CHAPTER XVIII
GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES

There is a suggestion of the pathetic in the name by which the French call their possessions in the New World—“L’AmÉrique FranÇaise.” It recalls the days when the territory they held on the western hemisphere was really worth that title, when Canada and Louisiana promised to grow into a great French empire in the west, and nothing suggested that a brief century would see their holdings reduced to a few fragments wedged into the string of British islands that form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean. The “French America” of to-day, except for Cayenne, a mere penal colony backed by a tiny slice of unexplored South American wilderness, consists of the minor islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and half a dozen islets dependent on the former. It is far better entitled to the more modest official name of “French Antilles.”

Guadeloupe—if I may be allowed an unpleasant comparison—is shaped like a pair of lungs, the left one flat and low, the other expanded into splendid mountain heights. They are really two islands separated by the short Salt River, across which is flung a single wooden bridge, and by some geographical oversight, their names have been twisted. The lowland to the east masquerades under the false title of Grande Terre, while the truly great land of magnificent heights and mighty ravines to the south and west is miscalled Basse Terre. The misnomers suggest that they were named by some bureaucrat seated before a map, rather than by explorers on the spot.

Columbus landed on what the natives called TurukÉra or KarnkÉra on his second voyage—a busy time, indeed, he must have had keeping his log on that journey—and recalled the promise he had made to the monks of Nuestra SeÑora de Guadeloupe in Estremadura to name an island in honor of their patron Lady. He found human flesh cooking in pots on the beach and knew that he had discovered at last a land of the Caribs, the warlike cannibals of whom he had heard in Hispaniola. Among other things he saw here his first pineapple—and no doubt, like all newcomers, was surprised to find they do not grow on trees. Ubiquitous old Ponce de Leon attempted to colonize the island in 1515, but was driven out by the imminent danger of being served up in a native barbecue. The first French to land were some missionaries who brought the aborigines bodily nourishment instead of the spiritual provender they had planned. It was not until the days of Richelieu that letters patent were issued giving a private company a monopoly of the island, which was gradually covered with French colonists and sugar-cane. African slavery followed as a matter of course, with its concomitant slave revolts, one of which came near to turning Guadeloupe into another Haiti, and for almost two centuries the history of the island was a constant succession of attempts on the part of England to add it to her possessions, as she did most of the French Antilles. Then in 1814 a treaty left it definitely French, slavery was abolished in 1848, and since that day Guadeloupe has followed the political reverses and successes of la mÉre patrie.

Basse Terre, the capital, is a modest little town on the southwest corner of the mountainous half of the island bearing the same name. Dating from the early days of French colonization, it once enjoyed a considerable importance, most of which disappeared with the founding of Pointe-À-Pitre, in a similar corner of the flat and more productive Grande Terre. The rape of its commerce by the parvenu has left it merely the seat of government, the Washington of the colony, more subservient to its business-bent metropolis than it likes to admit. This French custom of endowing their islands with separate official and commercial capitals has its advantages over the British scheme of collecting all the eggs in one basket. Martinique would have been left in a far sadder state had the destruction of St. Pierre wiped out its governmental as well as its business center. But there are also certain drawbacks to this more thoughtful plan; the traveler, for instance, who had hoped to find certain sources of information in Basse Terre is likely to learn that they live at “la Pointe,” and vice versa.

Built in the form of a spreading amphitheater and climbing a little way up the surge of ground that culminates in the volcano SoufriÈre, rival of PÉlÉe in all but its destructiveness, a scant ten miles behind it, the official capital is half hidden under a smothering foliage of trees, which stretch away in a vast carpet of verdure into the mountains beyond. Its open roadstead is commonly an unbroken expanse of Caribbean blue, often without even a schooner riding at anchor to suggest the olden days of maritime industry. Though the French mail-packets make this their last port of call before turning their prows into the Atlantic, or the first on the outward journey, they usually come and are gone in the night, with few inhabitants the wiser. The latter seem to worry little at this comparative slight, and dawdle on through a provincial life as if they had lost all hope or desire to wrest from “the Point” its frequent communion with the outside world. An old fort half covered with vegetation, a rambling government building constructed in the comfort-scorning, built-to-stay style of most French official structures of bygone centuries, are almost the only signs to distinguish it from half a dozen mere bourgs scattered about the edge of the island. A governor sent out from France dwells in a villa up in the hills; his few white assistants are bureaucrats tossed at random about the French colonies from Madagascar to Cayenne by a stroke of the pen in Paris, and they have little in common with the racial mulattoes who dwell in their uninviting, chiefly wooden houses lining the few long and rather unkempt streets of the drowsy capital, except an ardent, almost unquestioning patriotism for la France.

Good highways, with automobiles scattered along them, climb into the hills, especially to St. Claude, with its suburban dwellings, its big hospital, where boarders in the soundest of health are accepted, and its embracing view of the Caribbean already far below, and the dome of SoufriÈre almost sheer overhead. Higher still lies MatoubÁ, where one may bathe in icy streams within half an hour of the tropic and enervating seacoast. But there the highways cease, dwindling away into trails through coffee-groves and verdure-vaulted footpaths which are gradually lost in the great mountain wilderness, so primitive and unexplored that even the map in the governor’s office below shows only a blank space for all the heart of Basse Terre, the inaccessibility of which is typified in the name of its central peak, Mt. Sans Toucher. Other highways partly encircle the rugged half-island, clinging close to the shore, but feasible communication ceases everywhere within a few kilometers of the coast. Thus, though Basse Terre is virgin fertile in almost all its extent, and generously watered by countless springs and many rivers, it produces little for the outside world except a few tons of vanilla.

Like all the West Indies, it has almost no four-footed wild life. The agouti, of about the size of a rabbit and much prized for its savory flesh, is the only indigenous quadruped. The raccoon, brought from our own land long ago, has become acclimated and numerous; the island is infested with an enormous toad that was introduced to kill the rats, but which has prodigiously spread without doing much damage to the rodents. Martinique and Guadeloupe mutually accuse each other of harboring the deadly fer de lance, but neither seems to be able to produce unquestionable proof either of its own innocence or of its rival’s guilt.

There are guaguas also in the French islands, where they are called autos de poste. But there is little room in them compared with the demand for places, and a curt “Pas de place” is almost certain to be the greeting of the would-be traveler who does not buy his ticket at least the day before. Moreover, ticket or no ticket, it behooves him to be on hand at the back of the post-office well before the starting-hour set unless he would see his reserved place squeezed out of existence before he has occupied it or the conveyance gone before he arrives. For the public means of transport in the French West Indies have a mania for starting ahead of time that is little less disconcerting than the maÑana temperament of their Spanish neighbors, particularly as their favorite official hour of departure is daybreak.

Once upon a time the governor of Guadeloupe invited the officials of Pointe-À-Pitre to a ball at the capital. They left on a sailboat, the ladies in evening dress. In theory it is a journey of only a few hours, even in a sailing vessel. But this time the wind turned contrary, after the custom of winds, the boat was forced to put to sea, and it turned up six days afterward—in St. Thomas! These unhappy experiences are no longer required of the residents of the two capitals, for to-day a highway equal, except in spots, to those of France connects the two towns, nearly fifty miles apart, and an auto de poste makes the round trip daily. Then, too, as in all the Antilles, there are automobiles for hire to those whose income is not particularly limited.

The tropical night showed no sign of fading when the postal omnibus, its five cross seats packed with travelers of both sexes until its sides groaned, its every available space of running-boards, mud-guards, and bumper piled high with mail-sacks and baggage, rumbled away from the angry group of unsuccessful passengers gathered before the Basse Terre post-office. As we chugged out through the old fortress gate, a thin streak of light suddenly developed on the eastern horizon, widened with the rapidity of a stage effect too quickly timed, wiped out the blue-black dome of sky overhead, and sent the last remnants of night scurrying from their lurking-places like thieves before the gigantic flashlight that sprang above the rim of the earth to the east with unnatural, theatrical swiftness. In the darkness I had taken several of my fellow-passengers to be white. The same slanting sunshine that threw far to the westward the disheveled shadows of the cocoanut-palms betrayed the tell-tale African features of the lightest of them. Behind us spread a fairy panorama as we climbed to Gourbeyre, beyond which another opened out as we descended again through DolÉ, with its “summer” homes and its steaming hot-water falls at the very edge of the road. Having cut off the southern nose of the island and regained the coast once more at Trois RiviÈres, we clung close to this all the rest of the journey, as if any further encroachment upon the rugged domain of SoufriÈre, its head wrapped in a purple-black mantle of clouds above us, might rouse the slumbering giant to vent his wrath upon puny mankind.

The “Rue Gerville-RÉache” in which we halted a moment to exchange mail-sacks recalled the fact that the native of Guadeloupe best known to the outside world is a woman, as is the case with Martinique. Villas hidden away in the dense greenery gave way to little bay-like cane-fields, some of them so large as to boast tiny railroads, while here and there a buttress of the volcano above forced us out to the edge of the surf. In the offing Guadeloupe’s smallest dependencies, a cluster of islands named Les Saintes because Columbus discovered them on All Saints’ Day, stood forth from the sea like the domes of Oriental fantasy. Now and again the chauffeur or his assistant snatched at a letter held out by some countryman, indifferent to his shout of protest if they missed it, for they deigned to stop only before the town post-offices. The demand for seats was continuous, but those who had won them showed no inclination to descend. A score of times we sped past some lady of color all dressed up in her most resplendent turban, foulard, and ample, flower-printed calico gown, who had hoped to go to town that day, the chauffeur indicating by a disdainful wave of the hand across his body that there was “nothing doing.” Veritable riots of words assailed him at each halt, as if he might have produced new seats, magician-like, from his sleeve. One by one several male passengers took to displaying their fancied knowledge of English for my benefit; once a burly schooner-captain with just enough negro blood in his veins to make his hair curl, next a darker pair of graduates of the Sorbonne, who, once having impressed their fellow-passengers with their extraordinary learning, dropped back into French again, a French more precise and chosen than that of Paris, as soon as they found I understood it.

Even in the thatched huts along the way there was considerable more commoditÉ than in those of Haiti. The old semispherical sugar-kettles one finds scattered throughout the West Indies were here enclosed in stones and mortar and used as outdoor ovens. At Petit Bourg we came out on the edge of the open sea again, with a view across the bay to Pointe-À-Pitre, and behind it flat, unscenic Grande Terre, without even a hill to enliven its horizon. Soon we dropped down into a dreary level country utterly unlike the rolling cane-covered land swelling into mountains behind us, and sped through mangrove swamps that burdened the air with their rotting, salty smell, rumbled across the stagnant RiviÈre SalÉe, six miles long and some fifteen feet deep, which divides Guadeloupe into two islands, and turned into a broad, white, dusty road that not long after became the main street of “La Pointe.”

Pointe-À-Pitre is said to have taken its name from the fact that the “point” on which it was founded a century later than Basse Terre belonged to a Dutchman named Peters. Many refugees of this nationality settled in the French islands after the Portuguese drove them out of Brazil. The commercial capital is situated at the mouth of the Salt River, in one of the hottest and most uninviting spots in the West Indies. Across the bay Guadeloupe proper, piled up in its labyrinth of mountains veiled in the blue haze of distance, seems to invite the perspiring inhabitants to cease their bargainings and retire to the cool heights. Young as it is, “the Point” has long since outgrown Basse Terre in size and importance. It is a deadly flat town, with wide, right-angled streets, fairly well paved in a kind of crude concrete, with here and there a corner that recalls Paris, as do the street names. Its gray plaster houses have heavy wooden shutters and door-sized blinds that give them a curiously furtive air. Except for the turbans and calicos of the negresses, and the gamut of complexions, it is rather a colorless town, even the “cathedral” being of the prevailing gray, unpainted tint, though set off by a slight square tower in flaming red. The narrow entrance to its capacious bay is flanked by cocoanut-palms that stretch far around and finally envelop it, the view from the sea having little to attract the eye. The central square pulsates from dawn until the sun is high overhead with ceaselessly chattering market-women dressed in the hectic cotton garb peculiar to the French islands. Down by the wharves surges another market where fishermen in immense round hats come with their boatloads of fish and sundry sea-foods, including the langouste, a clawless lobster unsurpassed for quality and quantity of flesh and selling for the equivalent of a quarter.

There are suggestions of Parisian street life in Pointe-À-Pitre, interlarded with tropical touches of its own. Frenchmen whose faces give evidence that they have not left their cuisine and wine-cellars behind cling tenaciously to those white pith helmets without which no man of their race thinks he can endure the tropics. Soldiers and ex-soldiers with varying degrees of African complexions stalk about in their horizon-blue or colonial khaki, a string of medals gleaming on their chests. Negroes in Napoleon III beards stroll along the shaded edge of the streets with a certain Latin dignity befitting such adornment, even when it is accompanied by bare feet. Humped oxen, yoked sometimes on the neck, more often on the horns, saunter through town with their cumbersome carts. The town-criers, two men in uniform, the one beating a-drum and the other reading aloud an official notice on each corner, carry the thoughts back to medieval France. CafÉs with awning-shaded tables, monopolizing the sidewalks, notices exceedingly French not only in wording, but in general appearance, posted on house and shop walls, even the rather run-down aspect of the buildings, give the place a decidedly French atmosphere. If other proof of its nationality were needed, there are the crowds of wilted, yet patient, people packed about the wickets of post-office, telegraph station, and all other points where the public and the ambitionless, red-tape-ridden mortals whom France appoints to minor government office come into contact.

In the large, rather pleasantly unkempt park, shaded with veritable grandfathers among trees, lepers, victims of the “big leg,” and other loathsome ailments were cutting the grass with crude shears and little toy hoes. In the outskirts, to say nothing of suspicious odors in the heart of town, stood stagnant ditches of unassorted garbage. Venders of indecent photographs marched brazenly about town, buttonholing the male tourist at every opportunity. The children did less open begging than those in the British islands, but there were white boys and girls among them whose manners and appearance showed them in a little less degraded condition than the blacks. What a place Pointe-À-Pitre alone would be to “clean up” to something approaching our standards of sanitation and domestic morals, were we so foolish as to follow a recent suggestion and purchase the French Antilles.

We drifted into a courtroom during a civil trial. The room itself appeared not to have been swept or dusted for years except in those conspicuous central portions where it was unavoidable; cobwebs festooned every corner; little heaps of dÉbris lay under nearly every bench. Yet there were numerous statues in and about the building. The court consisted of three judges, a white man in the middle, flanked by two mulattos, all of them, as well as the more or less negro lawyers, dressed in black robes trimmed with “ermine”; that is, with moth-eaten rabbit-skin cuffs and lapels. On their heads were curious skull-caps, and beneath their robes unpressed white or khaki trousers of a cheap material, which suggested that the high cost of clothing burdened even these lofty officials. A lawyer was ranting monotonously, the gist of his remarks being that while all Guadeloupe knew that it was the desire of a gentleman recently deceased to leave his fortune to the plaintiff, it was quite impossible to carry out his desires because he had neglected to decorate his will with the required government stamp. Laboriously a yellow clerk, also in a robe, sat slowly scratching away with an old-fashioned steel pen, adding to the stacks of dog-eared hand-written papers that already filled a musty room next door almost to overflowing. Surely there was no doubt about Pointe-À-Pitre being French despite the un-Parisian complexions of its inhabitants.

If it is less beautiful than the mountainous half of Guadeloupe, Grande Terre had a materialistic advantage over the misnamed highland to the west. Its flatness makes it everywhere accessible by a network of good highways. A broad, white road stretches out along the coast through the mangroves that surround the commercial capital, and pushes on to the considerable towns of Ste. Anne, St. FranÇois, and Le Moule, while other highways crisscross the island, giving easy communication for all the sugar-mills scattered about it. More exactly they are rum-mills, for the French islanders give far more attention to their far-famed liquor, and the cane-fields that all but cover Grande Terre serve almost exclusively for filling casks and bottles. Their processes are still rather primitive, but fortunes have been won during the war, for all that. Once out upon this half of the island, the traveler finds it has a few low hills and ridges, but they are so slight that a bicycle affords easy means of communication, which can be said of few West Indian islands. Along the mangrove-lined coast are many shacks almost as carelessly thrown together as those of Haiti, yet all over Guadeloupe there is patent evidence that the negro is a far different fellow when directed by the white man than when running wild. The song of the jungle by night is broken by the constant roar of distant breakers and the noisy, merry negro voices and primitive laughter that explode now and then in the tropical darkness, while fireflies swarm so thickly that they look to the wanderer along the coast roads like the electric-lights of a large city.

All the scattered islets of the French West Indies are dependencies of Guadeloupe, being geographically nearer that island, leaving Martinique to concern herself with strictly domestic affairs. The most important of these is Marie Galante, six leagues south of Grande Terre, with fifteen thousand inhabitants and several usines to turn her canefields into rum. Les Saintes, Petite Terre, and DÉsirade, the latter the first landfall of Columbus on his second voyage, and owing its name to that circumstance, lie somewhat nearer the mother island. Far to the north is St. Martin, the possession of which France also shares with Holland despite its barely forty square miles of extent, making it the smallest territory in the world with two nationalities. No less interesting, though still more tiny, is the neighboring isle of St. BarthÉlemy, colloquially called “St. Barts.” The inhabitants are chiefly white, and among them one finds the physiognomy, traditions, and customs of their Norman ancestors. Yet though they speak French, it is only badly, the prevailing language being English, or at least the caricature of that tongue which many decades of isolation have developed.

The history of “St. Barts” recalls another nation that once had West Indian ambitions. In 1784 Louis XVI ceded the island to Sweden in return for the right to establish at Gothenburg a depot for French merchandise. But its isolation and distance from its homeland made it a burden to the Swedes, and in 1877, after all but one of its 351 inhabitants had voted in favor of a return to French nationality, it was handed back free of charge, King Oscar II making a gift to the inhabitants of the eighty thousand francs’ worth of crown property on the island. Since then the people seem again to have changed their minds, due probably to their subjection to the colored politicians of Guadeloupe. A few months ago, when the Crown Prince of Sweden called at “St. Barts” on his way to a hunting expedition in South America, he was received with open arms, and left with what the natives took to be a promise to assist them to transfer their allegiance to England or the United States, preferably the latter. Under the Stars and Stripes, they argue, their “great resources” would be fittingly developed. The island was once noted for its pineapples, but the tendency of shipping to strike farther southward and touch Barbados instead has ruined this, as it has the tree-cotton industry. Of volcanic formation, the island suffers for lack of trees and water, being forced to hoard its rainfall in large cisterns, like St. Thomas. Gustavia, the capital, was once rich and prosperous, being a depot of French and British corsairs who carried on trade with the Spanish colonies. There are still immense cellars built to bold the booty and merchandise, and zinc and lead mines that lie unexploited for lack of capital. To-day the inhabitants live for the most part in abject poverty, getting most of their sustenance from the neighboring islands and emigrating to Guadeloupe, where they are noted for their excellency as servants, despite their unfamiliarity with the native “creole.”

Martinique, though considerably smaller than Guadeloupe, from which it is separated by the British island of Dominica, probably means more to the average American, possibly because within the memory of the present generation it was the scene of the greatest catastrophe in the recorded history of the Western hemisphere. Some forty miles long and averaging about half of that in width, it is essentially volcanic in origin, untold centuries of eruptions having given it an almost unbrokenly mountainous character, heaping up those many mornes and pitons, as its large and small cone-shaped peaks are called, which stretch from its one end to the other. Its latest census, now ten years old, credited it with 184,000 inhabitants, ten thousand of whom consider themselves pure white. Martinique is fond of calling herself the “Queen of the French Antilles,” a title not wholly without justification, and to cite the fact that Cayenne and Guadeloupe are subservient to her in certain governmental matters as proof that she is the favorite American child of the mother country.

The traveler who disembarks in the harbor of Fort de France, capital of Martinique since 1680, is sure to have impressed upon him the fact that the negro with French training is even more inefficient under excitement than the excitable Gaul himself. Barely has the steamer come to anchor when her gangway becomes a shrieking, struggling, all but immovable mass of barefoot boatmen, of more or less negro policemen, custom employees, hotel runners, porters, ships’ agents, embarking and disembarking passengers, and venders of minor local products, all ignorant of that sophomoric law of physics that descending and ascending bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Bags, bundles, crates, valises, and trunks are dragged helter-skelter down this seething sloping bedlam, one of the latter now and then eluding the grasp of the struggling boatman, who is forced to dedicate one hand to his own safety, and splashing into the sea, there to float serenely about for some moments until it is rescued single-handed by the same hare-brained individual. For the bateliers of the French Antilles do not believe in mutual coÖperation. Three trunks suffered this particular fate during our landing, but our own luck was less trying, the only mishap being that the boat loaded with all our worldly baggage, forced beyond the grasp of its owner by his clamoring rivals, began to float serenely out to sea.

By some stroke of genius, indispensable to those who have been denied the lesser gift of common sense, the fellow succeeded in rescuing his craft before the swift tropical night had completely blotted it out, and a quarter of an hour later we scrambled up the end of a long, slender, not to say drunken and decrepit, wooden pier all but invisible in the thick darkness. A youth beside whom Rachel looked tall required assistance in placing the trunk on his head, but once under it he requested that the valises be piled on top of it and scurried away as if he had nothing on his mind but the aged felt hat that served him as a pad. The douane was dirty, ramshackle, and lighted only with a pair of weak oil torches, but its officials were so courteous that we were not even required to lower our possessions from the bearer’s head to the floor. A hotel facing the savanna resembled the hang-outs of Parisian apaches, but it was in some ways preferable to spending the night in the park. Luckily the “choice room” into which we were shown was only dimly lighted by a flickering candle.

“Et le bain?” I queried, as the chambermaid was hurrying away to resume her rÔle as waitress.

“Bath?” she murmured reminiscently, thrusting her turban-crowned African face back into the room. “Oh, yes, there is a tub below but—but it doesn’t function.”

“No water?”

“Plenty of water, monsieur, but the stopper has been lost.”

“What do people do?”

“When messieurs les clients wish to bathe, they sit in the tub and pour water on themselves, but—”

“Generally they don’t wish to?” I concluded caustically, but the intended sarcasm was completely lost on the femme-de-chambre, who replied with fetching simplicity, “No, usually not, monsieur.”

Luckily, the departure of a flock of tourists next day gave us admittance to the one tolerable hotel in the French West Indies.

A few weak electric-light bulbs scattered here and there in the dense humid darkness did not give the town a particularly inviting aspect. On the broad grassy savane there was scarcely light enough to see where one was going, which made progress perilous, for the habits of personal sanitation of the French islanders are not merely bad; some of them are incredible. The French themselves being none too careful in such matters, it is hardly to be expected that their negro subjects would develop high standards. Few streets are well paved, most of them have open gutters down each side, but the slope of the town is fortunately sufficient to keep the running water clear except at about eight in the morning, which is the hour chosen by householders to get rid of their accumulated garbage.

Though it was merely Friday evening, a band was playing, and playing well, a classical program in the savanna kiosk. Frenchmen, in huge pith helmets that gave them the aspect of wandering toadstools, were strolling under the big trees of the immense, grassy square. With them mingled, apparently on terms of complete equality, their colored compatriots, the women in Parisian hats or the chic little turban, with its single protruding donkey-ear, peculiar to Martinique, according to their social standing, the men in the drab garb of the mere male the world over. There was not exactly a boisterousness, but a French freedom from restraint which gave the gathering an atmosphere quite different from similar ones in the more solemn British West Indies. Among the most interesting features of the Antilles is to note how closely the imitative negroes resemble in manner, customs, and temperament their ruling nations. Yet one conspicuous feature of French night life was absent from that of Fort de France—the aggressively amorous female of the species.

By day we found the center of the savane occupied by the white marble statue of the most famous native of Martinique, the Empress Josephine. Surrounded by a quadrangle of magnificent royal palms, a bas relief of her crowning by Napoleon set into the pedestal, a medallion portrait of her imperial husband in one hand, she gazes away toward her birthplace across the bay with an expression which in certain lights suggests a wistful regret for ever having left it. But it is a flitting expression; most of the time she is visibly the proud Empress of the French, and still the idol of her native Martinique, for all her checkered story. Of other statues the most conspicuous is that of Schoelcher, the Senator from the Antilles who fathered the emancipation of the slaves, decorating the untended little plot before the Palais de Justice.

In the sunlight Fort de France has a cheerful aspect. About the edge of the savanna are several open-air cafÉs, some of them housed in tents, none of them free from clients even in the busiest hours of the day. The town swarms with women in that gay costume of Martinique, which suggests moving-picture actresses, dressed for their appearance before the camera, rather than staid housewives and market-women engaged in their unromantic daily tasks; some of its buildings rival them in the African gorgeousness of their multicolored walls. Almost wholly destroyed by fire thirty years ago, it has nothing of the ancient air to be found in many West Indian cities, though some of its comparatively modern structures are already sadly down at heel. Once it was of secondary importance, a mere capital, like Basse Terre in Guadeloupe, but the destruction of St. Pierre increased its commercial prosperity, and its twenty-seven thousand inhabitants of ten years ago have considerably increased since then. The decrepit horse-carriages of the last decade have almost wholly given way to automobiles, American in make by virtue of the war, and aware of their importance in an island with neither tramways nor railroads. Window glass, uncalled for in the tropics, is almost unknown, wooden jalousies taking the place of it when the blazing sunlight or a driving storm demands the closing of its habitually wide-open houses.

Its “best families,” few of them free from a touch of the tar-brush, have the customs of family isolation of the France of a century ago; its mulatto rank and file have the negro’s indifference to publicity in the most intimate of domestic affairs. If one may judge by the prevalence of ugly French pince-nez, the whites and “high yellows” find the glaring sunlight and light-colored streets trying to the eyes. Seen from any of the several hills high above, the town is dull-red in tint, flat and all but treeless, except for its green rectangular savane, only the open-work red spire of the cathedral protruding above the mass. Yet when the sun plays its cloud shadows across it, and the musical bells of its single church are tolling through one of the interminable funerals, the Fort Royal of olden days is well worth the stiff climb an embracing view of it requires.

The cathedral is modern, decidedly French in atmosphere despite strong negro leanings. Some of its stained-glass windows depict the native types, mulatto acolytes attending a white bishop, backed by the well-done likenesses of worshipers in the striking female costume of the island, with a male in solemn Sunday dress thrown in between for contrast. One wonders why the Spanish-Americans have not also adopted so effective a form of decoration instead of clinging tenaciously to the medieval types. In the congregation few pure whites are to be seen, except for the priests, and the nuns who herd their scores of girl orphans in brown ginghams and purple turbans into the gallery pews. The collection is taken up by a black priest—who gives change to those who have not come supplied with the customary small coin—but the officiating curates are wholly French. The lives they lead, if one may judge from certain indications, are more of a credit to their church than those of their colleagues in the Spanish tropics.

Sunday in Fort de France is not the deadly dull Sabbath of the British West Indies. The market and many of the shops are open in the morning; the cooler hours of the afternoon find the town enlivened with strollers, from the ramparts of grim old Fort St. Louis to the banks of the RiviÈre Madame, lined by vari-colored boats drawn up out of the water, with whole jungles of nets hung out to dry, with carelessly constructed little houses, in the shadows of which squat chattering, boisterously laughing negroes. The evening is one of the three during the week on which the movies function. We attempted one night to attend the largest of these. A long line of automobiles was disgorging noisy, overdressed natives of all colors except pure white. About the doors squatted scores of turbaned women, each waiting patiently for some admirer to supply her with a ticket; a swarm of ragged young black rascals blocked the entries, casting insolent glances, if not audible remarks, at the more attractive women, particularly if they chanced to be white. Black policemen garbed in resplendent white uniforms for once in the week, stood gossiping in groups, waving to their friends, doing everything except making any attempt to keep order. Then, if further proof of the genuine Frenchness of Fort de France were needed, there was a clawing, shrieking mob wedged in an impenetrable mass about a wicket six inches square and waist-high, in which one negro kept his face plastered for ten minutes, trying in vain to agree with whomever was behind it on the purchase of a paper ticket. The French have many fine qualities, but public orderliness is not one of them, particularly when African blood runs in their veins.

The great covered market of Fort de France is daily the scene of a similar uproar. By day it presents a kaleidoscopic panorama of venders and buyers in every known shade of garb and complexion; by dark, when it remains open that late, it suggests some drunken inferno. Bargaining is one of the chief amusements of the West Indian negro; when he has been reared in a French environment he seems to find double joy in it. Every purchase is the occasion for an extended quarrel which stops short of nothing but actual fisticuffs. A slice of meat tossed from the scales into a purchaser’s basket invariably brings a shriek of protest from the seller. The buyer has “short-changed” him! Buyers always do, unless they are the despised tourists who always foolishly pay the first price demanded. A mighty shouting arises over the scene of contention; it increases to an uproar that is almost audible above the general hubbub. The meat and the money are snatched back and forth a score of times; foul names are seen, if not heard, on the thick lips of the shrieking opponents; a copper is added to the handful of now bloody coins, withdrawn again as the seller slashes a match-sized strip off the maltreated slice of meat; copper and strip are once more conceded, the screams grow deafening, until at length a bargain is struck, and the two part company with friendly nods that are mutual promises to engage in similar entertainment on the morrow. The tiny portions of Haitian markets are not found in those of the French Antilles. Whole boxes of matches, entire yams, sometimes as many as two or three bananas change hands in one single transaction. Many a matron whose purchases do not sum up to more than three or four pounds is followed by a porter, who gathers them into his basket. A few of these burden-bearers are white men, beings sunk so low that they slink about among the haughty and more muscular negroes like creatures who are only permitted to live on suffrance; for both the French islands have dwarfish types of similar history to the “Chachas” of St. Thomas.

The traveler in the Lesser Antilles finds himself almost wholly cut off from the world’s news. It is a rare cable that has not been broken for months, if not for years, and the local newspapers are faintly printed little rags through which one may search in vain for a hint of the happenings outside the particular island on which one chances to be marooned. Instead of news, the front pages are taken up with local political squabbles, and, in the French islands, with challenges to duels, set in the largest type available. Let it not be supposed, however, that these lead to any great amount of bloodshed. In virtually all cases the long series of letters exchanged between the contestants, or, more exactly, between their seconds, and set down at full length in the public prints, end on some such tone as:

Messieurs Pinville and Larcher, representing M. Marc Larcher, and MM. Binet and Hantoni, representing M. Louis Percin, having met in the city hall in the matter of a demand for satisfaction from M. Marc Larcher by M. Persin, on account of an article in the “Democratic Coloniale” of March 20th, came to an agreement that there was a misunderstanding between M. Percin and M. Marc Larcher, neither the one nor the other having ever had the intention of making any allegations which should encroach upon the private life of either.

In consequence, they declare the incident irrevocably closed.

Done in duplicate at Fort de France, March 23, 1920,

and signed by the pacifiers. Thus the principals have impressed upon their fellow-citizens their chivalrous code of honor and undaunted courage, the seconds have won a bit of personal publicity, and no harm has been done. In a way the Martinique system has its advantages over the more direct American method of a pair of black eyes.

A coast steamer leaves Fort de France every morning at peep of dawn for what was once the larger city of St. Pierre. For three hours it chugs northwestward along the coast, dotted with little fisher villages half hidden behind cocoanut-palms and the long lines of pole-supported nets drying beneath them. Here and there it halts to pick up or discharge passengers in rowboats, and to take on the capital’s daily supply of milk—in five-gallon Standard Oil tins corked with handfuls of leaves. The sea is usually pond-smooth here under the lee of the island. Many sandstone cliffs as absolutely sheer as if they had been cut with a gigantic knife line the way, with little shrines at the foot of most of them to keep them from falling into the sea. Behind, the verdant mountains climb steeply into the sky, as if, the island being a bare twenty miles wide, they must make the most of the space allotted them. The coast is speckled with fishermen in broad, trapezoidal straw hats, standing erect in their precarious little boats or setting their nets for the day’s catch. Their method is simple. Half a dozen of them fence in a great oval stretch of water near the shore with a single net hundreds of yards long and weighted on one side. Then, when only the floating support blocks remain above the surface, they proceed to throw stones into the enclosure, to pound the water with their paddles, to splash about like men gone suddenly mad. Apparently the fish rise to see what all the commotion is about, for half an hour later the fishermen begin to drag their net inshore, and the haul is seldom less than several boatloads of the finny tribe, of every size from the coli roux, resembling the sardine, to mammoth fish that must be quickly clubbed to death for safety sake, and of every variety known to the tropical seas. Already the inhabitants of the neighboring villages are trooping down to the shore with their native baskets and makeshift receptacles, and by the time the net is stretched out on its poles to dry the last of the catch has been sold and carried away.

But we are nearing St. Pierre. Carbet, the last stop, where Columbus landed just four centuries before the great catastrophe, is falling astern, and as we round its protecting nose of land the flanks of PÉlÉe rise before us, broken and wrinkled and cracked and heaped up in scorched brown slopes that end in blue-black clouds clinging tenaciously about the volcano’s head, as if to shield the murderous old rascal from detection. This same steamer, one of the crew who served in the same capacity in those days tells us, barely escaped from the disaster that overwhelmed the chief city of the Lesser Antilles. She had left St. Pierre at daybreak—for her itinerary was reversed when the capital played second fiddle to her commercial rival—and was entering the harbor of Fort de France when two mighty explosions that seemed to shake all Martinique “set us praying for our friends in St. Pierre.” Next day she returned, only to find—but just here our informant was called away to help in the landing, and left us to picture for ourselves the sight that met his eyes as he steamed into this open roadstead on that memorable morning.

Ships no longer anchor off St. Pierre. For one thing, a shelf of the sea floor was broken off during the eruption, and left the harbor all but unfathomable. Besides, the world’s shipping passes ruined St. Pierre by now, and only this little coaster comes daily to tie up to a tiny pier where once stretched long and busy wharves. At the end of it one is confronted by a statue, a nude female figure which is meant to be symbolical of the ruined city in the day of its agony. But the effect is unfortunate. For the thing is so inartistically done that it suggests a lady of limited intelligence crawling out of her bathroom after having inadvertently blown out the gas—and the ludicrous seems out of place in one’s first pilgrimage to the American Pompeii.

The St. Pierre of the beginning of this century was the most important city of the French West Indies. More than that, it was noted throughout the Caribbean for its beauty, gaiety, and commercial activity. It was a stone city, of real cut stone, built in a perfect amphitheater sloping gently down to the deeply blue sea, and cut sharply off at the rear by sheer hills that spring quickly into mountains. White pirogues and the pleasure boats of its wealthier inhabitants balanced themselves in its bay among steamers and sailing vessels from all parts of the world. Its boulevards were lined with splendid shade trees; its Jardin des Plantes ranked among the world’s best botanical collections; it had electric lights and the only tramways in the Lesser Antilles; its bourse was as busy in its way as our own Wall Street. Masses of gorgeous flamboyants, of red and purple bougainvillea, decorated its open places and its commodious residences, which stretched away into flowery suburbs with half a dozen pretty French names. In a way it had copied Paris too closely, for its night life was hectic with “sadly famous” casinos, with gaiety unconfined; it felt a certain pride in hearing itself called the “naughtiest city in the West Indies.”

St. Pierre was proud of the old volcano that seemed to watch with a fatherly care over the destinies of the city at its feet. Never within the memory of the living generation had it given a sign of wrath. A pretty little lake filled its crater, with fougÈres and begonias and soft velvety moss growing about its shores. To the Pierrotins it had long been the chosen place for picnics and Sunday excursions.

Yet never was a people given fuller warning of impending disaster. As early as February in their final year of 1902 the inhabitants commenced to complain of a sulphurous odor from the mountain. During the following month dense clouds began to rise about its summit. “Old PÉlÉe is smoking again,” the people told one another, laughingly; but not a man of them dreamed that their old playmate meant them any harm. On April 22 a light earthquake broke the cable to Dominica. On the twenty-fourth a rain of cinders fell on all the northern part of the island. The Sunday following saw many pleasure parties mounting to the crater-lake to watch the playfulness of “old PÉlÉe” at close range. On the twenty-eighth great growlings were heard, as if some mammoth bear were struggling to escape from his prison in the bowels of the earth. From the beginning of May cinders fell almost daily over all Martinique. Steam rose from the crater; bursts of fire, like magnified lightning flashes, played about the volcano’s summit; the clouds grew so dense that the days were a perpetual twilight, the water-supply was half-ruined by the soot it carried. On the fifth a great deluge of boiling mud swept down the River Blanche, completely submerging a large sugar-factory on the edge of St. Pierre and killing several persons. Great rocks came rolling down the mountainside; the cable between Fort de France and Santo Domingo parted; rivers were everywhere overflowing their banks; cinders fell continuously; the vegetables which the market-women brought down from the hills were covered with ashes.

St. Pierre began to lose its nerve. But the optimists asserted that the worst was over. A decrease in the fall of cinders on the following day seemed to bear out their assertions, though trees were breaking under the weight of ashes, and the cable to St. Lucia was disrupted, completely cutting Martinique off from the outside world. The men of St. Pierre felt that they could not abandon their affairs for a mere display of gigantic fireworks; their families refused to leave husbands and fathers for their own selfish safety’s sake; no doubt pride kept many of the inhabitants from fleeing. A scientific commission in the capital assured the frightened city that it was in no danger whatever—scientists have been known to make serious mistakes on similar occasions. The governor and his wife came to St. Pierre to lend the reassurance of their presence, and the city took on a calmer demeanor and went on about its business.

On the night of May 7 a torrential rain, accompanied by unprecedented thunder and lightning, swept over the island. That, the people told themselves, was a sign that the danger was over. The eighth dawned fresh and clear. The vapors from the crater went straight up and floated away on the trade-wind. The inhabitants forgot their fears and began to prepare for a jour de grande fÊte, for it was Ascension Day. Then suddenly, at eight o’clock, two mighty explosions that were heard as far off as Dominica and St. Lucia had barely subsided when an enormous black cloud with bright streaks in it rolled down from the crater at express speed, enveloped St. Pierre, halted abruptly a few hundred yards north of the neighboring village of Carbet, and floated slowly away before the wind. The pride of the French West Indies, with its twenty-eight thousand inhabitants, had been completely wiped out in the space of forty-five seconds.

That night the wreck of a steamer, its super-structureless deck strewn with a score of charred and dismembered bodies, crawled into the harbor of St. Lucia.

“Who are you?” shouted the crowd gathered on the wharves, “and where do you come from?”

“We come from hell,” shouted back the only surviving officer.

“You can cable the world that St. Pierre no longer exists.”

Eighteen years have passed since the destruction of St. Pierre, and it is still little more than a fishing village. From the water-front one gets an impression of partial recovery; once landed, one finds only a fringe of houses along the sea, frail wooden houses with little resemblance to the old stone city. Sloping wharves of stone, strewn with broken and rusted lamp-posts, with worthless iron safes, and the twisted remnants of anchor chains, accommodate only a few fishing canoes instead of their former bustling ocean-going traffic. Back of the one partly restored street lies a labyrinth of old, gray cut-stone ruins choked with the rampant vegetation which does its concealing work quickly and well in the tropics. From the beach to the sheer green mountain wall behind, a dark-gray lava dust everywhere covers the natural soil, and from this fertile humus a veritable jungle has sprung up. Former parlors are filled with growing tobacco; banana plants wave their huge leaves from out what were once secluded family residences; one can get lost in the hills of lava, so overgrown are they with forests of brush, of manioc, hedgewood, and thorny brambles. The remnants of stone walls ready to fall down at the least tremor of the earth force the cautious visitor to make many a detour. Here are great stone stairways that lead nowhere; there massive buttresses upholding nothing. Ivy and climbing plants drape the low jagged walls of former rollicking clubs and solemn government buildings. Narrow paths squirm through the thorny brush where once were crowded city streets. Of the five large churches that adorned St. Pierre, only a piece of the tower, a fragment of the curved apse, and a bit of the faÇade of the great stone cathedral, once among the most important in the West Indies, peer above the surrounding vegetation. The entrance hall and the tiles of the main aisle lead now to a tiny wood-and-tin church built in the center of the former structure. Rusted iron pillars, hanging awry or completely fallen, help the brush to choke up the interior; a pathetic old iron saint, without head, arms, or feet, leans against the outer wall as if he were still dazed by the fall from his niche above. Gaunt black pigs roam everywhere through the ruins, the silence of which is seldom broken except by the wind whispering through the leaves and the murmur of the running water with which the ghost of a city is still abundantly supplied.

A marvelous view of the whole scene may be had from a hill to the south of the amphitheater, where the stone bases of what were evidently once splendid suburban residences are also choked with brush and brambles. From this height the sea is of so transparent a blue that one seems to see on its bottom the reflection of the fishing canoes scattered about the bay. The single restored street, once the main artery, cuts the ruined city in two with a heavy gray line. On either side of this is a broken row of houses, some roofed with somber tin, others with red tiles that are already beginning to take on the brownish tint of age. But these few colors, as well as the rare human noises that ascend on the breeze, are but slight contrast to the gray lifelessness of all the valley, so funereal in its general aspect that the gaily blossoming trees seem strangely out of place in it. There is a mild suggestion of Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Peruvian highlands, in this view of ruined St. Pierre, with its countless gray stone walls and gables standing forth above the deep green of the vegetation that covers all else. The gables stand in almost perfect rows, like the headstones of an immense graveyard, so that the little, bare, lava-covered cemetery with its tiny white wooden crosses back near the foot of the mountain-wall has a pathetic, almost ludicrous aspect, like the pretense of cement-made “rustic” furniture, for the whole town is one vast cemetery.

On closer inspection one finds more inhabitants than are suggested by the first glimpse. Dozens of drygoods-box shacks are hidden away in the lee of towering stone walls that seem on the very point of toppling over. Hovels of grass and thatch come suddenly to light as one scrambles through the jungles of former palace courtyards and lava-razed fortresses. The buoyant faith and trust of humanity laughs in the end at such catastrophes even as that of St. Pierre. We halted to talk with some of the denizens of these improvised homes among the ruins. An old negro and his wife in one of them had lost their four children in the disaster. The woman had been sent by her mistress on an errand into the country an hour before it occurred; the man had seen a long row of peasants bound for market killed up to within a few feet of where he was working on the roadside, and a stone had fallen upon his back, crippling him for life. Yet a few years later they had returned to build their shelter on the very spot where their children had fallen.

“We couldn’t stand it in Fort de France,” explained the old man. “It was always raining, stinking, full of mud and fever.” As a matter of fact, there is scarcely an iota of difference in climate between the two cities, but homesickness easily gives false impressions.

If St. Pierre is not yet rebuilt, it is not because of fear, but by reason of the fact that only a scattered handful of its inhabitants were left alive. In the city itself there was one survivor, a negro prisoner confined in a deep dungeon from which he was rescued four days later. Only those who chanced to be away from home or in the far outskirts outlived that fateful May morning. Yet already it has several distilleries, half a dozen schools, a post-office and telephone station, a gendarmerie, and two or three makeshift hotels. The inhabitants are more kindly, soft-mannered beings than those of the capital, as if the disaster had tamed their souls. But even they are beginning to demand the restoration of their city to the rank of a municipality. At present it is not even a commune, but a suburban dependency of the neighboring village of Carbet. Its streets are unlighted at night; five hundred market women crowd the little Place Bertin daily in blazing sunshine or drenching rain, for lack of a covered market. Only by its recreation into a separate municipality, insist its inhabitants, will these things and many like them be remedied; and once they are, St. Pierre will begin to take on its old importance and grow rich and prosperous once more. Meanwhile old PÉlÉe, cold and inexorable, sloping majestically upward from the blue Caribbean in broken, wrinkled, treeless, brown grandeur, seems to look down upon the optimistic little creatures at his feet with a grim, sardonic smile.

I set out to climb the volcano that afternoon, halting at Morne Rouge for the night. From St. Pierre a good highway climbs abruptly into the hills, along the lava cliffs of the RiviÈre Blanche, once seething with boiling mud, now glass-clear again, with washerwomen toiling here and there along its banks. During the eruption, the first visitors after it ceased assure us, blocks of lava a hundred cubic meters in size were thrown out by the monster, and the tropical rains falling on these red-hot ingots produced all manner of violent phenomena. To-day these giant blocks are broken up into far smaller masses, or have disintegrated entirely into lava soil of great fertility. Forty square miles were utterly devastated on that May morning, not a living thing remaining within that area. But if nature destroys in one swift flare, it also reconstructs quickly in these tropical regions. Lava valleys full of waving bamboos, cliffs lined with splendid tree-ferns, patches of sugar-cane stretching up the steep slopes seemed to belie the story of destruction, while swarms of children about the frequent huts, many of the boys in poilu caps, the gay little girls with frizzled tresses, sometimes covered with replica of their mothers’ gay turbans, showed that even mankind was recovering from the devastation. For the “race suicide” of continental France is not duplicated in her West Indian colonies.

Morne Rouge sits on a ridge of one of the great buttresses that uphold PÉlÉe, towering 4429 feet above the Caribbean, with dimensions not unsimilar to those of Vesuvius. It, too, was destroyed, though some months later than St. Pierre, but many of its inhabitants took warning in time and have returned to reconstruct the place to almost what it was before. By some miracle, according to the French parish priest with whom I spent the night, its huge church all but escaped damage, and only the cross on its spire, still tipsy after eighteen years, recalls the ordeal through which it passed. Wild begonias and many flowering shrubs give the scattered town the air of a semi-tropical garden, and the spreading view of the Caribbean, already far below, enhances the beauty of its situation.

The ascent of PÉlÉe is neither dangerous nor particularly difficult for an experienced pedestrian. If I accepted the guidance of “Patrice,” at the curate’s suggestion, it was rather because of the weather than for any other reason. The morning was gloomy, with heavy, intermittent showers, and the dense clouds that covered all the upper half of the volcano made it unlikely that a stranger could follow unassisted the path to the summit, though on a clear day there would have been no difficulty. It was so cold that I shivered visibly in my summer garb. Negroes in bare feet but wrapped to the ears in heavy poilu overcoats, squatted in the doors of their huts along the highway we followed for several miles farther. Then we struck upward through steeply sloping fields, already soaked from hat to shoes by the drenching downpours that soon became one continual deluge. As a matter of fact, “Patrice” did not boast the latter article of dress, which made it easier for him to cling to the narrow path down which poured a veritable brook. But he was more than once for turning back, and only the fear of what my host of the night might say if he abandoned a “helpless stranger who had been put in his special charge” urged him on. “Patrice” was three-fourths negro,—what the Haitians call a griffe and the Martiniquais a capre,—but somehow one did not think of his color, possibly because, like many of the French islanders, he seemed to be almost unconscious of it himself, and he had not a trace of that mixture of aggressiveness and obsequiousness of our own and the British blacks. His mind was a curious conglomeration of learning, picked up heaven knows where, and patches of the most astonishing ignorance, but he knew PÉlÉe as a child knows its own back-yard.

This was fortunate, for it was a day in which it would have been more than easy to go astray. Only once or twice in the ascent did the fog lift, giving a glimpse of both the Atlantic and the Caribbean, of Morne Rouge half hidden in its verdure, and the green-gray site of what was once St. Pierre. Great fields of tree-ferns, whole mountain-sides of them, showed in these brief intervals of visibility, with deeply wooded valleys and steep peaks and ridges entirely covered with vegetation; nowhere the bare rocks and patches of lava I had expected. Mountain “raspberries,” the same inviting but rather tasteless fruit which the Porto Ricans miscall fresas, lined the way almost to the summit, enticing us to halt and eat regardless of the downpour. Once during the last sheer miles we had a brief view of the rim of the crater, like the edge of a world broken off by some cataclysm of the solar system. But when we had surmounted this and paused on the brink, there was nothing to be seen except an immense void filled with swirling white mist.

“Patrice” knew the value of patience, however, and for a long shivering hour we waited. Then all at once the cloud-curtain was snatched away for the briefest instant, and at our feet lay, not the quarry-like crater of the imagination, but a great valley filled with a scrub vegetation which might have been duplicated in the highlands of Scotland. Across it, like a mammoth monument, the “needle” that marks the summit, in the new form which the latest eruption left it, stood out against the sky a mere rifle-shot away. Then the mists swept in again, as if nature were some busy caretaker who had little time to waste on mere sight-seers, and left us to find our way as best we could out of the little cell-like chamber of fog in which we were inclosed.

We descended by a path that “Patrice” knew, even in the clouds, to the bottom of the crater. Gigantic rocks of every possible form lay tumbled everywhere, but so completely were they covered with light vegetation that only this closer view revealed their existence. Here and there was a fumerole, or smoke-hole, from which issued light clouds of vapor indistinguishable, except in temperature, from the swirling mists in which they were quickly merged. We crawled into one of these, half-covered with a hoodlike boulder, and at once lost the chill that had pervaded our very bones. The vent was like some mammoth chimney-corner, with a damp, sulphurous heat which quickly induced sleepiness and a desire to stretch out and let the world below go hang. That and the bottle of syrupy Martinique rum which “Patrice” had been foresighted enough to bring with him allayed any fear of mishap from exposure, and we ate our lunch in as homelike comfort as if the wintry winds and pouring rain outside were a thousand leagues distant.

The descent was swifter than we would have had it, thanks to the rain-soaked slopes, and almost before I realized it we were down in the brilliant tropical sunshine again, great clumps of bamboos casting a welcome shade over the ever more level trail and the mountainsides; of tree-ferns again high above us. At Ajoupa Bouillon (ajoupa, a hastily constructed shelter, is one of the few Carib words which has survived) we rejoined the highway and parted company, “Patrice” dubious of a “helpless stranger’s” ability to find his way, even along a public road. But as I showed no inclination to add another five-franc note to his unusual day’s income for being piloted to the north coast, he took his leave with a doleful countenance and pattered away in the direction of Morne Rouge.

Everything I wore or carried was still dripping wet. I turned aside into the first open meadow and spread out all of which I could in decency divest myself, the blazing sunshine drying it with magical rapidity. One felt immensely more of a sense of civilization here than in Haiti. There a lone white man would have hesitated to lie down beside the highway, even had there been one. Here one seemed as secure as in the heart of France. Yet there was little outward difference between the Haitians and the simple, kindly country-people who plodded constantly past, the women carrying big bundles on their heads. The hats they secured by laying the load over one rim flapping behind them, balancing their burdens with a cadenced swing of the hips, their legs bare to the knees. The men were fewer and seldom carried anything. In the fields were flocks of cattle; the little houses were all built close to the road, for cacos are unknown in Martinique. Vehicles were few despite the excellence of the leisurely French highway. The great mass of the islanders do their traveling on foot, the wealthy by automobile; but the latter are not numerous enough to give the pedestrian much annoyance.

As I neared the coast, the rolling hills turned to cane-fields, stretching clear down to the edge of the Atlantic. Compared with Cuba or Porto Rico, the methods were primitive, or more exactly, diminutive. Children, women, and old men picked up the cut canes, one by one, tied them in bundles with the top leaves, and slowly carried them to small ox-carts in which they were laboriously stood on end, bundle by bundle. These workers received two francs a day—fifteen cents at the then rate of exchange. Men in the prime of life were paid four francs fifty centimes for such work as hoeing or transferring the ox-cart loads into the little four-wheeled railroad cars which bore them away to the factory. Cane-cutters, however, working by the tache, earned as much as twelve francs a day.

Women of Martinique