Guyane

réf. FRE55 — Oblong small folio ca. 177x277 cm 7 x 11 in. Ca. 180 pp. including ca. 99 pages of text. Pencil on yellowish paper. Period original illustrated wrappers fastened with a string. Amateur restoration with brown paper tape over the original spine and ca. two pages reinforced on the verso with paper. Occasional pencil corrections by the author. Wrappers fragile and rubbed with small losses to the front wrapper about ten pages with tears several leaves loose but otherwise a good copy. Historically significant manuscript diary of a forty-one-year-old railroad employee from Canton Ohio offering a first-hand account of an American gold-prospecting expedition into Venezuelan Guiana present-day Guayana in the fall of 1897. Gold discoveries in southeastern Venezuela during the mid-nineteenth century followed by the rapid development of the El Callao mining district in the 1860s attracted foreign prospectors to the remote interior of Venezuelan Guiana. The discoveries also intensified Venezuela’s long-running boundary dispute with Britain whose claims on behalf of British Guiana extended into gold-bearing territory and at their broadest approached the mouth of the Orinoco River. By the time our party arrived in 1897 the dispute was under international arbitration while Venezuela remained politically unstable with recurrent revolutions and fears of renewed armed conflict. Against this background the travellers pursued reports of a rich placer deposit supposedly discovered by an Ohio prospector named Bundy although no contemporary American newspaper account of this particular discovery has yet been located. According to the diary the author had “much experience handling earthwork and some knowledge of general prospecting.” The core party consisted of the author and fellow Canton residents J. H. Alexander and H. C. Knoblock. They left Canton on September 1 1897 travelling to New York by Fort Wayne and Erie Railroads then sailed aboard the S.S. Caracas transferring at Curaçao to the S.S. Philadelphia before reaching La Guaira Venezuela. After visiting Caracas they continued along the Venezuelan coast aboard the Dutch steamer Prins Maurits to Trinidad then re-entered Venezuela through the Orinoco Delta aboard the City of Bolívar and reached Ciudad Bolívar. From there they made a fifteen-day roughly 250-mile trek south to Paragua and later established a prospecting camp near Caño Wanaca and Mount El Rotundo. The diary ends in November and appears incomplete covering three of the four months indicated by its title. The diary features ninety-nine pages of manuscript text with the first thirteen pages describing the expedition's journey from their departure in Canton through their voyage to New York and Curaçao. About fourteen pages of the Venezuelan section trace the more urban stage of the journey through La Guaira Caracas and the coastal ports of Guanta Cumaná and Carúpano prior to the main prospecting expedition from Ciudad Bolívar. The author records stays at early hotels in La Guaira Hotel Sfatoro Grand Hotel and Hotel Italia as well as visits to cafés parks and public events La Guaira — Café Italia; Caracas — El Calvario and a military-band concert in Plaza Bolívar. Interestingly he describes La Guaira as a “filthy town” and criticizes Caracas’s open-gutter sewage poor gas and electric lighting. In the capital the compiler also records meeting General Jacinto Fabricio Lara the Venezuelan Minister of Development who oversaw mining interests and supplied the party with regional mining maps. He further notes Carúpano’s reconstruction after a destructive tidal wave active rum smuggling and the excessive customs formalities at Venezuelan ports. The central sixty pages cover the interior expedition south of Ciudad Bolívar with six burros and a hired “West Indian Negro” later dismissed for drunkenness. In these passages the author records numerous encounters with local residents including a woman preparing chicken soup with yuca & cassava cassava-bread production at La Tigre his treatment of a bleeding young man and the manufacture of papelón at a sugar plantation. He also recounts crossing the rock-strewn Río Grande Claro severe mosquito bites getting lost on the trail to Paragua and trading medicine for food. Interestingly at Paragua the author harshly criticizes the minimal use of dairy sparse furnishings repetitive music played on cuatros and widespread child cigar smoking and describes a local funeral that descended into a drunken brawl. In the same part of the diary the author details the party’s principal prospecting activities. He writes about their first field tests along the road to Paragua where he and a local guide examined a mountain stream using a pick shovel and gold pan; although they found no gold he records promising formations and notes a nearby mountain composed largely of iron ore. Near Paragua the author describes accompanying Señor Morales on a twenty-five-mile journey across the savanna to inspect a quartz vein at the foot of a large mountain though he notes that careful examination revealed no trace of gold. Finally he talks about their most systematic work at a base camp near Caño Wanaca and Mount El Rotundo where he recounts how they cleared brush blazed trails dug test pits in alluvial ravines washed stream gravels for “colors” of gold and examined the mountain’s iron-rich rock and unusual cave formations. Especially interesting are the author’s observations on Venezuela’s unstable political situation including the seizure at Carúpano of a vessel carrying arms for an impending revolution and the hurried transfer of cattle across the Paragua River following a disputed election. He also records a Venezuelan passenger’s fervent gratitude to the United States for resisting British territorial claims while another episode describes customs officials in Ciudad Bolívar mistaking the party’s food supplies for gunpowder and threatening them with imprisonment. Among the prominent officials who assisted the party at different stages of the journey were U.S. Minister Francis B. Loomis ca. 1861-1948 Legation Secretary William W. Russell ca. 1858-1944 and Consular Agent Robert Henderson in Ciudad Bolívar. The diary also contains a detailed account of the travellers’ stopover in Port of Spain Trinidad an important transit point on their journey. The author praises the colony’s infrastructure electric streetcars well-maintained botanical gardens and bustling commercial district stocked largely with imported English goods. Overall historically significant manuscript diary of a forty-one-year-old railroad employee from Canton Ohio offering a first-hand account of an American gold-prospecting expedition into Venezuelan Guiana in the fall of 1897. unknown