GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES
There is a suggestion of the pathetic in the name by which the French
call their possessions in the New World—“L’Amérique Française.” It
recalls the days when the territory they held on the western hemisphere
was really worth that title, when Canada and Louisiana promised to grow
into a great French empire in the west, and nothing suggested that a
brief century would see their holdings reduced to a few fragments wedged
into the string of British islands that form the eastern boundary of the
Caribbean. The “French America” of to-day, except for Cayenne, a mere
penal colony backed by a tiny slice of unexplored South American
wilderness, consists of the minor islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique,
and half a dozen islets dependent on the former. It is far better
entitled to the more modest official name of “French Antilles.”
Guadeloupe—if I may be allowed an unpleasant comparison—is shaped like a
pair of lungs, the left one flat and low, the other expanded into
splendid mountain heights. They are really two islands separated by the
short Salt River, across which is flung a single wooden bridge, and by
some geographical oversight, their names have been twisted. The lowland
to the east masquerades under the false title of Grande Terre, while the
truly great land of magnificent heights and mighty ravines to the south
and west is miscalled Basse Terre. The misnomers suggest that they were
named by some bureaucrat seated before a map, rather than by explorers
on the spot.
Columbus landed on what the natives called Turukéra or Karnkéra on his
second voyage—a busy time, indeed, he must have had keeping his log on
that journey—and recalled the promise he had made to the monks of
Nuestra Señora de Guadeloupe in Estremadura to name an island in honor
of their patron Lady. He found human flesh cooking in pots on the beach
and knew that he had discovered at last a land of the Caribs, the
warlike cannibals of whom he had heard in Hispaniola. Among other things
he saw here his first pineapple—and no doubt, like all newcomers, was
surprised to find they do not grow on trees. Ubiquitous old Ponce de
Leon attempted to colonize the island in 1515, but was driven out by the
imminent danger of being served up in a native barbecue. The first
French to land were some missionaries who brought the aborigines bodily
nourishment instead of the spiritual provender they had planned. It was
not until the days of Richelieu that letters patent were issued giving a
private company a monopoly of the island, which was gradually covered
with French colonists and sugar-cane. African slavery followed as a
matter of course, with its concomitant slave revolts, one of which came
near to turning Guadeloupe into another Haiti, and for almost two
centuries the history of the island was a constant succession of
attempts on the part of England to add it to her possessions, as she did
most of the French Antilles. Then in 1814 a treaty left it definitely
French, slavery was abolished in 1848, and since that day Guadeloupe has
followed the political reverses and successes of _la mére patrie_.
Basse Terre, the capital, is a modest little town on the southwest
corner of the mountainous half of the island bearing the same name.
Dating from the early days of French colonization, it once enjoyed a
considerable importance, most of which disappeared with the founding of
Pointe-à-Pitre, in a similar corner of the flat and more productive
Grande Terre. The rape of its commerce by the parvenu has left it merely
the seat of government, the Washington of the colony, more subservient
to its business-bent metropolis than it likes to admit. This French
custom of endowing their islands with separate official and commercial
capitals has its advantages over the British scheme of collecting all
the eggs in one basket. Martinique would have been left in a far sadder
state had the destruction of St. Pierre wiped out its governmental as
well as its business center. But there are also certain drawbacks to
this more thoughtful plan; the traveler, for instance, who had hoped to
find certain sources of information in Basse Terre is likely to learn
that they live at “la Pointe,” and vice versa.
Built in the form of a spreading amphitheater and climbing a little way
up the surge of ground that culminates in the volcano Soufrière, rival
of Pélée in all but its destructiveness, a scant ten miles behind it,
the official capital is half hidden under a smothering foliage of trees,
which stretch away in a vast carpet of verdure into the mountains
beyond. Its open roadstead is commonly an unbroken expanse of Caribbean
blue, often without even a schooner riding at anchor to suggest the
olden days of maritime industry. Though the French mail-packets make
this their last port of call before turning their prows into the
Atlantic, or the first on the outward journey, they usually come and are
gone in the night, with few inhabitants the wiser. The latter seem to
worry little at this comparative slight, and dawdle on through a
provincial life as if they had lost all hope or desire to wrest from
“the Point” its frequent communion with the outside world. An old fort
half covered with vegetation, a rambling government building constructed
in the comfort-scorning, built-to-stay style of most French official
structures of bygone centuries, are almost the only signs to distinguish
it from half a dozen mere _bourgs_ scattered about the edge of the
island. A governor sent out from France dwells in a villa up in the
hills; his few white assistants are bureaucrats tossed at random about
the French colonies from Madagascar to Cayenne by a stroke of the pen in
Paris, and they have little in common with the racial mulattoes who
dwell in their uninviting, chiefly wooden houses lining the few long and
rather unkempt streets of the drowsy capital, except an ardent, almost
unquestioning patriotism for _la France_.
Good highways, with automobiles scattered along them, climb into the
hills, especially to St. Claude, with its suburban dwellings, its big
hospital, where boarders in the soundest of health are accepted, and its
embracing view of the Caribbean already far below, and the dome of
Soufrière almost sheer overhead. Higher still lies Matoubá, where one
may bathe in icy streams within half an hour of the tropic and
enervating seacoast. But there the highways cease, dwindling away into
trails through coffee-groves and verdure-vaulted footpaths which are
gradually lost in the great mountain wilderness, so primitive and
unexplored that even the map in the governor’s office below shows only a
blank space for all the heart of Basse Terre, the inaccessibility of
which is typified in the name of its central peak, Mt. Sans Toucher.
Other highways partly encircle the rugged half-island, clinging close to
the shore, but feasible communication ceases everywhere within a few
kilometers of the coast. Thus, though Basse Terre is virgin fertile in
almost all its extent, and generously watered by countless springs and
many rivers, it produces little for the outside world except a few tons
of vanilla.
Like all the West Indies, it has almost no four-footed wild life. The
_agouti_, of about the size of a rabbit and much prized for its savory
flesh, is the only indigenous quadruped. The raccoon, brought from our
own land long ago, has become acclimated and numerous; the island is
infested with an enormous toad that was introduced to kill the rats, but
which has prodigiously spread without doing much damage to the rodents.
Martinique and Guadeloupe mutually accuse each other of harboring the
deadly fer de lance, but neither seems to be able to produce
unquestionable proof either of its own innocence or of its rival’s
guilt.
* * * * *
There are _guaguas_ also in the French islands, where they are called
_autos de poste_. But there is little room in them compared with the
demand for places, and a curt “_Pas de place_” is almost certain to be
the greeting of the would-be traveler who does not buy his ticket at
least the day before. Moreover, ticket or no ticket, it behooves him to
be on hand at the back of the post-office well before the starting-hour
set unless he would see his reserved _place_ squeezed out of existence
before he has occupied it or the conveyance gone before he arrives. For
the public means of transport in the French West Indies have a mania for
starting ahead of time that is little less disconcerting than the
_mañana_ temperament of their Spanish neighbors, particularly as their
favorite official hour of departure is daybreak.
Once upon a time the governor of Guadeloupe invited the officials of
Pointe-à-Pitre to a ball at the capital. They left on a sailboat, the
ladies in evening dress. In theory it is a journey of only a few hours,
even in a sailing vessel. But this time the wind turned contrary, after
the custom of winds, the boat was forced to put to sea, and it turned up
six days afterward—in St. Thomas! These unhappy experiences are no
longer required of the residents of the two capitals, for to-day a
highway equal, except in spots, to those of France connects the two
towns, nearly fifty miles apart, and an _auto de poste_ makes the round
trip daily. Then, too, as in all the Antilles, there are automobiles for
hire to those whose income is not particularly limited.
The tropical night showed no sign of fading when the postal omnibus, its
five cross seats packed with travelers of both sexes until its sides
groaned, its every available space of running-boards, mud-guards, and
bumper piled high with mail-sacks and baggage, rumbled away from the
angry group of unsuccessful passengers gathered before the Basse Terre
post-office. As we chugged out through the old fortress gate, a thin
streak of light suddenly developed on the eastern horizon, widened with
the rapidity of a stage effect too quickly timed, wiped out the
blue-black dome of sky overhead, and sent the last remnants of night
scurrying from their lurking-places like thieves before the gigantic
flashlight that sprang above the rim of the earth to the east with
unnatural, theatrical swiftness. In the darkness I had taken several of
my fellow-passengers to be white. The same slanting sunshine that threw
far to the westward the disheveled shadows of the cocoanut-palms
betrayed the tell-tale African features of the lightest of them. Behind
us spread a fairy panorama as we climbed to Gourbeyre, beyond which
another opened out as we descended again through Dolé, with its “summer”
homes and its steaming hot-water falls at the very edge of the road.
Having cut off the southern nose of the island and regained the coast
once more at Trois Rivières, we clung close to this all the rest of the
journey, as if any further encroachment upon the rugged domain of
Soufrière, its head wrapped in a purple-black mantle of clouds above us,
might rouse the slumbering giant to vent his wrath upon puny mankind.
The “Rue Gerville-Réache” in which we halted a moment to exchange
mail-sacks recalled the fact that the native of Guadeloupe best known to
the outside world is a woman, as is the case with Martinique. Villas
hidden away in the dense greenery gave way to little bay-like
cane-fields, some of them so large as to boast tiny railroads, while
here and there a buttress of the volcano above forced us out to the edge
of the surf. In the offing Guadeloupe’s smallest dependencies, a cluster
of islands named Les Saintes because Columbus discovered them on All
Saints’ Day, stood forth from the sea like the domes of Oriental
fantasy. Now and again the chauffeur or his assistant snatched at a
letter held out by some countryman, indifferent to his shout of protest
if they missed it, for they deigned to stop only before the town
post-offices. The demand for seats was continuous, but those who had won
them showed no inclination to descend. A score of times we sped past
some lady of color all dressed up in her most resplendent turban,
_foulard_, and ample, flower-printed calico gown, who had hoped to go to
town that day, the chauffeur indicating by a disdainful wave of the hand
across his body that there was “nothing doing.” Veritable riots of words
assailed him at each halt, as if he might have produced new seats,
magician-like, from his sleeve. One by one several male passengers took
to displaying their fancied knowledge of English for my benefit; once a
burly schooner-captain with just enough negro blood in his veins to make
his hair curl, next a darker pair of graduates of the Sorbonne, who,
once having impressed their fellow-passengers with their extraordinary
learning, dropped back into French again, a French more precise and
chosen than that of Paris, as soon as they found I understood it.
Even in the thatched huts along the way there was considerable more
_commodité_ than in those of Haiti. The old semispherical sugar-kettles
one finds scattered throughout the West Indies were here enclosed in
stones and mortar and used as outdoor ovens. At Petit Bourg we came out
on the edge of the open sea again, with a view across the bay to
Pointe-à-Pitre, and behind it flat, unscenic Grande Terre, without even
a hill to enliven its horizon. Soon we dropped down into a dreary level
country utterly unlike the rolling cane-covered land swelling into
mountains behind us, and sped through mangrove swamps that burdened the
air with their rotting, salty smell, rumbled across the stagnant Rivière
Salée, six miles long and some fifteen feet deep, which divides
Guadeloupe into two islands, and turned into a broad, white, dusty road
that not long after became the main street of “La Pointe.”
Pointe-à-Pitre is said to have taken its name from the fact that the
“point” on which it was founded a century later than Basse Terre
belonged to a Dutchman named Peters. Many refugees of this nationality
settled in the French islands after the Portuguese drove them out of
Brazil. The commercial capital is situated at the mouth of the Salt
River, in one of the hottest and most uninviting spots in the West
Indies. Across the bay Guadeloupe proper, piled up in its labyrinth of
mountains veiled in the blue haze of distance, seems to invite the
perspiring inhabitants to cease their bargainings and retire to the cool
heights. Young as it is, “the Point” has long since outgrown Basse Terre
in size and importance. It is a deadly flat town, with wide,
right-angled streets, fairly well paved in a kind of crude concrete,
with here and there a corner that recalls Paris, as do the street names.
Its gray plaster houses have heavy wooden shutters and door-sized blinds
that give them a curiously furtive air. Except for the turbans and
calicos of the negresses, and the gamut of complexions, it is rather a
colorless town, even the “cathedral” being of the prevailing gray,
unpainted tint, though set off by a slight square tower in flaming red.
The narrow entrance to its capacious bay is flanked by cocoanut-palms
that stretch far around and finally envelop it, the view from the sea
having little to attract the eye. The central square pulsates from dawn
until the sun is high overhead with ceaselessly chattering market-women
dressed in the hectic cotton garb peculiar to the French islands. Down
by the wharves surges another market where fishermen in immense round
hats come with their boatloads of fish and sundry sea-foods, including
the _langouste_, a clawless lobster unsurpassed for quality and quantity
of flesh and selling for the equivalent of a quarter.
There are suggestions of Parisian street life in Pointe-à-Pitre,
interlarded with tropical touches of its own. Frenchmen whose faces give
evidence that they have not left their cuisine and wine-cellars behind
cling tenaciously to those white pith helmets without which no man of
their race thinks he can endure the tropics. Soldiers and ex-soldiers
with varying degrees of African complexions stalk about in their
horizon-blue or colonial khaki, a string of medals gleaming on their
chests. Negroes in Napoleon III beards stroll along the shaded edge of
the streets with a certain Latin dignity befitting such adornment, even
when it is accompanied by bare feet. Humped oxen, yoked sometimes on the
neck, more often on the horns, saunter through town with their
cumbersome carts. The town-criers, two men in uniform, the one beating
a-drum and the other reading aloud an official notice on each corner,
carry the thoughts back to medieval France. Cafés with awning-shaded
tables, monopolizing the sidewalks, notices exceedingly French not only
in wording, but in general appearance, posted on house and shop walls,
even the rather run-down aspect of the buildings, give the place a
decidedly French atmosphere. If other proof of its nationality were
needed, there are the crowds of wilted, yet patient, people packed about
the wickets of post-office, telegraph station, and all other points
where the public and the ambitionless, red-tape-ridden mortals whom
France appoints to minor government office come into contact.
In the large, rather pleasantly unkempt park, shaded with veritable
grandfathers among trees, lepers, victims of the “big leg,” and other
loathsome ailments were cutting the grass with crude shears and little
toy hoes. In the outskirts, to say nothing of suspicious odors in the
heart of town, stood stagnant ditches of unassorted garbage. Venders of
indecent photographs marched brazenly about town, buttonholing the male
tourist at every opportunity. The children did less open begging than
those in the British islands, but there were white boys and girls among
them whose manners and appearance showed them in a little less degraded
condition than the blacks. What a place Pointe-à-Pitre alone would be to
“clean up” to something approaching our standards of sanitation and
domestic morals, were we so foolish as to follow a recent suggestion and
purchase the French Antilles.
We drifted into a courtroom during a civil trial. The room itself
appeared not to have been swept or dusted for years except in those
conspicuous central portions where it was unavoidable; cobwebs festooned
every corner; little heaps of débris lay under nearly every bench. Yet
there were numerous statues in and about the building. The court
consisted of three judges, a white man in the middle, flanked by two
mulattos, all of them, as well as the more or less negro lawyers,
dressed in black robes trimmed with “ermine”; that is, with moth-eaten
rabbit-skin cuffs and lapels. On their heads were curious skull-caps,
and beneath their robes unpressed white or khaki trousers of a cheap
material, which suggested that the high cost of clothing burdened even
these lofty officials. A lawyer was ranting monotonously, the gist of
his remarks being that while all Guadeloupe knew that it was the desire
of a gentleman recently deceased to leave his fortune to the plaintiff,
it was quite impossible to carry out his desires because he had
neglected to decorate his will with the required government stamp.
Laboriously a yellow clerk, also in a robe, sat slowly scratching away
with an old-fashioned steel pen, adding to the stacks of dog-eared
hand-written papers that already filled a musty room next door almost to
overflowing. Surely there was no doubt about Pointe-à-Pitre being French
despite the un-Parisian complexions of its inhabitants.
* * * * *
If it is less beautiful than the mountainous half of Guadeloupe, Grande
Terre had a materialistic advantage over the misnamed highland to the
west. Its flatness makes it everywhere accessible by a network of good
highways. A broad, white road stretches out along the coast through the
mangroves that surround the commercial capital, and pushes on to the
considerable towns of Ste. Anne, St. François, and Le Moule, while other
highways crisscross the island, giving easy communication for all the
sugar-mills scattered about it. More exactly they are rum-mills, for the
French islanders give far more attention to their far-famed liquor, and
the cane-fields that all but cover Grande Terre serve almost exclusively
for filling casks and bottles. Their processes are still rather
primitive, but fortunes have been won during the war, for all that. Once
out upon this half of the island, the traveler finds it has a few low
hills and ridges, but they are so slight that a bicycle affords easy
means of communication, which can be said of few West Indian islands.
Along the mangrove-lined coast are many shacks almost as carelessly
thrown together as those of Haiti, yet all over Guadeloupe there is
patent evidence that the negro is a far different fellow when directed
by the white man than when running wild. The song of the jungle by night
is broken by the constant roar of distant breakers and the noisy, merry
negro voices and primitive laughter that explode now and then in the
tropical darkness, while fireflies swarm so thickly that they look to
the wanderer along the coast roads like the electric-lights of a large
city.
All the scattered islets of the French West Indies are dependencies of
Guadeloupe, being geographically nearer that island, leaving Martinique
to concern herself with strictly domestic affairs. The most important of
these is Marie Galante, six leagues south of Grande Terre, with fifteen
thousand inhabitants and several _usines_ to turn her canefields into
rum. Les Saintes, Petite Terre, and Désirade, the latter the first
landfall of Columbus on his second voyage, and owing its name to that
circumstance, lie somewhat nearer the mother island. Far to the north is
St. Martin, the possession of which France also shares with Holland
despite its barely forty square miles of extent, making it the smallest
territory in the world with two nationalities. No less interesting,
though still more tiny, is the neighboring isle of St. Barthélemy,
colloquially called “St. Barts.” The inhabitants are chiefly white, and
among them one finds the physiognomy, traditions, and customs of their
Norman ancestors. Yet though they speak French, it is only badly, the
prevailing language being English, or at least the caricature of that
tongue which many decades of isolation have developed.
The history of “St. Barts” recalls another nation that once had West
Indian ambitions. In 1784 Louis XVI ceded the island to Sweden in return
for the right to establish at Gothenburg a depot for French merchandise.
But its isolation and distance from its homeland made it a burden to the
Swedes, and in 1877, after all but one of its 351 inhabitants had voted
in favor of a return to French nationality, it was handed back free of
charge, King Oscar II making a gift to the inhabitants of the eighty
thousand francs’ worth of crown property on the island. Since then the
people seem again to have changed their minds, due probably to their
subjection to the colored politicians of Guadeloupe. A few months ago,
when the Crown Prince of Sweden called at “St. Barts” on his way to a
hunting expedition in South America, he was received with open arms, and
left with what the natives took to be a promise to assist them to
transfer their allegiance to England or the United States, preferably
the latter. Under the Stars and Stripes, they argue, their “great
resources” would be fittingly developed. The island was once noted for
its pineapples, but the tendency of shipping to strike farther southward
and touch Barbados instead has ruined this, as it has the tree-cotton
industry. Of volcanic formation, the island suffers for lack of trees
and water, being forced to hoard its rainfall in large cisterns, like
St. Thomas. Gustavia, the capital, was once rich and prosperous, being a
depot of French and British corsairs who carried on trade with the
Spanish colonies. There are still immense cellars built to bold the
booty and merchandise, and zinc and lead mines that lie unexploited for
lack of capital. To-day the inhabitants live for the most part in abject
poverty, getting most of their sustenance from the neighboring islands
and emigrating to Guadeloupe, where they are noted for their excellency
as servants, despite their unfamiliarity with the native “creole.”
[Illustration: In the outskirts of Guadeloupe’s commercial capital]
[Illustration: Fort de France, capital of Martinique]
[Illustration: The _savane_ of Fort de France, with the Statue of
Josephine, once Empress of the French]