At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

This Paradise—for such it is—is somewhat too far from the city; and one passes in it few people, save an occasional brown nurse.  But when Port of Spain becomes, as it surely will, a great commercial city, and the slopes of Laventille, Belmont, and St. Ann’s, just above the gardens, are studded, as they surely will be, with the villas of rich merchants, then will the generous gift of English Governors be appreciated and used; and the Botanic Gardens will become a Tropic Garden of the Tuileries, alive, at five o’clock every evening, with human flowers of every hue with human

CHAPTER V: A LETTER FROM A WEST INDIAN COTTAGE ORNÉE

30th December 1869.

My Dear–, We are actually settled in a West Indian country-house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion, food of every conceivable variety.  The whole day long new objects and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams as well as in waking thoughts.  Amid such a confusion, to describe this place as a whole is as yet impossible.  It must suffice if you find in this letter a sketch or two—not worthy to be called a study—of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least, that we were verily in the Tropics.

You look out—would that you did look in fact!—over the low sill.  The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin.  But there the kindred ends.  A few green weeds, looking just like English ones, peep up through the gravel.  Weeds, all over the world, are mostly like each other; poor, thin, pale in leaf, small and meagre in stem and flower: meaner forms which fill up for good, and sometimes, too, for harm, the gaps left by Nature’s aristocracy of grander and, in these Tropics, more tyrannous and destroying forms.  So like home weeds they look: but pick one, and you find it unlike anything at home.  That one happens to be, as you may see by its little green mouse-tails, a pepper-weed, 27 first cousin to the great black pepper-bush in the gardens near by, with the berries of which you may burn your mouth gratis.

So it is, you would find, with every weed in the little cleared dell, some fifteen feet deep, beyond the gravel.  You could not—I certainly cannot—guess at the name, seldom at the family, of a single plant.  But I am going on too fast.  What are those sticks of wood which keep the gravel bank up?  Veritable bamboos; and a bamboo-pipe, too, is carrying the trickling cool water into the bath close by.  Surely we are in the Tropics.  You hear a sudden rattle, as of boards and brown paper, overhead, and find that it is the clashing of the huge leaves of a young fan palm, 28 growing not ten feet from the window.  It has no stem as yet; and the lower leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to each other by natural matting: but overhead they range out nobly in leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this is but a baby, a three years’ old thing.  Surely, again, we are in the Tropics.  Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut.  Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber, furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is, plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle.  Surely, again, we are in the Tropics.  Beyond it, again, blaze great orange and yellow flowers, with long stamens, and pistil curving upwards out of them.  They belong to a twining, scrambling bush, with finely-pinnated mimosa leaves.  That is the ‘Flower-fence,’ 29 so often heard of in past years; and round it hurries to and fro a great orange butterfly, larger seemingly than any English kind.  Next to it is a row of Hibiscus shrubs, with broad crimson flowers; then a row of young Screw-pines, 30 from the East Indian Islands, like spiral pine-apple plants twenty feet high standing on stilts.  Yes: surely we are in the Tropics.  Over the low roof (for the cottage is all of one storey) of purple and brown and white shingles, baking in the sun, rises a tall tree, which looks (as so many do here) like a walnut, but is not one.  It is the ‘Poui’ of the Indians, 31 and will be covered shortly with brilliant saffron flowers.

I turn my chair and look into the weedy dell.  The ground on the opposite slope (slopes are, you must remember, here as steep as house-roofs, the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts.  That is the famous Guinea-grass 32 which, introduced from Africa, has spread over the whole West Indies.  Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and ‘Felon’ printed on the back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between us and them are growing along the edge of the gutter, veritable pine-apples in the open air, and a low green tree just like an apple, which is a Guava; and a tall stick, thirty feet high, with a flat top of gigantic curly horse-chestnut leaves, which is a Trumpet-tree. 33  There are hundreds of them in the mountains round: but most of them dead, from the intense drought and fires of last year.  Beyond it, again, is a round-headed tree, looking like a huge Portugal laurel, covered with racemes of purple buds.  That is an ‘Angelim’; 34 when full-grown, one of the finest timbers in the world.  And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub?  Verily, again, we are in the Tropics.  They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern.  The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year’s leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut.  But these are not cocos.  The last year’s leaves of the coco are rich yellow, and its stem is curved.  These are groo-groos; 35

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1

Raleigh’s Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Iles of Azores.

2

Chiroteuthi and Onychoteuthi.

3

Cocoloba uvifera.

4

Plumieria.

5

Anona squamosa.

6

A. muricata.

7

A. chierimolia.

8

A. reticulata.

9

Persea gratissima.

10

Dioscorea.

11

Colocasia esculcuta.

12

Dr. Davy’s West Indies.

13

An account of the Souffrière of Montserrat is given by Dr. Nugent, Geological Society’s Transactions, vol. i., 1811.

14

For what is known of these, consult Dr. Nugent’s ‘Memoir on the Geology of Antigua,’ Transactions of Geological Society, vol. v., 1821.  See also Humboldt, Personal Narrative, book v. cap. 14.

15

Acrocomia.

16

Naval Chronicles, vol. xii. p. 206.

17

Craspedocephalus lanceolatus.

18

Coluber variabilis.

19

Breen’s St. Lucia, p. 295.

20

Personal Narrative, book v. cap. 14.

21

Dr. Davy.

22

Ipomæa Horsfallii.

23

Spondias lutea.

24

Desmoncus.

25

M. Joseph, History of Trinidad, from which most of these facts are taken.

26

Clitoria Ternatea; which should be in all our hothouses.

27

Peperomia.

28

Sabal.

29

Poinziana.

30

Pandanus.

31

Tecoma (serratifolia?)

32

Panicum jumentorum.

33

Cecropia.

34

Andira inermis.

35

Acrocomia sclerocarpa.