Settlement In Guiana From earliest times 11

As early as 1580, certain Dutch traders established a settlement on the eastern bank of the Pomeroon River; and even in the first year after its formation, this settlement was recognised by the home government.
A Dutch population gradually spread along the banks of this river and long flourished, though never developing a colony with a distinct government.
At a considerably later period…between 1650-1660, a vain attempt to give new vitality to the settlements on the Pomeroon was made, by building the two towns of New Zealand and New Middleburg.

Traces of Dutch life on this river are still to be seen on the deserted river banks, in abandoned coffee plantations, in groves of arnatto plants, long cultivated as a culinary dye used in place of cochineal, in ruined wells and remains of walls built of small, very regular Dutch bricks, in solitary coconut, and other foreign palms, in huge splendidly graceful and most stately clumps of bamboos, in solitary tombstones under these bamboos, and, it is said, in the remains of a canal which once connected the Pomeroon with the mouth of the Essequibo.
No colony, however, ever developed itself on the Pomeroon; though it was from there that the first settlers were sent to the Essequibo, there to found the earliest of the permanent settlements of Guiana.
In, or about the same year on which settlements were formed from the Pomeroon at the mouth of the neighbouring river Essequibo, another settlement was made on the Abary, a small river which runs into the sea about half way between the Demerara and Berbice.
The latter of these settlements seems to have had a much shorter, and even less eventful life, than those on the Pomeroon; but the former, that on Essequibo, was the germ which afterwards developed into the colony of the same name which was the first, and long the most important colony in Guiana.
The settlers at first took more and more land into cultivation at the mouth of the river, and developed a very considerable trade with the Indians. But in 1596 this prosperity began to be roughly disturbed by roving bands of Spaniards; the settlements were again and again destroyed, and the inhabitants were compelled to retire some 40 miles up the river, to the point where the Cuyuni joins the Mazaruni, just before the latter flows into the Essequibo.
There they established their headquarters, on a tiny island to which they gave the name Kykoverall, from the wide view along three huge rivers which it affords, and on which they found the remains of a small Portuguese fort, the earlier history of which was, and is, entirely unknown.
After this, Dutch cultivation spread rapidly along both banks of the Essequibo for some distance up its course, and, somewhat less extensively, along the Mazaruni and Cuyuni.
The year 1616 was an eventful one in Essequibo; for the chief authority there then fell into the hands of a man called Gromweagle, who seems to have been qualified in a very remarkable degree for the work which he had to perform.
To him that colony, the mother of all the others which grew up in what is now British Guiana, owed much of its success. The recorded events of history, unfortunately few in number, therefore deserve some notice.  (TO BE CONTINUED)
(From: ‘Timehri: being the journal of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana’ 2. The founding of the Colonies A.D. 1580 – 1745. Edited by E.F.Im Thurn. Vol 11:1883.)