The Ships From Calcutta and Java That Remade Two Colonies

Slavery's abolition in the British and Dutch Caribbean, 1838 in British Guiana and 1863 in Suriname, left sugar planters without a workforce, and both colonies turned to indenture. The Whitby and the Hesperus landed the first indentured Indians in British Guiana in May 1838; the Lalla Rookh brought the first group to Suriname in June 1873. Recruitment from India continued for decades afterward, and in 1890 the steamship Prins Willem II carried the first Javanese laborers to Suriname's Marienburg plantation, a third stream of arrivals that gave the colony a Hindu and Muslim population found nowhere else in the hemisphere in the same proportion.

The plantation coast was never the whole story. Enslaved Africans who escaped inland before abolition built independent Maroon societies deep in the forest, and the Dutch colonial government, unable to defeat them, signed peace treaties recognizing Ndyuka self governance in 1760 and Saramaka self governance in 1762, more than a century before indenture began. Winti and the Maroon creoles' own ritual registers descend from that earlier, African derived settlement, distinct in origin from the Hindu and Islamic worship the later ships brought, the two histories now standing side by side in the same small territory.