" Yet, in spite of these superior attractions, he
never recrossed the Atlantic; for his Joanna died soon after, and his
promising son, being sent to the father, was educated in England,
became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at sea. With his elegy,
in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded by a mourning
parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect they had on
the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative of a Five
Years' Expedition" closes.
The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year,
was ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The
Maroons gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested
themselves, left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three
thousand,--in Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at
seventy thousand by Captain Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831,--and a
recent American scientific expedition, having visited them in their
homes, reported them as still enjoying their wild freedom, and
multiplying, while the Indians on the same soil decay. The beautiful
forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty,
and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a
hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure;
the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle;
the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for
the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their
fill; the trees are garlanded with epiphytes and convolvuli, and
anchored to the earth by a thousand vines.
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