| Notes |
- Here is the diary of C.H. Forte in the 1920's as faxed to me by Katrina Wright of New Zealand. This was her direct ancestor. I've retyped it retaining original spelling, punctuation and wording. Notes Written by Mr. C. H. Forte.
"I was born in the town of Georgetown, Demarara, British Guiana in South America, situated 8 degrees north of the Equator. The year was 1870. My father was a medical man in the British Civil Service. The Colony of British Guiana is a sugar growing country, and the sugar plantations are worked by collie labour imported from India. Each sugar estate has so many Indian coolies in charge of overseers, and the Government requires them to have hospitals and take care of the sick. These hospitals are divided up into districts in charge of a doctor who has to visit them daily. which means a great amount of running around, as the estates are large and hospitals are far apart.
During my early boyhood it was my great joy to go the rounds with my father, and many were the experiences I had. One district that my father was in chare of had a hospital on an island called Tiger Island, situated at the mouth of the Esequibo River. These South American rivers are very large, the Esequibo is over 60 miles wide near the mouth, and contain several large islands, one named Laguan is as large as the Isle of Wight.
At the time I am writing of motor boats were not in existence, so when the doctor had to visit he was rowed across to Tiger Island in a boat called a batteux (a cross between a canoe and a punt); the current was very swift, and they often had to row a couple of miles up stream close into the bank so as to be able to shoot across the channel to the other side. If they did not do this they would have been carried down stream far below the landing on the far side. I can assure you I sued to thoroughly enjoy the excitement of crossing to Tiger Island.
As I grew older I was given a gun, and used to accompany my father shooting. One of the best classes of shooting was pigeons. These birds fly very fast and are hard to hit. The method of shooting wild pigeons is to find their feeding ground, and shoot them on their way to and from their daily feeding, and if the wind happens to be blowing the way the birds are flying they take some hitting. My parents used to take regular holidays to England, and I went with them much to the detriment of my education, as I had crossed between Demarara and England seven times before I was sixteen years of age. Demarara is a fever country, and when we had a bad time with Malaria we would be sent off to Barbados, one of the West India Islands, where malaria was practically unknown. Here we would be put to school for a few months, and then back to Demarara we would go.
To give my readers some idea of the conditions of life in Demarara fifty years ago I will tell you of what happened to one of my sisters. We were living at that time at a place called Mellenmcarsog and had a young nigger girl as nurse to us children. This nurse had a small brother who became ill and father had to attend to him, but he grew suddenly worse and eventually dies, the blame of his death being laid at my father's door. These old negroes are terribly superstitious and believed in a great deal of witchcraft, called Obia, and in the old theory of "a tooth for a tooth". What happened to my young sister, a baby of eighteen months, we were never able to find out: but one day Mother noticed a small wound in the cornea of Edith's eye, which got steadily worse, and nothing that Father could do to it was of any use. In a few weeks it got so bad that he decided to seek the advice of the best opthalmic surgeons in England: and so he took us Home. Poor little Edith grew steadily worse, in spite of all that was done for her. She was attended to by the best English doctors, who were completely puzzled by her symptoms, and eventually she died, after suffering untold agony. It was not until some years later, when that same nurse girl was ill and thought to be dying, that she confessed that she had taken Edith into the village to an old "Obia Man" and got him to "work Obia" on her in revenge for the death of her brother.
On another occasion I was greatly interested in a man who was brought in and accused of being a cannibal. He had dug up a man who had been buried the previous day, removed his head, and cooked and eaten it, because he wanted to become as wise as the dead man, so he said. The negro population lived principally on plaintain, (a species of banana), fish and fruits, of which in that tropical climate there is a profusion. Now plaintains require cultivation, and were valued very highly; every family had its plantain in grove and guarded it carefully, so you can imagine the consternation of the household if one morning they awoke to find their crop of plantains gone, - carried off in the night by thieves. This kind of thieving became so common and was so hard to detect, as plaintins all look as alike as peas in a pod, that the authorities had to step in and do something, so a law was passed making plantain stealing punishable by flogging with the cat-o-nine=tails, and I have sen several men strapped to the triangle and soundly thrashed with the cat; and I can assure you it soon put a stop to plantain stealing.
My father had to be present in this medical capacity, and I sued to accompany him, I being intended to follow in his footsteps; so my education started early, even to the extent of learning my anatomy when he was doing "post-mortems", of which there were a great many, as in that unhealthy climate men died very often. I well remember an accident on one of the sugar plantations; a boler burst and killed 11 of the workeres in the sugar mill, besides injuring and scalding several others. I was a boy of twelve then, and quite useful at helping at a p.m. or doing a dressing. I can't recall the name of the plantation on which the accident occurred: but it was the next plantation to one called "Aurora" on the Esequibo River, coast.
Talking about sugar, it was quite an interesting and romantic process in those days. Demarara is a perfectly flat country, situated at the mouths of three great rivers, and was originally a Dutch Colony; the old Dutch brought out their method of water carriage and worked it in their new colony; the country being so low and flat lent itself admirably to that sort of thing. They build sea walls along the coast and river frontages, put in flood gates called "Kokurs", drained the land by digging canals all over the place, then used their canals to carry the sugar canes to the mills to be ground, and the juice made into sugar. The canes came to the mill in large flat-bottomed punts drawn by mules. The punts with their cargoes of canes used to be drawn up alongside a jetty with an elevator on it that was worked on the endless belt principle, coolies threw the canes ont of the punt on to the moving deck of the jetty, and this carried them up to the crushing rollers at the mill, where the juice was extracted and made into sugar. Demarara sugar was known as the best in those days.
Most of the mills used steam power to run their plants; but on some of the small places windmills were used. In fact, in the Island of Barbados windmills were in use quite recently. When I was between fourteen and fifteen my father's health gave out, and we went to England and settled at Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. I was put to school at Newport Grammar School, where I remained for a couple of years. My father having recovered sufficiently to return to Demarara I was taken from school and went out to the colony with him in 1886; but as Father had a return of malaria in a few months after he got back, he threw up his work and we returned to Ventnor, where the rest of the family were living.
Having decided to give up practice, the next thing was to find a place to live in; and in April 1887 we set sail for South Africa, landed at Port Elizabeth, and eventually settled in a small up-country town called Grahamstown. I was just 17 then, and as there was no money for education I got out to work. Ostrich-farming was doing well then, so I got a situation as cadet on an ostrich farm at (lb.)1 per month and my keep. After being at that for about six months I secured another place, at the wonderful salary of (lb.)1 perr week and my keep, because I was useful with tools as a carpenter, and had picked up the Native language fairly fast. My job was to teach the Kaffir boys how to make farm gates and other rough carpentry; besides, look after the "birds" as the ostriches are called. Birds had to be fed in dry weather, then there was the regular round-up and feather cutting, two months later another round-up, and all the quills that the wing feathers had grown on and been cut required to be gone over and removed to prepare for the next season's growth of feathers. Then there were the birds in the breeding camps to be attended to. Breeding camps are small enclosures with a pair of birds in each. These mad nests and sat on the eggs; chicks had to be looked after, the incubators watched, and indeed one hundred and one things to be attended to.
In spite of all the work we used to manage to have quite a good time, as there was tennis in the evenings, and always shooting to be had whenever you could get away; and life was good at "Elina" ostrich farm, - in fact too good to last, as after I had been there about 18 months my employer's son came home from school, his education finished, and he took on my work, which meant another job for me. I got on to a very large place called Keatherton Towers, at the same salary of (lb.)1 per week and keep. The owner of this place was an M.P. and spent a lot of time in Capetown, so had to have a Manager to look after the farm, and I was employed as his assistant: He was a Mr. Verity, and a jolly nice chap. He and I got on splendidly, and as soon as he found out what I could do and how much I knew he recommended me for a rise of wages, and I was given (lb.)2, 10, 0 per week.
At this time my people got the wanderlust again very badly, and decided that Tasmania was the only place with a climate that was suitable, so nothing would do but pack up and be off to try it; and of course I went with them. They caught the N.A. Shipping Company's steamer "Acrangi" at Capetown; and after an uneventful voyage arrived at Hobart, Tasmania. After a few weeks I managed to secure work on a farm on the northwest coats at a place called Wynyard. Life in Tasmania was a very different thing from South Africa. In Africa we had natives to do all the rough work, ut in Tasmania it was a case of get your coats off and do whatever there was to be done. After a few months I to a situation with a surveyor who was surveying in the Huion district at a place called Port Esperance. Surveying is quite a good job in summer time." (F-617)
Note: As an adult, Claude became a dentist by profession. (F-617, E)
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1870 - Aft 1920 (51 years)
(Age 60 years) 