Guiana, to subdue rebel negroes. He never imagined that the year 1773
would behold him beneath the rainy season in a tropical country, wading
through marshes and splashing through lakes, exploring with his feet
for submerged paths, commanding impracticable troops and commanded by
an insufferable colonel, feeding on gree-gree worms and fed upon by
mosquitoes, howled at by jaguars, hissed at by serpents, and shot at by
those exceedingly unattainable gentlemen, "still longed for, never seen,"
the Maroons of Surinam.

Yet, as our young ensign sailed up the Surinam river, the world of
tropic beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was
close around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle
and the low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas,
a maze of cordage, like a fleet at anchor; odd monkeys travelled
ceaselessly up and down these airy paths, in armies, bearing their
young, like knapsacks, on their backs; macaws and humming-birds, winged
jewels, flew from tree to tree. As they neared Paramaribo, the river
became a smooth canal among luxuriant plantations, the air was perfumed
music, redolent of orange-blossoms and echoing with the songs of birds
and the sweet plash of oars; gay barges came forth to meet them; "while
groups of naked boys and girls were promiscuously playing and
flouncing, like so many tritons and mermaids, in the water." And when
the troops disembarked,--five hundred fine young men, the oldest not
thirty, all arrayed in new uniforms and bearing orange-flowers in their
caps, a bridal wreath for beautiful Guiana,--it is no wonder that the
Creole ladies were in ecstasy, and the boyish recruits little foresaw
the day, when, reduced to a few dozens, barefooted and ragged as
filibusters, their last survivors would gladly reembark from a country
beside which even Holland looked dry and even Scotland comfortable.