And who was Père Labat,--this strange priest whose memory, weirdly
disguised by legend, thus lingers in the oral literature of the colored
people? Various encyclopædians answer the question, but far less fully
and less interestingly than Dr. Rufz, the Martinique historian, whose
article upon him in the _Études Statistiques et Historiques_ has that
charm of sympathetic comprehension by which a master-biographer
sometimes reveals himself a sort of necromancer,--making us feel a
vanished personality with the power of a living presence. Yet even the
colorless data given by dictionaries of biography should suffice to
convince most readers that Jean-Baptiste Labat must be ranked among the
extraordinary men of his century.
Nearly two hundred years ago--24th August, 1693--a traveller wearing the
white habit of the Dominican order, partly covered by a black camlet
overcoat, entered the city of Rochelle. He was very tall and robust,
with one of those faces, at once grave and keen, which bespeak great
energy and quick discernment. This was the Père Labat, a native of
Paris, then in his thirtieth year. Half priest, half layman, one might
have been tempted to surmise from his attire; and such a judgment would
not have been unjust. Labat's character was too large for his
calling,--expanded naturally beyond the fixed limits of the
ecclesiastical life; and throughout the whole active part of his strange
career we find in him this dual character of layman and monk. He had
come to Rochelle to take passage for Martinique. Previously he had been
professor of philosophy and mathematics at Nancy. While watching a
sunset one evening from the window of his study, some one placed in his
hands a circular issued by the Dominicans of the French West Indies,
calling for volunteers. Death had made many wide gaps in their ranks;
and various misfortunes had reduced their finances to such an extent
that ruin threatened all their West Indian establishments. Labat, with
the quick decision of a mind suffering from the restraints of a life too
narrow for it, had at once resigned his professorship, and engaged
himself for the missions.
... In those days, communication with the West Indies was slow,
irregular, and difficult. Labat had to wait at Rochelle six whole months
for a ship. In the convent at Rochelle, where he stayed, there were
others waiting for the same chance,--including several Jesuits and
Capuchins as well as Dominicans. These unanimously elected him their
leader,--a significant fact considering the mutual jealousy of the
various religious orders of that period. There was something in the
energy and frankness of Labat's character which seems to have naturally
gained him the confidence and ready submission of others.
... They sailed in November; and Labat still found himself in the
position of a chief on board. His account of the voyage is amusing;--in
almost everything except practical navigation, he would appear to have
regulated the life of passengers and crew. He taught the captain
mathematics; and invented amusements of all kinds to relieve the
monotony of a two months' voyage.
... As the ship approached Martinique from the north, Labat first beheld
the very grimmest part of the lofty coast,--the region of Macouba; and
the impression it made upon him was not pleasing. "The island," he
writes, "appeared to me all one frightful mountain, broken everywhere by
precipices: nothing about it pleased me except the verdure which
everywhere met the eye, and which seemed to me both novel and agreeable,
considering the time of the year."
Almost immediately after his arrival he was sent by the Superior of the
convent to Macouba, for acclimation; Macouba then being considered the
healthiest part of the island. Whoever makes the journey on horseback
thither from St. Pierre to-day can testify to the exactitude of Labat's
delightful narrative of the trip. So little has that part of the island
changed since two centuries that scarcely a line of the father's
description would need correction to adopt it bodily for an account of a
ride to Macouba in 1889.
At Macouba everybody welcomes him, pets him,--finally becomes
enthusiastic about him. He fascinates and dominates the little community
almost at first sight. "There is an inexpressible charm," says
Rufz,--commenting upon this portion of Labat's narrative,--"in the
novelty of relations between men: no one has yet been offended, no envy
has yet been excited;--it is scarcely possible even to guess whence that
ill-will you must sooner or later provoke is going to come from;--there
are no rivals;--there are no enemies. You are everybody's friend; and
many are hoping you will continue to be only theirs."... Labat knew how
to take legitimate advantage of this good-will;--he persuaded his
admirers to rebuild the church at Macouba, according to designs made by
himself.
At Macouba, however, he was not permitted to sojourn as long as the good
people of the little burgh would have deemed even reasonable: he had
shown certain aptitudes which made his presence more than desirable at
Saint-Jacques, the great plantation of the order on the Capesterre, or
Windward coast. It was in debt for 700,000 pounds of sugar,--an
appalling condition in those days,--and seemed doomed to get more
heavily in debt every successive season. Labat inspected everything, and
set to work for the plantation, not merely as general director, but as
engineer, architect, machinist, inventor. He did really wonderful
things. You can see them for yourself if you ever go to Martinique; for
the old Dominican plantation--now Government property, and leased at an
annual rent of 50,000 francs--remains one of the most valuable in the
colonies because of Labat's work upon it. The watercourses directed by
him still excite the admiration of modern professors of hydraulics; the
mills he built or invented are still good;--the treatise he wrote on
sugar-making remained for a hundred and fifty years the best of its
kind, and the manual of French planters. In less than two years Labat
had not only rescued the plantation from bankruptcy, but had made it
rich; and if the monks deemed him veritably inspired, the test of time
throws no ridicule on their astonishment at the capacities of the
man.... Even now the advice he formulated as far back as 1720--about
secondary cultures,--about manufactories to establish,--about imports,
exports, and special commercial methods--has lost little of its value.
Such talents could not fail to excite wide-spread admiration,--nor to
win for him a reputation in the colonies beyond precedent. He was wanted
everywhere.... Auger, the Governor of Guadeloupe, sent for him to help
the colonists in fortifying and defending the island against the
English; and we find the missionary quite as much at home in this new
rôle--building bastions, scarps, counterscarps, ravelins, etc.,--as he
seemed to be upon the plantation of Saint-Jacques. We find him even
taking part in an engagement;--himself conducting an artillery
duel,--loading, pointing, and firing no less than twelve times after the
other French gunners had been killed or driven from their posts. After a
tremendous English volley, one of the enemy cries out to him in French:
"White Father, have they told?" (_Père Blanc, ont-ils porté?_) He
replies only after returning the fire with a better-directed aim, and
then repeats the mocking question: "Have they told? Yes, they have,"
confesses the Englishman, in surprised dismay; "but we will pay you back
for that!"...
... Returning to Martinique with new titles to distinction, Labat was
made Superior of the order in that island, and likewise Vicar-Apostolic.
After building the Convent of the Mouillage, at St. Pierre, and many
other edifices, he undertook that series of voyages in the interests of
the Dominicans whereof the narration fills six ample volumes. As a
traveller Père Labat has had few rivals in his own field;--no one,
indeed, seems to have been able to repeat some of his feats. All the
French and several of the English colonies were not merely visited by
him, but were studied in their every geographical detail. Travel in the
West Indies is difficult to a degree of which strangers have little
idea; but in the time of Père Labat there were few roads,--and a far
greater variety of obstacles. I do not believe there are half a dozen
whites in Martinique who thoroughly know their own island,--who have
even travelled upon all its roads; but Labat knew it as he knew the palm
of his hand, and travelled where roads had never been made. Equally well
he knew Guadeloupe and other islands; and he learned all that it was
possible to learn in those years about the productions and resources of
the other colonies. He travelled with the fearlessness and examined with
the thoroughness of a Humboldt,--so far as his limited science
permitted: had he possessed the knowledge of modern naturalists and
geologists he would probably have left little for others to discover
after him. Even at the present time West Indian travellers are glad to
consult him for information.
These duties involved prodigious physical and mental exertion, in a
climate deadly to Europeans. They also involved much voyaging in waters
haunted by filibusters and buccaneers. But nothing appears to daunt
Labat. As for the filibusters, he becomes their comrade and personal
friend;--he even becomes their chaplain, and does not scruple to make
excursions with them. He figures in several sea-fights;--on one occasion
he aids in the capture of two English vessels,--and then occupies
himself in making the prisoners, among whom are several ladies, enjoy
the event like a holiday. On another voyage Labat's vessel is captured
by a Spanish ship. At one moment sabres are raised above his head, and
loaded muskets levelled at his breast;--the next, every Spaniard is on
his knees, appalled by a cross that Labat holds before the eyes of the
captors,--the cross worn by officers of the Inquisition,--the terrible
symbol of the Holy Office. "It did not belong to me," he says, "but to
one of our brethren who had left it by accident among my effects." He
seems always prepared in some way to meet any possible emergency. No
humble and timid monk this: he has the frame and temper of those
mediaeval abbots who could don with equal indifference the helmet or the
cowl. He is apparently even more of a soldier than a priest. When
English corsairs attempt a descent on the Martinique coast at
Sainte-Marie they find Père Labat waiting for them with all the negroes
of the Saint-Jacques plantation, to drive them back to their ships.
For other dangers he exhibits absolute unconcern. He studies the
phenomena of hurricanes with almost pleasurable interest, while his
comrades on the ship abandon hope. When seized with yellow-fever, then
known as the Siamese Sickness (_mal de Siam_), he refuses to stay in bed
the prescribed time, and rises to say his mass. He faints at the altar;
yet a few days later we hear of him on horseback again, travelling over
the mountains in the worst and hottest season of the year...
... Labat was thirty years old when he went to the Antilles;--he was
only forty-two when his work was done. In less than twelve years he made
his order the most powerful and wealthy of any in the West
Indies,--lifted their property out of bankruptcy to rebuild it upon a
foundation of extraordinary prosperity. As Rufz observes without
exaggeration, the career of Père Labat in the Antilles seems to more
than realize the antique legend of the labors of Hercules. Whithersoever
he went,--except in the English colonies,--his passage was memorialized
by the rising of chinches, convents, and schools,--as well as mills,
forts, and refineries. Even cities claim him as their founder. The
solidity of his architectural creations is no less remarkable than their
excellence of design;--much of what he erected still remains; what has
vanished was removed by human agency, and not by decay; and when the old
Dominican church at St. Pierre had to be pulled down to make room for a
larger edifice, the workmen complained that the stones could not be
separated,--that the walls seemed single masses of rock. There can be no
doubt, moreover, that he largely influenced the life of the colonies
during those years, and expanded their industrial and commercial
capacities.
He was sent on a mission to Rome after these things had been done, and
never returned from Europe. There he travelled more or less in
after-years; but finally settled at Paris, where he prepared and
published the voluminous narrative of his own voyages, and other curious
books;--manifesting as a writer the same tireless energy he had shown in
so many other capacities. He does not, however, appear to have been
happy. Again and again he prayed to be sent back to his beloved
Antilles, and for some unknown cause the prayer was always refused. To
such a character, the restraint of the cloister must have proved a slow
agony; but he had to endure it for many long years. He died at Paris in
1738, aged seventy-five.
... It was inevitable that such a man should make bitter enemies: his
preferences, his position, his activity, his business shrewdness, his
necessary self-assertion, must have created secret hate and jealousy
even when open malevolence might not dare to show itself. And to these
natural results of personal antagonism or opposition were afterwards
superadded various resentments--irrational, perhaps, but extremely
violent,--caused by the father's cynical frankness as a writer. He spoke
freely about the family origin and personal failings of various
colonists considered high personages in their own small world; and to
this day his book has an evil reputation undeserved in those old creole
communities, where any public mention of a family scandal is never
forgiven or forgotten.... But probably even before his work appeared it
had been secretly resolved that he should never be permitted to return
to Martinique or Guadeloupe after his European mission. The exact
purpose of the Government in this policy remains a mystery,--whatever
ingenious writers may have alleged to the contrary. We only know that M.
Adrien Dessalles,--the trustworthy historian of Martinique,--while
searching among the old _Archives de la Marine_, found there a
ministerial letter to the Intendent de Vaucresson in which this
statement occurs:--
... "Le Père Labat shall never be suffered to return to the colonies,
whatever efforts he may make to obtain permission."