. As I surveyed the archive in The Hague, my amazement at the story of the Berbice Rebellion grew. Almost nine hundred people, close to half the surviving enslaved adults, were questioned as suspects and witnesses in the aftermath of the 1763 rebellion. In response to specific, and often leading, questions, the re-enslaved gave careful and strategic answers, mediated by the European clerk, who translated Creole into Dutch, summarized answers, and wrote in the third rather than the first person. Some testimonies were extremely short, while others went on for pages.