THE LAKE OF PITCH
Still weak from his illness after the manchineel poisoning, and
exhausted as he was after a sleepless night in the grip of a hurricane,
yet Stuart's first thought on leaving the hurricane wing was to get a
news story to his paper. The spell of journalism was on him.
Around the "Ol' Doc's" place, the hurricane seemed to have done little
damage. Not a building had fallen. Trees were stripped bare of their
leaves, cane-fields laid low, but when the boy commented on this escape,
the old scientist shook his head.
"I built these structures with hurricanes in view," he said. "This old
place will stand like a lighthouse. But you'll find it different in the
negro quarters. Alas! You will find mourning, everywhere."
At the boy's urgency the botanist agreed to lend him a horse and light
carriage and bade one of the negroes drive the lad to Bridgetown. A
hasty breakfast was swallowed, and, before six in the morning, Stuart
was on his way back across the island, his faithful typewriter beside
him.
They had not gone far before the real tragedy of the hurricane began to
show itself. Here was a house in splinters, and a group of people,
crying, with bowed heads, told that death had been there. The fields
were stripped bare. Near Corrington, a sugar factory showed a piece of
broken wall as all that remained. The road had been washed away by the
torrential floods.
In a small settlement, some negroes were working in a frenzy around a
mass of ruined cottages, from beneath which sounded dolorous cries. The
carriage stopped and both Stuart and the driver leaped out to aid. Ten
minutes' work unearthed three sufferers, two but slightly hurt, the
third with his leg broken. Alas! Others were not so fortunate.
Rising smoke, here and there, showed where fire had followed the
hurricane. Instead of the songs of labor in the fields, nothing was to
be heard but cries of distress. As the country grew more thickly
settled, on the way to Bridgetown, so was the suffering more intense and
the death-roll heavier. The drive, not more than twelve miles in all,
took over four hours, so littered was the road with fallen trees and the
débris of houses.
In the ruins of Bridgetown, Stuart met one of his newspaper friends, the
news instinct still inspiring him to secure every detail of the
catastrophe, though there was no newspaper office, the building being in
ruins and the presses buried under an avalanche of brick.
"The wires are down, too," said this newspaper man, "if I were you, I'd
chase right over to Trinidad. The mail steamer, which should have gone
last night, hasn't left yet, or, at least, I don't think she has. She
couldn't leave till the hurricane passed and the sea calmed down a bit.
At present, we are cut off from the world. It'll take two or three days,
a week, maybe, before the shore ends of the submarine cables are
recovered. If you can catch that steamer, you'll be in Trinidad this
evening."
"But suppose the cables are broken there, too?" suggested Stuart.
"They're not likely to be," his friend replied, "we just caught the
southern end of the hurricane here--lucky we didn't get the middle!--and
so Trinidad is likely to have escaped entirely. But you'll have to hurry
to catch that steamer. I'll get in touch with Ol' Doc, the best way I
can, and send your trunk on to you down there. Got your typewriter?
That's all right, then. Write your story on the boat. Now, hurry up!
Here!"
He shouted to a passing negro.
"Go down to the pier, Pierre, get a boat, any boat, and take this
passenger. He's got to catch the steamer."
"Me catch um!"
And he did, though it was by the narrowest margin, for the mail steamer
had steam up, and only waited until this last passenger should come
aboard.
Stuart had counted on being able to enrich his account of the hurricane
with personal stories from the passengers on the steamer, all of whom
had been through the disaster, some on board ship and some ashore. There
was no chance of this. Although a glorious day, not a soul among the
passengers was on deck. All were sleeping, for all, alike, had waked and
watched.
Stuart was dropping with weariness and sleep, but he remembered what the
Managing Editor had said to him about a "scoop" and he thought that this
might be the great opportunity of his life to make a reputation for
himself on his first trip out. A well-placed half-sovereign with the
deck steward brought him a cup of strong coffee every two hours, and
though his mind was fogged with weariness, so vivid had been his
impressions that they could not help but be thrilling.
Though one of the most richly verdant of all the West India islands,
Trinidad had little beauty to Stuart, on his first sight of it. He saw
it through a haze of weariness, his eyes red-rimmed through lack of
sleep. The harbor is shallow, and Stuart, like other passengers, landed
in a launch, but he had eyes only for one thing--the cable office. Since
his only luggage consisted of a portable typewriter--his trunk having
been left behind at "Ol' Doc's"--the customs' examination was brief.
At the Cable Office, Stuart learned, to his delight, that not a message
had either reached the office or gone out about the Barbados hurricane.
He had a scoop. He put his story on the wires, staggered across the
street to the nearest hotel, threw off coat and boots and dropped upon
the bed in an exhausted slumber. And, as an undercurrent to his dreams,
rang the triumph song of the journalist:
"A Scoop!"
Stuart slept the clock round. It was evening again when he awoke. A wash
to take the sleep out of his eyes, and down he went to see how big a
dinner he could put away. But the doorman at the hotel, an East Indian,
came forward to him with a telegram on a salver. The boy tore it open,
and read:
"GOOD--STUFF--SEND--SOME MORE--FERGUS."
And if Stuart had been offered the Governor Generalship of all the West
Indian Islands put together, he could not have been more proud.
He spent the evening interviewing some of the passengers who had come on
the mail steamer the day before and who had stayed in Port of Spain and,
before midnight, filed at the cable office a good "second-day story."
Remembering what his friend the reporter had told him, Stuart realized
that though he was still sending this matter to Fergus, as it was
straight news stuff, it probably was being handled by the Night
Telegraph staff. That would not help to fill Fergus' columns in the
Sunday issue, and the boy realized that, no matter what live day stuff
he got hold of, he must not fall behind in his series of articles on the
Color Question in the West Indies.
This question--which takes on the proportions of a problem in everyone
of the West Indian Islands--was very different in Trinidad than in
Barbados. The peoples and languages of Trinidad are strangely mixed.
Though it is an English colony, yet the language of the best families is
Spanish, and the general language of the negro population is Creole
French, a subvariant of that of Haiti. The boy found, too, on his first
long walks in the neighborhood of Port-of-Spain, that there was a large
outer settlement of East Indian coolies, and quite a number of Chinese.
The English, in Trinidad, were few in number.
In his quest for interviews about the hurricane, one of the chattiest of
Stuart's informants had been a Mr. James, a resident of Barbados, but
whose commercial interests were mainly in Trinidad. Since, then, this
gentleman evidently knew the life in both islands, his comparisons would
be of value, and the following day Stuart asked him for a second
interview.
"I'm starting out to my place on the Nariva Cocal," the planter replied,
"going in about an hour. Very glad to have you as my guest, if you wish,
and the trip will give you a good view of the island. Then we can chat
on the way."
Stuart jumped at the opportunity. This was exactly what he was after,
for the Nariva Cocal, with its thirteen-mile long coco-nut grove on the
shore of the ocean, is famous. The boy knew, too, that this section was
very difficult of access, the Nariva River forming a mixture of river,
tidal creek, lagoon, mangrove swamp and marsh, hard to cross.
For some little distance out of Port-of-Spain the train passed through
true tropical forests of a verdure not to be outrivaled in any part of
the New World. "Here," says Treves, "is a very revel of green, a hoard,
a pyramid, a piled-up cairn of green, rising aloft from an iris-blue
sea. Here are the dull green of wet moss, the clear green of the
parrot's wing, the green tints of old copper, of malachite, of the wild
apple, the bronze-green of the beetle's back, the dead green of the
autumn Nile." And these are expressed, not in plants, but in trees. The
moss is waist-high, the ferns wave twenty feet overhead, the bamboo
drapes a feathery fringe by every stream, the cocoa trees grow right up
to the road or railroad which sweeps along as on an avenue between them,
while at every crossing the white roadway is lined by the majestic
sentinels of plantain, coco-nut palm and breadfruit tree.
Beyond St. Joseph, the ground became a low plain, level and monotonous,
and given over to sugar-cane. Near d'Abadie, this crop gave place to
cocoa, the staple of the center of the island, and this extended through
Arima to Sangre Grande, the terminus of the railroad. During the trip
Stuart's host had enlightened him by an exact and painstaking
description of the growing of these various crops and the methods of
their preparation for market.
At Sangre Grande, the railroad ended and a two-wheeled buggy was
waiting. The planter ordered the East Indian driver to follow in the
motor-bus which conveys passengers to Manzanilla, and took the reins
himself, so as to give a place to Stuart. The road had left the level,
and passed over low hills and valleys all given over to cocoa trees.
"See those bottles!" commented Mr. James, pointing to bottles daubed
with paint, bunches of white feathers and similar objects hung on trees
at various points of the road.
"Yes," answered Stuart, "what are they for?"
"Those are our police!" the planter explained. "This colony is well
governed, but planters have had a good deal of trouble keeping the
negroes from stealing. We used to engage a number of watchmen, and the
police force in this part of the island was increased. It didn't do any
good, you know! Stealing went on just the same.
"So my partner, down here, went and got hold of the chief Obeah-man or
witch-doctor of the island--paid him a good stiff price, too--and asked
him to put a charm on the plantation. He did it, and those bottles and
feathers are some of the charms. We pay for having them renewed every
year. It costs a tidy bit, but less than the watchmen and police did."
"And have the thefts stopped?"
"Absolutely. There hasn't been a shilling's worth of stuff touched since
the obeah-man was here."
"But obeah wouldn't have any effect on East Indian coolies," objected
Stuart.
"Coolies don't steal," was the terse reply, "those that are Mohammedans
don't, any way. Trinidad negroes do. They're different from the
Barbadian negroes, quite different. Obeah seems to be about the only
thing they care about."
"I ran up against some Obeah in Haiti," remarked Stuart, "though Voodoo
is stronger there."
"I never heard of much real Voodoo stuff here in the Windward Islands,"
the planter rejoined, "but Obeah plays a big part in negro life. And, as
I was just telling you, the whites aren't above using it, sometimes."
"In Haiti," responded Stuart, "Father and I once found an Obeah sign in
the road. Father, who knows a lot about those things, read it as a charm
to prevent any white man going that way. I thought it was silly to pay
any attention, but Father made a long detour around it. A week or so
after I heard that a white trader had been driving along that road, and
he drove right over the sign. Half a mile on, his horse took fright,
threw him out of the buggy and he was killed."
The planter shrugged his shoulders.
"I know," he said. "It's all right to call it coincidence, but down in
these islands that kind of coincidence happens a bit too often. For me,
I'll throw a shilling to an Obeah-man any time I see one, and I won't
play any tricks with charms if I know enough about them to keep away."
The buggy jogged along at a smart pace until the shore was reached, and
then set down the beach over the hard wet sand. On the one side heaved
the long rollers of the Atlantic, on the other was the continuous grove
of coco-nut palms, thirteen miles long, one of the finest unbroken
stretches in the entire world.
A hospitable welcome was extended to Stuart at the house of the Nariva
Cocal, and, after dinner, the planter took him to the shores of the
Nariva River, not more than twenty or thirty yards from the house,
which, at this place, had a bank free of marsh for a distance of perhaps
a couple of hundred yards.
"It was just at a place like this, but a little higher up-stream," said
the planter, "that the snake story happened which Kingsley described in
'At Last.' Four girls were bathing in this river, because the surf is
too heavy for sea-bathing, and one of them, who had gone into the water
partly dressed, felt something clutch at her dress.
"It was a huge anaconda.
"The other three girls, with a good deal of pluck, I think, rushed into
the shallow water and grabbed hold of their comrade. The snake did not
let go, but the dress was torn from her body by the wrestle between the
strength of the reptile and that of the four girls. I know one of the
sisters quite well. She's an old woman, now, but she lives in Sangre
Grande, still."
Turning from the river, Stuart and the planter strolled some distance
down the knife-like sandy ridge between the ocean and the swamp. This
narrow ridge, at no point a hundred yards wide and averaging less than
half that, contains over 300,000 palms, and this plantation alone helps
to make Trinidad one of the greatest coco-nut markets of the world.
"I notice," said Stuart, anxious to get material for his articles, "that
nearly all your laborers here are East Indian coolies. Are they better
than negroes?"
"They come here under different conditions," explained the planter. "The
negro is free to work or not, as he chooses, but the coolie is
indentured. He has to work. He earns less than the negro, but, by the
time we pay his voyage and all the various obligations that we have to
undertake for an indentured laborer, the coolie isn't much cheaper to us
than the negro. But, while the negro can do more work in a day than the
coolie, he won't. Moreover, if he feels, after a few days' work, that he
has had enough of it, he just goes away. A Trinidad negro with a pound
or two in his pocket won't do a tap of work until the last penny be
spent. The coolie will work quietly, steadily, continuously. What is
more, he saves his money. That's bringing about a deuced curious
situation in Trinidad, you know.
"One of the queer things about the West Indies, as you know yourself,
having lived in Cuba, is that there is really no middle class. Here, in
Trinidad, there are the wealthy Spanish families and the English
officials and planters. The blacks are the laborers. For many decades
there has been no class between. Now, the East Indians, who came here as
coolies, are beginning to follow the commercial instinct of the east,
and to open small shops or to buy land. Hence the negro, who used to
despise and look down on the coolie because he worked for even less
money, is now finding himself subordinate to an East Indian class which
has risen to be his superior. Then the East Indians have commenced
rice-growing, and now are employing negroes, oversetting the old social
basis.
"There's one thing, son, which few people realize in this color question
in the West Indies. That is that the negro has not got the instincts of
a shopkeeper. He doesn't take to trade, ever. If he gets educated, he
wants at once to be a doctor, a lawyer, or, still more, a preacher. But
this is a commercial age, and any race which shows itself unfitted for
commerce is bound to stay the under dog, you know. Trinidad shows that,
given equal conditions, the East Indian coolie will rise, the negro
will not."
The following morning, Mr. James having gone over the books of the
plantation with his manager, the two started back for Port-of-Spain.
"Why don't you live here, Mr. James?" asked the boy. "It's a lovely
spot, in that coco-nut grove, with the sea right at your doors."
"Climate, my boy," was the answer. "I told you, on the way over here,
that Trinidad is reckoned one of the most prosperous islands of the West
Indies--though it really belongs more to the coast of South America than
it does to the Antilles--but, if you stop to think for a moment, you'll
see that the prosperity of Trinidad is due to the fact that it has a
warm, moist, even climate all the year round. That's fine for cocoa and
coco-nuts, but it's not good for humans. The warm moist air of Trinidad
is deuced enervating. No, let me go back to Barbados. It may not be as
beautiful--I'll admit that it isn't--but at least there is a north-east
breeze nearly all the year round to keep me jolly cool."
The two travelers talked of various subjects, but, once more aboard the
train at Sangre Grande, the question of Trinidad's wealth recurred to
Stuart, and he sought further information.
"You spoke of the island as being prosperous, Mr. James," he said. "Has
the Pitch Lake, discovered so many centuries ago by Sir Walter Raleigh,
had anything to do with it?"
"Directly, not such a great deal, though, of course, it is a steady
source of income, especially to the Crown. Asphalt is less than a
twentieth part of the value of the exports of the island, so, you see,
Trinidad would have been rich without that. Indirectly, of course, the
Pitch Lake has been the means of attracting attention to the island,
especially in earlier times. The facts that Trinidad is out of the
hurricane track and off the earthquake belt have had a good deal to do
with its prosperity, too, you know. My friend Cecil always declares that
Trinidad and Jamaica together, the two richest of the West Indian
islands, ought to run the whole cluster of Caribbean islands, just as
little England runs the whole British Empire."
"Who was it said that?" asked Stuart curiously, though his heart was
thumping with excitement.
"A chap I know, Cecil, Guy Cecil, sort of a globe-trotter. One of the
biggest shareholders in this Pitch Lake. Funny sort of Johnny. Know
him?"
"I--I think I've met him," answered the boy. "Tall, eyes a very light
blue, almost colorless, speaks very correct English, fussy about his
clothes and doesn't talk about himself much."
"That's the very man!" cried the planter, "I couldn't have described him
better myself. Where did you meet him?"
Stuart answered non-committally and steered the subject into other
channels, determining within himself that he would certainly go out to
the Pitch Lake, if only with the hope of finding out something more
about this mysterious Guy Cecil, whose name seemed to be cropping up
everywhere.
The following day, having seen his friend the planter off on the
homeward bound mail steamer, Stuart prepared for his visit to the famous
Pitch Lake, though the planter had warned him that he would be
disappointed.
Going by railway to Fernando, Stuart took a small steamer to La Brea,
the shipping point for the asphalt, a town, which, by reason of its
association with pitch, has a strange and unnatural air. The beach is
covered with pieces of pitch, encrusted with sand and stones, worn by
the water into the most grotesque shapes and forming so many
resting-places for hundreds of pelicans. Some of these blocks of
hardened asphalt had been polished by the sea until they shone like
jewels of jet as large as a table, others, fringed with green seaweed,
gave the shore an uncanny appearance of a sea-beach not of this earth.
Unlike the universally white towns of the West Indies, La Brea is black.
The impress of pitch is everywhere. The pier is caked with the pitch,
the pavements are pitch, and, on the only street in the town as Stuart
passed, he saw a black child, sitting on a black boulder of pitch, and
playing with a black doll made of pitch.
Taking a negro boy as a guide, Stuart started for the famous deposit of
asphalt, about one mile inland. The countryside leading thither was not
absolutely barren, but it was scrawny and dismal. A coarse sand
alternated with chunks of black asphalt. A few trees managed to find a
foothold here and there, and there was sparse vegetation in patches.
There was nothing exciting, nothing momentous in the approach to the
lake. Nor was there anything startling in the sight of the lake itself.
Although previously warned, Stuart could not repress an exclamation of
disappointed surprise at his first view of this famous lake, the
greatest deposit of natural asphalt in the world.
A circular depression, so slight that it was hard for the boy to realize
that it was a depression at all, had, toward its center, a smaller flat,
115 acres in extent. There were no flames, no sulphurous steam, no
smoke, no bubbling whirls of viscid matter, nothing exciting whatever.
The stretch before him resembled nothing so much as mud-flat with the
tide out. The dried-up bed of a large park pond, with a small island or
two of green shrubbery, and some very scrawny palms around the edge
would exactly represent the famous Pitch Lake of Trinidad.
Arriving at the edge, Stuart stepped on the lake with the utmost
precaution, for he had read that the lake was both warm and liquid. Both
were true. But the warmth was only slight, and the liquidity was so
dense that, when a piece of pitch was taken out, it took several hours
for the slow-moving mass to fill up the hole.
"The sensation that walking upon this substance gave," writes Treves,
"was no other than that of treading upon the flank of some immense
beast, some Titanic mammoth lying prostrate in a swamp. The surface was
black, it was dry and minutely wrinkled like an elephant's skin, it was
blood-warm, it was soft and yielded to the tread precisely as one would
suppose that an acre of solid flesh would yield. The general impression
was heightened by certain surface creases, where the hide seemed to be
turned in as in the folds behind an elephant's ears. These skin furrows
were filled with water, as if the collapsed animal was perspiring.
"The heat of the air was great, the light was almost blinding, while the
shimmer upon the baked surface, added to the swaying of one's feet in
soft places, gave rise to the idea that the mighty beast was still
breathing, and that its many-acred flank actually moved."
The task of taking the pitch out of this lake, Stuart found to be as
prosaic as the lake itself. Laborers, with picks, broke off large
pieces--which showed a dull blue cleavage--while other laborers lifted
the pieces on their heads--the material is light--and carried them to
trucks, running on a little railroad on the surface of the lake, and
pulled by a cable line.
The tracks sink into the lake, little by little, and have to be pried
up and moved to a new spot every three days, but as they are specially
constructed for this, the labor is trifling. The laborers work right
beside the railroad trucks. It makes no difference where the ditch is
dug, from which the asphalt is taken, as the hole left the night before
is filled again by the following morning.
It has been estimated that this deposit alone contains over 9,000,000
tons of asphalt. It is 135 feet deep, and though enormous quantities of
the stuff have been taken out, the level has not fallen more than ten
feet.
In the lake are certain small islands, which move around from place to
place, apparently following some little-known currents in the lower
layers of the pitch.
Stuart went on to the factory, hoping to get some further information
about Guy Cecil, but met with a sudden and unexpected rebuff. Not only
did no one about the place seem to know the name, but they refused to
admit that they recognized the description, and seemed to resent the
questions.
Trying to change the subject, Stuart commenced to ask questions about
where the asphalt came from, and the manager, who seemed to be a
Canadian, turned on the boy, sharply.
"See here," he said, "I don't know who you are, nor where you come from.
But I'll give a civil answer to a civil question. As for this Cecil, I
don't know anything about him. As for where this asphalt come from, I
don't know, and nobody knows. Some say it's inorganic, some say is from
vegetable deposits of a long time ago, some say it's fish. The chemists
are still scrapping about it. Nobody knows. Now, is there anything
more?"
The manner of the response was not one to lead Stuart to further
attempts. He shook his head, and with a curt farewell went back to La
Brea, Fernando and Port de Spain.
At the hotel he found a telegram.
"GET--STORY--PRESENT--CONDITION--ST. PIERRE--MARTINIQUE--FERGUS."
Two days later Stuart boarded the steamer for Martinique, the Island of
the Volcano.