Outalissi; a Tale of Dutch Guiana

Outalissi.

Chapter I. Route for South America.

- Nunc vino pellite curas;
Cras ingens iterabimus æquor.
     Hor.

Edward Bentinck, a young officer in the Dutch service, was stationed in the year 1820 with a detachment of his regiment at an outpost on the eastern extremity of the colony of Surinam, near the mouth of Marawina river. His father, a Dutch nobleman, who had emigrated from Holland on the expulsion of the Stadtholder, had obtained from the late Duke of Portland, of whom he was a distant relation, when that nobleman was at the head of the British Cabinet, the government of the neighbouring colony of Berbice, which he held for several years during the time that Dutch

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Guiana was in the occupation of the British. When he entered upon his appointment, he had left Edward at Eton with a view to his future service in the British army; but on the restoration of the Orange family, after the peace of 1814, he naturally preferred that of his native sovereign, from whom therefore he without difficulty procured a commission for his son. Edward, after having had the honour of being present at the battle of Waterloo, and personally sharing in the gallant rescue of his own prince, (who, as it is well known, having been severely wounded on that glorious occasion, was on the very point of being surrounded and taken prisoner,) was content for some time with the enjoyment of his well-earned laurels, and the society of his friends. Having however embraced the army as his profession, he was anxious to see some variety of service, and there being no immediate prospect of his active employment in Europe, he solicited and obtained leave to exchange into a regiment then stationed in South America, which he joined accordingly in the summer of the year 1820, and was very shortly after his arrival detached to the outpost already mentioned, being then in the twenty-fourth year of his age.

No young man ever entered life under stronger or more cheerful, grateful, and affectionate im-

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pressions of the truth and value of Christianity than Edward Bentinck. His mother, although a member of the Dutch church, and familiar with the Calvinistic view of revelation which characterizes that establishment, was a woman of such superior understanding and fervent charity, that she never could assent to all the repulsive peculiarities in the opinions of its great founder, which either acquired grace, consistency, and attraction from her mode of explaining them, or she confessed at once were beyond her comprehension. Whenever she was pressed with any inferences that seemed to bear hard upon the impartiality of the Christian dispensation, she used to say, the impartiality is as complete as is compatible with the free agency of the intelligent natures to which it is addressed; every one is as free to accept the restorative provision as he would have been to stand or fall had he been born in paradise, and had the nature of the disobedience of our first parents been such as to admit of its punishment being individual and not collective; if the effects should be partial, it will be simply because men are free agents, and will not always follow the light when they see it and know it, but continue in darkness because their deeds are evil. Every man's own bosom tells him that his moral character with his maker must de-

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pend upon the inobliquity and disinterestedness of his efforts to obey the will of God, as far as that will has been revealed to, or can be discovered by him. Mercy, by the Christian system, is infinite to failing efforts, where the combat has been manfully embraced; or even to repentant and redeeming efforts after long neglect, where the efforts are sincere. To deny a free agent the reward of victory where all combat is persistingly declined, is surely neither inconsistent with justice or mercy. My only anxious wish, Edward, she used to say, is to see you a good Christian; I have no other: ‘all else beneath the sun God knoweth if best bestowed or not, and let His will be done.’

Thus indelibly impressed on the core of his young heart, mingled with the remembrance of a vigilance for his happiness that never slept, a patience with his faults that never tired, an affection that not only forgave, but wept and prayed, and would have welcomed any death for him - like a name engraved on a young tree deepening with its age and expanding with its growth, and, what ever storms assailed it, if for a moment partially obscured, never, whilst life itself remained, to be erased or obliterated - so deep and dear were the impressions of Christianity engraved by maternal affection upon the heart of Edward Bentinck.