Paramaribo, the poor boys began to perish long before they began to
fight. Wading in water all day, hanging their hammocks over water at
night, it seemed a moist existence, even compared with the climate of
England and the soil of Holland. It was a case of "Invent a shovel, and
be a magistrate," even more than Andrew Marvell found it in the United
Provinces. In fact, Raynal evidently thinks that nothing but Dutch
experience in hydraulics could ever have cultivated Surinam.

The two gunboats which held one division of the expedition were merely
old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They
were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman
thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been
titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying
at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for rebels who
never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were full of the
same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less severely
tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the trees, but
they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a sentinel
declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the river in a
canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to arms--against
a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the most substantial
dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the chigres, locusts,
scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come half-way to meet
them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them the freedom of the
forests, and exhibited a hospitality almost excessive. Snakes twenty feet
long hung their seductive length from the trees; jaguars volunteered
their society through almost impenetrable marshes; vampire bats perched
by night with lulling endearments upon the toes of the soldiers. When
Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight mosquitoes at one
stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the spirit of martyrdom. But