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

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 pæan 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 Española, 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 Tortugas16 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 Mölde 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.