This is the map on the wall of the manager’s office, on the Wales Sugar Estate, Guyana. For me it’s a treasure trove of old names.
I’d been looking for the estate described by a Georgian traveller, called Bolingbroke.
This is the map on the wall of the manager’s office, on the Wales Sugar Estate, Guyana. For me it’s a treasure trove of old names.
I’d been looking for the estate described by a Georgian traveller, called Bolingbroke.
To understand what he’d seen, I needed to get to the Reynestein estate. Back in London, it had taken me days to find it, scouring old maps and books. I knew it was somewhere close to Zorg, up the Demerara River. Then I spotted it, an oblong of sugar, amongst a cluster of others. The map was just like this one, on the manager’s wall.
I love the idea that the old Georgian names have survived, even today. To me, they sound like old bawdy houses or Dutch bars: ‘Free and Easy’, ‘Jacob’s Lust’, ‘Vive La Force’, ‘De Yonge Rachale’, and ‘Goed Verwagting’. In London, I’d also also discovered that they were now all lumped together into a super-estate called Wales, which is how I ended up here.
Of course, for me, it was slightly easier getting there, than it had been in in 1799. Bolingbroke had taken a tent-boat from Georgetown, rowed by some slaves. The journey had lasted two-and-a-half hours, and – throughout it – the oarsmen had sung a song called ‘Good Neger make good Massa’ … Happily, it’s only the names that have survived.
