At five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave St.
Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent by the
shortest route of all,--that of the Morne St. Martin, one of Pelée's
western counterforts. We drive north along the shore for about half an
hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a winding mountain road,
leading to the upper plantations, between leagues of cane. The sky
begins to brighten as we ascend, and a steely glow announces that day
has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the
volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge against the growing light: there is not
a cloud visible. Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone; and
one of the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right an
immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens very
quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning to catch the
light, sink below us in distance; and above them, southwardly, an
amazing silhouette begins to rise,--all blue,--a mountain wall capped
with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée itself in the middle, but
sinking down to the sea-level westward. There are a number of
extraordinary acuminations; but the most impressive shape is the
nearest,--a tremendous conoidal mass crowned with a group of peaks, of
which two, taller than the rest, tell their name at once by the beauty
of their forms,--the Pitons of Carbet. They wear their girdles of cloud,
though Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only
deepens the color, does not dissipate it;--but in the nearer valleys
gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has not
been able to show himself;--it will take him some time yet to climb
Pelée.
Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden
cottages,--the quarters of the field hands,--and receive from the
proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At his
house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;--he provides for
our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,--two young colored
men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The guides
walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand and a package
on his head--our provisions, photographic instruments, etc.
The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred feet; and
for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the planter's residence we
still traverse fields of cane and of manioc. The light is now strong in
the valley; but we are in the shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at
last; the ascending path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass
run mad, and other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms. The
forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-lance
glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the bare feet of
our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it with a touch of his
cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches long, and almost the color of
the yellowish leaves under which it had been hiding.... The
conversation turns on snakes as we make our first halt at the verge of
the woods.
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, ST. PIERRE
_Completely destroyed by the catastrophe of 1902 except
for a marble statue of the Virgin. This has been set
high on a cliff above the town and may be seen from
far out at sea._]
Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows himself by
daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm. We are not likely,
in the opinion of all present, to meet another. Every one in the party,
except myself, has some curious experience to relate. I hear for the
first time about the alleged inability of the trigonocephalus to wound
except at a distance from his enemy of not less than one-third of his
length;--about M. A----, a former director of the Jardin des Plantes,
who used to boldly thrust his arm into holes where he knew snakes were,
and pull them out,--catching them just behind the head and wrapping the
tail round his arm,--and place them alive in a cage without ever getting
bitten;--about M. B----, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the
coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his fright that
the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite him;--about M.
C----, who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail, and "crack it like a
whip" until the head would fly off;--about an old white man living in
the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat, and who always kept in his
ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents" (_yon ka sèpent-salé_);--about a
monster eight feet long which killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles
Fabre's white cat, but was also killed by the cat after she had been
caught in the folds of the reptile;--about the value of snakes as
protectors of the sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;--about an
unsuccessful effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to
introduce the fer-de-lance there;--about the alleged power of a
monstrous toad, the _crapaud-ladre_, to cause the death of the snake
that swallows it;--and, finally, about the total absence of the idyllic
and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to the presence
of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna of the country remain
to a large extent unknown,"--adds the last speaker, an amiable old
physician of St. Pierre,--"because the existence of the fer-de-lance
renders all serious research dangerous in the extreme."
My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a
conversation;--I never saw alive but two very small specimens of the
trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable time in
Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a jar of
alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied fast to a bamboo.
But this is only because strangers rarely travel much in the interior of
the country, or find themselves on country roads after sundown. It is
not correct to suppose that snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood
of St. Pierre: they are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and
on the verge of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets
by heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been bitten
by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about the bulwarks
after dark;--for the snakes, which travel only at night, then descend
from the mornes towards the river. The Jardin des Plantes shelters great
numbers of the reptiles; and only a few days prior to the writing of
these lines a colored laborer in the garden was stricken and killed by a
fer-de-lance measuring one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length.
In the interior much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one
freshly killed measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg
in the middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some of
their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering
seasons;--the average annual mortality among the class of travailleurs
from serpent bite alone is probably fifty[33],--always fine young men or
women in the prime of life. Even among the wealthy whites deaths from
this cause are less rare than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a
rich citizen of St. Pierre, who in ten years lost three relatives by the
trigonocephalus,--the wound having in each case been received in the
neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure is
impossible.
[Footnote 33: "De la piqûre du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste
Charriez, Médecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875.]
V
... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields,
and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening
in the west. It has already broadened surprisingly, the sea,--appears to
have risen up, not as a horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure
precipice: what will it look like when we shall have reached the top?
Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_,
as it is called, of a plantation--slowly descending a slope, hewing the
canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder
(_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down, binds them
with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and carries them
away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that it
is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle
nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed
the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the island, with rare
exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an
army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then
the amarreuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
_ka_, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the
song;--and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old
days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an English
corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor into veritable
military: more than one attack was repelled by the cutlasses of a
plantation atelier.
At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though not
distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice, powerful as a
bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he walks along the line,
looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I ask one of our guides what
the cry is:--
--"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is
telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the cutlassers
approach the end of their task, the greater the danger: for the
reptiles, retreating before them to the last clump of cane, become
massed there, and will fight desperately. Regularly as the
ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human lives from among the
workers. But when one falls, another steps into the vacant
place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never
retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any
emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist....[34]
[Footnote 34: M. Francard Baya delle, overseer of the Presbourg
plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment
of snakebite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the
immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be
obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He
has saved several lives by these methods.
The negro _panseur's_ method is much more elaborate and, to some
extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small _couï_, or
half-calabash, in lieu of a glass; and then applies cataplasms of
herbs,--orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, _chardon-béni,
charpentier_, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;--this
poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient
is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange
juice--such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or _the head of the
fer-de-lance itself_, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro
has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;--he
refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit
to be treated even by an experienced white overseer.]