At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

As we were displaying our nosegay on deck, on our return, to some who had stayed stifling on board, and who were inclined (as West Indians are) at once to envy and to pooh-pooh the superfluous energy of newcome Europeans, R– drew out a large and lovely flower, pale yellow, with a tiny green apple or two, and leaves like those of an Oleander.  The brown lady, who was again at her post on deck, walked up to her in silence, uninvited, and with a commanding air waved the thing away.  ‘Dat manchineel.  Dat poison.  Throw dat overboard.’  R–, who knew it was not manchineel, whispered to a bystander, ‘Ce n’est pas vrai.’  But the brown lady was a linguist.  ‘Ah! mais c’est vrai,’ cried she, with flashing teeth; and retired, muttering her contempt of English ignorance and impertinence.

And, as it befell, she was, if not quite right, at least not quite wrong.  For when we went into the cabin, we and our unlucky yellow flower were flown at by another brown lady, in another gorgeous turban, who had become on the voyage a friend and an intimate; for she was the nurse of the baby who had been the light of the eyes of the whole quarter-deck ever since we left Southampton—God bless it, and its mother, and beautiful Mon Nid, where she dwells beneath the rock, as exquisite as one of her own humming-birds.  We were so scolded about this poor little green apple that we set to work to find put what it was, after promising at least not to eat it.  And it proved to be Thevetia neriifolia, and a very deadly poison.

This was the first (though by no means the last) warning which we got not to meddle rashly with ‘poison-bush,’ lest that should befall us which befell a scientific West Indian of old.  For hearing much of the edible properties of certain European toadstools, he resolved to try a few experiments in his own person on West Indian ones; during the course of which he found himself one evening, after a good toad-stool dinner, raving mad.  The doctor was sent for, and brought him round, a humbled man.  But a heavier humiliation awaited him, when his negro butler, who had long looked down on him for his botanical studies, entered with his morning cup of coffee.  ‘Now, Massa,’ said he, in a tone of triumphant pity, ‘I think you no go out any more cut bush and eat him.’

If we had wanted any further proof that we were in the Tropics, we might have had it in the fearful heat of the next few hours, when the Shannon lay with a steamer on each side, one destined for ‘The Gulf,’ the other for ‘The Islands’; and not a breath of air was to be got till late in the afternoon, when (amid shaking of hands and waving of handkerchiefs, as hearty as if we the ‘Island-bound,’ and they the ‘Gulf-bound,’ and the officers of the Shannon had known each other fourteen years instead of fourteen days) we steamed out, past the Little Saba rock, which was said (but it seems incorrectly) to have burst into smoke and flame during the earthquake, and then away to the south and east for the Islands: having had our first taste, but, thank God, not our last, of the joys of the ‘Earthly Paradise.’

CHAPTER II: DOWN THE ISLANDS

I had heard and read much, from boyhood, about these ‘Lesser Antilles.’  I had pictured them to myself a thousand times: but I was altogether unprepared for their beauty and grandeur.  For hundreds of miles, day after day, the steamer carried us past a shifting diorama of scenery, which may be likened to Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, repeated again and again, with every possible variation of the same type of delicate loveliness.

Under a cloudless sky, upon a sea, lively yet not unpleasantly rough, we thrashed and leaped along.  Ahead of us, one after another, rose high on the southern horizon banks of gray cloud, from under each of which, as we neared it, descended the shoulder of a mighty mountain, dim and gray.  Nearer still the gray changed to purple; lowlands rose out of the sea, sloping upwards with those grand and simple concave curves which betoken, almost always, volcanic land.  Nearer still, the purple changed to green.  Tall palm-trees and engine-houses stood out against the sky; the surf gleamed white around the base of isolated rocks.  A little nearer, and we were under the lee, or western side, of the island.  The sea grew smooth as glass; we entered the shade of the island-cloud, and slid along in still unfathomable blue water, close under the shore of what should have been one of the Islands of the Blest.

It was easy, in presence of such scenery, to conceive the exaltation which possessed the souls of the first discoverers of the West Indies.  What wonder if they seemed to themselves to have burst into Fairyland—to be at the gates of The Earthly Paradise?  With such a climate, such a soil, such vegetation, such fruits, what luxury must not have seemed possible to the dwellers along those shores?  What riches too, of gold and jewels, might not be hidden among those forest-shrouded glens and peaks?  And beyond, and beyond again, ever new islands, new continents perhaps, an inexhaustible wealth of yet undiscovered worlds.

No wonder that the men rose above themselves, for good and for evil; that having, as it seemed to them, found infinitely, they hoped infinitely, and dared infinitely.  They were a dumb generation and an unlettered, those old Conquistadores.  They did not, as we do now, analyse and describe their own impressions: but they felt them nevertheless; and felt them, it may be, all the more intensely, because they could not utter them; and so went, half intoxicated, by day and night, with the beauty and the wonder round them, till the excitement overpowered alike their reason and their conscience; and, frenzied with superstition and greed, with contempt and hatred of the heathen Indians, and often with mere drink and sunshine, they did deeds which, like all wicked deeds, avenge themselves, and are avenging themselves, from Mexico to Chili, unto this very day.

I said that these islands resembled Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples.  Like causes have produced like effects; and each island is little but the peak of a volcano, down whose shoulders lava and ash have slidden toward the sea.  Some carry several crater cones, complicating at once the structure and scenery of the island; but the majority carry but a single cone, like that little island, or rather rock, of Saba, which is the first of the Antilles under the lee of which the steamer passes.  Santa Cruz, which is left to leeward, is a long, low, ragged island, of the same form as St. Thomas’s and the Virgins, and belonging, I should suppose, to the same formation.  But Saba rises sheer out of the sea some 1500 feet or more, without flat ground, or even harbour.  From a little landing-place to leeward a stair runs up 800 feet into the bosom of the old volcano; and in that hollow live some 1200 honest Dutch, and some 800 Negroes, who were, till of late years, their slaves, at least in law.  But in Saba, it is said, the whites were really the slaves, and the Negroes the masters.  For they went off whither and when they liked; earned money about the islands, and brought it home; expected their masters to keep them when out of work: and not in vain.  The island was, happily for it, too poor for sugar-growing and the ‘Grande Culture’; the Dutch were never tempted to increase the number of their slaves; looked upon the few they had as friends and children; and when emancipation came, no change whatsoever ensued, it is said, in the semi-feudal relation between the black men and the white.  So these good Dutch live peacefully aloft in their volcano, which it is to be hoped will not explode again.  They grow garden crops; among which, I understand, are several products of the temperate zone, the air being, at that height pleasantly cool.  They sell their produce about the islands.  They build boats up in the crater—the best boats in all the West Indies—and lower them down the cliff to the sea.  They hire themselves out too, not having lost their forefathers’ sea-going instincts, as sailors about all those seas, and are, like their boats, the best in those parts.  They all speak English; and though they are nominally Lutherans, are glad of the services of the excellent Bishop of Antigua, who pays them periodical visits.  He described them as virtuous, shrewd, simple, healthy folk, retaining, in spite of the tropic sun, the same clear white and red complexions which their ancestors brought from Holland two hundred years ago—a proof, among many, that the white man need not degenerate in these isles.

Saba has, like most of these islands, its ‘Somma’ like that of Vesuvius; an outer ring of lava, the product of older eruptions, surrounding a central cone, the product of some newer one.  But even this latter, as far as I could judge by the glass, is very ancient.  Little more than the core of the central cone is left.  The rest has been long since destroyed by rains and winds.  A white cliff at the south end of the island should be examined by geologists.  It belongs probably to that formation of tertiary calcareous marl so often seen in the West Indies, especially at Barbadoes: but if so, it must, to judge from the scar which it makes seaward, have been upheaved long ago, and like the whole island—and indeed all the islands—betokens an immense antiquity.

Much more recent—in appearance at least—is the little isle of St. Eustatius, or at least the crater-cone, with its lip broken down at one spot, which makes up five-sixths of the island.  St. Eustatius may have been in eruption, though there is no record of it, during historic times, and looks more unrepentant and capable of misbehaving itself again than does any other crater-cone in the Antilles; far more so than the Souffrière in St. Vincent which exploded in 1812.

But these two are mere rocks.  It is not till the traveller arrives at St. Kitts that he sees what a West Indian island is.

The ‘Mother of the Antilles,’ as she is called, is worthy of her name.  Everywhere from the shore the land sweeps up, slowly at first, then rapidly, toward the central mass, the rugged peak whereof goes by the name of Mount Misery.  Only once, and then but for a moment, did we succeed in getting a sight of the actual summit, so pertinaciously did the clouds crawl round it.  3700 feet aloft a pyramid of black lava rises above the broken walls of an older crater, and is, to judge from its knife-edge, flat top, and concave eastern side, the last remnant of an inner cone which has been washed, or more probably blasted, away.  Beneath it, according to the report of an islander to Dr. Davy (and what I heard was to the same effect), is a deep hollow, longer than it is wide, without an outlet, walled in by precipices and steep declivities, from fissures in which steam and the fumes of sulphur are emitted.  Sulphur in crystals abounds, encrusting the rocks and loose stones; and a stagnant pool of rain-water occupies the bottom of the Souffrière.  A dangerous neighbour—but as long as he keeps his temper, as he has done for three hundred years at least, a most beneficent one—is this great hill, which took, in Columbus’s imagination, the form of the giant St. Christopher bearing on his shoulder the infant Christ, and so gave a name to the whole island.

From the lava and ash ejected from this focus, the whole soils of the island have been formed; soils of still unexhausted fertility, save when—as must needs be in a volcanic region—patches of mere rapilli and scoriæ occur.  The mountain has hurled these out; and everywhere, as a glance of the eye shows, the tropic rains are carrying them yearly down to the lowland, exposing fresh surfaces to the action of the air, and, by continual denudation and degradation, remanuring the soil.  Everywhere, too, are gullies sawn in the slopes, which terminate above in deep and narrow glens, giving, especially when alternated with long lava-streams, a ridge-and-furrow look to this and most other of the Antilles.  Dr. Davy, with his usual acuteness of eye and soundness of judgment, attributes them rather to ‘water acting on loose volcanic ashes’ than to ‘rents and fissures, the result of sudden and violent force.’  Doubtless he is in the right.  Thus, and thus only, has been formed the greater part of the most beautiful scenery in the West Indies; and I longed again and again, as I looked at it, for the company of my friend and teacher, Colonel George Greenwood, that I might show him, on island after island, such manifold corroborations of his theories in Rain and Rivers.

But our eyes were drawn off, at almost the second glance, from mountain-peaks and glens to the slopes of cultivated lowland, sheeted with bright green cane, and guinea-grass, and pigeon pea; and that not for their own sakes, but for the sake of objects so utterly unlike anything which we had ever seen, that it was not easy, at first, to discover what they were.  Gray pillars, which seemed taller than the tallest poplars, smooth and cylindrical as those of a Doric temple, each carrying a flat head of darkest green, were ranged along roadsides and round fields, or stood, in groups or singly, near engine-works, or towered above rich shrubberies which shrouded comfortable country-houses.  It was not easy, as I have said, to believe that these strange and noble things were trees: but such they were.  At last we beheld, with wonder and delight, the pride of the West Indies, the Cabbage Palms—Palmistes of the French settlers—which botanists have well named Oreodoxa, the ‘glory of the mountains.’  We saw them afterwards a hundred times in their own native forests; and when they rose through tangled masses of richest vegetation, mixed with other and smaller species of palms, their form, fantastic though it was, harmonised well with hundreds of forms equally fantastic.  But here they seemed, at first sight, out of place, incongruous, and artificial, standing amid no kindred forms, and towering over a cultivation and civilisation which might have been mistaken, seen from the sea, for wealthy farms along some English shore.  Gladly would we have gone on shore, were it but to have stood awhile under those Palmistes; and an invitation was not wanting to a pretty tree-shrouded house on a low cliff a mile off, where doubtless every courtesy and many a luxury would have awaited us.  But it could not be.  We watched kind folk rowed to shore without us; and then turned to watch the black flotilla under our quarter.

The first thing that caught our eye on board the negro boats which were alongside was, of course, the baskets of fruits and vegetables, of which one of us at least had been hearing all his life.  At St. Thomas’s we had been introduced to bananas (figs, as they are miscalled in the West Indies); to the great green oranges, thick-skinned and fragrant; to those junks of sugar-cane, some two feet long, which Cuffy and Cuffy’s ladies delight to gnaw, walking, sitting, and standing; increasing thereby the size of their lips, and breaking out, often enough, their upper front teeth.  We had seen, and eaten too, the sweet sop 5—a passable fruit, or rather congeries of fruits, looking like a green and purple strawberry, of the bigness of an orange.  It is the cousin of the prickly sour-sop; 6 of the really delicious, but to me unknown, Chirimoya; 7 and of the custard apple, 8 containing a pulp which (as those who remember the delectable pages of Tom Cringle know) bears a startling likeness to brains.  Bunches of grapes, at St. Kitts, lay among these: and at St. Lucia we saw with them, for the first time, Avocado, or Alligator pears, alias midshipman’s butter; 9 large round brown fruits, to be eaten with pepper and salt by those who list.  With these, in open baskets, lay bright scarlet capsicums, green coconuts tinged with orange, great roots of yam 10 and cush-cush, 11 with strange pulse of various kinds and hues.  The contents of these vegetable baskets were often as gay-coloured as the gaudy gowns, and still gaudier turbans, of the women who offered them for sale.

Screaming and jabbering, the Negroes and Negresses thrust each other’s boats about, scramble from one to the other with gestures of wrath and defiance, and seemed at every moment about to fall to fisticuffs and to upset themselves among the sharks.  But they did neither.  Their excitement evaporated in noise.  To their ‘ladies,’ to do them justice, the men were always civil, while the said ‘ladies’ bullied them and ordered them about without mercy.  The negro women are, without doubt, on a more thorough footing of equality with the men than the women of any white race.  The causes, I believe, are two.  In the first place there is less difference between the sexes in mere physical strength and courage; and watching the average Negresses, one can well believe the stories of those terrible Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey, whose boast is, that they are no longer women, but men.  There is no doubt that, in case of a rebellion, the black women of the West Indies would be as formidable, cutlass in hand, as the men.  The other cause is the exceeding ease with which, not merely food, but gay clothes and ornaments, can be procured by light labour.  The negro woman has no need to marry and make herself the slave of a man, in order to get a home and subsistence.  Independent she is, for good and evil; and independent she takes care to remain; and no schemes for civilising the Negro will have any deep or permanent good effect which do not take note of, and legislate for, this singular fact.

Meanwhile, it was a comfort to one fresh from the cities of the Old World, and the short and stunted figures, the mesquin and scrofulous visages, which crowd our alleys and back wynds, to see everywhere health, strength, and goodly stature, especially among women.  Nowhere in the West Indies are to be seen those haggard down-trodden mothers, grown old before their time, too common in England, and commoner still in France.  Health, ‘rude’ in every sense of the word, is the mark of the negro woman, and of the negro man likewise.  Their faces shine with fatness; they seem to enjoy, they do enjoy, the mere act of living, like the lizard on the wall.  It may be said—it must be said—that, if they be human beings (as they are), they are meant for something more than mere enjoyment of life.  Well and good: but are they not meant for enjoyment likewise?  Let us take the beam out of our own eye, before we take the mote out of theirs; let us, before we complain of them for being too healthy and comfortable, remember that we have at home here tens of thousands of paupers, rogues, whatnot, who are not a whit more civilised, intellectual, virtuous, or spiritual than the Negro, and are meanwhile neither healthy nor comfortable.  The Negro may have the corpus sanum without the mens sana.  But what of those whose souls and bodies are alike unsound?

Away south, along the low spit at the south end of the island, where are salt-pans which, I suspect, lie in now extinguished craters; and past little Nevis, the conical ruin, as it were, of a volcanic island.  It was probably joined to the low end of St. Kitts not many years ago.  It is separated from it now only by a channel called the Narrows, some four to six miles across, and very shallow, there being not more than four fathoms in many places, and infested with reefs, whether of true coral or of volcanic rock I should be glad to know.  A single peak, with its Souffrière, rises to some 2000 feet; right and left of it are two lower hills, fragments, apparently, of a Somma, or older and larger crater.  The lava and ash slide in concave slopes of fertile soil down to the sea, forming an island some four miles by three, which was in the seventeenth century a little paradise, containing 4000 white citizens, who had dwindled down in 1805, under the baneful influences of slavery, to 1300; in 1832 (the period of emancipation) to 500; and in 1854 to only 170. 12  A happy place, however, it is said still to be, with a population of more than 10,000, who, as there is happily no Crown land in the island, cannot squat, and so return to their original savagery; but are well-ordered and peaceable, industrious, and well-taught, and need, it is said, not only no soldiers, but no police.

One spot on the little island we should have liked much to have seen: the house where Nelson, after his marriage with Mrs. Nisbet, a lady of Nevis, dwelt awhile in peace and purity.  Happier for him, perhaps, though not for England, had he never left that quiet nest.

And now, on the leeward bow, another gray mountain island rose; and on the windward another, lower and longer.  The former was Montserrat, which I should have gladly visited, as I had been invited to do.  For little Montserrat is just now the scene of a very hopeful and important experiment. 13  The Messrs. Sturge have established there a large plantation of limes, and a manufactory of lime-juice, which promises to be able to supply, in good time, vast quantities of that most useful of all sea-medicines.

Their connection with the Society of Friends, and indeed the very name of Sturge, is a guarantee that such a work will be carried on for the benefit, not merely of the capitalists, but of the coloured people who are employed.  Already, I am assured, a marked improvement has taken place among them; and I, for one, heartily bid God-speed to the enterprise: to any enterprise, indeed, which tends to divert labour and capital from that exclusive sugar-growing which has been most injurious, I verily believe the bane, of the West Indies.  On that subject I may have to say more in a future chapter.  I ask the reader, meanwhile, to follow, as the ship’s head goes round to windward toward Antigua.

Antigua is lower, longer, and flatter than the other islands.  It carries no central peak: but its wildness of ragged uplands forms, it is said, a natural fortress, which ought to be impregnable; and its loyal and industrious people boast that, were every other West Indian island lost, the English might make a stand in Antigua long enough to enable them to reconquer the whole.  I should have feared, from the look of the island, that no large force could hold out long in a country so destitute of water as those volcanic hills, rusty, ragged, treeless, almost sad and desolate—if any land could be sad and desolate with such a blue sea leaping around and such a blue sky blazing above.  Those who wish to know the agricultural capabilities of Antigua, and to know, too, the good sense and courage, the justice and humanity, which have enabled the Antiguans to struggle on and upward through all their difficulties, in spite of drought, hurricane, and earthquake, till permanent prosperity seems now become certain, should read Dr. Davy’s excellent book, which I cannot too often recommend.  For us, we could only give a hasty look at its southern volcanic cliffs; while we regretted that we could not inspect the marine strata of the eastern parts of the island, with their calcareous marls and limestones, hardened clays and cherts, and famous silicified trees, which offer important problems to the geologist, as yet not worked out. 14

We could well believe, as the steamer ran into English Harbour, that Antigua was still subject to earthquakes; and had been shaken, with great loss of property though not of life, in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, when 5000 lives were lost in the town of Point-à-Pitre alone.  The only well-marked effect which Dr. Davy could hear of, apart from damage to artificial structures, was the partial sinking of a causeway leading to Rat Island, in the harbour of St. John.  No wonder: if St. John’s harbour be—as from its shape on the map it probably is—simply an extinct crater, or group of craters, like English Harbour.  A more picturesque or more uncanny little hole than that latter we had never yet seen: but there are many such harbours about these islands, which nature, for the time being at least, has handed over from the dominion of fire to that of water.  Past low cliffs of ash and volcanic boulder, sloping westward to the sea, which is eating them fast away, the steamer runs in through a deep crack, a pistol-shot in width.  On the east side a strange section of gray lava and ash is gnawn into caves.  On the right, a bluff rock of black lava dips sheer into water several fathoms deep; and you anchor at once inside an irregular group of craters, having passed through a gap in one of their sides, which has probably been torn out by a lava flow.  Whether the land, at the time of the flow, was higher or lower than at present, who can tell?  This is certain, that the first basin is for half of its circumference circular, and walled with ash beds, which seem to slope outward from it.  To the left it leads away into a long creek, up which, somewhat to our surprise, we saw neat government-houses and quays; and between them and us, a noble ironclad and other ships of war at anchor close against lava and ash cliffs.  But right ahead, the dusty sides of the crater are covered with strange bushes, its glaring shingle spotted with bright green Manchineels; while on the cliffs around, aloes innumerable, seemingly the imported American Agave, send up their groups of huge fat pointed leaves from crannies so arid that one would fancy a moss would wither in them.  A strange place it is, and strangely hot likewise; and one could not but fear a day—it is to be hoped long distant—when it will be hotter still.