CHAPTER I.

ISLAND OF TRINIDAD, "IERE"

I.

Had we known just a little more about Trinidad, it would have made a great difference in that luncheon, but it all came out wrong because some of us didn't know. Too late to influence us in the least, we read in the _Daily Gleaner_, of Jamaica, that the beef sold in Trinidad is exported alive from Venezuela. To be sure, we were aware that Venezuela occupies a large part of the northern coast of South America, and were conscious that Trinidad lies enclosed in a great bay of that coast, called the Gulf of Paria, off the delta of the Orinoco River; also, in a hazy way, we knew that the Spanish Main is a name applied somewhat vaguely to that same South American coast--a relic of the days of pirates, buccaneers, and freebooting English admirals; but we no more expected to be served a roast of beef from the Spanish Main than a dish of Boston baked beans from our castles in Spain. The two dimly intangible names had ever borne a close comradeship in our minds, a poetic association affiliated them in closest bonds. The same sun kissed into rose tints the turrets of our castles in Spain and the lofty summits of the Spanish Main. The same romance lifted them both away from reality into that land just bordering upon the Islands of the Blest, and much as we longed to materialise our dreams, and make the Spanish Main a usable fact, when the opportunity came for us to do so, it slipped away from us before we were conscious of its existence.

Unaware that the illuminated postal-card _menu_ on the table at the Queen's Park Hotel, Port of Spain, could in any sense lift the veil from our enchantments, we read the following bill of fare:

Mayonnaise of Fish, with Lettuce Oysters _en Poulet_ Scrambled Eggs with Asparagus Tips Irish Stew Haricot of Oxtail Brain Fritters Curry of Veal _à l'Indien_ Boiled Turkey and Rice Ham and Spinach Fried Sausages and Potatoes Salad Assorted Cold Meats String Beans Rice Mashed Potatoes Macaroni _au Gratin_ Chocolate Ice-cream Cakes Cheese

Eight of us sat down at a table on the veranda, white-walled, white-ceilinged, and white pillared. A white-gravelled walk led out into the white sun, through a stiff, boxed-in, English garden, stuffed with plants in green tubs, and redeemed only by those natural things that will grow and be beautiful in spite of all conventions. Thirsting for cool ices and delectable fruits, looking wistfully for our vanishing fancies of West Indian ambrosia, we turn in a listless, disappointed way to that bill of fare, where ham and spinach and Irish stew and fried sausages send our hopes a-scampering off like a lot of frightened children.

What man in his sane mind would order an haricot of ox-tail in the tropics, when he needs but lift his hand for the food of Paradise; what man, with any sense of the fitness of things, would eat curried veal, when, for the asking, he might sup a libation fit for the gods? Alas! The asking never brought it, and we--that is, one, at least--settled down to scrambled eggs, and felt and looked unutterable scorn upon the one next at table who began at mayonnaise of fish, and took every course to cheese. Ah! friends, this was a case where the one who didn't know fared ill. She lost her first opportunity of paying her respects to the Spanish Main.

Hungry and disillusioned, the one and the only thing to do is to forget those steaming sausages and the Irish stew as quickly as possible. We shall not stay here a moment longer. Hotels are makeshifts at the best. Let us leave these unromantic, unscrupulous venders of ham and spinach!

There, over yonder on the other side of the savannah, there is a delicious retreat where we can make good our escape.

II.

We shall never again see anything which can compare in beauty, of its kind, with the _Jardin des Plantes_ of Martinique. No, we never shall--still, we must be just to all. Trinidad's Botanical Garden is beautiful in its own way, and we were impressed with the idea that it possessed some features which that of Martinique lacked. However, that might have been owing to the fact that we did not view the Martinique Garden in its entirety. Had we done so, we might have found the same species in both places.

From casual observation there seemed to me to be one distinctive characteristic of tropical vegetation; the trees did not appear to grow so much in great social orders as do those of temperate zones. In the North, vast families of the same species of trees gather together and keep together with as rigid a pertinacity as any Scotch clan; the beech, birch, oak, maple, pine, hemlock, walnut, hickory, all have their pet homes and their own relations, and no amount of coddling or persuasion will ever induce them to a wide change of _habitat_; but in the far South, the tropical trees seem willing to settle anywhere in this land of endless summer. Of course, one finds that certain trees love the swamps, and others prefer the high lands; and some will grow in greater magnificence in some places where the conditions are absolutely congenial, than in other places where they are not so. There is the mangrove; it loves the wet and the mire--the mosquito-ridden, miasmatic river borders--and wherever, on these coasts, you find a swamp, whether in the very hottest spots, or in others only moderately so, there you'll find the mangrove sending out ærial roots, reaching down into the muck for new strength, forming--banyan-like--a family of new trunks, all under one leafy canopy, quite content if only it has the water about its roots and a certain degree of heat.

Away up there in Haïti, we find the ceiba, and down here in Trinidad it is equally at home. These conditions make the formation of a botanical garden, representing the world-growth of sunlit vegetation, peculiarly favourable. Trinidad is said to possess the most superb collection of tropical plants in existence; and though gathered from all lands, growing not as strangers or even stepchildren, but as rightful heirs to the immeasurable vital force which pours forth from a rich soil warmed by a blazing sun the year around.

The garden once entered, we pass a great, squarely built mansion, the governor's residence, and are in the midst of a wonderful vegetation from the first step. At the very entrance, we are greeted with, perhaps, the most unique tree in these latitudes.

After all, there is something stupefying in the effort to describe tropical wonders. When they are passing before one's eyes, each has a feature distinct to itself, which, in a way, is its own manner of description. Each has its peculiar wonder, its own glory,--no two alike--and yet, when one sits down to think it over, there is the same old alphabet from which to draw new pictures, new miracles; and how to make each different with the same letters is a question indeed.

If I could only tell you the name of this particular tree which stands at the entrance to the garden, you might some day hunt it up yourself, but as I know neither its family nor home, we will let that all go, and just tell you how it is dressed.

It is a heavily, glossily leafed, symmetrical, low tree, just about the size of those dear old cherry-trees we used to climb, oh, so long,--so long ago! From the tip of every branch there drops a cord-like fibre about a foot and a half long, and at the end of this little brown string there hangs a cluster of delicate pink flowers. These are suspended in almost exact length in rows from the lowest to the highest branch, and it really seems as if Nature were experimenting to see what wonderful living garlands she could create for a canopy above our heads.

III.

The character of the garden is defined at once upon entrance. It is a botanical garden, pure and simple, a place for strange plants from far away, a sort of orphan asylum for everybody's vegetable baby. It is not, like Martinique, an enchanted forest with cascades and glens fit for nymphs and dryads; it is matter-of-fact, orderly, prim, and businesslike. Aside from its unique trees, there is little to attract one, so we decide for once it would be wise to engage a guide who can tell us something about the inhabitants of the place, which otherwise promises to be rather dull.

So we hunt up a crooked, stump-legged Portuguese gardener, by name Manuel, who takes our heavy baskets, we following down a little glen which grows at once quite dark and sweet and silent.

Through long, freshly cut bamboo poles, streams of water are being carried hither and thither to special spots in the garden, and we stop to watch the trickling, and dip our hands down into its pleasant coolness. Away up through the dark leafage, a mighty royal palm with stern aristocratic grace swings and rattles its great, dead, brown arms--the skeleton of its last year's growth--beneath the luxuriant crown of this year's green plumes.

In the thicket, we find the nutmegs, hiding among the delicate foliage of a low-branching tree. Sister reaches among the leaves and pulls off some of the fragrant fruit, and gathers many from the ground. A sense of rare luxuriance comes over us. This gathering of the spices of life from the very ground upon which we tread is intoxicating, and we just begin to understand the causes back of those dark pages of West Indian history, when man first partook of this delirium.

These large-leafed, upright little trees are the Madagascar coffee, and the smaller and more graceful ones, the Java coffee--how they take us back to those happy days and months among the coffee plantations, long ago!--and near by is the friendly banana, so common an object that we pass its torn, drooping leaves with scarcely a thought, but it is worth more than a passing glance, for there is no plant in all the tropics more useful than the banana. It has not only delicious fruit of many sizes and varieties, but it is also cooked as a vegetable, and forms one of the chief sources of the native diet. It is planted, on account of its heavy shade and quick growth, to shade the coffee, while trees of slower growth and more permanent shade are maturing, thus forming a necessary and temporary protection; it is also used for the same purpose among the cacao trees. It is a sort of foster-mother to the cacao, to care for the tender shrub until its real mother, "_La Madre del Cacao_," can assume permanent care of its charge. The banana takes so little vitality from the ground that, as protection to the coffee and cacao, it is indispensable. We had some very delicious, green-skinned bananas at several places, and found the small apple banana everywhere.

Manuel leads us on, and stops under a spindling, tall tree, flowering with dainty, pink buds of a delicious odour, and there's one branch just low enough for Little Blue Ribbons to reach on tiptoe. Does it seem possible that the little brown cloves, rattling in my spice-box at home, could ever have been so fresh and soft and pink? Poor little mummies!

And just see what we are coming to! Did you ever imagine there could be such shade? It's a tree from the Philippines. We stoop to get under the black leaves, and there the shade is absolutely impenetrable. What an adjustment of things there is in this grand old earth of ours!

My thoughts fly back to our Northern woods. I see the sinuously graceful elms, with the sunlight streaming through their wide open branches upon an earth longing for warmth; and long shafts of white noonday shooting through the interstices of basswood, maple, and ash; the woods are not black and sunless; they are translucently green, quivering with light and needed warmth. But here, where the sun is a ball of redundant flame the year around, Nature bequeaths to her children a shaded forest, rigidly trunked, stolidly formed, thick-leafed, which no blazing sun can penetrate or sweeping hurricane desolate.

IV.

Quite as one strokes the head of a favourite animal, Manuel leads us to an insignificant-looking tree, takes a branch caressingly in his hand, brings out his clumsy knife, selects just the right spot, cuts off a bit, and hands us a piece of camphor wood.

Into the dear St. Thomas basket it goes, with the leaves of coffee, the pink and white clove blossoms, and a long spray of _araucaria_ from the Norfolk Islands,--a strange company, indeed!

Yonder long yellow avenues are cinnamon and spice groves with reddish-yellow bark, smooth as wax, casting slender shadows in the golden light. Here is the shaddock, entirely weaned from its Malayan home, and farther on a clump of low bushes, in among the nutmeg trees and coffee, with small satin-like leaf, brings us to the herb that "cheers but does not inebriate,"--the tea.

Just see those glorious great lemons, glowing in the ever-splendid sunlight, which transmits to every living object a radiance, a dazzling brilliancy, in which life progresses and finally dissolves out of sheer exhaustion from the exuberance of vitality.

Oh, to our starved eyes of the North; to our senses benumbed by dreary days of darkened sky, hearts chilled by bitterness of wind and gray, unyielding frost, this never-ending, unspeakable sunlight, filtering through the yellow vistas of clove and cinnamon, comes like the actual presence of Apollo, the Shining One! We may, in unguarded moments, in ungrateful moments, maybe, consider his embrace too positive, and we may raise the white umbrella, but we never quite lose our rejuvenated love for his golden glory.

Manuel, but half-clad, looks as if he would dismember at any moment. His trousers are hitched by a couple of old leathers, and his shirt looks as if it wished it "didn't have to," and his old hat is only there on sufferance, and his shoes--old flippety-flops--have dragged their ill-shaped existence through many a weary mile. But Manuel doesn't care; he loves his garden, and the sunshine and the luscious fruit, all his children so well behaved and so obedient to his voice. He takes a bamboo pole and gives one of the big, juicy lemons a rap, and down it falls on Wee One's head with such a thump! Then Manuel is very sorry, and he apologises for his child's misdemeanour in his funny, mixed-up Portuguese-English-Spanish and the rest, and we understand and don't mind a bit; in fact, we wouldn't care if more would fall in the same way.

Once upon a time, in the far-off golden days, when the Divine in Creation had not been quite forgot, there came to this shore a band of men,--not faultless, no, not faultless--but great men "for a' that," who, with glittering cross aloft, christened this fair land after the blessed Trinity. But this was not her first sacrament. Deep in the eternal silence of the forest, the dweller in the High Wood had sought expression of the divine through beauty, and chose a name from out the radiant wilderness which would tell for ever of its wonderment: "Iere," the land of the humming-bird, they called her--those dusky children of the High Wood--and to this day she clings lovingly to her maiden name.

We look about us. Where are the birds once peopling these forests, like myriads of rainbows? Oh, sisters! members of Humane Societies! Hunt up your old bonnets and see the poor little stuffed carcasses ornamenting your cast-off finery! So Trinidad has been bereft of her wonderful birds, and now there is but a name, a sad-sounding, meaningless name--Iere--to tell of days which knew not the pride and cruelty of women.

Think of it!--at one time, there averaged twenty thousand humming-birds a year exported from Trinidad to England alone!

And now, well--there are none left to export. We must find new islands to denude, to ravage, to desolate, for our adornment. But it's too unpleasant,--this seeing things as they are; we'll hide the poor little innocent card which the black woman gave us at the hotel; we'll cover up the word "Iere" with these coffee leaves. There, now the spray of _araucaria_, now the stick of camphor, and I think the lemon will fit right in among the nutmegs.

Come along, Manuel, we are ready; and we follow through the birdless paths, down where the _Nux Vomica_ grows, and the pepper, and the lime and the calabash, and the orange and breadfruit, and tamarind, and pineapple; and we go on and wake up the comical lizards who scurry away like brown flashes of whip-cord. What ridiculous creatures they are, and how desperately frightened! Why, surely they must be fifteen inches long, and fully four inches high, and what funny, nimble legs! They start off in the same spasm-like way as do the toy lizards we buy for the youngsters.

Manuel brings us to the plant house where the great forest wonders of the Far East are babied and loved into strength, and I could not but think of Daudet's dear old _Tartarin of Tarascon_, dreaming by the homesick little baobab-tree, which grew in his window-garden; and of the long nights under the mellow moon of sunny France; and how he fought great beasts and achieved great fame in the land of sweet illusion.

Dream on, Tartarin, wherever you may be! The time will come when it will all be true, and you, too, will rest under the yellow splendour of the golden trees; and the earth, the great Mother Earth, will open her heart to you and breathe upon you the spirit of limitless possibilities!

Good-bye, Manuel! The basket is heavy to carry with its spoils of fruit and flowers; and we take "turn about" across the savannah.

The races are on, and horses are dashing around the grassy turf, and the Trinidadians are yelling, the cricket games are going, and the picnic parties are gathering up their baskets for home; and the Hindoo girls clamour to carry our basket, and we gladly give over the load to a tough little head; and the merry-go-round wheezes out its squeaking tunes, and we pass through the black crowd, and narrowly escape taking a cab, for the way to the quay looks long, and we waver and weaken, and are just about to give in, when up comes a tinkling tram, and we jump in, with a penny to the Hindoo girl, and rumble away.

The man with the two monkeys, and the man with the green and blue parrot, and the boy with the shells, are still waiting.

Alackaday! Where is the woman with the baskets?