The English in the West Indies Part 8

I have known the fis.h.i.+ng boys of the English Channel all my life; they are generally skilful, ready, and daring beyond their years; but I never knew one lad not more than thirteen or fourteen years old who, if woke out of his sleep by a hurricane in a dark night and alone, would have understood so well what to do, or have it done so effectually. There are plenty more of such black boys in Dominica, and they deserve a better fate than to be sent drifting before const.i.tutional whirlwinds back into barbarism, because we, on whom their fate depends, are too ignorant or too careless to provide them with a tolerable government.

The kind Captain Churchill, finding himself tied to his chair, and wis.h.i.+ng to give me every a.s.sistance towards seeing the island, had invited a creole gentleman from the other side of it to stay a few days with us. Mr. F----, a man about thirty, was one of the few survivors from among the planters; he had never been out of the West Indies, but was a man of honesty and intelligence, could use his eyes, and form sound judgments on subjects which immediately concerned him. I had studied Roseau for myself. With Mr. F---- for a companion, I made acquaintance with the environs. We started for our walks at daybreak, in the cool of the morning. We climbed cliffs, we rambled on the rich levels about the river, once amply cultivated, and even now the soil is luxuriant in neglect; a few canefields still survive, but most of them are turned to other uses, and you pa.s.s wherever you go the ruins of old mills, the ma.s.sive foundations of ancient warehouses, huge hewn stones built and mortared well together, telling what once had been; the mango trees, which the owners had planted, waving green over the wrecks of their forgotten industry. Such industry as is now to be found is, as elsewhere in general, the industry of the black peasantry. It is the same as in Grenada: the whites, or the English part of them, have lost heart, and cease to struggle against the stream. A state of things more helplessly provoking was never seen. Skill and capital and labour have only to be brought to bear together, and the land might be a Garden of Eden. All precious fruits, and precious spices, and gums, and plants of rarest medicinal virtues will spring and grow and flourish for the asking. The limes are as large as lemons, and in the markets of the United States are considered the best in the world.

As to natural beauty, the West Indian Islands are like Scott's novels, where we admire most the one which we have read the last. But Dominica bears the palm away from all of them. One morning Mr. F---- took me a walk up the Roseau river, an ample stream even in what is called the dry season, with deep pools full of eels and mullet. We entered among the hills which were rising steep above us. The valley grew deeper, or rather there were a series of valleys, gorges dense with forest, which had been torn out by the cataracts. The path was like the mule tracts of the Alps, cut in other days along the sides of the precipices with remnants of old conduits which supplied water to the mills below. Rich odorous acacias bent over us. The flowers, the trees, the birds, the insects, were a maze of perfume and loveliness. Occasionally some valley opposite the sun would be spanned by a rainbow as the rays shone through a morning shower out of the blue sky. We wandered on and on, wading through tributary brooks, stopping every minute to examine some new fern or plant, peasant women and children meeting us at intervals on their way into the town. There were trees to take shelter under when indispensable, which even the rain of Dominica could not penetrate. The levels at the bottom of the valleys and the lower slopes, where the soil was favourable, were carelessly planted with limes which were in full bearing. Small black boys and girls went about under the trees, gathering the large lemon-shaped fruit which lay on the ground thick as apples in a West of England orchard. Here was all this profusion of nature, lavish beyond example, and the enterprising youth of England were neglecting a colony which might yield them wealth beyond the treasures of the old sugar planters, going to Florida, to Texas, to South America, taking their energy and their capital to the land of the foreigner, leaving Dominica, which might be the garden of the world, a precious emerald set in the ring of their own Antilles, enriched by the sacred memories of glorious English achievements, as if such a place had no existence. Dominica would surrender herself to-morrow with a light heart to France, to America, to any country which would accept the charge of her destinies. Why should she care any more for England, which has so little care for her? Beauties conscious of their charms do not like to be so thrown aside. There is no dislike to us among the blacks; they are indifferent, but even their indifference would be changed into loyalty if we made the slightest effort to recover it. The poor black was a faithful servant as long as he was a slave. As a freeman he is conscious of his inferiority at the bottom of his heart, and would attach himself to a rational white employer with at least as much fidelity as a spaniel. Like the spaniel, too, if he is denied the chance of developing under guidance the better qualities which are in him, he will drift back into a mangy cur.

In no country ought a government to exist for which respect is impossible, and English rule as it exists in Dominica is a subject for a comedy. The Governor-General of the Leeward Islands resides in Antigua, and in theory ought to go on progress and visit in turn his subordinate dominions. His visits are rare as those of angels. The eminent person, who at present holds that high office, has been once in Nevis; and thrice in Dominica, but only for the briefest stay there. Perhaps he has held aloof in consequence of an adventure which befell a visiting governor some time ago on one of these occasions. When there is a const.i.tution there is an opposition. If there are no grievances the opposition manufacture them, and the inhabitants of Roseau were persuaded that they were an oppressed people and required fuller liberties. I was informed that His Excellency had no sooner landed and taken possession of the Government House, than a mob of men and women gathered in the market place under the leaders.h.i.+p of their elected representative. The girls that I had admired very likely made a part of it. They swarmed up into the gardens, they demonstrated under the windows, laughing, shouting, and pet.i.tioning. His Excellency first barricaded the doors, then opened them and tried a speech, telling the dear creatures how much he loved and respected them. Probably they did not understand him, as few of them speak English. Producing no effect, he retreated again, barred the door once more, slipped out at a back entrance down a lane to the port, took refuge on board his steamer, and disappeared. So the story was told me--not by the administrator, who was not a man to turn English authority into ridicule--but by some one on the spot, who repeated the current report of the adventure. It may be exaggerated in some features, but it represents, at any rate, the feeling of the place towards the head representative of the existing government.

I will mention another incident, said to have occurred still more recently to one of these great persons, very like what befell Sancho Panza in Barataria. This, too, may have been wickedly turned, but it was the subject of general talk and general amus.e.m.e.nt on board the steamers which make the round of the Antilles. Universal belief is a fact of its kind, and though it tends to shape itself in dramatic form more completely than the facts justify, there is usually some truth at the bottom of it. The telegrams to the West Indies pa.s.s through New York, and often pick up something on the way. A warning message reached a certain colony that a Yankee-Irish schooner with a Fenian crew was coming down to annex the island, or at least to kidnap the governor.

This distinguished gentleman ought perhaps to have suspected that a joke was being played upon his fears; but he was a landlord. A governor-general had been threatened seriously in Canada, why not he in the Antilles? He was as much agitated as Sancho himself. All these islands were and are entirely undefended save by a police which cannot be depended on to resist a serious invasion. They were called out.

Rumour said that in half the rifles the cartridges were found afterwards inverted. The next day dispelled the alarm. The schooner was the creation of some Irish telegraph clerk, and the scare ended in laughter.

But under the jest lies the wretched certainty that the Antilles have no protection except in their own population, and so little to thank England for that scarcely one of the inhabitants, except the officials, would lift a finger to save the connection.

Once more, I tell these stories not as if they were authenticated facts, but as evidence of the scornful feeling towards English authority. The current belief in them is a fact of a kind and a very serious one.

The confederation of the Leeward Islands may have been a convenience to the Colonial Office, and may have allowed a slight diminution in the cost of administration. The whole West Indies might be placed under a single governor with only good results if he were a real one like the Governor-General at Calcutta. But each single island has lost from the change, so far, more than it has gained. Each s.h.i.+p of war has a captain of its own and officers of its own trained specially for the service. If the Antilles are ever to thrive, each of them also should have some trained and skilful man at its head, unembarra.s.sed by local elected a.s.semblies. The whites have become so weak that they would welcome the abolition of such a.s.semblies. The blacks do not care for politics, and would be pleased to see them swept away to-morrow if they were governed wisely and fairly. Of course, in that case it would be necessary to appoint governors who would command confidence and respect. But let governors be sent who would be governors indeed, like those who administer the Indian presidencies, and the white residents would gather heart again, and English and American capitalists would bring their money and their enterprise, and the blacks would grow upwards instead of downwards. Let us persist in the other line, let us use the West Indian governments as asylums for average worthy persons who have to be provided for, and force on them black parliamentary inst.i.tutions as a remedy for such persons' inefficiency, and these beautiful countries will become like Hayti, with Obeah triumphant, and children offered to the devil and salted and eaten, till the conscience of mankind wakes again and the Americans sweep them all away.

I had an opportunity of seeing what can really be done in Dominica by an English gentleman who has gone the right way to work there. Dr.

Nicholls came out a few years ago to Roseau as a medical officer. He was described to me as a man not only of high professional skill, but with considerable scientific attainments. Either by purchase or legacy (I think the latter) he had become possessed of a small estate on a hillside a mile or two from the town. He had built a house upon it. He was cultivating the soil on scientific principles, and had politely sent me an invitation to call on him and see what he was about. I was delighted to avail myself of such an opportunity.

I do not know the exact extent of the property which was under cultivation; perhaps it was twenty-five or thirty acres. The chief part of it was planted with lime trees, the limes which I saw growing being as large as moderate-sized lemons; most of the rest was covered with Liberian coffee, which does not object to the moist climate, and was growing with profuse luxuriance. Each tree, each plant had been personally attended to, pruned when it needed pruning, supported by bamboos if it was overgrowing its strength, while the ground about the house was consecrated to botanical experiments, and specimens were to be seen there of every tropical flower, shrub, or tree, which was either remarkable for its beauty or valuable for its chemical properties. His limes and coffee went princ.i.p.ally to New York, where they had won a reputation, and were in special demand; but ingenuity tries other tracks besides the beaten one. Dr. Nicholls had a manufactory of citric acid which had been found equally excellent in Europe. Everything which he produced was turning to gold, except donkeys, seven or eight of which were feeding under his windows, and which multiplied so fast that he could not tell what to do with them.

Industries so various and so active required labour, and I saw many of the blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent contradiction to the general West Indian experience, he told me that he had never found a difficulty about it. He paid them fair wages, and paid them regularly without the overseer's fines and drawbacks. He knew one from the other personally could call each by his name, remembered where he came from, where he lived, and how, and could joke with him about his wife or mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an innocent affection, stayed with him all the week without asking for holidays, and worked with interest and goodwill. Four years only had elapsed since Dr.

Nicholls commenced his undertakings, and he already saw his way to clearing a thousand pounds a year on that one small patch of acres. I may mention that, being the only man in the island of really superior attainments, he had tried in vain to win one of the seats in the elective part of the legislature.

There was nothing particularly favourable in the situation of his land.

All parts of Dominica would respond as willingly to similar treatment.

What could be the reason, Dr. Nicholls asked me, why young Englishmen went planting to so many other countries, went even to Ceylon and Borneo, while comparatively at their own doors, within a fortnight's sail of Plymouth, there was this island immeasurably more fertile than either? The explanation, I suppose, is the misgiving that the West Indies are consigned by the tendencies of English policy to the black population, and that a local government created by representatives of the negro vote would make a residence there for an energetic and self-respecting European less tolerable than in any other part of the globe. The republic of Hayti not only excludes a white man from any share of the administration, but forbids his acquisition or possession of real property in any form. Far short of such extreme provisions, the most prosperous industry might be blighted by taxation. Self-government is a beautiful subject for oratorical declamation. If the fact corresponded to the theory and if the possession of a vote produced the elevating effects upon the character which are so noisily insisted upon, it would be the welcome panacea for political and social disorder.

Unfortunately the fact does not correspond to the theory. The possession of a vote never improved the character of any human being and never will.

There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment might be ventured without any serious risk. Let the suffrage principle be applied in its fullness where the condition of the people seems best to promise success. In some one of them--Dominica would do as well as any other--let a man of ability and character with an ambition to distinguish himself be sent to govern with a free hand. Let him choose his own advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into fatal and inexcusable errors, with interference from home. Let him have time to carry out any plans which he may form, without fear of recall at the end of the normal period. After ten or fifteen years, let the results of the two systems be compared side by side. I imagine the objection to such a trial would be the same which was once made in my hearing by an Irish friend of mine, who was urging on an English statesman the conversion of Ireland into a Crown colony. 'You dare not try it,' he said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we would be the most prosperous island of the two, and you would be wanting to follow our example.'

We had exhausted the neighbourhood of Roseau. After a few days Captain C. was again able to ride, and we could undertake more extended expeditions. He provided me with a horse or pony or something between both, a creature that would climb a stone staircase at an angle of forty-five, or slide down a clay slope soaked by a tropical shower, with the same indifference with which it would canter along a meadow. In the slave times cultivation had been carried up into the mountains. There were the old tracks through the forest engineered along the edges of precipices, torrents roaring far down below, and tall green trees standing in hollows underneath, whose top branches were on a level with our eyes. We had to ride with mackintosh and umbrella, prepared at any moment to have the floods descend upon us. The best costume would be none at all. While the sun is above the horizon the island seems to lie under the arches of perpetual rainbows. One gets wet and one dries again, and one is none the worse for the adventure. I had heard that it was dangerous. It did no harm to me. A very particular object was to reach the crest of the mountain ridge which divides Dominica down the middle. We saw the peaks high above us, but it was useless to try the ascent if one could see nothing when one arrived, and mists and clouds hung about so persistently that we had to put off our expedition day after day.

A tolerable morning came at last. We started early. A faithful black youth ran alongside of the horses to pick us up if we fell, and to carry the indispensable luncheon basket. We rode through the town, over the bridge and by the foot of Dr. Nicholls's plantations. We pa.s.sed through lime and banana gardens rising slowly along the side of a glen above the river. The road had been made by the French long ago, and went right across the island. It had once been carefully paved, but wet and neglect had loosened the stones and tumbled them out of their places. Trees had driven their roots through the middle of the track. Mountain streams had taken advantage of convenient cuttings and scooped them into waterways.

The road commissioner on the official staff seemed a merely ornamental functionary. We could only travel at a foot pace and in single file.

Happily our horses were used to it. Along this road in 1805 Sir George Prevost retreated with the English garrison of Roseau, when attacked in force from Martinique; saved his men and saved the other part of the island till relief came and the invaders were driven out again. That was the last of the fighting, and we have been left since in undisturbed possession. Dominica was then sacred as the scene of Rodney's glories.

Now I suppose, if the French came again, we should calculate the mercantile value of the place to us, and having found it to be nothing at all, might conclude that it would be better to let them keep it.

We went up and up, winding round projecting spurs of mountain, here and there coming on plateaus where pioneering blacks were clearing patches of forest for their yams and coffee. We skirted the edge of a valley several miles across, on the far side of which we saw the steaming of the sulphur springs, and beyond and above it a mountain peak four thousand feet high and clothed with timber to the summit. In most countries the vegetation grows thin as you rise into the higher alt.i.tudes. Here the bush only seems to grow denser, the trees grander and more self-a.s.serting, the orchids and parasites on the boughs more variously brilliant. There were tree ferns less splendid than those in New Zealand and Australia, but larger than any one can see in English hot-houses, wild oranges bending under the weight of ripe fruit which was glowing on their branches, wild pines, wild begonias scattered along the banks, and a singularly brilliant plant which they call the wild plantain, but it is not a plantain at all, with large broad pointed leaves radiating out from a centre like an aloe's, and a crimson flower stem rising up straight in the middle. It was startling to see such insolent beauty displaying itself indifferently in the heart of the wilderness with no human eye to look at it unless of some pa.s.sing black or wandering Carib.

The track had been carried across hot streams fresh from boiling springs, and along the edge of chasms where there was scarcely foothold for the horses. At length we found ourselves on what was apparently the highest point of the pa.s.s. We could not see where we were for the trees and bushes which surrounded us, but the path began to descend on the other side. Near the summit was a lake formed in an old volcanic crater which we had come specially to look at. We descended a few hundred feet into a hollow among the hills where the lake was said to be. Where was it, then? I asked the guide, for I could discover nothing that suggested a lake or anything like one. He pointed into the bush where it was thicker with tropical undergrowth than a wheatfield with ears of corn.

If I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at the risk of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming creatures, I should find myself on the water's edge.

To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near a wonder which I could not see after all, was not what I had proposed to myself.

There was a traveller's rest at the point where we halted, a cool damp grotto carved into the sand-stone. We picketed our horses, cutting leafy boughs off the trees for them, and making cus.h.i.+ons for ourselves out of the ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we should see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky we might catch a glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds rolled, down off the mountains, filled the hollow where we stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the question seemed rather how we were to return than whether we should venture farther.

While we were considering what to do, we heard steps approaching through the fog, and a party of blacks came up on their way to Roseau with a sick companion whom they were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating our luncheon in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and stare at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me than good manners would have allowed if they had possessed such things; the 'I am as good as you, and you will be good enough to know it,' sort of tone which belongs to these democratic days showing itself rather notably in the rising generation in parts of these islands. I defended myself with producing a sketch book and proceeding to take their likenesses, on which they fled precipitately.

Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our cigars, I speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of redcoats who must have bivouacked on that very spot, when the clouds broke and the sun came out. The interval was likely to be a short one, so we hurried to our feet, walked rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane had torn a pa.s.sage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake as we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple of hundred feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round a promontory under the crags and woods of the opposite hills: they call it a crater, and I suppose it may have been one, for the whole island shows traces of violent volcanic disturbance, but in general a crater is a bowl, and this was like a reach of a river, which lost itself before one could see where it ended. They told us that in old times, when troops were in the fort, and the white men of the island went about and enjoyed themselves, there were boats on this lake, and parties came up and fished there. Now it was like the pool in the gardens of the palace of the sleeping princess, guarded by impenetrable thickets, and whether there are fish there, or enchanted princesses, or the huts of some tribe of Caribs, hiding in those fastnesses from negroes whom they hate, or from white men whom they do not love, no one knows or cares to know. I made a hurried pencil sketch, and we went on.

A little farther and we were out of the bush, at a rocky terrace on the rim of the great valley which carries the rainfall on the eastern side of the mountains down into the Atlantic. We were 3,000 feet above the sea. Far away the ocean stretched out before us, the horizon line where sky met water so far distant that both had melted into mist at the point where they touched. Mount Diablot, where Labat spent a night catching the devil birds, soared up on our left hand. Below, above, around us, it was forest everywhere; forest, and only forest, a land fertile as Adam's paradise, still waiting for the day when 'the barren woman shall bear children.' Of course it was beautiful, if that be of any consequence--mountain peaks and crags and falling waters, and the dark green of the trees in the foreground, dissolving from tint to tint to grey, violet, and blue in the far-off distance. Even at the height where we stood, the temperature must have been 70. But the steaming damp of the woods was gone, the air was clear and exhilarating as champagne.

What a land! And what were we doing with it? This fair inheritance, won by English hearts and hands for the use of the working men of England, and the English working men lying squalid in the grimy alleys of crowded towns, and the inheritance turned into a wilderness. Visions began to rise of what might be, but visions which were taken from me before they could shape themselves. The curtain of vapour fell down over us again, and all was gone, and of that glorious picture nothing was left but our own two selves and the few yards of red rock and soil on which we were standing.

There was no need for haste now. We return slowly to our horses, and our horses carried us home by the way that we had come. Captain C. went carelessly in front through the fog, over boulders and watercourses and roots of fallen trees. I followed as I could, expecting every moment to find myself flying over my horse's head; stumbling, plunging, sliding, but getting through with it somehow. The creature had never seen me before, but was as careful of my safety as if I had been an old acquaintance and friend. Only one misadventure befell me, if misadventure it may be called. Shaken, and damp with heat, I was riding under a wild orange tree, the fruit within reach of my hand. I picked an orange and plunged my teeth into the skin, and I had to remember my rashness for days. The oil in the rind, pungent as aromatic salts, rushed on my palate, and spurted on my face and eyes. The smart for the moment half blinded me. I bethought me, however, that oranges with such a flavour would be worth something, and a box of them which was sent home for me was converted into marmalade with a finer flavour than ever came from Seville.

What more can I say of Dominica? I stayed with the hospitable C.'s for a fortnight. At the appointed time the returning steamer called for me. I left Capt. C. with a warm hope that he might not be consigned for ever to a post which an English gentleman ought not to be condemned to occupy; that if matters could not be mended for him where he stood, he might find a situation where his courage and his understanding might be turned to useful purpose. I can never forget the kindness both of himself and his clever, good, graceful lady. I cannot forget either the two dusky damsels who waited upon me like spirits in a fairy tale. It was night when I left. The packet came alongside the wharf. We took leave by the gleaming of her lights. The whistle screamed, and Dominica, and all that I had seen, faded into a memory. All that I had seen, but not all that I had thought. That island was the scene of the most glorious of England's many famous actions. It had been won for us again and again by the gallantry of our seamen and soldiers. It had been secured at last to the Crown by the genius of the greatest of our admirals. It was once prosperous. It might be prosperous again, for the resources of the soil are untouched and inexhaustible. The black population are exceptionally worthy. They are excellent boatmen, excellent fishermen, excellent mechanics, ready to undertake any work if treated with courtesy and kindness. Yet in our hands it is falling into ruin. The influence of England there is gone. It is nothing.

Indifference has bred indifference in turn as a necessary consequence.

Something must be wrong when among 30,000 of our fellow-subjects not one could be found to lift a hand for us if the island were invaded, when a boat's crew from Martinique might take possession of it without a show of resistance.

If I am asked the question, What use is Dominica to us? I decline to measure it by present or possible marketable value; I answer simply that it is part of the dominions of the Queen. If we pinch a finger, the smart is felt in the brain. If we neglect a wound in the least important part of our persons, it may poison the system. Unless the blood of an organised body circulates freely through the extremities, the extremities mortify and drop off, and the dropping off of any colony of ours will not be to our honour and may be to our shame. Dominica seems but a small thing, but our larger colonies are observing us, and the world is observing us, and what we do or fail to do works beyond the limits of its immediate operation. The mode of management which produces the state of things which I have described cannot possibly be a right one. We have thought it wise, with a perfectly honest intention, to leave our dependencies generally to work out their own salvation. We have excepted India, for with India we dare not run the risk. But we have refused to consider that others among our possessions may be in a condition a.n.a.logous to India, and we have allowed them to drift on as they could. It was certainly excusable, and it may have been prudent, to try popular methods first, but we have no right to persist in the face of a failure so complete. We are obliged to keep these islands, for it seems that no one will relieve us of them; and if they are to remain ours, we are bound so to govern them that our name shall be respected and our sovereignty shall not be a mockery. Am I asked what shall be done? I have answered already. Among the silent thousands whose quiet work keeps the Empire alive, find a Rajah Brooke if you can, or a Mr.

Smith of Scilly. If none of these are attainable, even a Sancho Panza would do. Send him out with no more instructions than the knight of La Mancha gave Sancho--to fear G.o.d and do his duty. Put him on his mettle.

Promise him the respect and praise of all good men if he does well; and if he calls to his help intelligent persons who understand the cultivation of soils and the management of men, in half a score of years Dominica would be the brightest gem of the Antilles. From America, from England, from all parts of the world, admiring tourists would be flocking there to see what Government could do, and curious politicians with jealous eyes admitting reluctantly unwelcome conclusions.

Woman! no mortal o'er the widespread earth Can find a fault in thee; thy good report Doth reach the widespread heaven, as of some prince Who, in the likeness of a G.o.d, doth rule O'er subjects stout of heart and strong of hand; And men speak greatly of him, and his land Bears wheat and rye, his orchards bend with fruit, His flocks breed surely, the sea yields her fish, Because he guides his folk with wisdom.

In grace and manly virtue.[11]

Because 'He guides with wisdom.' That is the whole secret. The leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of the many, is the beginning and the end of all right action. Secure this, and you secure everything. Fail to secure it, and be your liberties as wide as you can make them, no success is possible.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] [Greek: o gynai ouk an tis se broton ep' apeirona gaian neikeoi; e gar seu kleos ouranon euryn hikanei; hoste teu e basileost amymonos, hoste theoudes andrasin en polloisi kai iphthimoisin ana.s.son, eudikias anechesi; pheresi de gaia melaina purous kai krithas, brithesi de dendrea karpoi tiktei de empeda mela, thala.s.sa de parechei ichthys, ex euegesies; aretosi de laoi hupo autou.--_Odyssey_, xix. 107.]

CHAPTER XII.

The Darien ca.n.a.l--Jamaica mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect of Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A walk through the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the Blue Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon riots--Changes in the Jamaican const.i.tution.

Once more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from steamer to steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean Sea to the great islands at the bottom of it. The English mail, after calling and throwing off its lateral branches at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti and Jamaica, and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien ca.n.a.l. This wonderful enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro population of the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work as they are supposed to be, they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day which M. Lesseps is furnis.h.i.+ng. The vessel which called for us at Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on.

Their average stay is for a year. At the end of a year half of them have gone to the other world. Half go home, made easy for life with money enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless as school-boys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.

If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much foul disease, such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.

By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers, card sharpers, h.e.l.l keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more deadly by the mult.i.tudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human machines which have broken down there.[12] Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral surroundings of 'the greatest undertaking of our age,' but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place and the description which I have given is probably too highly coloured. The accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. Not one person whom I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any other story to tell.

We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training squadron was lying outside, and the harbour was covered with boats full of blue-jackets. The big s.h.i.+ps were rolling heavily. They could have eaten up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville de Paris' would have been a mouthful to the smallest of them. Man for man, officers and crew were as good as Rodney ever commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they are meant more for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars and stripes on a Yankee trader have more to say in the West Indies than the white ensigns of a fleet of British iron-clads.

At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see. The English mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened on board. One does not realise distance on maps. Jamaica belongs to the West Indies, and the West Indies are a collective ent.i.ty. Yet it is removed from the Antilles by the diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several days, and I looked about to see who were to be my companions. There were several Spaniards, one or two English tourists, and some ladies who never left their cabins. The captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have often seen in a human face; rough and p.r.i.c.kly on the outside as a pineapple, internally very much resembling the same fruit, for at the bottom he was true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very amusing, and intimately known to all travellers on the West Indian line, in the service of which he had pa.s.sed forty years of his life. In his own s.h.i.+p he was sovereign and recognised no superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South American republics were, so far as their office went, no more to him than other people, and as long as they were on board were chattels of which he had temporary charge. Peer and peasant were alike under his orders, which were absolute as the laws of Medes and Persians. On the other hand, his eye was quick to see if there was any personal merit in a man, and if you deserved his respect you would have it. One particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known captains do a great deal too often.

All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the b.a.l.l.s and parties and the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant.

There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished quant.i.ty. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a guards.h.i.+p and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be found of the old Anglo-West Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him.

Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either of them--the likeness of these might be surviving, and it would be delightful to meet and talk to them. They would give fresh flavour to the immortal 'Log.' Even another Tom was not impossible; some middy to develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port Royal with his prizes in tow.

Nature at all events could not be changed. The white rollers would still be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms would still be waving on the sand ridge which forms the harbour, and the amber mist would be floating round the peaks of the Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and sailors and English people. The English language was spoken there by blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our country went for something, and there would be some persons, at least, to whom the old land was more than a stepmother, and who were not sighing in their hearts for annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir Henry Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was still absent; he had gone home on some legal business. Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation.

He had been spoken of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a chance, to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than Sir Henry's reputed power could do it--for in the thing itself there was no great difficulty--if only we at home were once disenchanted; though all the ability in the world would be thrown away as long as the enchantment continued. I did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few hours.

Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages are apt to be in these days of powerful steamboats. One morning there was a tropical rain storm which was worth seeing. We had a strong awning over the quarter-deck, so I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the sea, the surface of the water below being violently agitated. According to popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is drawing up water which it afterwards discharges. Were this so the water discharged would be salt, which it never is. The cause of the agitation is a cyclonic rotation of air or local whirlwind. The most noticeable feature was the blackness of the cloud itself. It became so dark that it would have been difficult to read any ordinary print. The rain, when it burst, fell not in drops but in torrents. The deck was flooded, and the scuttle-holes ran like jets from a pump. The awning was ceasing to be a shelter, for the water was driven bodily through it; but the downpour pa.s.sed off as suddenly as it had risen. There was no lightning and no wind. The sea under our side was gla.s.sy smooth, and was dashed into millions of holes by the plunging of the rain pellets.