After the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire in 1834, a number of Portuguese Catholics arrived from Madeira to work as labourers in the South American colony of Guyana. This was one of several publicly funded experiments to bring labour to the sugar plantations after the liberated black slaves proved reluctant to turn themselves into wage slaves. Immigrants came from India and China as well as from Madeira, and none of them had any more taste or aptitude for the plantations than the former slaves. A substantial number of the Portuguese soon established themselves in the urban retail trade, where they became the focus of resentment.
One evening in February 1856 a riot exploded in the centre of Georgetown, as many enraged and impoverished citizens broke into the small shops of the traders, to ransack and to plunder. Rioting spread to settlements along the coast and up the Demerara river, clashes occurring as far away as Essequibo and Berbice. ‘The town may be said to have been in open insurrection’, wrote the Governor, Sir Philip Wodehouse, ‘and the true character of the disturbances was at once revealed.’ Wodehouse was an energetic and vindictive colonial official, ordered home from Colombo by the House of Commons after the rebellion in Ceylon in 1848, but given a new posting to Guyana.
The riots were sparked off by the detention of John Sayers Orr, a black evangelical preacher who had recently returned to his native Georgetown after a long sojourn abroad.1 He had been touring Britain, ‘the Protestant parts of Ireland’, Canada, and the United States. Nicknamed ‘the Angel Gabriel’ because of his habit of summoning his flock with the blast of a trumpet, ‘he purveyed an inflammable mixture of Protestant zeal, populist radicalism, racism, and appeals to patriotism’.2 One of the posters printed on his American tour provides a flavour of his eclectic political stand:
Scorn be on those who rob us of our rights,
Purgatory for Popery and the Pope,
Freedom to man be he black or white,
Rule Britannia!
Orr’s powerful oratory, aimed against Catholics and the Portuguese, served to translate into religious and racial terms the black population’s sense of oppression. Orr’s preaching, wrote the governor, had attracted huge crowds of town and country blacks, ‘blending together skilfully and amazingly. . . political and religious subjects in a manner calculated to arouse the passions of the Black and Coloured Population against the Portuguese immigrants’.
Wodehouse had greeted Orr as a distinguished preacher, but he had second thoughts (as he wrote to London) when Orr began ‘walking about the Town and its vicinity, carrying a flag, wearing a badge, and blowing a horn occasionally at the corners of the Streets, followed by small groups of the rabble of the place’ Wodehouse believed that a black mutual aid society was behind the rioting, and indeed a group existed that had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish creole shops that might have competed with the Portuguese. No proven link was ever found, although the subject was one of general discussion.
With tension rising in the town, the governor banned all public gatherings. Orr sought to avert the ban by holding a meeting outside his mother’s house, but he was arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. News of the arrest sparked off the riots, and the black population began attacking the Portuguese traders - the immediate cause of their resentment against the colonial system. Wodehouse’s report noted that ‘men, women and children all joined in, and in some parts of the country every creole of the lower orders seems to have been one of the mob’ A Wesleyan missionary introduced an unusual element, describing how a ‘large number of Vile and Abandoned Women’ had taken part in the riots, as well as ‘wild, rude and half-savage children’.
Wodehouse also noted the participation of women:
Nothing remained in the minds of the actors but the long subsisting hatred and jealousy of the Portuguese Immigrants from Madeira and the love of plunder, aggravated by the gross and brutal character of the female population, who have throughout the Colony taken a most active part in the Riots, and who are of course the most difficult to punish.
He did not understand that many women were simply searching for food.
Wodehouse crushed the rebellion with black troops from the Second West India Regiment. Reinforcements were summoned from Barbados, and offers of assistance from warships stationed in the Dutch and French colonies were gratefully accepted.3 Hundred of whites and ‘respectable’ coloureds were sworn in as special constables. So many people were arrested that a special penal camp had to be set up. More than a hundred ‘ringleaders’ were flned and flogged, and then given three years’ hard labour in the cane flelds. This was the fate of Orr the preacher. A further 600 prisoners were discharged on condition that they worked on speciflc estates, signing a contract to provide six months’ work for each month of their notional sentence.
A more lasting punishment for the community was the imposition of a registration tax designed to reimburse the Portuguese traders for their losses. Claims for damages of nearly ?60,000, more than the colony’s annual budget, were accepted by the governor, and compensation was secured through a poll tax that bore heaviest on the poorer sections of society.
The population was resentful and expressed its anger towards Governor Wodehouse at every opportunity. When he left Georgetown on holiday in August 1857, he was pelted at the dockside with stones, cane stalks and offal. Sailing away for the last time, in May 1861, for a fresh imperial posting in Cape Colony, he left at night without ceremony, ‘to avoid a salute of dead cats and dogs’.
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