TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT
AS his steamer drops anchor far out in the immense shallow of the Gulf
of Paria, the traveler cannot but realize that at last he has come to
the end of the West Indies and is encroaching upon the South American
continent. The “Trinity” of fuzzy hills, to-day called the “Three
Sisters,” for which Columbus named the island have quite another aspect
than the precipitous volcanic peaks of the Lesser Antilles. Plump,
placid, their vegetation tanned a light brown by the now truly tropical
sun, they have a strong family resemblance to the mountains of Venezuela
hazily looming into the sky back across the Bocas. Fog, unknown among
the stepping-stones to the north, hangs like wet wool over all the
lowlands, along the edge of the bay. The trade wind that has never
failed on the long journey south has given place to an enervating
breathlessness; by seven in the morning the sun is already cruelly
beating down; instead of the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the
vast expanse of harbor has the drab, lifeless color of a faded brown
carpet. Sail-boats, their sails limply aslack as they await the signal
to come and carry off the steamer’s cargo, give the scene a
half-Oriental aspect that recalls the southern coast of China.
There is little, indeed, to excite the senses as the crowded launch
plows for half an hour toward the uninviting shore. Seen from the
harbor, Port of Spain, with its long straight line of wharves and
warehouses, looks dismal in the extreme, especially to those who have
left beautiful St. Georges of Grenada the evening before. Yet from the
moment of landing one has the feeling of having gotten somewhere at
last. The second in size and the most prosperous of the British West
Indies may be less beautiful than the scattered toy-lands bordering the
Caribbean, but a glance suffices to prove it far more progressive.
Deceived by its featureless appearance from the sea, the traveler is
little short of astounded to find Port of Spain an extensive city, the
first real city south of Porto Rico, with a beauty of its own
unsuggested from the harbor. Spread over an immense plain sloping ever
so slightly toward the sea, with wide, right-angled, perfect asphalt
streets, electric-cars as up-to-date as those of any American city
covering it in every direction, and having most of the conveniences of
modern times, it bears little resemblance to the backward, if more
picturesque, “capitals” of the string of tiny islands to the north. The
insignificant “Puerto de los Españoles,” which the English found here
when they captured the island a mere century and a quarter ago, was
burned to the ground in 1808; another conflagration swept it in 1895, so
that the city of to-day has a sprightly, new-built aspect, despite the
comparative flimsiness of its mainly wooden buildings. There are
numerous imposing structures of brick and stone, too, along its broad
streets, and many splendid residences in the suburbs stretching from the
bright and ample business section to the foot of the encircling hills.
Long before he reaches these, however, the visitor is sure to be struck
by the astonishing variety of types that make up the population. Unlike
that of the smaller islands, the development of Trinidad came mainly
after African slavery was beginning to be frowned upon, and though the
negro element of its population is large, the monotony of flat noses and
black skins is broken by an equal number of other racial
characteristics. Large numbers of Chinese workmen were imported in the
middle of the last century; Hindu coolies, indentured for five years,
were introduced in 1839, and though the Government of India has recently
forbidden this species of servitude, fully one third of the inhabitants
are East Indians or their more or less full-blooded descendants. Toward
the end of the eighteenth century large numbers of French refugees took
up their residence in Trinidad, and the island to-day has more
inhabitants of this race than any of the West Indies not under French
rule. Many of the plantation-owners are of this stock, improvident
fellows, if one may believe the rumors afloat, who mortgage their
estates when times are hard. Then, instead of paying their debts when
the price of sugar and cacao make them temporarily rich, they go to
Europe “on a tear.” Martinique and Guadeloupe have also sent their share
of laborers, and there are sections of Trinidad in which the negroes are
as apt to speak French as English. Portuguese, fleeing persecution in
Madeira, added to this heterogeneous throng, while Venezuelans are
constantly drifting across the Bocas to increase the helter-skelter of
races that makes up the island’s present population.
All this mixture may be seen in a single block of Port of Spain. Here
the stroller passes a wide-open, unfurnished room where turbanned Hindus
squat on their heels on the bare floor, some with long shovel-beards
through which they run their thin, oily fingers, some in the act of
getting their peculiar hair-cuts, nearly all of them smoking their
curious tree-shaped pipes, all of them chattering their dialects in the
rather effeminate voices of their race. On the sidewalk outside are
their women, in gold nose-rings varying in size from mere buttons to
hoops which flap against a cheek as they walk, silver bracelets from
wrists to elbows, anklets clinking above their bare feet, the lobes of
their ears loaded down with several chain-links, as well as earrings,
their bare upper arms protruding from the colorful cheap shrouds in
which they wrap themselves, a corner of it thrown over their bare heads.
There are wide diversities of type, even of this one race. Here a group
of Madrassis, several degrees blacker than the others, is stretched out
on another unswept floor, there a Bengalee squats in a doorway arranging
his straight black hair with a wooden comb. Mohammedans and Brahmins,
sworn enemies throughout the island as at home, pass each other without
a sign of recognition. Men of different castes mingle but slightly,
despite the broadening influence of foreign travel; they have one and
all lost caste by crossing the sea, but all in equal proportion, so that
their relative standing remains the same. The influence of their new
environment has affected them in varying degrees. Two men alike enough
in features to be brothers, the one in an elaborate turban, loose silky
blouse, and a flowing white mass of cloth hitched together between his
legs in lieu of trousers, the other in a khaki suit and a Wild West felt
hat, stand talking together in Hindustanee. Women in nose-rings,
bracelets, and massive silver necklaces weighing several pounds are
sometimes garbed in hat, shirt-waist, and skirt, sometimes even in low
shoes with silver anklets above them.
Next door to these groups, or alternating between them, is a family of
the same slovenly, thick-tongued, jolly negroes who overrun all the West
Indies. The difference in color between these and the Hindus, even the
swarthy Madrassis, is striking; the one is done in charcoal, the other
in oil colors. As great is the contrast between the coarse features of
the Africans and those of the East Indians, so finely modeled that they
might be taken for Caucasians, except for their mahogany complexions.
Even in manners the two races are widely separated. While the negro is
forward, fawningly aggressive, occasionally insolent, the Hindus have a
detached air which causes them never to intrude upon the passer-by, even
to the extent of a glance. They might be blind in so far as any evidence
of attention to the other races about them goes. Abutting the negro
residence is perhaps a two-story house with a long perpendicular
signboard in Chinese characters, a shop below, a residence above, with
many curious Celestial touches. Then comes a building placarded in
Spanish, “Venezuelans very welcome,” where not a word of English is
spoken by the whole swarming family. On down the street stretch all
manner of queer mixtures of customs, costumes, races, language, end
names. Sing How Can keeps a provision shop next to Diogenes Brathwaite’s
“Rum Parlor,” flanked on the other side by Rahman Singh, the barber, who
in his turn is shut in by the leather sandal factory of Pedro Vialva.
Women in the striking costume of the French islands stroll past with a
graceful, dignified carriage; a man in a red fez pauses to talk to a man
with a veritable cloth-shop wound about his head. Negro Beau Brummels
speaking a laboriously learned English with an amusing accent, stately
black policemen in spotless white jackets and helmets and those enormous
shoes, shining like the proverbial “nigger’s heel,” worn by all British
negroes in uniform, solemnly swinging their swagger-sticks with what
suggests the wisdom of the ages until a chance question discloses how
stupid they are under their impressive and patronizingly polite manner;
now and then a disgruntled Venezuelan general whom Castro or Gomez has
forced to seek an asylum under the Union Jack; a pair of sallow
shopkeepers sputtering their nasal Portuguese—all mingle together in the
passing throng. Then there are intermixtures of all these divergent
elements, mainly of the younger generation—a negro boy with almond eyes,
a youth who looks like a Hindu and a Chinaman, but is really neither, a
flock of children with unusually coarse East Indian features and woolly
hair playing about a one-room shop-residence the walls of which are
papered negro-fashion with clippings from illustrated newspapers;
farther on a Portuguese rum-seller with a mulatto baby on his knee; a
few types who look like conglomerations of all the other races, until
their family trees must sound like cocktail recipes. Both the Chinese
and the Hindu residents of Trinidad are thrifty; many of them are
well-to-do, for the former have indefatigable diligence in their favor,
and the latter, who neither gamble nor steal, have no very serious
faults, except the tendency to carve up their unfaithful wives. But
there are failures among both races, even in this virgin island.
Outcasts who were once Hindu or Chinese, sunk now to indescribable filth
and raggedness, slink about with an eye open for a stray crust or
cigarette butt. Under the _saman_ trees in Marine Square East Indian
derelicts dressed in nothing but a clout, a ragged jacket sometimes
dropped in a vermin-infested heap beside them, are sleeping soundly on
the stone pavement upon which white men, sipping their cocktails in the
Union Club, look down as placidly as if they were gazing out the windows
along Piccadilly.
[Illustration: The turn-out of most Barbadians]
[Illustration: A Barbadian windmill]
[Illustration: Two Hindus of Trinidad]
Modern street-cars carry this racial hash, or as much of it as can
afford to ride, about the well-paved city and its shady suburbs.
Single car-tickets cost six cents, but a strip of six may be had for a
shilling. So many citizens are unable to invest this latter sum all at
once, however, that numerous shopkeepers add to their profits by
selling the strip tickets at five cents each. Port of Spain has
perhaps the finest pair of lungs of any city of its size in the world.
Beyond the business section is an immense savanna, smooth as a
billiard-table—magnificent, indeed, it seems to the traveler who has
seen no really level open ground for weeks—called Queen’s Park. Here
graze large herds of cattle, half Oriental, too, like the people.
There is ample playground left, too, for all the city’s population. In
the afternoon, particularly of a Saturday, it presents a vast expanse
of pastimes seldom seen in the tropics. The warning cry of “Fore!”
frequently startles the mere stroller, only to have his changed course
bring him into a cluster of schoolboys shrilly cheering the prowess of
their respective teams. The game which outdoes all others in
popularity is that to the American incredibly stupid one of cricket,
which rages—or should one say languishes?—on every hand,
notwithstanding the fact that Trinidad is within ten degrees of the
equator. Nor is it monopolized by the better classes, for every group
of ragged urchins who can scrape together enough to get balls,
wickets, and that canoe-paddle the English call a “bat” takes turns in
loping back and forth across the grass, to what end the scorer knows.
If there is a color-line on the savanna, it is between the few pure
whites, many of them Englishmen who have “come out” within the present
century and brought all the unconscious snobbishness of their own
island with them, and the _olla podrida_ of all the other races. Among
the latter the lines are social, rather than racial, so that
Hindu-mulatto-Chinese youths, leaning on their canes, gaze with
scornful indifference upon other youths of similar labyrinthian
parentage whom chance has not raised to the dignity of annexing
collars to their shirts. But there is room enough for all on the
immense savanna.
Here and there it is dotted with huge, spreading trees, which grow more
thickly in the residential section surrounding it. The original
inhabitants called the island “Iëre,” or “Caïri,” meaning the “land of
humming-birds.” It is still that, but it is also the land of magnificent
trees and the land of asphalt. One may doubt whether any fragment of the
globe has so high a percentage of perfect streets and roads—no wonder,
surely, when it may have its asphalt in unlimited quantities for the
mere digging—and the giants of the forest which everywhere spread their
canopies give its rather placid landscape a beauty which makes up for
its lack of ruggedness. Behind Queen’s Park is a delightfully informal
botanical garden in the middle of which sits the massive stone residence
of the governor. Several times a week a band concert is given on his
front lawn, a formality bearing slight resemblance to the Sunday-night
gathering in a Spanish-American plaza. It takes place in the afternoon
and is attended only by the élite, though this does not by any means
confine it to Caucasian residents, for there are many others, at least
of the island-born Chinese and Hindus and their intermixtures, who count
themselves in this category, while negro and East Indian nursemaids are
constantly pursuing their overdressed charges across the noiseless
greensward. Any evidence of human interest is sternly suppressed in the
staid and orderly gathering. They sit like automatons on their scattered
chairs and benches, no one ever committing the faux pas of speaking
above a whisper. Woe betide the mere American who dares address himself
to a stranger, for British snobbery reaches its zenith in Trinidad, and
the open-handed hospitality of Barbados is painfully conspicuous by its
absence.
Trim lawns bordered with roses, hibiscus, poinsettia, variegated
crotons, and a host of other brilliant-foliaged plants surround the
homelike, though sometimes overdecorated, residences of the generously
shaded suburbs. Over the verandas hang mantles of pink coronella, violet
thumbergia, red bougainvillea, often interlacing, always a mass of
bloom, at least in this summer month of April. Maidenhair ferns line the
steps leading to the portico, rare orchids cling to the mammoth branches
of the spreading trees, the air is sweetly fragrant with the odors of
cape jasmine and the persistent patchouli. With sunset cigales,
tree-toads, and a host of tropical insects begin to chirrup their
nightly chorus—an improvement on the flocks of crowing roosters that
make the whole night hideous in the town itself, not only in Port of
Spain, but throughout the West Indies.
A magistrate’s court is an amusing scene in any of the Antilles; it is
doubly so in the racial whirlpool of Trinidad. An English “leftenant,”
assigned the task of prosecuting for the crown, but who never once
opened his mouth, was the only white man present on the morning I
visited this farcical melodrama. A mulatto magistrate whose offensive
pride of position stuck out on him like a sore thumb held the center of
the spotlight. Never did he let pass an opportunity to inflict the
crudest of witticisms, the most stupid of sarcasm on prisoners and
witnesses alike. In the language of English courts he was known as “Your
Worship,” a title by which even white men are frequently compelled to
address those of his class in the British West Indies, where the law
knows no color-line. A group of colored reporters sat below him in the
customary railed enclosure, jotting down his every burst of alleged wit
for the delectation of their next morning’s readers, who would be
regaled with such extraordinary moral truths as “His Worship told the
defendant that instead of living off his mother and sister he should go
and do some honest work to support them and himself,” or “His Worship
remarked that the witness seemed to be afflicted with a clogging of his
usually no doubt brilliant mental processes.” Beyond the rail was packed
the black audience that is never lacking at these popular entertainments
in the British West Indies.
The prisoners and the two pedestal-shod black policemen on either side
of them, stood stiffly at attention just outside the rail during all the
trial. Witnesses assumed a similar posture in a kind of pulpit, took the
oath by kissing a dirty dog-eared Bible—even though they were Hindus or
Chinese—and submitted themselves to “His Worship’s” caustic sarcasm. The
mere fact that the majority of them were patently and clumsily lying
from beginning to end of their testimony did not appear to arouse a
flicker of surprise in the minds of magistrate, the lawyers of like
color, or the open-mouthed audience. The testimony in each case was
laboriously written down in longhand by a dashingly attired mulatto
clerk, though evidently not word for word, for these fell too fast and
furiously to be caught in full. The accused was always given permission
to cross-examine the witnesses, with the result that a vociferous
quarrel frequently enlivened the proceedings. The majority of cases were
petty in the extreme, matters which in most countries would have been
settled out of court with a slap or a swift kick. But nothing so pleases
the British West Indian, at least of the masses, as a chance to appear
in the conspicuous rôle of plaintiff, or even as witness. One black
fellow had charged another with calling his wife a “cat.” “His Worship”
found the case a source of unlimited platitudes before he dismissed it
by adding five shillings to the crown’s resources. A fat negress accused
a long and scrawny one of offering to “box me face,” and as British West
Indian law takes account of threats, the lanky defendant was separated
from her week’s earnings, though she scored high with the audience by
proving that the accuser had also used threatening language, thereby
subjecting her to a similar financial disaster.
Corporal punishment is still in vogue in the British Antilles. Two negro
boys had been playing marbles, when one struck the other with a stick.
“His Worship” ordered the defendant to receive ten strokes with a
tamarind rod, to be administered by a member of the police force. The
order was immediately executed in a back room to which casual spectators
were not admitted. To judge from the shrieks that arose from it, the
punishment was genuine, but they were probably designed to reach the
magistrate’s ear, for when I put an inquiry to the big black chastiser
some time later, he replied with a grin, “Oh, not too hard; perhaps a
tingle or two at the end jes’ to make him remember.” Even adults are not
always spared bodily reminders. A vicious looking negro with a hint of
Chinese ancestry who was convicted for the fourth time of thieving was
sentenced to one year at hard labor and six lashes with the “cat.” But
as this punishment was inflicted at the general prison, there was no
means of learning how thoroughly the implement was wielded.
Though a Chinese and a Hindu interpreter were present, all the
witnesses, happening to be youthful and evidently born in the colony,
spoke perfect English—as it is spoken in Trinidad. It was somehow
incongruous to hear a Hindu woman in her silken shroud and a small
cartload of jewelry burst forth, as soon as she had kissed the unsavory
Bible with apparent fervor, in the negro-British dialect and contradict
the assertions of the accused with some such rejoinder as “Whatyer
tahlk, mahn, whatcher tahlk?” Those surprises are constantly being
sprung on the visitor to Trinidad, however, for notwithstanding the
composite of races and the fact that English was not introduced into the
island until 1815, it is decidedly the prevailing language. It is a
common experience to hear a group that is chattering in Hindustanee
suddenly change to British slang, or to turn and find that the
discussion of the latest cricket match in the broad-vowelled jargon of
the British West Indian negro is between a Chinese and a Hindu youth,
both dressed in the latest European fashion. Natives of the islands
assert that “the English of a typical Trinidadian is probably as
strongly in contrast to that of a typical Barbadian as the language of
any two parts of the British Empire.” But to the casual visitor they
sound much alike, and far removed from our own tongue. We might readily
understand the expression “I well glad de young mahn acquit,” but few of
us would recognize that “Don’t let he break me, sir,” means “Do not give
him a job after refusing it to me.” An incensed motorman cried out to a
Chinese-Hindu negro hackman who was impeding his progress, “Why y’u don’
go home wid dis cyart ef y’u can’ drive et?” to which came the placid
reply, “Why you vex, mahn? Every victoria follow he own wheels.” As in
the French islands, a banana is called a “fig” in Trinidad, while walls
are everywhere decorated with the warning “Stick no Bills.”
Speaking of bills of another sort, those of the smaller denominations
are badly needed in the British islands. With the exception of Jamaica,
they reckon their money in dollars and cents, but they are West Indian
dollars, worth four shillings and two pence each and following the
English pound in its rise or fall. Notes of five dollars are issued by
the Colonial Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada, but with the exception
of Trinidad and its dependency, Tobago, the government of which issues
one- and two-dollar bills, there is no local small change, and the
already overburdened visitor to these tropical climes must load himself
down with a double handful of English silver and mammoth coppers each
time he breaks a five-dollar bill. To add to his struggles with the
clumsy British monetary system, prices are given in cents, when there
are no cents. Small articles in the shops are tagged 24c, 48c, 72c, and
so on, never 25c, 50c, or 75c, which is easy enough, for those are the
local terms for one, two, or three shillings. But it is not so simple
for the heated and hurried stranger to calculate that the euphonism
“thirty-nine cents” means a shilling, a sixpence, a penny, and a
“ha’penny,” and to find the real significance of a demand for $5.35
requires either a pencil and paper or long practice in mental
arithmetic. Perhaps the least fatiguing method is to spread on the
counter the whole contents of one bulging pocket and trust to the
clerk’s honesty—except that he, too, even if he is trustworthy, is apt
to be weak in mental arithmetic. The fall in the value of the pound
sterling following the war forced the Trinidad government to enact a new
ordinance forbidding “the melting down of silver coins current in the
colony, the keeping possession of more silver than is needed for current
expenses, or the buying or offering to buy silver coins at more than
their face value.” The drop in exchange had given the metal more worth
than the coins themselves, and the Hindu custom of turning the family
wealth into bracelets and anklets for the women was threatening to make
small financial transactions impossible.
Marital felicity is by no means universal in Trinidad, if one may judge
from the columns of warnings to the public in its newspapers. In a
single issue may be found a score of insertions testifying to this
impression and to the mixture of races:
The Public is hereby notified that I will not be responsible for any
debt or debts contracted by my wife, Daisy Benjamin, she having left
my house and protection.
IZAKIAH BENJAMIN,
Petit Valley, Diego Martin.
The Public is hereby notified that I will not hold myself
responsible for any debts contracted by my wife Eparaih, she being
no longer under my protection and care.
His
RAMDOW X
Mark
Bejucal, Caroni.
Witness to Mark: SANTIAGO WILSON.
The Public is hereby notified that I will no longer be responsible
for the debts of my wife, Yew Chin, she having left my house and
protection without any just cause.
LEE WO SING,
Rock River Road, Penal.
Occasionally the other side of the house is heard from:
The Public are hereby warned that the undersigned will not be
responsible for any debts contracted by my husband, Emmanuel Paul,
as we are no longer associated as husband and wife.
MARGARET PAUL,
Lance Noir, Toco.
The Spanish influence may be seen in the custom of doctors and dentists
advertising “Lady in Attendance,” to add reassurance to their female
clientele.
* * * * *
The Government of Trinidad runs an excellent railway and coast steamer
service. The cars are of three classes, with cross-seats, as in Europe,
though with a few compartment partitions. Shades resembling cap-visors
project over the windows, and the trains are as clean and orderly as
those of Porto Rico. First class is small and exclusive, occupying only
one third of a coach, and the rare traveler in it is apt to be taken for
an important government official and saluted by all railway employees
and stared at with envy and astonishment by the “garden” variety of
voyagers. Even the few white citizens usually travel second-class,
though this is by no means free from African and Asiatic mixtures. The
bulk of the train is made up of third-class coaches, their hard wooden
benches crowded with every possible combination of negro, Hindu,
Chinese, Venezuelan, Portuguese, and French blood, with an occasional
poor white, and presents a truly cosmopolitan conglomeration of garb and
tongue. Employees are as varied in origin. A big-bearded “collector,” or
station-agent, with Hindu features which seem strangely out of place
under his placarded cap, rebukes a Chinese-Hindu passenger in the
amusing “English” of the West Indies, then slaps a jet black “head
guard” on the back with a “How goes?” and gets the reply, “Oh, getting
on poc’ á poc’.” In addition to these vigilant ticket-seekers, there are
inspectors whose official caps read “Head Examiner,” a title which more
than one stranger has misconstrued.
Trains are frequent. They are drawn by large oil-burning Montreal
engines with white “drivers” and set forth from Port of Spain, like our
own fliers, over a roadbed in excellent condition for the first twenty
miles or more. Beyond that, as the line breaks up into its several
branches, the engines get smaller and smaller; the engineers become
mulattoes, then blacks, with only a tropical sense of the value of time;
the tracks are more and more congested with train-loads of cane in the
cutting season, with the result that a well-arranged time-table is often
disrupted. Swampy stretches of mangroves to the right and left flank the
first few miles. Groups of prisoners, in yellow, white, or
orange-colored caps, according to whether they are misdemeanants,
felons, or “long-timers,” are turning some of these into solid ground.
Cocoanut plantations soon supersede the swamps, to be in turn replaced
by cane, as flat lands spread farther and farther away on the left to
the base of high hills or low mountains rather arid in appearance,
despite the density of their brush and forest, red trails here and there
climbing their wooded flanks.
Ten minutes out the considerable town of San Juan imposes the first
halt, its platform seething with a multi-colored throng struggling with
every manner of queer luggage. A few miles farther on, at the base of El
Tucuche, the highest peak of Trinidad, is the old Spanish capital of the
island, San José de Oruña, now called St. Joseph. Unlike the British,
the conquistadores preferred to build their principal towns some miles
back from the sea. It did them little good in this case, however, for
St. Joseph was burned to the ground by that prince of buccaneers, Sir
Walter Raleigh, and here the Spanish governor, Chacón, surrendered the
island to a superior British force in 1797 without a fight, which may be
one of the reasons why a street of the old capital is named for him. St.
Joseph lies a bit up hill from the station, with a magnificent view of
the vast Caroni plain, a floor-flat _vega_ dense with vegetation, dotted
with villages, and here and there the stacks of sugar-mills, called
_usines_ in Trinidad. Scattered, somewhat hilly, with the languid,
capacious air of a village, the old capital is interesting to-day for
its flora and its historical reminiscences. Veritable grandfathers of
trees, with long beards, their immense branches thickly grown with
orchids and other flowering parasites, shade it at every hour of the
day. Humming-birds flit in and out among its masses of red and purple
bougainvillea. The trade wind, which seldom reaches Port of Spain,
sweeps down through a break in the brownish-green hills which hem the
former capital in; if it is uncomfortably hot at noonday, it is because
all Trinidad is aware of its proximity to the equator. Of Spanish ruins
it has none, but there are numerous Venezuelan inhabitants, and the
Castilian tongue and customs have to some extent survived. Here, too,
are strange interminglings of races and tongues—“El Toro Store” on
Piccadilly Street; a rum-shop called “The Trinidadians’ Delight” on
Buena Vista Street. In its dry and stony cemetery are monuments with
Chinese, Spanish, Hindu, French and English names, some of the last all
too evidently those of negroes.
The newspapers of Trinidad announced a “Big Field Day and Race meeting”
at Tunapuna, a few miles beyond St. Joseph, on Easter Monday. Having
lived through five British holidays in the brief ten days since our
landing in Barbados, we ventured to hope that here might be something
less deadly dull. Had we paused to reflect, we should have known that
white people did not attend these popular festivities. The horror on the
face of an English native to whom we mentioned our destination might
have given us the same information, had we not taken it to be an
expression of pain at being addressed without a formal introduction.
Tunapuna is as Hindu as St. Joseph is Spanish. The domes, or, more
exactly, spheres of a white Brahmin temple bulk high above its low
houses. These are little mud-plastered houses, for the most part, with
dents poked in their walls before they have dried, by way of decoration,
which seem to be direct importations from India. The broad asphalt
highway bisecting the town was as seething a stream of humanity as the
Great Trunk Road. Hindus in their anklets and toe-rings, their clanking
bracelets and light-colored flowing garments, made up the bulk of the
throng, with here and there a Venezuelan driving a pack-laden donkey to
give contrast to the picture. If the place had a European section, it
eluded our attention; it looked like a village of India in which a few
African settlers had taken up their residence.
The “field day” was held on a broad level space in the center of town.
Constant streams of vari-colored Trinidadians, all clad in their most
gasp-provoking holiday attire, poured into it from special trains that
arrived in close succession. A bandstand covered with palm-leaves had
been erected for the higher social orders, but even this was no place
for a white spectator who did not care to arouse conspicuous attention.
There were perhaps half a dozen white men, all British soldiers,
scattered through the hilarious throng, but not a woman of her own race
to keep Rachel in countenance. Of near-whites there was no scarcity, all
of them affecting the haughty English manner in the vain hope of
concealing the African in their family wood-pile. Some of the mixtures
of race, language, and custom were incredible. Next to us sat a woman
who appeared to be half Hindu and half English, who spoke Spanish, and
who carried a quadroon baby with straw-colored hair and almond-shaped
blue eyes. We awarded her the palm for human conglomeration, but there
were many more who could have run her a close race.
The contests consisted mainly of bicycle races, an uproarious hubbub
invariably breaking out among the motley judges and officials after each
of them, causing great delay before the shotgun which served as starting
pistol set the stage for a new controversy. In view of the fact that the
contestants were vari-colored youths who probably lived in unpainted
shanties and wore shoes only on Sundays, the tableful of prizes beside
us was amusing. Among them we noted a gold-plated jewel-box, a cut-glass
fruit-dish, an ice-cream freezer, a gold-scrolled liqueur set, a
hatstand of gilt-tipped ox-horns, two manicure sets, a pair of marble
horses, and several overdecorated small clocks. One of the many dandies
who were continually displaying their graces to the feminine portion of
the stand, under the pretense of finding the open space before it more
comfortable than the chairs, protested that the prizes “lacked show.” Up
to that moment that had seemed to us the one thing they did not lack.
This particular individual, a mulatto with a touch of Chinese, wore a
tweed coat and white flannel trousers, an artificial daisy in his
buttonhole, a brown necktie embroidered at the top with flowers and at
the bottom with the word “Peace” in large letters, and carried a
riding-crop. Those of his companions who were not armed with this latter
sign of field-officer rank all bore canes. One of them flaunted a cravat
decorated with the flags of all the Allies. The majority frequently
removed their hats, regardless of the blazing sunshine, quite evidently
for the purpose of showing that their hair was not curly, an improvement
for which several quite evidently had to thank “Mme. Walker’s Peerless
Remedies.” An inattentive spectator might have concluded from the wagers
shouted back and forth among them at the beginning of each race that
they were persons of unlimited wealth, but it was noticeable that very
little money actually changed hands. Here, too, the lines of demarkation
were social, rather than racial. A Hindu youth dressed in the latest
imitation of London fashion might call across the compound to his
equally ornate Chinese friend, “Heh, Lee! Come down, mahn!” but he gave
no sign of seeing the East Indian in khaki and a battered felt hat who
sold peanuts in tiny measures cleverly arranged so that most of the nuts
stuck to the bottom when they were upturned in the purchaser’s hand.
* * * * *
Beyond Tunapuna next day other Hindus in the loose garb of their
homeland were clawing about the rice blades in their little
paddy-fields, cut up into small squares by low dikes. Wattled huts, with
East Indians squatted on their heels in the bare, hard-trodden spaces
before them, intermingled with wooden shanties, sometimes with lace
curtains at the glassless windows, shanties fairly bursting with their
swarming negro families. Tall, slender flagpoles from which flew little
red flags, some of them already bleached white, showed where goats had
been sacrificed in the frequent ceremonies of the Brahmin inhabitants.
Little white Hindu temples alternated with small negro churches. Through
Tacarigua, with its clusters of buildings flung far up the red-scarred
hillsides, Arouca, Dabadie, the procession of huts and cabins continued.
Almost without exception they were unpainted and unadorned with anything
but the barest necessities, for Trinidad, too, labors under the
discouraging “improvement tax.”
Arima, the last settlement of the aborigines before they disappeared
from the island as a race, spreads over a slightly elevated plateau, its
wide streets and well separated houses giving an impression of unlimited
elbow-room, its huge trees and flowery shrubbery making up for its
drygoods-box style of architecture. Here is Trinidad’s chief racetrack,
enclosing a grassy playground that almost rivals Port of Spain’s
savanna, but the incessant staring of the inhabitants suggests that
white men are ordinarily rare sights in this important cacao center, as
they are in many sections of the island.
Beyond Arima the hills die out and for miles the track is walled by
uncultivated brush or virgin forests, with only a rare frontier-like
village and a few young cacao plantations sheltered from the sun by the
_bois immortel_, or what Spaniards call _madre del cacao_. Hindus are
more numerous in this region than negroes. The railway ends at the
thriving town of Sangre Grande, though it hopes soon to push on to the
east coast. Chinese merchants and the resultant half-breeds are
unusually numerous; Hindu women in full metallic regalia, sitting in
buggies like farmers’ wives in our western prairie towns, some of them
smoking little Irish-looking clay pipes, and silversmiths of the same
race, naked but for a clout, plying their trade in back alleys, are
among the sights of the place.
The Ford mail-and-passenger bus in which I continued my journey was
driven by a youth, whose grandparents were respectively Chinese, Hindu,
negro, and white. The first had given him an emotionless countenance and
a strict attention to business, the second a slender, almost girlish
form and a silky complexion, the third wavy hair and an explosive
laughter, and the last frequent attacks of that haughty surliness so
common to mulattoes or quadroons. Among the passengers was a Hindu girl
of striking beauty. She spoke excellent English with a strong West
Indian accent, was tastefully and specklessly dressed in a Caucasian
waist, black silk skirt, and kid shoes, wore her silky black hair done
up in European fashion, and had the manners of an English débutante of
the sheltered class. Yet in her nose she wore two gold rings, her arms
gleamed with silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, about her neck was
a string of heavy gold coins, and a flowered silk wrap was flung about
her shoulders and head. Beside her sat a youth of the same race,
completely Europeanized in garb and manner. In front, separated from
this pair by one of the slow-witted, scornful negroes who filled most of
the two seats, was an East Indian in full white Hindu regalia,—a simple,
faintly purple turban, white caste marks across his forehead and in
front of his ears, and a string of black, seed-like beads about his
neck. Not once during the journey did he give a sign of recognition to
his Anglicized compatriots.
We snorted away along an asphalt highway bordered by large cacao
estates, passing many automobiles, some of them driven by Chinese and
Hindus, even through a great forest with many immense trees, their
branches laden with orchids and climbing vines. Except for one low ridge
the country was flat, with not even a suggestion of the rugged scenery
of most West Indian islands. Long hedges of hibiscus in full red bloom
lined the way through the considerable town of Matura, where negroes far
outranked the Hindus in numbers and Chinamen kept virtually all the
shops. Soon the landscape turned to cocoanut plantations, the now narrow
road mounted somewhat, and the Atlantic spread out before us. But it was
shallow and yellowish, not at all like the sea-lashed east coasts of
Barbados or Dominica, the shores of its many bays and indentations low
and heavily wooded, a hazy clump of hills stretching far away into the
south. Then came a cluster of ridges and mounds of earth covered with
primeval forest, only little patches of which had been cleared to give
place to the most primitive, weather-beaten thatched huts. These were
scattered at long intervals along the way and all inhabited by negroes,
the other races evidently finding the region too undeveloped for their
more civilized taste. Nineteen miles from Sangre Grande the bus halted
at a cluster of hovels on Balandra Bay, the road, which pushes on to the
northeast point of the island, being impassable for vehicles.
From that point one may see the important island of Tobago, the chief of
Trinidad’s dependencies and the most recent of England’s possessions in
the West Indies. It is reputed to have been the most fiercely contested
bit of ground in the western hemisphere, having been constantly disputed
by the French, Spanish, and English, until it finally fell to the latter
in 1803. To this day it is surrounded by the ruins of old forts. French
names still survive in its capital, Scarborough, and the splendid system
of roads it once boasted have been allowed to go back to bush under
British rule. In 1889 it was annexed to Trinidad, though it retains its
own elective financial board. Like many of the British West Indies,
Tobago has seen the insolence and aggressiveness of its negroes greatly
increased by the example of those who were debauched in France, and was
forced to suppress one riot with considerable bloodshed. The island may
be reached weekly by government steamer from Port of Spain.
* * * * *
At St. Joseph the more important branch of the railway turns south and,
sending an offshoot through a fertile cacao district and the oil regions
about Tabaquite to Rio Claro, follows the coast of the Gulf of Paria to
the edge of the southern chain of hills. A so-called express train
connects the capital with the metropolis of the south once a week, but
on account of the English “staff system” in vogue, its speed is
frequently checked and sophisticated passengers get on or off as it
slows up at each station to exchange the iron hoop which is the
engineer’s passport for the ensuing section. Broad, flat _vegas_ spread
on either hand beyond the old Spanish capital, the northern range of
hills withdrawing to the edge of the horizon. Great pastures with huge
spreading trees, some of them gay with blossoms, and thick clumps of
bamboo alternate with extensive cane-fields, most of them covered with
the young shoots after the recent cutting in this April season. Here and
there stands a large _usine_, or sugar-mill, with long rows of coolie
dwellings, some housing a dozen families side by side, while outside the
estate are crowded together the tin-roofed shacks of the negro and Hindu
workmen who prefer to house themselves, rather than submit to the
exacting sanitary rules of the company. The fields that are still uncut
have those fat yellow canes with long joints that are the joy of the
sugar grower, for the Caroni plain is famed for its fertility. Humped
Indian bulls and their tropic-defying offspring dot the pastures and
corrals. From Canupia a road leads to Alligator Village, where Hindus
may be seen standing naked and motionless on their flimsy little rafts
made of woven palm-fronds catching _cascadura_, the choicest delicacy of
Trinidad. The natives have a saying that whoever tastes the flesh of
this cross between a turtle and a lizard must return to end his days in
the island.
Cacao plantations, shaded by forests of high trees, gradually replace
the cane-fields as the train speeds southward. Parasites and climbing
lianas, that death-dealing vine called _matapalo_ by the Spaniards and
“Scotch attorney” by the Trinidadians, which finally chokes to death the
tree that sustains it, usurping its heritage of nourishment, give the
forest wall the appearance of a great carelessly woven tapestry. Wattled
huts as primitive as those of Haiti, many of them of spreading cone
shape, thrust their thatched roofs above the vegetation, giving many a
vista a touch that carries the mind back to India. Chaguanas,
Carapichaima, Couva—the towns nearly all bear Spanish names—are
populous, though California has a mere handful of hovels. Near the last
the low wooded foothills of the central range begin to peer above the
flat cane and cacao lands to the left; then the train bursts suddenly
out on the edge of the gulf amid a flurry of cocoanut palms. Claxton’s
Bay and Point-à-Pierre again recall Trinidad’s mixture of tongues, and
at length the staff-hampered “express” staggers into San Fernando.
The second city of Trinidad has but ten thousand inhabitants. It is
strewn over a clump of wooded knolls at the base of Naparima Hill,
rising six hundred feet above it. Its population is so overwhelmingly
East Indian that even the English residents are forced to learn
Hindustanee. “His Worship,” the mayor, is a Hindu; on certain days of
the week the visitor who strolls through its wide, asphalted streets
might easily fancy himself in a market city of central India. Such signs
as “Sultan Khan, Pawn Broker,” “Samaroo, Barber,” or “Jagai, Licensed to
Deal in Cacao and Licenseable Produce” are triply as numerous as the
shops bearing such patently negro mottoes as “To Trust is to Burst.”
A toy train runs from San Fernando through rolling fields of cane to
Prince’s Town, which name it adopted in honor of a visit long years ago
by the present king and his brother. The “staffs” in this case are
human. Every mile or less the engineer halts to take on board from a
kind of sentry-box a uniformed negro wearing a bright red cap—which, no
doubt, makes it possible to reduce his wages by half—stenciled with the
number of the section for which he is responsible. Prince’s Town lies in
the Naparima plain, the second of Trinidad’s great fertile _vegas_; or
one may visit another portion of it by continuing to the end of the main
line. On the way are Débé, almost wholly a Hindu town, with a stream of
many castes pouring down its highway, and Penal, with its miles of Hindu
vegetable gardens and its mud-and-reed huts that seem to have been
transported direct from India. Then comes a long run through an almost
uninhabited wilderness, though with considerable cacao on its low,
jungle-like hills, and finally Siparia, a rapidly growing frontier
village where busses and automobiles are waiting to carry travelers to
the slightly developed southern side of the island.
As we raced back down the hill again my hitherto private first-class
compartment—no, I shall not divulge the secret of why I chanced to be
displaying this sign of opulence and snobbishness—was invaded by the
first American I had met in Trinidad outside the capital. He was an
oil-driller from one of the newly developed fields. But though he had
been drawing three times the salary of a college professor, he had
“threw up the job because me an’ that there field-man didn’t hitch. He’s
only a Britisher, anyway.” What might have been a pleasant conversation
was disrupted by my new companion with such remarks as “Panama? Where’s
that? Up towards New Orleans?” “Hindus? Is them Hindus with rings in
their noses? I thought them was East Indians.” There is a saying in
Trinidad, as in many other parts of the world, that only fools or
Americans ride first-class. This man was both, for he was “afraid to go
second for fear my friends’ll see me an’ think I’m goin’ broke”—an
impression that would not have been at fault, as he had “blowed” his
princely wages as fast as he earned them.
* * * * *
The favorite excursion from Port of Spain is that by government steamer
through the Bocas Islands, which are scattered along the northwestern
horn of Trinidad. First comes a cluster of jagged rocks with a few large
trees, called Five Islands, government-owned and occupied by from one to
three houses each, which may be rented by the week when they are not in
use as quarantine stations. On one of them is the principal prison of
the colony, and convicts in charge of a guard row out for the supplies
and mail from town. Indeed, the journey is a constant succession of
rowboat parties, not to say mishaps, for it is frequently blowing a gale
about the Bocas, and as the steamer nowhere ventures close to shore,
passengers and groceries are often subjected to thorough duckings, if
nothing worse. The larger islands are privately owned, and dotted with
pretentious “summer” homes of those who cannot spend the hottest months
in Grenada or Barbados. An entire bay of one of them belongs to the son
of the inventor of one of Trinidad’s most famous products, “Angostura
Bitters.” I am not in a position to divulge the secret of its
manufacture, beyond stating that it contains rum, mace, nutmeg, and
powdered orange skins, which latter detail accounts for the fact that
the market-women of Port of Spain pare their oranges as we do an apple
and that the stone fences of the town are always littered with
orange-peelings drying in the sun.
Monos Island lies beyond the mainland, and between that and the last and
largest, rejoicing in the name of Chacachacare, are several _bocas_, or
channels, through which pass steamers touching at Trinidad. The colony
was in an uproar at the time of our visit because the government had
proposed to turn Chaca—but why repeat it all?—over to the lepers. Thanks
largely to its Hindu population, Trinidad has more than its share of
these sufferers, and though they are “isolated” in an asylum on the
mainland or in their own homes, they are frequently found mingling with
holiday throngs. Trinidadians protested against advertising the
prevalence of leprosy by housing the invalids on the most conspicuous
part of the colony, and the charge of graft was as freely bantered back
and forth as in our own merry land under similar conditions. From
Chacachacare one may see a great stretch of Venezuela across the
straits, the spur of the Andes on which sits Caracas rising higher and
higher into the sky and disappearing at length in the direction of lofty
Bogotá.
But to most strangers Trinidad has little meaning except as the home of
the “asphalt lake.” Strictly speaking, it is neither the one nor the
other, being rather a pitch deposit, but it would be foolish to quibble
over mere words. It is sufficient to know that the spot furnishes most
of the asphalt for the western hemisphere.
To reach it one must return to San Fernando by train and continue by
government steamer. This frequently flees before the ebbing tide and
anchors far out in the shallow, yellowish gulf until its passengers have
been rowed aboard, then turns southwest along a flat, uninteresting
coast. The pea-soup-colored sea swarms with jelly-fish that resemble
huge acorns in shape and color and on which whales come to feed at
certain seasons. Among them floats another species with long tendrils, a
mere touch of which leaves a sharply stinging sensation for hours
afterward. The steamer touches at half a dozen villages down the long
southern prong of Trinidad, rounding the point twice a week to Icacos,
reputed the largest cocoanut plantation in the world. It is owned by an
old Corsican who “came out” in his youth as a porter, and who, in the
words of the captain, “is of no class at all,” yet he has a mansion in
Port of Spain, several daughters married to French counts, and so much
money “he doesn’t know arithmetic enough to count it.”
But our interests are in the first port of call out of San Fernando. A
bit beyond the reddish town of La Brea (the Spanish word for pitch) a
very long pier with an ocean steamer at the far end of it and iron
buckets flying back and forth between it and the land, like a procession
of sea-gulls feeding their young, juts out into the gulf. Not so many
years ago all the population of this spot, called Brighton, lived on the
pier, the shore being famous for a fever that brought almost certain
death within two days. This completely disappeared, however, when
American concessionists turned the jungle into pasture land. The air is
full of pelicans, clumsily diving for fish or awaiting their turn for a
seat on the protruding jib boom of a wrecked schooner, along which
others sat as tightly crowded together as subway passengers in the
evening rush-hour.
[Illustration: Trinidad has many Hindu temples]
[Illustration: Very much of a lodge]
[Illustration: At the “Asphalt Lake”]
[Illustration: There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt
field]
We landed with misgiving, having often heard of “that terrible walk”
from the pier to the “lake.” No doubt it seems so to many a tourist,
being nearly ten minutes long up a very gentle slope by a perfect
macadam highway. Beside it buckets are constantly roaring past on
elevated cables, carrying pitch to the ship or returning for a new load
with an almost human air of preoccupation. The highway leads to the gate
of a yard with a mine-like reduction plant peopled with tar-smeared
negroes, immediately behind which opens out the “lake.”
The far-famed deposit is not much to look at. It is a slightly concave,
black patch of a hundred acres, with as definite shores as a lake of
water, surrounded by a Venezuelan landscape of scanty brush and low,
thirsty palms. To the left the black towers of half a dozen oil-wells
break the otherwise featureless horizon. About the surface of the hollow
several groups of negroes work leisurely. One in each group turns up
with every blow of his pick a black, porous lump of pitch averaging the
size of a market-basket; the others bear these away on their heads to
small cars on narrow tracks, along which they are pushed by hand to the
“factory.” That is all there is to it; an easier job for all concerned
would be hard to find. A trade wind sweeps almost constantly across the
field, the pitch is so light that the largest lump is hardly a burden,
from the nature of the case the pace is not fast, and the workers are so
constantly in sight that an overseer is hardly needed, nor piece-work
required. The men are paid eighty cents a day of ten hours, which seems
much to them and little to their employers, producing mutual
satisfaction. The work calls for no skill whatever; it is carried on in
the open air, with women venders of food and drink free to come and go;
on the side of the concessionists the deposit offers not even the
difficulty of transportation, being barely a mile from the ship,
furnishing its own material for the necessary roads, and virtually
inexhaustible. The holes dug during the day fill imperceptibly and are
gone by morning, the deepest one ever excavated having disappeared in
three days. Only a small fraction of the field is exploited, it could
easily keep all the ships of the world busy. Should it ever be
exhausted, there is a still larger deposit just across the bay in
Venezuela. In the slang of financial circles, “it is like finding it.”
The lake is soft underfoot, like a tar sidewalk in midsummer, the heels
sinking out of sight in a minute or two, and has a faint smell of
sulphur. In a few places it is not solid enough to sustain a man’s
weight, though children and the barefooted workmen scamper across it
anywhere at sight of a white visitor for the inevitable British West
Indian purpose of demanding “a penny, please, sir.” A crease remains
around each hole as it refills, some of these rolling under like the
edge of a rising mass of dough, and in these crevices, the rain gathers
in puddles of clear, though black-looking, water in which the
surrounding families do their washing. Only negroes are employed as
laborers; the twenty-five white men in the higher positions are nearly
all Americans, those with families housed in company bungalows on the
slope above the gulf, the bachelors in a company hotel. Most of the
pitch goes directly to the steamer, but as it is one-third water, and
royalties, duties, and transportation are paid by weight, a certain
proportion is boiled in vats in the “factory” and shipped in barrels
constructed on the spot. From the vat-platforms spreads out a vast
panorama, with San Fernando at the base of its lonely hill, Port of
Spain on its gently sloping plain, the entire Gulf of Paria, the Bocas
Islands, and the mountains of eastern Venezuela all in plain sight.
The pitch lake was known even in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, who
“payed” his vessels here during lulls in buccaneering, but it has been
exploited only during the last few decades. Three hundred thousands tons
have been shipped during a single year, the revenue to the Government of
Trinidad in 1912 being £63,453. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the
island has a much more prosperous air than its neighbors is that
millions have been paid into its treasury in royalties and duties from
its only “lake.” When a steamer is loading, buckets and negroes toil all
through the night in the glare of electric-lights. The barrels of the
refined product were first stowed on their sides, but as they flattened
out into a four hundred pound cube that could neither be rolled nor
lifted, they are now stood on end, tier after tier. The crude pitch
becomes a solid mass during the journey north, and must be dug up again
with picks when it reaches Perth Amboy.