Remembering the river-masters… Boat-builders of the Pomeroon
Guyana’s enduring maritime heritage encompasses many celebrated personages and noteworthy events. Among the more memorable are the contributions of highly-skilled craftsmen who have long plied their boat-building trade on the Pomeroon River.
Boat-building began with the Warrau people of northwestern Guyana whose habitat once stretched from the Pomeroon coastlands across the Atlantic coast to the mouth of the Orinoco River.i At the arrival of Europeans in the 1580s, the Warrau comprised the largest tribal group in the area and historical documents describe “a nation of boat-builders” steeped in traditional knowledge of local timbers and construction techniques. In 1825, Land Surveyor and Quarter-Master General of Indians William Hilhouse, described Warrau boats as:
...constructed on the best model for speed, elegance, and safety, without line or compass, and without the least knowledge of hydrostatics; - they have neither joint nor seam, plug or nail and are an extraordinary specimen of untaught natural skill.ii
In 1841, Robert H. Schomburgk, Commissioner for Surveying and Marking out the Boundaries of British Guiana, attested:
The Warraus are famed for their skill in finishing canoes out of the single trunk of a tree. They formerly furnished the colonists, as well as the tribe of Indians inhabiting the coast regions, with canoes and corials which, for durability and speed, far surpassed any boats ever introduced from Europe. Of late years their industry has much relaxed, and they are loud in their complaints that the Spaniards of the Orinoko take away all their largest craft and destroy them, and that the smaller only escape by their being able to hide them. The famed Spanish launches, employed during the revolutionary war of Venezuela (1810-23) were made by the Warraus. Some of these were roomy enough for from 50 to 70 people. They refuse now to make any of so large a size, not for want of the trees fit for the purpose, but that, they say, if the Spaniards hear of their making any large craft, they send a party of men to take them away or cut them in pieces, in order to prevent them from being sold and used for smuggling by the people at the mouth of the Orinoco.iii
The suppression of Warrau boat-building by Spanish raiders early in the nineteenth century seems to have quashed the once-flourishing trade in the construction and sale of large boats in northwestern Guyana. The trade restarted after the arrival of formerly enslaved Africans and British, German, Madeiran-Portuguese, East Indian and Caribbean immigrants who settled and farmed the banks of the Pomeroon and nearby rivers from the 1830s. The resilient newcomers, called “grantholders”, likely contributed their knowledge of diverse construction techniques of former homelands, building on the legendary traditions of the indigenous Warrau who are, indisputably, the first ‘river-masters’ of northwestern Guyana.
Indigenous people in Guyana had harvested timber and troolie palm for their own use long before Europeans arrived. Boat-building timber – mainly Mora, Gale (Yellow), and Keriti (Keritee/Kretti) Siruaballi (Silverballi) and Greenheart – was sourced from the headwaters of the Pomeroon, felled by teams of woodcutters and floated downriver with the aid of bamboo rafts. Huge logs lay immersed in the River’s ‘water-sides’ (mudflats) for long periods of curing before being cut and dressed at nearby ‘saw-mills’.
Commercial woodcutting was underway and by 1833, Thomas Hubbard and Solomon Abrahams were partners in the firm George Garraway and Co., ‘Boat-builders and Carpenters in Pomeroon’. In 1834 George Frederick Pickersgill, ex-Justice of the Peace for North-West
District, and James Chapman were operating a troolie and woodcutting business at the confluence of the Pomeroon and its tributary, the Arapiaco.v Another business, Alstein’s, was located upstream the Arapiaco and businesses owned by Holmes and Bunbury on the upper Pomeroon were also well-known.vi Up to the 1950s a large sawmill remained at Pickersgill, there was the Kamrudeen Sawmill on the Arapiaco, the Barakat
Hilhouse, William. Memoir on the Warow Land of British Guiana, Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, Vol. 4 (1834), 321-23.
Hilhouse, W. (1825). Indian notices. Georgetown: British Guiana: Printed for the author, pp. 32-34.
Schomburgk, Richard and Walter E. Roth. (1922) Richard Schomburgk's Travels in British Guiana, 1840-1844. Vol. 1, Georgetown: "Daily Chronicle" Office, pp. 111; Venezuela. (1898). Venezuela-British Guiana boundary arbitration: The case of the United States of Venezuela before the Tribunal of arbitration to convene at Paris under the provisions of the treaty. Vol. III, Appendix, Parts 3,4,5,6,7 and 8. New York: The Evening Post Job Printing House, 102-3.
Brett, W. H. (1881). Indian Missions in Guiana. London: George Bell, p. 147.
The London Gazette. Friday August 22nd, 1845, 2583.
British Guiana Boundary (1898) Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela. Appendix to the Case on Behalf of the government of Her Britannic Majesty Vol. VI, 1815-1892, London: Harrison and Sons, pp. 105.
SPELLING
Here are 15 words that are frequently misspelt. Ask someone to test you and see if you can spell all of them correctly. Check any new words in your dictionary. Write out any words that you couldn’t spell, and make sure they will never catch you again!
Treacherous, destruction, strength, twelfth, guidance, shepherd, undoubtedly, rebel, repetition, grandeur, unforgettable, sarcasm, unnecessary, tragedy, vicinity.
QUESTION TAGS
Look at this sentence:
Yuh coming, nuh?
In Creolese, we make a statement (Yuh coming), and then we turn it into a question by adding a question tag: “nuh”.
Sometimes we use the question tag “not so” instead of “nuh”: Yuh tekking the exam in June, not so?
In Standard English, it’s different. This is how it is done:
You are coming, aren’t you? He was late, wasn’t he? They arrived yesterday, didn’t they? She has found her shoes, hasn’t she? He will object, won’t he?
What is the pattern? Look:
You are (+ve) coming, aren’t (-ve) you?
He was (+ve) late, wasn’t (-ve) he?
She (+ve) has found her shoes, (-ve) hasn’t she? She can (+ve) plait her own hair, can’t (-ve) she?