West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the
negro, the temple of Jumbi, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one
is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A
Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the
men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to
defy the devil.
From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.
I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond
description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English
conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of
others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be
what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing
in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage
towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are
reservoirs of water.
Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other,
forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods;
yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments
of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly
different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no
relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can
be unlike another.
Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected
anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or
what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem
like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was
the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia nobilis_, at a distance like a
splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each
separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a
large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia
being leguminous like the rest.
Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice-trees,
orange-trees, coffee plants, and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special
virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits
of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was
preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener
stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less
frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odor, in which I might
have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a
manchineel-tree.
Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to
themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada
I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty
to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of
an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other,
the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a
natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance
attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker
atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not
remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock's
neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one.
"That sort no let catchee, massa," he said; and I was penitently glad to
hear it.
Among the wonders of the garden are the vines, as they call them, that
is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees.
Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty "cedar."
It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had
been murdered by a "fig-vine" which had started from the root, twined
itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and
spreading out in all directions, had covered boughs and twigs with a
foliage not its own. So far the "vine" had done no worse than ivy does
at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether.
The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet
above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let
fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a
foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything,
formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the
branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an
ordinary swing.
In three distinctly perfect instances the "vine" had executed this
singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the longest and
tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap of fifteen
feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree adjoining
on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable that I
conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I was
mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig-vine
threw out fine tendrils which hung downward like strings. The strongest
among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them,
the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found
support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken
and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant
itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.
But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage
at the extreme angle of it, where Kingsley[A] had been the guest of
Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep
verandas lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out
into the savanna through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the
canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred feet
into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape,
peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These
bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like
of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the
gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is
cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which
still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing
evening of his own life.
[Footnote A: Charles Kingsley, who wrote here his "At Last," descriptive
of tropical scenes.]
[Happiness makes its home with the negroes of Trinidad, whom
nature keeps in pristine idleness. They have little to do other
than to pull and eat.]
In Trinidad there are eighteen thousand freeholders, most of them
negroes and representatives of the old slaves. Their cabins are spread
along the road on either side, overhung with bread-fruit-trees,
tamarinds, calabash-trees, out of which they make their cups and
water-jugs; the luscious granadilla climbs among the branches; plantains
throw their cool shade over the doors; oranges and limes and citrons
perfume the air, and droop their boughs under the weight of their golden
burdens. There were yams in the gardens and cows in the paddocks, and
cocoa-bushes loaded with purple or yellow pods. Children played about in
swarms in happy idleness and abundance, with schools, too, at intervals,
and an occasional Catholic chapel, for the old religion prevails in
Trinidad, never having been disturbed.
What form could human life assume more charming than that which we were
now looking on? Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so
well off, so well cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the
sons and daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian
Islands. Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can
grow with small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may
"better his condition," if he has any such ambition, without stirring
beyond his own ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if
it is not turned off upon politics.
Even the necessary evils of the tropics are not many or serious. His
skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are snakes in Trinidad as there
were snakes in Eden. "Plenty snakes," said one of them who was at work
in his garden, "plenty snakes, but no bitee." As to costume, he would
prefer the costume of innocence if he were allowed. Clothes in such a
climate are superfluous for warmth, and to the minds of the negroes,
unconscious as they are of shame, superfluous for decency. European
prejudice, however, still passes for something; the women have a love
for finery, which would prevent a complete return to African simplicity;
and in the islands which are still French, and in those like Trinidad,
which the French originally colonized, they dress themselves with real
taste. They hide their wool in red or yellow handkerchiefs, gracefully
twisted; or perhaps it is not only to conceal the wool. Columbus found
the Carib women of the island dressing their hair in the same fashion.
The water-works, when we reached them, were even more beautiful than we
had been taught to expect. A dam has been driven across a perfectly
limpid mountain stream; a wide open area has been cleared, levelled,
strengthened with masonry, and divided into deep basins or reservoirs,
through which the current continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine
with crimson blossoms. Innumerable humming-birds glance to and fro among
the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung by magnificent
bamboos, which so astonished me by their size that I inquired if their
height had been measured. One of them, I was told, had lately fallen,
and was found to be one hundred and thirty feet long. A single drawback
only there was to this enchanting spot, and it was again the snakes.
There are huge pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed
the straits from the continent. Some washerwomen at work in the stream
had been disturbed a few days before our visit by one of these monsters,
who had come down to see what they were about. They are harmless, but
trying to the nerves.
[We shall conclude this selection with a leap from Trinidad to
Jamaica, and the relation of an adventure experienced by our
author in that island. He was on his way back from an excursion
into the island.]
The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset.
The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea-breeze had fallen, the
land-breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge.
Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the
direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me
to my destination before dark.
So I calculated; but alas! for human expectation. I engaged a "buggy" at
the station, with a decent-looking conductor, who assured me that he
knew the way to Cherry Garden as well as to his own door. His horse
looked starved and miserable. He insisted that there was not another in
Kingston that was more than a match for it. We set out, and for the
first two or three miles we went on well enough, conversing amicably on
things in general. But it so happened that it was market day. The road
was thronged with women plodding along with their baskets on their
heads, a single male on a donkey to each detachment of them, carrying
nothing, like an officer with a detachment of soldiers.
Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked my friend if he was not
ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so cruelly, while their
lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to his feelings as a
man, as if it were likely that he had got any. The wretch only laughed.
"Ah, massa," he said, with his tongue in his cheek, "women do women's
work, men do men's work,--all right." "And what is men's work?" I asked.
Instead of answering he went on, "Look at they women, massa,--how they
laugh, how happy they be! Nobody more happy than black woman, massa."
I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till he got excited too,
and we argued and contradicted each other, till at last the horse,
finding he was not attended to, went his own way, and that was a wrong
one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a deep sandy flat,
overgrown with brush and penetrated in all directions with labyrinthine
lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarrels, and neither of us knew
where we were. The sand was loose; our miserable beast was above his
fetlocks in it, and was visibly drooping under his efforts to drag us
along even at a walk.
The sun went down. The tropic twilight is short. The evening star shone
out in the west, and the crescent moon over our heads. My man said this
and said that; every word was a lie, for he had lost his way and would
not allow it. We saw a light through some trees. I sent him to inquire.
We were directed one way and another way, every way except the right
one. We emerged at last upon a hard road of some kind. The stars told me
the general direction. We came to cottages where the name of Cherry
Garden was known, and we were told that it was two miles off; but alas!
again there were two roads to it,--a short and good one and a long and
bad one, and they sent us by the last. There was a steep hill to climb,
for the house is eight hundred feet above the sea. The horse could
hardly crawl, and my "nigger" went to work to flog him to let off his
own ill-humor. I had to stop that by force, and at last, as it grew too
dark to see the road under the trees, I got out and walked, leaving him
to follow at a foot's pace. The night was lovely. I began to think that
we should have to camp out after all, and that it would be no great
hardship.
It was like the gloaming of a June night in England, the daylight in the
open spots not entirely gone, and mixing softly with the light of moon
and planet and the flashing of the fireflies. I plodded on, mile after
mile, and Cherry Garden still receded to one mile farther. We came to a
gate of some consequence. The outline of a large mansion was visible,
with gardens round it. I concluded that we had arrived, and was feeling
for the latch when the forms of a lady and gentleman appeared against
the sky who were strolling in the grounds. They directed me still
upward, with the mile which never diminished still to be travelled.
Like myself, our weary animal had gathered hopes from the sight of the
gate. He had again to drag on as he could. His owner was subdued and
silent, and obeyed whatever order I gave him. The trees now closed over
us so thick that I could see nothing. Vainly I repented of my
unnecessary philanthropy, which had been the cause of the mischief; what
had I to do with black women, or white either, for that matter? I had to
feel the way with my feet and a stick. I came to a place where the lane
again divided. I tried the nearest turn. I found a trench across it
three feet deep, which had been cut by a torrent. This was altogether
beyond the capacity of our unfortunate animal, so I took the other
boldly, prepared, if it proved wrong, to bivouac till morning with my
"nigger," and go on with my argument.
Happily there was no need; we came again on a gate which led into a
field. There was a drive across it and wire fences. Finally lights began
to glimmer and dogs to bark: we were at the real Cherry Garden at last,
and found the whole household alarmed for what had become of us.
I could not punish my misleader by stinting his fare, for I knew that I
had only myself to blame. He was an honest fellow after all. In the
disturbance of my mind I left a rather valuable umbrella in his buggy.
He discovered it after he had gone, and had grace enough to see that it
was returned to me. My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the
misadventure, perhaps unique of its kind: to address homilies to the
black people on the treatment of their wives not being the fashion in
those parts.
THE HIGH WOODS OF TRINIDAD.
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
[The skilled and popular novelist to whom we owe our present
selection seems to have entertained for years a vivid wish to
see the glory of the tropics, the achievement of which desire
is put upon record in "At Last," the work from which we quote.
In his "Westward Ho" he had years before given a
warmly-delineated imaginary picture of the tropics, but waited
for years afterwards to see these scenes in their picturesque
reality. He tells well the story of the tropical "High Woods."]
And now we set ourselves to walk to the depot, where the government
timber was being felled, and the real "High Woods" to be seen at last.
Our path lay along the half-finished tramway, through the first cacao
plantation I had ever seen, though, I am happy to say, not the last by
many a one.
Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large, long leaves. Each tree
is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grow
plants of the common hot-house Datura, its long white flowers perfuming
all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young
cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too,
at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an
ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs like a ceiba. You
look up and see that they are Bois immortelles, fifty or sixty feet
high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood
under a Lombardy poplar in early spring and looked up at its buds and
twigs showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the
beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly--but only faintly--the beauty
of these "madres de cacao,"--cacao mothers, as they call them
here,--because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while
the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.
I turned my dazzled eyes down again and looked into the delicious
darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or
green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced
through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem,
and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a
bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I
saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted
with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a
small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the
cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a
heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their
brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a
cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw
cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at
which news he grinned amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs made a
light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I
might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie
packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.
He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and
careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed
on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating
the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on
mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps
in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate,
"Menier" or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla--both,
possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an
adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in
Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes the story) he succeeded;
but the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could
not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and
fro from that centre of fashion, Paris. So the manufacture, which might
have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the
ladies of the island eat naught but French chocolate, costing, it is
said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.
As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still
unfinished), one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which
bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. It is one of
those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the
negro Obi-men and Obi-women. And as I looked at the insignificant weed,
I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to
this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a
plant. French negroes may have brought the name with them; but then
arose another wonder. How were the terrible properties of the plant
discovered? How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the
devil's work, and what long practice--considering its usual slowness
and dulness--must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked
out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool
for its jealousy and revenge! It may have taken ages to discover the
Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known. Why not?
As the Spaniards say, "The devil knows many things, because he is old."
Surely this is one of the many facts which point towards some immensely
ancient civilization in the tropics, and a civilization which may have
had its ugly vices and have been destroyed thereby.
Now we left the cacao grove; and I was aware on each side of the trace
of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even
in my dreams,--strange colossal shapes towering up a hundred feet and
more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach, for on either
side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs,
withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling, and among them
and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant
young growth of the "rastrajo," which springs up at once whenever the
primeval forest is cleared,--all utterly impassable. These rastrajo
forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in
botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark,
there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards
growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the
only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep
at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a
deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden
bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet
season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left
of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud
and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of
help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly
"buccra" to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of
the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short,
breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.
In the primeval forest, looking upon that upon which my teachers and
masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace,
Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine,
comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare
in ignorance. There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on
earth, and it was not less, but far more, wonderful than they had said.