The English in the West Indies Part 3

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 pa.s.sion 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 h.o.a.rds 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 la.s.s to fan you while you listened to the roar Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the sh.o.r.e.

But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be, So the king's s.h.i.+ps 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 la.s.s 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. Pere 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 s.h.i.+p lying a wreck. Two English ladies from Barbadoes and a dozen other people had escaped on sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.s. The priest of Los Santos agreed to say it for them. The sacred vessels &c. were sent for from the church on sh.o.r.e. 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. Ma.s.s 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 depot 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sed the 'Dragon's Jaws' before daylight. The sun had just risen when we anch.o.r.ed 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 sh.o.r.e. 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. s.h.i.+ps 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.

On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, 'Port of Spain' having been built by French and Spaniards according to their national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature, which is that of a forcing house and rarely falls below 80. The streets are broad and are planted with trees for shade, each house where room permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes and coffee plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none.

There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which run down by the footway are flushed almost every day. But they are all open. Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be washed into them or left to putrefy as fate shall direct. The smell would not be pleasant without the help of that natural scavenger the Johnny crow, a black vulture who roosts on the trees and feeds in the middle of the streets. We pa.s.sed a dozen of these unclean but useful birds in a fas.h.i.+onable thoroughfare gobbling up chicken entrails and refusing to be disturbed. When gorged they perch in rows upon the roofs. On the ground they are the nastiest to look at of all winged creatures; yet on windy days they presume to soar like their kindred, and when far up might be taken for eagles.

The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and the rain and Johnny crows between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a large savannah or park, where the villas are of the successful men of business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool airy habitation with open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off from the savannah by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a cabbage palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had collected in the woods. The borders were blazing with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn colour, the largest that I had ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting room, loaded with the perfume of orange trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room a.s.signed to myself would have been equally delightful but that my possession of it was disputed even in daylight by mosquitoes, who for bloodthirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and examined him through a gla.s.s. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius, had drawn his exact likeness as the devil--a long black stroke for a body, nick for neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for line there the figure was before me which in the unforgetable tailpiece is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the look-out for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land crabs, who would bite me if I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet, he is without a match in the world.

From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco smoke, or hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided.

Otherwise I found every provision to make life pa.s.s deliciously. To walk is difficult in a damp steamy temperature hotter during daylight than the hottest forcing house in Kew. I was warned not to exert myself and to take c.o.c.ktail freely. In the evening I might venture out with the bats and take a drive if I wished in the twilight. Languidly charming as it all was, I could not help asking myself of what use such a possession could be either to England or the English nation. We could not colonise it, could not cultivate it, could not draw a revenue from it. If it prospered commercially the prosperity would be of French and Spaniards, mulattoes and blacks, but scarcely, if at all, of my own countrymen. For here too, as elsewhere, they were growing fewer daily, and those who remained were looking forward to the day when they could be released. If it were not for the honour of the thing, as the Irishman said after being carried in a sedan chair which had no bottom, we might have spared ourselves so unnecessary a conquest.

Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took us round the savannah. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are fond of fine colours, especially black human beings, and the park was as brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene became yet more wonderful; air, gra.s.s, and trees being alight with fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glowworm. The palm tree at our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky, a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and clas.h.i.+ng against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night wind, while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.

The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to bed there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting which was to be held in a few days on the savannah. Trinidad is a purely Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus.

The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in 'Port of Spain' had discovered that they were living under 'a degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a 'const.i.tution.' They did not complain that their affairs had been ill managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their treasury. If this was so, it seemed to me that they had better let well alone. The population, all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty thousand than that of Barbadoes. They were a mixed and motley a.s.semblage of all races and colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never hitherto troubling themselves about politics. But it had pleased the Home Government to set up the beginning of a const.i.tution again in Jamaica, no one knew why, but so it was, and Trinidad did not choose to be behindhand. The official appointments were valuable, and had been hitherto given away by the Crown. The local popularities very naturally wished to have them for themselves. This was the reality in the thing so far as there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases borrowed from the great English masters of the art, about privileges of manhood, moral dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, &c., intended for home consumption among the believers in the orthodox Radical faith.

For myself I could but reply to the gentlemen who had sent the invitation, that I was greatly obliged by the compliment, but that I knew too little of their affairs to make my presence of any value to them. As they were doing so well, I did not see myself why they wanted an alteration. Political changes were generally little more than turns of a kaleidoscope; you got a new pattern, but it was made of the same pieces, and things went on much as before. If they wanted political liberty I did not doubt that they would get it if they were loud and persistent enough. Only they must understand that at home we were now a democracy. Any const.i.tution which was granted them would be on the widest basis. The blacks and coolies outnumbered the Europeans by four to one, and perhaps when they had what they asked for they might be less pleased than they expected.

You rise early in the tropics. The first two hours of daylight are the best of the day. My friend drove me round the town in his buggy the next morning. My second duty was to pay my respects to the Governor, Sir William Robinson, who had kindly offered me hospitality, and for which I must present myself to thank him. In Sir William I found one of those happy men whose const.i.tution is superior to climate, who can do a long day's work in his office, play cricket or lawn tennis in the afternoon, and entertain his miscellaneous subjects in the evening with sumptuous hospitality--a vigorous, effective, perhaps ambitious gentleman, with a clear eye to the views of his employers at home on whom his promotion depends--certain to make himself agreeable to them, likely to leave his mark to useful purpose on the colonies over which he presides or may preside hereafter. Here in Trinidad he was learning Spanish in addition to his other linguistic accomplishments, that he might show proper courtesies to Spanish residents and to visitors from South America.

The 'Residence' stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba or silk cotton tree, umbrella shaped, fifty yards in diameter, the huge and b.u.t.tressed trunk throwing out branches so ma.s.sive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.

Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi the proper home of Obeah. To cut one down is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil.

From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.

I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which we cannot raise even Lilliputian imitations. Let man be what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan palm of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water. Of exogenous trees, the majority were leguminous in some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seed in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old World names with characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations to peaches, and gum trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw forms which you seemed to recognise till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake.

A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia n.o.bilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendant bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it has not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.

Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice trees, orange trees, coffee plants and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odour, in which I might have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel tree.

Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other, the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker atmosphere. I saw a pair of b.u.t.terflies the match of which I do not remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peac.o.c.k's neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one.

'That sort no let catchee, ma.s.sa,' he said; and I was penitently glad to hear it.

Among the wonders of the gardens are the vines as they call them, that is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees.

Standing in an open s.p.a.ce there was what once had been a mighty 'cedar.'

It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had been murdered by a 'fig' vine which had started from the root, twined itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and spreading out in all directions had covered boughs and twigs with a foliage not their own. So far the 'vine' had done no worse than ivy does at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether.

The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything, formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an ordinary swing. In three distinctly perfect instances the 'vine' had executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig vine threw out fine tendrils which hung downwards like strings. The strongest among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them, the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion that the wind had been a.s.sisted by some aspiring energy in the plant itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.

But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage at the extreme angle of it (the old Government House before the present fabric had been erected), where Kingsley had been the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep verandahs lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out into the savannah through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the canes growing thick in circular ma.s.ses and shooting up a hundred feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape, peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing evening of his own life.

It was the dry season, mid-winter, yet raining every day for two or three hours, and when it rains in these countries it means business.

When the sky cleared the sun was intolerably hot, and distant expeditions under such conditions suited neither my age nor my health.

With c.o.c.ktail I might have ventured, but to c.o.c.ktail I could never heartily reconcile myself. Trinidad has one wonder in it, a lake of bitumen some ninety acres in extent, which all travellers are expected to visit, and which few residents care to visit. A black lake is not so beautiful as an ordinary lake. I had no doubt that it existed, for the testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was shown an actual specimen of the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe without seeing and without undertaking a tedious journey. I rather sympathised with a n.o.ble lord who came to Port of Spain in his yacht, and like myself had the lake impressed upon him. As a middle course between going thither and appearing to slight his friends' recommendations, he said that he would send his steward.

In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were living, and what they were thinking about, and this could best be done by drives about the town and neighbourhood. The cultivated land is a mere fringe round the edges of the forest. Three-fourths of the soil are untouched.

The rivers running out of the mountains have carved out the usual long deep valleys, and spread the bottoms with rich alluvial soil. Here among the wooded slopes are the country houses of the merchants. Here are the cabins of the black peasantry with their cocoa and coffee and orange plantations, which as in Grenada they hold largely as freeholds, reproducing as near as possible the life in Paradise of our first parents, without the consciousness of a want which they are unable to gratify, not compelled to work, for the earth of her own self bears for them all that they need, and ignorant that there is any difference between moral good and evil.

Large sugar estates, of course, there still are, and as the owners have not succeeded in bringing the negroes to work regularly for them,[5]

they have introduced a few thousand Coolies under indentures for five years. These Asiatic importations are very happy in Trinidad; they save money, and many of them do not return home when their time is out, but stay where they are, buy land, or go into trade. They are proud, however, and will not intermarry with the Africans. Few bring their families with them; and women being scanty among them, there arise inconveniences and sometimes serious crimes.

It were to be wished that there was more prospect of the Coolie race becoming permanent than I fear there is. They work excellently. They are picturesque additions to the landscape, as they keep to the bright colours and graceful drapery of India. The grave dignity of their faces contrasts remarkably with the broad, good-humoured, but common features of the African. The black women look with envy at the straight hair of Asia, and twist their unhappy wool into knots and ropes in the vain hope of being mistaken for the purer race; but this is all. The African and the Asiatic will not mix, and the African being the stronger will and must prevail in Trinidad as elsewhere in the West Indies. Out of a total population of 170,000, there are 25,000 whites and mulattoes, 10,000 coolies, the rest negroes. The English part of the Europeans shows no tendency to increase. The English come as birds of pa.s.sage, and depart when they have made their fortunes. The French and Spaniards may hold on to Trinidad as a home. Our people do not make homes there, and must be looked on as a transient element.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The negroes in the interior are beginning to cultivate sugar cane in small patches, with common mills to break it up. If the experiment succeeds it may extend.

CHAPTER VII.

A Coolie village--Negro freeholds--Waterworks--Pythons--Slavery--Evidence of Lord Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of English rule--The Blue Basin--Black boy and cray fish.