THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS
Once he has reached our Virgin Islands, the traveler down the
stepping-stones of the West Indies has left his worst experiences behind
him. For while connections are rare and precarious between the large
islands of the north Caribbean, the tiny ones forming its eastern
boundary are favored with frequent and comfortable intercommunication.
Several steamship lines from the north make St. Thomas their first stop,
and pausing a day or two in every island of any importance beyond, give
the through traveler all the time he can spend to advantage in all but
three or four of the Lesser Antilles. In these he can drop off for a
more extended exploration and catch the next steamer a week or two
later.
A twelve-hour run from St. Croix, with a glimpse of the tiny Dutch
islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, peering above the sea like drowning
volcanoes, brought us to what the British so familiarly call St. Kitts.
Columbus named it St. Christopher, one legend having it that he
discovered it on his own patron saint’s day, another that he saw in its
form a resemblance to that worthy carrying in his arms the infant Jesus.
The resemblance is not apparent to the critical eye, but the admirals of
those days, you recall, were not compelled to take their grape-juice
unfermented. Besides, we must not be too hard upon the busy “old man” of
the caravel fleet. With a sailor thrusting his head into the cabin every
hour or so to say, “Another island, _vuestra merced_; what shall we call
it?” it was natural that the Genoese, having no modern novels at hand,
should curse his gout and hobble across to the saints’ calendar on the
opposite bulkhead.
St. Kitts has more nearly the form of a heaping plate of curry and
rice—curious this should not have occurred to the galley-fed
seaman—culminating in Mt. Misery, four thousand and some feet high, with
an eight hundred foot crater nicely proportioned to hold the curry and
still steaming with clouds of vapor that habitually conceal its summit.
From the shores to the steeper heights of the mountain the swiftly
sloping island is covered with sugar-cane; above that the woods are said
to be full of monkeys, descendants of the pets which British soldiers
brought with them when St. Kitts was a bone of contention between the
French and the English. With one slight exception, this and the
neighboring island of Nevis are the only West Indies inhabited by our
racial ancestors, which are so troublesome that their direct descendants
below have given up trying to plant their gardens more than half-way up
the mountains.
Though St. Kitts was the first island of the West Indies to be settled
by the English, antedating even ultra-British Barbados in that regard by
nearly two years, its capital bears the French name of Basse Terre. It
is an uninteresting town of some seven thousand inhabitants, scarcely
one in a hundred of whom boast of a family tree wholly free from African
graftings, and most of them living in unpainted, weather-blackened,
shingle cabins hidden away in the forests of cocoanut palms. Even the
larger houses in the center of town are chiefly built of clapboards or
shingles, painted only by the elements, and with narrow little eaves
that give them the air of wearing hats several sizes too small for them.
The sums that are uselessly squandered on window-glass would easily
suffice to give the entire town a sadly needed coating of paint, were it
not that all such improvements are taxed out of existence, as in most of
the British West Indies. The only pleasant spot in town is a kind of
Spanish plaza run wild, generously shaded with royal palms and spreading
tropical trees, beneath which the grass stands ankle-high and hens pilot
their broods about among the brown windrows of fallen leaves. Its
unshaven condition rather enhances a certain rustic beauty that is not
marred by an unexpectedly artistic old stone fountain in its center.
Beyond the last lopsided negro hovels Basse Terre is surrounded by
cane-fields, with Mt. Misery piled into the sky close behind them.
We had the misfortune to first land in British territory on a Sunday.
Basse Terre was as dead as if a general funeral were just over. It was
not simply that we bemoaned with the tourist-minded fellow-countrymen
from the steamer the fact that every “Liquor Store” was tight and
genuinely closed; the dreary lifelessness of the whole place got on our
nerves. The very trade wind seemed to refrain from any unnecessary
exertion; the citizens appeared to have given even their minds a holiday
and replied to the simplest questions with a vacant stare. It was a
“holy day” as truly as a French or Spanish Sunday is a “day of feast,”
or “festival.” I imagine heaven is much like an English community on a
Sunday—so piously dull that a new inmate would soon be on his knees
imploring the gatekeeper to let him go to the only other available
place.
At eleven o’clock four species of church service broke out, the
Anglican, Catholic, Moravian, and what a black policeman in a white
blouse and helmet and the deliberate airs of a London “bobby” referred
to in a Sunday whisper as the “Whistling.” We went. One was forced to,
in self-defense and for the utter absence of any other form of
amusement. Then we understood why the community could endure the
apparent lack of recreation and exercise of its deadly Sabbath. Negroes
striving to maintain the cold, calm, rather bored English manner from
opening hymn to benediction supplied the former, and the ups and downs
of the Anglican service furnished the latter.
We found St. Kitts more down-at-heel, more indolent, less self-relying
than even our Virgin Islands. The shingle shacks of Basse Terre were
more miserable than those of St. Thomas; the swarms of negroes loafing
under the palm trees about them were as ragged as they were lazy and
insolent. Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus,” you may recall, came from
St. Kitts. His replica, except in the genuineness of his ailment, could
be seen in any patch of shade. A white stranger strolling through the
poorer section was the constant target of foul language and even more
loathsome annoyances from both sexes and all ages; in the center of town
his footsteps were constantly dogged by clamoring urchins who replied to
the slightest protest with streams of curses even in the presence of
white residents and the serenely unconscious negro policemen. The
inhabitants were incorrigible beggars, from street loafers to church
wardens; even the island postmaster begged, under the pretense of
selling a historical pamphlet; the country people left their “work” in
the fields to shout for alms from the passer-by.
A highway encircles the island, which is twenty-three miles long and
five wide. It flanks Brimstone Hill, sometimes called the “Gibraltar of
the West Indies” in memory of the part it played in the wars between the
French and English for the control of the Caribbean. Cane-fields spread
with monotonous sameness on either side of the moderately well-kept
roads, with here and there an old stone tower that was once a windmill
and what seems many chimneys to one who recalls how seldom two are seen
in the same horizon in Cuba. On the whole, the island is not to be
compared with St. Croix; despite its abundance of sugar it has a
poverty-stricken air, for St. Kitts seems to have lost its “pep,” if
ever it had any.
It took two days to unload our one-day’s cargo in the harbor of Basse
Terre. The local stevedores were on strike and their places had been
taken by less experienced men from the neighboring island of Nevis. This
had magnified the constant enmity between the St. Kittens—or whatever is
the proper term—and the inhabitants of “that other country,” as they
called it; but it was an enmity without violence, except of words,
torrents of words in what close observers assert are two distinct
dialects, though the islands are separated only by a narrow channel. The
strikers, to all appearances, felt they had won their chief aim by being
allowed to lie on their backs in the shade of the cocoanut palms.
The steamer’s loss was my gain, for the delay gave me time to visit the
island Columbus named “Nieve” from the snow-like clouds hovering about
it. Open sailing scows, perhaps three times the size of a lifeboat, were
constantly plying across the bay between the two capitals. The wind was
on the beam in both directions, and a dozen times I was convinced that
the waves that splashed continuously over the leeward gunwale of the
creaking old tub would fill her at the next squall sweeping through the
deep channel between the islands. But each time the simple son of Nevis
at the tiller met my questioning gaze with “Not blow too bad to-day,
boss,” now and then adding the reassuring information that several boats
were lost here every year. High on the windward gunwale the plunging of
the crude vessel was exhilarating in spite of the apparent danger, but
the negro women in their flashy dresses, tin bracelets, and much cheap
jewelry, who sprawled together in the bottom of the boat in supreme
indifference to the bilge-water and filth that sloshed back and forth
over them seemed to find nothing agreeable in the experience.
The craft half righted herself at length under the lee of the island,
heaped up into the clouds in similar but more abrupt and compact form
than St. Kitts. One scarcely needed to go ashore to see the place, so
nicely were its sights spread out on the steeply tilted landscape. Like
its neighbor it was but slightly wooded on its lower slopes, but made up
for this by the dense vegetation of its monkey-infested heights. One
made out a few groves of cocoanuts, patches of cotton, and green
stretches of sugar-cane, with here and there a windmill tower, one of
which still survived, its slowly turning arms giving a mild suggestion
of the Azores. Charlestown soon appeared out on the end of a low point,
a modest little town with a few red roofs peering through the cocoanut
trees. Gingertown, five miles in the interior, and the village of
Newcastle farther down the coast are the only other places of any size,
though the island is everywhere well populated. Time was when Nevis was
a famous watering place for Europe and America, with thermal baths and
medicinal waters, and an important capital named Jamestown, from which
all this region of the Caribbean was ruled. But the city was destroyed
one day by an earthquake and submerged beneath the sea, where some of
its coral-encrusted ruins can still be seen not far from the shore.
Natural causes led to the island’s gradual isolation, and to-day, though
its hot baths are exploited by an American owned hotel, it becomes
highly excited at the arrival of a stranger from the outside world.
Charlestown had little of the insolence of St. Kitts, though it was by
no means free from beggars. Its masses were more naïve in manner, even
more ragged of garb. Nine pence a day is the average adult male wage of
even those who succeed in finding work. _Obeah_, or African witchcraft,
seemed still to maintain a hold, for even the native bank clerk who
piloted me about town acknowledged a belief in certain forms of it. Two
or three blocks from the little triangular park that marks the center of
town are the ruins of a gray stone building in which Alexander Hamilton
is reputed to have been born. British visitors are more interested in
the house where Nelson lived and the little church in which he was
married to the widow Nisbet, two miles up the sloping hillside. Love for
England does not greatly flourish in Nevis, if one may take surface
indications as evidence.
“We are ruled over by an autocrat, a white Barbadian magistrate,”
complained an islander of the better class, while the group about him
nodded approval. “England takes everything from us and does nothing for
us. If it were not for the prohibition that would come with it, we would
be glad to see the island under American rule.”
* * * * *
A forty-mile run during the night brought us to Antigua. Steamers anchor
so far off shore that a government launch is required to do the work
performed in most of the Lesser Antilles by rowboats. For though there
is a splendid double harbor on the opposite side of the island, the
English cling to their invariable Caribbean rule of building the capital
and only city on the leeward shore. Two pretty headlands are passed on
the way in, the more prominent of them occupied by a leper asylum; both
are crowned by fortresses dating back to the days when England fought to
maintain her hold on the West Indies. From the bay St. John’s presents
an agreeable picture in the morning sunlight, an ancient two-towered
cathedral bulking above the greenery constituting the most conspicuous
landmark. It is much more of a town than Basse Terre, though with the
same wooden, shingled, often unpainted houses, and wide, unattractive,
right-angled streets. What energy it may once have had seems largely to
have departed, and for all its size it has the air of a half-forgotten
village. Its shops open at seven, close from nine to ten for breakfast,
and put up their shutters for the day at four. On closer inspection the
cathedral proves to be two churches, one of wood enclosed within another
of stone, as a protection against earthquakes. The negro women of the
market-place are given to the display of brilliant calicos, but the
population as a whole has little of the color,—except in complexion—the
dignity, and that suggestion of Gallic grace of the French islanders.
Antigua, thirteen by nine miles, is lower and less mountainous than St.
Kitts, being of limestone rather than volcanic formation, with less
luxuriant vegetation, having been almost wholly denuded of its forests.
In consequence, it suffers somewhat for lack of rainfall, though it is
almost everywhere cultivated, and offers many a pretty vista of rolling
landscape, usually with a patch of sea at the end of it. Sugar-cane is
by far its most important product, though corn-fields here and there
break the lighter green monotony, and limes and onions are piled high in
crates on St. John’s water-front. The island roads are tolerable.
Automobiles, mainly of the Ford variety, make it possible for the
traveler to see its “sights” in a few hours with less damage to the
exchequer than in many of the West Indies. Women in rather graceless
colored turbans are more numerous than men in the cane-fields, where
wages average 4½ pence per hundred holes of cane, whether for planting,
hoeing, or cutting, making the daily wage of the majority about fifteen
cents. What they do with all that money is a problem we found no time to
solve, though there were evidences that a fair proportion of it is
invested in native rum. Like all the world, Antigua has had her share of
labor troubles during the past few years. Two seasons ago much cane was
burned by the incensed workers, but the killing of several and the
wounding of some thirty more by government troops has settled the wage
problem on its old basis. Though many abandoned estates, with the
familiar square brick chimneys and armless windmill towers, dot the
landscape, two sugar factories to-day consume virtually all the cane.
They are rather old-fashioned institutions, with no such pretty,
well-planned _bateys_ and comfortable employee-houses as are to be found
in Cuba and Porto Rico. The hauling is chiefly done by tippy two-wheeled
carts, drawn by mules in tandem, occasionally by oxen, specially
designed, it would seem, to spill their loads each time an automobile
forces them to the edge of the road. Mangos and bamboo, in certain
sections clumps of cactus and patches of that troublesome thorny
vegetation which the Cubans call _aroma_, are the chief landscape
decorations, except on the tops of the scrub-fuzzy, rather than forested
hills. Shacks covered with shingles from mudsill to roof-tree,
interspersed with fewer thatched and once whitewashed huts, all of them
somewhat less miserable than those of St. Kitts, house the country
people in scattered formation or occasional clusters bearing such
misnomers as All Saints’ Village. Like most of the Lesser Antilles,
Antigua was once French, but it has retained less of the patois than the
other islands of similar history.
The goal of most mere visitors to Antigua is English Harbor on the
windward coast, two almost landlocked blue basins in which Nelson
refitted his fleet in preparation for the battle of Trafalgar. Here
stand several massive stone buildings, occupied now only by the negro
caretaker and his family. In the great stone barracks is a patch of wall
decorated by the none too artistic hand of the present King George, then
a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, wishing in vari-colored large
letters “A Merry Christmas 2 You All,” the space being reverently
covered now by a padlocked pair of shutters. More popular with the
romantic-minded is the immense anchor serving as gravestone of one,
Lieutenant Peterson. The lieutenant, runs the story, was the rival of
his commanding officer for the hand of the island belle. On the eve of a
naval ball he was ordered not to offer the young lady his escort. He
appeared with her at the height of the festivities, however, she having
declined in his favor the attentions of the commander, whereupon the
latter shot the lieutenant for disobeying orders and caused him to be
buried that same night in the barracks compound.
Patriotism for the empire to which they belong is not one of the chief
characteristics of the Antiguans. Indeed, there is “no love whatever”
for England, if we are to believe most of those with whom I talked on
the subject.
“There never was any, even in the old days,” asserted a man whose
parents emigrated from England half a century ago. “Before the war,” he
continued, “England would not buy her sugar in the West Indies because
she could get it cheaper from the beet-growers in Germany and Austria,
thanks to their government bounty. The sugar we sent to England often
lay on the wharves over there for months, until we had to send money to
pay wharfage and storage, and feed our sugar to the hogs here at home.
Once we enjoyed home rule; now our laws are made by the Secretary for
the West Indies in London, who thinks we wear breech-clouts and speak
some African dialect. They take everything from us in taxes and do
nothing for us in return. Our governor thinks his only duty is to hold
us down. He tries to be a little tin god, permits no one else to ride in
the public launch with him when he goes out to a ship, and all that sort
of thing. He came here two years ago from a similar position in one of
our African colonies, where he was accustomed to see everyone bring him
gifts and bow their heads in the sand whenever he passed. He got a
surprise when he landed here. Except for a few nigger policemen, no one
paid him any attention whatever, except that the drunken fellows shouted
after him in the streets and called him foul names. We had no
conscription here, yet we sent a large contingent. The well-to-do whites
paid their way home to enlist; the poor ones went over with the niggers
and were slowly picked out after they got over there. And England has
not done a thing for a man of them. The blacks are angry because they
got no promotion and all the dirtiest jobs. Mighty few of us would go
again to fight for the blooming Empire.”
Antigua is the capital of what the British call, for political purposes,
the Leeward Islands, comprising all their holdings between Santa Cruz
and Martinique. Geographically this is a misnomer, the real leeward
islands being the Greater Antilles, from Cuba to Porto Rico inclusive,
and all the Lesser Antilles the windward islands, as the Spaniards
recognized and still maintain. But the unnatural division serves the
purpose for which it was made. St. John’s is the seat of the governor
and the archbishop of all the group, with the principal prison and
asylum. Anguilla, far to the north, near the Dutch-French island of St.
Martin, is of coral formation, comparatively low and flat. The same may
be said of Barbuda, large as Antigua and reputed to have gone back to
nature under the improvident descendants of the slaves of the Codrington
family that long reigned supreme upon it. Montserrat, on the other hand,
is very mountainous, a flat-topped, pyramidal fragment of earth
thirty-five square miles in extent, its lower slopes planted with limes
and cacao, its upper reaches forest-clad. White ribbons of roads set
forth from Plymouth, the capital, in what looks like a determined effort
to scale the precipitous heights, but soon give up the attempt. The
population of the island is mainly negro-Irish, it having been settled
by emigrants from the “Old Sod,” so that to this day Irish names
predominate, freckled red-heads with African features are numerous, and
the inhabitants are noted throughout the West Indies for their brogue
and their gift of blarney.
* * * * *
Dominica, the southernmost and largest of the misnamed Leeward Islands,
is also entitled to several other superlatives. Most of the West Indies
boast themselves the “Queen of the Antilles,” but none with more justice
than this tiny Porto Rico isolated between the two principal islands of
“French America.” It is the highest of the Lesser Antilles, Mt.
Diablotin stretching 5314 feet into the tropical sky; the wettest, being
habitually surrounded by blue-black clouds that pour forth their deluges
by night or by day, in or out of season, even when all the sky about it
is translucent blue; and the world’s greatest enemy of the scurvy, for
it produces most of that fruit which has given the British sailor the
nickname of “limy.” Incidentally, it is the most difficult of the West
Indies in which to travel.
Roseau, the capital, sits right out on the Caribbean, the mountains
climbing directly, without an instant’s hesitation, into the sky behind
it. They are as sheer beneath water as above it and the steamer anchors
within an easy stone’s throw of the wharves. Boatmen in curious little
board canoes, showing their wooden ribs within and bearing such French
names as “Dieu Donne,” quickly surround the new arrival, some of them
bent on carrying her passengers ashore at a shilling a head, others to
dive for pennies thrown into this deepest-blue of seas, which is yet so
transparent that both coin and swimmer can be perfectly seen as far down
as lungs will carry them. Boats of the same quaint structure and only
slightly larger jockey for position along the ship’s side to receive the
cargo from her hatches. They are unreliable and poorly adapted for the
purpose, but their owners stick together in protecting their monopoly
and every modern lighter brought to Dominica has invariably been
scuttled within a week. Almost within the shadow of the steamer other
men are standing stiffly erect in the extreme stern of their fishing
canoes, steering them by almost imperceptible movements of their single
crude paddle, while their companions cast their nets or throw stones
within them to lure the fish to the surface. Immense hauls they make,
too, without going a hundred yards from the shore. How many fish there
must be in the sea when thousands of fishermen can ply their trade about
each of these West Indian stepping-stones the year round and come home
every day laden to the gunwales with their catches!
Roseau is scarcely more than a village. It is so small that all its
business is carried on within plain sight from the steamer’s deck,
though it strives to look very important with its few two-story stone
buildings, like a Briton in foreign parts aware that he must uphold the
national dignity unassisted. It is less given to wooden structures than
many of its rivals, and has a more aged, solid air, at least along the
water-front. An age-softened gray stone church that looks almost
Spanish, with an extraordinary width within, like a market-hall filled
with pews, and bilingual signs above the confessionals bearing the names
of French priests, seems conscious of its mastery over the few small
Protestant chapels. Higher still is one of the most magnificent little
botanical gardens in the world, with hundreds of tropical specimens
arranged with the unobtrusive orderliness of an English park.
I visited Dominica twice, and on the second occasion, having from early
morning until midnight, hired a horse to ride across the island. Roseau
Valley, a great sloping glen like a cleft in the mountains, climbs
swiftly upward to the clouds behind the town, a rock-boiling river,
surprisingly large for so small an island, pouring down it. At the
bridge across the stream on the edge of town is what claims to be the
greatest lime-juice factory on earth. I use both words with misgiving,
for it is no more a factory in our sense of the term than the white
lumps it ships away to a scurvy-dreading world are juice. Toward this a
constant stream of limes, which we would be more apt to call lemons, is
descending. Women and girls come trotting down out of the mountains with
bushel baskets of them, now and then sitting down on a boulder to rest
but never troubling to take the incredible load off their heads. Donkeys
with enormous straw saddle-bags heaped high with limes pick their way
more cautiously down the steep slope. Occasionally even a man deigns to
jog to town with a load of the fruit. They lie everywhere in great
yellow heaps under the low trees; they weigh down the usually
rain-dripping branches. Yet when they have been grown and picked and
carried all the way to town, they sell for a mere seven shillings a
barrel! Small wonder the human pack-horses and even the growers are more
extraordinarily ragged than any other West Indians outside of Haiti.
Cacao plants, too, are piled up the steeps on either side of the roaring
river, for Dominica has that constant humidity and more than frequent
rainfall they love so well. The unbroken density of the greenery is one,
perhaps the chief, charm of the valley, as of all the island. Nowhere in
all the climb does the eye make out the suggestion of a clearing. Where
man has not pitched his lime or cacao orchards, or planted his tiny
garden patch, nature forces the fertile black soil to produce to its
utmost capacity. It is an un-American density, as of an Oriental jungle,
all but completely concealing the miserable little huts tucked away in
it all over the lower hillsides; it makes up for the constant succession
of heavy showers that belie the sunny promises of the town and harbor
below. For the mountains of Dominica have an annual rainfall of three
hundred inches, twenty-five feet of water a year!
There are forty automobiles on the island of lemons, but they do not
venture far from home. The highway up the valley lasts a bare three
miles before it dwindles to a mountain trail that struggles constantly
upward, now steeply along the brink of the river far below, now in stony
zigzags that make no real progress, for all their pretense, except in
altitude. One has a curiously shut-in feeling, as if there were no
escape from the mighty ravine except by the narrow, slippery path
underfoot, which is, indeed, the case. Not even the jet black
inhabitants inured to mountain-climbing from birth, have attempted to
scale the heights by more direct paths than this zigzag trail up the
roof-steep bottom of the gorge. They speak among themselves a “creole”
as incomprehensible, even to one familiar with French, as that of Haiti,
though they babbled a bit of English that seemed to grow less fluent and
extensive with every mile away from the capital. There the white
stranger was subjected to an insolence and clamoring at his heels
inferior only in volume to that of St. Kitts; up here in the mountains
the passers-by yielded the trail and raised their ragged headgear with a
rustic politeness that would have been more charming had it not almost
invariably been followed by “A penny, please, sir” from both sexes and
all ages. For all their mountaineer diffidence, they are so given to
stealing one another’s crops that shops throughout the island are
“Licensed to Sell Protected Produce,” that the police may have a means
of detecting contraband. Perhaps they are scarcely to be blamed for
their light-fingered habits, with wages that rarely reach the lofty
height of a shilling a day.
The horse had leisurely English manners and the deliberate, loose-kneed
action of a St. Thomas waiter, so that we made far less progress than
his rangy form had promised. He showed, too, little of that endurance
and mountain wisdom for which the far smaller animals of tropical
America are noted. We reached the crest of the island at last, however,
and paused on the edge of a small fresh-water lake said to fill the
crater of an extinct volcano. Sedge-grass surrounded it and dense
vegetation framed it on every side, but there was nothing remarkable
about it, except, perhaps, to the Dominicans. But the wealth of flora
was well worth the excursion. Tree-ferns, ferns large and small, wild
bananas, lime-trees, clumps of bamboo, and a score of other plants and
trees which only a botanist with tropical experience could name,
completely concealed the earth, as the trunks of all the larger species
were hidden under climbing parasites with immense leaves, and even the
sheer banks were covered with densest vegetation.
A fog, white and luminous, yet impenetrable to the eye at more than
twenty yards, covered all the island top. I urged the animal down a far
steeper, more stony, trail than that we had climbed, cut deeper than a
horseman’s head into the red-black mountainside and pitching headlong
downward into the foggy void. A half hour of utter stillness, broken now
and then by the brief song of the solitaire and the constant stumbling
of the horse’s hoofs over the stones, brought us suddenly to the edge of
the cloud, with a magnificent view of the jagged northern coast edged by
the white breakers of the Atlantic. A few negroes again appeared,
climbing easily upward, carrying their shoes on their heads, an
excellent place to wear them at present prices. Now and then an aged,
carelessly constructed hut peered out from the teeming wilderness, but
the sense of the primeval, the uninhabited, the unknown to man, brooded
over all the scene despite these and the stony trail underfoot.
Halfway down I met two Carib Indians, easily distinguishable from the
bulk of the inhabitants by their features and color. They were short and
muscular, with more of the aggressive air of the Mexican highlander than
the slinking demeanor of the South American aborigines. They carried
their home-made baskets full of some native produce on their shoulders,
rather than on their heads, and apparently spoke but little English.
They came from the Carib reservation on the north coast, the only one
now left in all the West Indies over which, except for the four larger
islands, their man-eating ancestors ruled supreme until long after the
discovery. When at length, after long warfare, England entered into a
treaty with them, they were given two patches of territory for their
own. But the eruption of Soufrière in St. Vincent in 1902 destroyed the
colony on that island, and to-day the three hundred of Dominica are the
only ones left, and barely forty of these, it is said, are of pure
blood. They live at peace with their neighbors, make baskets, catch
fish, and are noted for their industry, as wild tribes go, in
agriculture.
More than halfway down to sea-level huts began to grow frequent again,
most of them completely covered with shingles and all of them devoid of
any but the scantiest home-made furniture. Ragged, useless-looking
inhabitants stood in the doorways staring at the extraordinary
apparition of a white man, many of them calling out in cheerful voices
for alms as I passed. Dominica is evidently an island without
timepieces; almost everyone I met wanted to know the hour, just why was
not apparent, since time seemed to have less than no value to them. My
watch having been stolen in Havana and I having declined to tempt West
Indians again by buying another, I could not satisfy their curiosity.
Besides, the Caribbean is no place in which to worry about time; the
fact that the sun rises and sets is all the division of eternity needed
in such an African Eden.
At Rosalie, an old-fashioned sugar-mill and a scattering of huts on the
north coast, I made a calculation. The sun was high overhead; it could
not be later than two; the map in my hand showed the distance around the
eastern end of the island to be less than twice that over the mountain;
a coast road would be comparatively level and much to be preferred to
another climb of 2500 feet on a jaded horse. Besides, I have a strong
antipathy to returning the same way I have come. I made a few inquiries.
The childlike inhabitants on this coast spoke almost no English and
nothing that could easily be recognized as French, but they seemed to
understand both tongues readily enough. I had only to ask if it were
about four hours ride to the capital to be assured that such was the
case. It was not until too late that I realized they were giving me the
answer they thought would please me best, like most uncivilized tribes,
with perfect indifference to the facts of the case. Any distance I chose
to assume in my question was invariably the exact distance; when I awoke
to my error and took to asking direct instead of leading questions, the
reply was invariably a soft “Yes, sir,” with an instant readiness to
change to “No, sir,” if anything in my manner suggested that I preferred
a negative answer. But by this time I was too far along the coast-road
to turn back.
I had only myself to blame for what soon promised to be a pretty
predicament. Certainly I had traveled enough in uncivilized countries to
know such people cannot be depended upon for even approximate accuracy
in matters of distance or time. I surely was mountain-experienced enough
to realize that an island as small and as lofty as Dominica could have
but little level land, even along the coast. As a matter of fact it had
virtually none at all. Never did the atrocious trail find a hundred
yards of flat going. One after another, in dogged, insistent,
disheartening succession, the great forest-clad buttresses of the island
plunged steeply down to the sea, forcing the stony path to claw its way
upward or make enormous detours around the intervening hollows, only to
pitch instantly down again from each hard-earned height into a mighty
ravine, beyond which another appalling mountain-wall blocked the horizon
immediately ahead. To make matters worse, the horse began to show all
too evident signs of giving out. In vain did I lash him with such
weapons as I could snatch from the jungle-wall alongside, not daring to
take time to dismount and seek a better cudgel. Steadily, inevitably,
his pace, none too good at the best, decreased. By what I took to be
four o’clock he could not be urged out of a slow walk, even on the rare
bits of level going; by five he was merely crawling, his knees visibly
trembling, coming every few yards to a complete halt from which he could
be driven only by all the punishment I could inflict upon him. His
condition was one to draw tears, but it was no time to be compassionate.
The steamer was sailing at midnight. It would be the last one in that
direction for two weeks. Rachel was waiting to join me on it at
Martinique and continue to Barbados. No one on board knew I had gone on
an excursion into the hills, nor even that I had left the steamer. My
possessions would be found scattered about my stateroom; by the time the
ship reached Martinique it would be assumed that I had fallen overboard
or suffered some equally pleasant fate. I had barely the equivalent of
five dollars on my person, not an extra pair of socks, not even a
toothbrush—and the Dominica cable was broken. Clearly it was no time to
spare the cudgel.
But it was of no use. Near sunset the horse took to stumbling to his
knees at every step. For long minutes he stood doggedly in his tracks,
trembling from head to foot. The sweat of fatigue, as well as heat, ran
in rivulets down his flanks. I tumbled off and tried to lead him. We
were climbing another of those incessant, interminable buttresses. With
all my strength I could only drag him a few creeping steps at a time.
After each short advance he sat down lifelessly on his haunches. If I
abandoned him in the trail there was no knowing whether the owners would
ever see him again; certainly they would not the saddle and bridle, and
the owners were a simple mulatto family of Roseau who could ill bear
such a loss. But I could scarcely risk further delay. The sun was
drowning in the Caribbean; the hazy form of Martinique thirty miles away
was still on my port bow, so to speak, showing that I had not yet turned
the point of the island, that I was not yet halfway to Roseau. It was
stupid of me not to have realized before that Dominica, for all its
scant 35,000 ignorant inhabitants, was almost as large as the French
island in the offing, and that to encircle one end of it was a stiff
all-day job.
[Illustration: Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica]
[Illustration: A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from
the mountain]
[Illustration: Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent]
[Illustration: Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue
of Nelson]
I was on the point of abandoning the animal when I caught sight of a man
climbing the trail far ahead of us, the first person I had seen in more
than an hour. I shouted, and for some time fancied he had dashed off
into the wilderness out of fear. Then a break in the vegetation showed
him again, and this time he halted. We reached him at last, a stodgy
negro youth in the remnants of hat, shirt, and trousers who stood at
attention, like a soldier, at the extreme edge of the trail, an
expression between fear and respectful attention on his stupid black
countenance.
“How far is it to Roseau?” I panted.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, seeming to poise himself for a dive into the
jungle void behind him.
“How many miles to Roseau?” I repeated, “five or ten or—”
“Yes, sir,” he reiterated, shifting his mammoth bare feet uneasily.
“I want to know the distance to the city,” I cried, unwisely raising my
voice in my haste and thereby all but causing him to bolt. “Can I make
it in six hours?”
“Yes, sir,” he answered, quickly. Then, evidently seeing that I was not
pleased with the answer, he added hastily, “N—No, sir.”
“_Est-ce qu’ on peut le faire en six heures?_” I hazarded, but he seemed
to understand French even less than English and stared at me mutely. The
brilliant idea of wasting no more time passed through the place my mind
should have been. I snatched out my note-book and pencil.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “Can you write?”
He could, to the extent of laboriously and all but illegibly penciling
his name, to which I added his address, a tiny hamlet up in the
mountains. I explained the situation to him briefly in words of one
syllable. He seemed to follow me. At least he answered “Yes, sir” at the
end of each sentence.
“You will take the horse to the police-station in Grand Bay,” I
specified, having gathered from my map and his monosyllables that this
was the next town. “I will tell the police there what to do with him,
and I will leave five shillings with them to give you if you bring
horse, saddle and bridle, and do not try to ride him on the way.”
“Yes sir,” he replied, taking the reins I held out to him, and I turned
and fled into the swiftly descending night.
I have climbed many mountains in my day, but none that were as wearying
as that endless succession of lofty ridges up the stony sides of which I
stumbled hour after hour in a darkness as black as the bottom of a well,
only to plunge instantly down again into another mighty, invisible
ravine. Several times I lost the trail; how I kept it at all is a
mystery. As I strained forward with every ounce of strength within me I
caught myself thanking fortune, or whoever has my particular case on his
books, that I had been a tramp all my days and had kept myself fit for
such an ordeal. Now and then I passed through a “town,” that is, what
voices told me was a scattered collection of huts hidden in the
vegetation and the night on either side of the trail, for a hundred
yards or two, along which a few ghostlike figures of negroes in white
garments dodged aside at sound of my shod footsteps, each time soon
giving way again to the deep stillness of an uninhabited wilderness,
broken only by the monotonous chorus of jungle insects. Which of these
places was Grand Bay I had no time to inquire, much less batter my head
against the native stupidity for sufficient time to find the
police-station and make known my case to slow-witted black officials. I
would think up some other way of meeting my obligations when I had
accomplished the more pressing mission on hand.
Once the trail came out on the very edge of the sea, crawling along
under the face of a sheer towering cliff, the spray dashing up to my
very feet; a dozen times it climbed what seemed almost perpendicularly
into the invisible, starless sky above for what appeared to my wasting
strength to be hours. I had eaten a hasty breakfast on board early that
morning. Four bananas was the sum total of food I had been able to get
along the way. My thighs trembled like the legs of a foundering horse;
more than once my wobbling knees seemed on the very point of giving way
beneath me. The rain had kindly held off all afternoon, an unusual boon
in Dominica, but the pace I was forced to set had so drenched me in
perspiration that it dripped in almost a stream from the end of my
leather belt.
Then all at once, at the top of an ascent I had told myself a score of
times I could never make, the lights of Roseau burst upon me, far below
yet seemingly no great distance away. There were a few lights in what
seemed to be the harbor, but not enough of them to be sure they were
those of a passenger-steamer. Yet hope suddenly stiffened my legs as
starch does a wilted collar. The town quickly disappeared again as I
plunged down a stony but wide highway that had suddenly grown up under
my feet. Several times I was convinced it led somewhere else than where
I hoped, so incredibly interminable was the descent to the town that had
seemed so near. Even when I caught sight of it again, where the road
grew suddenly level, it lay far down the coast, as far, it seemed, as it
had been from the top of the range. But the steamer was still there. I
broke into a feeble run, for it could not possibly have been much short
of midnight, but fell back into a walk when my legs had all but crumpled
under me. Never had a small town seemed so interminably long. Once I
passed a “nighthawk” and shouted a question at him over my shoulder.
“About twelve,” he replied, little suspecting the surge of despair his
words sent through me. As luck would have it, one boatman had remained
at the wharf in hope of a belated shilling. He got two. I had just begun
to wring the perspiration out of my coat into my cabin washstand when a
long blast of the siren and the chugging of the engines told me that we
had gotten under way.
Lest some ungentle reader carry away the impression that I had increased
the slight disrepute in which Americans are held in Dominica—for our
tourists land there frequently—may I add that I settled in full all my
obligations there through the purser of the steamer on its return
voyage? But to drop painful subjects and hark back to that other visit
to Dominica. Then we left at noon, and Roseau settled back into another
week’s sleep. There were several pretty villages tucked away in the
greenery along the shore, some of them with wide cobbled streets, though
hardly a yard of level ground, and each with a church just peering above
the fronds of the cocoanuts. A highway crawled as far as it was able
along the coast beside us, but soon gave it up where the steep hills,
looking like green plush, became precipitous mountains falling sheer
into the sea, yet with low forests clinging everywhere to the face of
them. Bit by bit the loveliest of the Caribbees, the most unbrokenly
mountainous of the West Indies, shrunk away behind us. Tiny fishing
boats with ludicrous little pocket-handkerchief sails ventured far out,
now standing forth against the horizon on the crest of a wave, now
completely lost from sight in a trough of the sea. But by this time
Martinique was looming large on the port bow, and we were straining our
eyes for the first glimpse of ruined St. Pierre.
* * * * *
St. Lucia, largest of the British Windward Islands and a bare
twenty-five miles south of Martinique, is the only one of the Lesser
Antilles where the steamer ties up at the wharf. Castries, the capital,
is situated on the edge of what was once a volcano crater, but presents
little else of interest to those who have seen its replica in several of
the other islands. Like all the group to which it belongs politically,
it was once French and still speaks a “creole” jargon in preference to
English. It, too, is mountainous, with a Soufrière that rises four
thousand feet into the sky, and despite its thirty-five by twelve miles
of extent, its population is as scanty and as unprogressive as that of
Dominica. The most striking of its sights are the two pitons at the
southern end of the island, cone-shaped peaks rising more than 2500 feet
sheer out of the sea, as if they were the surviving summits of a
Himalayan range that sank beneath the waves before the dawn of recorded
history.
* * * * *
The next of the stepping-stones is St. Vincent, for though Barbados, a
hundred miles due east of it, intervenes in the steamer’s itinerary, it
is neither geographically, geologically, nor politically a member of the
Windward group. St. Vincent was the last of the West Indies to come into
possession of the white man, for here the fierce Caribs offered their
last resistance and were conquered only by being literally driven into
the sea. It is ruggedly mountainous and unbrokenly green with rampant
vegetation, its jagged range cutting the sky-line like the teeth of a
gigantic saw. It, too, has its Soufrière, which erupted on the afternoon
before Pélée in Martinique, killing more than fifteen hundred and
devastating one end of the island. Rain falls easily on St. Vincent, and
even the capital is habitually humid and drenched with frequent showers.
This is named Kingstown, and lies scattered along the shore at the foot
of a wide valley sloping quickly upward to the jagged labyrinth of peaks
about which black clouds playfully chase one another the year round. It
is a gawky, ragged, rather insolent place of unenterprising negroes,
with a few scrawny leather-skinned poor whites scattered among them.
Some of these are of Portuguese origin, and there is a scattering of
East Indians. So colorless is the place, except in scenic beauty, that
the appearance of a woman of Martinique in full native regalia in its
streets resembles a loud noise in a deep silence. Even the sea comes in
with a slow, lazy _swo-ow_ among the weather-blackened fishing boats
that lie scattered along its beach. So quiet and peaceful is it
everywhere out of sound of the clamoring market-place that it would seem
an ideal spot in which to engage in intellectual labors, but there is no
evidence that St. Vincent has ever enriched the world’s art.
Roads climb away from the capital into the pretty, steep hills that
surround it, among which are tucked red-roofed estates and negro cabins.
The island looks more prosperous in the country than in the town. Its
cotton is said to be unsurpassed for the making of lace, and was selling
at the time of our visit, for $2 a pound. In addition, it produces
cottonseed oil, arrow-root, cacao, and, above all, nutmegs. The nutmeg
grows on a tree not unlike the plum in appearance—residents of Vermont
have no doubt seen it often—the fruit resembling a small apricot. Inside
this is a large nut prettily veined with the red mace that is another of
the island’s exports, and the nut being cracked discloses a kernel
which, dried and cured, is carried down from the hills in baskets on the
heads of negroes and shipped to the outside world as the nutmeg of
commerce. The natives, if the swarthy West Indians of to-day are
entitled to that term, make also pretty little covered baskets in all
sizes, which sell for far less after the steamer has blown her warning
whistle than when she has just arrived.
* * * * *
The eight-hour run from St. Vincent to Grenada, capital of the Windward
group, is close to the leeward of a scattered string of islands called
the Grenadines, some of them comparatively large, mountainous in their
small way, others mere jagged bits of rock strewn at random along the
edge of the Caribbean, all of them looking more or less dry and sterile.
Grenada is rugged and beautiful, though it does not rival Dominica in
either respect. It has variously been called the “Isle of Spices,” the
“Planter’s Paradise,” and the “Island of Nutmegs.” What claims to be the
largest nutmeg plantation on earth—the West Indians have something of
our own tendency for superlatives—lies among its labyrinth of hills; it
produces also cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cacao. Though it is
admittedly far more prosperous than St. Vincent, it shows few signs of
cultivation from the sea, for none of its principal products in their
growing state can be recognized from the forest and brush that cover
many an uncleared West Indian isle. The high prices paid for nutmegs
during the war, particularly by fruit preservers in the United States,
has brought fortunes to many of its planters, despite the fact that the
tree takes seven years to mature. Many of the negroes, too, own their
small estates and increase their incomes by making jelly from the nutmeg
fruit. Yet from the sea all this is hidden under a dense foliage that
completely covers the nowhere level island. Along the geometrical white
line of the beach are several villages; higher up are seen only
scattered huts and a few larger buildings, except where the two
considerable towns of Goyave and Victoria break the pretty green
monotony.
But if Grenada must yield the palm for beauty to some of its neighbors,
St. Georges, the capital, unquestionably presents the loveliest picture
from the sea of any port in the Lesser Antilles, if not of the West
Indies. Nestled among and piled up the green hills that terminate in a
jagged series of peaks above, its often three-story houses pitched in
stages one above the other, larger buildings crowning here and there a
loftier eminence, the whole delightfully irregular and individualistic,
it rouses even the jaded traveler to exclamations of pleasure. The
steamer chugs placidly by, as if it had suddenly decided not to call,
passes a massive old fortress, then suddenly swings inshore as though it
had forgotten its limitation and aspires to climb the mountain heights.
A narrow break in the rock wall opens before it, and it slides calmly
into a magnificent little blue harbor and drops anchor so close to the
shore that one can talk to the people on it in a conversational tone.
Why the vessel does not tie up to the wharf and have done with it is
difficult to understand, for the blue water seems fathoms deep up to the
very edge of the quay. Strictly speaking, it is not a wharf at all, but
one of the principal streets of the town, and passengers in their
staterooms have a sense of having moved into an apartment just across
the way from the negro families who lean out of their windows watching
with cheerful curiosity the activity on the decks below.
The sun was just setting in a cloudless sky when we landed in St.
Georges, yet we saw enough of it before darkness came to veil the now
all too familiar negro slovenliness, though it could not disguise the
concomitant odors. The same incessant cries for alms, the same
heel-treading throngs of guides marked our progress, until we had shaken
them off in a long tunnel through a mountain spur that connects the two
sections of the water-front. For despite its distant loveliness, the
town was overrun by the half-insolent, half-cringing black creatures who
so mar all the Caribbean wonderland, until one is ready to curse the men
of long ago who exterminated the aborigines and brought in their place
this lowest species of the human family. On shore St. Georges was
different only in its steep, cobbled streets and its rows of houses
piled sheer one above another. Every other shop announced itself a
“Dealer in Cacao and Nutmegs.” In the clamoring throngs of venders
squatted along the curb the only unfamiliar sight was the blue
“parrot-fish,” with so striking a resemblance to the talkative bird as
to be mistaken for it at first glance. But even here there were
evidences of Grenada’s greater prosperity. White men were a trifle more
numerous; numbers of private automobiles climbed away into the hills by
what at least began as excellent highways; a telephone line on which we
counted seventy-six wires disappeared into the interior over the first
crest behind the town. Then a full moon came up over the fuzzy hills,
lending a false beauty to many a commonplace old house-wall, restoring
the romance to the heaped-up town, and flooding the world with a silver
sheen long after we had steamed away in the direction of Trinidad.