The English in the West Indies Part 6

Sir Graham had called upon me at Government House, and had spoken fully and freely about the offered American sugar treaty. As a severe sufferer he was naturally irritated at the rejection of it; and in the mood in which I found him, I should think it possible that if the Americans would hold their hands out with an offer of admission into the Union, he and a good many other gentlemen would meet them halfway. He did not say so--I conjecture only from natural probabilities, and from what I should feel myself if I were in their position. Happily the temptation cannot fall in their way. An American official laconically summed up the situation to me: 'As satellites, sir, as much as you please; but as parts of the primary--no, sir.' The Americans will not take them into the Union; they must remain, therefore, with their English primary and make the best of it; neither as satellites, for they have no proper motion of their own, nor as incorporated in the British Empire, for they derive no benefit from their connection with it, but as poor relations distantly acknowledged. I did not expect that Sir Graham would have more to say to me than he had said already: but he was a cultivated and noteworthy person, his house was said to be the most splendid of the old Barbadian merchant palaces, and I gratefully accepted an invitation to pay him a short visit.

I started as before in the early morning, before the sun was above the trees. The road followed the line of the sh.o.r.e. Originally, I believe, Barbadoes was like the Antilles, covered with forest. In the interior little remains save cabbage palms and detached clumps of mangy-looking mahogany trees. The forest is gone, and human beings have taken the place of it. For ten miles I was driving through a string of straggling villages, each cottage or cabin having its small vegetable garden and clump of plantains. Being on the western or sheltered side of the island, the sea was smooth and edged with mangrove, through which at occasional openings we saw the s.h.i.+ning water and the white coral beach, and fis.h.i.+ng boats either drawn up upon it or anch.o.r.ed outside with their sails up. Trees had been planted for shade among the houses. There were village greens with great silk-cotton trees, banyans and acacias, mangoes and oranges, and shaddocks with their large fruit glowing among the leaves like great golden melons. The people swarmed, children tumbling about half naked, so like each other that one wondered whether their mothers knew their own from their neighbours'; the fishermen's wives selling flying fish, of which there are infinite numbers. It was an innocent, pretty scene. One missed green fields with cows upon them.

Guinea gra.s.s, which is all that they have, makes excellent fodder, but is ugly to look at; and is cut and carried, not eaten where it grows. Of animal life there were innumerable donkeys--no black man will walk if he can find a donkey to carry him--infinite poultry, and pigs, familiar enough, but not allowed a free entry into the cabins as in Ireland. Of birds there was not any great variety. The humming birds preferred less populated quarters. There were small varieties of finches and sparrows and buntings, winged atoms without beauty of form or colour; there were a few wild pigeons; but the prevailing figure was the Barbadian crow, a little fellow no bigger than a blackbird, a diminutive jackdaw, who gets his living upon worms and insects and parasites, and so tame that he would perch upon a boy's head if he saw a chance of finding anything eatable there. The women dress ill in Barbadoes, for they imitate English ladies; but no dress can conceal the grace of their forms when they are young. It struck Pere Labat two centuries ago, and time and their supposed sufferings as slaves have made no difference. They work harder than the men, and are used as beasts of burden to fetch and carry, but they carry their loads on their heads, and thus from childhood have to stand upright with the neck straight and firm. They do not spoil their shapes with stays, or their walk with high-heeled shoes.

They plant their feet firmly on the ground. Every movement is elastic and rounded, and the grace of body gives, or seems to give, grace also to the eyes and expression. Poor things! it cannot compensate for their colour, which now when they are free is harder to bear than when they were slaves. Their prettiness, such as it is, is short-lived. They grow old early, and an old negress is always hideous.

After keeping by the sea for an hour we turned inland, and at the foot of a steep hill we met my host, who transferred me to his own carriage.

We had still four or five miles to go through cane fields and among sugar mills. At the end of them we came to a grand avenue of cabbage palms, a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet high. How their slim stems with their dense coronet of leaves survive a hurricane is one of the West Indian marvels. They escape destruction by the elasticity with which they yield to it. The branches, which in a calm stand out symmetrically, forming a circle of which the stem is the exact centre, bend round before a violent wind, are pressed close together, and stream out horizontally like a horse's tail.

The avenue led up to Sir Graham's house, which stands 800 feet above the sea. The garden, once the wonder of the island, was running wild, though rare trees and shrubs survived from its ancient splendour. Among them were two Wellingtonias as tall as the palms, but bent out of shape by the trade winds. Pa.s.sing through a hall, among a litter of Carib curiosities, we entered the drawing-room, a magnificent saloon extending with various compartments over the greater part of the ground-floor story. It was filled with rare and curious things, gathered in the days when sugar was a horn of plenty, and selected with the finest taste; pictures, engravings, gems, antiquarian relics, books, maps, and ma.n.u.scripts. There had been fine culture in the West Indies when all these treasures were collected. The English settlers there, like the English in Ireland, had the tastes of a grand race, and by-and-by we shall miss both of them when they are overwhelmed, as they are likely to be, in the revolutionary tide. Sir Graham was stemming it to the best of his ability, and if he was to go under would go under like a gentleman.

A dining room almost as large had once been the scene of hospitalities like those which are celebrated by Tom Cringle. A broad staircase led up from the hall to long galleries, out of which bedrooms opened; with cool deep balconies and the universal green blinds. It was a palace with which Aladdin himself might have been satisfied, one of those which had stirred the envying admiration of foreign travellers in the last century, one of many then, now probably the last surviving representative of Anglo-West Indian civilisation. Like other forms of human life, it has had its day and could not last for ever. Something better may grow in the place of it, but also something worse may grow.

The example of Hayti ought to suggest misgivings to the most ardent philonegro enthusiast.

West Indian cookery was famous over the world. Pere Labat devotes at least a thousand pages to the dishes compounded of the spices and fruits of the islands, and their fish and fowl. Carib tradition was developed by artists from London and Paris. The Caribs, according to Labat, only ate one another for ceremony and on state occasions; their common diet was as excellent as it was innocent; and they had ascertained by careful experience the culinary and medicinal virtues of every animal and plant around them. Tom Cringle is eloquent on the same subject, but with less scientific knowledge. My own unfortunately is less than his, and I can do no justice at all to Sir Graham's entertainment of me; I can but say that he treated me to a West Indian banquet of the old sort, infinite in variety, and with subtle differences of flavour for which no language provides names. The wine--laid up _consule Planco_, when Pitt was prime minister, and the days of liberty as yet were not--was as admirable as the dishes, and the fruit more exquisite than either. Such pineapples, such shaddocks, I had never tasted before, and shall never taste again.

Hospitable, generous, splendid as was Sir Graham's reception of me, it was nevertheless easy to see that the prospects of the island sat heavy upon him. We had a long conversation when breakfast was over, which, if it added nothing new to what I had heard before, deepened and widened the impression of it.

The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a transition state, a new birth; a pa.s.sing away of what is old and worn out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain any such hope at all. We have been a ruling power there for two hundred and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are drifting into helplessness, and they regard England and England's policy as the princ.i.p.al cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we emanc.i.p.ated, do not feel that they are particularly obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were ill treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them, and that perhaps it was not benevolence at all on our part, but a desire to free ourselves from the reproach of slaveholding. At any rate, the tendencies now in operation are loosening the hold which we possess on the islands, and the longer they last the looser that hold will become.

French influence is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and Guadaloupe. The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes and the Antilles.

Having acquitted our conscience by emanc.i.p.ation, we have left our West Indian interest to sink or swim. Our principle has been to leave each part of our empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we give the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair play; that we have any further moral responsibilities towards them we do not imagine, even in our dreams, when they have ceased to be of commercial importance to us; and we a.s.sume that the honour of being British subjects will suffice to secure their allegiance. It will not suffice, as we shall eventually discover. We have decided that if the West Indies are to become again prosperous they must recover by their own energy. Our other colonies can do without help; why not they? We ought to remember that they are not like the other colonies. We occupied them at a time when slavery was considered a lawful inst.i.tution, profitable to ourselves and useful to the souls of the negroes, who were brought by it within reach of salvation.[9] We became ourselves the chief slave dealers in the world. We peopled our islands with a population of blacks more dense by far in proportion to the whites than France or Spain ever ventured to do. We did not recognise, as the French and Spaniards did, that if our western colonies were permanently to belong to us, we must occupy them ourselves. We thought only of the immediate profit which was to be gathered out of the slave gangs; and the disproportion of the two races--always dangerously large--has increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emanc.i.p.ation. It is now beyond control on the old lines. The scanty whites are told that they must work out their own salvation on equal terms with their old servants. The relation is an impossible one. The independent energy which we may fairly look for in Australia and New Zealand is not to be looked for in Jamaica and Barbadoes; and the problem must have a new solution.

Confederation is to be the remedy, we are told. Let the islands be combined under a const.i.tution. The whites collectively will then be a considerable body, and can a.s.sert themselves successfully. Confederation is, as I said before of the movement in Trinidad, but a turn of the kaleidoscope, the same pieces with a new pattern. A West Indian self-governed Dominion is possible only with a full negro vote. If the whites are to combine, so will the blacks. It will be a rule by the blacks and for the blacks. Let a generation or two pa.s.s by and carry away with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general will be found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches made for him by a black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation. The two races are not equal and will not blend. If the white people do not depart of themselves, black legislation will make it impossible for any of them to stay who would not be better out of the way. The Anglo-Irish Protestants will leave Ireland if there is an Irish Catholic parliament in College Green; the whites, for the same reason, will leave the West Indies; and in one and the other the connection with the British Empire will disappear along with them. It must be so; only politicians whose horizon does not extend beyond their personal future, and whose ambition is only to secure the immediate triumph of their party, can expect anything else.

Before my stay at Barbadoes ended, I had an opportunity of meeting at dinner a negro of pure blood who has risen to eminence by his own talent and character. He has held the office of attorney-general. He is now chief justice of the island. Exceptions are supposed proverbially to prove nothing, or to prove the opposite of what they appear to prove.

When a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong against the recurrence of it. Having heard the craniological and other objections to the supposed ident.i.ty of the negro and white races, I came to the opinion long ago in Africa, and I have seen no reason to change it, that whether they are of one race or not there is no original or congenital difference of capacity between them, any more than there is between a black horse and a black dog and a white horse and a white dog.

With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races, and Mr.

----'s well-earned success is an additional evidence of it. But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery. It would be far truer to set it down to freedom. The African blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming civilised. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as like their father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human race has been upon the planet for a hundred thousand years at least, and the first traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at farthest beyond six thousand. During all those ages mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and beasts. In Egypt or in India or one knows not where, accident or natural development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties; and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise. Our own Anglo-Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government, European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the probation period of the negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglas in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered them. But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury. They will slide back into their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the level to which we have no right to say that they are incapable of rising.

Chief Justice R---- owes his elevation to his English environment and his English legal training. He would not pretend that he could have made himself what he is in Hayti or in Dahomey. Let English authority die away, and the average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to a.s.sert itself, and there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes or anywhere.

Naturally, I found him profoundly interested in the late revelations of the state of Hayti. Sir Spenser St. John, an English official, after residing for twelve years in Port au Prince, had in a published narrative with many details and particulars, declared that the republic of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the idol of all believers in the new gospel of liberty, had, after ninety years of independence, become a land where cannibalism could be practised with impunity. The African Obeah, the wors.h.i.+p of serpents and trees and stones, after smouldering in all the West Indies in the form of witchcraft and poisoning, had broken out in Hayti in all its old hideousness. Children were sacrificed as in the old days of Moloch and were devoured with horrid ceremony, salted limbs being preserved and sold for the benefit of those who were unable to attend the full solemnities.

That a man in the position of a British resident should have ventured on a statement which, if untrue, would be ruinous to himself, appeared in a high degree improbable. Yet one had to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I went out to the West Indies I was still unbelieving. I could not bring myself to credit that in an island nominally Catholic, where the French language was spoken, and there were cathedrals and churches and priests and missionaries, so horrid a revival of devil-wors.h.i.+p could have been really possible. All the inquiries which I had been able to make, from American and other officers who had been in Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St.

John's story. I had hardly found a person who entertained a doubt of it.

I was perplexed and uncertain, when the Chief Justice opened the subject and asked me what I thought. Had I been convinced I should have turned the conversation, but I was not convinced and I was not afraid to say so. I reminded him of the universal conviction through Europe that the Jews were habitually guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been detailed instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts of justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses had been found to swear to facts which had been accepted as conclusive. Wretched creatures in Henry III.'s time had been dragged by dozens at horses'

tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to pieces by infuriated mobs. Even within the last two years, the same accusation had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had been established apparently by adequate proof. So far as popular conviction of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence against them, nothing could be stronger; and no charge could be without foundation on ordinary principles of evidence which revived so often and in so many places. And yet many persons, I said, and myself among them, believed that although the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was from end to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into the particulars of some of the trials. They were like the trials for witchcraft. The belief had created the fact, and accusation was itself evidence. I was prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred similarly of anti-negro prejudice.

Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any eagerness I should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence and continued hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed me in my own. I told him that I was going to Hayti to learn what I could on the spot. I could not expect that I, on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than Sir Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with me a mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity. He took leave of me with an expression of pa.s.sionate anxiety that it might be found possible to remove so black a stain from his unfortunate race.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] As I correct the proofs I learn, to my great sorrow, that Sir Graham is dead. I have lost in him a lately made but valued friend; and the colony has lost the ablest of its legislators.

[9] It was on this ground alone that slavery was permitted in the French islands. Labat says:

C'est une loi tres-ancienne que les terres soumises aux rois de France rendent libres tous ceux qui s'y peuvent retirer. C'est ce qui fit que le roi Louis XIII, de glorieuse memoire, aussi pieux qu'il etoit sage, eut toutes les peines du monde a consentir que les premiers habitants des isles eussent des esclaves: et ne se rendit enfin qu'aux pressantes sollicitations qu'on luy faisoit de leur octroyer cette permission que parce qu'on lui remontra que c'etoit un moyen infaillible et l'unique qu'il y eut pour inspirer le culte du vrai Dieu aux Africains, les retirer de l'idolatrie, et les faire perseverer jusqu'a la mort dans la religion chretienne qu'on leur feroit embra.s.ser.--Vol. iv. p. 14.

CHAPTER X.

Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of Pere Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old fort and barracks--Conversation with an American--Const.i.tution of Dominica--Land at Roseau.

Beyond all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see Dominica.[10] It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April 12. It was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least known. A tribe of aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the forests retaining the old look and the old language, and, except that they no longer ate their prisoners, retaining their old habits. They were skilful fishermen, skilful basket makers, skilful in many curious arts.

The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is one of the group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished from St. Lucia, St.

Vincent, Grenada, &c., which form the Windward. The early geographers drew the line differently and more rationally. The main direction of the trade winds is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the west of it--Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The modern division corresponds to no natural phenomenon. The drift of the trades is rather from the north-east than from the south-east, and the names serve only now to describe our own not very successful political groupings.

Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions. The French took it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it, colonised it, planted in it their religion and their language, and fought desperately to maintain their possession. Lord Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the West Indies, insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever since remained in spite of the furious efforts which France made to recover an island which she so highly valued during the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to learn what we had made of a place which we had fought so hard for.

Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles, it is split into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through each there runs a full and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on the rich levels along the sh.o.r.e the French had once their cane fields and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.

Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his hungry appet.i.te for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages, acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and poisons. The Pere was a clever, curious man, with a genial human sympathy about him, and was indulgent to the faults which the poor coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he liked for a gla.s.s of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and good sense out of a woman.

At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely, bent double, so that under ordinary circ.u.mstances nothing of her face could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fas.h.i.+on, she loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of pins and needles, knives and scissors.

Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science.

He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North American Indians. They called themselves _Banari_, which meant 'come from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind.

Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in, battle, and handed them round to be gnawed at special festivals. They were a light-hearted, pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and ready to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a hammer shark for his amus.e.m.e.nt by diving under the monster and stabbing him with knives. As to their religion, they had no objection to anything.

But their real belief was in a sort of devil.

Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the Caribs into the mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an ordered form of society.

Madame Ouvernard and her court went to their own place. Canes were planted, and indigo and coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and parish churches were scattered about the island. There were convents of nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison in it.

The French might have been there till now had not we turned them out some ninety years ago; English enterprise then setting in that direction under the impulse of Rodney's victories. I was myself about to see the improvements which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost us so dear.

I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from Barbadoes to St.

Thomas's. On our way we touched at St. Lucia, another once famous possession of ours. This island was once French also. Rodney took it in 1778. It was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It was in the harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney collected the fleet which fought and won the great battle with the Count de Gra.s.se. At the peace of Versailles, St. Lucia was restored to France; but was retaken in 1796 by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous island, twice as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this late day we have suddenly discovered that we have an interest. The threatened Darien ca.n.a.l has awakened us to a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in those quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for such a purpose, and works are already in progress there, and the long-deserted forts and barracks which had been made over to snakes and lizards, are again to be occupied by English troops.

We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of the next morning we were in the pa.s.sage between St. Lucia and St. Vincent just under the 'Pitons,' which were soaring grandly above us in the twilight. The Pitons are two conical mountains rising straight out of the sea at the southern end of St. Lucia, one of them 3,000 feet high, the other a few feet lower, symmetrical in shape like sugar loaves, and so steep as to be inaccessible to any one but a member of the Alpine Club. Tradition says that four English seamen, belonging to the fleet, did once set out to climb the loftier of the two. They were watched in their ascent through a telescope. When halfway up one of them was seen to drop, while three went on; a few hundred feet higher a second dropped, and afterwards a third; one had almost reached the summit, when he fell also. No account of what had befallen them ever reached their s.h.i.+p. They were supposed to have been bitten by the fer de lance, the deadliest snake in St. Lucia and perhaps in the world, who had resented and punished their intrusion into regions where they had no business. Such is the local legend, born probably out of the terror of a reptile which is no legend at all, but a living and very active reality.

I had gone on deck on hearing where we were, and saw the twin grey peaks high above me in the sky, the last stars glimmering over their tops and the waves was.h.i.+ng against the black precipices at their base. The night had been rough, and a considerable sea was running, which changed, however, to an absolute calm when we had pa.s.sed the Pitons and were under the lee of the island. I could then observe the peculiar blue of the water which I was told that I should find at St. Lucia and Dominica.

I have seen the sea of very beautiful colours in several parts of the world, but I never saw any which equalled this. I do not know the cause.

The depth is very great even close to the sh.o.r.e. The islands are merely volcanic mountains with sides extremely steep. The coral insect has made anchorages in the bays and inlets; elsewhere you are out of soundings almost immediately. As to St. Lucia itself, if I had not seen Grenada, if I had not known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever made, so perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills, the glens dividing them and the high mountain ranges in the interior still draped in the white mist of morning. Here and there along the sh.o.r.e there were bright green spots which meant cane fields. Sugar cane in these countries is always called for brevity _cane_.

Here, as elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro, forty thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio altering every year to white disadvantage. The old system has not, however, disappeared as completely as in other places. There are still white planters with large estates, which are not enc.u.mbered as in Barbadoes. They are struggling along, discontented of course, but not wholly despondent. The chief complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks, who they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake except at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect anything else from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be, with whom they have no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages are but twopence an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary pleasure of the overseer.

Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed. When the troops return there will be a change, and spirit may be put into them again.

Castries, the old French town, lies at the head of a deep inlet which runs in among the mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future coaling station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting 'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and cheaply fortified.

There is little or no tide in these seas. There is depth of water sufficient in the greater part of the harbour for line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps to anchor and turn, and the few coral shoals which would be in the way are being torn up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare for the dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which is to follow.

There was real work actively going on, a rare and perhaps unexampled phenomenon in the English West Indies.

We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was a strange scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out of coal stores, and gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over the workmen's sheds. Volumes of smoke rose out of the dredging engines and hovered over the town. We had come back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as parrots in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours looked oddly out of place by the side of the grimy reproduction of England.

I went on sh.o.r.e and fell in with the engineer of the works, who kindly showed me his plans of the harbour, and explained what was to be done.

He showed me also some beautiful large bivalves which had been brought up in the sc.r.a.pers out of the coral. They were new to me and new to him, though they may be familiar enough to more experienced naturalists.

Among other curiosities he had a fer de lance, lately killed and preserved in spirits, a rat-tailed, reddish, powerful-looking brute, about four feet long and as thick as a child's wrist. Even when dead I looked at him respectfully, for his bite is fatal and the effect almost instantaneous. He is fearless, and will not, like most snakes, get out of your way if he hears you coming, but leaves you to get out of his. He has a bad habit, too, of taking his walks at night; he prefers a path or a road to the gra.s.s, and your house or your garden to the forest; while if you step upon him you will never do it again. They have introduced the mongoose, who has cleared the snakes out of Jamaica, to deal with him; but the mongoose knows the creature that he has to encounter, and as yet has made little progress in extirpating him.