Prince In the Jungle

Circling the Caribbean on a good-will mission, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands last week set his red-nosed, silver-skinned DC-3 down in the only Netherlands territory on the American continent. Surinam, the middle of the three Guianas on South America's north coast, gave the Prince a gaudily polyglot greeting.

Along the 30-mile jungle track from the airfield to 300-year-old Paramaribo, he was hailed by ragged Negroes, Indians, white-scarved East Indians, stolid Dutch farmers and Javanese women in bright-colored, close-fitting sarongs. In the steaming riverbank capital, workers had poured sand into the biggest puddles in the unpaved streets. Dutch flags and orange banners hung from the front of the green-shuttered, two-story wood Parliament building. As Bernhard drove up, a band played the Dutch anthem, then broke into Surinam's own anthem, outlawed until The Hague granted the colony self-government last month.

Bernhard congratulated the 21 Parliament members (four Negro, seven East Indian, one Javanese, two white, and seven half-caste) on their new autonomy in home affairs. "Despite occasional possible political differences," replied the chairman, "Surinam remains in union with the House of Orange."

That pleased the Dutch. Yet the strongest sentimental and political ties could not alter the economic plight of the colony which they got from the British in 1667 in a rough exchange for Manhattan. Its once-rich sugar plantations are nearly ruined; most of its Negroes would rather starve in Paramaribo than work in the fields. Only the rice-raising Javanese and East Indians, imported as indentured labor in the 19th Century, have made a go of it in the coastal swamps; they now number nearly half the colony's 208,000 population.

Though Surinam's mines provide U.S. aluminum makers with two-thirds of their bauxite, they are so mechanized that fewer than 3,000 natives work in them. For the most part, Surinamers live in stagnant torpor, surrounded by jungle, mangrove swamps, umbrella ants, red howlers, web-footed dogs, and water pigs. Most of the people suffer variously from malaria, fllariasis, dysentery or leprosy.

Most notable Surinamers are the 20,000-odd Bush Negroes, whose ancestors rebelled at plantation slavery and fled inland centuries ago. Tall and agile, they range the rivers in dugout canoes and carry on indifferent agriculture in burned-over clearings. This week, having paid his respects to Paramaribo and looked over the Moengo bauxite mines, Prince Bernhard prepared for a launch trip up the muddy Surinam River to powwow with the barrel-chested Bush-Negro chieftains.

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