Kitabı oku: «The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses», sayfa 4

CHAPTER V

West Indian politeness – Negro morals and felicity – Island of St. Vincent – Grenada – The harbour – Disappearance of the whites – An island of black freeholders – Tobago – Dramatic art – A promising incident.

West Indian civilisation is old-fashioned, and has none of the pushing manners which belong to younger and perhaps more thriving communities. The West Indians themselves, though they may be deficient in energy, are uniformly ladies and gentlemen, and all their arrangements take their complexion from the general tone of society. There is a refinement visible at once in the subsidiary vessels of the mail service which ply among the islands. They are almost as large as those which cross the Atlantic, and never on any line in the world have I met with officers so courteous and cultivated. The cabins were spacious and as cool as a temperature of 80°, gradually rising as we went south, would permit. Punkahs waved over us at dinner. In our berths a single sheet was all that was provided for us, and this was one more than we needed. A sea was running when we cleared out from under the land. Among the cabin passengers was a coloured family in good circumstances moving about with nurses and children. The little things, who had never been at sea before, sat on the floor, staring out of their large helpless black eyes, not knowing what was the matter with them. Forward there were perhaps two or three hundred coloured people going from one island to another, singing, dancing, and chattering all night long, as radiant and happy as carelessness and content could make them. Sick or not sick made no difference. Nothing could disturb the imperturbable good humour and good spirits.

It was too hot to sleep; we sat several of us smoking on deck, and I learnt the first authentic particulars of the present manner of life of these much misunderstood people. Evidently they belonged to a race far inferior to the Zulus and Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa. They were more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have been slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at the worst had lost nothing by the change. They were good-natured, innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps, but not more lazy than is perfectly natural when even Europeans must be roused to activity by cocktail.

In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, negro families have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a cow. They live surrounded by most of the fruits which grew in Adam's paradise – oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not apples. Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken off from nature, and like Adam again they are under the covenant of innocence. Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to sin, because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They are married as they call it, but not parsoned. The woman prefers a looser tie that she may be able to leave a man if he treats her unkindly. Yet they are not licentious. I never saw an immodest look in one their faces, and never heard of any venal profligacy. The system is strange, but it answers. A missionary told me that a connection rarely turns out well which begins with a legal marriage. The children scramble up anyhow, and shift for themselves like chickens as soon as they are able to peck. Many die in this way by eating unwholesome food, but also many live, and those who do live grow up exactly like their parents. It is a very peculiar state of things, not to be understood, as priest and missionary agree, without long acquaintance. There is immorality, but an immorality which is not demoralising. There is sin, but it is the sin of animals, without shame, because there is no sense of doing wrong. They eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the difference between good and evil. They steal, but as a tradition of the time when they were themselves chattels, and the laws of property did not apply to them. They are honest about money, more honest perhaps than a good many whites. But food or articles of use they take freely, as they were allowed to do when slaves, in pure innocence of heart. In fact these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the Fall, and must come of another stock after all.

Meanwhile they are perfectly happy. In no part of the globe is there any peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty's black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to make them restless. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. In their own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two, lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it in Africa; their descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being, the 'nigger' who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity.

We retired to our berths at last. At waking we were at anchor off St. Vincent, an island of volcanic mountains robed in forest from shore to crest. Till late in the last century it was the headquarters of the Caribs, who kept up a savage independence there, recruited by runaway slaves from Barbadoes or elsewhere. Brandy and Sir Ralph Abercrombie reduced them to obedience in 1796, and St. Vincent throve tolerably down to the days of free trade. Even now when I saw it, Kingston, the principal town, looked pretty and well to do, reminding me, strange to say, of towns in Norway, the houses stretching along the shore painted in the same tints of blue or yellow or pink, with the same red-tiled roofs, the trees coming down the hill sides to the water's edge, villas of modest pretensions shining through the foliage, with the patches of cane fields, the equivalent in the landscape of the brilliant Norwegian grass. The prosperity has for the last forty years waned and waned. There are now two thousand white people there, and forty thousand coloured people, and proportions alter annually to our disadvantage. The usual remedies have been tried. The constitution has been altered a dozen times. Just now I believe the Crown is trying to do without one, having found the results of the elective principle not encouraging, but we shall perhaps revert to it before long; any way, the tables show that each year the trade of the island decreases, and will continue to decrease while the expenditure increases and will increase.

I did not land, for the time was short, and as a beautiful picture the island was best seen from the deck. The characteristics of the people are the same in all the Antilles, and could be studied elsewhere. The bustle and confusion in the ship, the crowd of boats round the ladder, the clamour of negro men's tongues, and the blaze of colours from the negro women's dresses, made up together a scene sufficiently entertaining for the hour which we remained. In the middle of it the Governor, Mr. S – , came on board with another official. They were going on in the steamer to Tobago, which formed part of his dominions.

Leaving St. Vincent, we were all the forenoon passing the Grenadines, a string of small islands fitting into their proper place in the Antilles semicircle, but as if Nature had forgotten to put them together or else had broken some large island to pieces and scattered them along the line. Some were large enough to have once carried sugar plantations, and are now made over wholly to the blacks; others were fishing stations, droves of whales during certain months frequenting these waters; others were mere rocks, amidst which the white-sailed American coasting schooners were beating up against the north-east trade. There was a stiff breeze, and the sea was white with short curling waves, but we were running before it and the wind kept the deck fresh. At Grenada, the next island, we were to go on shore.

Grenada was, like St. Vincent, the home for centuries of man-eating Caribs, French for a century and a half, and finally, after many desperate struggles for it, was ceded to England at the peace of Versailles. It is larger than St. Vincent, though in its main features it has the same character. There are lakes in the hills, and a volcanic crater not wholly quiescent; but the especial value of Grenada, which made us fight so hardly to win it, is the deep and landlocked harbour, the finest in all the Antilles.

Père Labat, to whose countrymen it belonged at the time of his own visit there, says that 'if Barbadoes had such a harbour as Grenada it would be an island without a rival in the world. If Grenada belonged to the English, who knew how to turn to profit natural advantages, it would be a rich and powerful colony. In itself it was all that man could desire. To live there was to live in paradise.' Labat found the island occupied by countrymen of his own, 'paisans aisez', he calls them, growing their tobacco, their indigo and scarlet rocou, their pigs and their poultry, and contented to be without sugar, without slaves, and without trade. The change of hands from which he expected so much had actually come about. Grenada did belong to the English, and had belonged to us ever since Rodney's peace. I was anxious to see how far Labat's prophecy had been fulfilled.

St. George's, the 'capital,' stands on the neck of a peninsula a mile in length, which forms one side of the harbour. Of the houses, some look out to sea, some inwards upon the carenage, as the harbour is called. At the point there was a fort, apparently of some strength, on which the British flag was flying. We signalled that we had the Governor on board, and the fort replied with a puff of smoke. Sound there was none or next to none, but we presumed that it had come from a gun of some kind. We anchored outside. Mr. S – landed in an official boat with two flags, a missionary in another, which had only one. The crews of a dozen other boats then clambered up the gangway to dispute possession of the rest of us, shouting, swearing, lying, tearing us this way and that way as if we were carcases and they wild beasts wanting to dine upon us. We engaged a boat for ourselves as we supposed; we had no sooner entered it than the scandalous boatman proceeded to take in as many more passengers as it would hold. Remonstrance being vain, we settled the matter by stepping into the boat next adjoining, and amidst howls and execrations we were borne triumphantly off and were pulled in to the land.

Labat had not exaggerated the beauty of the landlocked basin into which we entered on rounding the point. On three sides wooded hills rose high till they passed into mountains; on the fourth was the castle with its slopes and batteries, the church and town beyond it, and everywhere luxuriant tropical forest trees overhanging the violet-coloured water. I could well understand the Frenchman's delight when he saw it, and also the satisfaction with which he would now acknowledge that he had been a shortsighted prophet. The English had obtained Grenada, and this is what they had made of it. The forts which had been erected by his countrymen had been deserted and dismantled; the castle on which we had seen our flag flying was a ruin; the walls were crumbling and in many places had fallen down. One solitary gun was left, but that was honeycombed and could be fired only with half a charge to salute with. It was true that the forts had ceased to be of use, but that was because there was nothing left to defend. The harbour is, as I said, the best in the West Indies. There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boat-yard that I could see where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet mended. Once there had been a line of wharves, but the piles had been eaten by worms and the platforms had fallen through. Round us when we landed were unroofed warehouses, weed-choked courtyards, doors gone, and window frames fallen in or out. Such a scene of desolation and desertion I never saw in my life save once, a few weeks later at Jamaica. An English lady with her children had come to the landing place to meet my friends. They, too, were more like wandering ghosts than human beings with warm blood in them. All their thoughts were on going home – home out of so miserable an exile.⁴

Nature and the dark race had been simply allowed by us to resume possession of the island. Here, where the cannon had roared, and ships and armies had fought, and the enterprising English had entered into occupancy, under whom, as we are proud to fancy, the waste places of the earth grow green, and industry and civilisation follow as an inevitable fruit, all was now silence. And this was an English Crown colony, as rich in resources as any area of soil of equal size in the world. England had demanded and seized the responsibility of managing it – this was the result.

A gentleman who for some purpose was a passing resident in the island, had asked us to dine with him. His house was three or four miles inland. A good road remained as a legacy from other times, and a pair of horses and a phaeton carried us swiftly to his door. The town of St. George's had once been populous, and even now there seemed no want of people, if mere numbers sufficed. We passed for half a mile through a straggling street, where the houses were evidently occupied though unconscious for many a year of paint or repair. They were squalid and dilapidated, but the luxuriant bananas and orange trees in the gardens relieved the ugliness of their appearance. The road when we left the town was overshadowed with gigantic mangoes planted long ago, with almond trees and cedar trees, no relations of our almonds or our cedars, but the most splendid ornaments of the West Indian forest. The valley up which we drove was beautiful, and the house, when we reached it, showed taste and culture. Mr. – had rare trees, rare flowers, and was taking advantage of his temporary residence in the tropics to make experiments in horticulture. He had been brought there, I believe, by some necessities of business. He told us that Grenada was now the ideal country of modern social reformers. It had become an island of pure peasant proprietors. The settlers, who had once been a thriving and wealthy community, had almost melted away. Some thirty English estates remained which could still be cultivated, and were being cultivated with remarkable success. But the rest had sold their estates for anything which they could get. The free blacks had bought them, and about 8,000 negro families, say 40,000 black souls in all, now shared three-fourths of the soil between them. Each family lived independently, growing coffee and cocoa and oranges, and all were doing very well. The possession of property had brought a sense of its rights with it. They were as litigious as Irish peasants; everyone was at law with his neighbour, and the island was a gold mine to the Attorney-General; otherwise they were quiet harmless fellows, and if the politicians would only let them alone, they would be perfectly contented, and might eventually, if wisely managed, come to some good. To set up a constitution in such a place was a ridiculous mockery, and would only be another name for swindling and jobbery. Black the island was, and black it would remain. The conditions were never likely to arise which would bring back a European population; but a governor who was a sensible man, who would reside and use his natural influence, could manage it with perfect ease. The island belonged to England; we were responsible for what we made of it, and for the blacks' own sakes we ought not to try experiments upon them. They knew their own deficiencies and would infinitely prefer a wise English ruler to any constitution which could be offered them. If left entirely to themselves, they would in a generation or two relapse into savages; there were but two alternatives before not Grenada only, but all the English West Indies – either an English administration pure and simple, like the East Indian, or a falling eventually into a state like that of Hayti, where they eat the babies, and no white man can own a yard of land.

It was dark night when we drove back to the port. The houses along the road, which had looked so miserable on the outside, were now lighted with paraffin lamps. I could see into them, and was astonished to observe signs of comfort and even signs of taste – arm-chairs, sofas, sideboards with cut glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon the walls. The old state of things is gone, but a new state of things is rising which may have a worth of its own. The plant of civilisation as yet has taken but feeble root, and is only beginning to grow. It may thrive yet if those who have troubled all the earth will consent for another century to take their industry elsewhere.

The ship's galley was waiting at the wharf when we reached it. The captain also had been dining with a friend on shore, and we had to wait for him. The off-shore night breeze had not yet risen. The harbour was smooth as a looking glass, and the stars shone double in the sky and on the water. The silence was only broken by the whistle of the lizards or the cry of some far-off marsh frog. The air was warmer than we ever feel it in the depth of an English summer, yet pure and delicious and charged with the perfume of a thousand flowers. One felt it strange that with so beautiful a possession lying at our doors, we should have allowed it to slide out of our hands. I could say for myself, like Père Labat, the island was all that man could desire. 'En un mot, la vie y est délicieuse.'

The anchor was got up immediately that we were on board. In the morning we were to find ourselves at Port of Spain. Mr. S – , the Windward Island governor, who had joined us at St. Vincent, was, as I said, going to Tobago. De Foe took the human part of his Robinson Crusoe from the story of Juan Fernandez. The locality is supposed to have been Tobago, and Trinidad the island from which the cannibal savages came. We are continually shuffling the cards, in a hope that a better game may be played with them. Tobago is now-annexed to Trinidad. Last year it was a part of Mr. S – 's dominions which he periodically visited. I fell in with him again on his return, and he told us an incident which befell him there, illustrating the unexpected shapes in which the schoolmaster is appearing among the blacks. An intimation was brought to him on his arrival that, as the Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe at the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency. Of course he consented. They came, and went through their performance. To Mr. S – 's, and probably to the reader's astonishment, the play which they had selected was the 'Merchant of Venice.' Of the rest of it he perhaps thought, like the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry stuff;' but Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation. With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may have been assisted by personal recollections.

CHAPTER VI

Charles Kingsley at Trinidad – 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer' – A French forban– Adventure at Aves – Mass on board a pirate ship – Port of Spain – A house in the tropics – A political meeting – Government House – The Botanical Gardens' – Kingsley's rooms – Sugar estates and coolies.

I might spare myself a description of Trinidad, for the natural features of the place, its forests and gardens, its exquisite flora, the loveliness of its birds and insects, have been described already, with a grace of touch and a fullness of knowledge which I could not rival if I tried, by my dear friend Charles Kingsley. He was a naturalist by instinct, and the West Indies and all belonging to them had been the passion of his life. He had followed the logs and journals of the Elizabethan adventurers till he had made their genius part of himself. In Amyas Leigh, the hero of 'Westward Ho,' he produced a figure more completely representative of that extraordinary set of men than any other novelist, except Sir Walter, has ever done for an age remote from his own. He followed them down into their latest developments, and sang their swan song in his 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer.' So characteristic is this poem of the transformation of the West Indies of romance and adventure into the West Indies of sugar and legitimate trade, that I steal it to ornament my own prosaic pages.

THE LAY OF THE LAST BUCCANEER

 
Oh! England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,
But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I;
And such a port for mariners I'll never see again
As the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish main.
There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
All furnished well with small arms and cannon all about;
And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free
To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
Then we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,
Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folks of old;
Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
Who flog men and keelhaul them and starve them to the bone.
Oh! palms grew high in Aves, and fruits that shone like gold,
And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold,
And the negro maids to Aves from bondage fast did flee
To welcome gallant sailors a sweeping in from sea.
 
 
Oh! sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,
A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
With a negro lass to fan you while you listened to the roar
Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the shore.
But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be,
So the king's ships sailed on Aves and quite put down were we.
All day we fought like bull dogs, but they burnt the booms at night,
And I fled in a piragua sore wounded from the fight.
Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside,
Till for all I tried to cheer her the poor young thing she died.
But as I lay a gasping a Bristol sail came by,
And brought me home to England here to beg until I die.
And now I'm old and going: I'm sure I can't tell where.
One comfort is, this world's so hard I can't be worse off there.
If I might but be a sea dove, I'd fly across the main
To the pleasant Isle of Aves to look at it once again.
 

By the side of this imaginative picture of a poor English sea rover, let me place another, an authentic one, of a French forban or pirate in the same seas. Kingsley's Aves, or Isle of Birds, is down on the American coast. There is another island of the same name, which was occasionally frequented by the same gentry, about a hundred miles south of Dominica. Père Labat going once from Martinique to Guadaloupe had taken a berth with Captain Daniel, one of the most noted of the French corsairs of the day, for better security. People were not scrupulous in those times, and Labat and Daniel had been long good friends. They were caught in a gale off Dominica, blown away, and carried to Aves, where they found an English merchant ship lying a wreck. Two English ladies from Barbadoes and a dozen other people had escaped on shore. They had sent for help, and a large vessel came for them the day after Daniel's arrival. Of course he made a prize of it. Labat said prayers on board for him before the engagement, and the vessel surrendered after the first shot. The good humour of the party was not disturbed by this incident. The pirates, their prisoners, and the ladies stayed together for a fortnight at Aves, catching turtles and boucanning them, picnicking, and enjoying themselves. Daniel treated the ladies with the utmost politeness, carried them afterwards to St. Thomas's, dismissed them unransomed, sold his prizes, and wound up the whole affair to the satisfaction of every one. Labat relates all this with wonderful humour, and tells, among other things, the following story of Daniel. On some expedition, when he was not so fortunate as to have a priest on board, he was in want of provisions. Being an outlaw he could not furnish himself in an open port. One night he put into the harbour of a small island, called Los Santos, not far from Dominica, where only a few families resided. He sent a boat on shore in the darkness, took the priest and two or three of the chief inhabitants out of their beds, and carried them on board, where he held them as hostages, and then under pretence of compulsion requisitioned the island to send him what he wanted. The priest and his companions were treated meanwhile as guests of distinction. No violence was necessary, for all parties understood one another. While the stores were being collected, Daniel suggested that there was a good opportunity for his crew to hear mass. The priest of Los Santos agreed to say it for them. The sacred vessels &c. were sent for from the church on shore. An awning was rigged over the forecastle, and an altar set up under it. The men chanted the prayers. The cannon answered the purpose of music. Broadsides were fired at the first sentence, at the Exaudiat, at the Elevation, at the Benediction, and a fifth at the prayer for the king. The service was wound up by a Vive le Roi! A single small accident only had disturbed the ceremony. One of the pirates, at the Elevation, being of a profane mind, made an indecent gesture. Daniel rebuked him, and, as the offence was repeated, drew a pistol and blew the man's brains out, saying he would do the same to any one who was disrespectful to the Holy Sacrament. The priest being a little startled, Daniel begged him not to be alarmed; he was only chastising a rascal to teach him his duty. At any rate, as Labat observed, he had effectually prevented the rascal from doing anything of the same kind again. Mass being over, the body was thrown overboard, and priest and congregation went their several ways.

Kingsley's 'At Last' gave Trinidad an additional interest to me, but even he had not prepared me completely for the place which I was to see. It is only when one has seen any object with one's own eyes, that the accounts given by others become recognisable and instructive.

Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The Orinoco river and the ocean currents between them have cut a channel between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is approached are narrow and are called bocas or mouths – one the Dragon's Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood, the water is brackish, and the brilliant violet blue of the Caribbean Sea is changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbour which is so formed would hold all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be the depôt one day of an enormous trade.

Trinidad has had its period of romance. Columbus was the first discoverer of it. Raleigh was there afterwards on his expedition in search of his gold mine, and tarred his vessels with pitch out of the famous lake. The island was alternately Spanish and French till Picton took it in 1797, since which time it has remained English. The Carib part of the population has long vanished. The rest of it is a medley of English, French, Spaniards, negroes, and coolies. The English, chiefly migratory, go there to make money and go home with it. The old colonial families have few representatives left, but the island prospers, trade increases, coolies increase, cocoa and coffee plantations and indigo plantations increase. Port of Spain, the capital, grows annually; and even sugar holds its own in spite of low prices, for there is money at the back of it, and a set of people who, being speculative and commercial, are better on a level with the times than the old-fashioned planter aristocracy of the other islands. The soil is of extreme fertility, about a fourth of it under cultivation, the rest natural forest and unappropriated Crown land.

We passed the 'Dragon's Jaws' before daylight. The sun had just risen when we anchored off Port of Spain. We saw before us the usual long line of green hills with mountains behind them; between the hills and the sea was a low, broad, alluvial plain, deposited by an arm of the Orinoco and by the other rivers which run into the gulf. The cocoa-nut palms thrive best on the water's edge. They stretched for miles on either side of us as a fringe to the shore. Where the water was shoal, there were vast swamps of mangrove, the lower branches covered with oysters.

However depressed sugar might be, business could not be stagnant. Ships of all nations lay round us taking in or discharging cargo. I myself formed for the time being part of the cargo of my friend and host Mr. G – , who had brought me to Trinidad, the accomplished son of a brilliant mother, himself a distinguished lawyer and member of the executive council of the island, a charming companion, an invaluable public servant, but with the temperament of a man of genius, half humorous, half melancholy, which does not find itself entirely at home in West Indian surroundings.