The Amerindians' first experience of Europeans was hard, and across South America there was widespread genocide. In the Guianas, however, it was slightly different although far from easy ... Initially, the Europeans seemed to assumed that the 'savages' (as they were called) had been provided for their pleasure.
From what's now Guyana, men were taken back to Europe as souvenirs, and there are records of the ‘Guianians’ serving not only the English Tudors but also the Court of the Medicis. But most pleasing of all were the women. ‘Whoever lives amongst them,’ wrote one early adventurer, ‘had need to be the owner of no less than Joseph’s continency, not at least to covet their embraces’.
Even the good Sir Walter Raleigh found his continence severely tested (‘I have seldom seen a better favoured woman,’ he pants, ‘she was of good stature, with black eyes, fat of body …’). Then came sugar, and everything changed. By the early 1600s, the Dutch were gathering up the natives and trying to make them work. But it failed.
Like the Warau today (see photo), the Amerindians would rather die than do what they were told. They wouldn’t even work for baubles and periwigs, and so the import of Africans began. Only then did the Amerindians have a role, as man-hunters and captors of runaway slaves. In 1686, it became illegal to enslave Caribs and Arawaks, and for the next century and a half, they became a minor aristocracy, just below the whites. So, not genocide exactly, but hardly an edifying tale.