HISTORY. The coast of Guiana was firstvisited in 1499 and 1500 by Ojeda, Vespucci, and Pinzon. The Spaniards planted a few settlements in the region, none of which seem to have had any long existence. Missionaries visited the interior during the sixteenth century. The tales of El Dorado aroused interest in this corner of South America, but the main current of settlement and explora tion was along the Orinoco and to the westward of modern Guiana. Ralegh, who first made the name widely known, in 1595, confined his opera tions almost entirely to the river, although his sailing masters in 1594 and succeeding years carefully explored the coast to the east. After the formation of the Dutch West India Company in 1621, the Dutch, who had settled on the Pom erun River as early as 1581, and had explored the Guiana coast more fully in 1597 and 1598, gained a permanent foothold at the head of the Essequibo delta, where a settlement had been existing since 1613. In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia con firmed the Dutch West India Company in posses sion of the territory. Meanwhile the French had settled near Cape Orange, and the English near the mouth of the Surinam. In 1667 this English colony was exchanged with Holland for New Netherlands or New York. Things remained in
much the same condition until 1803, when Eng land captured Demerara, Berbice, and Essequibo from the Dutch, who formally surrendered them by treaty in 1814. The three colonies, compris ing some 76,000 square miles, were consolidated in 1831. The boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela (q.v.) ceased to be a subject of dispute after the arbitration treaty of 1897.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Martin, British Colonies (LonBibliography. Martin, British Colonies (Lon- don, 1849-51) ; Dalton, History of British Guiana (London, 1854) ; Duff, British Guiana (Glasgow, 1866) ; Palgrave, Dutch Guiana. (London, 1876) ; Bronkhurst, Colony of British Guiana and Labor ing Population (ib., 1883) ; Rodway, A Handbook of British Guiana (Georgetown, 1893) ; id., His tory of British Guiana (3 vols., Georgetown, 1891-94) ; Le Pays-Bas: La colonie Surinam (Amsterdam, 1898), and the Dutch statistical works, published annually by the Government; Norman, Colonial France (London, 18S6) ; Viala, Les trois Guyanes (Montpellier, 1893) ; Bas sieres, Notice stir la Guyane (Paris, 1900) ; Brousscau, Les richesses de la Guyane (ib., 1901).