RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE
Martinique, though considerably smaller than Guadeloupe, from which it
is separated by the British island of Dominica, probably means more to
the average American, possibly because within the memory of the present
generation it was the scene of the greatest catastrophe in the recorded
history of the Western hemisphere. Some forty miles long and averaging
about half of that in width, it is essentially volcanic in origin,
untold centuries of eruptions having given it an almost unbrokenly
mountainous character, heaping up those many _mornes_ and _pitons_, as
its large and small cone-shaped peaks are called, which stretch from its
one end to the other. Its latest census, now ten years old, credited it
with 184,000 inhabitants, ten thousand of whom consider themselves pure
white. Martinique is fond of calling herself the “Queen of the French
Antilles,” a title not wholly without justification, and to cite the
fact that Cayenne and Guadeloupe are subservient to her in certain
governmental matters as proof that she is the favorite American child of
the mother country.
The traveler who disembarks in the harbor of Fort de France, capital of
Martinique since 1680, is sure to have impressed upon him the fact that
the negro with French training is even more inefficient under excitement
than the excitable Gaul himself. Barely has the steamer come to anchor
when her gangway becomes a shrieking, struggling, all but immovable mass
of barefoot boatmen, of more or less negro policemen, custom employees,
hotel runners, porters, ships’ agents, embarking and disembarking
passengers, and venders of minor local products, all ignorant of that
sophomoric law of physics that descending and ascending bodies cannot
occupy the same place at the same time. Bags, bundles, crates, valises,
and trunks are dragged helter-skelter down this seething sloping bedlam,
one of the latter now and then eluding the grasp of the struggling
boatman, who is forced to dedicate one hand to his own safety, and
splashing into the sea, there to float serenely about for some moments
until it is rescued single-handed by the same hare-brained individual.
For the _bateliers_ of the French Antilles do not believe in mutual
coöperation. Three trunks suffered this particular fate during our
landing, but our own luck was less trying, the only mishap being that
the boat loaded with all our worldly baggage, forced beyond the grasp of
its owner by his clamoring rivals, began to float serenely out to sea.
By some stroke of genius, indispensable to those who have been denied
the lesser gift of common sense, the fellow succeeded in rescuing his
craft before the swift tropical night had completely blotted it out, and
a quarter of an hour later we scrambled up the end of a long, slender,
not to say drunken and decrepit, wooden pier all but invisible in the
thick darkness. A youth beside whom Rachel looked tall required
assistance in placing the trunk on his head, but once under it he
requested that the valises be piled on top of it and scurried away as if
he had nothing on his mind but the aged felt hat that served him as a
pad. The _douane_ was dirty, ramshackle, and lighted only with a pair of
weak oil torches, but its officials were so courteous that we were not
even required to lower our possessions from the bearer’s head to the
floor. A hotel facing the savanna resembled the hang-outs of Parisian
_apaches_, but it was in some ways preferable to spending the night in
the park. Luckily the “choice room” into which we were shown was only
dimly lighted by a flickering candle.
“Et le bain?” I queried, as the chambermaid was hurrying away to resume
her rôle as waitress.
“Bath?” she murmured reminiscently, thrusting her turban-crowned African
face back into the room. “Oh, yes, there is a tub below but—but it
doesn’t function.”
“No water?”
“Plenty of water, monsieur, but the stopper has been lost.”
“What do people do?”
“When _messieurs les clients_ wish to bathe, they sit in the tub and
pour water on themselves, but—”
“Generally they don’t wish to?” I concluded caustically, but the
intended sarcasm was completely lost on the femme-de-chambre, who
replied with fetching simplicity, “No, usually not, monsieur.”
Luckily, the departure of a flock of tourists next day gave us
admittance to the one tolerable hotel in the French West Indies.
A few weak electric-light bulbs scattered here and there in the dense
humid darkness did not give the town a particularly inviting aspect. On
the broad grassy _savane_ there was scarcely light enough to see where
one was going, which made progress perilous, for the habits of personal
sanitation of the French islanders are not merely bad; some of them are
incredible. The French themselves being none too careful in such
matters, it is hardly to be expected that their negro subjects would
develop high standards. Few streets are well paved, most of them have
open gutters down each side, but the slope of the town is fortunately
sufficient to keep the running water clear except at about eight in the
morning, which is the hour chosen by householders to get rid of their
accumulated garbage.
Though it was merely Friday evening, a band was playing, and playing
well, a classical program in the savanna kiosk. Frenchmen, in huge pith
helmets that gave them the aspect of wandering toadstools, were
strolling under the big trees of the immense, grassy square. With them
mingled, apparently on terms of complete equality, their colored
compatriots, the women in Parisian hats or the chic little turban, with
its single protruding donkey-ear, peculiar to Martinique, according to
their social standing, the men in the drab garb of the mere male the
world over. There was not exactly a boisterousness, but a French freedom
from restraint which gave the gathering an atmosphere quite different
from similar ones in the more solemn British West Indies. Among the most
interesting features of the Antilles is to note how closely the
imitative negroes resemble in manner, customs, and temperament their
ruling nations. Yet one conspicuous feature of French night life was
absent from that of Fort de France—the aggressively amorous female of
the species.
By day we found the center of the _savane_ occupied by the white marble
statue of the most famous native of Martinique, the Empress Josephine.
Surrounded by a quadrangle of magnificent royal palms, a bas relief of
her crowning by Napoleon set into the pedestal, a medallion portrait of
her imperial husband in one hand, she gazes away toward her birthplace
across the bay with an expression which in certain lights suggests a
wistful regret for ever having left it. But it is a flitting expression;
most of the time she is visibly the proud Empress of the French, and
still the idol of her native Martinique, for all her checkered story. Of
other statues the most conspicuous is that of Schoelcher, the Senator
from the Antilles who fathered the emancipation of the slaves,
decorating the untended little plot before the Palais de Justice.
In the sunlight Fort de France has a cheerful aspect. About the edge of
the savanna are several open-air cafés, some of them housed in tents,
none of them free from clients even in the busiest hours of the day. The
town swarms with women in that gay costume of Martinique, which suggests
moving-picture actresses, dressed for their appearance before the
camera, rather than staid housewives and market-women engaged in their
unromantic daily tasks; some of its buildings rival them in the African
gorgeousness of their multicolored walls. Almost wholly destroyed by
fire thirty years ago, it has nothing of the ancient air to be found in
many West Indian cities, though some of its comparatively modern
structures are already sadly down at heel. Once it was of secondary
importance, a mere capital, like Basse Terre in Guadeloupe, but the
destruction of St. Pierre increased its commercial prosperity, and its
twenty-seven thousand inhabitants of ten years ago have considerably
increased since then. The decrepit horse-carriages of the last decade
have almost wholly given way to automobiles, American in make by virtue
of the war, and aware of their importance in an island with neither
tramways nor railroads. Window glass, uncalled for in the tropics, is
almost unknown, wooden jalousies taking the place of it when the blazing
sunlight or a driving storm demands the closing of its habitually
wide-open houses.
Its “best families,” few of them free from a touch of the tar-brush,
have the customs of family isolation of the France of a century ago; its
mulatto rank and file have the negro’s indifference to publicity in the
most intimate of domestic affairs. If one may judge by the prevalence of
ugly French _pince-nez_, the whites and “high yellows” find the glaring
sunlight and light-colored streets trying to the eyes. Seen from any of
the several hills high above, the town is dull-red in tint, flat and all
but treeless, except for its green rectangular _savane_, only the
open-work red spire of the cathedral protruding above the mass. Yet when
the sun plays its cloud shadows across it, and the musical bells of its
single church are tolling through one of the interminable funerals, the
Fort Royal of olden days is well worth the stiff climb an embracing view
of it requires.
The cathedral is modern, decidedly French in atmosphere despite strong
negro leanings. Some of its stained-glass windows depict the native
types, mulatto acolytes attending a white bishop, backed by the
well-done likenesses of worshipers in the striking female costume of the
island, with a male in solemn Sunday dress thrown in between for
contrast. One wonders why the Spanish-Americans have not also adopted so
effective a form of decoration instead of clinging tenaciously to the
medieval types. In the congregation few pure whites are to be seen,
except for the priests, and the nuns who herd their scores of girl
orphans in brown ginghams and purple turbans into the gallery pews. The
collection is taken up by a black priest—who gives change to those who
have not come supplied with the customary small coin—but the officiating
curates are wholly French. The lives they lead, if one may judge from
certain indications, are more of a credit to their church than those of
their colleagues in the Spanish tropics.
Sunday in Fort de France is not the deadly dull Sabbath of the British
West Indies. The market and many of the shops are open in the morning;
the cooler hours of the afternoon find the town enlivened with
strollers, from the ramparts of grim old Fort St. Louis to the banks of
the Rivière Madame, lined by vari-colored boats drawn up out of the
water, with whole jungles of nets hung out to dry, with carelessly
constructed little houses, in the shadows of which squat chattering,
boisterously laughing negroes. The evening is one of the three during
the week on which the movies function. We attempted one night to attend
the largest of these. A long line of automobiles was disgorging noisy,
overdressed natives of all colors except pure white. About the doors
squatted scores of turbaned women, each waiting patiently for some
admirer to supply her with a ticket; a swarm of ragged young black
rascals blocked the entries, casting insolent glances, if not audible
remarks, at the more attractive women, particularly if they chanced to
be white. Black policemen garbed in resplendent white uniforms for once
in the week, stood gossiping in groups, waving to their friends, doing
everything except making any attempt to keep order. Then, if further
proof of the genuine Frenchness of Fort de France were needed, there was
a clawing, shrieking mob wedged in an impenetrable mass about a wicket
six inches square and waist-high, in which one negro kept his face
plastered for ten minutes, trying in vain to agree with whomever was
behind it on the purchase of a paper ticket. The French have many fine
qualities, but public orderliness is not one of them, particularly when
African blood runs in their veins.
The great covered market of Fort de France is daily the scene of a
similar uproar. By day it presents a kaleidoscopic panorama of venders
and buyers in every known shade of garb and complexion; by dark, when it
remains open that late, it suggests some drunken inferno. Bargaining is
one of the chief amusements of the West Indian negro; when he has been
reared in a French environment he seems to find double joy in it. Every
purchase is the occasion for an extended quarrel which stops short of
nothing but actual fisticuffs. A slice of meat tossed from the scales
into a purchaser’s basket invariably brings a shriek of protest from the
seller. The buyer has “short-changed” him! Buyers always do, unless they
are the despised tourists who always foolishly pay the first price
demanded. A mighty shouting arises over the scene of contention; it
increases to an uproar that is almost audible above the general hubbub.
The meat and the money are snatched back and forth a score of times;
foul names are seen, if not heard, on the thick lips of the shrieking
opponents; a copper is added to the handful of now bloody coins,
withdrawn again as the seller slashes a match-sized strip off the
maltreated slice of meat; copper and strip are once more conceded, the
screams grow deafening, until at length a bargain is struck, and the two
part company with friendly nods that are mutual promises to engage in
similar entertainment on the morrow. The tiny portions of Haitian
markets are not found in those of the French Antilles. Whole boxes of
matches, entire yams, sometimes as many as two or three bananas change
hands in one single transaction. Many a matron whose purchases do not
sum up to more than three or four pounds is followed by a porter, who
gathers them into his basket. A few of these burden-bearers are white
men, beings sunk so low that they slink about among the haughty and more
muscular negroes like creatures who are only permitted to live on
suffrance; for both the French islands have dwarfish types of similar
history to the “Chachas” of St. Thomas.
The traveler in the Lesser Antilles finds himself almost wholly cut off
from the world’s news. It is a rare cable that has not been broken for
months, if not for years, and the local newspapers are faintly printed
little rags through which one may search in vain for a hint of the
happenings outside the particular island on which one chances to be
marooned. Instead of news, the front pages are taken up with local
political squabbles, and, in the French islands, with challenges to
duels, set in the largest type available. Let it not be supposed,
however, that these lead to any great amount of bloodshed. In virtually
all cases the long series of letters exchanged between the contestants,
or, more exactly, between their seconds, and set down at full length in
the public prints, end on some such tone as:
Messieurs Pinville and Larcher, representing M. Marc Larcher, and
MM. Binet and Hantoni, representing M. Louis Percin, having met in
the city hall in the matter of a demand for satisfaction from M.
Marc Larcher by M. Persin, on account of an article in the
“Democratic Coloniale” of March 20th, came to an agreement that
there was a misunderstanding between M. Percin and M. Marc Larcher,
neither the one nor the other having ever had the intention of
making any allegations which should encroach upon the private life
of either.
In consequence, they declare the incident irrevocably closed.
Done in duplicate at Fort de France, March 23, 1920,
and signed by the pacifiers. Thus the principals have impressed upon
their fellow-citizens their chivalrous code of honor and undaunted
courage, the seconds have won a bit of personal publicity, and no harm
has been done. In a way the Martinique system has its advantages over
the more direct American method of a pair of black eyes.
* * * * *
A coast steamer leaves Fort de France every morning at peep of dawn for
what was once the larger city of St. Pierre. For three hours it chugs
northwestward along the coast, dotted with little fisher villages half
hidden behind cocoanut-palms and the long lines of pole-supported nets
drying beneath them. Here and there it halts to pick up or discharge
passengers in rowboats, and to take on the capital’s daily supply of
milk—in five-gallon Standard Oil tins corked with handfuls of leaves.
The sea is usually pond-smooth here under the lee of the island. Many
sandstone cliffs as absolutely sheer as if they had been cut with a
gigantic knife line the way, with little shrines at the foot of most of
them to keep them from falling into the sea. Behind, the verdant
mountains climb steeply into the sky, as if, the island being a bare
twenty miles wide, they must make the most of the space allotted them.
The coast is speckled with fishermen in broad, trapezoidal straw hats,
standing erect in their precarious little boats or setting their nets
for the day’s catch. Their method is simple. Half a dozen of them fence
in a great oval stretch of water near the shore with a single net
hundreds of yards long and weighted on one side. Then, when only the
floating support blocks remain above the surface, they proceed to throw
stones into the enclosure, to pound the water with their paddles, to
splash about like men gone suddenly mad. Apparently the fish rise to see
what all the commotion is about, for half an hour later the fishermen
begin to drag their net inshore, and the haul is seldom less than
several boatloads of the finny tribe, of every size from the _coli
roux_, resembling the sardine, to mammoth fish that must be quickly
clubbed to death for safety sake, and of every variety known to the
tropical seas. Already the inhabitants of the neighboring villages are
trooping down to the shore with their native baskets and makeshift
receptacles, and by the time the net is stretched out on its poles to
dry the last of the catch has been sold and carried away.
But we are nearing St. Pierre. Carbet, the last stop, where Columbus
landed just four centuries before the great catastrophe, is falling
astern, and as we round its protecting nose of land the flanks of Pélée
rise before us, broken and wrinkled and cracked and heaped up in
scorched brown slopes that end in blue-black clouds clinging tenaciously
about the volcano’s head, as if to shield the murderous old rascal from
detection. This same steamer, one of the crew who served in the same
capacity in those days tells us, barely escaped from the disaster that
overwhelmed the chief city of the Lesser Antilles. She had left St.
Pierre at daybreak—for her itinerary was reversed when the capital
played second fiddle to her commercial rival—and was entering the harbor
of Fort de France when two mighty explosions that seemed to shake all
Martinique “set us praying for our friends in St. Pierre.” Next day she
returned, only to find—but just here our informant was called away to
help in the landing, and left us to picture for ourselves the sight that
met his eyes as he steamed into this open roadstead on that memorable
morning.
Ships no longer anchor off St. Pierre. For one thing, a shelf of the sea
floor was broken off during the eruption, and left the harbor all but
unfathomable. Besides, the world’s shipping passes ruined St. Pierre by
now, and only this little coaster comes daily to tie up to a tiny pier
where once stretched long and busy wharves. At the end of it one is
confronted by a statue, a nude female figure which is meant to be
symbolical of the ruined city in the day of its agony. But the effect is
unfortunate. For the thing is so inartistically done that it suggests a
lady of limited intelligence crawling out of her bathroom after having
inadvertently blown out the gas—and the ludicrous seems out of place in
one’s first pilgrimage to the American Pompeii.
The St. Pierre of the beginning of this century was the most important
city of the French West Indies. More than that, it was noted throughout
the Caribbean for its beauty, gaiety, and commercial activity. It was a
stone city, of real cut stone, built in a perfect amphitheater sloping
gently down to the deeply blue sea, and cut sharply off at the rear by
sheer hills that spring quickly into mountains. White _pirogues_ and the
pleasure boats of its wealthier inhabitants balanced themselves in its
bay among steamers and sailing vessels from all parts of the world. Its
boulevards were lined with splendid shade trees; its Jardin des Plantes
ranked among the world’s best botanical collections; it had electric
lights and the only tramways in the Lesser Antilles; its bourse was as
busy in its way as our own Wall Street. Masses of gorgeous flamboyants,
of red and purple bougainvillea, decorated its open _places_ and its
commodious residences, which stretched away into flowery suburbs with
half a dozen pretty French names. In a way it had copied Paris too
closely, for its night life was hectic with “sadly famous” casinos, with
gaiety unconfined; it felt a certain pride in hearing itself called the
“naughtiest city in the West Indies.”
St. Pierre was proud of the old volcano that seemed to watch with a
fatherly care over the destinies of the city at its feet. Never within
the memory of the living generation had it given a sign of wrath. A
pretty little lake filled its crater, with _fougères_ and begonias and
soft velvety moss growing about its shores. To the Pierrotins it had
long been the chosen place for picnics and Sunday excursions.
Yet never was a people given fuller warning of impending disaster. As
early as February in their final year of 1902 the inhabitants commenced
to complain of a sulphurous odor from the mountain. During the following
month dense clouds began to rise about its summit. “Old Pélée is smoking
again,” the people told one another, laughingly; but not a man of them
dreamed that their old playmate meant them any harm. On April 22 a light
earthquake broke the cable to Dominica. On the twenty-fourth a rain of
cinders fell on all the northern part of the island. The Sunday
following saw many pleasure parties mounting to the crater-lake to watch
the playfulness of “old Pélée” at close range. On the twenty-eighth
great growlings were heard, as if some mammoth bear were struggling to
escape from his prison in the bowels of the earth. From the beginning of
May cinders fell almost daily over all Martinique. Steam rose from the
crater; bursts of fire, like magnified lightning flashes, played about
the volcano’s summit; the clouds grew so dense that the days were a
perpetual twilight, the water-supply was half-ruined by the soot it
carried. On the fifth a great deluge of boiling mud swept down the River
Blanche, completely submerging a large sugar-factory on the edge of St.
Pierre and killing several persons. Great rocks came rolling down the
mountainside; the cable between Fort de France and Santo Domingo parted;
rivers were everywhere overflowing their banks; cinders fell
continuously; the vegetables which the market-women brought down from
the hills were covered with ashes.
St. Pierre began to lose its nerve. But the optimists asserted that the
worst was over. A decrease in the fall of cinders on the following day
seemed to bear out their assertions, though trees were breaking under
the weight of ashes, and the cable to St. Lucia was disrupted,
completely cutting Martinique off from the outside world. The men of St.
Pierre felt that they could not abandon their affairs for a mere display
of gigantic fireworks; their families refused to leave husbands and
fathers for their own selfish safety’s sake; no doubt pride kept many of
the inhabitants from fleeing. A scientific commission in the capital
assured the frightened city that it was in no danger whatever—scientists
have been known to make serious mistakes on similar occasions. The
governor and his wife came to St. Pierre to lend the reassurance of
their presence, and the city took on a calmer demeanor and went on about
its business.
On the night of May 7 a torrential rain, accompanied by unprecedented
thunder and lightning, swept over the island. That, the people told
themselves, was a sign that the danger was over. The eighth dawned fresh
and clear. The vapors from the crater went straight up and floated away
on the trade-wind. The inhabitants forgot their fears and began to
prepare for a _jour de grande fête_, for it was Ascension Day. Then
suddenly, at eight o’clock, two mighty explosions that were heard as far
off as Dominica and St. Lucia had barely subsided when an enormous black
cloud with bright streaks in it rolled down from the crater at express
speed, enveloped St. Pierre, halted abruptly a few hundred yards north
of the neighboring village of Carbet, and floated slowly away before the
wind. The pride of the French West Indies, with its twenty-eight
thousand inhabitants, had been completely wiped out in the space of
forty-five seconds.
That night the wreck of a steamer, its super-structureless deck strewn
with a score of charred and dismembered bodies, crawled into the harbor
of St. Lucia.
“Who are you?” shouted the crowd gathered on the wharves, “and where do
you come from?”
“We come from hell,” shouted back the only surviving officer.
“You can cable the world that St. Pierre no longer exists.”
Eighteen years have passed since the destruction of St. Pierre, and it
is still little more than a fishing village. From the water-front one
gets an impression of partial recovery; once landed, one finds only a
fringe of houses along the sea, frail wooden houses with little
resemblance to the old stone city. Sloping wharves of stone, strewn with
broken and rusted lamp-posts, with worthless iron safes, and the twisted
remnants of anchor chains, accommodate only a few fishing canoes instead
of their former bustling ocean-going traffic. Back of the one partly
restored street lies a labyrinth of old, gray cut-stone ruins choked
with the rampant vegetation which does its concealing work quickly and
well in the tropics. From the beach to the sheer green mountain wall
behind, a dark-gray lava dust everywhere covers the natural soil, and
from this fertile humus a veritable jungle has sprung up. Former parlors
are filled with growing tobacco; banana plants wave their huge leaves
from out what were once secluded family residences; one can get lost in
the hills of lava, so overgrown are they with forests of brush, of
manioc, hedgewood, and thorny brambles. The remnants of stone walls
ready to fall down at the least tremor of the earth force the cautious
visitor to make many a detour. Here are great stone stairways that lead
nowhere; there massive buttresses upholding nothing. Ivy and climbing
plants drape the low jagged walls of former rollicking clubs and solemn
government buildings. Narrow paths squirm through the thorny brush where
once were crowded city streets. Of the five large churches that adorned
St. Pierre, only a piece of the tower, a fragment of the curved apse,
and a bit of the façade of the great stone cathedral, once among the
most important in the West Indies, peer above the surrounding
vegetation. The entrance hall and the tiles of the main aisle lead now
to a tiny wood-and-tin church built in the center of the former
structure. Rusted iron pillars, hanging awry or completely fallen, help
the brush to choke up the interior; a pathetic old iron saint, without
head, arms, or feet, leans against the outer wall as if he were still
dazed by the fall from his niche above. Gaunt black pigs roam everywhere
through the ruins, the silence of which is seldom broken except by the
wind whispering through the leaves and the murmur of the running water
with which the ghost of a city is still abundantly supplied.
* * * * *
A marvelous view of the whole scene may be had from a hill to the south
of the amphitheater, where the stone bases of what were evidently once
splendid suburban residences are also choked with brush and brambles.
From this height the sea is of so transparent a blue that one seems to
see on its bottom the reflection of the fishing canoes scattered about
the bay. The single restored street, once the main artery, cuts the
ruined city in two with a heavy gray line. On either side of this is a
broken row of houses, some roofed with somber tin, others with red tiles
that are already beginning to take on the brownish tint of age. But
these few colors, as well as the rare human noises that ascend on the
breeze, are but slight contrast to the gray lifelessness of all the
valley, so funereal in its general aspect that the gaily blossoming
trees seem strangely out of place in it. There is a mild suggestion of
Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Peruvian highlands, in this view of
ruined St. Pierre, with its countless gray stone walls and gables
standing forth above the deep green of the vegetation that covers all
else. The gables stand in almost perfect rows, like the headstones of an
immense graveyard, so that the little, bare, lava-covered cemetery with
its tiny white wooden crosses back near the foot of the mountain-wall
has a pathetic, almost ludicrous aspect, like the pretense of
cement-made “rustic” furniture, for the whole town is one vast cemetery.
On closer inspection one finds more inhabitants than are suggested by
the first glimpse. Dozens of drygoods-box shacks are hidden away in the
lee of towering stone walls that seem on the very point of toppling
over. Hovels of grass and thatch come suddenly to light as one scrambles
through the jungles of former palace courtyards and lava-razed
fortresses. The buoyant faith and trust of humanity laughs in the end at
such catastrophes even as that of St. Pierre. We halted to talk with
some of the denizens of these improvised homes among the ruins. An old
negro and his wife in one of them had lost their four children in the
disaster. The woman had been sent by her mistress on an errand into the
country an hour before it occurred; the man had seen a long row of
peasants bound for market killed up to within a few feet of where he was
working on the roadside, and a stone had fallen upon his back, crippling
him for life. Yet a few years later they had returned to build their
shelter on the very spot where their children had fallen.
“We couldn’t stand it in Fort de France,” explained the old man. “It was
always raining, stinking, full of mud and fever.” As a matter of fact,
there is scarcely an iota of difference in climate between the two
cities, but homesickness easily gives false impressions.
If St. Pierre is not yet rebuilt, it is not because of fear, but by
reason of the fact that only a scattered handful of its inhabitants were
left alive. In the city itself there was one survivor, a negro prisoner
confined in a deep dungeon from which he was rescued four days later.
Only those who chanced to be away from home or in the far outskirts
outlived that fateful May morning. Yet already it has several
distilleries, half a dozen schools, a post-office and telephone station,
a gendarmerie, and two or three makeshift hotels. The inhabitants are
more kindly, soft-mannered beings than those of the capital, as if the
disaster had tamed their souls. But even they are beginning to demand
the restoration of their city to the rank of a municipality. At present
it is not even a commune, but a suburban dependency of the neighboring
village of Carbet. Its streets are unlighted at night; five hundred
market women crowd the little Place Bertin daily in blazing sunshine or
drenching rain, for lack of a covered market. Only by its recreation
into a separate municipality, insist its inhabitants, will these things
and many like them be remedied; and once they are, St. Pierre will begin
to take on its old importance and grow rich and prosperous once more.
Meanwhile old Pélée, cold and inexorable, sloping majestically upward
from the blue Caribbean in broken, wrinkled, treeless, brown grandeur,
seems to look down upon the optimistic little creatures at his feet with
a grim, sardonic smile.
* * * * *
I set out to climb the volcano that afternoon, halting at Morne Rouge
for the night. From St. Pierre a good highway climbs abruptly into the
hills, along the lava cliffs of the Rivière Blanche, once seething with
boiling mud, now glass-clear again, with washerwomen toiling here and
there along its banks. During the eruption, the first visitors after it
ceased assure us, blocks of lava a hundred cubic meters in size were
thrown out by the monster, and the tropical rains falling on these
red-hot ingots produced all manner of violent phenomena. To-day these
giant blocks are broken up into far smaller masses, or have
disintegrated entirely into lava soil of great fertility. Forty square
miles were utterly devastated on that May morning, not a living thing
remaining within that area. But if nature destroys in one swift flare,
it also reconstructs quickly in these tropical regions. Lava valleys
full of waving bamboos, cliffs lined with splendid tree-ferns, patches
of sugar-cane stretching up the steep slopes seemed to belie the story
of destruction, while swarms of children about the frequent huts, many
of the boys in _poilu_ caps, the gay little girls with frizzled tresses,
sometimes covered with replica of their mothers’ gay turbans, showed
that even mankind was recovering from the devastation. For the “race
suicide” of continental France is not duplicated in her West Indian
colonies.
Morne Rouge sits on a ridge of one of the great buttresses that uphold
Pélée, towering 4429 feet above the Caribbean, with dimensions not
unsimilar to those of Vesuvius. It, too, was destroyed, though some
months later than St. Pierre, but many of its inhabitants took warning
in time and have returned to reconstruct the place to almost what it was
before. By some miracle, according to the French parish priest with whom
I spent the night, its huge church all but escaped damage, and only the
cross on its spire, still tipsy after eighteen years, recalls the ordeal
through which it passed. Wild begonias and many flowering shrubs give
the scattered town the air of a semi-tropical garden, and the spreading
view of the Caribbean, already far below, enhances the beauty of its
situation.
The ascent of Pélée is neither dangerous nor particularly difficult for
an experienced pedestrian. If I accepted the guidance of “Patrice,” at
the curate’s suggestion, it was rather because of the weather than for
any other reason. The morning was gloomy, with heavy, intermittent
showers, and the dense clouds that covered all the upper half of the
volcano made it unlikely that a stranger could follow unassisted the
path to the summit, though on a clear day there would have been no
difficulty. It was so cold that I shivered visibly in my summer garb.
Negroes in bare feet but wrapped to the ears in heavy _poilu_ overcoats,
squatted in the doors of their huts along the highway we followed for
several miles farther. Then we struck upward through steeply sloping
fields, already soaked from hat to shoes by the drenching downpours that
soon became one continual deluge. As a matter of fact, “Patrice” did not
boast the latter article of dress, which made it easier for him to cling
to the narrow path down which poured a veritable brook. But he was more
than once for turning back, and only the fear of what my host of the
night might say if he abandoned a “helpless stranger who had been put in
his special charge” urged him on. “Patrice” was three-fourths
negro,—what the Haitians call a _griffe_ and the Martiniquais a
_capre_,—but somehow one did not think of his color, possibly because,
like many of the French islanders, he seemed to be almost unconscious of
it himself, and he had not a trace of that mixture of aggressiveness and
obsequiousness of our own and the British blacks. His mind was a curious
conglomeration of learning, picked up heaven knows where, and patches of
the most astonishing ignorance, but he knew Pélée as a child knows its
own back-yard.
This was fortunate, for it was a day in which it would have been more
than easy to go astray. Only once or twice in the ascent did the fog
lift, giving a glimpse of both the Atlantic and the Caribbean, of Morne
Rouge half hidden in its verdure, and the green-gray site of what was
once St. Pierre. Great fields of tree-ferns, whole mountain-sides of
them, showed in these brief intervals of visibility, with deeply wooded
valleys and steep peaks and ridges entirely covered with vegetation;
nowhere the bare rocks and patches of lava I had expected. Mountain
“raspberries,” the same inviting but rather tasteless fruit which the
Porto Ricans miscall _fresas_, lined the way almost to the summit,
enticing us to halt and eat regardless of the downpour. Once during the
last sheer miles we had a brief view of the rim of the crater, like the
edge of a world broken off by some cataclysm of the solar system. But
when we had surmounted this and paused on the brink, there was nothing
to be seen except an immense void filled with swirling white mist.
“Patrice” knew the value of patience, however, and for a long shivering
hour we waited. Then all at once the cloud-curtain was snatched away for
the briefest instant, and at our feet lay, not the quarry-like crater of
the imagination, but a great valley filled with a scrub vegetation which
might have been duplicated in the highlands of Scotland. Across it, like
a mammoth monument, the “needle” that marks the summit, in the new form
which the latest eruption left it, stood out against the sky a mere
rifle-shot away. Then the mists swept in again, as if nature were some
busy caretaker who had little time to waste on mere sight-seers, and
left us to find our way as best we could out of the little cell-like
chamber of fog in which we were inclosed.
We descended by a path that “Patrice” knew, even in the clouds, to the
bottom of the crater. Gigantic rocks of every possible form lay tumbled
everywhere, but so completely were they covered with light vegetation
that only this closer view revealed their existence. Here and there was
a _fumerole_, or smoke-hole, from which issued light clouds of vapor
indistinguishable, except in temperature, from the swirling mists in
which they were quickly merged. We crawled into one of these,
half-covered with a hoodlike boulder, and at once lost the chill that
had pervaded our very bones. The vent was like some mammoth
chimney-corner, with a damp, sulphurous heat which quickly induced
sleepiness and a desire to stretch out and let the world below go hang.
That and the bottle of syrupy Martinique rum which “Patrice” had been
foresighted enough to bring with him allayed any fear of mishap from
exposure, and we ate our lunch in as homelike comfort as if the wintry
winds and pouring rain outside were a thousand leagues distant.
The descent was swifter than we would have had it, thanks to the
rain-soaked slopes, and almost before I realized it we were down in the
brilliant tropical sunshine again, great clumps of bamboos casting a
welcome shade over the ever more level trail and the mountainsides; of
tree-ferns again high above us. At Ajoupa Bouillon (_ajoupa_, a hastily
constructed shelter, is one of the few Carib words which has survived)
we rejoined the highway and parted company, “Patrice” dubious of a
“helpless stranger’s” ability to find his way, even along a public road.
But as I showed no inclination to add another five-franc note to his
unusual day’s income for being piloted to the north coast, he took his
leave with a doleful countenance and pattered away in the direction of
Morne Rouge.
* * * * *
Everything I wore or carried was still dripping wet. I turned aside into
the first open meadow and spread out all of which I could in decency
divest myself, the blazing sunshine drying it with magical rapidity. One
felt immensely more of a sense of civilization here than in Haiti. There
a lone white man would have hesitated to lie down beside the highway,
even had there been one. Here one seemed as secure as in the heart of
France. Yet there was little outward difference between the Haitians and
the simple, kindly country-people who plodded constantly past, the women
carrying big bundles on their heads. The hats they secured by laying the
load over one rim flapping behind them, balancing their burdens with a
cadenced swing of the hips, their legs bare to the knees. The men were
fewer and seldom carried anything. In the fields were flocks of cattle;
the little houses were all built close to the road, for _cacos_ are
unknown in Martinique. Vehicles were few despite the excellence of the
leisurely French highway. The great mass of the islanders do their
traveling on foot, the wealthy by automobile; but the latter are not
numerous enough to give the pedestrian much annoyance.
As I neared the coast, the rolling hills turned to cane-fields,
stretching clear down to the edge of the Atlantic. Compared with Cuba or
Porto Rico, the methods were primitive, or more exactly, diminutive.
Children, women, and old men picked up the cut canes, one by one, tied
them in bundles with the top leaves, and slowly carried them to small
ox-carts in which they were laboriously stood on end, bundle by bundle.
These workers received two francs a day—fifteen cents at the then rate
of exchange. Men in the prime of life were paid four francs fifty
centimes for such work as hoeing or transferring the ox-cart loads into
the little four-wheeled railroad cars which bore them away to the
factory. Cane-cutters, however, working by the _tache_, earned as much
as twelve francs a day.
[Illustration: Women of Martinique]
[Illustration: A principal street of Fort de France with its Cathedral]
[Illustration: The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as
the women]
[Illustration: Empress Josephine was born where this house stands]
Unlike the smaller British islands, the French Antilles have not put all
their faith in sugar. Cane products, however, form by far the most
important industry. If their exports of sugar decreased by half during
the war, it is because the making of rum proved more advantageous,
especially as France requisitioned their sugar at less than half the
price in the open market. In the very years when the United States was
adopting its prohibition amendment, Martinique and Guadeloupe increased
their rum production by some forty per cent. The present almost
unprecedented prosperity of the islands is mainly due to the distilled
cane juice they sent overseas while their sons were battling at the
front. But here, too, there are loud protests at the inequality of
distribution of that prosperity. Three-fourths of the island, the
Martiniquais complain, belongs to five families, of pure French blood,
who intermarry among themselves, keeping the estates and the chief
_usines_ in a sort of closed corporation. If a bit of land is offered
for sale, the complaint continues, these families bid it in at any price
demanded in order to freeze out “les petits.” The fact that the latter
may also be white men does not alter the attitude of the monopolists.
Moreover, the small planter is ruthlessly exploited by the large
distillers, who pay him fifty to sixty francs a ton for his cane and
sell their rum at seven francs a liter. One finds, therefore, among the
middle-class whites a considerable number of still patriotic but
disgruntled citizens.
A little story which was going the rounds during our stay in Martinique
shows that the game of “high finance” can be played even on a twenty by
forty mile island. A “high yellow” native who had never been credited
with extraordinary intelligence “cleaned up” three million francs during
the last year of the war by the following simple little scheme. France
decreed that the freight rate between Martinique and French ports should
be three hundred francs a ton. The ships secretly refused space at that
price. The “high yellow” individual entered into a private agreement
with the steamship companies to pay the price asked, 1200 francs a ton.
While his competitors were complaining that they could not ship, this
man’s rum was being carried to Europe, where it was sold at a high
price, but not one at which, his rivals pointed out to one another, he
could make any profit at such exorbitant freight rates. The man
persisted, however, paying for each shipment by check as soon as it was
landed. With the last barrels he, too, went to France. There he wrote a
polite note to the steamship company, requesting that he be refunded the
nine hundred francs a ton he had paid over the legal rate. The company
laughed loudly at his colonial naïveté. He put his check stubs in the
hands of a lawyer, and, to cut short the story, the company suddenly
recognized the bitter truth in the assertion that he who laughs last
shows superior mirth.
I halted that night in Lorrain, on the edge of a small bay with
precipitous shores into which the Atlantic threshed constantly, and next
morning caught the lumbering _auto de poste_, having had the foresight
to reserve a _place_ in it some days earlier. Even though we clung to
the coast, the road climbed continuously over the buttresses of the
central mountain chain, for these smaller West Indian islands have
virtually no real flat lands. From the tops of the higher ridges we
could plainly make out Dominica on the horizon behind us. Some of the
hillsides were built up in terraced gardens, though without stone
facings, in which grew among other favorite native vegetables, _gname_,
as Martinique calls the _malanga_ of Cuba or the _poi_ or _taro_ of the
South Seas. The chauffeur had small respect for any possible nerves
among the passengers, and tore about the constant curves and incessant
ups and downs of the ridge-braced coast as if speed were far more
essential than ultimate arrival. The coast-line, ragged as a shattered
panel, with pretty, old-as-France towns nestled in each scolloped bay,
presented many a beautiful vista. Here and there we crossed a little
cane railroad, some of the fields that fed them so precipitous that the
bundles of cane were shot down across the ravines on wire trolleys. At
Trinité, with its long peninsula stretching far out into the Atlantic,
we turned inland and climbed quickly into the hills. Here there were a
few Chinese and Hindu features, but the overwhelming majority were
negroes, though full-blooded Africans were almost rare. The Frenchman is
inclined to overlook the matter of color in his attachments, with the
result that mulattoes are much more numerous in the French than in the
British islands. There is a great difference, too, in what might be
called public discipline. To cite one of many examples: one of our
fellow-passengers crowded into the coach with an immense plate-glass
mirror without a frame. A mishap at any of the sharp turns or steep
descents might easily have shattered it and seriously injured the score
of persons huddled within the vehicle. But though the one white traveler
besides myself kept repeating during all the rest of the journey, “_Mais
c’est_ excessivement _dangereux_,” the mirror remained. In the British
islands the mere attempt to enter a public vehicle with such an object
would probably have resulted in a solemn case in a magistrate’s court
that same morning. Near Gros Morne were several hills completely covered
with pineapples, the cultivators climbing along the rows as up and down
a ladder. Then suddenly we came out high above the great bay of Fort de
France, the square chimneys of a dozen rum _usines_ dotting the almost
flat lands about it, and descended quickly through ever more populous
villages to the capital.
* * * * *
I returned to St. Pierre one morning for a walk through the heart of the
island. An excellent road in rather bad repair unites the ruined city
and the capital, a distance of twenty-five miles. It climbs quickly into
beautiful, cool, green mountains. When one says mountains in the West
Indies the word must be taken with a rather diminutive meaning, for
though they are real mountains in formation, and sometimes in
massiveness, the greater part of them is under water. Old sugar estates
dating from the high-priced Napoleonic days, with half perpendicular
cane-fields, surrounded the first few steep kilometers. Then the ascent
grew more leisurely, though it mounted steadily for some three hours up
the valley of the Carbet. If one was to believe the French guidebook in
my pocket, I was engaged in a perilous undertaking.
“One must remember,” it warned, “that Martinique is a tropical country,
and the act of exposing oneself to climbing a slope on foot or of
blowing up a bicycle tire, even in the shade”—the paragraph was
addressed to cyclists, for the writer would never have suspected a
visitor to Martinique of deliberately turning pedestrian—“is dangerous.
A tropical helmet,” he asserted on another page, “and a flannel
stomach-band are indispensable.” How I have succeeded in covering many
thousand miles of the tropics on foot without harnessing myself up in
those indispensable contrivances is, no doubt, a mystery. As a matter of
fact, the chatter of sedentary imaginations aside, tramping is no more
risky in the West Indies than in the midsummer Catskills.
During the first few miles I met many fierce-looking mulattoes in
flaring piratical mustaches and kinky Napoleon III beards, carrying in
their hands big, sharp-pointed cane-knives, but every passer-by bade me
a soft, kindly, respectful “Bon jour, monsieur”; they had not even the
hypocritical obsequiousness or the occasional insolence of the British
negro. Beyond Fond St. Denis the way descended somewhat along another
beautiful valley, its slopes densely wooded, a small river boiling over
the rocks at its bottom. The _Pitons du Carbet_ bulked majestically into
the sky overhead; a lower peak between them was completely covered with
tree-ferns. Then the highway began to mount again, disclosing
magnificent new panoramas at every turn. It was a soft-footed road, and
in these higher reaches almost entirely untraveled. The rich center of
the island was surprisingly uninhabited. The unfailing trade-wind swept
down through the mountain passes to the left; hurrying clouds broke the
fury of the tropical sun; there was splendid drinking water everywhere,
usually carried out to the edge of the road in bamboo troughs stuck into
the sheer mountain-side. The climb ended at two huts and a shrine,
dignified with the name of Deux Choux, whence another highway descended
to Robert, on the Atlantic. My own paused for a marvelous view back down
the dense green valley to cloud-capped Pélée and a broad stretch of the
Caribbean beyond St. Pierre, then came out on a tiny meadow with grazing
cattle, a lonely little hut, and a temperate climate. A wonderfully
symmetrical green peak stood directly overhead, with another, its summit
lost in the clouds, breaking the horizon beyond. Martinique, one was
forced to admit, was as beautiful in its small way as Porto Rico, even
though it lacks the red-leafed _bucaré_, the color-splashes of
orange-trees, and the snow-like tobacco-fields. A deep stillness
reigned, emphasized rather than broken by the murmur of some distant
little stream, the creaking of an insect far off in the wilderness, now
and then a gust of wind which set the ferns and the bamboo plumes to
whispering together. Once I thought I heard a groan, but it proved to be
only the native _boute_ I was smoking, struggling for air. Little wooden
shrines were here and there set into the mountain walls, the garments of
the dolls they inclosed tattered and weather-rotted.
Some eight miles from the capital a gap in the hills gave a
wide-spreading view of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and all the southern
half of Martinique, tumbled, mottled by sunshine and cloud shadows, more
brown than this central region, the three little islands that mark the
birthplace of a French empress dotting the dense-blue bay. Houses and
people began to appear again, happy-go-lucky little huts, though with
far more pride in their appearance than those of Haiti; then came the
“summer villas” of the wealthier citizens of Fort de France, until the
road became one long suburb. A branch to the right descended to the hot
baths of Absalon; farther on another pitched downward to those of
Didier, both at the bottom of an immense cleft in the hills, and an hour
later I was plodding through the hot, dusty, crowded streets of
gaily-turbaned Fort de France.
* * * * *
The people of the French Antilles have many of the characteristics of
the continental Frenchman. His faults and his virtues are theirs, the
former magnified, the latter shrunken, as is the way with the negro. In
outward demeanor they have little in common with the British West
Indian, still less perhaps with our own blacks. They are much less given
to outbursts of insolence and are more courteous. But, like the
Frenchman, they are impulsive and individualistic, hence one cannot
generalize too broadly. I have met some of the most genuinely courteous
persons in “French America,” mulattoes, _capres_, and even full negroes,
with the outward evidences of a culture superior to that of any but our
best class; I have met others who made me temporarily a firm believer in
the righteousness of Judge Lynch. The former were decidedly in the
majority; there were many who were rather over polite. But, like that of
the French, their politeness is individual, never collective. After
being treated with incredible courtesy by the few with whom one has come
into personal contact, one is astounded to find the crowds almost
brutal. The country people are, of course, more courteous than the
corresponding classes in the capital; the women are, on the whole, less
so than the men, another direct legacy from the French. The islanders
have, too, something of that French custom of not showing surprise at
strange sights or personal idiosyncrasies, that same quality that makes
it so easy to live in Paris. A white man on foot, for instance, rarely
seems to attract even a passing attention; in the British islands he is
the constant butt of inquiry, comment, and crude attempts at ridicule,
though he is an equally unusual sight in either group of islands. All
these things are visibly the result of environment and the negro’s
monkey-like faculty for imitation. From the _capre_ up he takes on
certain other qualities from his white parents, though they seldom equal
the original. The one pleasant trait native to the negro—his gaiety and
lack of gloom—is tempered in the French islands by a sort of Latin
pensiveness, while his sense of personal dignity is distinctly higher
than that among the former British slaves.
His superiority to the Haitian is ample proof of the advantage of having
the negro ruled over by whites, even though that rule be faulty, instead
of letting him run wild. He has more sense of responsibility, more
industry, and a civic spirit which the Haitian has almost completely
lost. All this tends to make him comparatively law-abiding. There are
few country police in the French islands, and they are not numerous in
the towns, yet the stranger may wander at will and rarely meet even with
annoyance. Barrels of rum are left unguarded for weeks in the streets or
on the wharves of Guadeloupe or Martinique, and the case is almost
unknown of their being broached or in any way molested. Even our own
land scarcely aspires to that high standard. White women may go freely
anywhere with far less likelihood of meeting with disrespect than in
many Caucasian lands.
The French negro’s superiority of deportment is partly due, no doubt, to
the higher sense of equality he enjoys under the tricolor. The color
line exists, but it is less direct, less tangible, more hidden than with
us. When the white inhabitants speak of it at all it is apt to be in
whispers. “Creoles” shake hands with, and show all the outward signs of
friendship to their colored neighbors; bi-colored functions, business
partnerships between the two races are common, yet the whites avoid
social mixture as far as they dare. I say “dare” because that is exactly
the word which seems to fit the case. The French appear to have a
certain fear of their negroes, if not actual physical fear, at least a
disinclination to show them discourtesy by referring to the matter of
color. In fact, the colored population may be said to have the upper
hand. The laws of the islands are made in France, but each of them sends
a senator and two deputies to Paris, and equal suffrage gives the whites
small chance of winning these offices; they have still less of being
elected to municipal and colonial councils.
“It was a great mistake to give the negroes the vote,” more than one
white islander assured me, in an undertone, “for it leaves us whites
swamped beneath them. With negroes voting, justice goes almost
invariably to the man who is a friend of the _député_, and the latter is
never white.”
“Our colored population should be handled with a firm hand,” said a
white colonial from the island of St. Martin, “but of course you cannot
expect the French to do that.”
Fortunately for the whites, there is a considerable amount of friction
between the negroes and the “_gens de couleur_,” and the blacks are
often more friendly to the Caucasian element than to those partly of
their own race.
Even the “creole” of the islands under French rule is more orderly than
that of Haiti. A knowledge of French is sufficient to carry on
conversation with all classes, though the language of the masses falls
far short of Parisian perfection. Curious local expressions are
numerous. “_Li_” means either _il y a_ or _il est_; the banana we know
is a “_gro’ femme_” the tiny ones which seldom reach our markets are
“_figues naines_”—literally “dwarf figs.” “Who” becomes “_Qui monde_” an
improvement at least over the “_Qui monde ça_” of Haiti. Innumerable
localisms of this kind, added to a slovenly pronunciation, make the
popular tongue difficult for the stranger, but at least he is not called
upon to guess the meaning of scores of terms from the African dialects
such as pepper the Haitian jargon.
Though French money is current, Guadeloupe and Martinique issue notes of
their own of from five francs upward. As these look exactly alike,
except for the name of the island printed upon them, yet are not
mutually accepted, the inexperienced traveler is sometimes put to
considerable annoyance. Nominally, prices are now almost as high as in
the United States, but the present low rate of exchange makes living
agreeably low for the foreigner. “Telegrams” turned in at a post-office
are telephoned to any part of the island in which they originate, with
un-Latin despatch, at the slight cost of fifty centimes (four cents at
the present exchange) for twenty words. There is no cable service,
however, between the two islands, which have less intercourse with each
other than with the mother country.
Schools are closely centralized, as in France, and not particularly
numerous or effective, though there is less illiteracy than the census
of the French islanders who helped to dig the Panama Canal seemed to
indicate. Among the surprises in store for the visitor is the profound
patriotism of almost all classes. Twenty thousand Martiniquais went to
France as conscripts, while the British West Indies sent only
volunteers, yet only one British island can in any way compare with
their French neighbors in loyalty to the homeland. Thus is France
rewarded for the comparative equality which she grants her subjects,
irrespective of color. While the British segregated their West Indian
troops into the separate regiments, with white officers over them and
only the non-commissioned ranks open to soldiers of color, France mixed
hers in with the poilus, and gave them equal chances of promotion. More
than one black French colonel held important posts during the war.
Incidentally, by this intermingling she got considerable fight out of
her black troops, which can scarcely be said of the “B. W. I.”
regiments. This policy, carried out with what to us would be too
thorough an indifference to the racial problem, has at least given her
“American” subjects a great loyalty and love for France.
The nearest approach to a railroad station in Martinique is a street
beside the post-office in the capital. There, at half-past two each
afternoon, three _autos de poste_ set out for as many extremities of the
island. A throng of would-be travelers, several times larger than the
snorting old busses can accommodate, forms a whirlpool of gay calicos,
multifarious bundles, and sputtering _patois_, in which a lone white man
seems strangely out of place. The distribution of tickets is somewhat
disorderly, as one might expect, and when the vehicles chug away with
their full, cramped quota, they are followed by angry shrieks and
gestures from the disappointed. The wealthy few of these hurry out to
the edge of the _savane_ to bargain for private cars, while the majority
trudge homeward, hoping that the morrow will bring better luck, or
wrathfully set out on foot for their destinations.
I won a place one afternoon in the bus for Ste. Anne, thirty-five miles
away on the southern point of the island. The region proved more
rolling, less broken by abrupt hills, than the central portion. Old
kettles scattered here and there, the ruins of a few windmill-towers and
ivy-grown brick chimneys showed that Martinique, too, had gone through a
certain process of centralization in her principal industry. The sense
of smell demonstrated that the larger and rarer _usines_ we passed gave
their attention rather to rum than to sugar. Beyond Petit Bourg the
plains bordering Fort de France Bay gave way to a wilder landscape, with
a rich red soil and many by no means perfect roads in every direction.
The turban-coiffed women and barefoot countrymen tramping them had no
such fear of the automobile as their Haitian cousins, but yielded the
road to it with a sort of lofty disdain. Everywhere men and women were
working side by side in the cane-fields, which filled each suggestion of
valley and covered the lower slopes about it. The appearance of the soil
and the short joints of the canes suggested that this southern region
needed irrigation. Farther on came several precipices and immense
ravines, the mountains sprinkled far and wide with huts and little
cultivated fields which the irregularity of the ground gave every
conceivable shape. Many of the mountaineers, according to a
fellow-passenger, own their farms, those far back in the hills being
mainly engaged in the cultivation of cacao. We passed half a dozen
populous towns on the way, that of Rivière Pilote in a setting of
enormous black boulders which carried the mind back to Namur in Belgium.
A thorny, half-arid vegetation stretched from there all the way to the
petrified forest and salt ponds on the southernmost point of the island.
[Illustration: The St. Pierre of to-day with Pelée in the background]
[Illustration: The Cathedral of St. Pierre]
[Illustration: The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses
into the corners of old stone ruins]
Ste. Anne is a thatch-roofed little village of perhaps a hundred
inhabitants, yet these included at least four _grands blessés_, cripples
from the far off battle-line in France. One blind youth, whose _poilu_
cap looked pale above his ebony face, sat playing a broken violin behind
the little hut in which he was born. Yet he would gladly go again, he
asserted, if “our dear France” needed him. Another wore the khaki
overseas cap marked “321 U. S.” he had picked up on the battlefield the
day he lost his leg. The policeman who gave me a shake-down in the hut
from which he ruled the community insisted on showing me all six of the
scars which decorated his black body, while his female companion
displayed the fragments of shrapnel that had inflicted them, precious
relics which she kept in a broken pitcher. He was still fighting the war
over again when I fell asleep. Simple-hearted, obliging negroes, the
citizens of Ste. Anne evidently saw a white man so seldom that they were
scarcely aware of the existence of the troublesome “color line.”
On my return, I dropped off at Petit Bourg and walked out to the village
of Trois Islets. A mile beyond it, back in a pretty little hollow in the
hills, are the ruins of the overseer’s house in which Josephine, once
Empress of the French, was born. The walls of the stone building where
her parents lived until a hurricane destroyed it just before her birth,
can still be traced; the kitchen behind it serves to this day the
mulatto family that has built a smaller dwelling on the same site.
Farther back in the valley, half hidden by tropical brush and clumps of
bamboo, are the roofless remains of her father’s sugar-mill—or, more
likely, rum plant—where she lived until the age of fifteen. Its square
brick chimney still peers above the encroaching vegetation. A long line
of women were hoeing the cane on a steep hillside across the brook,
their multicolored garments standing out against the Nile-green
background, snatches of the falsetto song with which they cheer one
another on at their labors drifting by on the trade wind—just such a
scene, perhaps, as Josephine herself had known so well in her girlhood.
Marie Joséphine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was first married to the
Vicomte de Beauharnais, son of a governor of Martinique. Her mother lies
buried in the parish church of Trois Islets, on a little knoll
overlooking the three tiny islands which give the place its name. A
stone set into the interior wall of the modest plaster and red-tiled
building informs all who care to read:
Ci Git
L’Auguste Madame
Rose Claire Duverger de Sanois
Veuve de Messire J. G. Tascher
de LA PAGERIE
Mère de SA MAJESTÈ
L’IMPERATRICE
des FRANÇAIS
Décédée le 2 Juin 1807
a l’age de 71 ans
Munie des sacrements de
L’EGLISE
But neither the old municipal secretary who takes it upon himself to
have a lunch prepared in the municipal building for all “distinguished
visitors”—thereby adding generously to his stipend—nor the dwarfish
priest in his garden-framed residence behind the church was interested
in Napoleonic history. Their problems were more modern.
“How can a man live,” they condoled with each other, while I studied the
decorations of the priestly parlor, “with rum advanced from fifty
centimes to _six francs_ a liter?”
Women carrying sewer-pipes and bricks on their heads had loaded the
“canoe” which carries the mails daily from Trois Islets to the capital
across the bay until its gunwales were barely visible above the water.
When a dozen negro passengers and sailors had added their weight to this
imminent possibility of disaster, we were rowed out beyond the islets,
where the captain of the trusting contrivance stood for some time at the
bow blowing on a conch-shell for the wind that at length saw fit to waft
us safely across to Fort de France.