Word: guianas
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Ecuador in a league "against encroachment by Yankees or Europeans." Eight years later the catalog of his unparalleled audacities included: 1) repudiating Venezuelan bonded debts to European investors; 2) seizing British and Dutch ships on the ground that "personal enemies of myself are being nurtured in British and French Guiana;" and 3) grossly insulting the French Government by refusing to allow their Minister to Venezuela to land, "because I suspect that the fellow has yellow fever!"-an impish charge unsubstantiated by any fact...
...Guianas. Between the high Tumac-Humac mountains and the Atlantic lies Guiana, storied and fabled since first sighted by Christopher Columbus. Properly speaking there are three Guianas-British, Dutch, French. Nothing so conduces to a realization of the positively alarming size of the South American Continent as to peer at a map and reflect that deceptively small British Guiana is really larger than England, plus Scotland, plus Wales. Dutch Guiana is four times larger than the Netherlands; French Guiana is one sixth as large as France...
...significant and smiting fact about all the Guianas is their stunted and negligible development under supposedly enlightened European aegis. During the present year a shocked House of Commons has been scandalized by the discovery that forgotten British Guiana has never had a British constitution and has hastily provided one. Since the colony possesses diamond fields, these have been exploited by absentee-owned syndicates; but it is fair and just to say that Great Britain has lamentably failed to turn her famed colonizing talents to the development of British Guiana. Equally deplorable is the Dutch failure to make anything...
...Indictment. Every year France sends a dismal shipload of some 700 convicts to her penal colony in French Guiana -north of Brazil, southeast of Venezuela. Here the condemned, one-half of whom die in the first year, eke out a prison sentence with hard labor, followed by continued exile; the avowed purpose being: "expiation of crime, regeneration of the guilty, and the protection of Society." That the purpose has been sadly travestied is common gossip abroad, but Blair Niles went to see for herself...
Broken in spirit and body, Michel became at last "liberé" (fantastic name for those wretches who survive imprisonment, but, exiled for years to come, must report periodically to the Guiana authorities). Meanwhile there was the listless scramble for barest necessities of existence. Few as these were after prison fare, the possibilities of work were fewer still, since employers preferred gangs of supervised prisoners available at minimum wage. Michel, marveled at his long-lost joie de vivre, remembered his ambitions, and the oath that never would he degenerate to a contemptible liberé, crouched on his empty barrow awaiting...