Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American
influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave
Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port au
Prince--The black republic--West Indian history.
The air and quiet of Vedado (so my retreat was called) soon set me up
again, and I was able to face once more my hotel and its Americans. I
did not attempt to travel in Cuba, nor was it necessary for my purpose.
I stayed a few days longer at Havana. I went to operas and churches; I
sailed about the harbour in boats, the boatmen, all of them, not
negroes, as in the Antilles, but emigrants from the old country, chiefly
Gallicians. I met people of all sorts, among the rest a Spanish
officer--a major of engineers--who, if he lives, may come to something.
Major D---- took me over the fortifications, showed me the interior
lines of the Moro, and their latest specimens of modern artillery. The
garrison are, of course, Spanish regiments made of home-bred Castilians,
as I could not fail to recognise when I heard any of them speak. There
are certain words of common use in Spain powerful as the magic formulas
of enchanters over the souls of men. You hear them everywhere in the
Peninsula; at cafe's, at tables d'hote, and in private conversation.
They are a part of the national intellectual equipment. Either from
prudery or because they are superior to old-world superstitions, the
Cubans have washed these expressions out of their language; but the
national characteristics are preserved in the army, and the spell does
not lose its efficacy because the islanders disbelieve in it. I have
known a closed post office in Madrid, where the clerk was deaf to polite
entreaty, blown open by an oath as by a bomb shell. A squad of recruits
in the Moro, who were lying in the shade under a tree, neglected to rise
as an officer went by. 'Saludad, C----o!' he thundered out, and they
bounded to their feet as if electrified.
On the whole Havana was something to have seen. It is the focus and
epitome of Spanish dominion in those seas, and I was forced to conclude
that it was well for Cuba that the English attempts to take possession
of it had failed. Be the faults of their administration as heavy as they
are alleged to be, the Spaniards have done more to Europeanise their
islands than we have done with ours. They have made Cuba
Spanish--Trinidad, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada have never been English
at all, and Jamaica and Barbadoes are ceasing to be English. Cuba is a
second home to the Spaniards, a permanent addition to their soil. We are
as birds of passage, temporary residents for transient purposes, with no
home in our islands at all. Once we thought them worth fighting for, and
as long as it was a question of ships and cannon we made ourselves
supreme rulers of the Caribbean Sea; yet the French and Spaniards will
probably outlive us there. They will remain perhaps as satellites of the
United States, or in some other confederacy, or in recovered strength of
their own; we, in a generation or two, if the causes now in operation
continue to work as they are now working, shall have disappeared from
the scene. In Cuba there is a great Spanish population; Martinique and
Guadaloupe are parts of France; to us it seems a matter of indifference
whether we keep our islands or abandon them, and we leave the remnants
of our once precious settlements to float or drown as they can.
Australia and Canada take care of themselves; we expect our West Indies
to do the same, careless of the difference of circumstance. We no longer
talk of cutting our colonies adrift; the tone of public opinion is
changed, and no one dares to advocate openly the desertion of the least
important of them. But the neglect and indifference continue. We will
not govern them effectively ourselves: our policy, so far as we have any
policy, is to extend among them the principles of self-government, and
self-government can only precipitate our extinction there as completely
as we know that it would do in India if we were wild enough to venture
the plunge. There is no enchantment in self-government which will make
people love each other when they are indifferent or estranged. It can
only force them into sharper collision.
The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary legatee
of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and that she will be
forced to take charge of them in the end whether she likes it or not.
Spain governs unjustly and corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they
are free from her, and if once independent they will throw themselves on
American protection.
We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift. Jamaica
and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities, can only become
like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature of things will hardly permit
so fair a part of the earth which has been once civilised and under
white control to fall back into barbarism.
To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but
in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their
immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide
out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a
tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It
would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain
any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the
unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the
process will be a rapid one.
'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or
gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we
assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves.
We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can
we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper
when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we
cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to
work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural
conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding
is foolish and mischievous.'
I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but
it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against
whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity.
There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local
councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a
governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures
on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly
organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your
schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among
them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and
over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm
authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil
rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate,
it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any
in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it
is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your
tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain
there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which
now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands
you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the
blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.
This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains
in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers
analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the
Indian peninsula.
A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is
one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be
made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present
interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom
of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine
language--no age ever talked more or better--but we don't believe in it;
we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and
does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow.
The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be
kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only
hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things
under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes
among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their
extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the
fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the
Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one
knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely
the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might
provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like
the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has
rather degenerated than improved in these late days of licence, might be
put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow--your
seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do
move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted
brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a
better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to
convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?
The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been
reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson
impressed upon him--that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and
not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it
is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to
say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment
and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he
has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I
had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it
was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England,
which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One
day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next.
The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to
pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one
corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic
intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that
the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were
the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same
vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus,
and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English
face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner.
He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following
morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The
Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to
grant me an _exeat regno_. I do not know that I gained much by his
intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained
indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to
part with. The necessary documents, however, had been sent through the
British consul, and I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill
at the hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my
pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper which is
called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny, and with my
distinguished friend Don G----, the real acquisition which I had made in
coming to his country, and who would not leave me till I was in the
boat, I drove away to the wharf.
It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen over the
hills, and was shining brightly on the roofs and towers of the city, and
on the masts and spars of the vessels which were riding in the harbour.
There was not a ripple on the water, and stars and city, towers and
ships, stood inverted on the surface pointing downward as into a second
infinity. The charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse
than Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains of
Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant vapours in
the dark hours. I could well believe Don G----'s saying, that but for
the natural healthiness of the place, they would all die of it like
poisoned flies. We had to cut our adieus short, for the mouth of some
horrid sewer was close to us. In the boat I did not escape; the water
smelt horribly as it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with
three centuries of pollution, and the phosphorescent light shone with a
sickly, sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was in
Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached the steamer I
watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon which is described
by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep, in the ship's shadow, some shark or other
monster sailed slowly by in an envelope of spectral lustre. When he
stopped his figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the
movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not seem as if
it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.
The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish Government,
and I suppose will not be improved till there is some change of dynasty.
All that can be said for it is that it is not the worst in these seas.
Our ship had just come from the Canal, and had brought the latest news
from thence.
* * * * *
But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense of
doing it are now notorious to all the world. The alternatives are to
abandon an enterprise so splendid in conception, so disastrous in the
execution, or to raise and spend fresh tens of millions to follow those
that are gone with no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest
part of the story will be soonest forgotten--the frightful consumption
of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M. Lesseps having
made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at eclipsing his first
achievement, by a second yet more splendidly ambitious, at a time of
life when common men are content to retire upon their laurels. He
deserves and will receive an unstinted admiration for his energy and his
enthusiasm. But his countrymen who have so zealously supported him will
be rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the two oceans
are eventually united, and no final success can be looked for in the
bold projector's life time.
At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more into the free
fresh open sea. We had come down on the south side of the island, we
returned by the north up the old Bahama Channel where Drake died on his
way home from his last unsuccessful expedition--Lope de Vega singing a
paean over the end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh passengers brought fresh
talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning from a
holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and would have pleased
my American who never knew good come of despondency. He had hopes for
his country, but they rested, like those of every sensible man that I
met, on an inability to believe that there would be further advances in
the direction of political liberty. A revised constitution, he said,
could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities. He had been
travelling in the Southern States. He had seen the state of Mississippi
deserted by the whites, and falling back into a black wilderness. He had
seen South Carolina, which had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and
carpet-bagger legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady
determination of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the
domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in the English
islands than in either of these states, from the enormous disproportion
of numbers. The experiment could be ventured only under a high census
and a restricted franchise. But the experience of all countries showed
that these limited franchises were invidious and could not be
maintained, the end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that
prudent counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.
On board also there was a traveller from a Manchester house of business,
who gave me a more flourishing account than I expected of the state of
our trade, not so much with the English islands as with the Spaniards in
Cuba and on the mainland. His own house, he said, had a large business
with Havana; twenty firms in the north of England were competing there,
and all were doing well. The Spanish Americans on the west side of the
continent were good customers, with the exception of the Mexicans, who
were energetic and industrious, and manufactured for their own
consumption. These modern Aztecs were skilful workmen, nimble-fingered
and inventive. Wages were low, but they were contented with them.
Mexico, I was surprised to hear from him, was rising fast into
prosperity. Whether human life was any safer then than it was a few
years ago, he did not tell me.
Amidst talk and chess and occasional whist after nightfall when reading
became difficult, we ran along with smooth seas, land sometimes in
sight, with shoals on either side of us.
We were to have one more glimpse of Hayti; we were to touch at Port au
Prince, the seat of government of the successors of Toussaint. If beauty
of situation could mould human character, the inhabitants of Port au
Prince might claim to be the first of mankind. St. Domingo or Espanola,
of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest island
discovered by Columbus and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean. It
remained Spanish, as I have already said, for 200 years, when Hayti was
taken by the French buccaneers, and made over by them to Louis XIV. The
French kept it till the Revolution. They built towns; they laid out
farms and sugar fields; they planted coffee all over the island, where
it now grows wild.' Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains;
splendid houses rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put out
its strength; there were churches and priests in every parish; there
were monasteries and nunneries for the religious orders. So firm was the
hold that they had gained that Hayti, like Cuba, seemed to have been
made a part of the old world, and as civilised as France itself. But
French civilisation became itself electric. The Revolution came, and the
reign of Liberty. The blacks took arms; they surprised the plantations;
they made a clean sweep of the whole French population. Yellow fever
swept away the armies which were sent to avenge the massacre, and France
being engaged in annexing Europe had no leisure to despatch more. The
island being thus derelict, Spain and England both tried their hand to
recover it, but failed from the same cause, and a black nation, with a
republican constitution and a population perhaps of about a million and
a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in unchallenged possession,
and has arrived at the condition which has been described to us by Sir
Spenser St. John. Republics which begin with murder and plunder do not
come to much good in this world. Hayti has passed through many
revolutions, and is no nearer than at first to stability. The present
president, M. Salomon, who was long a refugee in Jamaica, came into
power a few years back by a turn of the wheel. He was described to me as
a peremptory gentleman who made quick work with his political opponents.
His term of office having nearly expired, he had re-elected himself
shortly before for another seven years and was prepared to maintain his
right by any measures which he might think expedient. He had a few
regiments of soldiers, who, I was told, were devoted to him, and a fleet
consisting of two gunboats commanded by an American officer, to whom he
chiefly owed his security.
We had steamed along the Hayti coast all one afternoon, underneath a
high range of hills which used to be the hunting ground of the
buccaneers. We had passed their famous Tortugas[16] without seeing them.
Towards evening we entered the long channel between Gonaive island and
the mainland, going slowly that we might not arrive at Port au Prince
before daylight. It was six in the morning when the anchor rattled down,
and I went on deck to look about me. We were at the head of a fiord
rather broader than those in Norway, but very like them--wooded
mountains rising on either side of us, an open valley in front, and on
the rich level soil washed down by the rains and deposited along the
shore, the old French and now President Salomon's capital. Palms and
oranges and other trees were growing everywhere among the houses giving
the impression of graceful civilisation. Directly before us were three
or four wooded islets which form a natural breakwater, and above them
were seen the masts of the vessels which were lying in the harbour
behind. Close to where we were brought up lay the 'Canada,' an English
frigate, and about a quarter of a mile from her an American frigate of
about the same size, with the stars and stripes conspicuously flying. We
have had some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the
satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed, a
man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory terms. The
town lay under her guns; the president's ships, which she might perhaps
have seized as a security, had been taken out of sight into shallow
water, where she could not follow them. The Americans have no particular
rights in Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared,
and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on in those
waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps the president's admiral
of the station being an American may have had something to do with their
presence. Anyway, there the two ships were lying when I came up from
below, their hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep
wooded shores. The air was hot and steamy; fishing vessels with white
sails were drifting slowly about the glassy water. Except for the heat
and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and his boat and black
crew alongside, I could have believed myself off Moelde or some similar
Norwegian town, so like everything seemed, even to the colour of the
houses.
We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed. I had seen
Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for the worst which I
should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom; Port au Prince was the
central ulcer. Long before we came to shore there came off whiffs, not
of drains as at Havana, but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight.
Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully,
we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously as we
could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow ditch, where rotten
fish, vegetables, and other articles were lying about promiscuously, and
we came on what did duty for a grand parade.
We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and _places_, _fiacres_
and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of
the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under the parasols
were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I
saw a _fiacre_ broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker
ladyship was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that pestilential
squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have died of it in a single
year. There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in tawdry
European costume, and officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and
gilding. We passed up the principal avenue, which opened on the market
place. Above the market was the cathedral, more hideous than even the
Mormon temple at Salt Lake. It was full of ladies; the rank, beauty, and
fashion of Port au Prince were at their morning mass, for they are
Catholics with African beliefs underneath. They have a French clergy, an
archbishop and bishop, paid miserably but still subsisting; subsisting
not as objects of reverence at all, as they are at Dominica, but as the
humble servants and ministers of black society. We English are in bad
favour just now; no wonder, with the guns of the 'Canada' pointed at the
city; but the chief complaint is on account of Sir Spenser St. John's
book, which they cry out against with a degree of anger which is the
surest evidence of its truth. It would be unfair even to hint at the
names or stations of various persons who gave me information about the
condition of the place and people. Enough that those who knew well what
they were speaking about assured me that Hayti was the most ridiculous
caricature of civilisation in the whole world. Doubtless the whites
there are not disinterested witnesses; for they are treated as they once
treated the blacks. They can own no freehold property, and exist only on
tolerance. They are called 'white trash.' Black dukes and marquises
drive over them in the street and swear at them, and they consider it an
invasion of the natural order of things. If this was the worst, or even
if the dirt and the disease was the worst, it might be borne with, for
the whites might go away if they pleased, and they pay the penalty
themselves for choosing to be there. But this is not the worst.
Immorality is so universal that it almost ceases to be a fault, for a
fault implies an exception, and in Hayti it is the rule. Young people
make experiment of one another before they will enter into any closer
connection. So far they are no worse than in our own English islands,
where the custom is equally general; but behind the immorality, behind
the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the
West African superstitions; the serpent worship, and the child
sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it. A
missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago
within his own personal knowledge. The facts are notorious; a full
account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only
result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his
country. A few years ago persons guilty of these infamies were tried and
punished; now they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them
would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.
In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as well as
a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition into which the
country has fallen; rational and well-disposed Haytians would welcome
back the French but for an impression, whether well founded or ill I
know not, that the Americans would not suffer any European nation to
reacquire or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.
They make the most they can of their French connection. They send their
children to Paris to be educated, and many of them go thither
themselves. There is money among them, though industry there is none.
The Hayti coffee which bears so high a reputation is simply gathered
under the bushes which the French planters left behind them, and is half
as excellent as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet
so rich is the island in these and other natural productions that they
cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their customs of
5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political schemers. They have a
constitution, of course, with a legislature--two houses of a
legislature--universal suffrage, &c., but it does not save them from
revolutions, which recurred every two or three years till the time of
the present president. He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes
care that the votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and
knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say--I did not see
him--six feet some inches in height and broad in proportion. When in
Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon, and the intimacy between them is
worth noting, as throwing light on Gordon's political aspirations.
I stayed no longer than the ship's business detained the captain, and I
breathed more freely when I had left that miserable cross-birth of
ferocity and philanthropic sentiment. No one can foretell the future
fate of the black republic, but the present order of things cannot last
in an island so close under the American shores. If the Americans forbid
any other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves. If
they find Mormonism an intolerable blot upon their escutcheon, they will
have to put a stop in some way or other to cannibalism and
devil-worship. Meanwhile, the ninety years of negro self-government have
had their use in showing what it really means, and if English statesmen,
either to save themselves trouble or to please the prevailing
uninstructed sentiment, insist on extending it, they will be found when
the accounts are made up to have been no better friends to the unlucky
negro than their slave-trading forefathers.
From the head of the bay on which Port au Prince stands there reaches
out on the west the long arm or peninsula which is so peculiar a feature
in the geography of the island. The arm bone is a continuous ridge of
mountains rising to a height of 8,000 feet and stretching for 160 miles.
At the back towards the ocean is Jacmel, on the other side is the bight
of Leogane, over which and along the land our course lay after leaving
President Salomon's city. The day was unusually hot, and we sat under an
awning on deck watching the changes in the landscape as ravines opened
and closed again, and tall peaks changed their shapes and angles.
Clouds came down upon the mountain tops and passed off again, whole
galleries of pictures swept by, and nature never made more lovely ones.
The peculiarity of tropical mountain scenery is that the high summits
are clothed with trees. The outlines are thus softened and rounded, save
where the rock is broken into precipices. Along the sea and for several
miles inland are the Basses Terres as they used to be called, level
alluvial plains, cut and watered at intervals by rivers, once covered
with thriving plantations and now a jungle. There are no wild beasts
there save an occasional man, few snakes, and those not dangerous. The
acres of richest soil which are waiting there till reasonable beings can
return and cultivate them, must be hundreds of thousands. In the valleys
and on the slopes there are all gradations of climate, abundant water,
grass lands that might be black with cattle, or on the loftier ranges
white with sheep.
It is strange to think how chequered a history these islands have had,
how far they are even yet from any condition which promises permanence.
Not one of them has arrived at any stable independence. Spaniards,
English and French, Dutch and Danes scrambled for them, fought for them,
occupied them more or less with their own people, but it was not to
found new nations, but to get gold or get something which could be
changed for gold. Only occasionally, and as it were by accident, they
became the theatre of any grander game. The war of the Reformation was
carried thither, and heroic deeds were done there, but it was by
adventurers who were in search of plunder for themselves. France and
England fought among the Antilles, and their names are connected with
many a gallant action; but they fought for the sovereignty of the seas,
not for the rights and liberties of the French or English inhabitants of
the islands. Instead of occupying them with free inhabitants, the
European nations filled them with slave gangs. They were valued only for
the wealth which they yielded, and society there has never assumed any
particularly noble aspect. There has been splendour and luxurious
living, and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and
massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the romance of
pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of human life do not show
themselves under such conditions. There has been no saint in the West
Indies since Las Casas, no hero, unless philonegro enthusiasm can make
one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the
word, with a character and purpose of their own, unless to some extent
in Cuba, and therefore when the wind has changed and the wealth for
which the islands were alone desired is no longer to be made among them,
and slavery is no longer possible and would not pay if it were, there is
nothing to fall back upon. The palaces of the English planters and
merchants fall to decay; their wines and their furniture, their books
and their pictures, are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle
to keep afloat, and one by one they go under in the waves.
The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and partially
civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in our islands since
their emancipation, for though they were personally free the whites were
still their rulers, and they looked up to them with respect. They have
acquired land and notions of property, some of them can read, many of
them are tolerable workmen and some excellent, but in character the
movement is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the first
outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible for a
generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately lost, but the
effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is apparent at last. In the
English islands they are innocently happy in the unconsciousness of the
obligations of morality. They eat, drink, sleep, and smoke, and do the
least in the way of work that they can. They have no ideas of duty, and
therefore are not made uneasy by neglecting it. One or other of them
occasionally rises in the legal or other profession, but there is no
sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the race are improving
either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence is the other
way. No Uncle Tom, no Aunt Chloe need be looked for in a negro's cabin
in the West Indies. If such specimens of black humanity are to be found
anywhere, it will be where they have continued under the old influences
as servants in white men's houses. The generality are mere good-natured
animals, who in service had learnt certain accomplishments, and had
developed certain qualities of a higher kind. Left to themselves they
fall back upon the superstitions and habits of their ancestors. The key
to the character of any people is to be found in the local customs which
have spontaneously grown or are growing among them. The customs of
Dahomey have not yet shown themselves in the English West Indies and
never can while the English authority is maintained; but no custom of
any kind will be found in a negro hut or village from which his most
sanguine friend can derive a hope that he is on the way to mending
himself.
Roses do not grow on thorn trees, nor figs on thistles. A healthy human
civilisation was not perhaps to be looked for in countries which have
been alternately the prey of avarice, ambition, and sentimentalism. We
visit foreign countries to see varieties of life and character, to learn
languages that we may gain an insight into various literatures, to see
manners unlike our own springing naturally out of different soils and
climates, to see beautiful works of art, to see places associated with
great men and great actions, and subsidiary to these, to see lakes and
mountains, and strange skies and seas. But the localities of great
events and the homes of the actors in them are only saddening when the
spiritual results are disappointing, and scenery loses its charm unless
the grace of humanity is in the heart of it. To the man of science the
West Indies may be delightful and instructive. Rocks and trees and
flowers remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself.
But the traveller whose heart is with his kind, and who cares only to
see his brother mortals making their corner of this planet into an
orderly and rational home, had better choose some other object for his
pilgrimage.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Tortoise Islands; the buccaneers' head quarters.