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

The captain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted with the present black President of Hayti, Mr. Salomon. I had heard of this gentleman as an absolute person, who knew how to make himself obeyed, and who treated opposition to his authority in a very summary manner. He seemed to be a favourite of the captain's. He had been educated in France, had met with many changes of fortune, and after an exile in Jamaica had become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished to see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at Jacmel, which is one of the principal ports, to leave the mails, and Captain W – was good enough to say that, if I liked, I might go ashore for an hour or two with the officer in charge.

Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black problem, is the western portion of Columbus's Española, or St. Domingo, the largest after Cuba and the most fertile in natural resources of all the islands of the Caribbean Sea. It was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in the New World. The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and innocent Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended to convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of their discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The saint gave his name to the island, and his temperament to the conquerors. In carrying out their pious design, they converted the Indians off the face of the earth, working them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher constitution. They colonised, they built cities; they throve and prospered for nearly two hundred years; when Hayti, the most valuable half of the island, was taken from them by the buccaneers and made into a French province. The rest which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish, and is Spanish still – a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish republic. Hayti became afterwards the theatre of the exploits of the ever-glorious Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be allowed to continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. In sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man, woman, and child. Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and recover the colony. Toussaint, who had no share in the atrocities, and whose fault was only that he had been caught by the prevailing political epidemic and believed in the evangel of freedom, surrendered and was carried to France, where he died or else was made an end of. The yellow fever avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity of trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro self-government. The French troops perished in tens of thousands. They were reinforced again and again, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a victory to the black man which he could not win for himself. They abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. We English tried our hand to recover it afterwards, but we failed also, and for the same reason.

Hayti has thus for nearly a century been a black independent state. The negro race have had it to themselves and have not been interfered with. They were equipped when they started on their career of freedom with the Catholic religion, a civilised language, European laws and manners, and the knowledge of various arts and occupations which they had learnt while they were slaves. They speak French still; they are nominally Catholics still; and the tags and rags of the gold lace of French civilisation continue to cling about their institutions. But in the heart of them has revived the old idolatry of the Gold Coast, and in the villages of the interior, where they are out of sight and can follow their instincts, they sacrifice children in the serpent's honour after the manner of their forefathers. Perhaps nothing better could be expected from a liberty which was inaugurated by assassination and plunder. Political changes which prove successful do not begin in that way.

The Bight of Leogane is a deep bay carved in the side of the island, one arm of which is a narrow ridge of high mountains a hundred and fifty miles long and from thirty to forty wide. At the head of this bay, to the north of the ridge, is Port au Prince, the capital of this remarkable community. On the south, on the immediately opposite side of the mountains and facing the Caribbean Sea, is Jacmel, the town next in importance. We arrived off it shortly after daybreak. The houses, which are white, looked cheerful in the sunlight. Harbour there was none, but an open roadstead into which the swell of the sea sets heavily, curling over a long coral reef which forms a partial shelter. The mountain range rose behind, sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers into the island, and from which they took their name. The shore was abrupt; the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock tinted brilliantly with various colours. One rather striking white-cliff, a ship's officer assured me, was chalk; adding flint when I looked incredulous. His geological education was imperfect. We brought up a mile outside the black city. The boat was lowered. None of the other passengers volunteered to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity; and, indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself of Captain W – 's consent before he would take me. The presence of Europeans in any form is barely tolerated. A few only are allowed to remain about the ports, just as the Irish say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and Waterford after the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble business of trade.

The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown and parched. In the large islands the winter months are dry. As we approached the reef we saw the long hills of water turn to emerald as they rolled up the shoal, then combing and breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The officer in charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with sharks of the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying inside, one of which, belonging to an English company, had 'happened a misfortune,' and was breaking up as a deserted wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come in with salt fish and crackers – a singularly beautiful vessel, with immense beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle commanded before the dockyard martinets had improved her into ugliness, built on the lines of the old pirate craft of the islands, when the lives and fortunes of men hung on the extra speed, or the point which they could lie closer to the wind. Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.

Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed of themselves among their dusky lords and masters. I observed the Yankee skipper paddling himself off in a canoe with his broad straw hat and his cigar in his mouth, looking as if all the world belonged to him, and as if all the world, and the Hayti blacks in particular, were aware of the fact. The Yankee, whether we like it or not, is the acknowledged sovereign in these waters.

The landing place was, or had been, a jetty built on piles and boarded over. Half the piles were broken; the planks had rotted and fallen through. The swell was rolling home, and we had to step out quickly as the boat rose on the crest of the wave. A tattered crowd of negroes were loafing about variously dressed, none, however, entirely without clothes of some kind. One of them did kindly give me a hand, observing that I was less light of foot than once I might have been. The agent's office was close by. I asked the head clerk – a Frenchman – to find me a guide through the town. He called one of the bystanders whom he knew, and we started together, I and my black companion, to see as much as I could in the hour which was allowed me. The language was less hopeless than at Dominica. We found that we could understand each other – he, me, tolerably; I, him, in fragments, for his tongue went as fast as a shuttle. Though it was still barely eight o'clock the sun was scalding. The streets were filthy and the stench abominable. The houses were of white stone, and of some pretensions, but ragged and uninviting – paint nowhere, and the woodwork of the windows and verandahs mouldy and worm-eaten. The inhabitants swarmed as in a St. Giles's rookery. I suppose they were all out of doors. If any were left at home Jacmel must have been as populous as an African ants' nest. As I had looked for nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the degree of civilisation was more than I expected. I expressed my admiration of the buildings; my guide was gratified, and pointed out to me with evident pride a new hotel or boarding house kept by a Madame Somebody who was the great lady of the place. Madame Ellemême was sitting in a shady balcony outside the first-floor windows. She was a large menacing-looking mulatto, like some ogress of the 'Arabian Nights,' capable of devouring, if she found them palatable, any number of salt babies. I took off my hat to this formidable dame, which she did not condescend to notice, and we passed on. A few houses in the outskirts stood in gardens with inclosures about them. There is some trade in the place, and there were evidently families, negro or European, who lived in less squalid style than the generality. There was a governor there, my guide informed me – an ornamental personage, much respected. To my question whether he had any soldiers, I was answered 'No,' the Haytians didn't like soldiers. I was to understand, however, that they were not common blacks. They aspired to be a commonwealth with public rights and alliances. Hayti a republic, France a republic: France and Hayti good friends now. They had a French bishop and French priests and a French currency. In spite of their land laws, they were proud of their affinity with the great nation; and I heard afterwards, though not from my Jacmel companion, that the better part of the Haytians would welcome back the French dominion if they were not afraid that the Yankees would disapprove.

My guide persisted in leading me outside the town, and as my time was limited, I tried in various ways to induce him to take me back into it. He maintained, however, that he had been told to show me whatever was most interesting, and I found that I was to see an American windmill-pump which had been just erected to supply Jacmel with fresh water. It was the first that had been seen in the island, and was a wonder of wonders. Doubtless it implied 'progress,' and would assist in the much-needed ablution of the streets and kennels. I looked at it and admired, and having thus done homage, I was allowed my own way.

It was market day. The Yankee cargo had been unloaded, and a great open space in front of the cathedral was covered with stalls or else blankets stretched on poles to keep the sun off, where hundreds of Haytian dames were sitting or standing disposing of their wares – piles of salt fish, piles of coloured calicoes, knives, scissors, combs, and brushes. Of home produce there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables, and butcher's meat on slabs. I looked inquisitively at these last; but I acknowledge that I saw no joints of suspicious appearance. Children were running about in thousands, not the least as if they were in fear of being sacrificed, and babies hung upon their mothers as if natural affection existed in Jacmel as much as in other places. I asked no compromising questions, not wishing to be torn in pieces. Sir Spenser St. John's book has been heard of in Hayti, and the anger about it is considerable. The scene was interesting enough, but the smell was unendurable. The wild African black is not filthy in his natural state. He washes much, as wild animals do, and at least tries to keep himself clear of vermin. The blacks in Jacmel appeared (like the same animals as soon as they are domesticated) to lose the sense which belongs to them in their wild condition. My prejudices, if I have any, had not blinded me to the good qualities of the men and women in Dominica. I do not think it was prejudice wholly which made me think the faces which I saw in Hayti the most repulsive which I had ever seen in the world, or Jacmel itself, taken for all in all, the foulest, dirtiest, and nastiest of human habitations. The dirt, however, I will do them the justice to say did not seem to extend to their churches. The cathedral stood at the upper end of the market place. I went in. It was airy, cool, and decent-looking. Some priests were saying mass, and there was a fairly large congregation. I wished to get a nearer sight of the altar and the images and pictures, imagining that in Hayti the sacred persons might assume a darker colour than in Europe; but I could not reach the chancel without disturbing people who were saying their prayers, and, to the disappointment of my companion, who beckoned me on, and would have cleared a way for me, I controlled my curiosity and withdrew.

My hour's leave of absence was expired. I made my way back to the landing place, where the mail steamer's boat was waiting for me. On the steamer herself the passengers were waiting impatiently for breakfast, which had been put off on our account. We hurried on board at our best speed; but before breakfast could be thought of, or any other thing, I had to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great negro republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.

Leaving Jacmel and its associations, we ran all day along the land, skirting a range of splendid mountains between seven and eight thousand feet high; past the Isle à Vache; past the bay of Cayes, once famous as the haunt of the sea-rovers; past Cape Tubiron, the Cape of Sharks. At evening we were in the channel which divides St. Domingo from Jamaica. Captain – insisted to me that this was the scene of Rodney's action, and he pointed out to me the headland under which the British fleet had been lying. He was probably right in saying that it was the scene of some action of Rodney's, for there is hardly a corner of the West Indies where he did not leave behind him the print of his cannon shot; but it was not the scene of the great fight which saved the British Empire. That was below the cliffs of Dominica; and Captain W – , as many others have done, was confounding Dominica with St. Domingo.

The next morning we were to anchor at Port Royal. We had a Jamaica gentleman of some consequence on board. I had failed so far to make acquaintance with him, but on this last evening he joined me on deck, and I gladly used the opportunity to learn something of the present condition of things. I was mistaken in expecting to find a more vigorous or more sanguine tone of feeling than I had left at the Antilles. There was the same despondency, the same sense that their state was hopeless, and that nothing which they could themselves do would mend it. He himself, for instance, was the owner of a large sugar estate which a few years ago was worth 60,000l. It was not encumbered. He was his own manager, and had spared no cost in providing the newest machinery. Yet, with the present prices and with the refusal of the American Commercial Treaty, it would not pay the expense of cultivation. He held on, for it was all that he could do. To sell was impossible, for no one would buy even at the price of the stock on the land. It was the same story which I had heard everywhere. The expenses of the administration, this gentleman said, were out of all proportion to the resources of the island, and were yearly increasing. The planters had governed in the old days as the English landlords had governed Ireland. They had governed cheaply and on their own resources. They had authority; they were respected; their word was law. Now their power had been taken from them, and made over to paid officials, and the expense was double what it used to be. Between the demands made on them in the form of taxation and the fall in the value of their produce their backs were breaking, and the 'landed interest' would come to an end. I asked him, as I had asked many persons without getting a satisfactory answer, what he thought that the Imperial Government could do to mend matters. He seemed to think that it was too late to do anything. The blacks were increasing so fast, and the white influence was diminishing so fast, that Jamaica in a few years would be another Hayti.

In this gentleman, too, I found to my sorrow that there was the same longing for admission to the American Union which I had left behind me at the Antilles. In spite of soldiers and the naval station, the old country was still looked upon as a stepmother, and of genuine loyalty there was, according to him, little or nothing. If the West Indies were ever to become prosperous again, it could only be when they were annexed to the United States. For the present, at least, he admitted that annexation was impossible. Not on account of any possible objection on the part of the British Government; for it seems to be assumed by every one that the British Government cares nothing what they do; nor wholly on account of the objections of the Americans, though he admitted that the Americans were unwilling to receive them; but because in the existing state of feeling such a change could not be carried out without civil war. In Jamaica, at least, the blacks and mulattoes would resist. There were nearly 700,000 of them, while of the whites there were but 15,000, and the relative numbers were every year becoming more unfavourable. The blacks knew that under England they had nothing to fear. They would have everything more and more their own way, and in a short time they expected to have the island to themselves. They might collect arms; they might do what they pleased, and no English officer dared to use rough measures with them; while, if they belonged to the Union, the whites would recover authority one way or another. The Americans were ready with their rifles on occasions of disorder, and their own countrymen did not call them to account for it as we did. The blacks, therefore, preferred the liberty which they had and the prospects to which they looked forward, and they and the mulattoes also would fight, and fight desperately, before they would allow themselves to be made American citizens.

The prospect which Mr. – laid before me was not a beautiful one, and was coming a step nearer at each advance that was made in the direction of constitutional self-government; for, like every other person with whom I spoke on the subject, he said emphatically that Europeans would not remain to be ruled under a black representative system; nor would they take any part in it when they would be so overwhelmingly outvoted and outnumbered. They would sooner forfeit all that they had in the world and go away. An effective and economical administration on the Indian pattern might have saved all a few years ago. It was too late now, and Jamaica was past recovery. At this rate it was a sadly altered Jamaica since Tom Cringle's time, though his friend Aaron even then had seen what was probably coming. But I could not accept entirely all that Mr. – had been saying, and had to discount the natural irritation of a man who sees his fortune sliding out of his hands. Moreover, for myself, I never listen much to a desponding person. Even when a cause is lost utterly, and no rational hope remains, I would still go down, if it had to be so, with my spirit unbroken and my face to the enemy. Mr. – perhaps would recover heart if the price of sugar mended a little. For my own part, I do not care much whether it mends or not. The economics of the islands ought not to depend exclusively on any single article of produce. I believe, too, in spite of gloomy prognostics, that a loyal and prosperous Jamaica is still among the possibilities of the future, if we will but study in earnest the character of the problem. Mr. – , however, did most really convey to me the convictions of a large and influential body of West Indians – convictions on which they are already acting, and will act more and more. With Hayti so close, and with opinion in England indifferent to what becomes of them, they will clear out while they have something left to lose, and will not wait till ruin is upon them or till they are ordered off the land by a black legislature. There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no rights which the blacks are bound to recognise.

I walked forward after we had done talking. We had five hundred of the poor creatures on board on their way to the Darien pandemonium. The vessel was rolling with a heavy beam sea. I found the whole mass of them reduced into the condition of the pigs who used to occupy the foredeck in the Cork and Bristol packets. They were lying in a confused heap together, helpless, miserable, without consciousness apparently, save a sense in each that he was wretched. Unfortunate brothers-in-law! following the laws of political economy, and carrying their labour to the dearest market, where, before a year was out, half of them were to die. They had souls, too, some of them, and honest and kindly hearts. I observed one man who was suffering less than the rest reading aloud to a prostrate group a chapter of the New Testament; another was reading to himself a French Catholic book of devotion.

The dawn was breaking in the east when I came on deck in the morning. The Blue Mountains were hanging over us on our right hand, the peaks buried in white mist which the unrisen sun was faintly tinting with orange. We had passed Morant Bay, the scene of Gordon's rash attempt to imitate Toussaint l'Ouverture. As so often in the Antilles, a level plain stretched between the sea and the base of the hills, formed by the debris washed down by the rivers in the rainy season. Among cane fields and cocoa-nut groves we saw houses and the chimneys of the sugar factories; and, as we came nearer, we saw men and horses going to their early work. Presently Kingston itself came in sight, and Up Park Camp, and the white barracks high up on the mountain side, of which one had read and heard so much. Here was actually Tom Cringle's Kingston, and between us and the town was the long sand spit which incloses the lagoon at the head of which Kingston is built. How this natural breakwater had been deposited I could find no one to tell me. It is eight miles long, rising but a few feet above the water-line, in places not more than thirty yards across – nowhere, except at the extremity, more than sixty or a hundred.

The thundering swell of the Caribbean Sea breaks upon it from year's end to year's end, and never washes it any thinner. Where the sand is dry, beyond the reach of the waves, it is planted thickly all along with palms, and appears from the sea a soft green line, over which appear the masts and spars of the vessels at anchor in the harbour, and the higher houses of Kingston itself. To reach the opening into the lagoon you have to run on to the end of the sandbank, where there is a peninsula on which is built the Port Royal so famous in West Indian story. Halfway down among the palms the lighthouse stands, from which a gun was fired as we passed, to give notice that the English mail was coming in. Treacherous coral reefs rise out of the deep water for several miles, some under water and visible only by the breakers over them, others forming into low wooded islands. Only local pilots can take a ship safely through these powerful natural defence works. There are but two channels through which the lagoon can be approached. The eastern passage, along which we were steaming, runs so near the shore that an enemy's ship would be destroyed by the batteries among the sandhills long before it could reach the mouth. The western passage is less intricate, but that also is commanded by powerful forts. In old times Kingston was unattackable, so strong had the position been made by nature and art combined. It could be shelled now over the spit from the open sea. It might be destroyed, but even so could not easily be taken.

I do not know that I have ever seen any scene more interesting than that which broke upon my eyes as we rounded the point, and the lagoon opened out before me. Kingston, which we had passed half an hour, before, lay six miles off at the head of the bay, now inside the sand, ridge, blue and hazy in the distance. At the back were the mountains. The mist had melted off, standing in shadowy grey masses with the sun rising behind them. Immediately in front were the dockyards, forts, and towers of Port Royal, with the guardship, gunboats, and tenders, with street and terrace, roof and turret and glistening vane, all clearly and sharply defined in the exquisite transparency of the air. The associations of the place no doubt added to the impression. Before the first hut was run up in Kingston, Port Royal was the rendezvous of all English ships which, for spoil or commerce, frequented the West Indian seas. Here the buccaneers sold their plunder and squandered their gains in gambling and riot. Here in the later century of legitimate wars, whole fleets were gathered to take in stores, or refit when shattered by engagements. Here Nelson had been, and Collingwood and Jervis, and all our other naval heroes. Here prizes were brought in for adjudication, and pirates to be tried and hanged. In this spot more than in any other, beyond Great Britain herself, the energy of the Empire once was throbbing. The 'Urgent,' an old two-decker, and three gunboats were all that were now floating in the once crowded water; the 'Urgent,' no longer equipped for active service, imperfectly armed, inadequately manned, but still flaunting the broad white ensign, and as if grandly watching over the houses which lay behind her. There were batteries at the point, and batteries on the opposite shore. The morning bugle rang out clear and inspiriting from the town, and white coats and gold and silver lace glanced in and out as men and officers were passing to parade. Here, at any rate, England was still alive.