At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

We went up 800 feet of steep hill, to pay a visit on that Morne Fortunée which Moore and Abercrombie took, with terrible loss of life, in May 1796; and wondered at the courage and the tenacity of purpose which could have contrived to invest, and much more to assault, such a stronghold, ‘dragging the guns across ravines and up the acclivities of the mountains and rocks,’ and then attacking the works only along one narrow neck of down, which must be fat, to this day, with English blood.

All was peaceful enough now.  The forts were crumbling, the barracks empty, and the ‘neat cottages, smiling flower gardens, smooth grass-plats and gravel-walks,’ which were once the pride of the citadel, replaced for the most part with Guava-scrub and sensitive plants.  But nothing can destroy the beauty of the panorama.  To the north and east a wilderness of mountain peaks; to the west the Grand Cul-de-sac and the Carenage, mapped out in sheets of blue between high promontories; and, beyond all, the open sea.  What a land: and in what a climate: and all lying well-nigh as it has been since the making of the world, waiting for man to come and take possession.  But there, as elsewhere, matters are mending steadily; and in another hundred years St. Lucia may be an honour to the English race.

We were, of course, anxious to obtain at St. Lucia specimens of that abominable reptile, the Fer-de-lance, or rat-tailed snake, 17 which is the pest of this island, as well as of the neighbouring island of Martinique, and, in Père Labat’s time, of lesser Martinique in the Grenadines, from which, according to Davy, it seems to have disappeared.  It occurs also in Guadaloupe.  In great Martinique—so the French say—it is dangerous to travel through certain woodlands on account of the Fer-de-lance, who lies along a bough, and strikes, without provocation, at horse or man.  I suspect this statement, however, to be an exaggeration.  I was assured that this was not the case in St. Lucia; that the snake attacks no oftener than other venomous snakes,—that is, when trodden on, or when his retreat is cut off.  At all events, it seems easy enough to kill him: so easy, that I hope yet it may be possible to catch him alive, and that the Zoological Gardens may at last possess—what they have long coveted in vain—hideous attraction of a live Fer-de-lance.  The specimens which we brought home are curious enough, even from this æsthetic point of view.  Why are these poisonous snakes so repulsive in appearance, some of them at least, and that not in proportion to their dangerous properties?  For no one who puts the mere dread out of his mind will call the Cobras ugly, even anything but beautiful; nor, again, the deadly Coral snake of Trinidad, whose beauty tempts children, and even grown people, to play with it, or make a necklace of it, sometimes to their own destruction.  But who will call the Puff Adder of the Cape, or this very Fer-de-lance, anything but ugly and horrible: not only from the brutality signified, to us at least, by the flat triangular head and the heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and the lip?  ‘To us at least,’ I say.  For it is an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the realist schools of thought keep up their controversy—which they will do to the world’s end—whether this seeming hideousness be a real fact: whether we do not attribute to the snake the same passions which we should expect to find—and to abhor—in a human countenance of somewhat the same shape, and then justify our assumption to ourselves by the creature’s bites, which are actually no more the result of craft and malevolence than the bite of a frightened mouse or squirrel.  I should be glad to believe that the latter theory were the true one; that nothing is created really ugly, that the Fer-de-lance looks an hideous fiend, the Ocelot a beautiful fiend, merely because the outlines of the Ocelot approach more nearly to those which we consider beautiful in a human being: but I confess myself not yet convinced.  ‘There is a great deal of human nature in man,’ said the wise Yankee; and one’s human nature, perhaps one’s common-sense also, will persist in considering beauty and ugliness as absolute realities, in spite of one’s efforts to be fair to the weighty arguments on the other side.

These Fer-de-lances, be that as it may, are a great pest in St. Lucia.  Dr. Davy says that he ‘was told by the Lieutenant-Governor that as many as thirty rat-tailed snakes were killed in clearing a piece of land, of no great extent, near Government House.’  I can well believe this, for about the same number were killed only two years ago in clearing, probably, the same piece of ground, which is infested with that creeping pest of the West Indies, the wild Guava-bush, from which guava-jelly is made.  The present Lieutenant-Governor has offered a small reward for the head of every Fer-de-lance killed: and the number brought in, in the first month, was so large that I do not like to quote it merely from memory.  Certainly, it was high time to make a crusade against these unwelcome denizens.  Dr. Davy, judging from a Government report, says that nineteen persons were killed by them in one small parish in the year 1849; and the death, though by no means certain, is, when it befalls, a hideous death enough.  If any one wishes to know what it is like, let him read the tragedy which Sir Richard Schomburgk tells—with his usual brilliance and pathos, for he is a poet as well as a man of science—in his Travels in British Guiana, vol. ii. p. 255—how the Craspedocephalus, coiled on a stone in the ford, let fourteen people walk over him without stirring, or allowing himself to be seen: and at last rose, and, missing Schomburgk himself, struck the beautiful Indian bride, the ‘Liebling der ganzen Gesellschaft;’ and how she died in her bridegroom’s arms, with horrors which I do not record.

Strangely enough, this snake, so fatal to man, has no power against another West Indian snake, almost equally common, namely, the Cribo. 18  This brave animal, closely connected with our common water-snake, is perfectly harmless, and a welcome guest in West Indian houses, because he clears them of rats.  He is some six or eight feet long, black, with more or less bright yellow about the tail and under the stomach.  He not only faces the Fer-de-lance, who is often as big as he, but kills and eats him.  It was but last year, I think, that the population of Carenage turned out to see a fight in a tree between a Cribo and a Fer-de-lance, of about equal size, which, after a two hours’ struggle, ended in the Cribo swallowing the Fer-de-lance, head foremost.  But when he had got his adversary about one-third down, the Creoles—just as so many Englishmen would have done—seeing that all the sport was over, rewarded the brave Cribo by killing both, and preserving them as a curiosity in spirits.  How the Fer-de-lance came into the Antilles is a puzzle.  The black American scorpion—whose bite is more dreaded by the Negroes than even the snake’s—may have been easily brought by ship in luggage or in cargo.  But the Fer-de-lance, whose nearest home is in Guiana, is not likely to have come on board ship.  It is difficult to believe that he travelled northward by land at the epoch—if such a one there ever was—when these islands were joined to South America: for if so, he would surely be found in St. Vincent, in Grenada, and most surely of all in Trinidad.  So far from that being the case, he will not live, it is said, in St. Vincent.  For (so goes the story) during the Carib war of 1795-96, the savages imported Fer-de-lances from St. Lucia or Martinique, and turned them loose, in hopes of their destroying the white men: but they did not breed, dwindled away, and were soon extinct.  It is possible that they, or their eggs, came in floating timber from the Orinoco: but if so, how is it that they have never been stranded on the east coast of Trinidad, whither timber without end drifts from that river?  In a word, I have no explanation whatsoever to give; as I am not minded to fall back on the medieval one, that the devil must have brought them thither, to plague the inhabitants for their sins.

Among all these beautiful islands, St. Lucia is, I think, the most beautiful; not indeed on account of the size or form of its central mass, which is surpassed by that of several others, but on account of those two extraordinary mountains at its south-western end, which, while all conical hills in the French islands are called Pitons, bear the name of The Pitons par excellence.  From most elevated points in the island their twin peaks may be seen jutting up over the other hills, like, according to irreverent English sailors, the tips of a donkey’s ears.  But, as the steamer runs southward along the shore, these two peaks open out, and you find yourself in deep water close to the base of two obelisks, rather than mountains, which rise sheer out of the sea, one to the height of 2710, the other to that of 2680 feet, about a mile from each other.  Between them is the loveliest little bay; and behind them green wooded slopes rise toward the rearward mountain of the Souffrière.  The whole glitters clear and keen in blazing sunshine: but behind, black depths of cloud and gray sheets of rain shroud all the central highlands in mystery and sadness.  Beyond them, without a shore, spreads open sea.  But the fantastic grandeur of the place cannot be described in words.  The pencil of the artist must be trusted.  I can vouch that he has not in the least exaggerated the slenderness and steepness of the rock-masses.  One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true.  Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney’s men—and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three—are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French.  Beneath the bites of the Fer-de-lances, and it may be beneath the blaze of the sun, man after man dropped; and lay, or rolled down the cliffs.  A single survivor was seen to reach the summit, to wave the Union Jack in triumph over his head, and then to fall a corpse.  So runs the tale, which, if not true, has yet its value, as a token of what, in those old days, English sailors were believed capable of daring and of doing.

At the back of these two Pitons is the Souffrière, probably the remains of the old crater, now fallen in, and only 1000 feet above the sea: a golden egg to the islanders, were it but used, in case of war, and any difficulty occurring in obtaining sulphur from Sicily, a supply of the article to almost any amount might be obtained from this and the other like Solfaterras of the British Antilles; they being, so long as the natural distillation of the substance continues active as at present, inexhaustible.  But to work them profitably will require a little more common-sense than the good folks of St. Lucia have as yet shown.  In 1836 two gentlemen of Antigua, 19 Mr. Bennett and Mr. Wood, set up sulphur works at the Souffrière of St. Lucia, and began prosperously enough, exporting 540 tons the first year.  ‘But in 1840,’ says Mr. Breen, ‘the sugar-growers took the alarm,’ fearing, it is to be presumed, that labour would be diverted from the cane-estates, ‘and at their instigation the Legislative Council imposed a tax of 16s. sterling on every ton of purified sulphur exported from the colony.’  The consequence was that ‘Messrs. Bennett and Wood, after incurring a heavy loss of time and treasure, had to break up their establishment and retire from the colony.’  One has heard of the man who killed the goose to get the golden egg.  In this case the goose, to avoid the trouble of laying, seems to have killed the man.

The next link in the chain, as the steamer runs southward, is St. Vincent; a single volcano peak, like St. Kitts, or the Basse Terre of Guadaloupe.  Very grand are the vast sheets, probably of lava covered with ash, which pour down from between two rounded mountains just above the town.  Rich with green canes, they contrast strongly with the brown ragged cliffs right and left of them, and still more with the awful depths beyond and above, where, underneath a canopy of bright white clouds, scowls a purple darkness of cliffs and glens, among which lies, unseen, the Souffrière.

In vain, both going and coming, by sunlight, and again by moonlight, when the cane-fields gleamed white below and the hills were pitch-black above, did we try to catch a sight of this crater-peak.  One fact alone we ascertained, that like all, as far as I have seen, of the West Indian volcanoes, it does not terminate in an ash-cone, but in ragged cliffs of blasted rock.  The explosion of April 27, 1812, must have been too violent, and too short, to allow of any accumulation round the crater.  And no wonder; for that single explosion relieved an interior pressure upon the crust of the earth, which had agitated sea and land from the Azores to the West Indian islands, the coasts of Venezuela, the Cordillera of New Grenada, and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio.  For nearly two years the earthquakes had continued, when they culminated in one great tragedy, which should be read at length in the pages of Humboldt. 20  On March 26, 1812, when the people of Caraccas were assembled in the churches, beneath a still and blazing sky, one minute of earthquake sufficed to bury, amid the ruins of churches and houses, nearly 10,000 souls.  The same earthquake wrought terrible destruction along the whole line of the northern Cordilleras, and was felt even at Santa Fé de Bogota, and Honda, 180 leagues from Caraccas.  But the end was not yet.  While the wretched survivors of Caraccas were dying of fever and starvation, and wandering inland to escape from ever-renewed earthquake shocks, among villages and farms, which, ruined like their own city, could give them no shelter, the almost forgotten volcano of St. Vincent was muttering in suppressed wrath.  It had thrown out no lava since 1718; if, at least, the eruption spoken of by Moreau de Jonnés took place in the Souffrière.  According to him, with a terrific earthquake, clouds of ashes were driven into the air with violent detonations from a mountain situated at the eastern end of the island.  When the eruption had ceased, it was found that the whole mountain had disappeared.  Now there is no eastern end to St. Vincent, nor any mountain on the east coast: and the Souffrière is at the northern end.  It is impossible, meanwhile, that the wreck of such a mountain should not have left traces visible and notorious to this day.  May not the truth be, that the Souffrière had once a lofty cone, which was blasted away in 1718, leaving the present crater-ring of cliffs and peaks; and that thus may be explained the discrepancies in the accounts of its height, which Mr. Scrope gives as 4940 feet, and Humboldt and Dr. Davy at 3000, a measurement which seems to me to be more probably correct?  The mountain is said to have been slightly active in 1785.  In 1812 its old crater had been for some years (and is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around 800 feet in height, reminding one traveller of the Lake of Albano. 21  But for twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks, that it had its part to play in the great subterranean battle between rock and steam; and on the 27th of April 1812 the battle began.

A negro boy—he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent—was herding cattle on the mountain-side.  A stone fell near him; and then another.  He fancied that other boys were pelting him from the cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return.  But the stones fell thicker: and among them one, and then another, too large to have been thrown by human hand.  And the poor little fellow woke up to the fact that not a boy, but the mountain, was throwing stones at him; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the crater above was not harmless vapour, but dust, and ash, and stone.  He turned, and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate, while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans—to which all man’s engines of destruction are but pop-guns—roared on for three days and nights, covering the greater part of the island in ashes, burying crops, breaking branches off the trees, and spreading ruin from which several estates never recovered; and so the 30th of April dawned in darkness which might be felt.

Meanwhile, on that same day, to change the scene of the campaign two hundred and ten leagues, ‘a distance,’ as Humboldt says, ‘equal to that between Vesuvius and Paris,’ ‘the inhabitants, not only of Caraccas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over a space of four thousand square leagues, were terrified by a subterranean noise, which resembled frequent discharges of the loudest cannon.  It was accompanied by no shock: and, what is very remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues’ distance inland; and at Caraccas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were made to put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be advancing with heavy artillery.’  They might as well have copied the St. Vincent herd-boy, and thrown their stones, too, at the Titans; for the noise was, there can be no doubt, nothing else than the final explosion in St. Vincent far away.  The same explosion was heard in Venezuela, the same at Martinique and Guadaloupe: but there, too, there were no earthquake shocks.  The volcanoes of the two French islands lay quiet, and left their English brother to do the work.  On the same day a stream of lava rushed down from the mountain, reached the sea in four hours, and then all was over.  The earthquakes which had shaken for two years a sheet of the earth’s surface larger than half Europe were stilled by the eruption of this single vent.

No wonder if, with such facts on my memory since my childhood, I looked up at that Souffrière with awe, as at a giant, obedient though clumsy, beneficent though terrible, reposing aloft among the clouds when his appointed work was done.

The strangest fact about this eruption was, that the mountain did not make use of its old crater.  The original vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could not be reopened, even by a steam-force the vastness of which may be guessed at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two years.  So when the eruption was over, it was found that the old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undisturbed, as far as has been ascertained.  But close to it, and separated only by a knife-edge of rock some 700 feet in height, and so narrow that, as I was assured by one who had seen it, it is dangerous to crawl along it, a second crater, nearly as large as the first, had been blasted out, the bottom of which, in like manner, is now filled with water.  I regretted much that I could not visit it.  Three points I longed to ascertain carefully—the relative heights of the water in the two craters; the height and nature of the spot where the lava stream issued; and lastly, if possible, the actual causes of the locally famous Rabacca, or ‘Dry River,’ one of the largest streams in the island, which was swallowed up during the eruption, at a short distance from its source, leaving its bed an arid gully to this day.  But it could not be, and I owe what little I know of the summit of the Souffrière principally to a most intelligent and gentleman-like young Wesleyan minister, whose name has escaped me.  He described vividly as we stood together on the deck, looking up at the volcano, the awful beauty of the twin lakes, and of the clouds which, for months together, whirl in and out of the cups in fantastic shapes before the eddies of the trade-wind.

The day after the explosion, ‘Black Sunday,’ gave a proof of, though no measure of, the enormous force which had been exerted.  Eighty miles to windward lies Barbadoes.  All Saturday a heavy cannonading had been heard to the eastward.  The English and French fleets were surely engaged.  The soldiers were called out; the batteries manned: but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder.  On the 1st of May the clocks struck six: but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to the call.  The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning wore on.  A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over the whole island.  The Negroes rushed shrieking into the streets.  Surely the last day was come.  The white folk caught (and little blame to them) the panic; and some began to pray who had not prayed for years.  The pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbadoes) were not proof against the infection.  Old letters describe the scene in the churches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds.  And still the darkness continued, and the dust fell.

I have a letter, written by one long since dead, who had at least powers of description of no common order, telling how, when he tried to go out of his house upon the east coast, he could not find the trees on his own lawn, save by feeling for their stems.  He stood amazed not only in utter darkness, but in utter silence.  For the trade-wind had fallen dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone; and the only noise was the crashing of branches, snapped by the weight of the clammy dust.  He went in again, and waited.  About one o’clock the veil began to lift; a lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon: but all was black overhead.  Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away; the island saw the sun once more; and saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilising, dust.  The trade-wind blew suddenly once more out of the clear east, and the surf roared again along the shore.

Meanwhile, a heavy earthquake-wave had struck part at least of the shores of Barbadoes.  The gentleman on the east coast, going out, found traces of the sea, and boats and logs washed up, some 10 to 20 feet above high-tide mark: a convulsion which seems to have gone unmarked during the general dismay.

One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks and others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious panic which accompanied it.  Finding it still dark when he rose to dress, he opened (so the story used to run) his window; found it stick, and felt upon the sill a coat of soft powder.  ‘The volcano in St. Vincent has broken out at last,’ said the wise man, ‘and this is the dust of it.’  So he quieted his household and his Negroes, lighted his candles, and went to his scientific books, in that delight, mingled with an awe not the less deep because it is rational and self-possessed, with which he, like other men of science, looked at the wonders of this wondrous world.

Those who will recollect that Barbadoes is eighty miles to windward of St. Vincent, and that a strong breeze from E.N.E. is usually blowing from the former island to the latter, will be able to imagine, not to measure, the force of an explosion which must have blown this dust several miles into the air, above the region of the trade-wind, whether into a totally calm stratum, or into that still higher one in which the heated south-west wind is hurrying continually from the tropics toward the pole.  As for the cessation of the trade-wind itself during the fall of the dust, I leave the fact to be explained by more learned men: the authority whom I have quoted leaves no doubt in my mind as to the fact.

On leaving St. Vincent, the track lies past the Grenadines.  For sixty miles, long low islands of quaint forms and euphonious names—Becquia, Mustique, Canonau, Carriacou, Isle de Rhone—rise a few hundred feet out of the unfathomable sea, bare of wood, edged with cliffs and streaks of red and gray rock, resembling, says Dr. Davy, the Cyclades of the Grecian Archipelago: their number is counted at three hundred.  The largest of them all is not 8000 acres in extent; the smallest about 600.  A quiet prosperous race of little yeomen, beside a few planters, dwell there; the latter feeding and exporting much stock, the former much provisions, and both troubling themselves less than of yore with sugar and cotton.  They build coasting vessels, and trade with them to the larger islands; and they might be, it is said, if they chose, much richer than they are,—if that be any good to them.

The steamer does not stop at any of these little sea-hermitages; so that we could only watch their shores: and they were worth watching.  They had been, plainly, sea-gnawn for countless ages; and may, at some remote time, have been all joined in one long ragged chine of hills, the highest about 1000 feet.  They seem to be for the most part made up of marls and limestones, with trap-dykes and other igneous matters here and there.  And one could not help entertaining the fancy that they were a specimen of what the other islands were once, or at least would have been now, had not each of them had its volcanic vents, to pile up hard lavas thousands of feet aloft, above the marine strata, and so consolidate each ragged chine of submerged mountain into one solid conical island, like St. Vincent at their northern end, and at their southern end that beautiful Grenada to which we were fast approaching, and which we reached, on our outward voyage, at nightfall; running in toward a narrow gap of moonlit cliffs, beyond which we could discern the lights of a town.  We did not enter the harbour: but lay close off its gateway in safe deep water; fired our gun, and waited for the swarm of negro boats, which began to splash out to us through the darkness, the jabbering of their crews heard long before the flash of their oars was seen.