Guyana has not been a state in the modern sense for very long, and neither does it have a colonial past reaching back into the mists of history. In addition, for the first one hundred and eighty years or so of its existence, it was a very small plantocracy indeed without even a town, let alone a capital city to call its own. The Dutch headquarters in this country, both in Essequibo and Berbice, as well as later in Demerara, were fortifications to which were attached settlements that qualified as little more than villages in terms of their size.
The Dutch administration in Berbice had always employed a cadre of skilled enslaved workers, but in the latter part of the eighteenth century their numbers appear to have increased. They were referred to as Winkels, and the ward of Winkle in New Amsterdam records the area where they once had their homes. The best known, perhaps, were the carpenters, who so impressed the British when they arrived, that they took them to Demerara to employ them on building projects there, much to the annoyance of the new Berbician authorities.
They eventually had to be returned to Berbice, but already their building techniques, knowledge of local woods and familiarity with the challenges of the environment had filtered into Demerara. These formed the basis for the evolution of skills among the local carpenters there, whose talent and creativity for a time gave us the most graceful capital in the Caribbean, and whose inventiveness went into the development of natural air-cooling systems unparalleled anywhere in the tropics.
It was not just for the colonial and the Creole classes that these carpenters worked. Karna Singh in his little work Temples and Mosques describes how a carpenter would sit down with the local pandit in a village to design the octagonal temple the latter had in mind. Maybe the delicate fretwork and attractive balustrading was the decorative input supplied by the carpenters. And where have these buildings which once adorned the entire coastland gone, one might ask? The answer is that a later generation less appreciative of the aesthetic eye and originality of its forebears, tore them down to replace them with replicas of what they had seen in India in the belief that these copies were more authentic religiously speaking.
Colonial architecture of the domestic and public kind suffered the same fate. Even for some years after Independence, a stranger could walk the streets of Georgetown and see elegant building after elegant building alongside attractive small houses for the working classes. But they have mostly all disappeared. It is true that wood is hard to preserve in our environment not to mention expensive, and in the hard years of the Burnham era it was cheaper for residents to rebuild in concrete. As for the authorities, they had little interest in preserving the material wooden heritage which was often allowed to crumble into dust, like Castellani’s magnificent Palms building in Brickdam, or the Chess Hall in Main Street. Private citizens who owned perfectly sound colonial structures would sometimes destroy them to make way for an unsightly concrete monstrosity as happened again in Brickdam, when such a building was levelled by an owner, complete with its unusual Portuguese stained glass.
But this country also had a colonial brick heritage, and enslaved workers and later free ones, were involved both in brickmaking and in bricklaying. In the earliest days bricks were imported as ballast, but since these could not meet the demand for the construction of fortifications and the like, local brickeries were set up in all three Dutch colonies. The name of Brickery on the East Bank testifies to the presence of one of the Demerara manufactories.
The brick heritage has survived somewhat better in Essequibo than in Berbice, the remains at Kyk-over-al (or Kykoveral as the Dutch knew it) representing the oldest brick structure in Guyana. Much of the fort was dismantled in the 1760s to provide bricks for buildings on Fort Island and Hog Island, but that notwithstanding, we know from a drawing in the late nineteenth century that more of the archway existed then than does at present. It was built by the Dutch, not the Spanish or Portuguese as some popular sources would have it, and its Flemish-gauge bricks were presented to the Arbitral Tribunal of 1899 to prove the point.
Fort Island boasts the nearest thing in our jurisdiction to something approaching a complete Dutch fortification in the form of Fort Zeelandia which was erected in the eighteenth century, with only its roof and middle floor now missing. As for the Court of Policy building from the same period on the island, it has managed to survive remarkably intact, possibly because it was more or less in continuous use. Some roadways were also built of brick, such as at Fort Island, Fort Nassau in Berbice and notoriously Georgetown’s first street. The story goes that the wife of Governor L’Epinasse was annoyed about the hem of her dress getting muddy when she stepped onto the road, and so her husband had it bricked. The British subsequently referred to it as the bricked dam, hence Brickdam.
The bricks on this particular street have long since gone but so has much of the brickwork in Berbice as well. The surviving bricks of the Fort Nassau of 1763 vintage were probably cannibalised by the Dutch themselves for the erection of a large warehouse on the site, although in the 1970s all that was left of this was the foundations. It is possible that today not even these are much in evidence. Thirty or more years ago there were also stacks of eighteenth century tiles in the bush, but these too seem to have disappeared. What appears to have happened in the case of this former colony was that local residents raided historical brick sites for their hearths and firesides and whatever else. That certainly seems to have been the case where the Dutch Brandwagt was concerned. This was the signal station which older residents a few decades ago could recall as having survived the vicissitudes of history, but as having been raided for bricks by recent generations. It is no longer to be seen.
The British also did their share of building in brick in the nineteenth century, the best surviving example of which is St Peter’s Church in Leguan, while the Chateau Margot chimney, once part of a brick sugar factory is still hanging on. And then there are the kokers of both Dutch and British origin which have probably survived because of their utility.
The most systematic raiding, however, took place in relation to Dutch bottles. Both on the Berbice and Essequibo rivers there was a veritable industry in the sale of such bottles to foreigners, mostly from North America who came into the rivers to buy them in bulk. The first thing that must be explained is that bottles in particular, do not survive the extremes of temperature of many north-temperate climes, whereas they preserve beautifully in our climate, especially when cushioned in our protective mud soil.
The second thing which might be mentioned is that the nation could not possibly retain and display all the many thousands of Dutch genever, madeira and other bottles which generations of drunken planters tossed out onto the river banks and elsewhere. What the authorities should have insisted on, however, was that the National Museum had a complete collection of the different types of bottle, and exercised some control over where digging took place. But the National Museum had no interest, and was in any case totally lacking in any sense of purpose or concept of how it should function.
As it was the bottle craze was probably responsible for the destruction of any number of historical sites, as there was no clear knowledge on the part of the bottle hunters as to where these might be found. In addition, as a sideline they frequently looked for other things as well such as chinaware, and may have been responsible for the breaking up of Dutch tombstones to see if jewellery or gold coins were buried along with the bodies. If they had been a bit more informed about the period they would have known that the notoriously parsimonious Dutch would not have put anything of value into their graves.
And it is not just Dutch sites they may have damaged. There are also the settlements of the enslaved who may have traded with the Indigenous people at the back of the plantations, and where material objects could have been found giving us an insight into their lives.
Sometimes the local traders got into more dubious lines of moneymaking. A few decades ago St Andrew’s Kirk put the silver it had obtained from the Dutch Reformed Church at the beginning of the nineteenth century on public display. The watchman put to guard it is said to have fallen asleep, during which time some of it was stolen. It was subsequently sold to a Dutch citizen at what was the main bottle-trading centre in Essequibo, but the real scandal of the story is that he wrote an article in a Dutch journal giving the silver’s history and showing pictures of it. The matter was reported to then Police Commissioner Laurie Lewis, who was asked by those connected with St Andrew’s to contact Interpol. One must infer that nothing was done, because the silver has never been returned.
There is too the matter of this country’s disappearing ironwork, this time at the hands of the scrap-iron dealers. While a moratorium was put on their activities eventually, it was too late to save the bust of John Smith which was taken from the Smith’s Memorial Congregational Church in Brickdam to be sold and later melted down, no doubt, or the ornamental ironwork on the remarkable New Amsterdam Hospital – another Castellani building – which then Health Minister Leslie Ramsammy refused to save. As it was the ironwork was removed piece by piece either by the scrap-iron dealers or their agents, or vandals who later sold it to them.
In terms of the historic period as opposed to the pre-historic one, as already indicated, we have never had a huge amount to save. One might have thought that in those circumstances the authorities would have been a bit more diligent about researching and saving what does exist. Now that President Irfaan Ali is so keen to give money to all kinds of project, he should look at the needs of the National Trust again as well as those of the National Museum as well as the National Library while he is at it. Perhaps as a start he should revert to earlier practice and detach Culture from the Culture, Youth and Sport portfolio, and give it maybe to Education. Certainly he cannot argue financial constraints as was done in the past for not giving the local material heritage some attention.
