Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of Pere
Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended
coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old fort and
barracks--Conversation with an American--Constitution of
Dominica--Land at Roseau.
Beyond all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see
Dominica.[10] It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April 12. It
was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least known. A tribe of
aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the forests retaining the old look
and the old language, and, except that they no longer ate their
prisoners, retaining their old habits. They were skilful fishermen,
skilful basket makers, skilful in many curious arts.
The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is one of the
group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished from St. Lucia, St.
Vincent, Grenada, &c., which form the Windward. The early geographers
drew the line differently and more rationally. The main direction of the
trade winds is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the
whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the
Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the west of
it--Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The modern division
corresponds to no natural phenomenon. The drift of the trades is rather
from the north-east than from the south-east, and the names serve only
now to describe our own not very successful political groupings.
Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions. The French took
it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it, colonised it, planted in
it their religion and their language, and fought desperately to maintain
their possession. Lord Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the
West Indies, insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French
in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations
there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever since remained in
spite of the furious efforts which France made to recover an island
which she so highly valued during the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to
learn what we had made of a place which we had fought so hard for.
Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles, it is split
into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through each there runs a full
and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to
drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on
the rich levels along the shore the French had once their cane fields
and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.
Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth
century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his
hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages,
acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of
them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and
poisons. The Pere was a clever, curious man, with a genial human
sympathy about him, and was indulgent to the faults which the poor
coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to
make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he
liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found
that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded
charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and
good sense out of a woman.
At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a
Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and
beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When
Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and
grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely,
bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances nothing of her face
could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of
eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of
still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well
together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she
loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of
pins and needles, knives and scissors.
Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science.
He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North
American Indians. They called themselves _Banari_, which meant 'come
from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had
heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind.
Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried
the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in, battle, and
handed them round to be gnawed at special festivals. They were a
light-hearted, pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and
ready to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a hammer
shark for his amusement by diving under the monster and stabbing him
with knives. As to their religion, they had no objection to anything.
But their real belief was in a sort of devil.
Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the Caribs into the
mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an ordered form of society.
Madame Ouvernard and her court went to their own place. Canes were
planted, and indigo and coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and
parish churches were scattered about the island. There were convents of
nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison in it.
The French might have been there till now had not we turned them out
some ninety years ago; English enterprise then setting in that direction
under the impulse of Rodney's victories. I was myself about to see the
improvements which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost
us so dear.
I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from Barbadoes to St.
Thomas's. On our way we touched at St. Lucia, another once famous
possession of ours. This island was once French also. Rodney took it in
1778. It was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the
reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It was in the
harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney collected the fleet
which fought and won the great battle with the Count de Grasse. At the
peace of Versailles, St. Lucia was restored to France; but was retaken
in 1796 by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since
belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous island, twice
as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this late day we have suddenly
discovered that we have an interest. The threatened Darien canal has
awakened us to a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in
those quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for such a
purpose, and works are already in progress there, and the long-deserted
forts and barracks which had been made over to snakes and lizards, are
again to be occupied by English troops.
We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of the next morning we
were in the passage between St. Lucia and St. Vincent just under the
'Pitons,' which were soaring grandly above us in the twilight. The
Pitons are two conical mountains rising straight out of the sea at the
southern end of St. Lucia, one of them 3,000 feet high, the other a few
feet lower, symmetrical in shape like sugar loaves, and so steep as to
be inaccessible to any one but a member of the Alpine Club. Tradition
says that four English seamen, belonging to the fleet, did once set out
to climb the loftier of the two. They were watched in their ascent
through a telescope. When halfway up one of them was seen to drop, while
three went on; a few hundred feet higher a second dropped, and
afterwards a third; one had almost reached the summit, when he fell
also. No account of what had befallen them ever reached their ship. They
were supposed to have been bitten by the fer de lance, the deadliest
snake in St. Lucia and perhaps in the world, who had resented and
punished their intrusion into regions where they had no business. Such
is the local legend, born probably out of the terror of a reptile which
is no legend at all, but a living and very active reality.
I had gone on deck on hearing where we were, and saw the twin grey peaks
high above me in the sky, the last stars glimmering over their tops and
the waves washing against the black precipices at their base. The night
had been rough, and a considerable sea was running, which changed,
however, to an absolute calm when we had passed the Pitons and were
under the lee of the island. I could then observe the peculiar blue of
the water which I was told that I should find at St. Lucia and Dominica.
I have seen the sea of very beautiful colours in several parts of the
world, but I never saw any which equalled this. I do not know the cause.
The depth is very great even close to the shore. The islands are merely
volcanic mountains with sides extremely steep. The coral insect has made
anchorages in the bays and inlets; elsewhere you are out of soundings
almost immediately. As to St. Lucia itself, if I had not seen Grenada,
if I had not known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have
thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever made, so
perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills, the glens dividing
them and the high mountain ranges in the interior still draped in the
white mist of morning. Here and there along the shore there were bright
green spots which meant cane fields. Sugar cane in these countries is
always called for brevity _cane_.
Here, as elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro, forty
thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio altering every year
to white disadvantage. The old system has not, however, disappeared as
completely as in other places. There are still white planters with large
estates, which are not encumbered as in Barbadoes. They are struggling
along, discontented of course, but not wholly despondent. The chief
complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks, who
they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake
except at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect
anything else from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to
them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be,
with whom they have no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages
are but twopence an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary
pleasure of the overseer.
Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed. When the troops
return there will be a change, and spirit may be put into them again.
Castries, the old French town, lies at the head of a deep inlet which
runs in among the mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future
coaling station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting
'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and cheaply fortified.
There is little or no tide in these seas. There is depth of water
sufficient in the greater part of the harbour for line-of-battle ships
to anchor and turn, and the few coral shoals which would be in the way
are being torn up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed
seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare for the
dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which is to follow.
There was real work actively going on, a rare and perhaps unexampled
phenomenon in the English West Indies.
We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was a strange
scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out of coal stores, and
gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over the workmen's sheds. Volumes
of smoke rose out of the dredging engines and hovered over the town. We
had come back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses
behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as parrots
in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours looked oddly out of
place by the side of the grimy reproduction of England.
I went on shore and fell in with the engineer of the works, who kindly
showed me his plans of the harbour, and explained what was to be done.
He showed me also some beautiful large bivalves which had been brought
up in the scrapers out of the coral. They were new to me and new to him,
though they may be familiar enough to more experienced naturalists.
Among other curiosities he had a fer de lance, lately killed and
preserved in spirits, a rat-tailed, reddish, powerful-looking brute,
about four feet long and as thick as a child's wrist. Even when dead I
looked at him respectfully, for his bite is fatal and the effect almost
instantaneous. He is fearless, and will not, like most snakes, get out
of your way if he hears you coming, but leaves you to get out of his. He
has a bad habit, too, of taking his walks at night; he prefers a path or
a road to the grass, and your house or your garden to the forest; while
if you step upon him you will never do it again. They have introduced
the mongoose, who has cleared the snakes out of Jamaica, to deal with
him; but the mongoose knows the creature that he has to encounter, and
as yet has made little progress in extirpating him.
St. Lucia is under the jurisdiction of Barbadoes. It has no governor of
its own, but only an administrator indifferently paid. The elective
principle has not yet been introduced into the legislature, and perhaps
will not be introduced since we have discovered the island to be of
consequence to us, unless as part of some general confederation. The
present administrator--Mr. Laborde, a gentleman, I suppose, of French
descent--is an elderly official, and resides in the old quarters of the
general of the forces, 900 feet above the sea. He has large
responsibilities, and, having had large experience also, seems fully
equal to the duties which attach to him. He cannot have the authority of
a complete governor, or undertake independent enterprises for the
benefit of the island, as a Rajah Brooke might do, but he walks steadily
on in the lines assigned to him. St. Lucia is better off in this respect
than most of the Antilles, and may revive perhaps into something like
prosperity when the coaling station is finished and under the command of
some eminent engineer officer.
Mr. Laborde had invited us to lunch with him. Horses were waiting for
us, and we rode up the old winding track which led from the town to the
barracks. The heat below was oppressive, but the air cooled as we rose.
The road is so steep that resting places had been provided at intervals,
where the soldiers could recover breath or shelter themselves from the
tropical cataracts of rain which fall without notice, as if the string
had been pulled of some celestial shower bath. The trees branched
thickly over it, making an impenetrable shade, till we emerged on the
plateau at the top, where we were on comparatively level ground, with
the harbour immediately at our feet. The situation had been chosen by
the French when St. Lucia was theirs. The general's house, now Mr.
Laborde's residence, is a long airy building with a deep colonnade, the
drawing and dining rooms occupying the entire breadth of the ground
floor, with doors and windows on both sides for coolness and air. The
western front overlooked the sea. Behind were wooded hills, green
valleys, a mountain range in the background, and the Pitons blue in the
distance. As we were before our time, Mr. Laborde walked me out to see
the old barracks, magazines, and water tanks. They looked neglected and
dilapidated, the signs of decay being partly hid by the creepers with
which the walls were overgrown. The soldiers' quarters were occupied for
the time by a resident gentleman, who attended to the essential repairs
and prevented the snakes from taking possession as they were inclined to
do. I forget how many of the fer de lance sort he told me he had killed
in the rooms since he had lived in them.
In the war time we had maintained a large establishment in St. Lucia;
with what consequences to the health of the troops I could not clearly
make out. One informant told me that they had died like flies of yellow
fever, and that the fields adjoining were as full of bodies as the
Brompton cemetery; another that yellow fever had never been known there
or any dangerous disorder; and that if we wanted a sanitary station this
was the spot for it. Many thousands of pounds will have to be spent
there before the troops can return; but that is our way with the
colonies--to change our minds every ten years, to do and undo, and do
again, according to parliamentary humours, while John Bull pays the bill
patiently for his own irresolution.
The fortress, once very strong, is now in ruins, but, I suppose, will be
repaired and rearmed unless we are to trust to the Yankees, who are
supposed to have established a _Pax Dei_ in these waters and will permit
no aggressive action there either by us or against us. We walked round
the walls; we saw the hill a mile off from which Abercrombie had
battered out the French, having dragged his guns through a roadless
forest to a spot to which there seemed no access except on wings. The
word 'impossible' was not known in those days. What Englishmen did once
they may do again perhaps if stormy days come back. The ruins themselves
were silently impressive. One could hear the note of the old bugles as
they sounded the reveille and the roaring of the _feu de joie_ when the
shattered prizes were brought in from the French fleet. The signs of
what once had been were still visible in the parade ground, in the large
mangoes which the soldiers had planted, in the English grass which they
had introduced and on which cattle were now grazing. There was a clump
of guavas, hitherto only known to me in preserves. I gathered a blossom
as a remembrance, white like a large myrtle flower, but heavily
scented--too heavily, with an odour of death about it.
Mr. Laborde's conversation was instructive. His entertainment of us was
all which our acquired West Indian fastidiousness could desire. The
inevitable cigars followed, and Mr. L. gave me a beating at billiards.
There were some lively young ladies in the party, and two or three of
the ship's officers. The young ones played lawn tennis, and we old ones
looked on and wished the years off our shoulders. So passed the day. The
sun was setting when we mounted to ride down. So short is the twilight
in these latitudes, that it was dark night when we reached the town, and
we required the light of the stars to find our boat.
When the coaling process was finished, the ship had been washed down in
our absence and was anchored off beyond the reach of the dirt; but the
ports were shut; the windsails had been taken down; the air in the
cabins was stifling; so I stayed on deck till midnight with a clever
young American, who was among our fellow-passengers, talking of many
things. He was ardent, confident, self-asserting, but not disagreeably
either one or the other. It was rather a pleasure to hear a man speak in
these flabby uncertain days as if he were sure of anything, and I had to
notice again, as I had often noticed before, how well informed casual
American travellers are on public affairs, and how sensibly they can
talk of them. He had been much in the West Indies and seemed to know
them well. He said that all the whites in the islands wished at the
bottom of their hearts to be taken into the Union; but the Union
Government was too wise to meddle with them. The trade would fall to
America of itself. The responsibility and trouble might remain where it
was. I asked him about the Canadian fishery dispute. He thought it would
settle itself in time, and that nothing serious would come of it. 'The
Washington Cabinet had been a little hard on England,' he admitted; 'but
it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.' 'Honours were easy;
neither party could score.' 'We had been equally hard on them about
Alaska.'
He was less satisfied about Ireland. The telegraph had brought the news
of Mr. Goschen's defeat at Liverpool, and Home Rule, which had seemed to
have been disposed of, was again within the range of probabilities. He
was watching with pitying amusement, like most of his countrymen, the
weakness of will with which England allowed herself to be worried by so
contemptible a business; but he did seem to fear, and I have heard
others of his countrymen say the same, that if we let it go on much
longer the Americans may become involved in the thing one way or
another, and trouble may rise about it between the two countries.
We weighed; and I went to bed and to sleep, and so missed Pigeon Island,
where Rodney's fleet lay before the action, and the rock from which,
through his telescope, he watched De Grasse come out of Martinique, and
gave his own signal to chase. We rolled as usual between the islands. At
daylight we were again in shelter under Martinique, and again in classic
regions; for close to us was Diamond Rock--once his Majesty's ship
'Diamond,' commissioned with crew and officers--one of those curious
true incidents, out of which a legend might have grown in other times,
that ship and mariners had been turned to stone. The rock, a lonely
pyramid six hundred feet high, commanded the entrance to Port Royal in
Martinique. Lord Howe took possession of it, sent guns up in slings to
the top, and left a midshipman with a handful of men in charge. The
gallant little fellow held his fortress for several months, peppered
away at the French, and sent three of their ships of war to the bottom.
He was blockaded at last by an overwhelming force. No relief could be
spared for him. Escape was impossible, as he had not so much as a boat,
and he capitulated to famine.
We stayed two hours under Martinique. I did not land. It has been for
centuries a special object of care on the part of the French Government.
It is well looked after, and, considering the times, prosperous. It has
a fine garrison, and a dockyard well furnished, with frigates in the
harbours ready for action should occasion arise. I should infer from
what I heard that in the event of war breaking out between England and
France, Martinique, in the present state of preparation on both sides,
might take possession of the rest of the Antilles with little
difficulty. Three times we took it, and we gave it back again. In turn,
it may one day, perhaps, take us, and the English of the West Indies
become a tradition like the buccaneers.
The mountains of Dominica are full in sight from Martinique. The channel
which separates them is but thirty miles across, and the view of
Dominica as you approach it is extremely grand. Grenada, St. Vincent,
St. Lucia, Martinique are all volcanic, with lofty peaks and ridges; but
Dominica was at the centre of the force which lifted the Antilles out of
the ocean, and the features which are common to all are there in a
magnified form. The mountains range from four to five thousand feet in
height. Mount Diablot, the highest of them, rises to between five and
six thousand feet. The mountains being the tallest in all the group, the
rains are also the most violent, and the ravines torn out by the
torrents are the wildest and most magnificent. The volcanic forces are
still active there. There are sulphur springs and boiling water
fountains, and in a central crater there is a boiling lake. There are
strange creatures there besides: great snakes--harmless, but ugly to
look at; the diablot--from which the mountain takes its name--a great
bird, black as charcoal, half raven, half parrot, which nests in holes
in the ground as puffins do, spends all the day in them, and flies down
to the sea at night to fish for its food. There were once great numbers
of these creatures, and it was a favourite amusement to hunt and drag
them out of their hiding places. Labat says that they were excellent
eating. They are confined now in reduced numbers to the inaccessible
crags about the peak which bears their name.
Martinique has two fine harbours. Dominica has none. At the north end of
the island there is a bay, named after Prince Rupert, where there is
shelter from all winds but the south, but neither there nor anywhere is
there an anchorage which can be depended upon in dangerous weather.
Roseau, the principal or only town, stands midway along the western
shore. The roadstead is open, but as the prevailing winds are from the
east the island itself forms a breakwater. Except on the rarest
occasions there is neither surf nor swell there. The land shelves off
rapidly, and a gunshot from shore no cable can find the bottom, but
there is an anchorage in front of the town, and coasting smacks,
American schooners, passing steamers bring up close under the rocks or
alongside of the jetties which are built out from the beach upon piles.
The situation of Roseau is exceedingly beautiful. The sea is, if
possible, a deeper azure even than at St. Lucia; the air more
transparent; the forests of a lovelier green than I ever saw in any
other country. Even the rain, which falls in such abundance, falls often
out of a clear sky as if not to interrupt the sunshine, and a rainbow
almost perpetually hangs its arch over the island. Roseau itself stands
on a shallow promontory. A long terrace of tolerable-looking houses
faces the landing place. At right angles to the terrace, straight
streets strike backwards at intervals, palms and bananas breaking the
lines of roof. At a little distance, you see the towers of the old
French Catholic cathedral, a smaller but not ungraceful-looking Anglican
church, and to the right a fort, or the ruins of one, now used as a
police barrack, over which flies the English flag as the symbol of our
titular dominion. Beyond the fort is a public garden with pretty trees
in it along the brow of a precipitous cliff, at the foot of which, when
we landed, lay at anchor a couple of smart Yankee schooners and half a
dozen coasting cutters, while rounding inwards behind was a long shallow
bay dotted over with the sails of fishing boats. White negro villages
gleamed among the palms along the shore, and wooded mountains rose
immediately above them. It seemed an attractive, innocent, sunny sort of
place, very pleasant to spend a few days in, if the inner side of things
corresponded to the appearance. To a looker-on at that calm scene it
was not easy to realise the desperate battles which had been fought for
the possession of it, the gallant lives which had been laid down under
the walls of that crumbling castle. These cliffs had echoed the roar of
Rodney's guns on the day which saved the British Empire, and the island
I was gazing at was England's Salamis.
The organisation of the place, too, seemed, so far as I could gather
from official books, to have been carefully attended to. The
constitution had been touched and retouched by the home authorities as
if no pains could be too great to make it worthy of a spot so sacred.
There is an administrator, which is a longer word than governor. There
is an executive council, a colonial secretary, an attorney-general, an
auditor-general, and other such 'generals of great charge.' There is a
legislative assembly of fourteen members, seven nominated by the Crown
and seven elected by the people. And there are revenue officers and
excise officers, inspectors of roads, and civil engineers, and school
boards, and medical officers, and registrars, and magistrates. Where
would political perfection be found if not here with such elaborate
machinery?
The results of it all, in the official reports, seemed equally
satisfactory till you looked closely into them. The tariff of articles
on which duties were levied, and the list of articles raised and
exported, seemed to show that Dominica must be a beehive of industry and
productiveness. The revenue, indeed, was a little startling as the
result of this army of officials. Eighteen thousand pounds was the whole
of it, scarcely enough to pay their salaries. The population, too, on
whose good government so much thought had been expended, was only
30,000; of these 30,000 only a hundred were English. The remaining
whites, and those in scanty numbers, were French and principally
Catholics. The soil was as rich as the richest in the world. The
cultivation was growing annually less. The inspector of roads was likely
to have an easy task, for except close to the town there were no roads
at all on which anything with wheels could travel, the old roads made by
the French having dropped into horse tracks, and the horse tracks into
the beds of torrents. Why in an island where the resources of modern
statesmanship had been applied so lavishly and with the latest
discoveries in political science, the effect should have so ill
corresponded to the means employed, was a problem into which it would be
curious to inquire.
The steamer set me down upon the pier and went on upon its way. At the
end of a fortnight it would return and pick me up again. Meanwhile, I
was to make the best of my time. I had been warned beforehand that there
was no hotel in Roseau where an Englishman with a susceptible skin and
palate could survive more than a week; and as I had two weeks to provide
for, I was uncertain what to do with myself. I was spared the trial of
the hotels by the liberality of her Majesty's representative in the
colony. Captain Churchill, the administrator of the island, had heard
that I was coming there, and I was met on the landing stage by a message
from him inviting me to be his guest during my stay. Two tall handsome
black girls seized my bags, tossed them on their heads, and strode off
with a light step in front of me, cutting jokes with their friends; I
following, and my mind misgiving me that I was myself the object of
their wit.
I was anxious to see Captain Churchill, for I had heard much of him. The
warmest affection had been expressed for him personally, and concern for
the position in which he was placed. Notwithstanding 'the latest
discoveries of political science,' the constitution was still imperfect.
The administrator, to begin with, is allowed a salary of only 500_l._ a
year. That is not much for the chief of such an army of officials; and
the hospitalities and social civilities which smooth the way in such
situations are beyond his means. His business is to preside at the
council, where, the official and the elected members being equally
balanced and almost invariably dividing one against the other, his duty
is to give the casting vote. He cannot give it against his own officers,
and thus the machine is contrived to create the largest amount of
friction, and to insure the highest amount of unpopularity to the
administrator. His situation is the more difficult because the European
element in Roseau, small as it is at best, is more French than English.
The priests, the sisterhoods, are French or French-speaking. A French
patois is the language of the blacks. They are almost to a man
Catholics, and to the French they look as their natural leaders. England
has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to introduce her own civilisation;
and thus Dominica is English only in name. Should war come, a boatload
of soldiers from Martinique would suffice to recover it. Not a black in
the whole island would draw a trigger in defence of English authority,
and, except the Crown officials, not half a dozen Europeans. The
administrator can do nothing to improve this state of things. He is too
poor to open Government House to the Roseau shopkeepers and to bid for
social popularity. He is no one. He goes in and out unnoticed, and flits
about like a bat in the twilight. He can do no good, and from the nature
of the system on the construction of which so much care was expended, no
one else can do any good. The maximum of expense, the minimum of benefit
to the island, is all that has come of it.
Meanwhile the island drifts along, without credit to borrow money and
therefore escaping bankruptcy. The blacks there, as everywhere, are
happy with their yams, and cocoa nuts and land crabs. They desire
nothing better than they have, and do not imagine that they have any
rulers unless agitated by the elected members. These gentlemen would
like the official situations for themselves as in Trinidad, and they
occasionally attempt a stir with partial success; otherwise the island
goes on in a state of torpid content. Captain Churchill, quiet and
gentlemanlike, gives no personal offence, but popularity he cannot hope
for, having no means of recommending himself. The only really powerful
Europeans are the Catholic bishop and the priests and sisterhoods. They
are looked up to with genuine respect. They are reaping the harvest of
the long and honourable efforts of the French clergy in all their West
Indian possessions to make the blacks into Catholic Christians. In the
Christian part of it they have succeeded but moderately; but such
religion as exists in the island is mainly what they have introduced
and taught, and they have a distinct influence which we ourselves have
not tried to rival.
But we have been too long toiling up the paved road to Captain
Churchill's house. My girl-porter guides led me past the fort, where
they exchanged shots with the lounging black police, past the English
church, which stood buried in trees, the churchyard prettily planted
with tropical flowers. The sun was dazzling, the heat was intense, and
the path which led through it, if not apparently much used, looked shady
and cool.
A few more steps brought us to the gate of the Residence, where Captain
Churchill had his quarters in the absence of the Governor-in-Chief of
the Leeward Islands, whose visits were few and brief. In the event of
the Governor's arrival he removed to a cottage in the hills. The house
was handsome, the gardens well kept; a broad walk led up to the door, a
hedge of lime trees closely clipt on one side of it, on the other a lawn
with orange trees, oleanders, and hibiscus, palms of all varieties and
almond trees, which in Dominica grow into giants, their broad leaves
turning crimson before they fall, like the Virginia creeper. We reached
the entrance of the house by wide stone steps, where countless lizards
were lazily basking. Through the bars of the railings on each side of
them there were intertwined the runners of the largest and most
powerfully scented stephanotis which I have ever seen. Captain Churchill
(one of the Marlborough Churchills) received me with more than
cordiality. Society is not abundant in his Barataria, and perhaps as
coming from England I was welcome to him in his solitude. His wife, an
English Creole--that is, of pure English blood, but born in the
island--was as hospitable as her husband. They would not let me feel
that I was a stranger, and set me at my ease in a moment with a warmth
which was evidently unassumed. Captain C. was lame, having hurt his
foot. In a day or two he hoped to be able to mount his horse again, when
we were to ride together and see the curiosities. Meanwhile, he talked
sorrowfully enough of his own situation and the general helplessness of
it. A man whose feet are chained and whose hands are in manacles is not
to be found fault with if he cannot use either. He is not intended to
use either. The duty of an administrator of Dominica, it appears, is to
sit still and do nothing, and to watch the flickering in the socket of
the last remains of English influence and authority. Individually he was
on good terms with everyone, with the Catholic bishop especially, who,
to his regret and mine, was absent at the time of my visit.
His establishment was remarkable; it consisted of two black girls--a
cook and a parlourmaid--who 'did everything;' and 'everything,' I am
bound to say, was done well enough to please the most fastidious nicety.
The cooking was excellent. The rooms, which were handsomely furnished,
were kept as well and in as good order as in the Churchills' ancestral
palace at Blenheim. Dominica has a bad name for vermin. I had been
threatened with centipedes and scorpions in my bedroom. I had been
warned there, as everywhere in the West Indies, never to walk across the
floor with bare feet, lest a land crab should lay hold of my toe or a
jigger should bite a hole in it, lay its eggs there, and bring me into
the hands of the surgeon. Never while I was Captain C.'s guest did I see
either centipede, or scorpion, or jigger, or any other unclean beast in
any room of which these girls had charge. Even mosquitoes did not
trouble me, so skilfully and carefully they arranged the curtains. They
were dressed in the fashion of the French islands, something like the
Moorish slaves whom one sees in pictures of Eastern palaces. They
flitted about silent on their shoeless feet, never stumbled, or upset
chairs or plates or dishes, but waited noiselessly like a pair of elves,
and were always in their place when wanted. One had heard much of the
idleness and carelessness of negro servants. In no part of the globe
have I ever seen household work done so well by two pairs of hands. Of
their morals I know nothing. It is usually said that negro girls have
none. They appeared to me to be perfectly modest and innocent. I asked
in wonder what wages were paid to these black fairies, believing that at
no price at all could the match of them be found in England. I was
informed that they had three shillings a week each, and 'found
themselves,' i.e. found their own food and clothes. And this was above
the usual rate, as Government House was expected to be liberal. The
scale of wages may have something to do with the difficulty of obtaining
labour in the West Indies. I could easily believe the truth of what I
had been often told, that free labour is more economical to the employer
than slave labour.
The views from the drawing room windows were enchantingly beautiful. It
is not the form only in these West Indian landscapes, or the colour
only, but form and colour seen through an atmosphere of very peculiar
transparency. On one side we looked up a mountain gorge, the slopes
covered with forest; a bold lofty crag jutting out from them brown and
bare, and the mountain ridge behind half buried in mist. From the other
window we had the Botanical Gardens, the bay beyond them sparkling in
the sunshine, and on the farther side of it, a few miles off, an island
fortress which the Marquis de Bouille, of Revolution notoriety, took
from the English in 1778. The sea stretched out blue and lovely under
the fringe of sand, box trees, and almonds which grew along the edge of
the cliff. The air was perfumed by white acacia flowers sweeter than
orange blossom.
Captain C. limped down with me into the gardens for a fuller look at the
scene. Dusky fishermen were busy with their nets catching things like
herrings, which come in daily to the shore to escape the monsters which
prey upon them. Canoes on the old Carib pattern were slipping along
outside, trailing lines for kingfish and bonitos. Others were setting
baskets, like enormous lobster pots or hoop nets--such as we use to
catch tench in English ponds--these, too, a legacy from the Caribs, made
of strong tough cane. At the foot of the cliff were the smart American
schooners which I had seen on landing--broad-beamed, shallow, low in the
water with heavy spars, which bring Yankee 'notions' to the islands and
carry back to New York bananas and limes and pineapples. There they
were, models of Tom Cringle's 'Wave,' airy as English yachts, and equal
to anything from a smuggling cruise to a race for a cup. I could have
gazed for ever, so beautiful, so new, so like a dream it was, had I not
been brought back swiftly to prose and reality. Suddenly out of a clear
sky, without notice, and without provocation, first a few drops of rain
fell, and then a deluge which set the gutters running. We had to scuttle
home under our umbrellas. I was told, and I discovered afterwards by
fuller experience, that this was the way in Dominica, and that if I went
out anywhere I must be prepared for it. In our retreat we encountered a
distinguished-looking abbe with a collar and a gold cross, who bowed to
my companion. I would gladly have been introduced to him, but neither he
nor we had leisure for courtesies in the torrent which was falling upon
us.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Not to be confounded with St. Domingo, which is called after St.
Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now divided into the
two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in the chain
of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so named by
Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.