Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
India Company had operated in parts of South America since 1621 and established trading
and sugar-farming colonies in Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice, all on the continent's north
coast in the area which became British Guiana and is now Guyana. When the British took
over this region in 1815 they asked for the transfer of official records along with the lands,
to help the new administration, and the Dutch agreed. The papers left behind include court
records, taxation returns, reports on slaves, and grants of land.
Among these Dutch archives was this plan, bound in a volume of similar items, each ac-
companied by a dated certificate granting the land shown. These are mostly plans of small
estates. In a dedication at the front of the volume, the colony's Surveyor General observed
that he was thus delivering copies of the measured surveys to the Governor as promised.
This explains why the plans are homogenous in style although their stated dates range from
1756 to 1771. There are also two miscellaneous plans which would both have interested the
Governor. One shows a fort where gunpowder was kept, and the other a building which may
have been the government house. This volume as a whole offers an insight into the work and
abilities of an official surveyor appointed to oversee land survey in an established colony.
This plan shows the 2000-acre plantation of Plegt Ankker, edged in gold at the top of the
sheet. The straight boundaries are consistent with a colonial land grant. This property of Jan
de Koning lay upriver from New Amsterdam and south-east of Georgetown, on the River
Berbice. Two of its smaller neighbours have been included below it, perhaps to give a bet-
ter idea of where Koning's land lay in relation to the bend in the river. Along the left-hand
boundary the colony's own ground is named but not shown in detail. The Dutch had a long
tradition as seafarers and chart-makers, which may explain the presence of quite a large cir-
cular compass indicator, strategically placed so that its centre is where the southern boundary
of Plegt Ankker met the north-west corner of the estate edged in blue, Christina's Lust.
The scale is given in Rhineland roods, the most common Dutch land measure, where one
rood was equal to just over 14 square metres. Notes written across the map indicate that Plegt
Ankker was not an ideal plantation. There was some higher better ground and woods, but
mostly the soil was waterlogged clay and peat in a marshy landscape. The surveyor captured
all these plantations in several volumes representing the colony's land. Meanwhile, in a fanci-
ful touch, the local river god - who as fount of the stream symbolically sits leaning on an
overflowing ewer - waves an oar as he surveys his watery domain.
