The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses

Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any eagerness I should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence and continued hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed me in my own. I told him that I was going to Hayti to learn what I could on the spot. I could not expect that I, on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than Sir Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with me a mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity. He took leave of me with an expression of passionate anxiety that it might be found possible to remove so black a stain from his unfortunate race.

CHAPTER X

Leeward and Windward Islands – The Caribs of Dominica – Visit of Père 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 Père 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.