A Coolie village--Negro
freeholds--Waterworks--Pythons--Slavery--Evidence of Lord
Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of English rule--The Blue
Basin--Black boy and cray fish.
The second morning after my arrival, my host took me to a Coolie village
three miles beyond the town. The drive was between spreading cane
fields, beneath the shade of bamboos, or under rows of cocoa-nut palms,
between the stems of which the sea was gleaming.
Human dwelling places are rarely interesting in the tropics. A roof
which will keep the rain out is all that is needed. The more free the
passage given to the air under the floor and through the side, the more
healthy the habitation; and the houses, when we came among them, seemed
merely enlarged packing cases loosely nailed together and raised on
stones a foot or two from the ground. The rest of the scene was
picturesque enough. The Indian jewellers were sitting cross-legged
before their charcoal pans, making silver bracelets and earrings.
Brilliant garments, crimson and blue and orange, were hanging to dry on
clothes lines. Men were going out to their work, women cooking, children
(not many) playing or munching sugar cane, while great mango trees and
ceibas spread a cool green roof over all. Like Rachel, the Coolies had
brought their gods to their new home. In the centre of the village was a
Hindoo temple, made up rudely out of boards with a verandah running
round it. The doors were locked. An old man who had charge told us we
could not enter; a crowd, suspicious and sullen, gathered about us as we
tried to prevail upon him; so we had to content ourselves with the
outside, which was gaudily and not unskilfully painted in Indian
fashion. There were gods and goddesses in various attitudes; Vishnu
fighting with the monkey god, Vishnu with cutlass and shield, the monkey
with his tail round one tree while he brandished two others, one in each
hand, as clubs. I suppose that we smiled, for our curiosity was
resented, and we found it prudent to withdraw.
The Coolies are useful creatures. Without them sugar cultivation in
Trinidad and Demerara would cease altogether. They are useful and they
are singularly ornamental. Unfortunately they have not the best
character with the police. There is little crime among the negroes, who
quarrel furiously with their tongues only. The Coolies have the fiercer
passions of their Eastern blood. Their women being few are tempted
occasionally into infidelities, and would be tempted more often but that
a lapse in virtue is so fearfully avenged. A Coolie regards his wife as
his property, and if she is unfaithful to him he kills her without the
least hesitation. One of the judges told me that he had tried a case of
this kind, and could not make the man understand that he had done
anything wrong. It is a pity that a closer intermixture between them and
the negroes seems so hopeless, for it would solve many difficulties.
There is no jealousy. The negro does not regard the Coolie as a
competitor and interloper who has come to lower his wages. The Coolie
comes to work. The negro does not want to work, and both are satisfied.
But if there is no jealousy there is no friendship. The two races are
more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists
the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the
white might forget it.
Among the sights in the neighbourhood of Port of Spain are the
waterworks, extensive basins and reservoirs a few miles off in the
hills. We chose a cool afternoon, when the temperature in the shade was
not above 86 deg., and went to look at them. It was my first sight of the
interior of the island, and my first distinct acquaintance with the
change which had come over the West Indies. Trinidad is not one of our
oldest possessions, but we had held it long enough for the old planter
civilisation to take root and grow, and our road led us through jungles
of flowering shrubs which were running wild over what had been once
cultivated estates. Stranger still (for one associates colonial life
instinctively with what is new and modern), we came at one place on an
avenue of vast trees, at the end of which stood the ruins of a mansion
of some great man of the departed order. Great man he must have been,
for there was a gateway half crumbled away on which were his crest and
shield in stone, with supporters on either side, like the Baron of
Bradwardine's Bears; fallen now like them, but unlike them never, I
fear, to be set up again. The Anglo-West Indians, like the English
gentry in Ireland, were a fine race of men in their day, and perhaps the
improving them off the earth has been a less beneficial process in
either case than we are in the habit of supposing.
Entering among the hills we came on their successors. In Trinidad there
are 18,000 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
was 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
colonised, 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.[6]
The waterworks, 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 and 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 130 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. The cool water pools attract them, and they are seen
occasionally coiled among the branches of the bamboos. 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. One of the men about the
place shot this one, and he told me that he had shot another a short
time before asleep in a tree. The keeper of the works was a retired
soldier, an Irish-Scot from Limerick, hale, vigorous, and happy as the
blacks themselves. He had married one of them--a remarkable exception to
an almost universal rule. He did not introduce us, but the dark lady
passed by us in gorgeous costume, just noticing our presence with a
sweep which would have done credit to a duchess.
We made several similar small expeditions into the settled parts of the
neighbourhood, seeing always (whatever else we saw) the boundless
happiness of the black race. Under the rule of England in these islands
the two million of these poor brothers-in-law of ours are the most
perfectly contented specimens of the human race to be found upon the
planet. Even Schopenhauer, could he have known them, would have admitted
that there were some of us who were not hopelessly wretched. If
happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire, theirs is a
condition which admits of no improvement: were they independent, they
might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondmen of the
stronger; under the beneficent despotism of the English Government,
which knows no difference of colour and permits no oppression, they can
sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as they please, fearing no
danger. If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them. No one
can say what may be before them hereafter. The powers which envy human
beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West
Indian negro; but so long as the English rule continues, he may be
assured of the same tranquil existence.
As life goes he has been a lucky mortal. He was taken away from Dahomey
and Ashantee--to be a slave indeed, but a slave to a less cruel master
than he would have found at home. He had a bad time of it occasionally,
and the plantation whip and the branding irons are not all dreams, yet
his owner cared for him at least as much as he cared for his cows and
his horses. Kind usage to animals is more economical than barbarity,
and Englishmen in the West Indies were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney says:
'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have often made
my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves, and can aver that
I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them, but that in general
they lived better than the honest day-labouring man in England, without
doing a fourth part of his work in a day, and I am fully convinced that
the negroes in our islands are better provided for and live better than
when in Guinea.'
Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in sentiment.
Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the worst horrors of the slave
trade or slave usage as fluent tongue of missionary or demagogue has
described them, yet nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of
common humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny that
the balance has been more than redressed; and the negroes who were taken
away out of Africa, as compared with those who were left at home, were
as the 'elect to salvation,' who after a brief purgatory are secured an
eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the maintenance of the
authority of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot
equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old traditions. If,
for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force them to
govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands as a ghastly example of the
condition into which they will then inevitably fall. If we persist, we
shall be sinning against light--the clearest light that was ever given
in such affairs. The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects
of political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which the
infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for whose
interests they pretend particularly to care.
The Pitch Lake I resisted all exhortations to visit, but the days in the
forest were delightful--pre-eminently a day which we spent at the 'Blue
Basin,' a pool scooped out in the course of ages by a river falling
through a mountain gorge; blue, not from any colour in the water, which
is purely transparent, but from a peculiar effect of sky reflection
through an opening in the overhanging trees. As it was far off, we had
to start early and encounter the noonday heat. We had to close the
curtains of the carriage to escape the sun, and in losing the sun we
shut out the wind. All was well, however, when we turned into the hills.
Thenceforward the road followed the bottom of a densely wooded ravine;
impenetrable foliage spreading over our heads, and a limpid river
flashing along in which our horses cooled their feet and lips as we
crossed it again and again. There were the usual cabins and gardens on
either side of us, sometimes single, sometimes clustering into villages,
and high above them the rocks stood out, broken into precipices or
jutting out into projecting crags, with huge trees starting from the
crevices, dead trunks with branching arms clothed scantily with
creepers, or living giants with blue or orange-coloured flowers. Mangoes
scented the valley with their blossom. Bananas waved their long broad
leaves--some flat and unbroken as we know them in conservatories, some
split into palm-like fronds which quivered in the breeze. The cocoa pods
were ripe or ripening, those which had been gathered being left on the
ground in heaps as we see apples in autumn in an English orchard.
We passed a lady on the way who was making sketches and daring the
mosquitoes, that were feeding at leisure upon her face and arms. The
road failed us at last. We alighted with our waterproofs and luncheon
basket. A couple of half-naked boys sprang forward to act as guides and
porters--nice little fellows, speaking a French patois for their natural
language, but with English enough to earn shillings and amuse the
British tourist. With their help we scrambled along a steep slippery
path, the river roaring below, till we came to a spot where, the rock
being soft, a waterfall had cut out in the course of ages a natural
hollow, of which the trees formed the roof, and of which the floor was
the pool we had come in search of. The fall itself was perpendicular,
and fifty or sixty feet high, the water issuing at the top out of a dark
green tunnel among overhanging branches. The sides of the basin were
draped with the fronds of gigantic ferns and wild plantains, all in
wild luxuriance and dripping with the spray. In clefts above the rocks,
large cedars or gum trees had struck their roots and flung out their
gnarled and twisted branches, which were hung with ferns; while at the
lower end of the pool, where the river left it again, there grew out
from among the rocks near the water's edge tall and exquisitely grouped
acacias with crimson flowers for leaves.
[Illustration: BLUE BASIN, TRINIDAD.]
The place broke on us suddenly as we scrambled round a corner from
below. Three young blacks were bathing in the pool, and as we had a lady
with us, they were induced, though sullenly and with some difficulty, to
return into their scanty garments and depart. Never certainly was there
a more inviting spot to swim in, the more so from exciting possibilities
of adventure. An English gentleman went to bathe there shortly before
our coming. He was on a rock, swaying his body for a plunge, when
something caught his eye among the shadows at the bottom. It proved to
be a large dead python.
We had not the luck ourselves of falling in with so interesting a beast.
Great butterflies and perhaps a humming bird or two were flitting among
the leaves as we came up; other signs of life there were none, unless we
call life the motion of the plantain leaves, waving in the draughts of
air which were eddying round the waterfall. We sat down on stones, or on
the trunk of a fallen tree, the mosquitoes mercifully sparing us. We
sketched a little, talked a little, ate our sandwiches, and the male
part of us lighted our cigars. G---- then, to my surprise, produced a
fly rod. In the streams in the Antilles, which run out of the mountains,
there is a fish in great abundance which they call _mullet_, an inferior
trout, but a good substitute where the real thing is not. He runs
sometimes to five pounds weight, will take the fly, and is much sought
after by those who try to preserve in the tropics the amusements and
habits of home. G---- had caught many of them in Dominica. If in
Dominica, why not in Trinidad?
He put his tackle together, tied up a cast of trout flies, and
commenced work. He tried the still water at the lower end of the basin.
He crept round the rock and dropped his line into the foam at the foot
of the fall. No mullet rose, nor fish of any kind. One of our small boys
had looked on with evident impatience. He cried out at last, 'No mullet,
but plenty crayfish,' pointing down into the water; and there, following
the direction of his finger, we beheld strange grey creatures like
cuttle-fish, moving about on the points of their toes, the size of small
lobsters. The flies were dismounted, a bare hook was fitted on a fine
gut trace, with a split shot or two to sink the line, all trim and
excellent. A fresh-water shrimp was caught under a stone for a bait.
G---- went to work, and the strange things took hold and let themselves
be lifted halfway to the surface. But then, somehow, they let go and
disappeared.
Our small boy said nothing; but I saw a scornful smite upon his lips. He
picked up a thin dry cane, found some twine in the luncheon basket which
had tied up our sandwiches, found a pin there also, and bent it, and put
a shrimp on it. With a pebble stone for a sinker he started in
competition, and in a minute he had brought out upon the rock the
strangest thing in the shape of a fish which I had ever seen in fresh
water or salt. It was a true 'crayfish,' _ecrevisse_, eight inches long,
formed regularly with the thick powerful tail, the sharp serrated snout,
the long antennae, and the spider-like legs of the lobster tribe. As in a
crayfish, the claws were represented by the correctly shaped but
diminutive substitutes.
When we had done wondering at the prize, we could admire the smile of
conscious superiority in the face of the captor. The fine tackle had
been beaten, as usual, by the proverbial string and crooked pin, backed
by knowledge in the head of a small nigger boy.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Traen las cabezas atadas con unos panuelos labrados hermosos que
parecen de lejos de seda y almazarrones.