CHAPTER XIV
THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS

Once he has reached our Virgin Islands, the traveler down the stepping-stones of the West Indies has left his worst experiences behind him. For while connections are rare and precarious between the large islands of the north Caribbean, the tiny ones forming its eastern boundary are favored with frequent and comfortable intercommunication. Several steamship lines from the north make St. Thomas their first stop, and pausing a day or two in every island of any importance beyond, give the through traveler all the time he can spend to advantage in all but three or four of the Lesser Antilles. In these he can drop off for a more extended exploration and catch the next steamer a week or two later.

A twelve-hour run from St. Croix, with a glimpse of the tiny Dutch islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, peering above the sea like drowning volcanoes, brought us to what the British so familiarly call St. Kitts. Columbus named it St. Christopher, one legend having it that he discovered it on his own patron saint’s day, another that he saw in its form a resemblance to that worthy carrying in his arms the infant Jesus. The resemblance is not apparent to the critical eye, but the admirals of those days, you recall, were not compelled to take their grape-juice unfermented. Besides, we must not be too hard upon the busy “old man” of the caravel fleet. With a sailor thrusting his head into the cabin every hour or so to say, “Another island, vuestra merced; what shall we call it?” it was natural that the Genoese, having no modern novels at hand, should curse his gout and hobble across to the saints’ calendar on the opposite bulkhead.

St. Kitts has more nearly the form of a heaping plate of curry and rice—curious this should not have occurred to the galley-fed seaman—culminating in Mt. Misery, four thousand and some feet high, with an eight hundred foot crater nicely proportioned to hold the curry and still steaming with clouds of vapor that habitually conceal its summit. From the shores to the steeper heights of the mountain the swiftly sloping island is covered with sugar-cane; above that the woods are said to be full of monkeys, descendants of the pets which British soldiers brought with them when St. Kitts was a bone of contention between the French and the English. With one slight exception, this and the neighboring island of Nevis are the only West Indies inhabited by our racial ancestors, which are so troublesome that their direct descendants below have given up trying to plant their gardens more than half-way up the mountains.

Though St. Kitts was the first island of the West Indies to be settled by the English, antedating even ultra-British Barbados in that regard by nearly two years, its capital bears the French name of Basse Terre. It is an uninteresting town of some seven thousand inhabitants, scarcely one in a hundred of whom boast of a family tree wholly free from African graftings, and most of them living in unpainted, weather-blackened, shingle cabins hidden away in the forests of cocoanut palms. Even the larger houses in the center of town are chiefly built of clapboards or shingles, painted only by the elements, and with narrow little eaves that give them the air of wearing hats several sizes too small for them. The sums that are uselessly squandered on window-glass would easily suffice to give the entire town a sadly needed coating of paint, were it not that all such improvements are taxed out of existence, as in most of the British West Indies. The only pleasant spot in town is a kind of Spanish plaza run wild, generously shaded with royal palms and spreading tropical trees, beneath which the grass stands ankle-high and hens pilot their broods about among the brown windrows of fallen leaves. Its unshaven condition rather enhances a certain rustic beauty that is not marred by an unexpectedly artistic old stone fountain in its center. Beyond the last lopsided negro hovels Basse Terre is surrounded by cane-fields, with Mt. Misery piled into the sky close behind them.

We had the misfortune to first land in British territory on a Sunday. Basse Terre was as dead as if a general funeral were just over. It was not simply that we bemoaned with the tourist-minded fellow-countrymen from the steamer the fact that every “Liquor Store” was tight and genuinely closed; the dreary lifelessness of the whole place got on our nerves. The very trade wind seemed to refrain from any unnecessary exertion; the citizens appeared to have given even their minds a holiday and replied to the simplest questions with a vacant stare. It was a “holy day” as truly as a French or Spanish Sunday is a “day of feast,” or “festival.” I imagine heaven is much like an English community on a Sunday—so piously dull that a new inmate would soon be on his knees imploring the gatekeeper to let him go to the only other available place.

At eleven o’clock four species of church service broke out, the Anglican, Catholic, Moravian, and what a black policeman in a white blouse and helmet and the deliberate airs of a London “bobby” referred to in a Sunday whisper as the “Whistling.” We went. One was forced to, in self-defense and for the utter absence of any other form of amusement. Then we understood why the community could endure the apparent lack of recreation and exercise of its deadly Sabbath. Negroes striving to maintain the cold, calm, rather bored English manner from opening hymn to benediction supplied the former, and the ups and downs of the Anglican service furnished the latter.

We found St. Kitts more down-at-heel, more indolent, less self-relying than even our Virgin Islands. The shingle shacks of Basse Terre were more miserable than those of St. Thomas; the swarms of negroes loafing under the palm trees about them were as ragged as they were lazy and insolent. Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus,” you may recall, came from St. Kitts. His replica, except in the genuineness of his ailment, could be seen in any patch of shade. A white stranger strolling through the poorer section was the constant target of foul language and even more loathsome annoyances from both sexes and all ages; in the center of town his footsteps were constantly dogged by clamoring urchins who replied to the slightest protest with streams of curses even in the presence of white residents and the serenely unconscious negro policemen. The inhabitants were incorrigible beggars, from street loafers to church wardens; even the island postmaster begged, under the pretense of selling a historical pamphlet; the country people left their “work” in the fields to shout for alms from the passer-by.

A highway encircles the island, which is twenty-three miles long and five wide. It flanks Brimstone Hill, sometimes called the “Gibraltar of the West Indies” in memory of the part it played in the wars between the French and English for the control of the Caribbean. Cane-fields spread with monotonous sameness on either side of the moderately well-kept roads, with here and there an old stone tower that was once a windmill and what seems many chimneys to one who recalls how seldom two are seen in the same horizon in Cuba. On the whole, the island is not to be compared with St. Croix; despite its abundance of sugar it has a poverty-stricken air, for St. Kitts seems to have lost its “pep,” if ever it had any.

It took two days to unload our one-day’s cargo in the harbor of Basse Terre. The local stevedores were on strike and their places had been taken by less experienced men from the neighboring island of Nevis. This had magnified the constant enmity between the St. Kittens—or whatever is the proper term—and the inhabitants of “that other country,” as they called it; but it was an enmity without violence, except of words, torrents of words in what close observers assert are two distinct dialects, though the islands are separated only by a narrow channel. The strikers, to all appearances, felt they had won their chief aim by being allowed to lie on their backs in the shade of the cocoanut palms.

The steamer’s loss was my gain, for the delay gave me time to visit the island Columbus named “Nieve” from the snow-like clouds hovering about it. Open sailing scows, perhaps three times the size of a lifeboat, were constantly plying across the bay between the two capitals. The wind was on the beam in both directions, and a dozen times I was convinced that the waves that splashed continuously over the leeward gunwale of the creaking old tub would fill her at the next squall sweeping through the deep channel between the islands. But each time the simple son of Nevis at the tiller met my questioning gaze with “Not blow too bad to-day, boss,” now and then adding the reassuring information that several boats were lost here every year. High on the windward gunwale the plunging of the crude vessel was exhilarating in spite of the apparent danger, but the negro women in their flashy dresses, tin bracelets, and much cheap jewelry, who sprawled together in the bottom of the boat in supreme indifference to the bilge-water and filth that sloshed back and forth over them seemed to find nothing agreeable in the experience.

The craft half righted herself at length under the lee of the island, heaped up into the clouds in similar but more abrupt and compact form than St. Kitts. One scarcely needed to go ashore to see the place, so nicely were its sights spread out on the steeply tilted landscape. Like its neighbor it was but slightly wooded on its lower slopes, but made up for this by the dense vegetation of its monkey-infested heights. One made out a few groves of cocoanuts, patches of cotton, and green stretches of sugar-cane, with here and there a windmill tower, one of which still survived, its slowly turning arms giving a mild suggestion of the Azores. Charlestown soon appeared out on the end of a low point, a modest little town with a few red roofs peering through the cocoanut trees. Gingertown, five miles in the interior, and the village of Newcastle farther down the coast are the only other places of any size, though the island is everywhere well populated. Time was when Nevis was a famous watering place for Europe and America, with thermal baths and medicinal waters, and an important capital named Jamestown, from which all this region of the Caribbean was ruled. But the city was destroyed one day by an earthquake and submerged beneath the sea, where some of its coral-encrusted ruins can still be seen not far from the shore. Natural causes led to the island’s gradual isolation, and to-day, though its hot baths are exploited by an American owned hotel, it becomes highly excited at the arrival of a stranger from the outside world.

Charlestown had little of the insolence of St. Kitts, though it was by no means free from beggars. Its masses were more naÏve in manner, even more ragged of garb. Nine pence a day is the average adult male wage of even those who succeed in finding work. Obeah, or African witchcraft, seemed still to maintain a hold, for even the native bank clerk who piloted me about town acknowledged a belief in certain forms of it. Two or three blocks from the little triangular park that marks the center of town are the ruins of a gray stone building in which Alexander Hamilton is reputed to have been born. British visitors are more interested in the house where Nelson lived and the little church in which he was married to the widow Nisbet, two miles up the sloping hillside. Love for England does not greatly flourish in Nevis, if one may take surface indications as evidence.

“We are ruled over by an autocrat, a white Barbadian magistrate,” complained an islander of the better class, while the group about him nodded approval. “England takes everything from us and does nothing for us. If it were not for the prohibition that would come with it, we would be glad to see the island under American rule.”

A forty-mile run during the night brought us to Antigua. Steamers anchor so far off shore that a government launch is required to do the work performed in most of the Lesser Antilles by rowboats. For though there is a splendid double harbor on the opposite side of the island, the English cling to their invariable Caribbean rule of building the capital and only city on the leeward shore. Two pretty headlands are passed on the way in, the more prominent of them occupied by a leper asylum; both are crowned by fortresses dating back to the days when England fought to maintain her hold on the West Indies. From the bay St. John’s presents an agreeable picture in the morning sunlight, an ancient two-towered cathedral bulking above the greenery constituting the most conspicuous landmark. It is much more of a town than Basse Terre, though with the same wooden, shingled, often unpainted houses, and wide, unattractive, right-angled streets. What energy it may once have had seems largely to have departed, and for all its size it has the air of a half-forgotten village. Its shops open at seven, close from nine to ten for breakfast, and put up their shutters for the day at four. On closer inspection the cathedral proves to be two churches, one of wood enclosed within another of stone, as a protection against earthquakes. The negro women of the market-place are given to the display of brilliant calicos, but the population as a whole has little of the color,—except in complexion—the dignity, and that suggestion of Gallic grace of the French islanders.

Antigua, thirteen by nine miles, is lower and less mountainous than St. Kitts, being of limestone rather than volcanic formation, with less luxuriant vegetation, having been almost wholly denuded of its forests. In consequence, it suffers somewhat for lack of rainfall, though it is almost everywhere cultivated, and offers many a pretty vista of rolling landscape, usually with a patch of sea at the end of it. Sugar-cane is by far its most important product, though corn-fields here and there break the lighter green monotony, and limes and onions are piled high in crates on St. John’s water-front. The island roads are tolerable. Automobiles, mainly of the Ford variety, make it possible for the traveler to see its “sights” in a few hours with less damage to the exchequer than in many of the West Indies. Women in rather graceless colored turbans are more numerous than men in the cane-fields, where wages average 4½ pence per hundred holes of cane, whether for planting, hoeing, or cutting, making the daily wage of the majority about fifteen cents. What they do with all that money is a problem we found no time to solve, though there were evidences that a fair proportion of it is invested in native rum. Like all the world, Antigua has had her share of labor troubles during the past few years. Two seasons ago much cane was burned by the incensed workers, but the killing of several and the wounding of some thirty more by government troops has settled the wage problem on its old basis. Though many abandoned estates, with the familiar square brick chimneys and armless windmill towers, dot the landscape, two sugar factories to-day consume virtually all the cane. They are rather old-fashioned institutions, with no such pretty, well-planned bateys and comfortable employee-houses as are to be found in Cuba and Porto Rico. The hauling is chiefly done by tippy two-wheeled carts, drawn by mules in tandem, occasionally by oxen, specially designed, it would seem, to spill their loads each time an automobile forces them to the edge of the road. Mangos and bamboo, in certain sections clumps of cactus and patches of that troublesome thorny vegetation which the Cubans call aroma, are the chief landscape decorations, except on the tops of the scrub-fuzzy, rather than forested hills. Shacks covered with shingles from mudsill to roof-tree, interspersed with fewer thatched and once whitewashed huts, all of them somewhat less miserable than those of St. Kitts, house the country people in scattered formation or occasional clusters bearing such misnomers as All Saints’ Village. Like most of the Lesser Antilles, Antigua was once French, but it has retained less of the patois than the other islands of similar history.

The goal of most mere visitors to Antigua is English Harbor on the windward coast, two almost landlocked blue basins in which Nelson refitted his fleet in preparation for the battle of Trafalgar. Here stand several massive stone buildings, occupied now only by the negro caretaker and his family. In the great stone barracks is a patch of wall decorated by the none too artistic hand of the present King George, then a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, wishing in vari-colored large letters “A Merry Christmas 2 You All,” the space being reverently covered now by a padlocked pair of shutters. More popular with the romantic-minded is the immense anchor serving as gravestone of one, Lieutenant Peterson. The lieutenant, runs the story, was the rival of his commanding officer for the hand of the island belle. On the eve of a naval ball he was ordered not to offer the young lady his escort. He appeared with her at the height of the festivities, however, she having declined in his favor the attentions of the commander, whereupon the latter shot the lieutenant for disobeying orders and caused him to be buried that same night in the barracks compound.

Patriotism for the empire to which they belong is not one of the chief characteristics of the Antiguans. Indeed, there is “no love whatever” for England, if we are to believe most of those with whom I talked on the subject.

“There never was any, even in the old days,” asserted a man whose parents emigrated from England half a century ago. “Before the war,” he continued, “England would not buy her sugar in the West Indies because she could get it cheaper from the beet-growers in Germany and Austria, thanks to their government bounty. The sugar we sent to England often lay on the wharves over there for months, until we had to send money to pay wharfage and storage, and feed our sugar to the hogs here at home. Once we enjoyed home rule; now our laws are made by the Secretary for the West Indies in London, who thinks we wear breech-clouts and speak some African dialect. They take everything from us in taxes and do nothing for us in return. Our governor thinks his only duty is to hold us down. He tries to be a little tin god, permits no one else to ride in the public launch with him when he goes out to a ship, and all that sort of thing. He came here two years ago from a similar position in one of our African colonies, where he was accustomed to see everyone bring him gifts and bow their heads in the sand whenever he passed. He got a surprise when he landed here. Except for a few nigger policemen, no one paid him any attention whatever, except that the drunken fellows shouted after him in the streets and called him foul names. We had no conscription here, yet we sent a large contingent. The well-to-do whites paid their way home to enlist; the poor ones went over with the niggers and were slowly picked out after they got over there. And England has not done a thing for a man of them. The blacks are angry because they got no promotion and all the dirtiest jobs. Mighty few of us would go again to fight for the blooming Empire.”

Antigua is the capital of what the British call, for political purposes, the Leeward Islands, comprising all their holdings between Santa Cruz and Martinique. Geographically this is a misnomer, the real leeward islands being the Greater Antilles, from Cuba to Porto Rico inclusive, and all the Lesser Antilles the windward islands, as the Spaniards recognized and still maintain. But the unnatural division serves the purpose for which it was made. St. John’s is the seat of the governor and the archbishop of all the group, with the principal prison and asylum. Anguilla, far to the north, near the Dutch-French island of St. Martin, is of coral formation, comparatively low and flat. The same may be said of Barbuda, large as Antigua and reputed to have gone back to nature under the improvident descendants of the slaves of the Codrington family that long reigned supreme upon it. Montserrat, on the other hand, is very mountainous, a flat-topped, pyramidal fragment of earth thirty-five square miles in extent, its lower slopes planted with limes and cacao, its upper reaches forest-clad. White ribbons of roads set forth from Plymouth, the capital, in what looks like a determined effort to scale the precipitous heights, but soon give up the attempt. The population of the island is mainly negro-Irish, it having been settled by emigrants from the “Old Sod,” so that to this day Irish names predominate, freckled red-heads with African features are numerous, and the inhabitants are noted throughout the West Indies for their brogue and their gift of blarney.

Dominica, the southernmost and largest of the misnamed Leeward Islands, is also entitled to several other superlatives. Most of the West Indies boast themselves the “Queen of the Antilles,” but none with more justice than this tiny Porto Rico isolated between the two principal islands of “French America.” It is the highest of the Lesser Antilles, Mt. Diablotin stretching 5314 feet into the tropical sky; the wettest, being habitually surrounded by blue-black clouds that pour forth their deluges by night or by day, in or out of season, even when all the sky about it is translucent blue; and the world’s greatest enemy of the scurvy, for it produces most of that fruit which has given the British sailor the nickname of “limy.” Incidentally, it is the most difficult of the West Indies in which to travel.

Roseau, the capital, sits right out on the Caribbean, the mountains climbing directly, without an instant’s hesitation, into the sky behind it. They are as sheer beneath water as above it and the steamer anchors within an easy stone’s throw of the wharves. Boatmen in curious little board canoes, showing their wooden ribs within and bearing such French names as “Dieu Donne,” quickly surround the new arrival, some of them bent on carrying her passengers ashore at a shilling a head, others to dive for pennies thrown into this deepest-blue of seas, which is yet so transparent that both coin and swimmer can be perfectly seen as far down as lungs will carry them. Boats of the same quaint structure and only slightly larger jockey for position along the ship’s side to receive the cargo from her hatches. They are unreliable and poorly adapted for the purpose, but their owners stick together in protecting their monopoly and every modern lighter brought to Dominica has invariably been scuttled within a week. Almost within the shadow of the steamer other men are standing stiffly erect in the extreme stern of their fishing canoes, steering them by almost imperceptible movements of their single crude paddle, while their companions cast their nets or throw stones within them to lure the fish to the surface. Immense hauls they make, too, without going a hundred yards from the shore. How many fish there must be in the sea when thousands of fishermen can ply their trade about each of these West Indian stepping-stones the year round and come home every day laden to the gunwales with their catches!

Roseau is scarcely more than a village. It is so small that all its business is carried on within plain sight from the steamer’s deck, though it strives to look very important with its few two-story stone buildings, like a Briton in foreign parts aware that he must uphold the national dignity unassisted. It is less given to wooden structures than many of its rivals, and has a more aged, solid air, at least along the water-front. An age-softened gray stone church that looks almost Spanish, with an extraordinary width within, like a market-hall filled with pews, and bilingual signs above the confessionals bearing the names of French priests, seems conscious of its mastery over the few small Protestant chapels. Higher still is one of the most magnificent little botanical gardens in the world, with hundreds of tropical specimens arranged with the unobtrusive orderliness of an English park.

I visited Dominica twice, and on the second occasion, having from early morning until midnight, hired a horse to ride across the island. Roseau Valley, a great sloping glen like a cleft in the mountains, climbs swiftly upward to the clouds behind the town, a rock-boiling river, surprisingly large for so small an island, pouring down it. At the bridge across the stream on the edge of town is what claims to be the greatest lime-juice factory on earth. I use both words with misgiving, for it is no more a factory in our sense of the term than the white lumps it ships away to a scurvy-dreading world are juice. Toward this a constant stream of limes, which we would be more apt to call lemons, is descending. Women and girls come trotting down out of the mountains with bushel baskets of them, now and then sitting down on a boulder to rest but never troubling to take the incredible load off their heads. Donkeys with enormous straw saddle-bags heaped high with limes pick their way more cautiously down the steep slope. Occasionally even a man deigns to jog to town with a load of the fruit. They lie everywhere in great yellow heaps under the low trees; they weigh down the usually rain-dripping branches. Yet when they have been grown and picked and carried all the way to town, they sell for a mere seven shillings a barrel! Small wonder the human pack-horses and even the growers are more extraordinarily ragged than any other West Indians outside of Haiti.

Cacao plants, too, are piled up the steeps on either side of the roaring river, for Dominica has that constant humidity and more than frequent rainfall they love so well. The unbroken density of the greenery is one, perhaps the chief, charm of the valley, as of all the island. Nowhere in all the climb does the eye make out the suggestion of a clearing. Where man has not pitched his lime or cacao orchards, or planted his tiny garden patch, nature forces the fertile black soil to produce to its utmost capacity. It is an un-American density, as of an Oriental jungle, all but completely concealing the miserable little huts tucked away in it all over the lower hillsides; it makes up for the constant succession of heavy showers that belie the sunny promises of the town and harbor below. For the mountains of Dominica have an annual rainfall of three hundred inches, twenty-five feet of water a year!

There are forty automobiles on the island of lemons, but they do not venture far from home. The highway up the valley lasts a bare three miles before it dwindles to a mountain trail that struggles constantly upward, now steeply along the brink of the river far below, now in stony zigzags that make no real progress, for all their pretense, except in altitude. One has a curiously shut-in feeling, as if there were no escape from the mighty ravine except by the narrow, slippery path underfoot, which is, indeed, the case. Not even the jet black inhabitants inured to mountain-climbing from birth, have attempted to scale the heights by more direct paths than this zigzag trail up the roof-steep bottom of the gorge. They speak among themselves a “creole” as incomprehensible, even to one familiar with French, as that of Haiti, though they babbled a bit of English that seemed to grow less fluent and extensive with every mile away from the capital. There the white stranger was subjected to an insolence and clamoring at his heels inferior only in volume to that of St. Kitts; up here in the mountains the passers-by yielded the trail and raised their ragged headgear with a rustic politeness that would have been more charming had it not almost invariably been followed by “A penny, please, sir” from both sexes and all ages. For all their mountaineer diffidence, they are so given to stealing one another’s crops that shops throughout the island are “Licensed to Sell Protected Produce,” that the police may have a means of detecting contraband. Perhaps they are scarcely to be blamed for their light-fingered habits, with wages that rarely reach the lofty height of a shilling a day.

The horse had leisurely English manners and the deliberate, loose-kneed action of a St. Thomas waiter, so that we made far less progress than his rangy form had promised. He showed, too, little of that endurance and mountain wisdom for which the far smaller animals of tropical America are noted. We reached the crest of the island at last, however, and paused on the edge of a small fresh-water lake said to fill the crater of an extinct volcano. Sedge-grass surrounded it and dense vegetation framed it on every side, but there was nothing remarkable about it, except, perhaps, to the Dominicans. But the wealth of flora was well worth the excursion. Tree-ferns, ferns large and small, wild bananas, lime-trees, clumps of bamboo, and a score of other plants and trees which only a botanist with tropical experience could name, completely concealed the earth, as the trunks of all the larger species were hidden under climbing parasites with immense leaves, and even the sheer banks were covered with densest vegetation.

A fog, white and luminous, yet impenetrable to the eye at more than twenty yards, covered all the island top. I urged the animal down a far steeper, more stony, trail than that we had climbed, cut deeper than a horseman’s head into the red-black mountainside and pitching headlong downward into the foggy void. A half hour of utter stillness, broken now and then by the brief song of the solitaire and the constant stumbling of the horse’s hoofs over the stones, brought us suddenly to the edge of the cloud, with a magnificent view of the jagged northern coast edged by the white breakers of the Atlantic. A few negroes again appeared, climbing easily upward, carrying their shoes on their heads, an excellent place to wear them at present prices. Now and then an aged, carelessly constructed hut peered out from the teeming wilderness, but the sense of the primeval, the uninhabited, the unknown to man, brooded over all the scene despite these and the stony trail underfoot.

Halfway down I met two Carib Indians, easily distinguishable from the bulk of the inhabitants by their features and color. They were short and muscular, with more of the aggressive air of the Mexican highlander than the slinking demeanor of the South American aborigines. They carried their home-made baskets full of some native produce on their shoulders, rather than on their heads, and apparently spoke but little English. They came from the Carib reservation on the north coast, the only one now left in all the West Indies over which, except for the four larger islands, their man-eating ancestors ruled supreme until long after the discovery. When at length, after long warfare, England entered into a treaty with them, they were given two patches of territory for their own. But the eruption of SoufriÈre in St. Vincent in 1902 destroyed the colony on that island, and to-day the three hundred of Dominica are the only ones left, and barely forty of these, it is said, are of pure blood. They live at peace with their neighbors, make baskets, catch fish, and are noted for their industry, as wild tribes go, in agriculture.

More than halfway down to sea-level huts began to grow frequent again, most of them completely covered with shingles and all of them devoid of any but the scantiest home-made furniture. Ragged, useless-looking inhabitants stood in the doorways staring at the extraordinary apparition of a white man, many of them calling out in cheerful voices for alms as I passed. Dominica is evidently an island without timepieces; almost everyone I met wanted to know the hour, just why was not apparent, since time seemed to have less than no value to them. My watch having been stolen in Havana and I having declined to tempt West Indians again by buying another, I could not satisfy their curiosity. Besides, the Caribbean is no place in which to worry about time; the fact that the sun rises and sets is all the division of eternity needed in such an African Eden.

At Rosalie, an old-fashioned sugar-mill and a scattering of huts on the north coast, I made a calculation. The sun was high overhead; it could not be later than two; the map in my hand showed the distance around the eastern end of the island to be less than twice that over the mountain; a coast road would be comparatively level and much to be preferred to another climb of 2500 feet on a jaded horse. Besides, I have a strong antipathy to returning the same way I have come. I made a few inquiries. The childlike inhabitants on this coast spoke almost no English and nothing that could easily be recognized as French, but they seemed to understand both tongues readily enough. I had only to ask if it were about four hours ride to the capital to be assured that such was the case. It was not until too late that I realized they were giving me the answer they thought would please me best, like most uncivilized tribes, with perfect indifference to the facts of the case. Any distance I chose to assume in my question was invariably the exact distance; when I awoke to my error and took to asking direct instead of leading questions, the reply was invariably a soft “Yes, sir,” with an instant readiness to change to “No, sir,” if anything in my manner suggested that I preferred a negative answer. But by this time I was too far along the coast-road to turn back.

I had only myself to blame for what soon promised to be a pretty predicament. Certainly I had traveled enough in uncivilized countries to know such people cannot be depended upon for even approximate accuracy in matters of distance or time. I surely was mountain-experienced enough to realize that an island as small and as lofty as Dominica could have but little level land, even along the coast. As a matter of fact it had virtually none at all. Never did the atrocious trail find a hundred yards of flat going. One after another, in dogged, insistent, disheartening succession, the great forest-clad buttresses of the island plunged steeply down to the sea, forcing the stony path to claw its way upward or make enormous detours around the intervening hollows, only to pitch instantly down again from each hard-earned height into a mighty ravine, beyond which another appalling mountain-wall blocked the horizon immediately ahead. To make matters worse, the horse began to show all too evident signs of giving out. In vain did I lash him with such weapons as I could snatch from the jungle-wall alongside, not daring to take time to dismount and seek a better cudgel. Steadily, inevitably, his pace, none too good at the best, decreased. By what I took to be four o’clock he could not be urged out of a slow walk, even on the rare bits of level going; by five he was merely crawling, his knees visibly trembling, coming every few yards to a complete halt from which he could be driven only by all the punishment I could inflict upon him. His condition was one to draw tears, but it was no time to be compassionate. The steamer was sailing at midnight. It would be the last one in that direction for two weeks. Rachel was waiting to join me on it at Martinique and continue to Barbados. No one on board knew I had gone on an excursion into the hills, nor even that I had left the steamer. My possessions would be found scattered about my stateroom; by the time the ship reached Martinique it would be assumed that I had fallen overboard or suffered some equally pleasant fate. I had barely the equivalent of five dollars on my person, not an extra pair of socks, not even a toothbrush—and the Dominica cable was broken. Clearly it was no time to spare the cudgel.

But it was of no use. Near sunset the horse took to stumbling to his knees at every step. For long minutes he stood doggedly in his tracks, trembling from head to foot. The sweat of fatigue, as well as heat, ran in rivulets down his flanks. I tumbled off and tried to lead him. We were climbing another of those incessant, interminable buttresses. With all my strength I could only drag him a few creeping steps at a time. After each short advance he sat down lifelessly on his haunches. If I abandoned him in the trail there was no knowing whether the owners would ever see him again; certainly they would not the saddle and bridle, and the owners were a simple mulatto family of Roseau who could ill bear such a loss. But I could scarcely risk further delay. The sun was drowning in the Caribbean; the hazy form of Martinique thirty miles away was still on my port bow, so to speak, showing that I had not yet turned the point of the island, that I was not yet halfway to Roseau. It was stupid of me not to have realized before that Dominica, for all its scant 35,000 ignorant inhabitants, was almost as large as the French island in the offing, and that to encircle one end of it was a stiff all-day job.

I was on the point of abandoning the animal when I caught sight of a man climbing the trail far ahead of us, the first person I had seen in more than an hour. I shouted, and for some time fancied he had dashed off into the wilderness out of fear. Then a break in the vegetation showed him again, and this time he halted. We reached him at last, a stodgy negro youth in the remnants of hat, shirt, and trousers who stood at attention, like a soldier, at the extreme edge of the trail, an expression between fear and respectful attention on his stupid black countenance.

“How far is it to Roseau?” I panted.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, seeming to poise himself for a dive into the jungle void behind him.

“How many miles to Roseau?” I repeated, “five or ten or—”

“Yes, sir,” he reiterated, shifting his mammoth bare feet uneasily.

“I want to know the distance to the city,” I cried, unwisely raising my voice in my haste and thereby all but causing him to bolt. “Can I make it in six hours?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, quickly. Then, evidently seeing that I was not pleased with the answer, he added hastily, “N—No, sir.”

“Est-ce qu’ on peut le faire en six heures?” I hazarded, but he seemed to understand French even less than English and stared at me mutely. The brilliant idea of wasting no more time passed through the place my mind should have been. I snatched out my note-book and pencil.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “Can you write?”

He could, to the extent of laboriously and all but illegibly penciling his name, to which I added his address, a tiny hamlet up in the mountains. I explained the situation to him briefly in words of one syllable. He seemed to follow me. At least he answered “Yes, sir” at the end of each sentence.

“You will take the horse to the police-station in Grand Bay,” I specified, having gathered from my map and his monosyllables that this was the next town. “I will tell the police there what to do with him, and I will leave five shillings with them to give you if you bring horse, saddle and bridle, and do not try to ride him on the way.”

“Yes sir,” he replied, taking the reins I held out to him, and I turned and fled into the swiftly descending night.

I have climbed many mountains in my day, but none that were as wearying as that endless succession of lofty ridges up the stony sides of which I stumbled hour after hour in a darkness as black as the bottom of a well, only to plunge instantly down again into another mighty, invisible ravine. Several times I lost the trail; how I kept it at all is a mystery. As I strained forward with every ounce of strength within me I caught myself thanking fortune, or whoever has my particular case on his books, that I had been a tramp all my days and had kept myself fit for such an ordeal. Now and then I passed through a “town,” that is, what voices told me was a scattered collection of huts hidden in the vegetation and the night on either side of the trail, for a hundred yards or two, along which a few ghostlike figures of negroes in white garments dodged aside at sound of my shod footsteps, each time soon giving way again to the deep stillness of an uninhabited wilderness, broken only by the monotonous chorus of jungle insects. Which of these places was Grand Bay I had no time to inquire, much less batter my head against the native stupidity for sufficient time to find the police-station and make known my case to slow-witted black officials. I would think up some other way of meeting my obligations when I had accomplished the more pressing mission on hand.

Once the trail came out on the very edge of the sea, crawling along under the face of a sheer towering cliff, the spray dashing up to my very feet; a dozen times it climbed what seemed almost perpendicularly into the invisible, starless sky above for what appeared to my wasting strength to be hours. I had eaten a hasty breakfast on board early that morning. Four bananas was the sum total of food I had been able to get along the way. My thighs trembled like the legs of a foundering horse; more than once my wobbling knees seemed on the very point of giving way beneath me. The rain had kindly held off all afternoon, an unusual boon in Dominica, but the pace I was forced to set had so drenched me in perspiration that it dripped in almost a stream from the end of my leather belt.

Then all at once, at the top of an ascent I had told myself a score of times I could never make, the lights of Roseau burst upon me, far below yet seemingly no great distance away. There were a few lights in what seemed to be the harbor, but not enough of them to be sure they were those of a passenger-steamer. Yet hope suddenly stiffened my legs as starch does a wilted collar. The town quickly disappeared again as I plunged down a stony but wide highway that had suddenly grown up under my feet. Several times I was convinced it led somewhere else than where I hoped, so incredibly interminable was the descent to the town that had seemed so near. Even when I caught sight of it again, where the road grew suddenly level, it lay far down the coast, as far, it seemed, as it had been from the top of the range. But the steamer was still there. I broke into a feeble run, for it could not possibly have been much short of midnight, but fell back into a walk when my legs had all but crumpled under me. Never had a small town seemed so interminably long. Once I passed a “nighthawk” and shouted a question at him over my shoulder. “About twelve,” he replied, little suspecting the surge of despair his words sent through me. As luck would have it, one boatman had remained at the wharf in hope of a belated shilling. He got two. I had just begun to wring the perspiration out of my coat into my cabin washstand when a long blast of the siren and the chugging of the engines told me that we had gotten under way.

Lest some ungentle reader carry away the impression that I had increased the slight disrepute in which Americans are held in Dominica—for our tourists land there frequently—may I add that I settled in full all my obligations there through the purser of the steamer on its return voyage? But to drop painful subjects and hark back to that other visit to Dominica. Then we left at noon, and Roseau settled back into another week’s sleep. There were several pretty villages tucked away in the greenery along the shore, some of them with wide cobbled streets, though hardly a yard of level ground, and each with a church just peering above the fronds of the cocoanuts. A highway crawled as far as it was able along the coast beside us, but soon gave it up where the steep hills, looking like green plush, became precipitous mountains falling sheer into the sea, yet with low forests clinging everywhere to the face of them. Bit by bit the loveliest of the Caribbees, the most unbrokenly mountainous of the West Indies, shrunk away behind us. Tiny fishing boats with ludicrous little pocket-handkerchief sails ventured far out, now standing forth against the horizon on the crest of a wave, now completely lost from sight in a trough of the sea. But by this time Martinique was looming large on the port bow, and we were straining our eyes for the first glimpse of ruined St. Pierre.

St. Lucia, largest of the British Windward Islands and a bare twenty-five miles south of Martinique, is the only one of the Lesser Antilles where the steamer ties up at the wharf. Castries, the capital, is situated on the edge of what was once a volcano crater, but presents little else of interest to those who have seen its replica in several of the other islands. Like all the group to which it belongs politically, it was once French and still speaks a “creole” jargon in preference to English. It, too, is mountainous, with a SoufriÈre that rises four thousand feet into the sky, and despite its thirty-five by twelve miles of extent, its population is as scanty and as unprogressive as that of Dominica. The most striking of its sights are the two pitons at the southern end of the island, cone-shaped peaks rising more than 2500 feet sheer out of the sea, as if they were the surviving summits of a Himalayan range that sank beneath the waves before the dawn of recorded history.

The next of the stepping-stones is St. Vincent, for though Barbados, a hundred miles due east of it, intervenes in the steamer’s itinerary, it is neither geographically, geologically, nor politically a member of the Windward group. St. Vincent was the last of the West Indies to come into possession of the white man, for here the fierce Caribs offered their last resistance and were conquered only by being literally driven into the sea. It is ruggedly mountainous and unbrokenly green with rampant vegetation, its jagged range cutting the sky-line like the teeth of a gigantic saw. It, too, has its SoufriÈre, which erupted on the afternoon before PÉlÉe in Martinique, killing more than fifteen hundred and devastating one end of the island. Rain falls easily on St. Vincent, and even the capital is habitually humid and drenched with frequent showers. This is named Kingstown, and lies scattered along the shore at the foot of a wide valley sloping quickly upward to the jagged labyrinth of peaks about which black clouds playfully chase one another the year round. It is a gawky, ragged, rather insolent place of unenterprising negroes, with a few scrawny leather-skinned poor whites scattered among them. Some of these are of Portuguese origin, and there is a scattering of East Indians. So colorless is the place, except in scenic beauty, that the appearance of a woman of Martinique in full native regalia in its streets resembles a loud noise in a deep silence. Even the sea comes in with a slow, lazy swo-ow among the weather-blackened fishing boats that lie scattered along its beach. So quiet and peaceful is it everywhere out of sound of the clamoring market-place that it would seem an ideal spot in which to engage in intellectual labors, but there is no evidence that St. Vincent has ever enriched the world’s art.

Roads climb away from the capital into the pretty, steep hills that surround it, among which are tucked red-roofed estates and negro cabins. The island looks more prosperous in the country than in the town. Its cotton is said to be unsurpassed for the making of lace, and was selling at the time of our visit, for $2 a pound. In addition, it produces cottonseed oil, arrow-root, cacao, and, above all, nutmegs. The nutmeg grows on a tree not unlike the plum in appearance—residents of Vermont have no doubt seen it often—the fruit resembling a small apricot. Inside this is a large nut prettily veined with the red mace that is another of the island’s exports, and the nut being cracked discloses a kernel which, dried and cured, is carried down from the hills in baskets on the heads of negroes and shipped to the outside world as the nutmeg of commerce. The natives, if the swarthy West Indians of to-day are entitled to that term, make also pretty little covered baskets in all sizes, which sell for far less after the steamer has blown her warning whistle than when she has just arrived.

The eight-hour run from St. Vincent to Grenada, capital of the Windward group, is close to the leeward of a scattered string of islands called the Grenadines, some of them comparatively large, mountainous in their small way, others mere jagged bits of rock strewn at random along the edge of the Caribbean, all of them looking more or less dry and sterile. Grenada is rugged and beautiful, though it does not rival Dominica in either respect. It has variously been called the “Isle of Spices,” the “Planter’s Paradise,” and the “Island of Nutmegs.” What claims to be the largest nutmeg plantation on earth—the West Indians have something of our own tendency for superlatives—lies among its labyrinth of hills; it produces also cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cacao. Though it is admittedly far more prosperous than St. Vincent, it shows few signs of cultivation from the sea, for none of its principal products in their growing state can be recognized from the forest and brush that cover many an uncleared West Indian isle. The high prices paid for nutmegs during the war, particularly by fruit preservers in the United States, has brought fortunes to many of its planters, despite the fact that the tree takes seven years to mature. Many of the negroes, too, own their small estates and increase their incomes by making jelly from the nutmeg fruit. Yet from the sea all this is hidden under a dense foliage that completely covers the nowhere level island. Along the geometrical white line of the beach are several villages; higher up are seen only scattered huts and a few larger buildings, except where the two considerable towns of Goyave and Victoria break the pretty green monotony.

But if Grenada must yield the palm for beauty to some of its neighbors, St. Georges, the capital, unquestionably presents the loveliest picture from the sea of any port in the Lesser Antilles, if not of the West Indies. Nestled among and piled up the green hills that terminate in a jagged series of peaks above, its often three-story houses pitched in stages one above the other, larger buildings crowning here and there a loftier eminence, the whole delightfully irregular and individualistic, it rouses even the jaded traveler to exclamations of pleasure. The steamer chugs placidly by, as if it had suddenly decided not to call, passes a massive old fortress, then suddenly swings inshore as though it had forgotten its limitation and aspires to climb the mountain heights. A narrow break in the rock wall opens before it, and it slides calmly into a magnificent little blue harbor and drops anchor so close to the shore that one can talk to the people on it in a conversational tone. Why the vessel does not tie up to the wharf and have done with it is difficult to understand, for the blue water seems fathoms deep up to the very edge of the quay. Strictly speaking, it is not a wharf at all, but one of the principal streets of the town, and passengers in their staterooms have a sense of having moved into an apartment just across the way from the negro families who lean out of their windows watching with cheerful curiosity the activity on the decks below.

The sun was just setting in a cloudless sky when we landed in St. Georges, yet we saw enough of it before darkness came to veil the now all too familiar negro slovenliness, though it could not disguise the concomitant odors. The same incessant cries for alms, the same heel-treading throngs of guides marked our progress, until we had shaken them off in a long tunnel through a mountain spur that connects the two sections of the water-front. For despite its distant loveliness, the town was overrun by the half-insolent, half-cringing black creatures who so mar all the Caribbean wonderland, until one is ready to curse the men of long ago who exterminated the aborigines and brought in their place this lowest species of the human family. On shore St. Georges was different only in its steep, cobbled streets and its rows of houses piled sheer one above another. Every other shop announced itself a “Dealer in Cacao and Nutmegs.” In the clamoring throngs of venders squatted along the curb the only unfamiliar sight was the blue “parrot-fish,” with so striking a resemblance to the talkative bird as to be mistaken for it at first glance. But even here there were evidences of Grenada’s greater prosperity. White men were a trifle more numerous; numbers of private automobiles climbed away into the hills by what at least began as excellent highways; a telephone line on which we counted seventy-six wires disappeared into the interior over the first crest behind the town. Then a full moon came up over the fuzzy hills, lending a false beauty to many a commonplace old house-wall, restoring the romance to the heaped-up town, and flooding the world with a silver sheen long after we had steamed away in the direction of Trinidad.

The “Ancient and Loyal Colony of Barbados” lies so far out to sea that it requires a real ocean voyage to reach it. Low and uninteresting at first glance, compared to many of the West Indies, it is by no means so flat as most descriptions lead one to suppose. Seen from the sea it stretches up to a fairly lofty central ridge that is regular from end to end, except for being a trifle serrated or ragged in the center of the island. Dutch looking windmills, the only survivors of the cane-crushers that have fallen into disuse and left only the vine-grown ruins of their stone towers in all the rest of the Lesser Antilles, are slowly turning here and there on the even sky-line. Though the island is entirely of coral and limestone formation, glaringly yellow-white under the blazing sunshine at close range, there is a suggestion of England in the velvety slopes of its varied-green fields as seen from far out in the bay. First settled by the English in 1624, it boasts itself the oldest British colony that has remained unceasingly loyal to the crown and accepts with pride the pseudonym of “Little England.”

Barbados has come nearer than any other land to solving the vexing “negro problem.” Cultivated in all its extent, with a population of 140,000 negroes and 20,000 whites on a little patch of earth twenty-one miles long and fifteen wide, or 1200 human beings to the square mile, without an acre of “bush” on which the liberated slaves could squat, the struggle for existence is so intense that the black man displays here an energy and initiative unusual to his race. The traveler hears rumours of the Barbadian’s un-African activity long before he reaches the island; he sees evidences of it before his ship comes to anchor in Carlisle Bay. Not only is the harbor more active, more crowded with shipping than any other in the Lesser Antilles, but it has every air of a place that is “up on its toes.” All the languor, the don’t-care-whether-I-work-or-not of nature’s favored spots are here replaced by a feverish anxiety to please, an eager energy to snap up any job that promises to turn a nimble shilling. Scores of rowboats surround the steamer in a clamoring multitude, their occupants holding aloft boards on which are printed the names of their craft—unromantic, unimaginative names compared to those of the islands that were once or are still French, such as “Maggie,” “Bridget,” “Lillie White,” “Daisy,” “Tiger.” In face of the fierce competition the boatmen strive their utmost to win a promise from a passenger leaning over the rail, to impress the name of their craft on his memory so that he will call for it when he descends the gangway, to win his good-will by flattery, by some crude witticism,—“Remember the ‘Maggie,’ mistress; Captain Snowball”; “The ‘Lillie White,’ my lady; upholstered in and out!” “The ‘Daisy,’ my gentleman; rowboat extraordinary to His Majesty!” Meanwhile the divers for pennies, a few girls among them, are besieging the passengers from their curious little flat-bottomed boats of double wedge shape to toss their odd coins into the water and “see the human porpoises” display their prowess. Yet, unlike the pandemonium in the other islands, there is no scramble of venders and beggars up the gangway to the discomfiture of descending passengers; no crowding of boatmen about it fighting with one another for each possible fare, to the not infrequent disaster of the latter. A bull-voiced negro police sergeant, in a uniform that suggests he has been loaned from the cast of “Pinafore,” keeps perfect order from the top of the gangway, permitting boats to draw near only when they are called by name and ruling the clamoring situation with an iron hand. For there is this difference between the harbor police of Barbados and those of all the other ports, that they speak to be obeyed, permit no argument, and if they are not respected, they are at least duly feared.

Bridgetown was static. The entire population was massed about the inner harbor; beyond the bridge that gives the town its name stood an immense new arch with the words “Welcome to Barbados” emblazoned upon it. We thought it very kind of them to give us such unexpected attention, until we discovered they were not waiting for us at all, but for one whom some loyal but not too well schooled Barbadian had named in chalk on a nearby wall the “Prints of Whales.” This was the first time in half a century, it seems, that a member of the royal family to which the “ancient and loyal” little colony has shown unbroken allegiance had come to visit it. The black multitude was agog with poorly suppressed excitement; white natives were squirming nervously; even the few Englishmen in the crowd were so thawed by the “epoch-making event” that they actually spoke to strangers. The harbor officer was so eager to lose none of it that he let us pass without examination; an enterprising black youth won a sixpence by finding us a place on a crowded barge a few yards from the royal landing-stage. The tramways had been stopped; black troops lined the vacant expanse of white main street that stretched away toward the government house. Nelson’s one-armed statue in Trafalgar Square had been given an oil bath; buildings were half hidden behind the fluttering flags of all the Allies—the Stars and Stripes rarest among them. Even nature had contributed to the occasion by sending an unexpected little shower to lay the white limestone dust that habitually rouses the ire of new arrivals. The island newspaper announced a special holiday in honor of “the Prince, who will confer upon the loyal inhabitants of this ancient colony the privilege of receiving a message from his august father”; it still carried the advertisements of the closed shops, imploring the citizens not only to buy flags and decorations but to “get new clothes in honor of our royal visitor.”

He landed twenty minutes after us. A salvo of twenty-two guns from his battleship in the bay sent as many gasps of excitement and delight through the eager multitude. The subconscious thought came to us that it might be better to pay outstanding war debts than to squander so much powder and coal, but it ill behooves an American of these days to criticize our neighbors for squandering public funds. Besides, it is no easy matter to keep up this loyalty-to-the-king business nowadays, though England, surely, need have no fear of changes. Then a white launch dashed up the cheering inner harbor, a curiously boyish-faced young man in a gleaming white helmet stepped briskly out on the landing-stage into a group of black policemen in speckless girlish sailor suits, who seemed to lack an ostrich feather on their round white straw hats, the governor in full-dress uniform and the lord mayor in purple and red robes bowed low over the hand that was proffered, and the prince and his suite were whisked away.

Black as it was, we were struck by the orderliness of the throng—what a pandemonium such an event would have caused in the temperamental French islands!—and its politeness, compared to the other British West Indies. But if the excitement was suppressed with British sternness, it was not voiceless. The brief glimpse of the fÊted youth had aroused a thousand exclamations like that of the ragged old negro woman behind us, “Oh, my God! Dat’s he himself! Oh Christ!” On the outskirts of the crowd another who had been so far away as to have caught, at best, a glimpse of the top of the royal helmet was still confiding to her surroundings, “My Jesus, but him good lookin’!” An old negro in a battered derby through which his whitening wool peered here and there elbowed his way through the dispersing crowd mumbling to himself, “No use talkin’, it’s de British flag nowadays!” Farther on a breathless market-woman was asking with the anxious tone of a master of ceremonies who had missed his train and feared the worst, “Has my gentleman landed yet?” But the enthusiasm was not unanimous, for still another woman, who fell in with us down the street, asserted, “Even if de prince landing, it all de same for we workin’ people. De Prince Albert him landed fifty year ago, an’ de school-girls dat fall wid de grandstand still hobblin’ about on dey broken legs.”

The prince spent a whole day in the ancient and loyal colony before continuing his journey to Australia, most of it in the isolation of the governor’s residence, but if he carried away an imperfect picture of this isolated fragment of the empire, he could at least report to his “august father” that it still retains its extraordinary loyalty to the crown.

Bridgetown is very English, despite its complexion and dazzling sunshine. Broken bottles embedded in the tops of plaster walls, which everywhere shut in private property, shows that this, too, is an overcrowded country where the few who have must take stern precautions against the many who have not. The streets bear such ultra-English names as “Cheapside,” “Philadelphia Lane,” “Literary Row,” “Lightfoot’s Passage,” “Whitepark Road.” The very signboards carry the mind back to England—“Grog Shop—The Rose of Devon,” “Coals for Sale,” “Try Ward’s Influenza Rum—Best Tonic”; the tin placard of some “Assurance Company” decorates every other faÇade. Even the little shingle shacks in the far outskirts bear some unromantic name painted above their doors; shopkeepers are as insistent in giving their full qualifications as the clamoring boatmen in the bay. “O. B. Lawless—American Tailor—Late of Panama” announces a tiny one-room hovel. There is a British orderliness of public demeanor even among the naturally disorderly negroes; the women have neither the color sense nor the dignified carriage of their sisters of Martinique, rather the gracelessness of the English women of the lower classes. Yet in one thing Barbados is not English. It is hospitable, quite ready to enter into conversation even with strangers.

When it is not silent and deserted under the spell of a holiday or its deadly Sabbath, Bridgetown pulsates with life. Its wharves are as busy as all those of the rest of the Lesser Antilles put together, as busy as our St. Thomas was before Barbados became the focal point of the eastern Caribbean. Bales and bundles and barrels and boatloads of produce pour into it as continuously as if every one of its 160,000 were wealthy consumers of everything the world has to offer. Its own product is constantly being trundled down to waiting lighters—great hogsheads of sugar or molasses carried on specially designed iron frames on wheels, each operated by three negroes who have not lost the amusing childishness of their race for all their competition-bred industry, for they invariably take turns in riding the contrivance back to the warehouse, though the clinging to it must require far more physical exertion than walking. Steamers, schooners, lighters, rowboats, mule-trucks, auto-“lorries” are incessantly carrying the world’s goods to and fro. Innumerable horse-carriages, scores of automobiles, ply for hire. Excellent electric-lights banish the darkness from all but the poorer class of houses. Yet despite the constant struggle for livelihood,—or perhaps because of it,—Bridgetown has little of the insolence of the other British West Indies. Applicants for odd jobs swarm and beggars are plentiful, but the latter are unoffensive and the former approach each possible client with a “Do you want me, my gentleman?” so courteous that one feels inclined to think up some imaginary errand on which to send them. They seem to recognize that politeness is an important asset in their constant battle against hunger, which gives them also a responsibility, a reliability in any task assigned them, and a moderation in their demands that is attained by few other West Indians.

Barbados has a tramway and a railroad, the only ones between Porto Rico and Trinidad. True, they are modest little affairs, the tramcars being drawn by mules. Yet the latter step along so lively, the employees and most of the passengers are so courteous, and overcrowding is so sternly forbidden that one comes to like them, especially those lines which rumble along the edge of the sea in the never-failing breeze, above all in the delightfully soft air of morning or evening. It would be difficult in these modern days of indifferent labor to find more courtesy, more earnest efficiency, and stricter living up to the rules than among Bridgetown’s tram-drivers and conductors, yet their highest wage is sixty-four cents a day. But for the war, the system would long since have been electrified; the new rails have already arrived. There is no real reason, except civic pride, however, that the mule-cars should be abolished. They are more reliable than many an electric-line in larger cities; they are a pleasant change to the speed-weary traveler; and the perfection with which their extra mule is hitched on at the bottom of the one hill in town and unhitched again at its summit without the loss of a single trot is a never-ending source of amusement.

Sojourners in Barbados are certain to make the acquaintance of at least the long tram-line to St. Lawrence. There are plenty of hotels in the town proper, but they are habitually crowded with gentlemen of color. White visitors dwell out Hastings way, some two miles from Trafalgar Square. Unlike the French and Spanish towns of tropical America, the downtown section of the Barbadian capital is almost wholly given over to business—and negroes. The numerous white inhabitants and most of the darker ones of any standing dwell in the outskirts. There one may find parks shaded by mahogany and palm-trees, splendid avenues lined by one or both of these species, comfortable residences ranging all the way from tiny “villas” draped with an ivy-like vine or gorgeous masses of the bougainvillea to luxurious estates in their own private parks. Even the poorer classes in another stratum still farther from the center of town dwell in neat little toy-houses of real comfort, compared with the huts of the masses of Haiti or Porto Rico. For miles along the sea beside this longest tram-line one passes a constant succession of comfortable, light-colored houses with boxed verandas, wooden shutters that raise from the bottom, and a sort of cap visor over the windows. In many cases these boast tropically unnecessary panes of glass through which one can make out of an evening interiors of perfect neatness, homelike, well lighted, furnished and decorated in taste, with none of the gaudy and crowded bric-a-brac to be seen behind Spanish rejas in the larger islands.

The night life of Bridgetown is worth a ride behind the now weary mules, if only to see a negro urchin diligently striving to light a candle in a tin box on the end of his soap-box cart, lest he be hauled up for violation of the ordinance forbidding vehicles to circulate after dark without lamps. Promptly at sunset the black policemen have changed their white helmets and jackets for German looking caps and capes. On the way downtown one passes half a dozen wide-open churches and chapels in which black preachers are vociferously exhorting their nightly congregations to “walk in de way of de Lard”; one is certain to rumble past the shrieking hubbub of a Salvation Army meeting or two. There are crowds of loafers on many a corner—jolly, inoffensive, black idlers with the spirit of rollicking fun in their ebony faces, bursting into howls of laughter at the slightest incident that seems comical to their primitive minds. The filthy street-habits of the French and Spanish islands are little in evidence, for the police of Barbados are as vigilant as they are heavy-handed.

Downtown the activities of the day have departed. The larger stores have closed at four, the small shops at sundown. Only a scattered score of negro women squat in Trafalgar Square before their little trays of peanuts, bananas, and home-made sweets, a wick torch burning on a corner of them whether they are deposited on the ground or are seeking lack of competition elsewhere on top of their owners’ heads. There is no theater in Bridgetown; the cinema is as sad a parody on amusement as it is everywhere, but the audience is worth seeing, once. The negroes sit in the “pit,” the Élite, chiefly yellow of tint, in a kind of church gallery. Shouts, screams, roof-raising roars of primitive laughter, deafening applause whenever the frock-coated villain is undone, mark the unwinding of the film from beginning to end; it is a scene far different from the comparative dignity of a black French audience. In the French and Spanish West Indies the cinemas begin after nine and end around midnight; in Barbados they start sharply at seven and terminate at ten with a rush for the last mule-cars, with all but the swift out of luck, and Bridgetown settles down to deathly Sunday stillness while the weary mules are still crawling toward the end of their laborious day.

Or, if the visitor does not care to break up his evening by descending into town, there are few more ideal spots in which to hear a band concert than the little park known as Hastings Rocks, on the very edge of the sea, especially under a full moon. I am an inveterate concert-goer; one naturally becomes so in tropical America, where other music is so rare, and I must confess a preference for the Spanish-American type of concert over the Anglo-Saxon, for the gay throngs of promenaders about the sometimes not too successful attempts to render a classical program over the staid gatherings that listen motionless to an uproar of “popular” music. But even this serves to while away an evening and seldom fails to offer a touch of local color. Thus in negro-teeming Barbados there is scarcely a suggestion of African parentage to be seen at this stately entertainment on Hastings Rocks. It is partly the sixpence admission that keeps the negroes outside, but not entirely. Struck by the fact that there was only one mulatto boy and two light-yellow girls, all very staid and quiet, on the seaside benches, I sought information of the negro gatekeeper. Yes, indeed, he refused admittance to most of those of his own color, and to some white people, too.

“You see,” he explained, “it is like this. Perhaps last night you might go with a girl downtown, and then you come here to-night with your wife; and if that girl allowed to come in here she might want to get familiar and gossip with you. Or she might giggle at you. We can’t have that,” he added, in a tone that reminded one that the Briton, even when his skin is black, is first cousin to Mrs. Grundy. The English sense of dignified orderliness and the negro’s natural gaiety, his tendency to “giggle” at inopportune moments, do not mix well, and the Hasting Rocks concert is one of those places where African hilarity must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Besides Bridgetown, with its 35,000 or more inhabitants, Barbados has a number of what might best be called large collections of houses, such as Speightstown, Holetown—popularly known as “the Hole”—and the like, but its population, surpassed in density, if at all, only by China, a density compared to which that of Porto Rico seems slight indeed, is spread so evenly over all the island that it is hard to tell where a town begins or ends. The island is one of the most remarkable instances of coral formation. Comparatively flat, when likened to most of the West Indies, it consists of a number of stages or platforms that have been built one after the other as the island rose slowly and gradually from the sea to a height, at one point, of nearly 1200 feet. When first discovered it was surrounded by mangrove swamps and tangled, rotting vegetation, but all this has since turned to solid ground. The coral of which it is built contains some ninety per cent. of lime, so that almost the whole island might be reduced to powder in a lime-kiln. The rest of it consists of a species of sandstone known as “Scotland rock,” which comes to the surface in the northwestern part of the island.

Thanks to its geological formation, the close network of roads which reaches every corner of Barbados, as well as all its bare open spaces, are glaringly white and hard on the eyes, especially, if one may judge by the prevalence of glasses among them, those of the white and “high yellow” inhabitants. Yet, for the same reason, it is perhaps the most healthful of the West Indies. It has no swamps to breed malaria; the trade winds from the open ocean sweep incessantly across it. Once it was troubled with typhoid, but the establishment of a single unpolluted water supply for the whole island has done away with this danger. There is great equability of temperature day or night the year round. The wet season, from June to October, is less so than in most tropical lands; though visitors and European inhabitants complain of the midday heat, except in December and January, it is always cool compared to midsummer in the United States. Fresh, dry, and constantly laden with ocean ozone, it is a climate that makes little demand upon the strength and vital powers. All indications point to the fact, however, that it is no place for white women as permanent residents, for virtually without exception they grow scrawny, nervous, and weak-eyed, their pasty complexions sprayed with freckles under their veils.

All roads lead to Bridgetown, but to follow them in the opposite direction to any chosen point is not so simple a matter. Signboards are almost unknown, no doubt being considered a superfluity in so small and crowded a community. The country people, though willing enough, are often too stupid to give intelligible directions, though they make up for this by a persistency in showing one the way in person which no amount of protest can overcome. Ask a question or give them any other slightest excuse to do so, and they will cling to the white pedestrian’s heels for miles in the hope of picking up a penny or a “bit,” always taking their leave with, “I beg you for a cent, sir.” Indeed, that is the constant refrain everywhere along the dazzling but excellent highways. Women and men shout it from the doors of their little cabins; children scamper after one, the black babies are egged on by their elders as soon as they can toddle, each shrieking the invariable demand in a tone of voice which suggests that refusal is impossible. They seem to fancy that white strangers cross the island for no other purpose than to distribute a cartload of English coppers along the way. Almost as incessant are the demands upon the kodak-carrier to “Make me photo, sir,” or, “Draw me portrait, master.”

On week-days the highways of Barbados are as crowded as city streets. Heavy draft horses and mules, auto-trucks large and small, are constantly descending to Bridgetown with the cumbersome hogsheads of sugar and molasses, or returning with supplies for the estates. There is an endless procession of almost toy-like carts, each drawn by a single small donkey, the two wheels habitually wobbly, the name, address, and license number of the owner in crude letters on the front of the diminutive box. The donkey is the invariable beast of burden of the Barbadian of the masses. He carries to town the products of little gardens; he brings the supplies of the innumerable small shops throughout the island; the country youth takes his “girl” riding in his donkey-cart; in later years the whole ebony family packs into it for a jolt across the country. Unlike the rest of tropical America, Barbados does not ride its donkeys or use them as pack-animals; nor, to all appearances, are they abused. Centuries of British training seems to have given the black islanders a compassion rare among their neighbors. Horsemen and pack-mules are likewise unknown along the white highways; oxen are rare; pedestrians are much less numerous than one would expect in so populous a community, while bicycles are as widely in use as in England.

There is a curiously English homelikeness about the landscape, which, if it is seldom rugged, is by no means monotonous. Every acre of ground is utilized; forbidding stone-and-mud walls topped by spikes or broken glass line the roads for long distances; villages, or at least houses, are so continuous that one is almost never out of human sight or sound. Coral is so abundant and wood so expensive that immense limestone steps often lead up to tiny wooden shacks, as out of proportion to their foundations as statues to their pedestals. The majority of the rather well-kept little negro cabins, however, are simply set up on small blocks of coral at the four corners. More than one band of hilarious sailors from visiting battleships have amused themselves by removing one of these props and tumbling a Barbadian family out of their beds in the small hours of the night.

Shopkeeping might almost be called the favorite sport of the “Badeyan”; the lack of jobs enough to go round has led so many to adopt this means of winning a possible livelihood that the island has been called “Over-shopped Barbados.” Everywhere wayside shanties bear the familiar black sign with white letters, varying only in name and number: “Percival Brathwaite—Licensed Seller of Liquors—No. 765.” Inside, perhaps behind a counter contrived from a single precious board, are a few crude shelves stocked mainly with bottles of rum or with cheap “soft drinks,” a few shillings’ worth of uninviting foodstuffs flanking them. The Barbadians have long been known as the “Yankees of the West Indies.” They are far more diligent merchants than most natives of tropical America, so much so that neither the Chinese, Jews, Portuguese, nor Syrians, so numerous in the other islands, can compete with them to advantage. But their knowledge of book-keeping is scanty, and it is often only the visible end of his light resources that convinces the petty shopkeeper that he is losing, rather than gaining at the popular pastime.

Every little way along the island roads other shanties bear the sign of this or that “Friendly Society.” These are a species of local insurance company or mutual benefit association. The negroes pay into them from three pence to a shilling a week,—some of the poorer neighbors nothing at all,—and receive in return sickness or accident benefits, or have their funeral expenses paid in case of death. But they are typically tropical or African in their indifference to a more distant to-morrow, for at the end of each year the remaining funds are divided among those members who have not drawn out more than they paid in, and with perhaps as much as five dollars each in their pockets the society indulges in a hilarious “blow-out.” Equally numerous are the signboards of “agents” of the undertakers of Bridgetown. They do not believe in waiting for the sickle of Father Time, those deathbed functionaries of the capital, but drum up trade with Barbadian energy. The island’s newspaper habitually carries their enticing pleas for clients:

“OUR DEAD MUST BE BURIED,” begins one of these appeals. “In the SAD HOUR why trouble yourself over the Dead when you can see E. T. ARCHER GITTENS, the up-to-date and experienced UNDERTAKER face to face? Look for the Hearse with the GOLDEN ANGEL!” There follows a “poem” of twenty-four verses setting forth the advantages of being buried by Gittens and ending with the touching appeal:

No doubt it would.

The Barbados government railway—one could not call it a railroad in so English a community—is an amusing little thing twenty years old and some two hours long, though that does not mean as much in miles as one might expect. On week-days its passenger-train sometimes makes a one-way journey, at a cost of four shillings and sixpence for first and two shillings for second-class travelers, but on Sundays it indulges in the whole round trip. From the station near the famous bridge from which the capital takes its name, the little train tears away as if excited at its own importance, through slightly rolling cane-fields, rocky white coral gullies, past frequent Dutchy windmills flailing their shadows on the ground. Vistas as broad as if it were crossing a continent instead of a tiny parcel of land flung far out into the ocean, spread on either hand, that to the right flat and almost desertlike in its aridity, the north broken in rugged low ridges, with many scattered villages and gray heaps of sugar-mills on their crests. The soil is so thin one marvels that it will grow anything, yet every acre of it shows signs of constant cultivation, the long expanses of cane broken here and there by small patches of corn, cassava, yams, and the sweet potatoes on which the mass of the population depends for nourishment. Every few minutes the train halts at a station seething with cheerful black faces; everywhere it crosses white coral roads, some of them cut deep down through the limestone ridges. Trees are almost plentiful, but they all show evidence of having been planted. The Spanish discoverers, it is said, gave the island its present name because its forests were bearded (barbudos) with what is known in our southern states as “Spanish moss,” but this, like the original woods, has long since disappeared.

Sunday is as dead as it can only be in a British community. The cattle and mules stand in the corrals eating dry cane-tops; the square brick chimneys of the boiling-houses emit not a fleck of smoke. Only in rare cases even are the windmills allowed to work, though for some reason nature does not shut off the bracing trade-wind. This is so constant that it forces all the branches of the trees to the southwest, until even the royal palms seem to be wearing their hair on one side. Fields brown with cut cane-tops contrast with the pale green of those still unharvested; the general sun-flooded whiteness of the landscape is painful to the eyes. Here and there is a patch of blackish soil, but it has the vigorless air of having long been overworked, a looseness as of volcanic lava.

In less than an hour the Atlantic spreads out on the horizon ahead. Rusty limestone cliffs, a jagged coral coast against which the sea dashes itself as if angry at the first resistance it encounters since passing the Cape Verde Islands many hundred miles away, stretch out to the north and south. We come out to the edge of it, fifty feet above, then descend to a track so close to the surf that the right of way must be braced up with old rails. It is a dreary, barren-dry, brown-yellow coast, yet of a beauty all its own, with its chaotic jumble of huge rocks among which hundreds of negroes are bathing stark naked and spouting holes out of which the thundering surf dashes high into the air. Farther north the landscape grows almost mountainous, but we have already reached Bathsheba, where Sunday travelers habitually disembark, leaving the train to crawl on alone to a few tiny oil-wells around the next rugged promontory.

I climbed the sheer cliff a thousand feet high above Bathsheba, its face covered with brown grasses, ferns, creeping plants, and the smaller species of palm that cling to each projecting rock as if their available nourishment were as scanty and precious as that of the teeming human population. The view from the summit forever banishes the notion that Barbados is flat. All “Scotland,” as the northern end of the island is called, is laid out before you, broken and pitched and jumbled until it resembles the Andes in miniature. White ribbons of roads and a network of trails are carelessly strewn away across it, hundreds of huts are scattered over its chaotic surface, and an immense building stands forth on the summit of its highest hill. Jagged, gray-black sandstone boulders of gigantic size contrast with the white limestone to give the tumbled scene the aspect of having been left unfinished by the Builder of the western hemisphere in his hurry to cross the Atlantic. Below, this scene spreads away to infinity, its scalloped, foam-lashed shore clear-cut in the dry, luminous atmosphere as far as the eye can see in either direction. Behind, the picture is tamer, though by no means level. Rolling cane-fields, with here and there a royal palm, numerous clusters of huts, and the ubiquitous chimneys and windmills of sugar-factories breaking the sky-line, stretch endlessly away to the yellow-brown horizon.

I returned to Bridgetown on foot—he who still fancies the island is level and tiny should walk across it on a blazing Sunday afternoon—passing not more than a score of travelers on the way. Once I paused to chat with a group of “poor whites,” as they call themselves, or what their black neighbors refer to as “poor buckras” or “red legs.” These reminders of our own “crackers” are numerous in Barbados, especially in the “Scotland” district. They are descendants of the convicts or prisoners taken in the civil wars of England during the Commonwealth or the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion. Chiefly Scotch and Irish, some of them royalists of the nobility, they were sent to the island by Cromwell between 1650 and 1660 and sold to the planters for 1500 pounds of sugar a head. It is doubtful whether any of them would be worth that now. Branded and mutilated to prevent their escape, treated more brutally than the blacks by whom they are held in contempt to this day, they steadily declined in health and spirits until their present descendants, with the exception of the few who rose to be planters, are listless and poverty-stricken, degenerate victims of the hookworm and of intermarriage. The original prisoners wore kilts; hence the tropical sun soon won them the nickname of “red legs,” which has persisted to this day, perhaps because their bare feet have still a distinctly ruddy tinge. But their faces are corpse-like in color and their bodies thin and anemic. Of the adults in this group, not one had more than a half dozen crumbling fangs in the way of teeth.

Yet they seemed moderately well-informed and of far quicker intelligence than the sturdier blacks who so despise them. Their air of honest simplicity acquitted them of any suggestion of boasting when they asserted that the “poor whites” never steal cane and other growing crops, the theft of which by the negroes, despite heavy penalties, is one of the curses of the island. The chief topic of conversation, nevertheless, was that inevitable post-war one the world over, the high cost of food. Coffee, their principal nourishment, they took nowadays without sugar, and though it had sold at sixteen cents a pound when the war ended, it was now forty. Rice, sweet potatoes, meal, even breadfruit, “the staff of Barbados,” had trebled in price. Their “spots,” as they call their gardens, were constantly being robbed by the negroes. It was no use trying to keep a goat or a sheep; some black thief was sure to carry it off.

I succeeded at length in bringing up the matter of education. They sent their boys to the public schools, but it was not safe to send the girls. There were elementary schools in every parish, where each pupil paid a penny a week. The teachers were nearly all men and all were colored. In the higher public schools, which an average tuition of $72 a year put out of reach for most of them, the teachers were usually Englishmen; but the color-line was drawn only in the private schools, of which there were plenty for those who could afford them. While they talked I noted that the enmity between the two races was camouflaged under an outward friendliness; the greetings between the group of “red legs” and the black passers-by had a heartiness of tone that might easily have deceived an unenquiring observer.

One of the sights of Barbados is the large, old, gray stone Anglican church in each of the eleven parishes. Their erection was decreed way back in the days when the Earl of Carlisle, having a superior “pull” with the King of England, ousted Sir William Courteen as founder of the colony. They are as English in their sturdy bulkiness, with their heavy crenelated stone towers and the replica of an English country churchyard about each of them, despite the difficulty of digging graves in hard limestone, as the English sparrows which flock about the neighboring cane-fields. The Anglicans, having gotten in on the ground floor, have almost a monopoly in the island, though other denominations have no great difficulty in establishing their claims to endowments. The Catholics, of whom there are barely a thousand, have only one small church. Even the shouting sects seem to have less popularity among the Barbadians than in most negro communities. Religion is reputed the true bulwark of the social order in Barbados, but it is rather because the long established churches serve to maintain the class distinctions on which this is based than because they succeed in holding the negroes up to any particularly high standard of morals. Mrs. Grundy is strongly entrenched in all the British West Indies, but her influence is rather superficial among the black masses, who have a considerable amount of what other races call the “hypocrisy” of the Anglo-Saxon.

But Sunday is no time to see Barbados. I walked entirely across the island without meeting one donkey-cart, so numerous on week-days. There was scarcely a wheeled vehicle in all the long white vista of highways, except a rare bicycle and the occasional automobile of a party of American tourists. Pedestrians were as rare; the people were everywhere shut in behind their tight-closed wooden shutters, a few of them singing hymns, most of them sleeping in their air-tight cabins. The few I roused, out of mere curiosity, treated the annoyance as something bordering on the sacrilegious. Nowhere was there a group under the trees; never a picnic party; not a sign of any one enjoying life. Bridgetown itself, compared to the swarming uproar of the “prince’s day,” was as a graveyard to carnival time.

With the dawn of Monday, however, the island awakens again to its feverish activity, and one may easily catch an auto-truck across the floor-flat, dusty plain stretching some five miles inland from the capital and drop off on the breezy higher shelves of the island. Something of interest is sure to turn up within the next mile or two.

The Barbadian, for instance, digs his wells not to get water, but to get rid of it. They are to be found everywhere, often at the very edge of the highway and always open and unprotected. They are big round holes cut far down into the jagged coral rock, splendid places, it would seem, into which to throw something or somebody for which one has no use. This is exactly their purpose, for they are designed to carry off the floods of the rainy season. Barbados has no rivers and no lakes, or rather, these are all underground, some of them in immense caverns. In former days the mass of the population depended for its water supply on shallow, intermittent ponds, the better class on private arrangements. Now two central pumping stations and more than a hundred miles of underground pipe furnish the entire island with excellent, if lukewarm, water from the unseen rivers. Instead of the roadside shrines of the French islands, the limestone embankments of Barbadian highways have faucets at frequent intervals. Water is free to those who fetch it from these. The better class residents are everywhere supplied by private pipes at a nominal sum per house. Business places pay thirty cents per thousand gallons, which is considered so expensive that only one estate on the island is irrigated though drought is frequently disastrous in the west and south.

The stodgy windmills everywhere fanning the air are used exclusively for the grinding of cane. It is a rare patch of landscape that does not show at least half a dozen of these toiling away six days of the week. The fact that they have survived in Barbados, of all the West Indies, may be as much due to its unfailing trade wind as to the crowded conditions which make the innovation of labor-saving devices so unpopular. Methods long since abandoned elsewhere are still in vogue in Barbadian sugar-mills. The cane is passed by hand between the iron rollers in the stone windmill tower. The big hilltop yard about this is covered with drying bagasse, or cane pulp, which is finally heaped up about the boiling-house in which it serves as fuel. The juice runs in open troughs from the windmill to this latter building, where it is strained and left to settle until the scum rises to the surface. Then, this being skimmed off, it is boiled in open copper kettles. A negro watches each of them, dipping out the froth now and then with a huge soup-ladle and tossing the boiling liquid into the air when it shows signs of burning. Toward the end of the process the “sugar-master” is constantly trying the syrup between a finger and thumb, in order to tell when the crystals are forming and when to “strike” the contents of the kettle, which must be done at the right moment if the sugar is to be worth shipping. From beginning to end the work is done by hand, and a Barbadian sugar-mill has little resemblance, except in its pungently sweet odor, to the immense centrals of Cuba.

In the early days the sugar-men had much trouble in transporting their product because of the deep gullies and bad roads. Once upon a time camels were used, but though they answered the purpose splendidly, being very sure-footed and capable of carrying the price of a “red leg” each, they died for lack of a proper diet. To this day Barbadian sugar or molasses is shipped in the cumbersome 110–gallon hogsheads which were adopted in the days of camels, though the hauling is now done on mule or auto-trucks.

With an unlimited supply of cheap labor, it is natural that the Barbadian planters should cling to the old processes. Indeed, the estate owner who attempts to bring in new machinery is heartily criticized by his competitors, while the establishment of new mills is out of the question, there being already too many factories for the available acreage. The sugar planters, nine out of ten of whom are as white as the Anglo-Saxon can be after many generations of tropical residence, hold all Barbados, leaving only the steeper hillsides and the less fertile patches as “spots” on which the “red legs” and the negroes plant their yams, arrow-root, sweet potatoes, and cassava. They live in luxurious old manor houses, usually on high knolls overlooking their not particularly broad acres, half-hidden in groves of mahogany-trees, which are protected by law from destruction. With few exceptions they are the descendants of English colonists, and still keep the British qualities their ancestors brought with them, keep them so tenaciously that in some ways they are more English than the modern Englishman himself. There are suggestions that they are as short-sighted as most conservatives in taking the last ounce of advantage of the crowded conditions to keep the laboring masses at ludicrously low wages. Molasses, which the Barbadians call “syrup,” has advanced from seven cents to a dollar a gallon in the past few years, yet the planters are still paying about a shilling per hundred “holes” of cane, making it impossible for the hardest workers to earn more than “two and six” a day, though the prices, even of the foodstuffs grown on the island, have nearly all trebled. The pessimists foresee trouble and cite the continual presence of a battleship in Barbadian waters as proof that even the government fears it. But though they constitute only one eighth of the population and the percentage is steadily decreasing, the whites have always ruled in Barbados. As early as 1649 the slaves planned to kill them all off, and kept the secret of the conspiracy so well that it would probably have succeeded but for a servant who gave the planters warning on the eve of the attack. In 1816 there came another fierce negro rebellion, which was put down with an iron hand. Since then the blacks have been given little real voice in the government, despite their overwhelming majority, and the traveler of to-day finds Barbados the one island of the British West Indies in which the negroes are not beginning to “feel their oats.”

Some attribute the patent difference between the Barbadian and other negroes of the western hemisphere to his origin in Sierra Leone, while the rest came from the Kru or the Slave Coast, but there is little historical evidence to support this contention. Still others credit his superior energy and initiative to the absence of malaria in the island. Most observers see in those qualities merely a proof that the negro develops most nearly into a creditable member of society under physical conditions which require him either to work or starve. Whoever is right, the fact remains that Barbados is one of the few places where emancipation was not disastrous, and that the Barbadians are probably, on the whole, the most pleasant mannered people in the West Indies, if not in the western hemisphere. Except for rare cases of rowdyism, they are always courteous, yet without cringing. Even those in positions bringing them into official contact with the public are, as is too often the reverse in many another country, extremely obliging, cheerful, yet never patronizing, rarely brusk, yet efficient and prompt, fairly true to their promises, for a tropical country, and have little of that aggressive insolence which is becoming so wide-spread among the negroes in our own country and the other British West Indies. The crowded condition of the country evidently makes the constant meeting of people a reason to cut down friction to the minimum, while the necessity of earning a livelihood where work is scarce leads them to be careful not to antagonize any one.

That they are amusing goes without saying. The magnificent black “bobby” in his white blouse and helmet, for instance, does not reply to your query about the next tramway with, “Goin’ to Hastings? Better geta move on then,” but with a mellifluous, “Ah, your destination is Hastings? Then you will be obliged to proceed very rapidly; otherwise you are in danger of being detained a half-hour until the next car departs.” Yet they are not a people that grows upon one. As with all negroes, there is a shallowness back of their politeness, a something which reminds you every now and then that they have no history, no traditions, no ancient culture—such as that which is apparent, for instance, in the most ragged Hindu coolie—behind them.

Small as it is, there are many more points of interest in Barbados. There is Speightstown, for example, where whaling is still sometimes carried on; Holetown, with its monument to the first English colonists; a marvelous view of all the ragged Atlantic coast from the parish churchyard of St. John’s, in which lies buried a descendant of the Greek emperors who was long its sexton; Mt. Hillaby, the highest point of the island, from which one may look down upon all the chaotic jumble of hills in St. Andrew’s Parish, better known as “Scotland,” or in the south the broad, parched flatlands of Christ Church, the only one of the eleven parishes not named for some saint of the Anglican calendar. Or there is amusement, at least, among the huts tucked away into every jagged coral ravine, in noting the curious subterfuges adopted to wrest a livelihood from an overburdened and rather unwilling soil. Every acre of the island being under cultivation, there is, of course, no hunting; wild animals are unknown, except for a few monkeys in Turner’s Woods. These are rarely seen, for so human have they become in their own struggle for existence that they post a guard whenever they engage in their forays and flee at his first intimation of danger. Negro boys earn a penny or two a day for keeping the monkeys off the cane-fields. There being no streams or lakes, the island has no disciples of Isaac Walton, but the Barbadians are inveterate fishermen, for all that. Time was when the little boats which are constantly pushing out to sea in water so clear that one may see every crevice of the coral bottom sixty feet below brought back more fish than the island could consume. Then one might buy a hundred flying-fish for a penny; to-day these favorites of the Barbadian table cost as high as two pence each, while the equally familiar dolphins cost twice that a pound. “Sea eggs,” which are nothing more or less than the sea-urchin of northern waters, are a standard dish in this crowded community, for the same reason, perhaps, that the French have discovered the edible qualities of snails.

Barbados is the only foreign land ever visited by the father of our country. In the winter of 1751–52, nearly a quarter of a century before the Revolution, Captain George Washington, then adjutant general of Virginia at one hundred and fifty pounds a year, accompanied his brother on a journey in quest of his health. Major Lawrence Washington of the British army, owner of Mt. Vernon, fourteen years older than George, had been suffering from consumption since he served in the expedition against Cartagena in South America. They sailed direct to Barbados, then a famous health resort, by schooner. The skipper must have been weak on navigation, for, says George’s journal, “We were awakened one morning by a cry of land, when by our reckonings there should have been none within 150 leagues of us. If we had been a bit to one side or the other we would never have noticed the island and would have run on down to ——”, the future father of our country does not seem to have a very clear idea just where. In fact, schoolmarms who have been holding up the hatchet-wielder as a model for their pupils—unless some millionaire movie hero has taken his place in the hearts of our young countrymen nowadays—will no doubt be horrified to learn that George was not only weak in geography, but even in spelling. He frequently speaks of “fields of cain,” for instance, and sometimes calls his distressing means of conveyance a “scooner,” or a “chooner.” But let him speak for himself:

Nov. 4, 1751—This morning received a card from Major Clark welcoming us to Barbados, with an invitation to breakfast and dine with him. We went—myself with some reluctance, as the small pox was in the family. Mrs. Clark was so much indisposed [the italics are mine] by it that we had not the pleasure of her company. Spent next few days writ^g letters to be carried by the Chooner Fredericksburg to Virginia.

Thursday 8th. Came Captⁿ Crofton with his proposals which tho extravagantly dear my Brother was obliged to give. £15 pr Month is his charge exclusive of Liquors & washings which we find. In the evening we remov’d some of our things up and ourselves; it’s pleasantly situated pretty near the sea and ab^t a mile from the Town, the prospective agreable by Land and pleasant by Sea as we command the prospect of Carlyle Bay & all the shipping in such a manner that none can go in or out with out being open to our view.

The Washingtons evidently lived near the same spot now inhabited by American tourists, any two of whom would be only too happy nowadays to pay forty-three dollars a month for board and lodging, “Liquor” or no liquor. Capt. Crofton, the rascally profiteer, must have made a small fortune out of his “paying guests,” for they were always being invited out to meals at the “Beefstake & Tripe Club” or elsewhere. Church members, however, will be glad to see the next entry, despite of that unhappy break about the “Liquor”:

Sunday 11th. Dressed in order for Church but got to Town too Late. [What man ever kept his sense of time in the tropics?] Went to Evening Service.

Thursday 15th. Was treated with a play ticket to see the Tragedy of George Barnwell acted. [George, you see, was no money-strewing tourist. But then, he was not an American in those days.]

Saturday 17th. Was strongly attacked with the small Pox sent for Dr. Lanahan whose attendance was very constant till my recovery and going out which was not ’till thursday the 12th December.

December 12th. Went to Town visited Maj. Clarke (who kindly visited me in my illness and contributed all he cou’d in send’g me the necessary’s required by ye disorder).

Kind of him, surely, after his other little contribution to “ye disorder” in the shape of that first invitation. The only real result of the Washingtons’ trip to Barbados was that our first President was pockmarked for life, for Lawrence got no good out of the trip. George went back to Virginia and Lawrence to Bermuda, where he grew steadily worse, and finally went home to die at Mt. Vernon the following summer bequeathing the estate to his younger brother.

Washington speaks constantly in his journal of the hospitality of Barbados. That characteristic remains to this day, where it is carried to an extreme unknown in England and rarely in the United States. Of all the Lesser Antilles, one leaves Barbados, perhaps, with most regret.

AS his steamer drops anchor far out in the immense shallow of the Gulf of Paria, the traveler cannot but realize that at last he has come to the end of the West Indies and is encroaching upon the South American continent. The “Trinity” of fuzzy hills, to-day called the “Three Sisters,” for which Columbus named the island have quite another aspect than the precipitous volcanic peaks of the Lesser Antilles. Plump, placid, their vegetation tanned a light brown by the now truly tropical sun, they have a strong family resemblance to the mountains of Venezuela hazily looming into the sky back across the Bocas. Fog, unknown among the stepping-stones to the north, hangs like wet wool over all the lowlands, along the edge of the bay. The trade wind that has never failed on the long journey south has given place to an enervating breathlessness; by seven in the morning the sun is already cruelly beating down; instead of the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the vast expanse of harbor has the drab, lifeless color of a faded brown carpet. Sail-boats, their sails limply aslack as they await the signal to come and carry off the steamer’s cargo, give the scene a half-Oriental aspect that recalls the southern coast of China.

There is little, indeed, to excite the senses as the crowded launch plows for half an hour toward the uninviting shore. Seen from the harbor, Port of Spain, with its long straight line of wharves and warehouses, looks dismal in the extreme, especially to those who have left beautiful St. Georges of Grenada the evening before. Yet from the moment of landing one has the feeling of having gotten somewhere at last. The second in size and the most prosperous of the British West Indies may be less beautiful than the scattered toy-lands bordering the Caribbean, but a glance suffices to prove it far more progressive. Deceived by its featureless appearance from the sea, the traveler is little short of astounded to find Port of Spain an extensive city, the first real city south of Porto Rico, with a beauty of its own unsuggested from the harbor. Spread over an immense plain sloping ever so slightly toward the sea, with wide, right-angled, perfect asphalt streets, electric-cars as up-to-date as those of any American city covering it in every direction, and having most of the conveniences of modern times, it bears little resemblance to the backward, if more picturesque, “capitals” of the string of tiny islands to the north. The insignificant “Puerto de los EspaÑoles,” which the English found here when they captured the island a mere century and a quarter ago, was burned to the ground in 1808; another conflagration swept it in 1895, so that the city of to-day has a sprightly, new-built aspect, despite the comparative flimsiness of its mainly wooden buildings. There are numerous imposing structures of brick and stone, too, along its broad streets, and many splendid residences in the suburbs stretching from the bright and ample business section to the foot of the encircling hills.

Long before he reaches these, however, the visitor is sure to be struck by the astonishing variety of types that make up the population. Unlike that of the smaller islands, the development of Trinidad came mainly after African slavery was beginning to be frowned upon, and though the negro element of its population is large, the monotony of flat noses and black skins is broken by an equal number of other racial characteristics. Large numbers of Chinese workmen were imported in the middle of the last century; Hindu coolies, indentured for five years, were introduced in 1839, and though the Government of India has recently forbidden this species of servitude, fully one third of the inhabitants are East Indians or their more or less full-blooded descendants. Toward the end of the eighteenth century large numbers of French refugees took up their residence in Trinidad, and the island to-day has more inhabitants of this race than any of the West Indies not under French rule. Many of the plantation-owners are of this stock, improvident fellows, if one may believe the rumors afloat, who mortgage their estates when times are hard. Then, instead of paying their debts when the price of sugar and cacao make them temporarily rich, they go to Europe “on a tear.” Martinique and Guadeloupe have also sent their share of laborers, and there are sections of Trinidad in which the negroes are as apt to speak French as English. Portuguese, fleeing persecution in Madeira, added to this heterogeneous throng, while Venezuelans are constantly drifting across the Bocas to increase the helter-skelter of races that makes up the island’s present population.

All this mixture may be seen in a single block of Port of Spain. Here the stroller passes a wide-open, unfurnished room where turbanned Hindus squat on their heels on the bare floor, some with long shovel-beards through which they run their thin, oily fingers, some in the act of getting their peculiar hair-cuts, nearly all of them smoking their curious tree-shaped pipes, all of them chattering their dialects in the rather effeminate voices of their race. On the sidewalk outside are their women, in gold nose-rings varying in size from mere buttons to hoops which flap against a cheek as they walk, silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, anklets clinking above their bare feet, the lobes of their ears loaded down with several chain-links, as well as earrings, their bare upper arms protruding from the colorful cheap shrouds in which they wrap themselves, a corner of it thrown over their bare heads. There are wide diversities of type, even of this one race. Here a group of Madrassis, several degrees blacker than the others, is stretched out on another unswept floor, there a Bengalee squats in a doorway arranging his straight black hair with a wooden comb. Mohammedans and Brahmins, sworn enemies throughout the island as at home, pass each other without a sign of recognition. Men of different castes mingle but slightly, despite the broadening influence of foreign travel; they have one and all lost caste by crossing the sea, but all in equal proportion, so that their relative standing remains the same. The influence of their new environment has affected them in varying degrees. Two men alike enough in features to be brothers, the one in an elaborate turban, loose silky blouse, and a flowing white mass of cloth hitched together between his legs in lieu of trousers, the other in a khaki suit and a Wild West felt hat, stand talking together in Hindustanee. Women in nose-rings, bracelets, and massive silver necklaces weighing several pounds are sometimes garbed in hat, shirt-waist, and skirt, sometimes even in low shoes with silver anklets above them.

Next door to these groups, or alternating between them, is a family of the same slovenly, thick-tongued, jolly negroes who overrun all the West Indies. The difference in color between these and the Hindus, even the swarthy Madrassis, is striking; the one is done in charcoal, the other in oil colors. As great is the contrast between the coarse features of the Africans and those of the East Indians, so finely modeled that they might be taken for Caucasians, except for their mahogany complexions. Even in manners the two races are widely separated. While the negro is forward, fawningly aggressive, occasionally insolent, the Hindus have a detached air which causes them never to intrude upon the passer-by, even to the extent of a glance. They might be blind in so far as any evidence of attention to the other races about them goes. Abutting the negro residence is perhaps a two-story house with a long perpendicular signboard in Chinese characters, a shop below, a residence above, with many curious Celestial touches. Then comes a building placarded in Spanish, “Venezuelans very welcome,” where not a word of English is spoken by the whole swarming family. On down the street stretch all manner of queer mixtures of customs, costumes, races, language, end names. Sing How Can keeps a provision shop next to Diogenes Brathwaite’s “Rum Parlor,” flanked on the other side by Rahman Singh, the barber, who in his turn is shut in by the leather sandal factory of Pedro Vialva. Women in the striking costume of the French islands stroll past with a graceful, dignified carriage; a man in a red fez pauses to talk to a man with a veritable cloth-shop wound about his head. Negro Beau Brummels speaking a laboriously learned English with an amusing accent, stately black policemen in spotless white jackets and helmets and those enormous shoes, shining like the proverbial “nigger’s heel,” worn by all British negroes in uniform, solemnly swinging their swagger-sticks with what suggests the wisdom of the ages until a chance question discloses how stupid they are under their impressive and patronizingly polite manner; now and then a disgruntled Venezuelan general whom Castro or Gomez has forced to seek an asylum under the Union Jack; a pair of sallow shopkeepers sputtering their nasal Portuguese—all mingle together in the passing throng. Then there are intermixtures of all these divergent elements, mainly of the younger generation—a negro boy with almond eyes, a youth who looks like a Hindu and a Chinaman, but is really neither, a flock of children with unusually coarse East Indian features and woolly hair playing about a one-room shop-residence the walls of which are papered negro-fashion with clippings from illustrated newspapers; farther on a Portuguese rum-seller with a mulatto baby on his knee; a few types who look like conglomerations of all the other races, until their family trees must sound like cocktail recipes. Both the Chinese and the Hindu residents of Trinidad are thrifty; many of them are well-to-do, for the former have indefatigable diligence in their favor, and the latter, who neither gamble nor steal, have no very serious faults, except the tendency to carve up their unfaithful wives. But there are failures among both races, even in this virgin island. Outcasts who were once Hindu or Chinese, sunk now to indescribable filth and raggedness, slink about with an eye open for a stray crust or cigarette butt. Under the saman trees in Marine Square East Indian derelicts dressed in nothing but a clout, a ragged jacket sometimes dropped in a vermin-infested heap beside them, are sleeping soundly on the stone pavement upon which white men, sipping their cocktails in the Union Club, look down as placidly as if they were gazing out the windows along Piccadilly.

Modern street-cars carry this racial hash, or as much of it as can afford to ride, about the well-paved city and its shady suburbs. Single car-tickets cost six cents, but a strip of six may be had for a shilling. So many citizens are unable to invest this latter sum all at once, however, that numerous shopkeepers add to their profits by selling the strip tickets at five cents each. Port of Spain has perhaps the finest pair of lungs of any city of its size in the world. Beyond the business section is an immense savanna, smooth as a billiard-table—magnificent, indeed, it seems to the traveler who has seen no really level open ground for weeks—called Queen’s Park. Here graze large herds of cattle, half Oriental, too, like the people. There is ample playground left, too, for all the city’s population. In the afternoon, particularly of a Saturday, it presents a vast expanse of pastimes seldom seen in the tropics. The warning cry of “Fore!” frequently startles the mere stroller, only to have his changed course bring him into a cluster of schoolboys shrilly cheering the prowess of their respective teams. The game which outdoes all others in popularity is that to the American incredibly stupid one of cricket, which rages—or should one say languishes?—on every hand, notwithstanding the fact that Trinidad is within ten degrees of the equator. Nor is it monopolized by the better classes, for every group of ragged urchins who can scrape together enough to get balls, wickets, and that canoe-paddle the English call a “bat” takes turns in loping back and forth across the grass, to what end the scorer knows. If there is a color-line on the savanna, it is between the few pure whites, many of them Englishmen who have “come out” within the present century and brought all the unconscious snobbishness of their own island with them, and the olla podrida of all the other races. Among the latter the lines are social, rather than racial, so that Hindu-mulatto-Chinese youths, leaning on their canes, gaze with scornful indifference upon other youths of similar labyrinthian parentage whom chance has not raised to the dignity of annexing collars to their shirts. But there is room enough for all on the immense savanna.

Here and there it is dotted with huge, spreading trees, which grow more thickly in the residential section surrounding it. The original inhabitants called the island “IËre,” or “CaÏri,” meaning the “land of humming-birds.” It is still that, but it is also the land of magnificent trees and the land of asphalt. One may doubt whether any fragment of the globe has so high a percentage of perfect streets and roads—no wonder, surely, when it may have its asphalt in unlimited quantities for the mere digging—and the giants of the forest which everywhere spread their canopies give its rather placid landscape a beauty which makes up for its lack of ruggedness. Behind Queen’s Park is a delightfully informal botanical garden in the middle of which sits the massive stone residence of the governor. Several times a week a band concert is given on his front lawn, a formality bearing slight resemblance to the Sunday-night gathering in a Spanish-American plaza. It takes place in the afternoon and is attended only by the Élite, though this does not by any means confine it to Caucasian residents, for there are many others, at least of the island-born Chinese and Hindus and their intermixtures, who count themselves in this category, while negro and East Indian nursemaids are constantly pursuing their overdressed charges across the noiseless greensward. Any evidence of human interest is sternly suppressed in the staid and orderly gathering. They sit like automatons on their scattered chairs and benches, no one ever committing the faux pas of speaking above a whisper. Woe betide the mere American who dares address himself to a stranger, for British snobbery reaches its zenith in Trinidad, and the open-handed hospitality of Barbados is painfully conspicuous by its absence.

Trim lawns bordered with roses, hibiscus, poinsettia, variegated crotons, and a host of other brilliant-foliaged plants surround the homelike, though sometimes overdecorated, residences of the generously shaded suburbs. Over the verandas hang mantles of pink coronella, violet thumbergia, red bougainvillea, often interlacing, always a mass of bloom, at least in this summer month of April. Maidenhair ferns line the steps leading to the portico, rare orchids cling to the mammoth branches of the spreading trees, the air is sweetly fragrant with the odors of cape jasmine and the persistent patchouli. With sunset cigales, tree-toads, and a host of tropical insects begin to chirrup their nightly chorus—an improvement on the flocks of crowing roosters that make the whole night hideous in the town itself, not only in Port of Spain, but throughout the West Indies.

A magistrate’s court is an amusing scene in any of the Antilles; it is doubly so in the racial whirlpool of Trinidad. An English “leftenant,” assigned the task of prosecuting for the crown, but who never once opened his mouth, was the only white man present on the morning I visited this farcical melodrama. A mulatto magistrate whose offensive pride of position stuck out on him like a sore thumb held the center of the spotlight. Never did he let pass an opportunity to inflict the crudest of witticisms, the most stupid of sarcasm on prisoners and witnesses alike. In the language of English courts he was known as “Your Worship,” a title by which even white men are frequently compelled to address those of his class in the British West Indies, where the law knows no color-line. A group of colored reporters sat below him in the customary railed enclosure, jotting down his every burst of alleged wit for the delectation of their next morning’s readers, who would be regaled with such extraordinary moral truths as “His Worship told the defendant that instead of living off his mother and sister he should go and do some honest work to support them and himself,” or “His Worship remarked that the witness seemed to be afflicted with a clogging of his usually no doubt brilliant mental processes.” Beyond the rail was packed the black audience that is never lacking at these popular entertainments in the British West Indies.

The prisoners and the two pedestal-shod black policemen on either side of them, stood stiffly at attention just outside the rail during all the trial. Witnesses assumed a similar posture in a kind of pulpit, took the oath by kissing a dirty dog-eared Bible—even though they were Hindus or Chinese—and submitted themselves to “His Worship’s” caustic sarcasm. The mere fact that the majority of them were patently and clumsily lying from beginning to end of their testimony did not appear to arouse a flicker of surprise in the minds of magistrate, the lawyers of like color, or the open-mouthed audience. The testimony in each case was laboriously written down in longhand by a dashingly attired mulatto clerk, though evidently not word for word, for these fell too fast and furiously to be caught in full. The accused was always given permission to cross-examine the witnesses, with the result that a vociferous quarrel frequently enlivened the proceedings. The majority of cases were petty in the extreme, matters which in most countries would have been settled out of court with a slap or a swift kick. But nothing so pleases the British West Indian, at least of the masses, as a chance to appear in the conspicuous rÔle of plaintiff, or even as witness. One black fellow had charged another with calling his wife a “cat.” “His Worship” found the case a source of unlimited platitudes before he dismissed it by adding five shillings to the crown’s resources. A fat negress accused a long and scrawny one of offering to “box me face,” and as British West Indian law takes account of threats, the lanky defendant was separated from her week’s earnings, though she scored high with the audience by proving that the accuser had also used threatening language, thereby subjecting her to a similar financial disaster.

Corporal punishment is still in vogue in the British Antilles. Two negro boys had been playing marbles, when one struck the other with a stick. “His Worship” ordered the defendant to receive ten strokes with a tamarind rod, to be administered by a member of the police force. The order was immediately executed in a back room to which casual spectators were not admitted. To judge from the shrieks that arose from it, the punishment was genuine, but they were probably designed to reach the magistrate’s ear, for when I put an inquiry to the big black chastiser some time later, he replied with a grin, “Oh, not too hard; perhaps a tingle or two at the end jes’ to make him remember.” Even adults are not always spared bodily reminders. A vicious looking negro with a hint of Chinese ancestry who was convicted for the fourth time of thieving was sentenced to one year at hard labor and six lashes with the “cat.” But as this punishment was inflicted at the general prison, there was no means of learning how thoroughly the implement was wielded.

Though a Chinese and a Hindu interpreter were present, all the witnesses, happening to be youthful and evidently born in the colony, spoke perfect English—as it is spoken in Trinidad. It was somehow incongruous to hear a Hindu woman in her silken shroud and a small cartload of jewelry burst forth, as soon as she had kissed the unsavory Bible with apparent fervor, in the negro-British dialect and contradict the assertions of the accused with some such rejoinder as “Whatyer tahlk, mahn, whatcher tahlk?” Those surprises are constantly being sprung on the visitor to Trinidad, however, for notwithstanding the composite of races and the fact that English was not introduced into the island until 1815, it is decidedly the prevailing language. It is a common experience to hear a group that is chattering in Hindustanee suddenly change to British slang, or to turn and find that the discussion of the latest cricket match in the broad-vowelled jargon of the British West Indian negro is between a Chinese and a Hindu youth, both dressed in the latest European fashion. Natives of the islands assert that “the English of a typical Trinidadian is probably as strongly in contrast to that of a typical Barbadian as the language of any two parts of the British Empire.” But to the casual visitor they sound much alike, and far removed from our own tongue. We might readily understand the expression “I well glad de young mahn acquit,” but few of us would recognize that “Don’t let he break me, sir,” means “Do not give him a job after refusing it to me.” An incensed motorman cried out to a Chinese-Hindu negro hackman who was impeding his progress, “Why y’u don’ go home wid dis cyart ef y’u can’ drive et?” to which came the placid reply, “Why you vex, mahn? Every victoria follow he own wheels.” As in the French islands, a banana is called a “fig” in Trinidad, while walls are everywhere decorated with the warning “Stick no Bills.”

Speaking of bills of another sort, those of the smaller denominations are badly needed in the British islands. With the exception of Jamaica, they reckon their money in dollars and cents, but they are West Indian dollars, worth four shillings and two pence each and following the English pound in its rise or fall. Notes of five dollars are issued by the Colonial Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada, but with the exception of Trinidad and its dependency, Tobago, the government of which issues one- and two-dollar bills, there is no local small change, and the already overburdened visitor to these tropical climes must load himself down with a double handful of English silver and mammoth coppers each time he breaks a five-dollar bill. To add to his struggles with the clumsy British monetary system, prices are given in cents, when there are no cents. Small articles in the shops are tagged 24c, 48c, 72c, and so on, never 25c, 50c, or 75c, which is easy enough, for those are the local terms for one, two, or three shillings. But it is not so simple for the heated and hurried stranger to calculate that the euphonism “thirty-nine cents” means a shilling, a sixpence, a penny, and a “ha’penny,” and to find the real significance of a demand for $5.35 requires either a pencil and paper or long practice in mental arithmetic. Perhaps the least fatiguing method is to spread on the counter the whole contents of one bulging pocket and trust to the clerk’s honesty—except that he, too, even if he is trustworthy, is apt to be weak in mental arithmetic. The fall in the value of the pound sterling following the war forced the Trinidad government to enact a new ordinance forbidding “the melting down of silver coins current in the colony, the keeping possession of more silver than is needed for current expenses, or the buying or offering to buy silver coins at more than their face value.” The drop in exchange had given the metal more worth than the coins themselves, and the Hindu custom of turning the family wealth into bracelets and anklets for the women was threatening to make small financial transactions impossible.

Marital felicity is by no means universal in Trinidad, if one may judge from the columns of warnings to the public in its newspapers. In a single issue may be found a score of insertions testifying to this impression and to the mixture of races:

The Public is hereby notified that I will not be responsible for any debt or debts contracted by my wife, Daisy Benjamin, she having left my house and protection.

The Public is hereby notified that I will not hold myself responsible for any debts contracted by my wife Eparaih, she being no longer under my protection and care.

The Public is hereby notified that I will no longer be responsible for the debts of my wife, Yew Chin, she having left my house and protection without any just cause.

Occasionally the other side of the house is heard from:

The Public are hereby warned that the undersigned will not be responsible for any debts contracted by my husband, Emmanuel Paul, as we are no longer associated as husband and wife.

The Spanish influence may be seen in the custom of doctors and dentists advertising “Lady in Attendance,” to add reassurance to their female clientele.

The Government of Trinidad runs an excellent railway and coast steamer service. The cars are of three classes, with cross-seats, as in Europe, though with a few compartment partitions. Shades resembling cap-visors project over the windows, and the trains are as clean and orderly as those of Porto Rico. First class is small and exclusive, occupying only one third of a coach, and the rare traveler in it is apt to be taken for an important government official and saluted by all railway employees and stared at with envy and astonishment by the “garden” variety of voyagers. Even the few white citizens usually travel second-class, though this is by no means free from African and Asiatic mixtures. The bulk of the train is made up of third-class coaches, their hard wooden benches crowded with every possible combination of negro, Hindu, Chinese, Venezuelan, Portuguese, and French blood, with an occasional poor white, and presents a truly cosmopolitan conglomeration of garb and tongue. Employees are as varied in origin. A big-bearded “collector,” or station-agent, with Hindu features which seem strangely out of place under his placarded cap, rebukes a Chinese-Hindu passenger in the amusing “English” of the West Indies, then slaps a jet black “head guard” on the back with a “How goes?” and gets the reply, “Oh, getting on poc’ Á poc’.” In addition to these vigilant ticket-seekers, there are inspectors whose official caps read “Head Examiner,” a title which more than one stranger has misconstrued.

Trains are frequent. They are drawn by large oil-burning Montreal engines with white “drivers” and set forth from Port of Spain, like our own fliers, over a roadbed in excellent condition for the first twenty miles or more. Beyond that, as the line breaks up into its several branches, the engines get smaller and smaller; the engineers become mulattoes, then blacks, with only a tropical sense of the value of time; the tracks are more and more congested with train-loads of cane in the cutting season, with the result that a well-arranged time-table is often disrupted. Swampy stretches of mangroves to the right and left flank the first few miles. Groups of prisoners, in yellow, white, or orange-colored caps, according to whether they are misdemeanants, felons, or “long-timers,” are turning some of these into solid ground. Cocoanut plantations soon supersede the swamps, to be in turn replaced by cane, as flat lands spread farther and farther away on the left to the base of high hills or low mountains rather arid in appearance, despite the density of their brush and forest, red trails here and there climbing their wooded flanks.

Ten minutes out the considerable town of San Juan imposes the first halt, its platform seething with a multi-colored throng struggling with every manner of queer luggage. A few miles farther on, at the base of El Tucuche, the highest peak of Trinidad, is the old Spanish capital of the island, San JosÉ de OruÑa, now called St. Joseph. Unlike the British, the conquistadores preferred to build their principal towns some miles back from the sea. It did them little good in this case, however, for St. Joseph was burned to the ground by that prince of buccaneers, Sir Walter Raleigh, and here the Spanish governor, ChacÓn, surrendered the island to a superior British force in 1797 without a fight, which may be one of the reasons why a street of the old capital is named for him. St. Joseph lies a bit up hill from the station, with a magnificent view of the vast Caroni plain, a floor-flat vega dense with vegetation, dotted with villages, and here and there the stacks of sugar-mills, called usines in Trinidad. Scattered, somewhat hilly, with the languid, capacious air of a village, the old capital is interesting to-day for its flora and its historical reminiscences. Veritable grandfathers of trees, with long beards, their immense branches thickly grown with orchids and other flowering parasites, shade it at every hour of the day. Humming-birds flit in and out among its masses of red and purple bougainvillea. The trade wind, which seldom reaches Port of Spain, sweeps down through a break in the brownish-green hills which hem the former capital in; if it is uncomfortably hot at noonday, it is because all Trinidad is aware of its proximity to the equator. Of Spanish ruins it has none, but there are numerous Venezuelan inhabitants, and the Castilian tongue and customs have to some extent survived. Here, too, are strange interminglings of races and tongues—“El Toro Store” on Piccadilly Street; a rum-shop called “The Trinidadians’ Delight” on Buena Vista Street. In its dry and stony cemetery are monuments with Chinese, Spanish, Hindu, French and English names, some of the last all too evidently those of negroes.

The newspapers of Trinidad announced a “Big Field Day and Race meeting” at Tunapuna, a few miles beyond St. Joseph, on Easter Monday. Having lived through five British holidays in the brief ten days since our landing in Barbados, we ventured to hope that here might be something less deadly dull. Had we paused to reflect, we should have known that white people did not attend these popular festivities. The horror on the face of an English native to whom we mentioned our destination might have given us the same information, had we not taken it to be an expression of pain at being addressed without a formal introduction.

Tunapuna is as Hindu as St. Joseph is Spanish. The domes, or, more exactly, spheres of a white Brahmin temple bulk high above its low houses. These are little mud-plastered houses, for the most part, with dents poked in their walls before they have dried, by way of decoration, which seem to be direct importations from India. The broad asphalt highway bisecting the town was as seething a stream of humanity as the Great Trunk Road. Hindus in their anklets and toe-rings, their clanking bracelets and light-colored flowing garments, made up the bulk of the throng, with here and there a Venezuelan driving a pack-laden donkey to give contrast to the picture. If the place had a European section, it eluded our attention; it looked like a village of India in which a few African settlers had taken up their residence.

The “field day” was held on a broad level space in the center of town. Constant streams of vari-colored Trinidadians, all clad in their most gasp-provoking holiday attire, poured into it from special trains that arrived in close succession. A bandstand covered with palm-leaves had been erected for the higher social orders, but even this was no place for a white spectator who did not care to arouse conspicuous attention. There were perhaps half a dozen white men, all British soldiers, scattered through the hilarious throng, but not a woman of her own race to keep Rachel in countenance. Of near-whites there was no scarcity, all of them affecting the haughty English manner in the vain hope of concealing the African in their family wood-pile. Some of the mixtures of race, language, and custom were incredible. Next to us sat a woman who appeared to be half Hindu and half English, who spoke Spanish, and who carried a quadroon baby with straw-colored hair and almond-shaped blue eyes. We awarded her the palm for human conglomeration, but there were many more who could have run her a close race.

The contests consisted mainly of bicycle races, an uproarious hubbub invariably breaking out among the motley judges and officials after each of them, causing great delay before the shotgun which served as starting pistol set the stage for a new controversy. In view of the fact that the contestants were vari-colored youths who probably lived in unpainted shanties and wore shoes only on Sundays, the tableful of prizes beside us was amusing. Among them we noted a gold-plated jewel-box, a cut-glass fruit-dish, an ice-cream freezer, a gold-scrolled liqueur set, a hatstand of gilt-tipped ox-horns, two manicure sets, a pair of marble horses, and several overdecorated small clocks. One of the many dandies who were continually displaying their graces to the feminine portion of the stand, under the pretense of finding the open space before it more comfortable than the chairs, protested that the prizes “lacked show.” Up to that moment that had seemed to us the one thing they did not lack. This particular individual, a mulatto with a touch of Chinese, wore a tweed coat and white flannel trousers, an artificial daisy in his buttonhole, a brown necktie embroidered at the top with flowers and at the bottom with the word “Peace” in large letters, and carried a riding-crop. Those of his companions who were not armed with this latter sign of field-officer rank all bore canes. One of them flaunted a cravat decorated with the flags of all the Allies. The majority frequently removed their hats, regardless of the blazing sunshine, quite evidently for the purpose of showing that their hair was not curly, an improvement for which several quite evidently had to thank “Mme. Walker’s Peerless Remedies.” An inattentive spectator might have concluded from the wagers shouted back and forth among them at the beginning of each race that they were persons of unlimited wealth, but it was noticeable that very little money actually changed hands. Here, too, the lines of demarkation were social, rather than racial. A Hindu youth dressed in the latest imitation of London fashion might call across the compound to his equally ornate Chinese friend, “Heh, Lee! Come down, mahn!” but he gave no sign of seeing the East Indian in khaki and a battered felt hat who sold peanuts in tiny measures cleverly arranged so that most of the nuts stuck to the bottom when they were upturned in the purchaser’s hand.

Beyond Tunapuna next day other Hindus in the loose garb of their homeland were clawing about the rice blades in their little paddy-fields, cut up into small squares by low dikes. Wattled huts, with East Indians squatted on their heels in the bare, hard-trodden spaces before them, intermingled with wooden shanties, sometimes with lace curtains at the glassless windows, shanties fairly bursting with their swarming negro families. Tall, slender flagpoles from which flew little red flags, some of them already bleached white, showed where goats had been sacrificed in the frequent ceremonies of the Brahmin inhabitants. Little white Hindu temples alternated with small negro churches. Through Tacarigua, with its clusters of buildings flung far up the red-scarred hillsides, Arouca, Dabadie, the procession of huts and cabins continued. Almost without exception they were unpainted and unadorned with anything but the barest necessities, for Trinidad, too, labors under the discouraging “improvement tax.”

Arima, the last settlement of the aborigines before they disappeared from the island as a race, spreads over a slightly elevated plateau, its wide streets and well separated houses giving an impression of unlimited elbow-room, its huge trees and flowery shrubbery making up for its drygoods-box style of architecture. Here is Trinidad’s chief racetrack, enclosing a grassy playground that almost rivals Port of Spain’s savanna, but the incessant staring of the inhabitants suggests that white men are ordinarily rare sights in this important cacao center, as they are in many sections of the island.

Beyond Arima the hills die out and for miles the track is walled by uncultivated brush or virgin forests, with only a rare frontier-like village and a few young cacao plantations sheltered from the sun by the bois immortel, or what Spaniards call madre del cacao. Hindus are more numerous in this region than negroes. The railway ends at the thriving town of Sangre Grande, though it hopes soon to push on to the east coast. Chinese merchants and the resultant half-breeds are unusually numerous; Hindu women in full metallic regalia, sitting in buggies like farmers’ wives in our western prairie towns, some of them smoking little Irish-looking clay pipes, and silversmiths of the same race, naked but for a clout, plying their trade in back alleys, are among the sights of the place.

The Ford mail-and-passenger bus in which I continued my journey was driven by a youth, whose grandparents were respectively Chinese, Hindu, negro, and white. The first had given him an emotionless countenance and a strict attention to business, the second a slender, almost girlish form and a silky complexion, the third wavy hair and an explosive laughter, and the last frequent attacks of that haughty surliness so common to mulattoes or quadroons. Among the passengers was a Hindu girl of striking beauty. She spoke excellent English with a strong West Indian accent, was tastefully and specklessly dressed in a Caucasian waist, black silk skirt, and kid shoes, wore her silky black hair done up in European fashion, and had the manners of an English dÉbutante of the sheltered class. Yet in her nose she wore two gold rings, her arms gleamed with silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, about her neck was a string of heavy gold coins, and a flowered silk wrap was flung about her shoulders and head. Beside her sat a youth of the same race, completely Europeanized in garb and manner. In front, separated from this pair by one of the slow-witted, scornful negroes who filled most of the two seats, was an East Indian in full white Hindu regalia,—a simple, faintly purple turban, white caste marks across his forehead and in front of his ears, and a string of black, seed-like beads about his neck. Not once during the journey did he give a sign of recognition to his Anglicized compatriots.

We snorted away along an asphalt highway bordered by large cacao estates, passing many automobiles, some of them driven by Chinese and Hindus, even through a great forest with many immense trees, their branches laden with orchids and climbing vines. Except for one low ridge the country was flat, with not even a suggestion of the rugged scenery of most West Indian islands. Long hedges of hibiscus in full red bloom lined the way through the considerable town of Matura, where negroes far outranked the Hindus in numbers and Chinamen kept virtually all the shops. Soon the landscape turned to cocoanut plantations, the now narrow road mounted somewhat, and the Atlantic spread out before us. But it was shallow and yellowish, not at all like the sea-lashed east coasts of Barbados or Dominica, the shores of its many bays and indentations low and heavily wooded, a hazy clump of hills stretching far away into the south. Then came a cluster of ridges and mounds of earth covered with primeval forest, only little patches of which had been cleared to give place to the most primitive, weather-beaten thatched huts. These were scattered at long intervals along the way and all inhabited by negroes, the other races evidently finding the region too undeveloped for their more civilized taste. Nineteen miles from Sangre Grande the bus halted at a cluster of hovels on Balandra Bay, the road, which pushes on to the northeast point of the island, being impassable for vehicles.

From that point one may see the important island of Tobago, the chief of Trinidad’s dependencies and the most recent of England’s possessions in the West Indies. It is reputed to have been the most fiercely contested bit of ground in the western hemisphere, having been constantly disputed by the French, Spanish, and English, until it finally fell to the latter in 1803. To this day it is surrounded by the ruins of old forts. French names still survive in its capital, Scarborough, and the splendid system of roads it once boasted have been allowed to go back to bush under British rule. In 1889 it was annexed to Trinidad, though it retains its own elective financial board. Like many of the British West Indies, Tobago has seen the insolence and aggressiveness of its negroes greatly increased by the example of those who were debauched in France, and was forced to suppress one riot with considerable bloodshed. The island may be reached weekly by government steamer from Port of Spain.

At St. Joseph the more important branch of the railway turns south and, sending an offshoot through a fertile cacao district and the oil regions about Tabaquite to Rio Claro, follows the coast of the Gulf of Paria to the edge of the southern chain of hills. A so-called express train connects the capital with the metropolis of the south once a week, but on account of the English “staff system” in vogue, its speed is frequently checked and sophisticated passengers get on or off as it slows up at each station to exchange the iron hoop which is the engineer’s passport for the ensuing section. Broad, flat vegas spread on either hand beyond the old Spanish capital, the northern range of hills withdrawing to the edge of the horizon. Great pastures with huge spreading trees, some of them gay with blossoms, and thick clumps of bamboo alternate with extensive cane-fields, most of them covered with the young shoots after the recent cutting in this April season. Here and there stands a large usine, or sugar-mill, with long rows of coolie dwellings, some housing a dozen families side by side, while outside the estate are crowded together the tin-roofed shacks of the negro and Hindu workmen who prefer to house themselves, rather than submit to the exacting sanitary rules of the company. The fields that are still uncut have those fat yellow canes with long joints that are the joy of the sugar grower, for the Caroni plain is famed for its fertility. Humped Indian bulls and their tropic-defying offspring dot the pastures and corrals. From Canupia a road leads to Alligator Village, where Hindus may be seen standing naked and motionless on their flimsy little rafts made of woven palm-fronds catching cascadura, the choicest delicacy of Trinidad. The natives have a saying that whoever tastes the flesh of this cross between a turtle and a lizard must return to end his days in the island.

Cacao plantations, shaded by forests of high trees, gradually replace the cane-fields as the train speeds southward. Parasites and climbing lianas, that death-dealing vine called matapalo by the Spaniards and “Scotch attorney” by the Trinidadians, which finally chokes to death the tree that sustains it, usurping its heritage of nourishment, give the forest wall the appearance of a great carelessly woven tapestry. Wattled huts as primitive as those of Haiti, many of them of spreading cone shape, thrust their thatched roofs above the vegetation, giving many a vista a touch that carries the mind back to India. Chaguanas, Carapichaima, Couva—the towns nearly all bear Spanish names—are populous, though California has a mere handful of hovels. Near the last the low wooded foothills of the central range begin to peer above the flat cane and cacao lands to the left; then the train bursts suddenly out on the edge of the gulf amid a flurry of cocoanut palms. Claxton’s Bay and Point-À-Pierre again recall Trinidad’s mixture of tongues, and at length the staff-hampered “express” staggers into San Fernando.

The second city of Trinidad has but ten thousand inhabitants. It is strewn over a clump of wooded knolls at the base of Naparima Hill, rising six hundred feet above it. Its population is so overwhelmingly East Indian that even the English residents are forced to learn Hindustanee. “His Worship,” the mayor, is a Hindu; on certain days of the week the visitor who strolls through its wide, asphalted streets might easily fancy himself in a market city of central India. Such signs as “Sultan Khan, Pawn Broker,” “Samaroo, Barber,” or “Jagai, Licensed to Deal in Cacao and Licenseable Produce” are triply as numerous as the shops bearing such patently negro mottoes as “To Trust is to Burst.”

A toy train runs from San Fernando through rolling fields of cane to Prince’s Town, which name it adopted in honor of a visit long years ago by the present king and his brother. The “staffs” in this case are human. Every mile or less the engineer halts to take on board from a kind of sentry-box a uniformed negro wearing a bright red cap—which, no doubt, makes it possible to reduce his wages by half—stenciled with the number of the section for which he is responsible. Prince’s Town lies in the Naparima plain, the second of Trinidad’s great fertile vegas; or one may visit another portion of it by continuing to the end of the main line. On the way are DÉbÉ, almost wholly a Hindu town, with a stream of many castes pouring down its highway, and Penal, with its miles of Hindu vegetable gardens and its mud-and-reed huts that seem to have been transported direct from India. Then comes a long run through an almost uninhabited wilderness, though with considerable cacao on its low, jungle-like hills, and finally Siparia, a rapidly growing frontier village where busses and automobiles are waiting to carry travelers to the slightly developed southern side of the island.

As we raced back down the hill again my hitherto private first-class compartment—no, I shall not divulge the secret of why I chanced to be displaying this sign of opulence and snobbishness—was invaded by the first American I had met in Trinidad outside the capital. He was an oil-driller from one of the newly developed fields. But though he had been drawing three times the salary of a college professor, he had “threw up the job because me an’ that there field-man didn’t hitch. He’s only a Britisher, anyway.” What might have been a pleasant conversation was disrupted by my new companion with such remarks as “Panama? Where’s that? Up towards New Orleans?” “Hindus? Is them Hindus with rings in their noses? I thought them was East Indians.” There is a saying in Trinidad, as in many other parts of the world, that only fools or Americans ride first-class. This man was both, for he was “afraid to go second for fear my friends’ll see me an’ think I’m goin’ broke”—an impression that would not have been at fault, as he had “blowed” his princely wages as fast as he earned them.

The favorite excursion from Port of Spain is that by government steamer through the Bocas Islands, which are scattered along the northwestern horn of Trinidad. First comes a cluster of jagged rocks with a few large trees, called Five Islands, government-owned and occupied by from one to three houses each, which may be rented by the week when they are not in use as quarantine stations. On one of them is the principal prison of the colony, and convicts in charge of a guard row out for the supplies and mail from town. Indeed, the journey is a constant succession of rowboat parties, not to say mishaps, for it is frequently blowing a gale about the Bocas, and as the steamer nowhere ventures close to shore, passengers and groceries are often subjected to thorough duckings, if nothing worse. The larger islands are privately owned, and dotted with pretentious “summer” homes of those who cannot spend the hottest months in Grenada or Barbados. An entire bay of one of them belongs to the son of the inventor of one of Trinidad’s most famous products, “Angostura Bitters.” I am not in a position to divulge the secret of its manufacture, beyond stating that it contains rum, mace, nutmeg, and powdered orange skins, which latter detail accounts for the fact that the market-women of Port of Spain pare their oranges as we do an apple and that the stone fences of the town are always littered with orange-peelings drying in the sun.

Monos Island lies beyond the mainland, and between that and the last and largest, rejoicing in the name of Chacachacare, are several bocas, or channels, through which pass steamers touching at Trinidad. The colony was in an uproar at the time of our visit because the government had proposed to turn Chaca—but why repeat it all?—over to the lepers. Thanks largely to its Hindu population, Trinidad has more than its share of these sufferers, and though they are “isolated” in an asylum on the mainland or in their own homes, they are frequently found mingling with holiday throngs. Trinidadians protested against advertising the prevalence of leprosy by housing the invalids on the most conspicuous part of the colony, and the charge of graft was as freely bantered back and forth as in our own merry land under similar conditions. From Chacachacare one may see a great stretch of Venezuela across the straits, the spur of the Andes on which sits Caracas rising higher and higher into the sky and disappearing at length in the direction of lofty BogotÁ.

But to most strangers Trinidad has little meaning except as the home of the “asphalt lake.” Strictly speaking, it is neither the one nor the other, being rather a pitch deposit, but it would be foolish to quibble over mere words. It is sufficient to know that the spot furnishes most of the asphalt for the western hemisphere.

To reach it one must return to San Fernando by train and continue by government steamer. This frequently flees before the ebbing tide and anchors far out in the shallow, yellowish gulf until its passengers have been rowed aboard, then turns southwest along a flat, uninteresting coast. The pea-soup-colored sea swarms with jelly-fish that resemble huge acorns in shape and color and on which whales come to feed at certain seasons. Among them floats another species with long tendrils, a mere touch of which leaves a sharply stinging sensation for hours afterward. The steamer touches at half a dozen villages down the long southern prong of Trinidad, rounding the point twice a week to Icacos, reputed the largest cocoanut plantation in the world. It is owned by an old Corsican who “came out” in his youth as a porter, and who, in the words of the captain, “is of no class at all,” yet he has a mansion in Port of Spain, several daughters married to French counts, and so much money “he doesn’t know arithmetic enough to count it.”

But our interests are in the first port of call out of San Fernando. A bit beyond the reddish town of La Brea (the Spanish word for pitch) a very long pier with an ocean steamer at the far end of it and iron buckets flying back and forth between it and the land, like a procession of sea-gulls feeding their young, juts out into the gulf. Not so many years ago all the population of this spot, called Brighton, lived on the pier, the shore being famous for a fever that brought almost certain death within two days. This completely disappeared, however, when American concessionists turned the jungle into pasture land. The air is full of pelicans, clumsily diving for fish or awaiting their turn for a seat on the protruding jib boom of a wrecked schooner, along which others sat as tightly crowded together as subway passengers in the evening rush-hour.

Trinidad has many Hindu temples