Guyana, whose rich feet are mines of gold. Whose head knocked against the roof of stars. Stands on her tip-toes at fair England looking. Kissing her hands, lowering her mighty breast. And every sign of submission making to be her sister and her daughter both. Of our most sacred maid.
(Adamson, Jack H & Folland, Harold (1969) “The Shepherd of the Ocean,” Gambit, Boston)
Sir Walter Raleigh so believed in the legend of El Dorado, ruled by the Emperor El Dorado, that he spent his entire fortune fitting out expeditions bound for its imperial city, Manoa. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas and the treasure that flowed into the Spanish treasury dazzled the minds of European monarchs. Raleigh observed that the Spanish wealth consisted mainly of silver and speculated that America’s gold existed elsewhere.
The Empire of Guiana is directly east from Peru. It hath more abundance of gold than any part of Peru, and as many or more great cities than Peru had; it is governed by the same laws, and the people obey the same religion and the same form of policies in Government as was used in Peru not differing in any part (Ibid.).
This Raleigh knew even before he left England. He had come into contact with persons who told stories of tons of gold and a few of his contacts had even visited the “imperial city”. Whatever the genesis of this story, the truth of the matter is that EI Dorado did not exist and that Raleigh, Berrio, and others suffered in vain. (V. S. Naipaul (1973) The Loss of El Dorado. Penguin, London).
Nonetheless, that area with which the imaginary city of gold became best associated continues to give rise to controversy. At the end of the 19th century, war between Great Britain on the one hand and the United States of America and Venezuela on the other was narrowly averted and today that controversy still exists.
The Guyana Shield of Venezuela and the Essequibo region of Guyana constituted the main hunting ground of those who sought El Dorado and it is this region that is still in dispute. Presented here is a brief account that seeks to place the modern controversy in its broader context.
The modern controversy is not about the 19th century colonial quarrel, which was definitively settled by the 1899 arbitration. But in attempting to gain popular support for his government’s contention that a colonial conspiracy deprived Venezuelans of what was rightfully theirs, President Maduro is said to have claimed that in colonial times Venezuela ‘controlled everything to the west of the Essequibo river’ and that in 1824 the British Empire recognised the entire Essequibo territory as Venezuelan (Cloud Cuckoo Land. SN 12/7/15). The first in this series of articles will put this false claim to rest.
It is said that Alonso de Ojeda first sailed into Guiana up the Essequibo in 1499. In December 1596, the first European settlement was founded by Antonio de Berrio at San Thome de la Guayana on the southern bank of the Orinoco. Somewhere between 1616 and 1617, Sir Walter Raleigh destroyed the Guayana settlement, which was later rebuilt. A charter from the government of the Netherlands to the Dutch West India Company in 1621 (reaffirmed in 1637) gave the limits of the Dutch West India Company as the Orinoco. According to eyewitnesses, in 1637 the Dutch were in the Amacuro, Essequibo and Berbice. From a secret report to the king of Spain, it would appear that by the mid-seventeenth century Dutch settlements extended to the neighbourhood of the Barima and Amacuro rivers. (British Parliamentary Paper, (1896) HMSO, London).
The Treaty of Munster (1648) put an end to the war between Spain and the Netherlands and allowed the Dutch and the Spaniards to possess what they had and to own:
such Lordships, cities, castles, fortresses, commerce and countries in the East and West Indies, and also in Brazil and on the coasts of Asia, Africa, and America respectively, as the said Lords, the King and the States respectively, hold and possess, comprehending therein particularly places and forts which the Portuguese have taken from the Lords, the States since the year 1641; as also the forts and the places which the said Lords, the States, shall chance to acquire and possess after this, without infraction of the present treaty. (Report of the United States Commission on the Boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana. (1899) Washington.
In 1664, Father Flaurie, who visited Guiana to set up a Jesuit mission, reported the province abandoned by the Spanish. In 1669, the Dutch West India Company granted to Count Fedrick Casimir 30 Dutch miles on the coast of Guiana, 100 Dutch miles inland and as many more as might be required and occupied at one time or another from their territory of Guiana situated between the River Orinoco and the River Amazon. This grant was made openly and was published in the same year without protest from the Spaniards. In the 1730s, Marquis de Tominuera claimed that the Dutch were occupying lands from the Orinoco to Surinam, from 318 1/2 degrees to 324 degrees longitude. (Ibid.)
In 1781, the Dutch colonies were captured by the English and in the following year the French took them from the English. By the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, the colonies were returned to the Dutch. In April 1796, during the Napoleonic wars, the British captured the colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. Under the terms of the 1802 Peace of Amiens, Great Britain returned these colonies to the Dutch. A year later, the peace was in tatters and in September 1803, the British once again took the colonies, never again to return them. They were confirmed in their possession by the August 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty.
In 1827, an official report on Crown lands by Lieutenant Governor of British Guiana, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, gave the boundaries of the colonies as follows:
Out to the North the sea-coast from the mouth of the River Abary to Cape Barima near the mouth of the Orinoco. On the west a line running north and south from Cape Barima into the interior (Ibid.).
In 1835, the British government gave a grant to the Royal Geographical Society to explore its colony of Guiana. The society selected one Robert Schomburgk to do its work and in 1839, he called attention to the need for an early demarcation of the boundary between Guiana and Venezuela. In 1840, the government employed Schomburgk to revisit Guiana to map out the boundary and the Venezuelans immediately objected to the line he began to draw (London Times, 14/01/1896).
The argument above is a brief of the British position up to the 1899 arbitration award and it does not suggest in the slightest that Great Britain ever recognised the Essequibo as belonging to Spain/Venezuela. Indeed, according to the British, their possessions comprised the territories bounded by the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Amazon, the waters joining the Amazon and the Rio Negro and the Atlantic Ocean.
