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.

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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.

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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.”