British Case by the entire failure to distinguish between these different classes of Dutch trade.

Of course, nothing can be predicated on Dutch trade as a basis of sovereignty where the Spaniards were the other parties to the traffic. The Dutch could acquire no rights as against Spain, either territorial or of any other kind, by a trade in which Spain took part equally with them. No distinction, however, is apparently drawn by the British Case between these different classes of trade; and the movements of a Dutchman in the territory in question, even though he is only crossing it for the purpose of dealing with his Spanish neighbors, are dwelt upon as being all of equal importance, while the movements of Spaniards in the disputed territory, whether trading with the Indians or with the settlements of Essequibo, are alike ignored.

The only question presented here is as to the effect of Dutch trade with the natives in the disputed territory.

I. WAS THE TRADE SYSTEMATIC?

The Dutch trade fails to fulfill this requirement. It was not systematic in the sense of having definite trade locations or in any other sense. It was fugitive; conducted on the streams by the passing of wares from one canoe to another, or on the banks, or in the paths of the forest, under the shade of trees, or under temporary shelters where shade was not convenient or the exigencies of trade involved some delays.

The trade was carried on either by old negro slaves of the Company or by the "itinerant traders" or "rovers" who roamed through the forest and bought or bartered in defiance of the Company's regulations. There is no locality that can be pointed to as an established centre of trade west of the falls of Cuyuni and west of the post of Moruca. There was no agent anywhere established by the Dutch, either of the Colonial authorities or of private traders, to carry on such trade except in the short-lived post in Cuyuni, which the Spanish speedily brought to an end,

and the "shelter " which Beekman intended for use in the Barima in 1683, but which, if used at all, was used only for a few months, as the undertaking was shortly ended by the Company's refusal to take up Beekman's project and by the cutting off of Essequibo from direct communication with the coast territory by the second colony of Pomeroon planters.

As showing the maintenance of a systematic trade during a period of a century and a half these so-called evidences point rather to the exclusion of the Dutch from a systematic trade than to their maintenance of such a trade. Even if there had been an agent and an agency in the locality, the existence of such an agency merely for trading purposes would not have been evidence of dominion. But where the only attempt that was made to establish such an agency in the disputed territory was frustrated by the capture and imprisonment of the agent, or by his withdrawal under threats of attack in one case, and the abandonment of the project in the other, these facts prove affirmatively the absence of dominion.

That there was a large and important trade with the Spaniards and to regions admittedly Spanish is unquestionable. The trade with the Indians, however, was small in its money value and in its ministry to the colony. The Indians were not producers, but warriors. The Caribs who largely frequented the Barima and Cuyuni regions were in particular a predatory tribe. "Red slaves" were their principal offerings. Food stores were chiefly for their own use, and produced by the labor of the squaws. In the very early period, the Dutch no doubt obtained from the Indians considerable cassava, the dried root which both Spaniards and Dutch used as a substitute for bread. It was not long, however, before the colony had its own cassava or or bread plantations within its own limits; certainly before the close of the 17th century. So with the supplies of wild hog and earliest colonists were more or less sup

fish, with which the

plied by the Indians. These supplies were later replaced by the

hunting of the wild hog in the neighborhood of the colony, by the colonists themselves and by the shore fisheries which the Dutch conducted along the coast on both sides of the mouth of the Essequibo. The articles obtained from the Indians were "red slaves," dyes, poison-wood, canoes, fresh and salt fish, balsam, letter-wood and hammocks.

An examination of the entries in the Commandeur's Journal (B. C-C., pp. 47-158) shows the petty character of the trade and the manner in which it was conducted. The first entry shows that the products of the plantations had become large. One hundred and nineteen hogsheads of sugar had been shipped from a single plantation.

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The items as to the Indian trade run thus: "Some fish"; 'some fresh fish "; " fourteen or fifteen bundles of poison-wood"; "some oriane dye"; "two parcels of bread"; "four female slaves, two children and a boy." And then we have a negro trader returned from the upper Essequibo with "129 pieces of salt fish, 12 calabashes of balsam, 20 logs of letter- wood, and four balls of fine dye." How long it had taken him to collect this cargo we do not know. Another trader comes from the upper Essequibo with "140 pieces of salt fish, making together about two casks full." But the yacht "Rammekens" bad to go to the coast "to obtain provisions" for the garrison and slaves.

And so the story goes. The trade with these South American Indians was on a very different footing from that with the North American Indians. The former had nothing to barter that was not the product of manual labor-and the warrior scorned such labor; while the latter, by the chase, accumulated pelts of great value, and so opened the way for a trade that was vast and profitable.

These Journal extracts not only show that the trade was small, but that it was largely conducted by single negroes going out in canoes to find the Indians and to pick up here and there through

the forest the balls of dye or pieces of cassava root, or fish or hammocks that they brought back.

II. WAS THE TRADE EXCLUSIVE?

The use of this territory for purposes of trade was not exclusive. It is manifest from the description which has been given above, without any evidence to that effect, that the trade could not have been exclusive. No measures were taken by the Dutch to exclude anybody. The journeys to and fro of the three or four negro traders, some of whom were occupied in the upper Essequibo, and none of whom had any fixed routes or times for trading, could not have excluded anybody else who desired to enter the territory. Neither could the few itinerant traders or rovers who went in there on their own account. There was not a settlement of Dutchmen west of Cuyuni, in the interior, or west of Moruca, on the coast. There was not, during the whole period of a century and a half a political or military agent of the Dutch in that territory to enforce any exclusion, either with or without the necessary men to carry out such an object. As far as any measures taken by the Dutch were concerned, the region was as open to anybody else as it was to Dutchmen. Moreover, as far as its geographical character was concerned, the region was more open on the west than upon the east. In the interior, the east side, adjoining the Dutch settlement, was a forest wilderness, traversed only by a river whose rocks and cataracts and rapids made its passage dangerous even to the Indians. The west side, adjoining the Orinoco, was an open territory, largely consisting of savannas, watered by great streams, whose accessibility was clearly shown by the advance in the course of the eighteenth century from the Orinoco as a base of more than a score of prosperous settlements and villages. The coast territory could only be reached from the east by sea, going around Cape Nassau and ascending the Pomeroon or Moruca, whence the passage by the itabo through the savan

nas was frequently interrupted, nearly always in fact during the dry season. On the western side, the entrance, without ever leaving the Orinoco, was made by the mouth of a great and deep river, the Barima, free from rocks or falls or obstructions to navigation of any kind, a river which gave access to the whole territory at all seasons as far as the itabo itself.

In view of the geographical characteristics of this territory as to accessibility on its eastern and western frontiers, it might be expected, and it was the fact, that the Spaniards did more trade in it than the Dutch. In the interior district south of the Imataka Mountains the Spaniards not only traded in it, but settled in it. The efforts of their Capuchin missionaries, sent out by Royal authority, which were begun in 1686, at converting and Christianizing the Indians paved the way for the establishment of mission settlements, which, beginning in 1724, continued throughout the whole century, the last one being Tumeremo, which the Crown established in 1784.

During this whole period the Spanish settlements were constantly increasing in numbers and importance, notwithstanding the fact that in the middle of the century some of them suffered from the attacks of hostile Indians. In 1813 they numbered twenty-nine settlements, with over twenty-one thousand inhabitants, chiefly Indians. (V. C. II, 487.)

In addition to the settlements directly in charge of the missionaries, other settlements existed in the same territory, such as Upata, with its great tobacco plantations, and the Hato or cattle farm with two hundred thousand head of cattle, and the fort on the south side of the Cuyuni at the mouth of the Curumo. Nearly all these settlements and establishments were in the territory washed by the Cuyuni and its tributaries. How great a stimulus they must have proved to inland trade it is not necessary to dwell upon.

Long before the missions were established, however, the Spanish were trading in this district. In 1684 Beekman wrote (V.