CHAPTER VII

HITHER AND YON IN THE HAITIAN BUSH

Of many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in the company

of gendarme officers, the first was to the _caco_-infested district of

Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on an inspection trip there had a

seat left after his assistant and a native gendarme had been

accommodated. Among the four of us there were as many revolvers and

three rifles, all ready for instant action. One can, of course, hire

private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from the decided

expense, a Haitian chauffeur under military orders is much to be

preferred to one who is subject to his own whims; moreover, there is

much more to be seen and heard in gendarme company, and, lastly, if one

chances to “pop off” a _caco_, there is not even the trouble of

explaining, for one’s companions will do that in their laconic report to

headquarters.

There are few roads in the West Indies as crowded as that broad new

highway across the plain which is a continuation of the wide main street

of Port au Prince. By it all traffic from the north and west enters the

capital. The overwhelming majority of travelers are market-women, most

of them barefooted and afoot, but a large number are seated sidewise on

their donkeys or small mules, balancing on their toes the slippers,

which are never known to fall off under any provocation. Pedestrians

carry their invariably heavy and cumbersome loads on their heads, the

haughtier class in crude saddle-bags, and the sight of this river of

jogging humanity, often completely filling the broad highway as far as

it can be seen in the heat-hazy distance, is one of which we never tired

as often as we rode out through it.

At the time of the outbreak against the French the population roughly

was made up of thirty thousand whites, as many “people of color,” and

four hundred and fifty thousand blacks. There has been, of course, no

census since that time, but signs indicate that Haiti has now two and a

half million inhabitants, for however unproductive the semi-savage

hordes may be in other ways, they are diligent in the process of

multiplication. White people are more rare to-day, even if one counts

our forces of occupation, than before the revolt, the mixed race has not

greatly increased, so that fully nine tenths of the population are

full-blooded Africans. Close observers are convinced that, thanks mainly

to the constant revolutions, there are three females to every male, and

of the latter a considerable number are now roaming the hills of the

interior as _cacos_. Furthermore, the men take little part in selling

the country produce. The result is that the stream of humanity pouring

into the capital is almost entirely made up of jet-black women and

girls.

The throng was particularly dense on the morning of our journey to Las

Cahobas, for it was Friday, and the great weekly market in Port au

Prince begins at dawn on Saturday morning. An American once stationed

himself at the typical negro arch of triumph, straddling the entrance

from the Cul-de-Sac to the capital, and counted thirty thousand

travelers in an hour, of whom all but about two hundred were

market-women. They were somewhat less multitudinous during our stay in

Haiti, for the Americans had recently set a maximum scale of prices for

foodstuffs, and many of the women had gone on strike and refused to

bring their produce to town. They had another grievance in the

requirement to sell most things by weight. For generations they had sold

only by the “pile,” consisting of three articles of such things as eggs,

plantains, yams, and the like, or of tiny heaps in the case of grains

and similar produce; few of them, moreover, could afford to buy scales,

and they resented the right given purchasers to appeal to gendarmes

stationed in the market-places for the verifying of weights. But only

those who had seen it under still more crowded conditions would have

realized that the highway was not thronged to its full density on this

particular morning.

Through the main street, out past the only modern sugar-mill in Haiti,

for miles across the plain, our constantly honking Ford plowed through

this endless procession of black humanity, casting it aside in two

turbulent furrows of donkeys, mules, women, and multifarious bundles.

There is nothing more amusing, and pathetic, too, than the behavior of

the primitive masses of Haiti before an automobile. This is scarcely to

be wondered at in a country where any wheeled traffic except a very rare

ox-cart crawling along on its creaking and wobbling wheels was unknown

up to a few years ago, and where the half-dozen automobiles of Port au

Prince could not make their way into the country until the Americans had

begun the reconstruction of the roads. But it is proof, too, of the

close relationship of the Haitians to their savage brethren in central

Africa. Just like this, one can easily imagine, the latter would act at

the sudden apparition of a strange machine which the great mass of

Haitians firmly believe is run by voodoo spirits devoted to the white

man.

The highway, like most of those the Americans have built, is of

boulevard width, and there is ample room for even such a throng as this

to pass an automobile in safety. But the primitive-minded natives are

terror-stricken at sight of one bearing down upon them. The mounted

women invariably tumble off their animals and fall to beating, pushing,

and dragging them to the extreme edge of the road, at the same time

shrieking as if the Grim Reaper had suddenly appeared before them with

his sickle poised. The pedestrians succumb to a similar panic, so that

the journey out the flat highway presents a constant vista of

dismounting women and a turmoil of animals and frightened human beings

tumbling over one another in their excited eagerness to get well out of

reach of the swiftly approaching demon of destruction. Farther on, where

the road begins to wind, and the cuts into the hills are often deep, the

scene is still more laughter-provoking, for the startled animals

invariably bury their noses in the sheer road-banks and will not, for

all the cajolery or threats in the world, swing in sidewise along them.

If they are donkeys, the women pick up their hind quarters and lift them

out of the way by main force; when they are too large for this

courageous treatment, the riders put a shoulder to the quivering rumps,

abandon those useless tactics to drag at the halters as the machine

draws nearer, and finally bury their faces also in the bank, as if to

shut out the horrible experience of seeing their precious animals

mutilated beyond recognition.

Still more distracting to drivers is the behavior of persons approached

from the rear. A horn is of little use in this case. The Haitian’s

hearing is acute enough, but his mind does not synchronize in its

various faculties; he is aware of a disagreeable noise behind him, but

that noise does not register as a warning of danger and a call for

action. Then, when at last he realizes that it means something and is

addressed to him, or when the bumper or fender touches his ragged

coat-tail, he is electrified into record-breaking activity.

Unfortunately, his psychology is that of the chicken, and in eight cases

out of ten he darts across the road instead of withdrawing to the side

of it. This happens even when he is far out of danger at the edge of a

wide street or highway, and every automobile trip through the crowded

parts of Haiti is a constant succession of interweaving pedestrians bent

on getting to the opposite side of the road.

An American estate manager who drives a heavy car at a high rate of

speed, yet who is noted for his freedom from accidents, was bowling

alone one September afternoon far out in the country. The road was

twenty-two feet wide, and he was driving to the right of it, without an

animate object in sight except for one ragged countryman plodding along

the extreme left in the same direction. Seeing no reason to do so, he

did not blow his horn. Suddenly the pedestrian caught sight of the car

out of the tail of an eye and darted across the road. The machine struck

him squarely and knocked him, as was afterward proved by measurement,

fifty-two feet, then ran completely over him. The driver hurried him

back to a hospital, where it was found that the only injuries he had

sustained were a few minor bruises and a gash on the head. This was

treated, and a few days later he was discharged, and returned to his

hut, where he died the next week of blood poisoning caused by the native

healer whom he insisted on having redress his almost healed wound.

Though somewhat stony and grown with an ugly, thorny vegetation, the

great Cul-de-Sac plain is noted for its fertility. Here the aborigines

cultivated cotton and tobacco; at the time of French expulsion it had

nearly seven thousand plantations, chiefly of sugar-cane, which was

brought to Haiti from the Canary Islands early in the sixteenth century.

The French had covered it with a thorough irrigation system, with a

_grand bassin_ in the hills above and streams of water spreading from it

like the fingers of the hand to all parts of the plain. There were

numerous splendid highways between towns and estates, and the ninety

thousand acres were dotted with fine residences, hundreds of

sugar-mills, and many coffee, cotton, and indigo works. To-day the roads

which our forces of occupation, or the two American companies that are

beginning to reclaim some of the plain, have not found time to restore

are rutty successions of mud-holes so narrowed by ever-encroaching

vegetation as to resemble the trails of blackest Africa, or have

disappeared entirely. There are a few rude bridges, usually patched upon

the crumbling remains of once fine French structures, but as a rule

streams are forded. Except where the newcomers have constructed new

ones, the saying in Haiti is, “Never cross a bridge if you can go around

it.” Many of the former estates are completely overgrown with brush and

broken walls, trees rise from former courtyards, the remnants of once

sumptuous halls are the haunts of bats, night birds, and lizards. In

some of the less dilapidated ruins negro families now cluster; most of

them live in shanties patched together of jungle rubbish, their only

furnishings a sleeping-net and a German enamelware pot. Whatever else he

lacks, the Haitian always has the latter, its holes stopped with

corncobs until they become too large, when the pot is filled with earth,

planted with flowers, and set up in a conspicuous position about the

hovel. Everywhere are to be found reminders of the prosperous days when

Haiti was France’s richest colony. Large, semispherical iron

sugar-kettles, rusted, broken, and full of holes, lie tumbled everywhere

along the highway and across the plain. Old French bells bearing

pre-Napoleonic dates and quaint inscriptions, ruined stone aqueducts,

mammoth grass-grown stairways, rust-eaten machinery, inexplicable stone

ruins of all shapes and sizes, are stumbled upon wherever the visitor

rambles.

The characteristic sour stench of a dirty little sugar- and rum-mill

only rarely assails the nostrils. The natives have lost not only the

energy, but almost the knowledge, required for the growing and making of

sugar, producing only _rapadoue_, dark-brown lumps of crude, coagulated

molasses, which, wrapped in leaves, are to be found in every Haitian

market. The American companies found the people so ignorant of

agricultural methods that it was impossible to introduce the _colono_

system. The men and women who work in the sugar- and cotton-fields of

these new enterprises are as patched and ragged a crew as can be found

on the earth’s surface. The average daily wage for adult male laborers

in Haiti is a _gourde_, or twenty cents, a day, women and boys in

proportion. The new companies have raised this to thirty cents. In

theory the laborers are fed by their employers, but it would be

considerable exaggeration to call the one gourdful of rice-and-bean hash

which a disheveled, yet dictatorial, old negro woman was dishing out to

each of a long line of gaunt and soil-stained workmen on one of the

estates at which we stopped one evening the nourishment needed for a

long day in the fields. Except for a sugar-cane, a lump of _rapadoue_,

or possibly a bit of rice or plantain, which they find for themselves in

the morning, this is the only food of the Haitian field laborer. So lazy

have they become in their masterless condition that this one meal a day

has come to be the habitual diet of the masses and all they expect of

their employers; but the impression on both sides that this is all they

need is probably costing the companies more in lack of efficient labor

than they themselves realize. Only at one season during the year does

the average Haitian get more than these slim pickings; that is in

mango-time, and then the roads and trails are carpeted with the yellow

pits.

Dusty, thorny, and hot, the Cul-de-Sac plain continued as level as the

sea at its edge to where we began to climb the steep slope of wrinkled,

rusty mountains shutting it off abruptly on the north and offering a

panorama of rare beauty from Port au Prince, particularly when sunrise

or sunset gives them a dozen swiftly changing colors. As we rose above

it, the reedy edged first of two large lakes, one of which stretches on

into the Republic of Santo Domingo, broke the red-brown carpet with a

contrasting shimmer of blue at the eastern end, and the mountains behind

the capital stood forth in silhouette against the transparent tropical

sky. The aboriginal name “Haiti” means a high and mountainous land; like

its inhabitants, its scenery and vegetation are more savage than those

of Cuba. So steep was the new road climbing diagonally up the face of

the range that we were twice compelled to dismount and call upon a gang

of road laborers to push the machine over the next stony rise. The

stream of market-women continued to pour down this in cascades. Many of

the heavy black faces would have made splendid gargoyles. Almost all of

the women wore gowns of blue denim; the year before, the driver said,

they had all worn purple, but the style had changed only in color. Once

we met a lone marine, and higher up paused at a camp where there were

several of them. But they were not the spick-and-span “leather-necks” we

know taking their shore leave along Broadway. They wore only the

indispensable parts of their uniforms, on the faces of those old enough

to produce it was a week’s growth of beard, and they clutched their

rifles with the alert and ready air of expecting to use them at any

moment, for we were now entering a region constantly harassed by

_cacos_.

We grasped our own weapons and closely watched the brush-covered banks

on each hand, as well as every approaching traveler. There are only two

ways of telling a _caco_ from a harmless Haitian; if he is armed or if

he runs. Then the orders are to fire, for the “good citizens” do not

carry weapons and are very careful to move slowly and be prepared to

flourish their _bon habitant_ card at sight of a white face or a

gendarme uniform. Several times I fancied for an instant that we had

been attacked, until I grew accustomed to the thump of stones with which

the road was ever more thickly strewn striking the bottom of the car

with reports startlingly like rifle-shots. From the crest of the first

range we descended into the Artibonite Valley, remarkable for its

colors. A constant series of rusty red humps, more beautiful at a

distance, no doubt, than to a hungry marine climbing over them expecting

at any moment to run into a _caco_ ambush, patches of scenery almost

equal to the Alps in color, slender pines standing out against the red

and tumbled background, here and there a clump of palm-trees to give

contrast and a suggestion of peaceful tropical languor, spread before us

farther than the eye could see.

As far as the marine-garrisoned town of Mirebalais the road was

passable, though it had steadily deteriorated from the modern highway of

the plain to a road made only by the feet of animals and men. It would

have been an exceedingly optimistic stranger, however, who could ever

have attempted to drive an automobile over the mountain trail that lay

beyond, yet over which the doughty Ford climbed as if military orders

forbade it to give up so long as it retained a gasp of life. Here and

there we forded a considerable stream, meeting at one of them a group of

marines driving pack-laden donkeys and cattle, in some cases astride the

latter, more often splashing thigh-deep through the water, and with a

score of produce-bearing natives plodding at their heels for protection.

Farther on we passed an airplane camp, from which “God’s wicked angels,”

as the natives call them, periodically bombard the retreats of the

_cacos_. Rumor has it that these warriors of the air have not always

made certain of the character of the gatherings they attack, and the

_cacos_ once sent a protest to England against the Americans for using a

means of warfare which the “Haitians fighting for their liberty” cannot

combat or imitate.

The name of Las Cahobas, the old Spanish form of the word for

mahogany-trees, is an indication of the fact that it was formerly within

the territory of Santo Domingo. It is a miserable little town in which

the palm-trunk huts that are the lowest form of dwelling in Cuba are

considered residences _de luxe_. A whitewashed jail where the hundred or

more black inmates, most simply dressed in two-piece suits of

red-and-white striped cotton, seem only too glad to get their three

meals a day, two of them with meat rations, was the chief sight of

interest. Some of the gendarme guards had become so thoroughly

Americanized under their marine officers that they “rolled their own,”

closed their tobacco-sacks with their teeth, and returned them to

hip-pockets exactly as required by our military manuals. It is

remarkable what can be done with a backward race under proper guidance.

The officers themselves, nearly all enlisted men in the organization

from which they had been loaned, were, like most of those I met

throughout the country, forceful, energetic, efficient chaps, many of

whom spoke the native “creole” as if they had been born in the district.

In the North we scarcely think of a corporal or sergeant of marines as

standing particularly high in the social scale; in these Haitian

villages they have almost the power of absolute monarchs, and are

treated with corresponding respect by their native subjects. Even the

village accounts are periodically brought to them to be audited. So

accustomed do the Haitians become to obeying the commander of the

district in which they live that it is difficult to get them to change

their allegiance. A marine major who had long reigned in a certain

region summoned all the native authorities to meet a newly arrived

lieutenant colonel, explaining that the latter was thereafter the

commander in chief; yet as long as the major remained, he never broke

the natives of the habit of appealing to him first of all whenever any

official matter turned up.

On the edge of Las Cahobas, as here and there along the road to it, was

a Haitian cemetery. These are invariably bare and sun-scorched, the

graves covered with vault-shaped structures ranging from heaped-up

cobbles to almost elaborate stone and plaster mounds. Without crosses or

any other indication of the Christian faith, they seem to be direct

importations from the interior of Africa, and though one knows that the

stones are piled there primarily to keep the energetic Haitian pigs from

rooting up and feasting on the corpses, it is hard to think of them as

anything but the African’s protection against the voodoo spirits which

must be forcibly prevented from escaping out of bodies committed to the

earth. The usual Haitian funeral is accompanied with strange rites

destined to exorcise these same spirits, after which others of a totally

different nature enliven the proceedings, for the corpse is generally

carried on the heads of men who dance and sing in a drunken orgy all the

way to the burial-ground.

Market-women were still straggling toward town when we returned. The

view of the Cul-de-Sac plain toward sunset, carpeted with brown and

green vegetation, speckled here and there with little houses, the lakes

on the left and the ocean on the right reflecting the colors of the

purple and lilac clouds which hung above the mountains, was as striking

as any I had seen in many a day. Nearer the capital the road was still

almost crowded, while here and there under the trees beside it the

women, their big straw hats off now, but still wearing their brilliant

bandanas, had camped for the night, and were cooking their humble

dinners on fagot fires. Once we found a woman bareheaded, but this was

because she was tearing her hair and shrieking in what seemed to be

physical agony. As she caught sight of my uniformed companions, she

rushed out upon them and reported that she had been robbed by _cacos_ of

the produce she had expected to spread out in the big market-square

before the cathedral by the dawn of Saturday. Such things happen even on

the broad highway into Port au Prince, while more often still gendarmes

are sent out along the road by some colonel or major whose wife has

invited guests, with orders to buy the chickens and turkeys needed

before they reach the close competition of the market. In either case

the women are deeply disgruntled, for the mere selling is only half

their pleasure in offering their wares.

* * * * *

Of the other two highways out of Port au Prince one climbs into the

hills to Pétionville, from which a trail leads to cool and refreshing

Furcy, among its pine-trees, four thousand feet above the sea. A longer

road is that to the southern peninsula. Leaving the capital at the

opposite end of the main street from that to the Cul-de-Sac, it passes

the “navy yard” and skirts the bay for miles beyond. It, too, is apt to

be crowded with market-women, and with donkeys, women, and men carrying

rock salt from Léogane. Half-way to that town there is a clearing in the

dense woods famed as the scene of frequent voodoo rites, and for a long

space the road is bordered by the scraggly tree-bushes of an abandoned

castor-bean plantation from which our Government once hoped to produce

oil for its airplanes. Léogane is a town of considerable size, the usual

grass-grown square of which is faced by a quaint old church of what

might almost be called Haitian architecture. Churches were the only

buildings spared by the infuriated slaves in their revolt against the

French, as the priests were the only white people who escaped attack,

but neglect and the tropical climate have in most cases completed the

work of destruction. The town and the region about it is one of the few

places in Haiti where the malarial mosquito abounds. Here, too, are to

be found many bush-grown ruins of French plantations. Far to the

westward along the tongue of land forming the southern horn of Haiti,

and to be reached only by horse or boat, is the town of Jérémie, near

which the elder Dumas was born, the son of a French general and a negro

slave.

The gendarme officer with whom I was traveling on this occasion,

however, had come to inspect Jacmel, on the southern coast. At two and a

half hours by Ford from the capital, the last part of it by a narrow

dirt roadway winding through high hills, we changed to moth-eaten native

horses and rode away down the River Gauche, which we forded one hundred

and eighteen times during the next four hours. The black soil was

fertile, and cultivated in scattered patches even to the tops of the

hills. Coffee in uncared-for luxuriance often bordering the way showed

what this region had been under the French. It was still well populated,

for the people of the southern peninsula have never revolted, and

_cacos_ are unknown, though there is much petty thieving. At every turn

of the trail startled, respectful negroes raised their hats as we

passed, only a few of them having the half-sullen air of their

fellow-countrymen elsewhere at sight of Americans. Their little huts of

thatch, or _tache_, as _yagua_ is called in Haiti, were everywhere

tucked away in the bush, cattle and pigs were numerous, though all

animals except the goats had a half-starved appearance. Bananas and

oranges grew in profusion; the trail was strewn with the peelings of the

native pear-shaped grape-fruit. Frequent patches of Kafir-corn, called

_pitimi_, the “creole” abbreviation of _petit maïs_, waved their lofty

heads of rice-like grain in the breeze. Immovable donkeys now and then

blocked the trail, indifferent alike to the shrieks of their drivers and

to the commanding voice of the native gendarme who accompanied us. Here

and there washing parties of women were beating their rags on stones at

the edge of the stream and spreading them out in the sun to bleach,

their almost nude black bodies glistening in the sunshine and their

tongues cackling incessantly until a glimpse of us reduced them to

sudden silence. Several times we passed voodoo signs—a chicken with its

entrails removed hanging by one leg from a pole, the white skull of a

horse decorated with bits of red rag set on the top of a cactus-bush.

Now and then we came across the most primitive form of cane-crusher

except the human teeth. It consisted of a grooved stick driven through a

tree or post, with a bit of sapling fastened at one end. While one negro

held a sugar-cane, another rolled the sapling back and forth along it,

the juice running down the groove into a gourd or pot. Wherever the

breeze reached us the weather was agreeable; in the breathless pockets

of the hills the humid heat hung about us like a hot wet blanket.

The marine-gendarme commander of Jacmel met us with an automobile

farther out along the trail than one had ever been driven before, and

the astounded natives fled shrieking before it as if the malignant

spirits they fancied they could hear groaning under its hood were

visibly pursuing them. In the town itself the people greeted their

benevolent despot with just such antics as one might fancy their

forefathers performed before their African chiefs. Jacmel, however, has

a number of “citizens of color” of education and moderate wealth. The

hills about it grow two crops of coffee a year, cotton and cacao

alternate all the year round, veritable forests of cotton-trees cover

the sites of old French plantations, and there is considerable shipping,

though the bay is deep and dangerous. But its prosperity is mainly due,

of course, to its lifelong freedom from _cacos_ and revolutions. It is a

hilly town of six thousand inhabitants, with sharp lines of caste, more

stone buildings than are usual in Haiti, a Protestant as well as a

Catholic church, an imposing _hotel de ville_, with the familiar

misstatement “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” on its façade, “summer”

homes in its suburbs, and a tile-roofed market. Strangers but seldom

disrupt the languid tenor of its ways, however, and not only is there no

hotel, but not even a place to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich,

unless one accept the hospitality of marines or gendarme officers. Some

years ago a foreign company erected an electric light plant, fitted up

all Jacmel with elaborate poles or underground wires, operated for one

night, collected their government subsidy and as much as possible from

the citizens, and fled. To this day the town continues to worry along

with such lights as might be found in an African village. In 1896 it was

completely wiped out by fire, the land and sea breeze joining to pile

the flames so high that the population was forced to flee to the hills,

leaving all their possessions behind.

On our return to Port au Prince the road, particularly from Léogane in,

was even more densely thronged than usual; for it was the last day of

the year, and New Year’s is not only Haiti’s day of independence, but

the one on which presents are given, after the French custom. Women

carrying on their heads heaps of native baskets higher than themselves,

others with as disproportionate loads of gourds, donkeys laden to the

point of concealment with anything there was any hope of selling for

gifts at that evening’s big market, filled the tumultuous wake behind

us. I called that afternoon on the mulatto President of Haiti in the

unfinished palace, and caught him and the minister of finance in the act

of shaking and rearranging the rugs in preparation for the coming

festivities. No doubt a president whose duties are assumed by men from

the outside world must find something to do to pass the time. Next day,

however, there was no such informality in his manner as he was driven in

silk-hat solemnity to a Te Deum in the cathedral. Four prancing horses

drew the presidential carriage, preceded and followed by a company of

native horsemen in more than resplendent uniforms and drawn sabers. At

the door he was met by the archbishop and all the higher officers of our

forces of occupation, who fell in behind the august ruler as he marched

down the central aisle, flanked at close intervals by negro firemen in

brilliant red shirts of heavy flannel and shining metal helmets. In

their wake came all the élite of Port au Prince, some in silk hats and

full dress, nearly all in brand-new garb, for New Year’s takes the place

of Easter in this respect in Haiti, and so generously perfumed that the

clouds of incense arising about the altar made no impression upon the

nostrils. Outside, the great open square and the adjacent streets were

compact seas of upturned black faces. The booming of cannon frequently

punctuated the ceremony, though the beating of tomtoms would have been

more in keeping, and the cost of the powder might then have been spent

in running the trade school which had just been abandoned for lack of

funds. Faces running all the gamut from white to black were to be seen

in the glaringly yellow interior, but none of the former were Haitian,

and the latter were in the decided majority. The clergy were white, the

acolytes black; the formality and solemnity which reigned could scarcely

have been equaled in the elaborate functions in Notre Dame of Paris.

* * * * *

A Cuban bon mot has it that “The Haitian is the animal which most nearly

resembles man.” Without subscribing to so broad a statement, it must be

admitted that they are close to the primitive savage despite a veneer of

civilization which all but hides the African in the upper class and is

so thin upon the masses as to be transparent. Tradition has it that when

the uprising against the French was planned the conspirators gave every

slave some grains of corn, telling him to throw one away every day and

attack when none remained, for in no other way could they have known the

date. To this day the intelligence of the masses is of that caliber.

Readily capable of imitation, they initiate nothing, not even the next

obvious move in the simplest undertakings. They have not a trace of

gratitude in their make-up, no sexual morality, unbounded superstition,

and no family love. Mothers gladly give away their children; if they

ever see them again there is no evidence of gladness shown on either

side. They have a certain naïve simplicity and some of the unintentional

honesty that goes with it; they have of course their racial

cheerfulness, though even that is less in evidence than among most of

their race. A French woman who has spent nearly all her life in Haiti

long tried to discover some symptoms of poetical fancy or love for the

beautiful among the full blacks. One day she found a servant sitting in

the back yard looking up into the tree-tops. Asked what he was thinking

about, he answered, “I am not thinking; I am listening to the breeze in

the cocoanut-palms.” That is the sum total of sentiment during long

years of observation. Family relations are little short of promiscuous.

Girls who have reached the age of ten are made to understand that they

must be on the lookout for lovers; mothers refuse to support them after

they have grown old enough to live with a man. An old maid is considered

a freak of nature in Haiti, and such freaks are exceedingly rare in the

Black Republic.

[Illustration: Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over

Haiti]

[Illustration: A Haitian wayside store]

[Illustration: The market women of Haiti sell everything under the sun—A

“General Store” in a Haitian market]

[Illustration: There are still more primitive sugar mills than these in

Haiti]

More temperamental than our own negroes, the Haitians are incredibly

childlike in their mental processes. A certain gendarme officer whose

butler was frequently remiss in his duties had him enrolled in the

native corps in order to bring military discipline to bear upon him. A

few days later the servant requested that he be given the right to carry

arms, like other gendarmes. The officer good naturedly gave him a

harmless old revolver that had been captured from the _cacos_. A few

days later reports began to leak into headquarters that the national

force was terrorizing the inhabitants of a certain section of Port au

Prince. The detectives got busy, and found that the gendarme-butler, his

day’s service over, was in the habit of patrolling that part of town in

which he was born and where he was well known, strutting back and forth

among his awed fellow-citizens during the evening, and from midnight on

beating on house doors and commanding the inmates, “in the name of the

law,” and at the point of his revolver, to come outside and line up “for

inspection.” He had no designs upon their possessions, but was simply

indulging his love for display and authority. When his employer took his

putative weapon away from him again, he wept like a child of six. His

grief, however, was short lived, for when the President called at the

home of the officer on New Year’s afternoon, he found the butler so

dressed up that he inadvertently shook hands with him as one of the

guests.

Abuse of authority is a fixed fault in the Haitian character, as with

most negroes. Of the several reasons why there are only two or three

native lieutenants in the gendarmerie, lack of intelligence and

dishonesty are less conspicuous than the inability to wield authority

lightly. The Haitians of the masses have only three forms of recreation,

dances, cock-fights, and voodooism. They have not even risen to the

level of the “movies,” for though there are two cinemas in the capital

and one in Cap Haïtien, these are too “high brow” for any but the upper

class. Of pretty native customs we found only one—that of hanging up

little colored-paper churches with candles inside them at

Christmas-time. The Haitians are inveterate gamblers, which is only

another way of saying that they abhor work. As the negro admires the

successful and dominant, so he has supreme contempt for the broken and

discredited. The Germans who once ruled the commercial roost in Haiti

and who were interned after our entry into the war would find no

advantage in returning, even if they were permitted to, for they have

lost for life the respect of the natives by allowing themselves to be

arrested. The profiteering Syrians who have largely inherited their

control of commerce have far more standing to-day despite their slippery

methods.

Between the primitive bulk of the population and the slight minority of

educated citizens, mainly “people of color,” there is a wide gulf. Haiti

has no middle class, not even a skilled labor class. Those who have

ambition or wealth enough to go in for “higher education” will have

nothing to do with anything even suggestive of manual labor. The ability

to read, write, and speak French automatically brings with it a contempt

for work and workers. As in all Latin America, an agricultural school is

worse than useless, because it serves only to spoil what might have been

good foremen, and the mere possession of a scrap of paper announcing the

holder a graduate of such an institution is prima-facie evidence that he

intends to loaf in the shade all the rest of his days. The result is

that the population is made up of poverty-stricken, incredibly ignorant

laborers and peasants, and of lawyers, “doctors” of this and that, and

the political-military class which tyrannizes and fattens on the African

masses.

Superficially, the educated class of Haiti is pleasant to meet, though

the first impression seldom lasts. It has all the outward manners of the

French, with none of their solid basis. In discussions of literature and

art these “_gens de couleur_” could give the average American business

man cards and spades; in actually doing or producing something worth

while they are completely out of their depth. Once in a blue moon one

runs across a full-blooded negro who shows outcroppings of genius. We

were invited to meet such a one at the home of a “high yellow” senator

on New Year’s eve, a pianist who had studied in Paris. I had been told

that there were several fine musicians in Haiti, but, in the light of

other experiences, had inwardly scoffed at the idea. It required but

very little time to be convinced that here at least was one. The man not

only played the best classics in a manner that would have been applauded

in the highest class of concert halls, but gave several pieces of his

own composition which could hold their place in any program. He had

played a few times in the United States, but the drawback of color had

proved insurmountable, and as there is naturally no income to be derived

from such a source in Haiti, Ludovic Lamothe now holds a minor clerkship

in the ministry of agriculture! When he had finished, the senator

himself sat down at the piano and gave an exhibition which, I have no

hesitancy in asserting, could scarcely have been duplicated by any

member of our own upper house, and one which reminded us by contrast of

the uproarious rag-time that was even at that moment reigning along

Broadway. Yet it was such men as these that our marines once evicted

from the Haitian senate with, “Come on, you niggers, get out of here!”

Even the Southerner who had been induced to come with us, and whose

muscles seemed to tense with inward horror as our host greeted him with

a handshake and introduced him to the pianist, gradually shrank down

into his chair in unconscious acknowledgment of his own ignorance of the

higher things of life as compared with these cultured “niggers.”

We met a few other men of this type at the yearly “Haitian ball” in the

chief native club, which American civilians attend, to the unbounded

disgust of the forces of occupation. Yet the primitive African now and

then showed itself in the whitest of them. Those who know them well say

that even Haiti’s élite, educated in Europe or the United States, are

apt to forget their Christian faith when troubles assail them and go to

a “Papa Loi” for a _wanga_, or charm, and pay for a voodoo ceremony. In

Paris lives a certain Mme. Thebes, in high repute among those who

believe in sorcery and prophecy. If the stories which gradually leak out

from the confidences of returning natives to their friends are

trustworthy, she tells all Haitians that they are some day to become

president of their country, not a bad guess under old conditions, though

the supernatural madame does not seem to have kept up with the times.

More than one revolution has been started on the strength of her

prophecies. Some of these upper-class “people of color” are descendants

of the same families who fled to Philadelphia and New Orleans at the

time of the slave revolt. The members who remained behind were or have

since become intermixed with the blacks. At least one American connected

with the forces of occupation was introduced at a presidential reception

to a colored family of the same name, which turned out to be relatives.

As the American chanced to be a Southerner, it is easy to imagine

whether the discovery brought joy and mutual social calls.

Stories of human sacrifices, cannibalism, and occult poisonings are

always going the rounds in Haiti, though it is difficult to find any one

of unquestioned integrity who has actually seen such things himself. I

met two gendarme officers who asserted they had found the feet of a

black baby sticking out of a boiling pot, and there are numbers of

well-balanced Americans in Haiti who are firmly convinced that all three

of the crimes above mentioned are practised. Certainly many of the

natives look hungry enough to eat their own children. The body of a

marine was once found in a condition to bear out the charge of

cannibalism, but it has never been proved that this was not the work of

hogs or dogs. Most frequent of all, say the believers, are the cases of

blood-sucking, the victims being preferably virgins. Not long before our

occupation a baby in the best district of Port au Prince died for loss

of blood, which an old neighbor later confessed to having inflicted

while the mother was out of the room. The daughter of a former minister

is said to have been similarly treated by her grandmother and a

prominent man. The rite over, they pronounced her dead, and she was

buried with much pomp, the grandmother, according to the story,

replacing with coffee the embalming fluid that was poured down her

throat. Five years later a rumor of her existence having reached a

priest through the confessional, what is believed to be the same girl

was discovered in a hill town. She was wild, unkempt, demented, and had

borne three children. The coffin was dug up, and in it was found her

wedding dress,—for though she was only eight or nine at the time, it is

the custom in Haiti to bury young girls in such garments,—but the

autopsy proved the remains to be those of a man, the legs cut off and

laid alongside the body. That there are Haitian Obeah practitioners who

have so remarkable a knowledge of vegetable poisons that they can

destroy their enemies or those of their clients without being detected

seems to be generally admitted. Some of these poisons are said to be so

subtle that the victims live for years, dying slowly as from some

wasting disease, or going insane, deaf, blind, or dumb, with the

civilized medical profession helpless to relieve them. Men of undoubted

judgment and integrity, some of them Americans, claim to have positive

proof of such cases.

The less gruesome forms of Obeah and voodooism are known to be practised

in Haiti. The former is a species of witchcraft by men and women who are

supposed to possess supernatural powers, and who certainly have far

greater sway over the masses of the people than priests or presidents.

For a small sum they will undertake to help in business matters, to

create love in unresponsive breasts, possibly to put an enemy out of the

way, and some of the “stunts” they perform are beyond comprehension.

Voodooism, unlike the other, is a form of religion, the deity being an

imaginary “great green serpent,” with a high priest known as “Papa Loi”

and a priestess called “Maman Loi.” Chicken snakes and a harmless python

are kept as sacred beings in Haiti, and fed by the faithful. In theory

the serpent deity demands sacrifices of a “goat without horns”; in other

words, a child, preferably white. But there is no positive evidence to

prove that anything more than goats, sheep, or roosters are actually

sacrificed. These simpler rites are carried on almost openly, and are

accompanied by all sorts of childish incantations, with such nonsensical

fetishes as red rags, dried snakes and lizards, human bones, or portions

of human organs, stolen perhaps from graveyards. The most frequent form

of revenge among the Haitian masses is the burying of a bottle filled

with “charms” of this nature, over which are recited various

incantations at certain phases of the moon, in the hope of bringing

destruction or lesser punishment on the object of the enmity. So firm is

the belief of the negroes in the power of Obeah that they sometimes

succumb to fear and die merely because some one has cast such a spell

upon them. A French priest who was traveling through the country called

at a cabin one night to ask the occupant to show him the way. The man

refused, whereupon the priest, being denied the customary form of

expressing displeasure, began to recite a quotation from Ovid. To his

surprise the native dashed out of his hut, fell at his feet, and offered

to do anything he demanded, if only he would not “put Obeah” on him.

Perhaps the most serious result of these practices is the appalling

number of children who die under the ministrations of voodoo “doctors.”

A group of Americans once offered to pay for a voodoo supper if they

were allowed to attend it. White men are seldom admitted to the native

ceremonies; some have suffered for their intrusion. In this case there

was the added fear that the officials who saw the rites would forbid

them thereafter; but a Frenchman finally persuaded the natives that it

would be to their advantage to let the Americans see one of their

festivities in order to prove that they were harmless. How much was left

out because of the guests there is of course no means of knowing.

About seventy dollars was spent for corn-meal, _tafia_ (crude native

rum), sacrifices, and other things required, and to pay the chief

performers their fees. The temple was decorated with flags and various

fetishes. The ceremony began with a tomtom dance by the priests, who

were soon joined by the high priestess, wearing a white skirt, a red

waist, and a brilliant bandana, and waving spangled flags. Then a goat,

scrubbed to spotless white, its horns gilded, and a red bow on its head,

was brought in. The priestess danced about it with a snaky motion,

holding her shoulders stiffly and giving her waist the maximum of

movement. Then she got astride the goat and rode round and round,

clinging to its horns. Every few minutes the priests gave her _tafia_

until she had worked herself into a real or feigned paroxysm of

excitement. To say that she was intoxicated would perhaps be putting it

too strongly, for the average Haitian is so soaked in rum from birth

that it has little visible effect upon him.

At length a priest caught up a handful of corn-meal and, with what

appeared to be two careless gestures, formed a perfect cross with it on

the ground. Candles were placed at the ends of the cross, then _tafia_

and other liquors were poured along the lines of corn-meal, the

priestess meanwhile continuing to ride the goat with hideous

contortions. Finally she dismounted, slipped off the white skirt,

leaving her entirely clothed in red, and while a priest held the goat by

the front feet she pierced a vein in its neck and drank all the blood

she could contain. For a time she seemed to be in a stupor; then she

began to “prophesy” in loathsome, incomprehensible noises, which a

priest “translated,” probably in terms of his own choosing. While this

pair howled, the goat was prepared and put in caldrons to cook, with

rice, beans, _tafia_, salt, pepper, and lard. Old women stirred the

contents of these with their bare hands, which had been bleached almost

white by frequent emersions in similar boiling messes. When the food was

cooked, the priestess came suddenly out of her trance and fell to with

all the negroes present, who were still sitting about in a circle eating

sacred goat meat and drinking _tafia_ when the white spectators finally

left.

“The only thing wrong with the Haitians is lack of education,” says a

recent investigator, which can scarcely be doubted, since it is true of

all mankind. By some oversight, perhaps, no mention of schools and

courts was made in the treaty under which we are administering the

country. The French maintained no schools for the negroes, and it goes

without saying that conditions scarcely improved during the century and

a quarter of independence. An American superintendent, who is quite

properly a Catholic and of Louisiana creole stock, has been appointed,

and is in theory directly responsible to the native minister of public

instruction. But the higher American civilian officials, clinging

perhaps too closely to the letter of the treaty, have not seen fit to

assign any great amount of the public revenues of Haiti to this purpose.

There are thirteen hundred teachers in the country, probably the

majority of whom are in no way qualified for their task, and of the

fifty thousand pupils enrolled barely one in three is in regular

attendance. In other words, not ten per cent. of the children of school

age get even primary instruction, and less than one per cent. ever reach

the secondary schools. The law school in Port au Prince, with thirty

students, is reported to be efficient; the medical school is frankly a

farce. Teaching methods are in all but a few cases primitive, consisting

of little more than monologues by the “teacher,” to which the pupils

listen only when nothing else occupies their attention. A thorough

reform in this matter is essential to the task we have undertaken in

Haiti, unless we subscribe as a nation to the old Southern attitude that

the negro is better off without education. The present generation is

hopeless in this as in many other regards; it remains to be seen whether

we will and can lift the next out of the primitive savagery which at

present reigns.

The popular language of Haiti bears no very close resemblance to the

tongue from which it is largely descended. The slaves came from

different parts of Africa, in some cases belonging to enemy tribes, and

“creole” is the natural evolution of their desire to talk with one

another. The resultant dialect has French as a basis, but it is so

abbreviated, condensed, and simplified, and includes so many African

words, that it has become almost a new language. It is quite distinct

from the patois of Canada and even of the French West Indies, though

there are points of resemblance. It has not even the inflection of real

French, and only now and then does one knowing that language catch an

intelligible word. Haitian voices have a softness equal to those of our

Southern darkies, and are in marked contrast to the rasping tones of

Cuba. It is a local form of politeness to use a squeaky falsetto in

greetings, and women of the masses curtsy to one another when they shake

hands, probably a survival from slave days originally adopted as a sign

of their equality to their expelled mistresses. Gender, number, case,

modes, tenses, and articles have almost completely disappeared. As a

rule, only the feminine form of adjectives has survived. Plurality is

indicated, when it is necessary, by a participle. Many words have been

abbreviated almost out of recognition. _Plaît-il?_ has become “Aiti?”

The Dominicans over the border are called “Pagno.” The word _bagaille_,

probably a corruption of _bagage_, means almost anything; servants told

to “pick up” that _bagaille_ grasp whatever is nearest at hand; _bon

bagaille_ and _pas bon bagaille_ are the usual forms of good and bad.

“Who” has grown to be “Qui monde ça?” Many words have changed their

meanings entirely; the urchin who approaches you rubbing his stomach and

mumbling “grand gout,” wishes to impress upon you the very probable fact

that he has “large hunger.” On the whole, it is probably an advantage,

in learning Haitian “creole,” not to know real French.

* * * * *

The automobile in which we took our final leave of Port au Prince plowed

its way for several miles along the thronged highway across the

Cul-de-Sac plain, then turned west through an endless semi-desert

bristling with thorny _aroma_. A dead negro lying a few yards from the

road on the bare ground awakened no surprise from our native chauffeur

or the gendarme in plain clothes beside him. There were no vultures

flying about the body. Those natural scavengers were once introduced

into Haiti, but the natives killed and ate them. Soon we came out on the

edge of the sea, along the foot of those same cliffs we had seen while

rolling in the doldrums on the Haitian navy three weeks before. What had

then seemed a sheer mountain wall was in reality a flat narrow plain

backed by sloping hills. Naked black fishermen were plying their trade

thigh-deep in the blue water. Gonave island and the southern peninsula

were almost golden brown under the early sun. For a long time the thorny

desert continued, for southern Haiti had for months been suffering from

drought. There were several ruins of ox-and-kettle sugar-mills, here and

there evidences of former plantation houses; miserable native huts

leaning drunkenly against their broken walls. Once we passed a massive

old stone aqueduct. The parched and sun-burned landscape was now and

then broken by green oases of villages. A little railroad followed us

all the way to St. Marc, but there was no sign of trains. The town was

carpeted in dust, a ruined stone church towered above the low houses, a

dust-and-stone-paved central square had a grandstand and a fountain

screaming in the national colors. Down on the edge of the deep bay

crooked, reddish logwood dragged in by donkeys was being weighed on

large crude wooden scales. This chief product of the region to-day lay

in heaps along the dusty road beyond. Cannon bearing the Napoleonic

device and date, left by the ill-starred expeditionary force under

Leclerc, served as corner-posts of the bridges. The dense green of

mango-trees contrasted with the dry mountain-walled plain; nowhere was

there a sprig of grass, seldom a sign of water. _Pitimi_ grew rather

abundantly, however, and there was some cotton. About the mouth of the

Artibonite, sometimes called the “Haitian Nile,” was a spreading delta

of greenery. Miserable thatched huts of mud plastered on reeds were

numerous, yet blended so into the dull, dry landscape as scarcely to

draw the attention. Negroes carrying huge loads of reed mats now and

then jogged past in the hot dust; everywhere was what a native writer

calls “l’aridité désolante de la campagne.” Yet though the drought

occasionally flagellates portions of it, there is scarcely a spot in

Haiti which would not produce abundantly under anything like proper

cultivation.

Arid hills, with parched, purple-brown scrub forests, shut in the town

of Dessalines, with its pathetic little forts that were long ago

designed to protect the general of the same name. A small, dust-covered,

baking-hot town well back from the sea in a kind of bay of the plain, it

was indeed a negro capital. Farther on the dust and aridity largely

disappeared. There was considerable cotton showing signs of languid

cultivation, some fields were being hoed, others irrigated, as we snaked

in and out along the wrinkled skirts of the rocky range on the right.

Crippled beggars lined the way even here; in fact, there is a suggestion

of India in the numbers of diseased mendicants squatting beside the

dusty, sunny roads of Haiti. Women and children were bathing in brackish

streams. Then it grew arid again, and we found Gonaïves, more than a

hundred miles from the capital, in a very dry setting on the edge of a

smaller bay. It claims twenty-five thousand inhabitants, some of whom

live in moderate comfort. As in Port au Prince, one was assailed on all

sides by the modern Haitian motto, “Gimme fi’ cents,” which is really

not so serious a demand as it sounds, since it only means five centimes.

It was in Gonaïves that independence was declared in 1804, and from here

Toussaint l’Ouverture was sent to France in chains. The town is engaged

chiefly in commerce. From it we turned back north by east into the

country. A pathetic little railroad again began to follow us. The first

few miles over a range of foot-hills were burned as dry as all the

southern slope; then, as we climbed higher, it grew rapidly greener, the

dust disappeared, we forded several small rivers many times, and were

completely shut in by fresh and verdant vegetation before we reached

Ennery.

This is a stony, sleepy little hamlet among the mountains, famed in

Haitian history as the place where Toussaint was living when the French

general Brunet wrote him, asking for an interview, at which he was

traitorously arrested and sent to end his days in a French dungeon.

There we left the road to Cap Haïtien and, still fording, rising

constantly over long humps of ground, always turning, gradually gained

coffee-growing elevation. A fine new road, passing one large marine

camp, carried us higher still, until green mountains stood all about us,

the air grew pleasant as that of our Northern spring-time, and at length

we found ourselves among pine-trees. Just after sundown, in the soft

gray-blue evening of the temperate tropics, we sighted the little white

church of St. Michel, beyond which we spun across a floor-level plateau

a little farther to the residence of an American estate manager. To say

that we had covered a hundred and fifty miles comfortably, with one

short and one long stop, between daylight and dark gives some idea of

what American occupation has done for Haitian roads.

The great plains, fourteen hundred feet high, were flooded with

moonlight all through the night, in which I several times awoke

shivering for all my heavy blankets. By day the sea-flat plateau proved

to be covered with brown grass beneath which was the blackest of loamy

soil. Gasolene tractors were turning this up, working by night as well

as by day, and operated by Haitians who had been trained on the spot

under American overseers. It was virgin soil, for this region was

Spanish territory in the time of the French and had been used only as

grazing land. The new company would soon have hundreds of acres planted

in cotton, with other crops to follow. Such enterprises, multiplied many

fold, are among the most immediate needs of Haiti.

Colonel W—— of the Marine Corps and Major General W——, Chef de la

Gendarmérie d’Haiti, who are one and the same person, set out that

afternoon on an inspection trip through the heart of Haiti, and invited

me to go along. The region being _caco_-infested and a “restricted

district” in which white women were not allowed to travel, Rachel was to

continue by automobile on the well-guarded highway to Cap Haïtien. The

colonel and I left the plantation by car also, skimming for more than an

hour across the wonderful grassy plain without any need of a road.

Groups of horses were grazing here and there, but there were no cattle.

Occasionally we met a lone gendarme plodding along in the shoes to which

he was still far from accustomed. An unfinished road carried us on from

where the plain began to break up into rolling country, with clusters of

trees in the hollows. Now and then the colonel brought down one of the

deep-blue wild pigeons which flew frequently past, but the flocks of

wild guineas usually found in this region had evidently been warned of

his marksmanship. Four-footed game does not exist in Haiti, and even its

harmless reptiles are rare; Noah evidently did not touch the West

Indies. Gradually the forest appeared, growing thicker and thicker,

until we were inclosed in tunnels of vegetation, fording many small

rivers. Suddenly a great hubbub ahead caused us to make sure that our

rifles were in readiness, but it was only a cock-fight in the woods, the

men standing, the women seated on little home-made chairs outside the

male circle about the ring, made of barrel staves driven upright into

the ground. In the next mile we passed a dozen black men, each with a

rooster under one arm, hurrying to the scene of conflict.

At the town of Maissade we halted at a marine camp on a hill overlooking

the surrounding country, and commanded by Captain Becker, a famous

hunter of _cacos_. His tent was almost filled with captured war

material: rifles of every kind in use a century ago corded like so much

stove-wood; revolvers and pistols enough to stock a museum devoted to

the history and development of that arm; French swords dating back to

the seventeenth century; rapiers such as flash through Dumas’s stories;

heaps of rusted machetes, battered bugles, bamboo musical instruments,

and hollow-log tomtoms from voodoo temples; drums abandoned by Leclerc;

ragged pieces of uniform decorated with ribbons; dozens of hats and caps

of “generals,” of felt, cloth, and straw, all more or less ragged, and

all bearing such signs of rank as might be adopted by small boy

warriors. Then there were beads and charms, Obeah vials found on the

bodies of dead _cacos_, mysterious articles of unknown purpose and

origin. The captain dissected one of the charms. It consisted of a

bullet wrapped in a dirty bit of paper on which were scrawled a few

strange characters, the dried foot of a lizard, and what was apparently

a powdered insect, all inclosed in a brass cartridge-shell, with a

string attached to it long enough to go around the neck of the original

owner, whom it was supposed to protect against bullets. The captain had

shot him a few days before, and as he fell he cried out in “creole,” “O

Mama, they’ve got me!” then died cursing the Obeah man for making an

imperfect charm. Some of the _cacos_ in the region had recently

surrendered, and had been made “division commanders,” with the duty of

helping to hunt down their former comrades. One of them had showed the

marine who shot him the bullet which he had dug out of his flesh with a

machete, and now followed him everywhere like a faithful dog.

In the town itself the gendarme detachment was in command of a native

lieutenant who was rated an excellent officer, but he had barely a touch

of negro blood. Beyond was a road of boulevard width along which we spun

at thirty-five miles an hour. Wild pigeons, parrots, and negroes far

less ragged than those of Port au Prince enlivened the striking scenery,

and at sunset we drew up before the gendarmerie of Hinche, the

birthplace of the departed Charlemagne. There was something amusingly

anachronistic in the sight of half a hundred marines playing baseball

and basketball on the plain about their camp at the edge of town, for

Hinche itself had little in common with such scenes.

All Haitian towns have a close family resemblance. There is always a

big, brown, bare, dusty central _place_, with a tiny bandstand with

steps painted in the national colors and surmounted by a single royal

palm-tree, called the “_patrie_.” From this radiate wide, right-angled

dirt streets lined by low houses, some of plastered mud, a few

whitewashed, many of split palm trunks, most of them of _tache_, nearly

all with earth floors, all except the few covered with corrugated iron

in the center of town being roofed with thatch. Some have narrow

sapling-pillared porches paved with little cobblestones, these sometimes

also whitewashed; and where houses are missing are broken hedges of

organ cactus on which hang drying rags of clothing. Facing the _place_

is a more or less ruined church, farther off a large open market-place,

with perhaps a few ragged thatch-roof shelters from the sun. Then there

is sure to be a spick-and-span gendarmerie, with large numbers of docile

prisoners and proud black gendarmes, perhaps a group of marines, or at

any rate of their native prototypes, here and there stalking through the

dusty streets, ignoring the respectful greetings of the teeming black

populace squatted in their doorways or on their dirt floors. Little

fagot fires on the ground behind or beside the huts, a well-worn path

down to the river, and an indefinable scent of the tropics and black

humanity living in primitive conditions complete the picture. Men who

have seen both assert that a Congo village is a paradise compared with a

Haitian hamlet.

The curate came over to smoke a cigarette and drink a sip of rum with us

after supper. He was a large, powerful Frenchman from Brittany, of

remarkably fine features, sparkling blue eyes, and no recent hair-cut or

shave, dressed in an ecclesiastical bonnet and enormous “congress” shoes

run down at heel, and the long black gown which seems so out of place,

yet is really very convenient, in the tropics. For twelve years he had

shepherded Hinche and the neighboring region, being much of the time the

only white man in it. He expected to complete twenty-five years’

residence, then go home in retirement. He traveled freely everywhere

within his district, _caco_ sentinels and the bands themselves hiding

when he passed rather than molest him. Cannibalism was certainly

practised to this day, in his opinion, especially among the hills, where

there were many negroes older than he who had never come to town. There

was less superstition in this district, he asserted, because the people

came somewhat under the more civilized Dominican influence. While we

talked, two former _cacos_, now “division chiefs,” came in to report to

the efficient young American gendarme commander, simple old souls with

childlike eyes and Napoleon III beards whom one would scarcely have

suspected of harming a chicken. The day before two native women had

brought in a _caco_ whom they had cudgeled into submission, and that

afternoon an old man, unarmed, had presented the commander with another,

leading him by a rope around the neck.

In these circumstances we set out on horseback next morning in no great

fear of the bandits, though we kept our rifles and revolvers handy. With

us went a curious dwarf who lived in the next town and who had attached

himself to the Americans like a stray mastiff, which he closely

resembled in expression and in his devotion to them. He was of full size

from the waist upward, but his legs were scarcely a foot long, and his

bare feet hardly reached to the edges of the saddle in which he sat,

once he had been placed there, with all the assurance of a cow-boy of

the plains. Then there was “Jim,” looking like the advance agent of a

minstrel show. “Jim” was a descendant of American negroes, his

grandparents having come from Philadelphia to Samaná, Santo Domingo,

where a number of black colonists from our northern states settled at

the invitation of the Haitians when they ruled the whole island. He

spoke a fluent English, with a mixture of Southern and foreign accent,

as well as “creole” and Spanish, and having served the colonel as

interpreter years before during the marine advance from Monte Cristi to

Santiago, had come to Haiti to join him again when he took charge of the

gendarmerie. He had been assigned to plain-clothes duty, but “Jim’s”

conception of that phrase did not include the adjective, and he had set

forth on what promised to be anything but a dressy expedition in a garb

well suited for a presidential reception. This was already beginning to

show the effects of scrambling through the underbrush in quest of the

wild pigeons which had fallen before the colonel’s shotgun.

The mayor of Hinche, a first cousin of Charlemagne, saw us off in

person, holding the colonel’s stirrup and bidding him farewell with

bared head. We forded the Guayamoc River and wound away through

foot-hills that soon gave way to a brown, level savanna which two years

before had been covered with cattle, now wholly disappeared. Once we

climbed over a large hill of oyster-shells, which geologists would no

doubt recognise as proof that the region was formerly under the sea; but

the French colonists of long ago were probably as fond of oysters as are

their fellow-countrymen to-day, and it is worthy of note that these were

all half-shells. We passed one small village in a hollow, with a mud hut

full of gendarmes; the rest of the morning the dry and arid, yet lightly

wooded, country was almost wholly uninhabited. For long spaces the

scornful cries of black crows were the only sounds except the constant

switching required to keep our thin Haitian horses and mules on the

move.

Thomasique, where we halted for lunch at the mud-hut gendarmerie, was a

dismal little hamlet of lopsided thatched hovels. The commander of the

district had found a new use for captured _caco_ rifles, using the

barrels as gratings for his outdoor cooking-place. The _juge de paix_,

the magistrate, and the richest man of the town, ranging in color from

quadroon to _griffe_, called to pay their respects to the general,

frankly admitting by their attitude that the young American lieutenant

of gendarmes was their superior officer. Under his guidance the revenues

of Thomasique had increased five fold in a single month. It was evident

from the manner of the judge that he had something on his chest, and at

length he unburdened himself. The Government, it seemed, had not paid

him his salary—of one dollar a month—for more than half a year, and he

respectfully petitioned the general to take the matter up with the

president upon his return to Port au Prince. There was probably a

connection between his lack of funds and the auditing of the village

accounts by the lieutenant.

The country was more broken beyond. Pine-trees of moderate size grew

beside girlishly slender little palms with fan-shaped leaves. A high

bank of blue gravel along a dry river-bed would probably have attracted

the attention of a miner or a geologist. In detail the country was not

pretty; in the mass it was vastly so. Brown, reddish, and green hills

were heaped up on every hand; the play of colors across them, changing

at every hour from dawn through blazing noonday into dusk and finally

moonlight, made up for the monotony of the near-by landscape. There were

almost no signs of humanity, the silence was sometimes complete, though

here and there we passed the evidences of former gardens in dry

_arroyos_. Toward sunset we burst suddenly out among banana-groves,

starting up a great flock of wild guineas, and at dark rode into Cerca

la Source, a more than usually whitewashed little town nestled among

real mountains. It was Sunday, and the great weekly cock-fight having

just ended at the barrel-stave pit in a corner of the immense open

_place_, the hubbub of settling bets had not yet subsided, and for a

half hour afterward scores of negroes with pretty game-cocks under their

arms wandered about in the moonlight shouting merry challenges to one

another for the ensuing Sabbath.

Beyond Cerca la Source a steep mountain trail climbs for hours through

the stillness of pine-forests where birds, except the cawing crows, are

rare and almost no human habitations break the vista of tumbled world

over which even the native horses make their way with difficulty. A

telephone wire known among the marines as the “beer-bottle line,” those

being the only insulators to be had when it was constructed by our

forces of occupation, is the one dependable guide through the region.

Four hours brought us to a score of sorry huts in a little hollow known

as La Miel. Even that had its hilltop gendarmerie and prison, commanded

by a native sergeant, who had his force drawn up for inspection when we

arrived, though he had no warning of the colonel’s approach or any other

proof of his official character other than the blouseless uniform he

wore. A white rascal owning a marine uniform could play strange tricks

in Haiti. Even here there was a big French bell of long ago supported by

poles at some distance from the broken-backed church, and Spanish

influence of the Dominicans beyond the now not very distant border

showed itself in such slight matters as the use of “_yo_” for “_ge_” and

“_buen_” instead of “_bon_.” There followed a not very fertile region,

with more pine-trees and long, brown, tough grass, with only here and

there a _conuco_, shut in by the slanted pole fences native to Santo

Domingo, planted with weed-grown _pois Congo_, _manioc_, and tropical

tubers. In mid-afternoon, where the vegetation grew more dense, it began

to rain, as we had been warned it would here before our departure from

Port au Prince. The first sprinkle increased to a steady downpour by

what would probably have been sunset, the trail became toboggans of red

mud down which our weary animals skated for long distances, or sloughs

so deep and slopes so steep that we were forced to dismount and wade, or

climb almost on all fours. Dripping coffee-bushes under higher trees

sometimes lined the way, the best information we got from any of the

rare passers-by was that our destination was a “little big distance”

away. That it remained until we finally slipped and sprawled our way

into it.

It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent

the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking

slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the

early spring. The place was more than three thousand feet above the sea,

and the cold seemed to penetrate to the very marrow even within doors.

It was ruled with an iron hand by an “old-timer” who had been so long a

sergeant in the Marine Corps that he had come to divide all the world

into exact gradations of rank. My companion he unfailingly addressed as

“the General,” never by the familiar pronoun “you,” and he took personal

charge of everything pertaining to his comfort, even to removing his wet

garments and extracting the bones from his chosen portions of chicken.

Nothing would induce him to eat before the general had finished or to

sit down in his presence. Myself he treated almost as an equal, or as he

might have another sergeant who slightly outranked him in length of

service, with now and then a hint of scorn at my merely civilian

standing. He was probably as small a man as ever broke into our military

service, yet the stentorian voice in which he invariably gave his

commands to the great hulking negro who served as cook in the

unsheltered “kitchen” outside and as general factotum about the hut

never failed to cause that person to prance with fear. The natives he

addressed in the same tone, and the whole town seemed to spring to

attention when he opened the door and bawled out into the night for the

mayor to “Report here on the double quick.” How the Haitians managed to

understand his English was a mystery, but they lost no time in obeying

every order. After the general had retired, the lieutenant, for such was

his rank in the gendarmerie, confided to me that he had several books on

“creole” and was preparing to learn it. As I had been on the lookout for

something of the kind since my arrival in Haiti, hitherto in vain, I

expressed a desire to see them. The lieutenant cast aside a soaked

tarpaulin and handed me half a dozen French grammars such as are used in

our own schools.

The colonel’s clothing was dry and newly pressed when we set out again

next morning, though my own was still dripping. “Jim’s” plain clothes

were by this time worthy a still more commonplace adjective, for in

addition to the mishaps of the trail, he had spent the night in them on

the bare earth floor of the gendarme barracks. There came a few more red

mud toboggans, then we came out on a vista of half northern Haiti, to

which we descended by a rock trail worn horseback deep in the

mountain-side and so steep that even “Jim” for once deigned to dismount.

The rain ceased a few hundred feet down, though the sky remained dull

and overcast, in striking contrast to the speckless blue heavens of

southern Haiti, for the seasons are reversed in the two parts of the

country. A few hours’ jog across another savanna of denser vegetation

than the plateau of St. Michel brought us to the considerable town of

Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border, where an automobile bore us away

to the west. The great Plaine du Nord, once completely covered with

sugar-cane and dotted with French plantation houses and mills, was now a

wilderness teeming with blue-legged wild guineas, here and there some

bush-grown stone ruins, through which a mud road and a single telephone

wire forced their way. We passed the populous towns of Terrier Rouge and

Le Trou, famed for their _caco_ sympathies, and Limonade, in the

grass-grown old church of which Christophe, Emperor of northern Haiti,

was once stricken with apoplexy, and brought up in the mud and darkness

at Cap Haïtien.

[Illustration: A corner of Christophe’s Citadel. Its situation is such

that it could only be well photographed from an airplane]

[Illustration: The ruins of Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci]

[Illustration: The mayor, the judge, and the richest man of a Haitian

town in the bush]

[Illustration: Cockfighting is a favorite Haitian sport]

Meanwhile Rachel had reached “the Cape,” as it is familiarly called, by

the usual route. Leaving Ennery, this had begun at once to climb the

mountain Puilboreau, winding in and out along its wrinkled face. The

vegetation was rather monotonous, with a yellowish tinge to the several

shades of green, now and then an orange cactus blossom, a purple morning

glory, a pink vine, or the old-gold bark of a tree adding a touch of

color. The view back down the valley, with its tiny specks of houses,

remained unbroken until they reached the summit three thousand feet

above the sea at Bakersville, so called for the marine who had charge of

this difficult bit of road building, when there burst forth as

far-reaching a scene to the north. The Plaisance Valley lay under the

heavy gray veil of a rain-cloud, the harbor of Cap Haïtien visible far

below, and far off on the horizon was the faint line of what seemed to

be Tortuga, chief of Haiti’s “possessions” and once the favorite

residence of buccaneers. The change of landscape was abrupt; heavy,

dense green vegetation smelling of moisture surrounding the travelers on

every hand as they wound down the mountain-side by a mud-coated highway,

passing here and there gangs of road laborers. This northern slope was

more thickly inhabited, thatched huts conspicuous by their damp brown

against the greenery occasionally clustering together into villages in

which some of the mud walls were whitewashed or painted. Market-women

bound for “the Cape,” men grubbing in the fields, women paddling

clothes—sometimes those in which they should have been dressed—in the

streams, all gave evidence of the slighter dread of _cacos_ on this

northern slope. Then came another climb and a descent into the valley of

the Limbé, some miles along which brought them to the village of the

same name and to the greatest difficulty to the automobilist in Haiti.

The fording of the Limbé is certain to be the chief topic of

conversation between those who have traveled from Port au Prince to Cap

Haïtien. At times it is impassable, and has been known to delay

travelers for a week. This time men and women were crossing with bundles

on their heads and the water barely up to their armpits. A gang of

prisoners was brought from the village gendarmerie, the vitals of the

car removed and sent across on their heads, then with the passengers

sitting on the back of the back seat, the baggage in their laps, the

reunited gang, amid continual shrieks of “_Poussez!_” and an excited

jabbering of “creole,” eventually dragged and pushed the dismantled

automobile to the opposite shore. An hour and a half passed between the

time it halted on one bank and started out again from the other, which

was close to a record for the crossing. From there on the wide, but

muddy, road, now thronged with people returning from market with their

purchases or empty baskets, passed many ruins of old plantations, and

the crumbling stone and plaster gate-posts which once flanked the only

entrances to them.

* * * * *

Cap Haïtien, the second city of Haiti, sometimes called the “capital of

the North,” is situated on a large open bay in which the winds

frequently play havoc. On its outer reef the flagship of Columbus came

to grief on Christmas eve, 1492, and the discoverer spent Christmas as

the guest of the Indian chief who then ruled the district. The wreckage

of the _Santa Maria_ was brought ashore near the present fisher village

of Petit Anse, and here was erected the first European fort in the New

World. In the days of Haiti’s prosperity Cap Haïtien was known as the

“Paris of America” and rivaled in wealth and culture any other city in

the western hemisphere. Then it had an imposing cathedral, several

squares and _places_ decorated with fountains and statuary, and was

noted for its fine residences and urbane society. Old stone ruins still

stretch clear out to the lighthouse on a distant point. Destroyed by the

revolting blacks, by Christophe in his wars against Pétion, by an

earthquake or two, and by more than a century of neglect and tropical

decay, it retains little evidence of its former grandeur. Some of its

wide streets, however, are still stone-paved, and bear names which carry

the imagination back to medieval France. A few of its citizens live in

moderate comfort; the overwhelming majority are content to loll out

their days in uncouth hovels. It is so populous that it supports a

cinema, and some of its business houses are moderately up to date and

prosperous, though these are in most cases owned by foreigners. The

acrid smell of raw coffee everywhere assails the nostrils; coffee spread

out on canvas or on the cement pavement of one of its few remaining

squares is constantly being turned over with wooden shovels by

barefooted negroes who think nothing of wading through it; here and

there one passes a warehouse in which chattering old women sit

thigh-deep in coffee, clawing over the berries with their fleshless

black talons. Its market-place is large and presents the usual chaos of

wares and hubbub of bargaining; its blue vaulted cathedral easily proves

its antiquity, and American marines are everywhere in evidence. On the

whole, its populace is somewhat less ragged than that of Port au Prince,

but whatever it lacks in picturesqueness is made up for by the view of

its surrounding mountains crowned by the great Citadel of Christophe.

Election day came during our stay at “the Cape.” In olden times such an

event was worth coming far to see, provided one could keep out of the

frequent mêlées accompanying it. Under the Americans it is tame in the

extreme. To obviate the necessity of counting more votes than there are

inhabitants, the marines have introduced a plan charming in its

simplicity. As he casts his ballot, each voter is required to dip the

end of his right forefinger in a solution of nitrate of silver. The nail

of course turns black, for the finger-nails even of a negro are

ordinarily light colored,—and remains so until election day is over. Far

be it from me to suggest that such a scheme might be adopted to

advantage in our own country. A few district commanders, to make doubly

sure, use iodine. The rank and file accept this formality as cheerfully

as they do every other incomprehensible requirement of their new white

rulers, most of them making the sign of the cross with the wet finger.

But the haughty “_gens de couleur_” are apt to protest loudly against

this “implied insult to my honor,” and if they can catch the American

official off his guard, are sure to dip in the wrong finger or merely

make a false pass over the liquid, meanwhile scowling into silence the

low-caste native watchers.

Haiti has long dreamed of some day uniting the several bits of miniature

railroad scattered about the country into a single line between the two

principal cities. The existing section in the north, twenty odd miles in

length, connects Cap Haïtien with Grande Rivière and Bahon. Its fares,

like those of the equally primitive lines out of Port au Prince, are so

low that for once the assertions of the owners that they lose money on

passengers can be accepted without a grin of incredulity. To raise them,

however, is not so simple a matter as it may seem, for the Haitian

masses are little inclined as it is to part with their rare _gourdes_

for the mere privilege of saving their calloused feet. There were far

more travelers along the broad highway out of “the Cape” than in the

little cars themselves in which we followed it through a region that

might have been highly productive had it been as diligently tended by

man as by nature. The train stopped frequently and long at forest-choked

clusters of negro huts varying only in size. Such scenes had grown so

commonplace that we found more of interest in the car itself,

particularly among the marines who sprawled over several of the seats.

The majority of our forces of occupation are so decidedly a credit to

their country that it needed the contrast of such types as these to

explain why the “Gooks,” as the natives are popularly known among their

class, generally resent our presence on Haitian soil. Loudmouthed,

profane, constantly passing around a grass-bound gallon bottle of rum,

and boasting of their conquests among the negro girls, they were far

less agreeable traveling companions than the blackest of the natives.

Their “four years’ cruise in Hate-eye,” one would have supposed in

listening to them, was a constant round of these things and “fighting

chickens,” with an occasional opportunity of “putting a lot of families

in mourning” thrown in. Yet underneath it all they were good-hearted,

cheerful, and generous, despite the notion prevalent among too many

Americans that boisterousness and rowdyism is a proof of courage and

manhood.

Grande Rivière is a town of some consequence in Haiti, prettily situated

in a river valley among green hills. Its grassy _place_ and the

unfailing “_patrie_” in its center are decided improvements on most of

those in the republic; the several large church bells under a roof of

their own at some distance from the building itself still retain their

musical French voices. A dyewood establishment is its chief single

industry. The crooked logwood, carved down to the red heart before it

leaves the forests, is gnawed to bits by a noisy machine, boiled in a

succession of vats, the red water running off through sluiceways, and

the waste tossed out to dry and serve as fuel, and the concentrated

product, thick as molasses, is inclosed in barrels for shipment.

Scarcely an hour passes between the picking up of a log and the rolling

away of the barrel containing its extract.

But of all the sights in any Haitian town the market-place is surest to

attract the idle traveler. It was Saturday, or beef day, and two long

lines of venders were dispensing mere nibbles of meat to the clamoring

throng of purchasers, no portion of the animal being too uninviting to

escape consumption. Of a hundred little squares on the ground dotted

with “piles” of miscellaneous wares the inventory we made of one is

characteristic of all, and its sum total of value probably did not reach

two dollars. There were long, square strips of yellow soap, brooms and

ropes made of jungle plants, castor-beans (the oil from which is used in

native lamps), unhulled rice, all kinds of woven things from baskets to

saddle-bags, peanuts, green plantains, pitch-pine kindling for torches,

huge sheets of cassava bread, folded twice, rock salt, gay calicoes, all

tropical fruits, unground pepper, old nails, loose matches, cinnamon

bark, peanut and _jijimi_ sweets, pewter spoons, scissors, thread,

little marbles of blue dye, unassorted buttons, cheap knives,

safety-pins, yarn, tiny red clay pipes and the reed stems to go with

them, rusted square spikes of the kind used a century ago, shelled corn,

ground corn, _pitimi_, several kinds of beans, tiny scraps of leather,

four tin cans from a marine messroom, five bottles of as many shapes and

sizes, one old shoe, and a handful of red berries used in Haiti as

beads.

* * * * *

A bare five days from New York stands the most massive, probably the

most impressive single ruin in America. One might go farther and say

that there are few man-built structures in Europe that can equal in

mightiness and in the extraordinary difficulties overcome in its

construction this chief sight of the West Indies. Only the pyramids of

Egypt, in at least the familiar regions of the earth, can compare with

this gigantic monument to the strength and perseverance of puny man, and

the pyramids are built down on the floor of the earth instead of being

borne aloft to the tiptop of a mountain. It is curious, yet symbolical

of our ignorance of the neighbors of our own hemisphere, that while most

Americans know of far less remarkable structures in Europe, not one in a

hundred of us has ever heard of the great Haitian Citadel of Christophe.

We caught our first view of it from “the Cape.” The January day had

broken in a flood of tropical sunshine, which brought out every crack

and wrinkle of the long mountain-range cutting its jagged outline in the

Haitian sky to the southward of the city. On the top of its highest

peak, called the “Bishop’s Bonnet,” stood forth a square-cut summit

which only the preinformed could have believed was the work of man.

Twenty-five miles away it looked like an enormous hack in the mountain

itself, a curious natural formation which man could never have imitated

except on a tiny scale. It is a standing joke in Cap Haïtien to listen

in all solemnity to newcomers laughing to scorn the assertions of the

residents that this distant mountain summit was fashioned by human

hands.

Now and again as we journeyed toward it on the little railroad to Grande

Rivière we had a glimpse of the citadel through the dense tropical

vegetation, yet so slowly did it increase in size that its massiveness

became all the more incredible. Where we descended at a cross-trail in

the forest a group of small Haitian horses was already awaiting us. The

gendarme officer in charge of them was a powerful young American beside

whom a native of the color known as _griffe_, in civilian garb, looked

like a half-grown boy. For the pilots assigned us on this excursion were

none other than Captain Hanneken and Jean Batiste, now Lieutenant,

Conzé, the exterminators of Charlemagne.

The trail broke out at length into a wide clearing which stretched away

as far as the eye could follow in each direction, its grassy surface cut

up by several wandering paths along which plodded a few natives and a

donkey or two. It was once the “royal highway” between Christophe’s main

palace and Cap Haïtien, outdoing in width the broadest boulevards of

Europe. An hour or more along this brought us to Milot, a small town

lined up on each side of the road like people awaiting a procession of

royalty. At the back of it the highway ended at a great crumbling ruin

which had about it something suggestive of Versailles.

Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci, for such it was, is wholly

uninhabitable to-day, yet there is still enough of it standing to

indicate that it was once one of the most ornate and commodious

structures in the western hemisphere. Two pairs of mammoth gate-posts,

square in form and nearly twenty feet high, guard the entrance to the

lower yard-platform, bounded by a heavy stone wall. On the inside these

are hollowed out into unexpected sentry-boxes, for Christophe was a

strong believer in many guards. Higher up, sustained by a still stronger

wall, is another grassy platform, from which a stairway as broad and

elaborate as any trodden by European sovereigns leads sidewise to a

balustraded entrance court, also flanked by sentry-boxes. Crumbling

walls in which many small bushes have found a foothold tower high aloft

above this to where they are broken off in jagged irregularity. The

palace was evidently five stories high, built of native brick and

plaster, and the architecture is still impressive despite its

dilapidated condition and for all its African-minded ostentation. The

roof has completely given way, and in the vast halls of the lower floor

grow wild oranges and tropical bush. Those higher up, of which only the

edges of the floors and the walls remain, are said to have included a

great ball-room, an immense billiard-hall, separate suites for the

emperor and his black consort, and apartments for the immediate royal

family. At some distance from the palace proper stand the lower walls of

the former lodgings of minor princes, a host of courtiers, the stables,

and the caserns. The several _parterres_, once covered with rare flowers

watered by irrigating canals, are mere tangles of jungle. The

_caimite_-tree under which the black tyrant is said to have sat in

judgment on his subjects, after the example of Louis IX of France, still

casts its mammoth shade in the back courtyard; a small chapel lower down

that was probably used by the lesser nobles serves Milot as a church;

with those exceptions there is little left as Christophe saw it. Our

forces of occupation are threatening to tear down the walls, which are

soon likely to fall of themselves, to clear away the vegetation, and to

build barracks of the materials that remain.

The narrow trail that zigzags from the back of the palace up the

mountain may not be the one by which those condemned under the

_caimite_-tree were carried or dragged to their death before the

ramparts of the citadel, but there remain no evidences of any other

route. Much of the way it is all but impassable even during a lull in

the rainy season, for the dense vegetation shuts out the sun that might

otherwise harden the mud in which the hardiest native horses frequently

wallow belly-deep and now and then give up in frank despair. For a time

it leads through banana- and mango-groves, with huts swarming with negro

babies here and there peering forth from the thick undergrowth; higher

still there is a bit of coffee, but the last two thirds of the journey

upward is wholly uninhabited. Only once or twice in the ascent does one

catch a glimpse of the goal until one emerges from a brown jungle of

giant grasses, to find its grim gray walls towering sheer overhead.

Before this mammoth structure the memory of Sans Souci sinks into

insignificance. As the latter is ornate and cheerful in architecture,

the citadel is savage in its unadorned masculine strength. The mighty

stone walls, twenty feet thick in many cases, are square-cut and

formidable in their great unbroken surfaces. The northern side is red

with fungus, the rest merely weather-dulled. Even the cannon of to-day

would find them worthy adversaries. Time, which has wrought such havoc

on the palace at the mountain’s foot, has scarcely made an impression on

the exterior of this cyclopean structure, and even within only the

wooden portions have given way. Great iron-studded doors groaning on

their mammoth hinges give admittance to an endless labyrinth of gloomy

chambers, dungeon-like in all but their astonishing size. Cannon of the

largest makes known when the fortress was constructed are to be found

everywhere, some of them still pointing dizzily out their embrasures,

stretching in row after row of superimposed batteries, others lying

where the rotting of their heavy wooden supports has left them. Many

bear the royal arms of Spain’s most famous monarchs, several those of

Queen Elizabeth, and the rest evidences of English and French origin.

Tradition has it that Christophe mounted three hundred and sixty-five

cannon of large caliber in the citadel, and it is small wonder that his

successors have not had the courage to attempt to remove them. The

imagination grows numb and helpless at the thought of transporting these

immense weapons by mere man power to the summit of a steep mountain

three thousand feet above the plain below. Yet not only these, but the

uncounted mammoth blocks of stone of which the acres of thick walls are

constructed, the mortars, the iron chests, the smaller cannon, the heaps

of huge iron cannon-supports, the pyramids of cannonballs that are found

wherever the footsteps turn in the clammy chambers or the jungle-grown

courtyards, were all brought here by sheer force of human arms.

Higher and higher the visitor mounts by great dank stairways through

story after story of immense rooms, the vaulted stone ceilings of a few

partly fallen in, most of them wholly intact, all dedicated to the grim

business of war, to come out at last in an upper courtyard with the

ruins of a chapel and the mammoth stone vault in which Christophe lies

buried. Some of the marvels of the place are the stone basins always

full of clear running water, the source of which no man has ever been

able to discover. Here the group of prisoners whom the captain had sent

ahead with the paraphernalia and provisions for an elaborate picnic

lunch were shivering in their thin striped garments until their black

faces seemed to be blurred of outline. Yet they had less cause to

tremble than their fellows of a century ago who were herded in this same

inclosure to await their turn for being thrown from the ramparts above.

For such was Christophe’s favorite method of capital punishment. The

throwing-off place is a long stone platform ten feet wide at the very

top of the citadel. From its edge the sheer wall drops to a sickening

depth before it joins the mountain-slope almost as steep, forming that

great hack in the summit which looks from “the Cape” like a natural

precipice. Men hurled from this height must have fallen nearly a

thousand feet before they struck the bushy boulder-strewn face of the

mountain, down which their mutilated remains bounded and slid to where

they brought up against a ledge of rock or a larger bush, there to lie

until their whitened bones crumbled into dust. Multitudes of his

subjects are said to have met this fate under the black tyrant, some in

punishment for real crimes, more for having unintentionally aroused his

enmity or to satisfy his whims. The story goes that Christophe and his

British ambassador once got into a friendly argument on the subject of

soldierly discipline. The black emperor contended that there was no

order which his troops would not unhesitatingly obey, and to prove his

point he led his guest to the top of the citadel, where he set a company

to drilling and at a given command caused it to march off the edge of

the wall. This particular tale should perhaps be taken with a grain of

salt, but there is unquestionable evidence of similar playful acts on

the part of the heartless monarch.

Once the visitor can withdraw his eyes from the jagged Golgotha below,

the view spread out before him is rivaled by few in the world. All Haiti

seems to be visible in every detail: the ocean, the entire course of

meandering rivers, high mountains, deep valleys, a sea of greenery, form

a circular panorama bounded only by the limitless horizon. Little houses

in tiny clearings on the plain below, a dozen towns and villages, “the

Cape,” Ouanaminthe, even the hills of Santo Domingo, stand forth as

clearly as if they were only a bare mile away, some flashing in the

tropical sunshine, others dulled by the great cloud shadows crawling

languidly across the landscape.

Henri Christophe was a full-blooded negro who passed the early days of

his life as the slave of a French planter. When the blacks rose against

their masters he led the revolt on his own plantation and quickly

avenged his years of bondage. Serving first as a common soldier under

Toussaint l’Ouverture, he rose to the rank of general and became one of

the chief supporters of Dessalines. The assassination of the latter in

1806 left Christophe commander-in-chief of the Haitian forces and led to

his election as the first President of Haiti. His first official act was

to protest against the newly adopted constitution on the ground that it

did not give him sufficient power. Civil war broke out between him and

the mulatto general Pétion, who drove him into the north and became

president in his place, leaving Christophe the official ranking of an

outlaw. Pétion, however, was never able to conquer his rival.

Proclaiming himself president under a new constitution drawn up by an

assembly of his own choosing, the rebel took possession of the northern

half of the country and ruled it for thirteen long years with one of the

bloodiest hands known to history.

In 1811 he proclaimed himself king, honored his black consort with the

title of queen, and proceeded to form a Haitian nobility consisting of

his own numerous children as “princes of the royal blood,” three

“princes of the kingdom,” eight “dukes,” twenty “counts,” thirty-seven

“barons,” and eleven “chevaliers,” each and all of them former slaves or

the descendants of slaves. These jet-black “nobles,” many of whom added

to their titles the names of such native towns as Limonade, Marmalade,

and the like, soon became the laughing-stock of more advanced

civilizations, though candor forces the admission that Christophe was

only following the example of those who ennobled the robber barons of

Europe in earlier centuries, with the slight difference in the matter of

complexions. As “King Henry” he surrounded himself with all the pomp and

ceremony of royalty, erected nine palaces, of which Sans Souci was the

most magnificent and the only one that has not completely disappeared,

built eight royal châteaux, maintained great stables of horses and royal

coaches, innumerable retainers and servants, and a tremendous bodyguard.

Later, feeling that he had not done himself full honor, he named himself

hereditary emperor under the title of “Henri I,” and having come within

an ace of conquering the entire country, settled down to govern his

portion of it in a manner that would have been the envy of Nero.

The name of Christophe, in so far as it is known at all, is synonymous

with unbridled brutality. Yet there is a certain violent virtue in the

efforts by which the ex-slave sought to force his unprogressive black

subjects to climb the slippery ladder of civilization. He founded

schools, distributed the estates of the exiled Frenchmen among the

veterans of his army, reëstablished commercial relations with England

and the United States, created workshops in which the word “can’t” was

taboo. His methods were simple and direct. Causing a French carriage to

be placed at the disposition of his workmen, he ordered them to produce

another exactly like it within a fortnight on pain of death. Similar

tasks were meted out in all lines of endeavor, the tyrant refusing to

admit that what white men could do his black subjects could not do also.

His despotism, however, was not bounded by the mere desire for

advancement. When he passed, the people were compelled to kneel, and

death was the portion of the man who dared look upon his face without

permission. Thievery he abhorred, and inflicted capital punishment for

the mere stealing of a chicken. It came to be a regular part of his

daily life to order men, women, and even children thrown from the summit

of the citadel.

Tradition asserts that thirty thousand of his black subjects perished in

the building of this chief monument to his ambition. All the French and

Belgian architects and the skilled mechanics who worked on it are said

to have been assassinated when it was finished. The tale is still going

the rounds in Haiti that the emperor once came upon a gang of workmen

idling about one of the massive blocks of stone destined for the citadel

above, and demanded the reason for their inaction.

“It is too heavy, Sire,” replied the workmen; “we cannot carry it to the

mountain-top.”

“Line up,” ordered the tyrant; then turning to his bodyguard, he

commanded, “Shoot every fourth man. Perhaps you will feel stronger now,”

he remarked to the survivors as he rode onward.

On his return, however, the stone was no higher up the hill.

“It is quite impossible, your Majesty,” gasped the foreman; “it will not

budge.”

“Throw that man from the precipice,” said the despot, “and repeat the

order of this morning.”

The remaining workmen, according to the tale, succeeded in carrying the

stone to its destination.

Such stories always hover about those mighty monuments that seem

impossible without supernatural aid, yet no one who has beheld the

success with which the forces of gravity have been derided in this

incredible undertaking, incredible even in the enormousness of the

structure itself without taking into account its extraordinary

situation, will question its cost in such details as a few thousand more

or less human lives. Obsessed with the idea that the French would try to

reconquer the country, Christophe had resolved to erect a stronghold

that would be an impregnable place of resistance against them, or at

worst a “nest-egg of liberty,” which would afford certain refuge to the

_défenseurs de la patrie_ until better days dawned for them. There he

stored vast quantities of grain and food, of ammunition, flints,

bullets, powder, soggy heaps of which are still to be found, clothing,

tools, and a gold reserve amounting to more than thirty million dollars.

His enemies saw in the citadel only a pretext to indulge his innate

barbarism, to decimate his people for the mere pleasure of playing Nero.

It may be that this is not a just verdict. Christophe felt that he

incarnated the soul of his black brethren and that belief made him

wholly insensible to any other consideration. The mere fact that his

lack of perspective and his ignorance of such details as the feeding of

a long-besieged garrison made his seemingly impregnable fortress an

utter waste of effort may speak poorly for the instruction which his

French masters gave him, but it does not belittle the actual

accomplishment of his superhuman undertaking.

Christophe as violently died as he had lived. Stricken with apoplexy in

the church of Limonade, he attempted to cure himself by heroic measures,

such as rum and red-pepper baths. Finding this of no avail and refusing

to outlive his despotic power over his subjects, he shot himself through

the head. Barely was his body cold, if we are to believe current

stories, when his officers and retainers sacked the palace of Sans Souci

in which it lay, the wealth of many Haitian families of this day being

based on the spoils from this and his other royal residences. The corpse

was carried to the citadel and covered with quick lime, but tradition

asserts that it retained its life-like appearance for many years

afterward and was on view to all who cared to peer through the glass

heading of the vault until a later ruler decreed this exposition

“indecent,” and ordered the remains to be covered with earth.