Next day, like the 'Young Muleteers of Grenada,' a good song which
often haunted me in those days,
'With morning's earliest twinkle
Again we are up and gone,'
with two horses, two mules, and a Negro and a Coolie carrying our
scanty luggage in Arima baskets: but not without an expression of
pity from the Negro who cleaned my boots. 'Where were we going?'
To the east coast. Cuffy turned up what little nose he had. He
plainly considered the east coast, and indeed Trinidad itself, as
not worth looking at. 'Ah! you should go Barbadoes, sa. Dat de
country to see. I Barbadian, sa.' No doubt. It is very quaint,
this self-satisfaction of the Barbadian Negro. Whether or not he
belonged originally to some higher race--for there are as great
differences of race among Negroes as among any white men--he looks
down on the Negroes, and indeed on the white men, of other islands,
as beings of an inferior grade; and takes care to inform you in the
first five minutes that he is 'neider C'rab nor Creole, but true
Barbadian barn.' This self-conceit of his, meanwhile, is apt to
make him unruly, and the cause of unruliness in others when he
emigrates. The Barbadian Negroes are, I believe, the only ones who
give, or ever have given, any trouble in Trinidad; and in Barbadoes
itself, though the agricultural Negroes work hard and well, who that
knows the West Indies knows not the insubordination of the
Bridgetown boatmen, among whose hands a traveller and his luggage
are, it is said, likely enough to be pulled in pieces? However,
they are rather more quiet just now; for not a thousand years ago a
certain steamer's captain, utterly unable to clear his quarter of
the fleet of fighting, jabbering brown people, turned the steam pipe
on them. At which quite unexpected artillery they fled
precipitately; and have had some rational respect for a steamer's
quarter ever since. After all, I do not deny that this man's being
a Barbadian opened my heart to him at once, for old sakes' sake.
Another specimen of Negro character I was to have analysed, or tried
to analyse, at the estate where I had slept. M. F--- had lately
caught a black servant at the brook-side busily washing something in
a calabash, and asked him what was he doing there? The conversation
would have been held, of course, in French-Spanish-African--Creole
patois, a language which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and
declensions, etc. A curious book on it has lately been published in
Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at
once no mean philologer and no mean humorist. The substance of the
Negro's answer was, 'Why, sir, you sent me to the town to buy a
packet of sugar and a packet of salt; and coming back it rained so
hard, the packets burst, and the salt was all washed into the sugar.
And so--I am washing it out again.' . . .
This worthy was to have been brought to me, that I might discover,
if possible, by what processes of 'that which he was pleased to call
his mind' he had arrived at the conclusion that such a thing could
be done. Clearly, he could not plead unavoidable ignorance of the
subject-matter, as might the old cook at San Josef, who, the first
time her master brought home Wenham Lake ice from Port of Spain, was
scandalised at the dirtiness of the 'American water,' washed off the
sawdust, and dried the ice in the sun. His was a case of Handy-
Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr.
Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe
the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of
muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no
proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane
persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy;
and very frequent, I am afraid, among the Negroes. But--as might
have been expected--the poor boy's moral sense had proved as shaky
as his intellectual powers. He had just taken a fancy to some goods
of his master's; and had retreated, to enjoy them the more securely,
into the southern forests, with a couple of brown policemen on his
track. So he was likely to undergo a more simple investigation than
that which was submitted to my analysis, viz. how he proposed to
wash the salt out of the sugar.
We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in the
woods, with a good shop or 'store' upon a village green, under the
verandah whereof lay, side by side with bottled ale and biscuit
tins, bags of Carapo {265} nuts; trapezoidal brown nuts--enclosed
originally in a round fruit--which ought some day to form a valuable
article of export. Their bitter anthelminthic oil is said to have
medicinal uses; but it will be still more useful for machinery, as
it has--like that curious flat gourd the Sequa {266a}--the property
of keeping iron from rust. The tree itself, common here and in
Guiana, is one of the true Forest Giants; we saw many a noble
specimen of it in our rides. Its timber is tough, not over heavy,
and extensively used already in the island; while its bark is a
febrifuge and tonic. In fact it possesses all those qualities which
make its brethren, the Meliaceae, valuable throughout the Tropics.
But it is not the only tree of South America whose bark may be used
as a substitute for quinine. They may be counted possibly by
dozens. A glance at the excellent enumerations of the uses of
vegetable products to be found in Lindley's Vegetable Kingdom (a
monument of learning) will show how God provides, how man neglects
and wastes. As a single instance, the Laurels alone are known
already to contain several valuable febrifuges, among which the
Demerara Greenheart, or Bibiri, {266b} claims perhaps the highest
rank. 'Dr. Maclagan has shown,' says Dr. Lindley, 'that sulphate of
Bibiri acts with rapid and complete success in arresting ague.'
This tree spreads from Jamaica to the Spanish Main. It is plentiful
in Trinidad; still more plentiful in Guiana; and yet all of it which
reaches Europe is a little of its hard beautiful wood for the use of
cabinetmakers; while in Demerara, I am assured by an eye-witness,
many tons of this precious Greenheart bark are thrown away year by
year. So goes the world; and man meanwhile at once boasts of his
civilisation, and complains of the niggardliness of Nature.
But if I once begin on this subject I shall not know where to end.
Our way lay now for miles along a path which justified all that I
had fancied about the magnificent possibilities of landscape
gardening in the Tropics. A grass drive, as we should call it in
England--a 'trace,' as it is called in the West Indies--some sixty
feet in width, and generally carpeted with short turf, led up hill
and down dale; for the land, though low, is much ridged and gullied,
and there has been as yet no time to cut down the hills, or to metal
the centre of the road. It led, as the land became richer, through
a natural avenue even grander than those which I had already seen.
The light and air, entering the trace, had called into life the
undergrowth and lower boughs, till from the very turf to a hundred
and fifty feet in height rose one solid green wall, spangled here
and there with flowers. Below was Mamure, Roseau, Timit, Aroumas,
and Tulumas, {266c} mixed with Myrtles and Melastomas; then the
copper Bois Mulatres among the Cocorite and Jagua palms; above them
the heads of enormous broad-leaved trees of I know not how many
species; and the lianes festooning all from cope to base. The
crimson masses of Norantea on the highest tree-tops were here most
gorgeous; but we had to beware of staring aloft too long, for fear
of riding into mud-holes--for the wet season would not end as yet,
though dry weather was due--or, even worse, into the great Parasol-
ant warrens, which threatened, besides a heavy fall, stings
innumerable. At one point, I recollect, a gold-green Jacamar sat on
a log and looked at me till I was within five yards of her. At
another we heard the screams of Parrots; at another, the double note
of the Toucan; at another, the metallic clank of the Bell-bird, or
what was said to be the Bell-bird. But this note was not that
solemn and sonorous toll of the Campanese of the mainland which is
described by Waterton and others. It resembled rather the less
poetical sound of a woman beating a saucepan to make a swarm of bees
settle.
At one point we met a gang of Negroes felling timber to widen the
road. Fresh fallen trees, tied together with lianes, lay
everywhere. What a harvest for the botanist was among them! I
longed to stay there a week to examine and collect. But time
pressed; and, indeed, collecting plants in the wet season is a
difficult and disappointing work. In an air saturated with moisture
specimens turn black and mouldy, and drop to pieces; and unless
turned over and exposed to every chance burst of sunshine, the
labour of weeks is lost, if indeed meanwhile the ants, and other
creeping things, have not eaten the whole into rags.
Among these Negroes was one who excited my astonishment; not merely
for his size, though he was perhaps the tallest man whom I saw among
the usually tall Negroes of Trinidad; but for his features, which
were altogether European of the highest type; the forehead high and
broad, the cheek-bones flat, the masque long and oval, and the nose
aquiline and thin enough for any prince. Conscious of his own
beauty and strength, he stood up among the rest as an old Macedonian
might have stood up among the Egyptians he had conquered. We tried
to find out his parentage. My companions presumed he was an
'African,' i.e. imported during the times of slavery. He said No:
that he was a Creole, island born; but his father, it appeared, had
been in one of our Negro regiments, and had been settled afterwards
on a Government grant of land. Whether his beauty was the result of
'atavism'--of the reappearance, under the black skin and woolly
hair, of some old stain of white blood; or whether, which is more
probable, he came of some higher African race; one could not look at
him without hopeful surmises as to the possible rise of the Negro,
and as to the way in which it will come about--the only way in which
any race has permanently risen, as far as I can ascertain; namely,
by the appearance among them of sudden sports of nature; individuals
of an altogether higher type; such a man as that terrible Daaga,
whose story has been told. If I am any judge of physiognomy, such a
man as that, having--what the Negro has not yet had--'la carriere
ouverte aux talents,' might raise, not himself merely, but a whole
tribe, to an altogether new level in culture and ability.
Just after passing this gang we found, lying by the road, two large
snakes, just killed, which I would gladly have preserved had it been
possible. They were, the Negroes told us, 'Dormillons,' or
'Mangrove Cascabel,' a species as yet, I believe, undescribed; and,
of course, here considered as very poisonous, owing to their
likeness to the true Cascabel, {268} whose deadly fangs are justly
dreaded by the Lapo hunter. For the Cascabel has a fancy for living
in the Lapo's burrow, as does the rattlesnake in that of the prairie
dog in the Western United States, and in the same friendly and
harmless fashion; and is apt, when dug out, to avenge himself and
his host by a bite which is fatal in a few hours. But these did not
seem to me to have the heads of poisonous snakes; and, in spite of
the entreaties of the terrified Negroes, I opened their mouths to
judge for myself, and found them, as I expected, utterly fangless
and harmless. I was not aware then that Dr. De Verteuil had stated
the same fact in print; but I am glad to corroborate it, for the
benefit of at least the rational people in Trinidad: for snakes,
even poisonous ones, should be killed as seldom as possible. They
feed on rats and vermin, and are the farmer's good friend, whether
in the Tropics or in England; and to kill a snake, or even an adder-
-who never bites any one if he is allowed to run away--is, in
nineteen cases out of twenty, mere wanton mischief.
The way was beguiled, if I recollect rightly, for some miles on, by
stories about Cuba and Cuban slavery from one of our party. He
described the political morality of Cuba as utterly dissolute; told
stories of great sums of money voted for roads which are not made to
this day, while the money had found its way into the pockets of
Government officials; and, on the whole, said enough to explain the
determination of the Cubans to shake off Spanish misrule, and try
what they could do for themselves on this earth. He described Cuban
slavery as, on the whole, mild; corporal punishment being restricted
by law to a few blows, and very seldom employed: but the mildness
seemed dictated rather by self-interest than by humanity. 'Ill-use
our slaves?' said a Cuban to him. 'We cannot afford it. You take
good care of your four-legged mules: we of our two-legged ones.'
The children, it seems, are taken away from the mothers, not merely
because the mothers are needed for work, but because they neglect
their offspring so much that the children have more chance of
living--and therefore of paying--if brought up by hand. So each
estate has, or had, its creche, as the French would call it--a great
nursery, in which the little black things are reared, kindly enough,
by the elder ladies of the estate. To one old lady, who wearied
herself all day long in washing, doctoring, and cramming the babies,
my friend expressed pity for all the trouble she took about her
human brood. 'Oh dear no,' answered she; 'they are a great deal
easier to rear than chickens.' The system, however, is nearly at an
end. Already the Cuban Revolution has produced measures of half-
emancipation; and in seven years' time probably there will not be a
slave in Cuba.
We waded stream after stream under the bamboo clumps, and in one of
them we saw swimming a green rigoise, or whip-snake, which must have
been nearly ten feet long. It swam with its head and the first two
feet of its body curved aloft like a swan, while the rest of the
body lay along the surface of the water in many curves--a most
graceful object as it glided away into dark shadow along an oily
pool. At last we reached an outlying camp, belonging to one of our
party who was superintending the making of new roads in that
quarter, and there rested our weary limbs, some in hammock, some on
the tables, some, again, on the clay floor. Here I saw, as I saw
every ten minutes, something new--that quaint vegetable plaything
described by Humboldt and others; namely, the spathe of the Timit
palm. It encloses, as in most palms, a branched spadix covered with
innumerable round buds, most like a head of millet, two feet and a
half long: but the spathe, instead of splitting and forming a hood
over the flowers, as in the Cocorite and most palms, remains entire,
and slips off like the finger of a glove. When slipped off, it is
found to be made of two transverse layers of fibre--a bit of
veritable natural lace, similar to, though far less delicate than,
the famous lace-bark of the Lagetta-tree, peculiar, I believe, to
one district in the Jamaica mountains. And as it is elastic and
easily stretched, what hinders the brown child from pulling it out
till it makes an admirable fool's cap, some two feet high, and
exactly the colour of his own skin, and dancing about therein, the
fat oily little Cupidon, without a particle of clothing beside? And
what wonder if we grown-up whites made fools' caps too, for children
on the other side of the Atlantic? During which process we found--
what all said they had never seen before--that one of the spadices
carried two caps, one inside the other, and one exactly like the
other; a wanton superfluity of Nature, which I should like to hear
explained by some morphologist.
We rode away from that hospitable group of huts, whither we were to
return in two or three days; and along the green trace once more.
As we rode, M--- the civiliser of Montserrat and I side by side,
talking of Cuba, and staring at the Noranteas overhead, a dull sound
was heard, as if the earth had opened; as indeed it had, engulfing
in the mud the whole forehand of M---'s mule; and there he knelt,
his beard outspread upon the clay, while the mule's visage looked
patiently out from under his left arm. However, it was soft falling
there. The mule was hauled out by main force. As for cleaning
either her or the rider, that was not thought of in a country where
they were sure to be as dirty as ever in an hour; and so we rode on,
after taking a note of the spot, and, as it happened, forgetting it
again--one of us at least.
On again, along the green trace, which rose now to a ridge, with
charming glimpses of wooded hills and glens to right and left; past
comfortable squatters' cottages, with cacao drying on sheets at the
doors or under sheds; with hedges of dwarf Erythrina, dotted with
red jumby beads, and here and there that pretty climbing vetch, the
Overlook. {270} I forgot, by the by, to ask whether it is planted
here, as in Jamaica, to keep off the evil eye, or 'overlook'; whence
its name. Nor can I guess what peculiarity about the plant can have
first made the Negro fix on it as a fetish. The genesis of folly is
as difficult to analyse as the genesis of most other things.
All this while the dull thunder of the surf was growing louder and
louder; till, not as in England over a bare down, but through
thickest foliage down to the high tide mark, we rode out upon the
shore, and saw before us a right noble sight; a flat, sandy, surf
beaten shore, along which stretched, in one grand curve, lost at
last in the haze of spray, fourteen miles of Coco palms.
This was the Cocal; and it was worth coming all the way from England
to see it alone. I at once felt the truth of my host's saying, that
if I went to the Cocal I should find myself transported suddenly
from the West Indies to the East. Just such must be the shore of a
Coral island in the Pacific.
These Cocos, be it understood, are probably not indigenous. They
spread, it is said, from an East Indian vessel which was wrecked
here. Be that as it may, they have thoroughly naturalised
themselves. Every nut which falls and lies, throws out, during the
wet season, its roots into the sand; and is ready to take the place
of its parent when the old tree dies down.
About thirty to fifty feet is the average height of these Coco
palms, which have all, without exception, a peculiarity which I have
noticed to a less degree in another sand- and shore-growing tree,
the Pinaster of the French Landes. They never spring-upright from
the ground. The butt curves, indeed lies almost horizontal in some
cases, for the lowest two or three yards; and the whole stem, up to
the top, is inclined to lean; it matters not toward which quarter,
for they lean as often toward the wind as from it, crossing each
other very gracefully. I am not mechanician enough to say how this
curve of the stem increases their security amid loose sands and
furious winds. But that it does so I can hardly doubt, when I see a
similar habit in the Pinaster. Another peculiarity was noteworthy:
their innumerable roots, long, fleshy, about the thickness of a
large string, piercing the sand in every direction, and running down
to high-tide mark, apparently enjoying the salt water, and often
piercing through bivalve shells, which remained strung upon the
roots. Have they a fondness for carbonate of lime, as well as for
salt?
The most remarkable, and to me unexpected, peculiarity of a Cocal is
one which I am not aware whether any writer has mentioned; namely,
the prevalence of that amber hue which we remarked in the very first
specimens seen at St. Thomas's. But this is, certainly, the mark
which distinguishes the Coco palm, not merely from the cold dark
green of the Palmiste, or the silvery gray of the Jagua, but from
any other tree which I have ever seen.
When inside the Cocal, the air is full of this amber light.
Gradually the eye analyses the cause of it, and finds it to be the
resultant of many other hues, from bright vermilion to bright green.
Above, the latticed light which breaks between and over the
innumerable leaflets of the fruit fronds comes down in warmest
green. It passes not over merely, but through, the semi-transparent
straw and amber of the older leaves. It falls on yellow spadices
and flowers, and rich brown spathes, and on great bunches of green
nuts, to acquire from them more yellow yet; for each fruit-stalk and
each flower-scale at the base of the nut is veined and tipped with
bright orange. It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then
yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery
lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and
spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts,
and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling
Echites, with pairs of large cream-white flowers. Thus the
transparent shade is flooded with gold. One looks out through it at
the chequer-work of blue sky, all the more intense from its
contrast; or at a long whirl of white surf and gray spray; or,
turning the eyes inland toward the lagoon, at dark masses of
mangrove, above which rise, black and awful, the dying balatas,
stag-headed, blasted, tottering to their fall; and all as through an
atmosphere of Rhine wine, or from the inside of a topaz.
We rode along, mile after mile, wondering at many things. First,
the innumerable dry fruits of Timit palm, which lay everywhere;
mostly single, some double, a few treble, from coalition, I suppose,
of the three carpels which every female palm flower ought to have,
but of which it usually develops only one. They may have been
brought down the lagoon from inland by floods; but the common belief
is, that most of them come from the Orinoco itself, as do also the
mighty logs which lie about the beach in every stage of wear and
tear; and which, as fast as they are cut up and carried away, are
replaced by fresh ones. Some of these trees may actually come from
the mainland, and, drifting into this curving bay, be driven on
shore by the incessant trade wind. But I suspect that many of them
are the produce of the island itself; and more, that they have
grown, some of them, on the very spot where they now lie. For there
are, I think, evidences of subsidence going on along this coast.
Inside the Cocal, two hundred yards to the westward, stretches
inland a labyrinth of lagoons and mangrove swamps, impassable to
most creatures save alligators and boa-constrictors. But amid this
labyrinth grow everywhere mighty trees--balatas in plenty among
them, in every stage of decay; dying, seemingly, by gradual
submergence of their roots, and giving a ghastly and ragged
appearance to the forest. At the mouth of the little river Nariva,
a few miles down, is proof positive, unless I am much mistaken, of
similar subsidence. For there I found trees of all sizes--roseau
scrub among them--standing rooted below high-tide mark; and killed
where they grew.
So we rode on, stopping now and then to pick up shells; chip-chips,
{274a} which are said to be excellent eating; a beautiful purple
bivalve, {274b} to which, in almost every case, a coralline {274c}
had attached itself, of a form quite new to me. A lash some
eighteen inches long, single or forked; purplish as long as its coat
of lime--holding the polypes--still remained, but when that was
rubbed off a mere round strip of dark horn; and in both cases
flexible and elastic, so that it can be coiled up and tied in knots;
a very curious and graceful piece of Nature's workmanship. Among
them were curious flat cake-urchins, with oval holes punched in
them, so brittle that, in spite of all our care, they resolved
themselves into the loose sand of which they had been originally
compact; and I could therefore verify neither their genus nor their
species.
These were all, if I recollect, that we found that day. The next
day we came on hundreds of a most beautiful bivalve, {274d} their
purple colour quite fresh, their long spines often quite uninjured.
Some change of the sandy bottom had unearthed a whole warren of the
lovely things; and mixed with chip-chips innumerable, and with a
great bivalve {274e} with a thin wing along the anterior line of the
shell, they strewed the shore for a quarter of a mile and more.
We came at last to a little river, or rather tideway, leading from
the lagoon to the sea, which goes by the name of Doubloon River.
Some adventurous Spaniard, the story goes, contracted to make a
cutting which would let off the lagoon water in time of flood for
the sum of one doubloon--some three pound five; spent six times the
money on it; and found his cutting, when once the sea had entered,
enlarge into a roaring tideway, dangerous, often impassable, and
eating away the Cocal rapidly toward the south; Mother Earth, in
this case at least, having known her own business better than the
Spaniard.
How we took off our saddles, sat down on the sand, hallooed, waited;
how a black policeman--whose house was just being carried away by
the sea--appeared at last with a canoe; how we and our baggage got
over one by one in the hollow log without--by seeming miracle--being
swept out to sea or upset: how some horses would swim, and others
would not; how the Negroes held on by the horses till they all went
head over ears under the surf; and how, at last, breathless with
laughter and anxiety for our scanty wardrobes, we scrambled ashore
one by one into prickly roseau, re-saddled our horses in an
atmosphere of long thorns, and then cut our way and theirs out
through scrub into the Cocal;--all this should not be written in
these pages, but drawn for the benefit of Punch, by him who drew the
egg-stealing frog--whose pencil I longed for again and again amid
the delightful mishaps of those forest rambles, in all of which I
never heard a single grumble, or saw temper lost for a moment. We
should have been rather more serious, though, than we were, had we
been aware that the river-god, or presiding Jumby, of the Doubloon
was probably watching us the whole time, with the intention of
eating any one whom he could catch, and only kept in wholesome awe
by our noise and splashing.
At last, after the sun had gone down, and it was ill picking our way
among logs and ground-creepers, we were aware of lights; and soon
found ourselves again in civilisation, and that of no mean kind. A
large and comfortable house, only just rebuilt after a fire, stood
among the palm-trees, between the sea and the lagoon; and behind it
the barns, sheds, and engine-houses of the coco-works; and inside it
a hearty welcome from a most agreeable German gentleman and his
German engineer. A lady's hand--I am sorry to say the lady was not
at home--was evident enough in the arrangements of the central room.
Pretty things, a piano, and good books, especially Longfellow and
Tennyson, told of cultivation and taste in that remotest wilderness.
The material hospitality was what it always is in the West Indies;
and we sat up long into the night around the open door, while the
surf roared, and the palm trees sighed, and the fireflies twinkled,
talking of dear old Germany, and German unity, and the possibility
of many things which have since proved themselves unexpectedly most
possible. I went to bed, and to somewhat intermittent sleep.
First, my comrades, going to bed romping, like English schoolboys,
and not in the least like the effeminate and luxurious Creoles who
figure in the English imagination, broke a four-post bedstead down
among them with hideous roar and ruin; and had to be picked up and
called to order by their elders. Next, the wind, which ranged
freely through the open roof, blew my bedclothes off. Then the dogs
exploded outside, probably at some henroost-robbing opossum, and had
a chevy through the cocos till they tree'd their game, and bayed it
to their hearts' content. Then something else exploded--and I do
not deny it set me more aghast than I had been for many a day--
exploded, I say, under the window, with a shriek of Hut-hut-tut-tut,
hut-tut, such as I hope never to hear again. After which, dead
silence; save of the surf to the east and the toads to the west. I
fell asleep, wondering what animal could own so detestable a voice;
and in half an hour was awoke again by another explosion; after
which, happily, the thing, I suppose, went its wicked way, for I
heard it no more.
I found out the next morning that the obnoxious bird was not an owl,
but a large goat-sucker, a Nycteribius, I believe, who goes by the
name of jumby-bird among the English Negroes: and no wonder; for
most ghostly and horrible is his cry. But worse: he has but one
eye, and a glance from that glaring eye, as from the basilisk of
old, is certain death: and worse still, he can turn off its light
as a policeman does his lantern, and become instantly invisible:
opinions which, if verified by experiment, are not always found to
be in accordance with facts. But that is no reason why they should
not be believed.
In St. Vincent, for instance, the Negroes one evening rushed
shrieking out of a boiling-house, 'Oh! Massa Robert, we all killed.
Dar one great jumby-bird come in a hole a-top a roof. Oh! Massa
Robert, you no go in; you killed, we killed,' etc. etc. Massa
Robert went in, and could see no bird. 'Ah, Massa Robert, him darky
him eye, but him see you all da same. You killed, we killed,' etc.
Da capo.
Massa Robert was not killed: but lives still, to the great benefit
of his fellow-creatures, Negroes especially. Nevertheless, the
Negroes held to their opinion. He might, could, would, or should
have been killed; and was not that clear proof that they were right?
After this, who can deny that the Negro is a man and a brother,
possessing the same reasoning faculties, and exercising them in
exactly the same way, as three out of four white persons?
But if the night was disturbed, pleasant was the waking next
morning; pleasant the surprise at finding that the whistling and
howling air-bath of the night had not given one a severe cold, or
any cold at all; pleasant to slip on flannel shut and trousers--
shoes and stockings were needless--and hurry down through a stampede
of kicking, squealing mules, who were being watered ere their day's
work began, under the palms to the sea; pleasant to bathe in warm
surf, into which the four-eyes squattered in shoals as one ran down,
and the moment they saw one safe in the water, ran up with the next
wave to lie staring at the sky; pleasant to sit and read one's book
upon a log, and listen to the soft rush of the breeze in the palm-
leaves, and look at a sunrise of green and gold, pink and orange,
and away over the great ocean, and to recollect, with a feeling of
mingled nearness and loneliness, that there was nothing save that
watery void between oneself and England, and all that England held;
and then, when driven in to breakfast by the morning shower, to
begin a new day of seeing, and seeing, and seeing, certain that one
would learn more in it than in a whole week of book-reading at home.
We spent the next morning in inspecting the works. We watched the
Negroes splitting the coconuts with a single blow of that all-useful
cutlass, which they handle with surprising dexterity and force,
throwing the thick husk on one side, the fruit on the other. We saw
the husk carded out by machinery into its component fibres, for
coco-rope matting, coir-rope, saddle-stuffing, brushes, and a dozen
other uses; while the fruit was crushed down for the sake of its
oil; and could but wish all success to an industry which would be
most profitable, both to the projectors and to the island itself,
were it not for the uncertainty, rather than the scarcity, of
labour. Almost everything is done, of course, by piecework. The
Negro has the price of his labour almost at his own command; and
when, by working really hard and well for a while, he has earned a
little money, he throws up his job and goes off, careless whether
the whole works stand still or not. However, all prosperity to the
coco-works of Messrs. Uhrich and Gerold; and may the day soon come
when the English of Trinidad, like the Ceylonese and the Dutch of
Java, shall count by millions the coco-palms which they have planted
along their shores, and by thousands of pounds the profit which
accrues from them.
After breakfast--call it luncheon rather--we started for the lagoon.
We had set our hearts on seeing Manatis ('sea cows'), which are
still not uncommon on the east coast of this island, though they
have been exterminated through the rest of the West Indies since the
days of Pere Labat. That good missionary speaks of them in his
delightful journal as already rare in the year 1695; and now, as far
as I am aware, none are to be found north of Trinidad and the
Spanish Main, save a few round Cuba and Jamaica. We were anxious,
too, to see, if not to get, a boa-constrictor of one kind or other.
For there are two kinds in the island, which may be seen alive at
the Zoological Gardens in the same cage. The true Boa, {277a} which
is here called Mahajuel, is striped as well as spotted with two
patterns, one over the other. The Huillia, Anaconda, or Water-boa,
{277b} bears only a few large round spots. Both are fond of the
water, the Huillia living almost entirely in it; both grow to a very
large size; and both are dangerous, at least to children and small
animals. That there were Huillias about the place, possibly within
fifty yards of the house, there was no doubt. One of our party had
seen with his own eyes one of seven-and-twenty feet long killed,
with a whole kid inside it, only a few miles off. The brown
policeman, crossing an arm of the Guanapo only a month or two
before, had been frightened by meeting one in the ford, which his
excited imagination magnified so much that its head was on the one
bank while its tail was on the other--a measurement which must, I
think, be divided at least by three. But in the very spot in which
we stood, some four years since, happened what might have been a
painful tragedy. Four young ladies, whose names were mentioned to
me, preferred, not wisely, a bathe in the still lagoon to one in the
surf outside; and as they disported themselves, one of them felt
herself seized from behind. Fancying that one of her sisters was
playing tricks, she called out to her to let her alone; and looking
up, saw, to her astonishment, her three sisters sitting on the bank,
and herself alone. She looked back, and shrieked for help: and
only just in time; for the Huillia had her. The other three girls,
to their honour, dashed in to her assistance. The brute had luckily
got hold, not of her poor little body, but of her bathing-dress, and
held on stupidly. The girls pulled; the bathing-dress, which was,
luckily, of thin cotton, was torn off; the Huillia slid back again
with it in his mouth into the dark labyrinth of the mangrove-roots;
and the girl was saved. Two minutes' delay, and his coils would
have been round her; and all would have been over.
The sudden daring of these lazy and stupid animals is very great.
Their brain seems to act like that of the alligator or the pike,
paroxysmally, and by rare fits and starts, after lying for hours
motionless as if asleep. But when excited, they will attempt great
deeds. Dr. De Verteuil tells a story--and if he tells it, it must
be believed--of some hunters who wounded a deer. The deer ran for
the stream down a bank; but the hunters had no sooner heard it
splash into the water than they heard it scream. They leapt down to
the place, and found it in the coils of a Huillia, which they killed
with the deer. And yet this snake, which had dared to seize a full-
grown deer, could have had no hope of eating her; for it was only
seven feet long.
We set out down a foul porter-coloured creek, which soon opened out
into a river, reminding us, in spite of all differences, of certain
alder and willow-fringed reaches of the Thames. But here the wood
which hid the margin was altogether of mangrove; the common
Rhizophoras, or black mangroves, being, of course, the most
abundant. Over them, however, rose the statelier Avicennias, or
white mangroves, to a height of fifty or sixty feet, and poured down
from their upper branches whole streams of air-roots, which waved
and creaked dolefully in the breeze overhead. But on the water was
no breeze at all. The lagoon was still as glass; the sun was
sickening; and we were glad to put up our umbrellas and look out
from under them for Manatis and Boas. But the Manatis usually only
come in at night, to put their heads out of water and browse on the
lowest mangrove leaves; and the Boas hide themselves so cunningly,
either altogether under water, or with only the head above, that we
might have passed half a dozen without seeing them. The only
chance, indeed, of coming across them, is when they are travelling
from lagoon to lagoon, or basking on the mud at low tide.
So all the game which we saw was a lovely white Egret, {278} its
back covered with those stiff pinnated plumes which young ladies--
when they can obtain them--are only too happy to wear in their hats.
He, after being civil enough to wait on a bough till one of us got a
sitting shot at him, heard the cap snap, thought it as well not to
wait till a fresh one was put on, and flapped away. He need not
have troubled himself. The Negroes--but too apt to forget something
or other--had forgotten to bring a spare supply; and the gun was
useless.
As we descended, the left bank of the river was entirely occupied
with cocos; and the contrast between them and the mangroves on the
right was made all the more striking by the afternoon sun, which, as
it sank behind the forest, left the mangrove wall in black shadow,
while it bathed the palm-groves opposite with yellow light. In one
of these palm-groves we landed, for we were right thirsty; and to
drink lagoon water would be to drink cholera or fever. But there
was plenty of pure water in the coco-trees, and we soon had our
fill. A Negro walked--not climbed--up a stem like a four-footed
animal, his legs and arms straight, his feet pressed flat against
it, his hands clinging round it--a feat impossible, as far as I have
seen, to an European--tossed us down plenty of green nuts; and our
feast began.
Two or three blows with the cutlass, at the small end of the nut,
cut off not only the pith-coat, but the point of the shell; and
disclose--the nut being held carefully upright meanwhile--a cavity
full of perfectly clear water, slightly sweet, and so cold (the
pith-coat being a good non-conductor of heat) that you are advised,
for fear of cholera, to flavour it with a little brandy. After
draining this natural cup, you are presented with a natural spoon of
rind, green outside and white within, and told to scoop out and eat
the cream which lines the inside of the shell, a very delicious food
in the opinion of Creoles. After which, if you are as curious as
some of us were, you will sit down under the amber shade, and
examine at leisure the construction and germination of these famous
and royal nuts. Let me explain it, even at the risk of prolixity.
The coat of white pith outside, with its green skin, will gradually
develop and harden into that brown fibre of which matting is made.
The clear water inside will gradually harden into that sweetmeat
which little boys eat off stalls and barrows in the street; the
first delicate deposit of which is the cream in the green nut. This
is albumen, intended to nourish the young palm till it has grown
leaves enough to feed on the air, and roots enough to feed on the
soil; and the birth of that young palm is in itself a mystery and a
miracle, well worth considering. Much has been written on it, of
which I, unfortunately, have read very little; but I can at least
tell what I have seen with my own eyes.
If you search among the cream-layer at the larger end of the nut,
you will find, gradually separating itself from the mass, a little
white lump, like the stalk of a very young mushroom. That is the
ovule. In that lies the life, the 'forma formativa,' of the future
tree. How that life works, according to its kind, who can tell?
What it does, is this: it is locked up inside a hard woody shell,
and outside that shell are several inches of tough tangled fibre.
How can it get out, as soft and seemingly helpless as a baby's
finger?
All know that there are three eyes in the monkey's face, as the
children call it, at the butt of the nut. Two of these eyes are
blind, and filled up with hard wood. They are rudiments--hints--
that the nut ought to have, perhaps had uncounted ages since, not
one ovule, but three, the type-number in palms. One ovule alone is
left; and that is opposite the one eye which is less blind than the
rest; the eye which a schoolboy feels for with his knife, when he
wants to get out the milk.
As the nut lies upon the sand, in shade, and rain, and heat, that
baby's finger begins boring its way, with unerring aim, out of the
weakest eye. Soft itself, yet with immense wedging power, from the
gradual accretion of tiny cells, it pierces the wood, and then rends
right and left the tough fibrous coat. Just so may be seen--I have
seen--a large flagstone lifted in a night by a crop of tiny soft
toadstools which have suddenly blossomed up beneath it. The baby's
finger protrudes at last, and curves upward toward the light, to
commence the campaign of life: but it has meanwhile established,
like a good strategist, a safe base of operations in its rear, from
which it intends to draw supplies. Into the albuminous cream which
lines the shell, and into the cavity where the milk once was, it
throws out white fibrous vessels, which eat up the albumen for it,
and at last line the whole inside of the shell with a white pith.
The albumen gives it food wherewith to grow, upward and downward.
Upward, the white plumule hardens into what will be a stem; the one
white cotyledon which sheaths it develops into a flat, ribbed,
forked, green leaf, sheathing it still; and above it fresh leaves,
sheathing always at their bases, begin to form a tiny crown; and
assume each, more and more, the pinnate form of the usual coco-leaf.
But long ere this, from the butt of the white plumule, just outside
the nut, white threads of root have struck down into the sand; and
so the nut lies, chained to the ground by a bridge-like chord, which
drains its albumen, through the monkey's eye, into the young plant.
After a while--a few months, I believe--the draining of the nut is
complete; the chord dries up--I know not how, for I had neither
microscope nor time wherewith to examine--and parts; and the little
plant, having got all it can out of its poor wet-nurse, casts her
ungratefully off to wither on the sand; while it grows up into a
stately tree, which will begin to bear fruit in six or seven years,
and thenceforth continue, flowering and fruiting the whole year
round without a pause, for sixty years and more.
I think I have described this--to me--'miraculum' simply enough to
be understood by the non-scientific reader, if only he or she have
first learned the undoubted fact--known, I find, to very few
'educated' English people--that the coco-palm which produces coir-
rope, and coconuts, and a hundred other useful things, is not the
same plant as the cacao-bush which produces chocolate, nor anything
like it. I am sorry to have to insist upon this fact: but till
Professor Huxley's dream--and mine--is fulfilled, and our schools
deign to teach, in the intervals of Latin and Greek, some slight
knowledge of this planet, and of those of its productions which are
most commonly in use, even this fact may need to be re-stated more
than once.
We re-embarked again, and rowed down to the river-mouth to pick up
shells, and drink in the rich roaring trade breeze, after the
choking atmosphere of the lagoon; and then rowed up home, tired, and
infinitely amused, though neither Manati nor Boa-constrictor had
been seen; and then we fell to siesta; during which--with Mr.
Tennyson's forgiveness--I read myself to sleep with one of his best
poems; and then went to dinner, not without a little anxiety.
For M--- (the civiliser of Montserrat) had gone off early, with
mule, cutlass, and haversack, back over the Doubloon and into the
wilds of Manzanilla, to settle certain disputed squatter claims, and
otherwise enforce the law; and now the night had fallen, and he was
not yet home. However, he rode up at last, dead beat, with a strong
touch of his old swamp-fever, and having had an adventure, which had
like to have proved his last. For as he rode through the Doubloon
at low tide in the morning, he espied in the surf that river-god, or
Jumby, of which I spoke just now; namely, the gray back-fin of a
shark; and his mule espied it too, and laid back her ears, knowing
well what it was. M--- rode close up to the brute. He seemed full
seven feet long, and eyed him surlily, disinclined to move off; so
they parted, and M--- went on his way. But his business detained
him longer than he expected; when he got back to the river-mouth it
was quite dark, and the tide was full high. He must either sleep on
the sands, which with fever upon him would not have been over-safe,
or try the passage. So he stripped, swam the mule over, tied her
up, and then went back, up to his shoulders in surf; and cutlass in
hand too, for that same shark might be within two yards of him. But
on his second journey he had to pile on his head, first his saddle,
and then his clothes and other goods; few indeed, but enough to
require both hands to steady them: and so walked helpless through
the surf, expecting every moment to be accosted by a set of teeth,
from which he would hardly have escaped with life. To have faced
such a danger, alone and in the dark, and thoroughly well aware, as
an experienced man, of its extremity, was good proof (if any had
been needed) of the indomitable Scots courage of the man.
Nevertheless, he said, he never felt so cold down his back as he did
during that last wade. By God's blessing the shark was not there,
or did not see him; and he got safe home, thankful for dinner and
quinine.
Going back the next morning at low tide, we kept a good look-out for
M---'s shark, spreading out, walkers and riders, in hopes of
surrounding him and cutting him up. There were half a dozen weapons
among us, of which my heavy bowie-knife was not the worst; and we
should have given good account of him had we met him, and got
between him and the deep water. But our valour was superfluous.
The enemy was nowhere to be seen; and we rode on, looking back
wistfully, but in vain, for a gray fin among the ripples.
So we rode back, along the Cocal and along that wonderful green
glade, where I, staring at Noranteas in tree-tops, instead of at the
ground beneath my horse's feet, had the pleasure of being swallowed
up--my horse's hindquarters at least--in the very same slough which
had engulfed M---'s mule three days before, and got a roll in much
soft mud. Then up to ---'s camp, where we expected breakfast, not
with greediness, though we had been nigh six hours in the saddle,
but with curiosity. For he had promised to send out the hunters for
all game that could be found, and give us a true forest meal; and we
were curious to taste what lapo, quenco, guazupita-deer, and other
strange meats might be like. Nay, some of us agreed, that if the
hunters had but brought in a tender young red monkey, {282a} we
would surely eat him too, if it were but to say that we had done it.
But the hunters had had no luck. They had brought in only a Pajui,
{282b} an excellent game bird; an Ant-eater, {282c} and a great
Cachicame, or nine-banded Armadillo. The ant-eater the foolish
fellows had eaten themselves--I would have given them what they
asked for his skeleton; but the Armadillo was cut up and hashed for
us, and was eaten, to the last scrap, being about the best game I
ever tasted. I fear he is a foul feeder at times, who by no means
confines himself to roots, or even worms. If what I was told be
true, there is but too much probability for Captain Mayne Reid's
statement, that he will eat his way into the soft parts of a dead
horse, and stay there until he has eaten his way out again. But, to
do him justice, I never heard him accused, like the giant Armadillo
{282d} of the Main, of digging dead bodies out of their graves, as
he is doing in a very clever drawing in Mr. Wood's Homes without
Hands. Be that as it may, the Armadillo, whatever he feeds on, has
the power of transmuting it into most delicate and wholesome flesh.
Meanwhile--and hereby hangs a tale--I was interested, not merely in
the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with which it, and
everything else, was cooked in a little open shed over a few stones
and firesticks. And complimenting my host thereon, I found that he
had, there in the primeval forest, an admirable French cook, to whom
I begged to be introduced at once. Poor fellow! A little lithe
Parisian, not thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road.
Cook to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love
with his master's daughter, and she with him. And when their love
was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish things, not
having--as is too common in France--the fear of God before their
eyes, could think of no better resource than to shut themselves up
with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so go they knew not-whither.
The poor girl went--and was found dead. But the boy recovered; and
was punished with twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a
sort of ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood. I talked a
while with him, cheered him with some compliments about the
Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman's heart--what else
was there to say?--and so left him, not without the fancy that, if
he had had but such an education as the middle classes in Paris have
not, there were the makings of a man in that keen eye, large jaw,
sharp chin. 'The very fellow,' said some one, 'to have been a
first-rate Zouave.' Well: perhaps he was a better man, even as he
was, than as a Zouave.
And so we rode away again, and through Valencia, and through San
Josef, weary and happy, back to Port of Spain.
I would gladly, had I been able, have gone farther due westward into
the forests which hide the river Oropuche, that I might have visited
the scene of a certain two years' Idyll, which was enacted in them
some forty years and more ago.
In 1827 cacao fell to so low a price (two dollars per cwt.) that it
was no longer worth cultivating; and the head of the F--- family,
leaving his slaves to live at ease on his estates, retreated, with a
household of twelve persons, to a small property of his own, which
was buried in the primeval forests of Oropuche. With them went his
second son, Monsignor F---, then and afterwards cure of San Josef,
who died shortly before my visit to the island. I always heard him
spoken of as a gentleman and a scholar, a saintly and cultivated
priest of the old French School, respected and beloved by men of all
denominations. His church of San Josef, though still unfinished,
had been taxed, as well as all the Roman Catholic churches of the
island, to build the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Port of Spain; and
he, refusing to obey an order which he considered unjust, threw up
his cure, and retreated with the rest of the family to the palm-leaf
ajoupas in the forest.
M. F--- chose three of his finest Negroes as companions. Melchior
was to go out every day to shoot wild pigeons, coming every morning
to ask how many were needed, so as not to squander powder and shot.
The number ordered were always punctually brought in, besides
sometimes a wild turkey--Pajui--or other fine birds. Alejos, who is
now a cacao proprietor, and owner of a house in Arima, was chosen to
go out every day, except Sundays, with the dogs; and scarcely ever
failed to bring in a lapp or quenco. Aristobal was chosen for the
fishing, and brought in good loads of river fish, some sixteen
pounds weight: and thus the little party of cultivated gentlemen
and ladies were able to live, though in poverty, yet sumptuously.
The Bishop had given Monsignor F--- permission to perform service on
any of his father's estates. So a little chapel was built; the
family and servants attended every Sunday, and many days in the
week; and the country folk from great distances found their way
through the woods to hear Mass in the palm-thatched sanctuary of 'El
Riposo.'
So did that happy family live 'the gentle life' for some two years;
till cacao rose again in price, the tax on the churches was taken
off, and the F---s returned again to the world: but not to
civilisation and Christianity. Those they had carried with them
into the wilderness; and those they brought back with them
unstained.