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

The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand aspects of the Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and forests you see a series of undulating hills, cultivated with tolerable care, and sprinkled with farmhouses. All the more imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked natural forms, are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it was already a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above us stern, proud, and defiant, upon a rock right above the water, with high frowning bastions, the lighthouse at an angle of it, and the Spanish banner floating proudly from a turret which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a fortification is, I am told, indefensible against modern artillery, presenting too much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to look at. It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour is something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow entrance and a long natural breakwater between the lagoon and the ocean; but what at Port Royal is a sand-spit eight miles long, is at Havana a rocky peninsula on which the city itself is built. The opening from the sea is half a mile wide. On the city side there are low semicircular batteries which sweep completely the approaches and the passage itself. The Moro rises opposite at the extreme point of the entrance, and next to it, farther in towards the harbour on the same side, on the crest and slopes of a range of hills, stands the old Moro, the original castle which beat off Drake and Oliver's sea-generals, and which was captured by the English in the last century. The lines were probably weaker than they are at present, and less adequately manned. A monument is erected there to the officers and men who fell in the defence.

The city as we steamed by looked singularly beautiful, with its domes and steeples and marble palaces, and glimpses of long boulevards and trees and handsome mansions and cool arcades. Inside we found ourselves in a basin, perhaps of three miles diameter, full of shipping of all sorts and nationalities. The water, which outside is pure as sapphire, has become filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations. The tide, which even at the springs has but a rise and fall of a couple of feet, is totally ineffective to clear it, and as long as they have the Virgin Mary to pray to, the pious Spaniards will not drive their sewage into the ocean. The hot sun rays stream down into the thick black liquid. Horrible smells are let loose from it when it is set in motion by screw or paddle, and ships bring up at mooring buoys lest their anchors should disturb the compost which lies at the bottom. Yet one forgot the disagreeables in the novelty and striking character of the scene. A hundred boats were plying to and fro among the various vessels, with their white sails and white awnings. Flags of all countries were blowing out at stern or from masthead; among them, of course, the stars and stripes flying jauntily on some splendid schooner which stood there like a cock upon a dunghill that might be his own if he chose to crow for it.

As soon as we had brought up we were boarded by the inevitable hotel touters, custom-house officers, porters, and boatmen. Interpreters offered their services in the confusion of languages. Gradually there emerged out of the general noise two facts of importance. First, that I ought to have had a passport, and if I had not brought one that I was likely to be fined at the discretion of Spanish officials. Secondly, that if I trusted to my own powers of self-defence, I should be the victim of indefinite other extortions. Passport I had none – such things are not required any longer in Spain, and it had not occurred to me that they might still be in demand in a Spanish colony. As to being cheated, no one could or would tell me what I was to pay for anything, for there were American dollars, Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, and Cuban dollars, all different. And there were multiples of dollars in gold, and single dollars in silver, and last and most important of all there was the Cuban paper dollar, which was 230 per cent. below the Cuban gold dollar. And in this last the smaller transactions of common life were carried on, the practical part of it to a stranger being that when you had to receive you received in paper, and when you had to pay you paid in specie.

I escaped for the time the penalty which would have been inflicted on me about the passport. I had a letter of introduction to the Captain-General of the island, and the Captain-General – so the viceroy is called – was so formidable a person that the officials did not venture to meddle with me. For the rest I was told that as soon as I had chosen my hotel, the agent, who was on board, would see me through all obstructions, and would not allow me to be plundered by anyone but himself. To this I had to submit. I named an hotel at random; a polite gentleman in a few moments had a boat alongside for me; I had stept into it when the fair damsels bound for Darien, who had been concealed all this time in their cabin, slipped down the ladder and took their places at my side, to the no small entertainment of the friends whom I had left on board and who were watching us from the deck.

At the wharf I was able to shake off my companions, and I soon forgot the misadventure, for I found myself in Old Castile once more, amidst Spanish faces, Spanish voices, Spanish smells, and Spanish scenes. On the very wharf itself was a church grim and stern, and so massive that it would stand, barring earthquakes, for a thousand years. Church, indeed, it was no longer; it had been turned into a custom-house. But this was because it had been desecrated when we were in Havana by having an English service performed in it. They had churches enough without it, and they preferred to leave this one with a mark upon it of the anger of the Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches thick as public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond church, palace beyond palace, the narrow streets where neighbours on either side might shake hands out of the upper stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses with the windows grated towards the street, with glimpses through the street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters, its palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework, the curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell, the carriages, the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest gliding along the footway – it was Toledo or Valladolid again with the sign manual on it of Spain herself in friendly and familiar form. Every face that I saw was Spanish. In Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana the proportion is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at all. Boatmen, porters, cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one of whom are negroes in our islands, are there Spaniards, either Cuban born or emigrants from home. A few black beggars there were – permitted, as objects of charity to pious Catholics and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty among the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.

After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old town into a large square and thence into a wide Alameda or boulevard with double avenues of trees, statues, fountains, theatres, clubhouses, and all the various equipments of modern luxuriousness and so-called civilised life. Beyond the Alameda was another still larger square, one side of which was a railway station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was the hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome, in style half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the Puerto del Sol at Madrid.

Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were interpreters and waiters more or less accomplished in other tongues, especially in English, of which they heard enough, for I found Havana to be the winter resort of our American cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to the Riviera, to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle States. This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular garden, into which looked tiers of windows; and wings had been thrown out with terraced roofs, suites of rooms opening out upon them; each floor being provided with airy sitting rooms and music rooms. Here were to be heard at least a hundred American voices discussing the experiences and plans of their owners. The men lounged in the hall or at the bar, or sat smoking on the rows of leather chairs under the colonnade, or were under the hands of barbers or haircutters in an airy open saloon devoted to these uses. When I retreated upstairs to collect myself, a lady was making the corridors ring close by as she screamed at a piano in the middle of an admiring and criticising crowd. Dear as the Americans are to me, and welcome in most places as is the sound of those same sweet voices, one had not come to Havana for this. It was necessary to escape somewhere, and promptly, from the discord of noises which I hoped might be due to some momentary accident. The mail company's agent, Mr. R – , lived in the hotel. He kindly found me out, initiated me in the mysteries of Cuban paper money, and giving me a tariff of the fares, found me a cab, and sent me out to look about me.

My first object was the cathedral and the tomb of Columbus. In Catholic cities in Europe churches stand always open; the passer-by can enter when he pleases, fall on his knees and say his silent prayers to his Master whom he sees on the altar. In Havana I discovered afterward that, except at special hours, and those as few as might be, the doors were kept locked and could only be opened by a golden key. It was carnival time, however; there were functions going on of various kinds, and I found the cathedral happily accessible. It was a vast building, little ornamented, but the general forms severe and impressive, in the style of the time of Philip II., when Gothic art had gone out in Spain and there had come in the place of it the implacable sternness which expresses the very genius of the Inquisition. A broad flight of stone steps led up to the great door. The afternoon was extremely hot; the curtains were thrown back to admit as much air as possible. There was some function proceeding of a peculiar kind. I know not what it was; something certainly in which the public had no interest, for there was not a stranger present but myself. But the great cathedral officials were busy at work, and liked to be at their ease. On the wall as you entered a box invited contributions, as limosna por el Santo Padre. The service was I know not what. In the middle of the nave stood twelve large chairs arranged in a semicircle; on these chairs sat twelve canons, like a row of mandarins, each with his little white patch like a silver dollar on the crown of his black head. Five or six minor dignitaries, deacons, precentors, or something of that sort, were droning out monotonous recitations like the buzzing of so many humble-bees in the warm summer air. The dean or provost sat in the central biggest chair of all. His face was rosy, and he wiped it from time to time with a red handkerchief; his chin was double or perhaps treble; he had evidently dined, and would or might have slept but for a pile of snuff on his chair arm, with continual refreshments from which he kept his faculties alive. I sat patiently till it was over, and the twelve holy men rose and went their way. I could then stroll about at leisure. The pictures were of the usual paltry kind. On the chancel arch stood the royal arms of Spain, as the lion and the unicorn used to stand in our parish churches till the High Church clergy mistook them for Erastian wild beasts. At the right side of the altar was the monument which I had come in search of; a marble tablet fixed against the wall, and on it a poorly executed figure in high relief, with a ruff about its neck and features which might be meant for anyone and for no one in particular. Somewhere near me there were lying I believed and could hope the mortal remains of the discoverer of the New World. An inscription said so. There was written:

O Restos y Imagen del grande ColonMil siglos durad guardados en la UrnaY en remembranza de nuestra Nacion.

The court poet, or whoever wrote the lines, was as poor an artist in verse as the sculptor in stone. The image of the grande Colon is certainly not 'guarded in the urn,' since you see it on the wall before your eyes. The urn, if urn there be, with the 'relics' in it, must be under the floor. Columbus and his brother Diego were originally buried to the right and left of the altar in the cathedral of St. Domingo. When St. Domingo was abandoned, a commission was appointed to remove the body of Christophe to Havana. They did remove a body, but St. Domingo insists that it was Diego that was taken away, that Christophe remains where he was, and that if Spain wants him Spain must pay for him. I followed the canons into the sacristy where they were unrobing. I did not venture to address either of themselves, but I asked an acolyte if he could throw any light upon the matter. He assured me that there neither was nor could have been any mistake. They had the right body and were in no doubt about it. In more pious ages disputes of this sort were settled by an appeal to miracles. Rival pretenders for the possession of the same bones came, however, at last to be able to produce authentic proofs of miracles which had been worked at more than one of the pretended shrines; so that it was concluded that saints' relics were like the loaves and fishes, capable of multiplication without losing their identity, and of having the property of being in several places at the same moment. The same thing has been alleged of the Holy Coat of Trèves and of the wood of the true cross. Havana and St. Domingo may perhaps eventually find a similar solution of their disagreement over the resting place of Columbus.

I walked back to my hotel up a narrow shady street like a long arcade. Here were the principal shops; several libraries among them, into which I strayed to gossip and to look over the shelves. That so many persons could get a living by bookselling implied a reading population, but the books themselves did not indicate any present literary productiveness. They were chiefly old, and from the Old World, and belonged probably to persons who had been concerned in the late rebellion and whose property had been confiscated. They were absurdly cheap; I bought a copy of Guzman de Alfarache for a few pence.

I had brought letters of introduction to several distinguished people in Havana; to one especially, Don G – , a member of a noble Peninsular family, once an officer in the Spanish navy, now chairman of a railway company and head of an important commercial house. His elder brother, the Marques de – , called on me on the evening of the day of my arrival; a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts, with courteous high-bred manners, rapid, prompt, and incisive, with the air of a soldier, which in early life he had been. He had travelled, spoke various languages, and spoke to me in admirable English. Don G – , who might be a year or two younger, came later and stayed an hour and a half with me. Let me acknowledge here, and in as warm language as I can express it, the obligations under which I stand to him, not for the personal attentions only which he showed me during my stay in Havana, but for giving me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a real specimen of Plato's superior men, who were now and then, so Plato said, to be met with in foreign travel. It is to him that I owe any knowledge which I brought away with me of the present state of Cuba. He had seen much, thought much, read much. He was on a level with the latest phases of philosophical and spiritual speculation, could talk of Darwin and Spencer, of Schopenhauer, of Strauss, and of Renan, aware of what they had done, aware of the inconvenient truths which they had forced into light, but aware also that they had left the most important questions pretty much where they found them. He had taken no part in the political troubles of the late years in Cuba, but he had observed everything. No one knew better the defects of the present system of government; no one was less ready to rush into hasty schemes for violently mending it.

The ten years' rebellion, of which I had heard so much and knew so little, he first made intelligible to me. Cuba had been governed as a province of Spain, and Spain, like other mother countries, had thought more of drawing a revenue out of it for herself than of the interests of the colony. Spanish officials had been avaricious, and Spanish fiscal policy oppressive and ruinous. The resources of the island in metals, in minerals, in agriculture were as yet hardly scratched, yet every attempt to develop them was paralysed by fresh taxation. The rebellion had been an effort of the Cuban Spaniards, precisely analogous to the revolt of our own North American colonies, to shake off the authority of the court of Madrid and to make themselves independent. They had fought desperately and had for several years been masters of half the island. They had counted on help from the United States, and at one time they seemed likely to get it. But the Americans could not see their way to admitting Cuba into the Union, and without such a prospect did not care to quarrel with Spain on their account. Finding that they were to be left to themselves, the insurgents came to terms and Spanish authority was re-established. Families had been divided, sons taking one side and fathers the other, as in our English Wars of the Roses, perhaps for the same reason, to save the family estates whichever side came out victorious. The blacks had been indifferent, the rebellion having no interest for them at all. They had remained by their masters, and they had been rewarded after the peace by complete emancipation. There was not a slave now in Cuba. No indemnity had been granted to their owners, nor had any been asked for, and the business on the plantations had gone on without interruption. Those who had been slaves continued to work at the same locations, receiving wages instead of food and maintenance; all were satisfied at the change, and this remarkable revolution had been carried out with an ease and completeness which found no parallel in any other slave-owning country.

In spite of rebellion, in spite of the breaking up and reconstruction of the social system, in spite of the indifferent administration of justice, in spite of taxation, and the inexplicable appropriation of the revenue, Cuba was still moderately prosperous, and that it could flourish at all after trials so severe was the best evidence of the greatness of its natural wealth. The party of insurrection was dissolved, and would revive again only under the unlikely contingency of encouragement from the United States. There was a party, however, which desired for Cuba a constitution like the Canadian – Home Rule and the management of its own affairs – and as the black element was far outnumbered and under control, such a constitution would not be politically dangerous.

If the Spanish Government does not mend its ways, concessions of this kind may eventually have to be made, though the improvement to be expected from it is doubtful. Official corruption is engrained in the character and habits of the Spanish people. Judges allowed their decisions to be 'influenced' under Philip III. as much as to-day in the colonies of Queen Christina; and when a fault is the habit of a people, it survives political reforms and any number of turnings of the kaleidoscope.

The encouraging feature is the success of emancipation. There is no jealousy, no race animosity, no supercilious contempt of whites for 'niggers.' The Spaniards have inherited a tinge of colour themselves from their African ancestors, and thus they are all friends together. The liberated slave can acquire and own land if he wishes for it, but as a rule he prefers to work for wages. These happy conditions arise in part from the Spanish temperament, but chiefly from the numerical preponderance of the white element, which, as in the United States, is too secure to be uneasy. The black is not encouraged in insubordination by a sense that he could win in a contest of strength, and the aspect of things is far more promising for the future than in our own islands. The Spaniards, however inferior we may think them to ourselves, have filled their colonies with their own people and are reaping the reward of it. We have so contrived that such English as had settled in the West Indies on their own account are leaving them.

Spain, four centuries ago, was the greatest of European nations, the first in art, or second only to Italy, the first in arms, the first in the men whom she produced. She has been swept along in the current of time. She fought against the stream of tendency, and the stream proved too strong for her, great as she was. The modern spirit, which she would not have when it came in the shape of the Reformation, has flowed over her borders as revolution, not to her benefit, for she is unable to assimilate the new ideas. The old Spain of the Inquisition is gone; the Spain of to-day is divided between Liberalism and Catholic belief. She is sick in the process of the change, and neither she nor her colonies stand any longer in the front lines in the race of civilisation; yet the print of her foot is stamped on the New World in characters which will not be effaced, and may be found to be as enduring as our own.

The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country. The Catholic Church, Don G – said, has little influence in Cuba; 'she has had no rival,' he explained, 'and so has grown lazy.' I judged the same from my own observations. The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired about famous preachers. I was told that there was no preaching in Havana, famous or otherwise. I might if I was lucky and chose to go there in the early morning, hear a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I went; I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating, but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty women with scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous to look at him. The Catholic Church, whether it be for want of rivals, or merely from force of time, has fallen from its high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it has lost the art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power to burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in the Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with the waning of faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is but 'use and wont;' not 'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.

Don G – had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing with Don G – that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England. The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position, which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a common level – a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom; and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of Alva. From the Grand Captain to Señor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Doré, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;' from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V. after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change had been really for the better.