The Guiana Boundary 53 wearing clothes and using the same arms in fighting as the people of New Granada" — a passage no longer suggestive of "white men." But, while Great Britain thus gave over all assertion of Dutch settlement in Guiana prior to 16 13, she still stoutly fought the claim that Spain had ever occupied the Essequibo. She even brought bodily to the arbiters the carved keystone of the old fort at Kijk- overal, sometimes thought the work of Portuguese or Spaniards, to show that the emblem on it is not a cross, and offered much expert testimony to prove the architecture Dutch — a conclusion else most probable. To the other evidence for the presence of Spaniards, however, she could oppose only the silence of Spanish records ; and this the Venezuelans were able to meet with a fresh paper of much interest — a letter of the Duke of Lerma, who writing on be- half of the King of Spain, February 2, 161 5, to the president of the Spanish Council of the Indies, mentions, among the places against which the Dutch were rumored to be planning an attack, Essequibo, " where there are some persons, from twelve to fifteen Spaniards, who there till the soil to raise cassava root, from which bread is made for the Governor of Trinidad and Orinoco." But not only did both sides agree in accepting for the beginning of Dutch trade on the Guiana coast the year 1598, and for the be- ginning of Dutch attempts at settlement there the year 16 13, there was a unanimity substantially as great as to the first establishment of the Dutch in the Essequibo. If the British lawyers did not ex- plicitly relinquish Major John Scott's tradition of its settlement by "one Captain Gromwegle " in 16 16, they admitted its uncertainty, and were content with insisting that " an organized colony under the West India Company was in existence on that river" soon after the creation of the Company in 162 1. In support of this they pro- duced, from the manuscripts of the British Museum, the journal of certain " Heads of Families sent by the Directors of the West India Company to visit the Coast of Guiana" in 1623. This journal, written in French (the families seem to have been Huguenots), tells us that " the Directors of the West India Company had resolved at entering on their administration to send to the river Amazon and coast of Guiana," and were begged by one Jesse Des Forests, "who, with the permission of the States-General of the United Provinces, had enrolled several families desirous of inhabiting the said Indies," that these " might be employed in the service of the said Com- pany." But " the said Directors thought that, instead of transport- ing the said families, it would be better to send a certain number of heads of families, in order ... to see the places and to choose
