I
St. Pierre is in one respect fortunate beyond many tropical cities;--she
has scarcely any mosquitoes, although there are plenty of mosquitoes
in other parts of Martinique, even in the higher mountain villages. The
flood of bright water that pours perpetually through all her streets,
renders her comparatively free from the pest;--nobody sleeps under a
mosquito bar.
Nevertheless, St. Pierre is not exempt from other peculiar plagues of
tropical life; and you cannot be too careful about examining your bed
before venturing to lie down, and your clothing before you dress;--for
various disagreeable things might be hiding in them: a spider large as a
big crab, or a scorpion or a _mabouya_ or a centipede,--or certain large
ants whose bite burns like the pricking of a red-hot needle. No one who
has lived in St. Pierre is likely to forget the ants.... There are three
or four kinds in every house;--the _fourmi fou_ (mad ant), a little
speckled yellowish creature whose movements are so rapid as to delude
the vision; the great black ant which allows itself to be killed before
it lets go what it has bitten; the venomous little red ant, which is
almost too small to see; and the small black ant which does not bite at
all,--are usually omnipresent, and appear to dwell together in
harmony. They are pests in kitchens, cupboards, and safes; but they are
scavengers. It is marvellous to see them carrying away the body of
a great dead roach or centipede,--pulling and pushing together like
trained laborers, and guiding the corpse over obstacles or around them
with extraordinary skill.... There was a time when ants almost destroyed
the colony,--in 1751. The plantations, devastated by them are described
by historians as having looked as if desolated by fire. Underneath the
ground in certain places, layers of their eggs two inches deep were
found extending over acres. Infants left unwatched in the cradle for a
few hours were devoured alive by them. Immense balls of living ants
were washed ashore at the same time on various parts of the coast (a
phenomenon repeated within the memory of creoles now living in the
north-east parishes). The Government vainly offered rewards for the best
means of destroying the insects; but the plague gradually disappeared as
it came.
None of these creatures can be prevented from entering a dwelling;--you
may as well resign yourself to the certainty of meeting with them from
time to time. The great spiders (with the exception of those which are
hairy) need excite no alarm or disgust;--indeed they are suffered to
live unmolested in many houses, partly owing to a belief that they bring
good-luck, and partly because they destroy multitudes of those enormous
and noisome roaches which spoil whatever they cannot eat. The scorpion
is less common; but it has a detestable habit of lurking under beds; and
its bite communicates a burning fever. With far less reason, the mabouya
is almost equally feared. It is a little lizard about six inches long,
and ashen-colored;--it haunts only the interior of houses, while the
bright-green lizards dwell only upon the roofs. Like other reptiles of
the same order, the mabouya can run over or cling to polished surfaces;
and there is a popular belief that if frightened, it will leap at one's
face or hands and there fasten itself so tightly that it cannot be
dislodged except by cutting it to pieces. Moreover, it's feet are
supposed to have the power of leaving certain livid and ineffaceable
marks upon the skin of the person to whom it attaches itself:--_ça ka
ba ou lota_, say the colored people. Nevertheless, there is no creature
more timid and harmless than the mabouya.
But the most dreaded and the most insolent invader of domestic peace is
the centipede. The water system of the city banished the mosquito; but
it introduced the centipede into almost every dwelling. St. Pierre has a
plague of centipedes. All the covered drains, the gutters, the crevices
of fountain-basins and bathing-basins, the spaces between floor and
ground, shelter centipedes. And the _bête à-mille-pattes_ is the terror
of the barefooted population:--scarcely a day passes that some child or
bonne or workman is not bitten by the creature.
The sight of a full-grown centipede is enough to affect a strong set
of nerves. Ten to eleven inches is the average length of adults; but
extraordinary individuals much exceeding this dimension may be sometimes
observed in the neighborhood of distilleries (_rhommeries_) and
sugar-refineries. According to age, the color of the creature varies
from yellowish to black;--the younger ones often have several different
tints; the old ones are uniformly jet-black, and have a carapace of
surprising toughness,--difficult to break. If you tread, by accident or
design, upon the tail, the poisonous head will instantly curl back and
bite the foot through any ordinary thickness of upper-leather.
As a general rule the centipede lurks about the court-yards,
foundations, and drains by preference; but in the season of heavy rains
he does not hesitate to move upstairs, and make himself at home in
parlors and bed-rooms. He has a provoking habit of nestling in your
_moresques_ or your _chinoises_,--those wide light garments you put on
before taking your siesta or retiring for the night. He also likes to
get into your umbrella,--an article indispensable in the tropics; and
you had better never open it carelessly. He may even take a notion to
curl himself up in your hat, suspended on the wall. (I have known a
trigonocephalus to do the same thing in a country-house). He has also a
singular custom of mounting upon the long trailing dresses (douillettes)
worn by Martinique women,--and climbing up very swiftly and lightly to
the wearer's neck, where the prickling of his feet first betrays his
presence. Sometimes he will get into bed with you and bite you, because
you have not resolution enough to lie perfectly still while he is
tickling you.... It is well to remember before dressing that merely
shaking a garment may not dislodge him;--you must examine every part
very patiently,--particularly the sleeves of a coat and the legs of
pantaloons.
The vitality of the creature is amazing. I kept one in a bottle without
food or water for thirteen weeks, at the end of which time it remained
active and dangerous as ever. Then I fed it with living insects,
which it devoured ravenously;--beetles, roaches, earthworms, several
_lepismaoe_, even one of the dangerous-looking millepedes, which have a
great resemblance in outward structure to the centipede, but a thinner
body, and more numerous limbs,--all seemed equally palatable to the
prisoner.... I knew an instance of one, nearly a foot long, remaining in
a silk parasol for more than four months, and emerging unexpectedly
one day, with aggressiveness undiminished, to bite the hand that had
involuntarily given it deliverance.
In the city the centipede has but one natural enemy able to cope with
him,--the hen! The hen attacks him with delight, and often swallows him,
head first, without taking the trouble to kill him. The cat hunts him,
but she is careful never to put her head near him;--she has a trick of
whirling him round and round upon the floor so quickly as to stupefy
him: then, when she sees a good chance, she strikes him dead with her
claws. But if you are fond of your cat you will let her run no risks, as
the bite of a large centipede might have very bad results for your pet.
Its quickness of movement demands all the quickness of even the cat for
self-defence.... I know of men who have proved themselves able to seize
a fer-de-lance by the tail, whirl it round and round, and then flip it
as you would crack a whip,--whereupon the terrible head flies off; but I
never heard of anyone in Martinique daring to handle a living centipede.
There are superstitions concerning the creature which have a good effect
in diminishing his tribe. If you kill a centipede, you are sure
to receive money soon; and even if you dream of killing one it
is good-luck. Consequently, people are glad of any chance to kill
centipedes,--usually taking a heavy stone or some iron utensil for the
work;--a wooden stick is not a good weapon. There is always a little
excitement when a _bête-ni-pié_ (as the centipede is termed in the
patois) exposes itself to death; and you may often hear those who kill
it uttering a sort of litany of abuse with every blow, as if addressing
a human enemy:--"_Quitté moin tchoué ou, maudi!--quitté moin tchoué
ou, scelerat!--quitté moin tchoué ou, Satan!--quitté moin tchoué
ou, abonocio!_" etc. (Let me kill you, accursed! scoundrel! Satan!
abomination!)
The patois term for the centipede is not a mere corruption of the French
_bête-à-mille-pattes_. Among a population of slaves, unable to read or
write, [48] there were only the vaguest conceptions of numerical values;
and the French term bête-à-mille-pattes was not one which could appeal
to negro imagination. The slaves themselves invented an equally vivid
name, _bête-anni-pié_ (the Beast-which-is-all-feet); _anni_ in creole
signifying "only," and in such a sense "all." Abbreviated by subsequent
usage to _bête-'ni-pié_, the appellation has amphibology;--for there are
two words _ni_ in the patois, one signifying "to have," and the other
"naked." So that the creole for a centipede might be translated in three
ways,--"the Beast-which-is-all-feet"; or, "the Naked-footed Beast"; or,
with fine irony of affirmation, "the Beast-which-has-feet."
[Footnote 50: According to the Martinique "Annuaire" for 1887, there
were even then, out of a total population of 173,182, no less than
125,366 unable to read and write.]