At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

Most weird and fantastic are these nightly visits to West Indian harbours.  Above, the black mountain-depths, with their canopy of cloud, bright white against the purple night, hung with keen stars.  The moon, it may be on her back in the west, sinking like a golden goblet behind some rock-fort, half shrouded in black trees.  Below, a line of bright mist over a swamp, with the coco-palms standing up through it, dark, and yet glistering in the moon.  A light here and there in a house: another here and there in a vessel, unseen in the dark.  The echo of the gun from hill to hill.  Wild voices from shore and sea.  The snorting of the steamer, the rattling of the chain through the hawse-hole; and on deck, and under the quarter, strange gleams of red light amid pitchy darkness, from engines, galley fires, lanthorns; and black folk and white folk flitting restlessly across them.

The strangest show: ‘like a thing in a play,’ says every one when they see it for the first time.  And when at the gun-fire one tumbles out of one’s berth, and up on deck, to see the new island, one has need to rub one’s eyes, and pinch oneself—as I was minded to do again and again during the next few weeks—to make sure that it is not all a dream.  It is always worth the trouble, meanwhile, to tumble up on deck, not merely for the show, but for the episodes of West Indian life and manners, which, quaint enough by day, are sure to be even more quaint at night, in the confusion and bustle of the darkness.  One such I witnessed in that same harbour of Grenada, not easily to be forgotten.

A tall and very handsome middle-aged brown woman, in a limp print gown and a gorgeous turban, stood at the gangway in a glare of light, which made her look like some splendid witch by a Walpurgis night-fire.  ‘Tell your boatman to go round to the other side,’ quoth the officer in charge.

‘Fanqua!  (François)  You go round oder side of de ship!’

Fanqua, who seemed to be her son, being sleepy, tipsy, stupid, or lazy, did not stir.

‘Fanqua!  You hear what de officer say?  You go round.’

No move.

‘Fanqua!  You not ashamed of youself?  You not hear de officer say he turn a steam-pipe over you?’

No move.

‘Fanqua!’ (authoritative).

‘Fanqua!’ (indignant).

‘Fanqua!’ (argumentative).

‘Fanqua!’ (astonished).

‘Fanqua!’ (majestic).

‘Fanqua!’ (confidentially alluring).

‘Fanqua!’ (regretful).  And so on, through every conceivable tone of expression.

But Fanqua did not move; and the officer and bystanders laughed.

She summoned all her talents, and uttered one last ‘Fanqua!’ which was a triumph of art.

Shame and surprise were blended in her voice with tenderness and pity, and they again with meek despair.  To have been betrayed, disgraced, and so unexpectedly, by one whom she loved, and must love still, in spite of this, his fearful fall!

It was more than heart could bear.  Breathing his name but that once more, she stood a moment, like a queen of tragedy, one long arm drawing her garments round her, the other outstretched, as if to cast off—had she the heart to do it—the rebel; and then stalked away into the darkness of the paddle-boxes—for ever and a day to brood speechless over her great sorrow?  Not in the least.  To begin chattering away to her acquaintances, as if no Fanqua existed in the world.

It was a piece of admirable play-acting; and was meant to be.  She had been conscious all the while that she was an object of attention—possibly of admiration—to a group of men; and she knew what was right to be done and said under the circumstances, and did it perfectly, even to the smallest change of voice.  She was doubtless quite sincere the whole time, and felt everything which her voice expressed: but she felt it, because it was proper to feel it; and deceived herself probably more than she deceived any one about her.

A curious phase of human nature is that same play-acting, effect-studying, temperament, which ends, if indulged in too much, in hopeless self-deception, and ‘the hypocrisy which,’ as Mr. Carlyle says, ‘is honestly indignant that you should think it hypocritical.’  It is common enough among Negresses, and among coloured people too: but is it so very uncommon among whites?  Is it not the bane of too many Irish? of too many modern French? of certain English, for that matter, whom I have known, who probably had no drop of French or Irish blood in their veins?  But it is all the more baneful the higher the organisation is; because, the more brilliant the intellect, the more noble the instincts, the more able its victim is to say—‘See: I feel what I ought, I say what I ought, I do what I ought: and what more would you have?  Why do you Philistines persist in regarding me with distrust and ridicule?  What is this common honesty, and what is this “single eye,” which you suspect me of not possessing?’

Very beautiful was that harbour of George Town, seen by day.  In the centre an entrance some two hundred yards across: on the right, a cliff of volcanic sand, interspersed with large boulders hurled from some volcano now silent, where black women, with baskets on their heads, were filling a barge with gravel.  On the left, rocks of hard lava, surmounted by a well-lined old fort, strong enough in the days of 32-pounders.  Beyond it, still on the left, the little city, scrambling up the hillside, with its red roofs and church spires, among coconut and bread-fruit trees, looking just like a German toy town.  In front, at the bottom of the harbour, villa over villa, garden over garden, up to the large and handsome Government House, one of the most delectable spots of all this delectable land; and piled above it, green hill upon green hill, which, the eye soon discovers, are the Sommas of old craters, one inside the other towards the central peak of Mount Maitland, 1700 feet high.  On the right bow, low sharp cliff-points of volcanic ash; and on the right again, a circular lake a quarter of a mile across and 40 feet in depth, with a coral reef, almost awash, stretching from it to the ash-cliff on the south side of the harbour mouth.  A glance shows that this is none other than an old crater, like that inside English Harbour in Antigua, probably that which has hurled out the boulders and the ash; and one whose temper is still uncertain, and to be watched anxiously in earthquake times.  The Etang du Vieux Bourg is its name; for, so tradition tells, in the beginning of the seventeenth century the old French town stood where the white coral-reef gleams under water; in fact, upon the northern lip of the crater.  One day, however, the Enceladus below turned over in his sleep, and the whole town was swallowed up, or washed away.  The sole survivor was a certain blacksmith, who thereupon was made—or as sole survivor made himself—Governor of the island of Grenada.  So runs the tale; and so it seemed likely to run again, during the late earthquake at St. Thomas’s.  For on the very same day, and before any earthquake-wave from St. Thomas’s had reached Grenada—if any ever reached it, which I could not clearly ascertain—this Etang du Vieux Bourg boiled up suddenly, hurling masses of water into the lower part of the town, washing away a stage, and doing much damage.  The people were, and with good reason, in much anxiety for some hours after: but the little fit of ill-temper went off, having vented itself, as is well known, in the sea between St. Thomas’s and Santa Cruz, many miles away.

The bottom of the crater, I was assured, was not permanently altered: but the same informant—an eye-witness on whom I can fully depend—shared the popular opinion that it had opened, sucked in sea-water, and spouted it out again.  If so, the good folks of George Town are quite right in holding that they had a very narrow escape of utter destruction.

An animated and picturesque spot, as the steamer runs alongside, is the wooden wharf where passengers are to land and the ship to coal.  The coaling Negroes and Negresses, dressed or undressed, in their dingiest rags, contrast with the country Negresses, in gaudy prints and gaudier turbans, who carry on their heads baskets of fruit even more gaudy than their dresses.  Both country and town Negroes, meanwhile, look—as they are said to be—comfortable and prosperous; and I can well believe the story that beggars are unknown in the island.  The coalers, indeed, are only too well off, for they earn enough, by one day of violent and degrading toil, to live in reckless shiftless comfort, and, I am assured, something very like debauchery, till the next steamer comes in.

No sooner is the plank down, than a struggling line getting on board meets a struggling line getting on shore; and it is well if the passenger, on landing, is not besmirched with coal-dust, after a narrow escape of being shoved into the sea off the stage.  But, after all, civility pays in Grenada, as in the rest of the world; and the Negro, like the Frenchman, though surly and rude enough if treated with the least haughtiness, will generally, like the Frenchman, melt at once at a touch of the hat, and an appeal to ‘Laissez passer Mademoiselle.’  On shore we got, through be-coaled Negroes, men and women, safe and not very much be-coaled ourselves; and were driven up steep streets of black porous lava, between lava houses and walls, and past lava gardens, in which jutted up everywhere, amid the loveliest vegetation, black knots and lumps scorched by the nether fires.  The situation of the house—the principal one of the island—to which we drove, is beautiful beyond description.  It stands on a knoll some 300 feet in height, commanded only by a slight rise to the north; and the wind of the eastern mountains sweeps fresh and cool through a wide hall and lofty rooms.  Outside, a pleasure-ground and garden, with the same flowers as we plant out in summer at home; and behind, tier on tier of green wooded hill, with cottages and farms in the hollows, might have made us fancy ourselves for a moment in some charming country-house in Wales.  But opposite the drawing-room window rose a Candelabra Cereus, thirty feet high.  On the lawn in front great shrubs of red Frangipani carried rose-coloured flowers which filled the air with fragrance, at the end of thick and all but leafless branches.  Trees hung over them with smooth greasy stems of bright copper—which has gained them the name of ‘Indian skin,’ at least in Trinidad, where we often saw them wild; another glance showed us that every tree and shrub around was different from those at home: and we recollected where we were; and recollected, too, as we looked at the wealth of flower and fruit and verdure, that it was sharp winter at home.  We admired this and that: especially a most lovely Convolvulus—I know not whether we have it in our hothouses 22—with purple maroon flowers; and an old hog-plum 23—Mombin of the French—a huge tree, which was striking, not so much from its size as from its shape.  Growing among blocks of lava, it had assumed the exact shape of an English oak in a poor soil and exposed situation; globular-headed, gnarled, stunted, and most unlike to its giant brethren of the primeval woods, which range upward 60 or 80 feet without a branch.  We walked up to see the old fort, commanding the harbour from a height of 800 feet.  We sat and rested by the roadside under a great cotton-wood tree, and looked down on gorges of richest green, on negro gardens, and groo-groo palms, and here and there a cabbage-palm, or a huge tree at whose name we could not guess; then turned through an arch cut in the rock into the interior of the fort, which now holds neither guns nor soldiers, to see at our feet the triple harbour, the steep town, and a very paradise of garden and orchard; and then down again, with the regretful thought, which haunted me throughout the islands—What might the West Indies not have been by now, had it not been for slavery, rum, and sugar?

We got down to the steamer again, just in time, happily, not to see a great fight in the water between two Negroes; to watch which all the women had stopped their work, and cheered the combatants with savage shouts and laughter.  At last the coaling and the cursing were over; and we steamed out again to sea.

I have antedated this little episode—delightful for more reasons than I set down here—because I do not wish to trouble my readers with two descriptions of the same island—and those mere passing glimpses.

There are two craters, I should say, in Grenada, beside the harbour.  One, the Grand Etang, lies high in the central group of mountains, which rise to 3700 feet, and is itself about 1740 feet above the sea.  Dr. Davy describes it as a lake of great beauty, surrounded by bamboos and tree-ferns.  The other crater-lake lies on the north-east coast, and nearer to the sea-level: and I more than suspect that more would be recognised, up and down the island, by the eye of a practised geologist.

The southern end of Grenada—of whatsoever rock it may be composed—shows evidence of the same wave-destruction as do the Grenadines.  Arches and stacks, and low horizontal strata laid bare along the cliff, in some places white with guano, prove that the sea has been at work for ages, which must be many and long, considering that the surf, on that leeward side of the island, is little or none the whole year round.  With these low cliffs, in strongest contrast to the stately and precipitous southern point of St. Lucia, the southern point of Grenada slides into the sea, the last of the true Antilles.  For Tobago, Robinson Crusoe’s island, which lies away unseen to windward, is seemingly a fragment of South America, like the island of Trinidad, to which the steamer now ran dead south for seventy miles.

It was on the shortest day of the year—St. Thomas’s Day—at seven in the morning (half-past eleven of English time, just as the old women at Eversley would have been going round the parish for their ‘goodying’), that we became aware of the blue mountains of North Trinidad ahead of us; to the west of them the island of the Dragon’s Mouth; and westward again, a cloud among the clouds, the last spur of the Cordilleras of the Spanish Main.  There was South America at last; and as a witness that this, too, was no dream, the blue water of the Windward Islands changed suddenly into foul bottle-green.  The waters of the Orinoco, waters from the peaks of the Andes far away, were staining the sea around us.  With thoughts full of three great names, connected, as long as civilised man shall remain, with those waters—Columbus, Raleigh, Humboldt—we steamed on, to see hills, not standing out, like those of the isles which we had passed, in intense clearness of green and yellow, purple and blue, but all shrouded in haze, like those of the Hebrides or the West of Ireland.  Onward through a narrow channel in the mountain-wall, not a rifle-shot across, which goes by the name of the Ape’s Mouth, banked by high cliffs of dark Silurian rock—not bare, though, as in Britain, but furred with timber, festooned with lianes, down to the very spray of the gnawing surf.  One little stack of rocks, not thirty feet high, and as many broad, stood almost in the midst of the channel, and in the very northern mouth of it, exposed to the full cut of surf and trade-wind.  But the plants on it, even seen through the glasses, told us where we were.  One huge low tree covered the top with shining foliage, like that of a Portugal laurel; all around it upright Cerei reared their gray candelabra, and below them, hanging down the rock to the very surf, deep green night-blowing Cereus twined and waved, looking just like a curtain of gigantic stag’s-horn moss.  We ran through the channel; then amid more low wooded islands, it may be for a mile, before a strong back current rushing in from the sea; and then saw before us a vast plain of muddy water.  No shore was visible to the westward; to the eastward the northern hills of Trinidad, forest clad, sank to the water; to the south lay a long line of coast, generally level with the water’s edge, and green with mangroves, or dotted with coco-palms.  That was the Gulf of Paria, and Trinidad beyond.

Shipping at anchor, and buildings along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest reclaimed alluvial in the world.

As the steamer stopped at last, her screw whirled up from the bottom clouds of yellow mud, the mingled deposits of the Caroni and the Orinoco.  In half an hour more we were on shore, amid Negroes, Coolies, Chinese, French, Spaniards, short-legged Guaraon dogs, and black vultures.

CHAPTER III: TRINIDAD

It may be worth while to spend a few pages in telling something of the history of this lovely island since the 31st of July 1499, when Columbus, on his third voyage, sighted the three hills in the south-eastern part.  He had determined, it is said, to name the first land which he should see after the Blessed Trinity; the triple peaks seemed to him a heaven-sent confirmation of his intent, and he named the island Trinidad; but the Indians called it Iere.

He ran from Punta Galera, at the north-eastern extremity—so named from the likeness of a certain rock to a galley under sail—along the east and south of the island; turned eastward at Punta Galeota; and then northward, round Punta Icacque, through the Boca Sierpe, or serpent’s mouth, into the Gulf of Paria, which he named ‘Golfo de Balena,’ the Gulf of the Whale, and ‘Golfo Triste,’ the Sad Gulf; and went out by the northern passage of the Boca Drago.  The names which he gave to the island and its surroundings remain, with few alterations, to this day.

He was surprised, says Washington Irving, at the verdure and fertility of the country, having expected to find it more parched and sterile as he approached the equator; whereas he beheld groves of palm-trees, and luxuriant forests sweeping down to the seaside, with fountains and running streams beneath the shade.  The shore was low and uninhabited: but the country rose in the interior, and was cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations.  In a word, the softness and purity of the climate, and the verdure, freshness, and sweetness of the country, appeared to equal the delights of early spring in the beautiful province of Valencia in Spain.

He found the island peopled by a race of Indians with fairer complexions than any he had hitherto seen; ‘people all of good stature, well made, and of very graceful bearing, with much and smooth hair.’  They wore, the chiefs at least, tunics of coloured cotton, and on their heads beautiful worked handkerchiefs, which looked in the distance as if they were made of silk.  The women, meanwhile, according to the report of Columbus’s son, seem, some of them at least, to have gone utterly without clothing.

They carried square bucklers, the first Columbus had seen in the New World; and bows and arrows, with which they made feeble efforts to drive off the Spaniards who landed at Punta Arenal, near Icacque, and who, finding no streams, sank holes in the sand, and so filled their casks with fresh water, as may be done, it is said, at the same spot even now.

And there—the source of endless misery to these happy harmless creatures—a certain Cacique, so goes the tale, took off Columbus’s cap of crimson velvet, and replaced it with a circle of gold which he wore.

Alas for them!  That fatal present of gold brought down on them enemies far more ruthless than the Caribs of the northern islands, who had a habit of coming down in their canoes and carrying off the gentle Arrawaks to eat them at their leisure, after the fashion which Defoe, always accurate, has immortalised in Robinson Crusoe.  Crusoe’s island is, almost certainly, meant for Tobago; Man Friday had been stolen in Trinidad.

Columbus came no more to Trinidad.  But the Spaniards had got into their wicked heads that there must be gold somewhere in the island; and they came again and again.  Gold they could not get; for it does not exist in Trinidad.  But slaves they could get; and the history of the Indians of Trinidad for the next century is the same as that of the rest of the West Indies: a history of mere rapine and cruelty.  The Arrawaks, to do them justice, defended themselves more valiantly than the still gentler people of Hayti, Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico, and the Lucayas: but not so valiantly as the fierce cannibal Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whom the Spaniards were never able to subdue.

It was in 1595, nearly a century after Columbus discovered the island, that ‘Sir Robert Duddeley in the Bear, with Captain Munck, in the Beare’s Whelpe, with two small pinnesses, called the Frisking and the Earwig,’ ran across from Cape Blanco in Africa, straight for Trinidad, and anchored in Cedros Bay, which he calls Curiapan, inside Punta Icacque and Los Gallos—a bay which was then, as now, ‘very full of pelicans.’  The existence of the island was known to the English: but I am not aware that any Englishman had explored it.  Two years before, an English ship, whose exploits are written in Hakluyt by one Henry May, had run in, probably to San Fernando, ‘to get refreshing; but could not, by reason the Spaniards had taken it.  So that for want of victuals the company would have forsaken the ship.’  How different might have been the history of Trinidad, if at that early period, while the Indians were still powerful, a little colony of English had joined them, and intermarried with them.  But it was not to be.  The ship got away through the Boca Drago.  The year after, seemingly, Captain Whiddon, Raleigh’s faithful follower, lost eight men in the island in a Spanish ambush.  But Duddeley was the first Englishman, as far as I am aware, who marched, ‘for his experience and pleasure, four long marches through the island; the last fifty miles going and coming through a most monstrous thicke wood, for so is most part of the island; and lodging myself in Indian townes.’  Poor Sir Robert—‘larding the lean earth as he stalked along’—in ruff and trunk hose, possibly too in burning steel breastplate, most probably along the old Indian path from San Fernando past Savannah Grande, and down the Ortoire to Mayaro on the east coast.  How hot he must have been.  How often, we will hope, he must have bathed on the journey in those crystal brooks, beneath the balisiers and the bamboos.  He found ‘a fine-shaped and a gentle people, all naked and painted red’ (with roucou), ‘their commanders wearing crowns of feathers,’ and a country ‘fertile and full of fruits, strange beasts and fowls, whereof munkeis, babions, and parats were in great abundance.’  His ‘munkeis’ were, of course, the little Sapajous; his ‘babions’ no true Baboons; for America disdains that degraded and dog-like form; but the great red Howlers.  He was much delighted with the island; and ‘inskonced himself’—i.e. built a fort: but he found the Spanish governor, Berreo, not well pleased at his presence; ‘and no gold in the island save Marcasite’ (iron pyrites); considered that Berreo and his three hundred Spaniards were ‘both poore and strong, and so he had no reason to assault them.’  He had but fifty men himself, and, moreover, was tired of waiting in vain for Sir Walter Raleigh.  So he sailed away northward, on the 12th of March, to plunder Spanish ships, with his brains full of stories of El Dorado, and the wonders of the Orinoco—among them ‘four golden half-moons weighing a noble each, and two bracelets of silver,’ which a boat’s crew of his had picked up from the Indians on the other side of the Gulf of Paria.

He left somewhat too soon.  For on the 22d of March Raleigh sailed into Cedros Bay, and then went up to La Brea and the Pitch Lake.  There he noted, as Columbus had done before him, oysters growing on the mangrove roots; and noted, too, ‘that abundance of stone pitch, that all the ships of the world might be therewith laden from thence; and we made trial of it in trimming our shippes, to be most excellent good, and melteth not with the sun as the pitch of Norway.’  From thence he ran up the west coast to ‘the mountain of Annaparima’ (St. Fernando hill), and passing the mouth of the Caroni, anchored at what was then the village of Port of Spain.

There some Spaniards boarded him, to buy linen and other things, all which he ‘entertained kindly, and feasted after our manner, by means whereof I learned as much of the estate of Guiana as I could, or as they knew, for those poore souldiers having been many years without wine, a few draughts made them merrie, in which mood they vaunted of Guiana and the riches thereof,’—much which it had been better for Raleigh had he never heard.