Guyanese Online
Andrew Watson – Scotland’s captain – 1881
By Gaiutra Bahadur | Published in History Today Volume: 64 Issue: 1 2014 – Empire South America
In 1861 a young clergyman’s son arrived in British Guiana to oversee a sugar plantation. Over the next 30 years Henry Bullock’s letters home caught the texture of life in a remote backwater of Empire – though they don’t tell the whole story, as Gaiutra Bahadur explains.
The main street in New Amsterdam, of which Anthony Trollope wrote in 1860, ‘three persons in the street constitute a crowd’. Getty Images/Popperfoto Continue reading
By Major General (retd) Joseph G Singh MSS, MSc, FRGS
Borsselen Island in the Demerara River
The Demerara River – origin of its name, its profile and its significance
The early Spanish explorers referred to this river as ‘Rio de Mirar’, the wonderful river, but it was the Dutch who christened the river, the Demerara, from the word ‘Demirar’, the wonderful.[1]
The wonderful Demerara River originates from the rugged, rain-fed, forested northern slopes of the Makari Mountains, located slightly right of centre of the narrow waist of Guyana. Continue reading
“The people are doing nothing. It is the Government who are rioting and shooting down the people.”
—Guyanese worker to British soldier: Guiana Chronicle, 5th December 1905 (1)
1905 WAS A landmark year in the history of Guyana, as it was for several places around the world. In Russia, the Tsar and his troops shot workers delivering a petition in St. Petersburg. In Bengal there were communal shootings; in South West Africa the German massacre of the Herero people was in full progress.
In the British Caribbean, just two years previously, the Trinidad Water Rebellion was characterized by violence and killings, culminating in the burning of the government Red House, symbol of the British colonial occupation. British Guiana (Guyana)(2) in 1905 was no different. The rebellion that year had a dramatic and forceful impact. Continue reading
Stabroek Market – Georgetown. Guyana (1921) Here is one in a collection of old pics of British Guiana from the archives of the Colonial Office.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/sets/72157630712109326/
