Homeward bound.
Again the enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in
order inverse; again is the island-Litany of the Saints repeated for us,
but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to
receive us;--each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow,
then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always sharply radiant at last,
symmetrically exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and
sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic hills, the
cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that tower to heaven, the
peaks perpetually wearing that luminous cloud which seems the breathing
of each island-life,--its vital manifestation....
[Illustration: THE LION OF GUN HILL, BARBADOES
_A heroic statue carved in the native rock by a
British army officer._]
... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions
received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results,--general
ideas or convictions. Strongest among these is the belief that the white
race is disappearing from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a
cost of blood and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have been
advanced--economical, climatic, ethnical, political--all of which
contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the fact.
Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing at a rate that
almost staggers credibility. In the island paradise of Martinique in
1848 there were 12,000 whites; now, against more than 160,000 blacks and
half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic
struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many
of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former
cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St.
Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has
lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous,
the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full
decadence. And while the white element is disappearing, the dark races
are multiplying as never before;--the increase of the negro and
half-breed populations has been everywhere one of the startling results
of emancipation. The general belief among the creole whites, of the
Lesser Antilles would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave
races of the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there
the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everywhere the ultimate
result must be the same, unless the present conditions of commerce and
production become marvellously changed. The exterminated Indian peoples
of the Antilles have already been replaced by populations equally fitted
to cope with the forces of the nature about them,--that splendid and
terrible Nature of the tropics which consumes the energies of the races
of the North, which devours all that has been accomplished by their
heroism or their crimes,--effacing their cities, rejecting their
civilization. To those peoples physiologically in harmony with this
Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest--already
begun--for racial supremacy.
But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical problem
would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed peoples prevail
hatreds more enduring and more intense than any race prejudices between
whites and freedmen in the past;--a new struggle for supremacy could not
fail to begin, with the perpetual augmentation of numbers, the
ever-increasing competition for existence. And the true black element,
more numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted to
pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win. All these
mixed races, all these beautiful fruit-colored populations, seem doomed
to extinction: the future tendency must be to universal blackness, if
existing conditions continue--perhaps to universal savagery. Everywhere
the sins of the past have borne the same bruit, have furnished the
colonies with social enigmas that mock the wisdom of legislators,--a
dragon-crop of problems that no modern political science has yet proved
competent to deal with. Can it even be hoped that future sociologists
will be able to answer them, after Nature--who never forgives--shall
have exacted the utmost possible retribution for all the crimes and
follies of three hundred years?
[Illustration]
MARTINIQUE
SKETCHES
[Illustration]