... We steam very slowly into the harbor of St. George, Grenada, in dead
silence. No cannon-signal allowed here.... Some one suggests that the
violence of the echoes in this harbor renders the firing of cannon
dangerous; somebody else says the town is in so ruinous a condition that
the report of a gun would shake it down.
... There are heavy damp smells in the warm air as of mould, or of wet
clay freshly upturned.
This harbor is a deep clear basin, surrounded and shadowed by immense
volcanic hills, all green. The opening by which we entered is cut off
from sight by a promontory, and hill shapes beyond the promontory;--we
seem to be in the innermost ring of a double crater. There is a
continuous shimmering and plashing of leaping fish in the shadow of the
loftiest height, which reaches half across the water.
As it climbs up the base of the huge hill at a precipitous angle, the
city can be seen from the steamer's deck almost as in a bird's-eye view.
A senescent city; mostly antiquated Spanish architecture,--ponderous
archways and earthquake-proof walls. The yellow buildings fronting us
beyond the wharf seem half decayed; they are strangely streaked with
green, look as if they had been long under water. We row ashore, land in
a crowd of lazy-looking, silent blacks.
... What a quaint, dawdling, sleepy place it is! All these narrow
streets are falling into ruin; everywhere the same green stains upon the
walls, as of slime left by a flood; everywhere disjointed brickwork,
crumbling roofs, pungent odors of mould. Yet this Spanish architecture
was built to endure; those yellow, blue, or green walls were constructed
with the solidity of fortress-work; the very stairs are stone; the
balustrades and the railings were made of good wrought iron. In a
Northern clime such edifices would resist the wear and tear of five
hundred years. But here the powers of disintegration are extraordinary,
and the very air would seem to have the devouring force of an acid. All
surfaces and angles are yielding to the attacks of time, weather, and
microscopic organisms; paint peels, stucco falls, tiles tumble, stones
slip out of place, and in every chink tiny green things nestle,
propagating themselves through the jointures and dislocating the
masonry. There is an appalling mouldiness, an exaggerated mossiness--the
mystery and the melancholy of a city deserted. Old warehouses without
signs, huge and void, are opened regularly every day for so many hours;
yet the business of the aged merchants within seems to be a
problem;--you might fancy those gray men were always waiting for ships
that sailed away a generation ago, and will never return. You see no
customers entering the stores, but only a black mendicant from time to
time. And high above all this, overlooking streets too steep for any
vehicle, slope the red walls of the mouldering fort, patched with the
viridescence of ruin.
By a road leading up beyond the city, you reach the cemetery. The
staggering iron gates by which you enter it are almost rusted from their
hinges, and the low wall enclosing it is nearly all verdant. Within, you
see a wilderness of strange weeds, vines, creepers, fantastic shrubs run
mad, with a few palms mounting above the green confusion;--only here and
there a gleam of slabs with inscriptions half erased. Such as you can
read are epitaphs of seamen, dating back to the years 1800, 1802, 1812.
Over these lizards are running; undulations in the weeds warn you to
beware of snakes; toads leap away as you proceed; and you observe
everywhere, crickets perched--grass-colored creatures with two ruby
specks for eyes. They make a sound shrill as the scream of machinery
bevelling marble. At the farther end of the cemetery is a heavy ruin
that would seem to have once been part of a church: it is so covered
with creeping weeds now that you only distinguish the masonry on close
approach, and high trees are growing within it.
There is something in tropical ruin peculiarly and terribly impressive:
this luxuriant, evergreen, ever-splendid Nature consumes the results of
human endeavor so swiftly, buries memories so profoundly, distorts the
labors of generations so grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere
else, how ephemeral man is, how intense and how tireless the effort
necessary to preserve his frail creations even a little while from the
vast unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, to all factitious
equilibrium.
... A gloomy road winds high around one cliff overlooking the hollow of
the bay. Following it, you pass under extraordinarily dark shadows of
foliage, and over a blackish soil strewn with pretty bright green fruit
that has fallen from above. Do not touch them even with the tip of your
finger! Those are manchineel apples; with their milky juice the old
Caribs were wont to poison the barbs of their parrot-feathered arrows.
Over the mould, swarming among the venomous fruit, innumerable crabs
make a sound almost like the murmuring of water. Some are very large,
with prodigious stalked eyes, and claws white as ivory, and a red
cuirass; others, very small and very swift in their movements, are
raspberry-colored; others, again, are apple-green, with queer mottlings
of black and white. There is an unpleasant odor of decay in the
air--vegetable decay.
Emerging from the shadow of the manchineel-trees, you may follow the
road up, up, up, under beetling cliffs of plutonian rock that seem about
to topple down upon the path-way. The rock is naked and black near the
road; higher, it is veiled by a heavy green drapery of lianas, curling
creepers, unfamiliar vines. All around you are sounds of crawling, dull
echoes of dropping; the thick growths far up waver in the breathless air
as if something were moving sinuously through them. And always the odor
of humid decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder, sloping
between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and
night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns without
regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to the old West
Indian city rotting in the sun.
... Yet Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the seeming
desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous of the Antilles.
Other islands have been less fortunate: the era of depression has almost
passed for Grenada; through the rapid development of her secondary
cultures--coffee and cocoa--she hopes with good reason to repair some of
the vast losses involved by the decay of the sugar industry.
Still, in this silence of mouldering streets, this melancholy of
abandoned dwellings, this invasion of vegetation, there is a suggestion
of what any West Indian port might become when the resources of the
island had been exhausted, and its commerce ruined. After all persons of
means and energy enough to seek other fields of industry and enterprise
had taken their departure, and the plantations had been abandoned, and
the warehouses closed up forever, and the voiceless wharves left to rot
down into the green water, Nature would soon so veil the place as to
obliterate every outward visible sign of the past. In scarcely more than
a generation from the time that the last merchant steamer had taken her
departure some traveller might look for the once populous and busy mart
in vain: vegetation would have devoured it.
... In the mixed English and creole speech of the black population one
can discern evidence of a linguistic transition. The original French
patois is being rapidly forgotten or transformed irrecognizably.
Now, in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So often have
some of the Antilles changed owners, moreover, that in them the negro
has never been able to form a true _patois._ He had scarcely acquired
some idea of the language of his first masters, when other rulers and
another tongue were thrust upon him,--and this may have occurred three
or four times! The result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of
speech-forms--a _baragouin_ fantastic and unintelligible beyond the
power of any one to imagine who has not heard it....