THE BRITISH WEST INDIES

CHAPTER XIVTHE 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 tobe 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 inmatewould 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 villageof 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, thoughthere 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-plannedbateysand comfortable employee-houses as are to be found in Cuba and Porto Rico. The haulingis 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 callaroma, 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, untilwe 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 thisday 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 densevegetation 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 trailfind 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.

Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica

A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from the mountain

Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent

Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue of Nelson

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 disappearedagain 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 Antilleswhere 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, lazyswo-owamong 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’sgreater 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.

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