SOME BOOKS OF TIIE WEEK.
[17nder this heading we notice suck Books of tho wool; as have not teas reserved for revive in other forms.] Storm van 'sGravesande. By C. A. Harris and J. A. J. de Villiers 2 vols. (Hakluyt Society.)—The subject of this memoir and writer of the despatches that follow it was Governor of Dutch Guiana in the zenith of its prosperity, from 1743 to 1772. He had already served as a soldier for sixteen years before accepting the office of secretary and book-keeper in Essequibo. This discipline was to be of use to him before he retired, worn out, strenuous and conscientious to the last, after repeated requests to be relieved of his responsibilities. He was the most upright and painstaking of Colonial governors ; we may even say the best that any chartered company ever had. Gravesend° belonged to the type of which the de Witte were perhaps the best representatives. Holland may well be proud of them, but she gave them scant appreciation in their lifetime, and soon forgot them. Even we should know little about the man but for that long-standing boundary quarrel which necessitated the overhauling of colonial documents. The Governor's despatches, which were among them, would, if printed in the same type as the Hakluyt Series, fill twenty-one volumes of three hundred pages each. They are remarkable in many ways. They reveal a personality absolutely honourable and incorruptible, religious, humane, extraordinarily just, excessively sensitive to opinion, and almost painfully con- scientious. They indicate the scholar of wide reading and sympathies, who quotes freely from Horace and Shakespeare, and also a man who suffered many bereavements and ex- pressed his griefs as if writing to an individual. Submissive and respectful as is the tenor of the despatches, ho says trenchant and bitter things, which had they been addressed to anything more human than a company would have cut deep. The reputation of the Dutch for meanness was not undeserved in those days. One wonders that a man of Gravesande's character submitted to it for so long. One of the last despatches is an appeal for the humane treatment of slaves and some recognition of the services of the Caribs. The directors sent some blue drill, combs, beads, toy-trumpets, and looking-glasses, a fitting reward
for men who had helped to quell a rebellion ! The man's energy was really exhausted in combating this policy. It ruined the Dutch Colony as it has ruined all colonies—Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, and Dutch—conducted on like principles. We are seldom permitted such insight into the character of an eighteenth-century administrator or vouchsafed a side-light on colonial history from such reliable material.
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