(motorcycle engine roaring) On the northern edge of South America are three small territories. Until about 10
years ago, not a single road connected them with the outside world. They sit on the edge of Latin America, and yet none of them are Latino. They're some of the
world's least talked about places. And yet, they have
interesting stories to tell. Stories of calypso
and cults, slavery and sugar. This series of
videos is about the Guyanas. (upbeat music) These videos tell
stories of places and peoples as I try to find the echoes of the past in the lives of the present. This is going to be
a story about the Guyanas perched on the top of South America. Originally, they came in five flavors, Spanish, British,
Dutch, French and Portuguese. But now, Spanish
Guiana is part of Venezuela, and Portuguese Guiana is
the Brazilian state of Amapa. So when people talk
about the Guianas today, they mean these middle three, British, Dutch and French. The modern day Guyana,
Suriname and French Guiana. Only two of them are countries, because French Guiana
is a department of France. In fact, France's longest border anywhere is actually with Brazil. The three Guianas
are unique in South America for never having been
either Spanish or Portuguese. They're their own little worlds. In the words of
travel writer John Gimlette, they've never known salsa or tango, bolivar, machismo, liberation theology. It's almost as
though the giant at their backs has never existed. They are indeed their own little world. With a combined
population of only 1.7 million people, the Guianas are one of the
most sparsely populated regions on earth. Suriname, the size of Florida, has fewer people than Wichita, Kansas. Because the
stories of each of the Guianas are so interconnected, this video will tell them together up until the point of independence. At that point, the
series will look at the history and context of each of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana in turn. So let's begin. (upbeat music) In most of the Guianas, the population is almost
entirely concentrated on the coast in three towns,
Georgetown, Parameribo and Cayenne, each sitting on a major river mouth. Nine out of 10 inhabitants of the Guianas live in this 10
mile strip along the coast. The region known as the Guianas consists of what is
called the Guiana Shield. Where the rivers
run south into the Amazon, That's the Amazon basin. Where they run to the Atlantic, that's the Guiana Shield. Its name comes from an Amerindian word meaning land of many waters. And that is spot on. The biggest rivers
have mouths wide enough to contain the island of Barbados. But unlike many of the
world's other great rivers, and make no mistake about it, these are great rivers. They are as much obstacles as highways. The rivers of the
Guianas don't allow shipping due to rapids. The only vessels
that can go very far up them are canoes small enough that you can drag them across land. So the water has for the longest time sealed any interior
communities off from the world and therefore limited development. Without an airplane
it can take up to four weeks to get into the interior. All roads stick to the
coast and throughout the Guyanas there isn't even a single natural harbor. It has not historically been a recipe for economic flourishing. Huge tracks of the Guiana Shield are only vaguely described. And each year when
scientists can penetrate it, they yield new species. The Guyanas have the
biggest ants in the world, and the biggest freshwater fish. They have jaguars,
stingrays, electric eels, and swarms of bugs
ready to drink your blood. It's either an
ecological paradise or a tropical hell. A land that humans
have never really possessed. It starts with the muddy coastline, which gives way to
swamps in the thick rainforest. These are bound to
the south by the Akaray and Tumukumak Mountains, which define the rim of the Amazon Basin. In the Guiana
Highlands there are sandstone tabletop mountains called Tepuis. Because of their steep sides, the tops of many of
these are completely separated from the jungle below,
and are ecological islands, having evolved their own
unique plant and animal species. They are also the source
of the world's highest waterfalls, such as Angel Falls in Venezuela. And it was to visit one of these that I got up early one
morning in Georgetown, Guyana, to take a plane to
the mighty Kaiteur Falls. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) We flew
over Georgetown and Southwest, deep into the interior. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) Throughout the Guianas, both regulated
and unregulated gold mining is a serious problem. The work for much of
it done by illegal migrants from Venezuela and
Brazil working in the shadows. The flight from Guyana's capital to its flagship tourist destination reveals mine after
mine, scarring the forest. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) A short walk from
the runway is the lookout. On this occasion, there wasn't so much
to see, but luckily there are more lookouts, just a short walk through the jungle. And from there, you can see
Kaiteur in all its magnificence. Every minute, 24 Olympic-sized
swimming pools of water fall 27 stories in height. A river almost as
large as the Thames slides through the jungle
and into mid-air to fall 226 meters and run down a valley
more enchanting than any I have ever seen. In this stunning physical beauty,
the Guianas collided with colonialism. Out of the jungle, the Europeans carved these little
demographic experiments that became what the Guianas are today. In the next part of this video, we will look at the
people's history of the Guianas. In telling the
indigenous history of South America before Europeans arrived, nothing is certain due to a lack of
written and even archaeological sources. With little stone to build with, the jungle pretty quickly
has reclaimed most of what the indigenous people left behind. As a result, much of what I discuss here is going to be
about what the Europeans did. Regrettably, the Amerindian perspective
on all these things is largely missing. This is because the European
sources are more or less the only ones we have. So whenever I say something like "unexplored" that is
always an obviously with the caveat that Amerindian people had been living in the Guianas for millenia and knew the land better than anyone did
either before or in fact since. Now you'll also notice
I'm using the word "Amerindian". Unlike in other
parts of South America, that is the most common
word used in the Guianas. While I was
travelling in the region, I was talking to a
Makushi girl who told me that there is actually
debate within Amerindian communities about
whether Amerindian or indigenous is the better word
to use, so it's not settled. She told me that Amerindian remains the standard and that's
also what I've read, so that's what I'm using, even if that isn't
usually used elsewhere in South America. So this is what we know. The Guianas were largely
populated with Arawak speaking people. These are the same people that spread throughout the Caribbean
islands, eventually being partly replaced by the
Caribs, who also came from the Guianas, and
who gave the Caribbean its name. These two groups,
the Caribs and the Arawaks, are who met Alonso
de Ojeda's first expedition from Spain at the Essequibo River in 1499. After sorting through a few names, the
Europeans called this area the "Wild Coast". In theory, Spain was the first European empire to claim this
area, as well as the rest of the Western
Hemisphere, with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, when the Pope split the world between the
Spanish and the Portuguese. It was another 30 years
before anyone tried to land, and they were attacked by the locals. Spanish interests
understandably diminished after this, and they only ever
occupied the northwest end, which is now part of Venezuela. The Portuguese
colonized the southern portion, which is now the
Brazilian state of Amapa, and the bit in between,
well, that was up for grabs. So with the Spanish losing interest, the first proper European explorer was the Englishman
Walter Raleigh in 1594. He was searching, like
many at the time, for El Dorado. He told of rumors of a city made of gold and described attractive women with an environment
overflowing with bounteous food, which stimulated more European interest. The people that became
the Pilgrims in the United States actually flirted with the idea of planting New England along this coast. By the end of the 1500s, the Dutch were beginning to sniff around. They were the first to stitch together a viable economic entity. They were most interested
in trade rather than colonization, and throughout the 17th century, the Dutch established
trading outposts under the banner of the Dutch West India Company. They were always
competing with the English, and both the English and
the Dutch were periodically harassed by the Spanish and Portuguese, who argued that this was
their land because the Pope said so. And the whole time
settlements were collapsing because of being
destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese, or because of conflicts with the natives. The French joined this
game of musical chairs as well, though their first
attempts collapsed within months. For the next 200 years, the three great
European powers of France, Britain, and Holland
would snatch each other's colonies up and down the coast. These were wars that
always began and ended in Europe, and there were nine of them. First Dutch,
second Dutch, Grand Alliance, Spanish succession,
Jenkins Air, Austrian succession, Seven Years, American
Independence, and Napoleonic. During this time, what
is now Guyana changed hands nine times, Suriname six times, and French Guiana seven times. At one point, the Dutch had all three, and so did the British. But throughout these centuries, this entire game was played out almost entirely on the coast. The Dutch, for example, only ever visited about
4% of the land they claimed. So at the end of all this warfare, the Europeans carved out shares that more or less reflected
their military power at the time. Britain got the biggest part, an area about as large as the UK itself. This would become Guyana. Dutch Guyana was half the size of this, and would become Suriname. Then France was left
with the smallest territory on the entire
continent, which would become France. I mean, it's still
literally a part of France, but we'll cover that later in the series. All of this, however, is
not to say the borders are settled. Venezuela, for example, right now, claims almost 70% of Guyana, another topic we're going to dive into in the next few videos. So what were the Europeans trying to do? By the 1700s, the Europeans were addicts, and they would pay
any amount to get their fix. The drug, of course, was sugar. An investor in
sugar could double his capital in less than three years, and sugar from the
Guianas created millionaires in Bristol and Amsterdam. The Guianas became the
archetypal plantation colonies. Sugar dominated the economy of the Guanas for over 300
years, creating a ruling class known as the Plantocracy. Before its decline in the 1860s, sugar was 95% of British Guanas exports. Sugar has shaped the Guianas, transforming both the
population and the landscape. You can still see it from space. Mile upon mile of
oblongs: sugarcane fields. For each square mile of cane, 10 million tons of
earth needed to be shifted, and 65 miles of drainage canals dug, and none of this
work was done by Europeans. After finding that the native people weren't suitable as slave labor, mostly due to their
susceptibility to old world diseases, the mass importation of Africans began. These colonies were
entirely the creation of slaves. They chopped the
wood, stacked the bricks, dug the canals, cleared the roads, planted the cane,
and harvested the sugar. The history of
almost everyone in the Guanas in one way or
another leads back to slavery. It's in the language people talk, the food they eat, and of
course, in the people themselves. All the Europeans got
involved in the slave trade. The Dutch brought
the first slaves in 1652, and even minor players
like the Danes and the Swedes brought human cargoes to the wild coast. But it was the
English who made this an industry. By 1760, they had a
fleet of 146 slave boats capable of carrying 36,000 slaves. To quote John Gimlette again, "No one knows how many African lives were merged with the Guainese clay... but it must be hundreds of thousands." This was the transatlantic slave trade, which between 1500 and 1840, transferred some 12
million Africans to the Americas. In the same period,
around 3.4 million Europeans crossed the ocean as well. In other words, for
the first three centuries of European
colonization of the Western Hemisphere, for every European
that came to the Americas, three Africans made the same journey. The crowds on the
streets of this new America were African crowds. The farmers were African farmers. Until the later
mass migrations of Europeans at the end of the 19th century, demographically speaking, the colonization of
the Americas was an extension of Africa into the Western Hemisphere. And nowhere was this
truer than in the Guianas. The slaves were given
new names, erasing their history, and they learned the
languages of their masters, usually English. Throughout Guyana and Suriname, the most widely spoken
languages today are Creoles. Guyanese Creole in Guyana, and Sranan Tongo in Suriname. There are also the
languages of the maroon communities in Suriname and French Guiana, like Saramaken,
Ndyuka, Matawai, and Kwinti, all based on English, though with
substantial injections of African, Amerindian, and other languages. One of them,
Ndyuka, even has its own script. And today's people of African descent are themselves divided into Creoles, who are mostly located along the coast, and Maroons, who
are descendants of people who escaped slavery and
settled in the interior regions, self-sufficient and
beyond the reach of Europeans for literal centuries. In Suriname, almost one in six people is descended from
maroons, or runaway slaves. For 200 years, they
lived completely separately in the interior,
speaking their own languages and practicing their own religions. In fact, in some ways, there was as much or more African culture in the jungles of the Guianas as there was in parts of Africa. Theirs is a fascinating story, which we will delve
into in the Suriname videos. Chattel slavery made slaves anonymous. They were something to
be bought and sold in stores, entirely based on
their physical characteristics. And the slave owners
that ultimately owned them, for the most part,
never even set eyes on them. They were thousands of miles away, safe from the disease and the heat, getting rich in
London or Paris or Amsterdam. From 1652 until 1870, when the Dutch
finally ended it in their colony, slavery defined the Guianas. Meanwhile, as their lands were invaded by people from other continents, the Amerindians were
forced back into the hinterland. Now they make up only about 3% of the population of the three Guianas. However, even they played
their part in the slave trade, respected for their
skill in tracking down runaways and taking a place
in the colonial hierarchy, just below the whites. And then into this story,
we have another group of people, because for all of the scale of the transatlantic slave trade, the largest ethnic group
in both Guyana and Suriname today is not African and
certainly isn't Europeans, it is Indian. And no, I'm not
talking about indigenous people from the Americas, I'm
talking about Indians from India. After the abolition
of slavery in the colonies, the plantations still needed labor. And so Indians were
brought as indentured servants. Now they are about
40% of the population of Ghana and over a quarter of Suriname's. They too are a massive
part of the story of the Guanas, as you will soon see. To make it more complicated, you have the Hmong
communities brought by the French from Indochina to French Guiana, and in Suriname, the
substantial community of Javanese, who were recruited from
the Dutch colony of Indonesia, now making up well
over 10% of the population. The Guianas, you could say, are a demographic science experiment composed mostly of people who didn't really want to go there. (soft music) So that, broadly
speaking, is the story of the Guianas. In this series of videos, we will look at each of them in turn, the history, the society, the politics. There's a lot going on. (soft music)