CHAPTER XIX

RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE

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

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

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

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

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

“No water?”

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

“What do people do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In consequence, they declare the incident irrevocably closed.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

Unlike the smaller British islands, the French Antilles have not put all their faith in sugar. Cane products, however, form by far the most important industry. If their exports of sugar decreased by half during the war, it is because the making of rum proved more advantageous, especially as France requisitioned their sugar at less than half the price in the open market. In the very years when the United States was adopting its prohibition amendment, Martinique and Guadeloupe increased their rum production by some forty per cent. The present almost unprecedented prosperity of the islands is mainly due to the distilled cane juice they sent overseas while their sons were battling at the front. But here, too, there are loud protests at the inequality of distribution of that prosperity. Three-fourths of the island, the Martiniquais complain, belongs to five families, of pure French blood, who intermarry among themselves, keeping the estates and the chief _usines_ in a sort of closed corporation. If a bit of land is offered for sale, the complaint continues, these families bid it in at any price demanded in order to freeze out “les petits.” The fact that the latter may also be white men does not alter the attitude of the monopolists. Moreover, the small planter is ruthlessly exploited by the large distillers, who pay him fifty to sixty francs a ton for his cane and sell their rum at seven francs a liter. One finds, therefore, among the middle-class whites a considerable number of still patriotic but disgruntled citizens.

A little story which was going the rounds during our stay in Martinique shows that the game of “high finance” can be played even on a twenty by forty mile island. A “high yellow” native who had never been credited with extraordinary intelligence “cleaned up” three million francs during the last year of the war by the following simple little scheme. France decreed that the freight rate between Martinique and French ports should be three hundred francs a ton. The ships secretly refused space at that price. The “high yellow” individual entered into a private agreement with the steamship companies to pay the price asked, 1200 francs a ton. While his competitors were complaining that they could not ship, this man’s rum was being carried to Europe, where it was sold at a high price, but not one at which, his rivals pointed out to one another, he could make any profit at such exorbitant freight rates. The man persisted, however, paying for each shipment by check as soon as it was landed. With the last barrels he, too, went to France. There he wrote a polite note to the steamship company, requesting that he be refunded the nine hundred francs a ton he had paid over the legal rate. The company laughed loudly at his colonial naïveté. He put his check stubs in the hands of a lawyer, and, to cut short the story, the company suddenly recognized the bitter truth in the assertion that he who laughs last shows superior mirth.

I halted that night in Lorrain, on the edge of a small bay with precipitous shores into which the Atlantic threshed constantly, and next morning caught the lumbering _auto de poste_, having had the foresight to reserve a _place_ in it some days earlier. Even though we clung to the coast, the road climbed continuously over the buttresses of the central mountain chain, for these smaller West Indian islands have virtually no real flat lands. From the tops of the higher ridges we could plainly make out Dominica on the horizon behind us. Some of the hillsides were built up in terraced gardens, though without stone facings, in which grew among other favorite native vegetables, _gname_, as Martinique calls the _malanga_ of Cuba or the _poi_ or _taro_ of the South Seas. The chauffeur had small respect for any possible nerves among the passengers, and tore about the constant curves and incessant ups and downs of the ridge-braced coast as if speed were far more essential than ultimate arrival. The coast-line, ragged as a shattered panel, with pretty, old-as-France towns nestled in each scolloped bay, presented many a beautiful vista. Here and there we crossed a little cane railroad, some of the fields that fed them so precipitous that the bundles of cane were shot down across the ravines on wire trolleys. At Trinité, with its long peninsula stretching far out into the Atlantic, we turned inland and climbed quickly into the hills. Here there were a few Chinese and Hindu features, but the overwhelming majority were negroes, though full-blooded Africans were almost rare. The Frenchman is inclined to overlook the matter of color in his attachments, with the result that mulattoes are much more numerous in the French than in the British islands. There is a great difference, too, in what might be called public discipline. To cite one of many examples: one of our fellow-passengers crowded into the coach with an immense plate-glass mirror without a frame. A mishap at any of the sharp turns or steep descents might easily have shattered it and seriously injured the score of persons huddled within the vehicle. But though the one white traveler besides myself kept repeating during all the rest of the journey, “_Mais c’est_ excessivement _dangereux_,” the mirror remained. In the British islands the mere attempt to enter a public vehicle with such an object would probably have resulted in a solemn case in a magistrate’s court that same morning. Near Gros Morne were several hills completely covered with pineapples, the cultivators climbing along the rows as up and down a ladder. Then suddenly we came out high above the great bay of Fort de France, the square chimneys of a dozen rum _usines_ dotting the almost flat lands about it, and descended quickly through ever more populous villages to the capital.

* * * * *

I returned to St. Pierre one morning for a walk through the heart of the island. An excellent road in rather bad repair unites the ruined city and the capital, a distance of twenty-five miles. It climbs quickly into beautiful, cool, green mountains. When one says mountains in the West Indies the word must be taken with a rather diminutive meaning, for though they are real mountains in formation, and sometimes in massiveness, the greater part of them is under water. Old sugar estates dating from the high-priced Napoleonic days, with half perpendicular cane-fields, surrounded the first few steep kilometers. Then the ascent grew more leisurely, though it mounted steadily for some three hours up the valley of the Carbet. If one was to believe the French guidebook in my pocket, I was engaged in a perilous undertaking.

“One must remember,” it warned, “that Martinique is a tropical country, and the act of exposing oneself to climbing a slope on foot or of blowing up a bicycle tire, even in the shade”—the paragraph was addressed to cyclists, for the writer would never have suspected a visitor to Martinique of deliberately turning pedestrian—“is dangerous. A tropical helmet,” he asserted on another page, “and a flannel stomach-band are indispensable.” How I have succeeded in covering many thousand miles of the tropics on foot without harnessing myself up in those indispensable contrivances is, no doubt, a mystery. As a matter of fact, the chatter of sedentary imaginations aside, tramping is no more risky in the West Indies than in the midsummer Catskills.

During the first few miles I met many fierce-looking mulattoes in flaring piratical mustaches and kinky Napoleon III beards, carrying in their hands big, sharp-pointed cane-knives, but every passer-by bade me a soft, kindly, respectful “Bon jour, monsieur”; they had not even the hypocritical obsequiousness or the occasional insolence of the British negro. Beyond Fond St. Denis the way descended somewhat along another beautiful valley, its slopes densely wooded, a small river boiling over the rocks at its bottom. The _Pitons du Carbet_ bulked majestically into the sky overhead; a lower peak between them was completely covered with tree-ferns. Then the highway began to mount again, disclosing magnificent new panoramas at every turn. It was a soft-footed road, and in these higher reaches almost entirely untraveled. The rich center of the island was surprisingly uninhabited. The unfailing trade-wind swept down through the mountain passes to the left; hurrying clouds broke the fury of the tropical sun; there was splendid drinking water everywhere, usually carried out to the edge of the road in bamboo troughs stuck into the sheer mountain-side. The climb ended at two huts and a shrine, dignified with the name of Deux Choux, whence another highway descended to Robert, on the Atlantic. My own paused for a marvelous view back down the dense green valley to cloud-capped Pélée and a broad stretch of the Caribbean beyond St. Pierre, then came out on a tiny meadow with grazing cattle, a lonely little hut, and a temperate climate. A wonderfully symmetrical green peak stood directly overhead, with another, its summit lost in the clouds, breaking the horizon beyond. Martinique, one was forced to admit, was as beautiful in its small way as Porto Rico, even though it lacks the red-leafed _bucaré_, the color-splashes of orange-trees, and the snow-like tobacco-fields. A deep stillness reigned, emphasized rather than broken by the murmur of some distant little stream, the creaking of an insect far off in the wilderness, now and then a gust of wind which set the ferns and the bamboo plumes to whispering together. Once I thought I heard a groan, but it proved to be only the native _boute_ I was smoking, struggling for air. Little wooden shrines were here and there set into the mountain walls, the garments of the dolls they inclosed tattered and weather-rotted.

Some eight miles from the capital a gap in the hills gave a wide-spreading view of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and all the southern half of Martinique, tumbled, mottled by sunshine and cloud shadows, more brown than this central region, the three little islands that mark the birthplace of a French empress dotting the dense-blue bay. Houses and people began to appear again, happy-go-lucky little huts, though with far more pride in their appearance than those of Haiti; then came the “summer villas” of the wealthier citizens of Fort de France, until the road became one long suburb. A branch to the right descended to the hot baths of Absalon; farther on another pitched downward to those of Didier, both at the bottom of an immense cleft in the hills, and an hour later I was plodding through the hot, dusty, crowded streets of gaily-turbaned Fort de France.

* * * * *

The people of the French Antilles have many of the characteristics of the continental Frenchman. His faults and his virtues are theirs, the former magnified, the latter shrunken, as is the way with the negro. In outward demeanor they have little in common with the British West Indian, still less perhaps with our own blacks. They are much less given to outbursts of insolence and are more courteous. But, like the Frenchman, they are impulsive and individualistic, hence one cannot generalize too broadly. I have met some of the most genuinely courteous persons in “French America,” mulattoes, _capres_, and even full negroes, with the outward evidences of a culture superior to that of any but our best class; I have met others who made me temporarily a firm believer in the righteousness of Judge Lynch. The former were decidedly in the majority; there were many who were rather over polite. But, like that of the French, their politeness is individual, never collective. After being treated with incredible courtesy by the few with whom one has come into personal contact, one is astounded to find the crowds almost brutal. The country people are, of course, more courteous than the corresponding classes in the capital; the women are, on the whole, less so than the men, another direct legacy from the French. The islanders have, too, something of that French custom of not showing surprise at strange sights or personal idiosyncrasies, that same quality that makes it so easy to live in Paris. A white man on foot, for instance, rarely seems to attract even a passing attention; in the British islands he is the constant butt of inquiry, comment, and crude attempts at ridicule, though he is an equally unusual sight in either group of islands. All these things are visibly the result of environment and the negro’s monkey-like faculty for imitation. From the _capre_ up he takes on certain other qualities from his white parents, though they seldom equal the original. The one pleasant trait native to the negro—his gaiety and lack of gloom—is tempered in the French islands by a sort of Latin pensiveness, while his sense of personal dignity is distinctly higher than that among the former British slaves.

His superiority to the Haitian is ample proof of the advantage of having the negro ruled over by whites, even though that rule be faulty, instead of letting him run wild. He has more sense of responsibility, more industry, and a civic spirit which the Haitian has almost completely lost. All this tends to make him comparatively law-abiding. There are few country police in the French islands, and they are not numerous in the towns, yet the stranger may wander at will and rarely meet even with annoyance. Barrels of rum are left unguarded for weeks in the streets or on the wharves of Guadeloupe or Martinique, and the case is almost unknown of their being broached or in any way molested. Even our own land scarcely aspires to that high standard. White women may go freely anywhere with far less likelihood of meeting with disrespect than in many Caucasian lands.

The French negro’s superiority of deportment is partly due, no doubt, to the higher sense of equality he enjoys under the tricolor. The color line exists, but it is less direct, less tangible, more hidden than with us. When the white inhabitants speak of it at all it is apt to be in whispers. “Creoles” shake hands with, and show all the outward signs of friendship to their colored neighbors; bi-colored functions, business partnerships between the two races are common, yet the whites avoid social mixture as far as they dare. I say “dare” because that is exactly the word which seems to fit the case. The French appear to have a certain fear of their negroes, if not actual physical fear, at least a disinclination to show them discourtesy by referring to the matter of color. In fact, the colored population may be said to have the upper hand. The laws of the islands are made in France, but each of them sends a senator and two deputies to Paris, and equal suffrage gives the whites small chance of winning these offices; they have still less of being elected to municipal and colonial councils.

“It was a great mistake to give the negroes the vote,” more than one white islander assured me, in an undertone, “for it leaves us whites swamped beneath them. With negroes voting, justice goes almost invariably to the man who is a friend of the _député_, and the latter is never white.”

“Our colored population should be handled with a firm hand,” said a white colonial from the island of St. Martin, “but of course you cannot expect the French to do that.”

Fortunately for the whites, there is a considerable amount of friction between the negroes and the “_gens de couleur_,” and the blacks are often more friendly to the Caucasian element than to those partly of their own race.

Even the “creole” of the islands under French rule is more orderly than that of Haiti. A knowledge of French is sufficient to carry on conversation with all classes, though the language of the masses falls far short of Parisian perfection. Curious local expressions are numerous. “_Li_” means either _il y a_ or _il est_; the banana we know is a “_gro’ femme_” the tiny ones which seldom reach our markets are “_figues naines_”—literally “dwarf figs.” “Who” becomes “_Qui monde_” an improvement at least over the “_Qui monde ça_” of Haiti. Innumerable localisms of this kind, added to a slovenly pronunciation, make the popular tongue difficult for the stranger, but at least he is not called upon to guess the meaning of scores of terms from the African dialects such as pepper the Haitian jargon.

Though French money is current, Guadeloupe and Martinique issue notes of their own of from five francs upward. As these look exactly alike, except for the name of the island printed upon them, yet are not mutually accepted, the inexperienced traveler is sometimes put to considerable annoyance. Nominally, prices are now almost as high as in the United States, but the present low rate of exchange makes living agreeably low for the foreigner. “Telegrams” turned in at a post-office are telephoned to any part of the island in which they originate, with un-Latin despatch, at the slight cost of fifty centimes (four cents at the present exchange) for twenty words. There is no cable service, however, between the two islands, which have less intercourse with each other than with the mother country.

Schools are closely centralized, as in France, and not particularly numerous or effective, though there is less illiteracy than the census of the French islanders who helped to dig the Panama Canal seemed to indicate. Among the surprises in store for the visitor is the profound patriotism of almost all classes. Twenty thousand Martiniquais went to France as conscripts, while the British West Indies sent only volunteers, yet only one British island can in any way compare with their French neighbors in loyalty to the homeland. Thus is France rewarded for the comparative equality which she grants her subjects, irrespective of color. While the British segregated their West Indian troops into the separate regiments, with white officers over them and only the non-commissioned ranks open to soldiers of color, France mixed hers in with the poilus, and gave them equal chances of promotion. More than one black French colonel held important posts during the war. Incidentally, by this intermingling she got considerable fight out of her black troops, which can scarcely be said of the “B. W. I.” regiments. This policy, carried out with what to us would be too thorough an indifference to the racial problem, has at least given her “American” subjects a great loyalty and love for France.

The nearest approach to a railroad station in Martinique is a street beside the post-office in the capital. There, at half-past two each afternoon, three _autos de poste_ set out for as many extremities of the island. A throng of would-be travelers, several times larger than the snorting old busses can accommodate, forms a whirlpool of gay calicos, multifarious bundles, and sputtering _patois_, in which a lone white man seems strangely out of place. The distribution of tickets is somewhat disorderly, as one might expect, and when the vehicles chug away with their full, cramped quota, they are followed by angry shrieks and gestures from the disappointed. The wealthy few of these hurry out to the edge of the _savane_ to bargain for private cars, while the majority trudge homeward, hoping that the morrow will bring better luck, or wrathfully set out on foot for their destinations.

I won a place one afternoon in the bus for Ste. Anne, thirty-five miles away on the southern point of the island. The region proved more rolling, less broken by abrupt hills, than the central portion. Old kettles scattered here and there, the ruins of a few windmill-towers and ivy-grown brick chimneys showed that Martinique, too, had gone through a certain process of centralization in her principal industry. The sense of smell demonstrated that the larger and rarer _usines_ we passed gave their attention rather to rum than to sugar. Beyond Petit Bourg the plains bordering Fort de France Bay gave way to a wilder landscape, with a rich red soil and many by no means perfect roads in every direction. The turban-coiffed women and barefoot countrymen tramping them had no such fear of the automobile as their Haitian cousins, but yielded the road to it with a sort of lofty disdain. Everywhere men and women were working side by side in the cane-fields, which filled each suggestion of valley and covered the lower slopes about it. The appearance of the soil and the short joints of the canes suggested that this southern region needed irrigation. Farther on came several precipices and immense ravines, the mountains sprinkled far and wide with huts and little cultivated fields which the irregularity of the ground gave every conceivable shape. Many of the mountaineers, according to a fellow-passenger, own their farms, those far back in the hills being mainly engaged in the cultivation of cacao. We passed half a dozen populous towns on the way, that of Rivière Pilote in a setting of enormous black boulders which carried the mind back to Namur in Belgium. A thorny, half-arid vegetation stretched from there all the way to the petrified forest and salt ponds on the southernmost point of the island.

Ste. Anne is a thatch-roofed little village of perhaps a hundred inhabitants, yet these included at least four _grands blessés_, cripples from the far off battle-line in France. One blind youth, whose _poilu_ cap looked pale above his ebony face, sat playing a broken violin behind the little hut in which he was born. Yet he would gladly go again, he asserted, if “our dear France” needed him. Another wore the khaki overseas cap marked “321 U. S.” he had picked up on the battlefield the day he lost his leg. The policeman who gave me a shake-down in the hut from which he ruled the community insisted on showing me all six of the scars which decorated his black body, while his female companion displayed the fragments of shrapnel that had inflicted them, precious relics which she kept in a broken pitcher. He was still fighting the war over again when I fell asleep. Simple-hearted, obliging negroes, the citizens of Ste. Anne evidently saw a white man so seldom that they were scarcely aware of the existence of the troublesome “color line.”

On my return, I dropped off at Petit Bourg and walked out to the village of Trois Islets. A mile beyond it, back in a pretty little hollow in the hills, are the ruins of the overseer’s house in which Josephine, once Empress of the French, was born. The walls of the stone building where her parents lived until a hurricane destroyed it just before her birth, can still be traced; the kitchen behind it serves to this day the mulatto family that has built a smaller dwelling on the same site. Farther back in the valley, half hidden by tropical brush and clumps of bamboo, are the roofless remains of her father’s sugar-mill—or, more likely, rum plant—where she lived until the age of fifteen. Its square brick chimney still peers above the encroaching vegetation. A long line of women were hoeing the cane on a steep hillside across the brook, their multicolored garments standing out against the Nile-green background, snatches of the falsetto song with which they cheer one another on at their labors drifting by on the trade wind—just such a scene, perhaps, as Josephine herself had known so well in her girlhood.

Marie Joséphine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was first married to the Vicomte de Beauharnais, son of a governor of Martinique. Her mother lies buried in the parish church of Trois Islets, on a little knoll overlooking the three tiny islands which give the place its name. A stone set into the interior wall of the modest plaster and red-tiled building informs all who care to read:

Ci Git L’Auguste Madame Rose Claire Duverger de Sanois Veuve de Messire J. G. Tascher de LA PAGERIE Mère de SA MAJESTÈ L’IMPERATRICE des FRANÇAIS Décédée le 2 Juin 1807 a l’age de 71 ans Munie des sacrements de L’EGLISE

But neither the old municipal secretary who takes it upon himself to have a lunch prepared in the municipal building for all “distinguished visitors”—thereby adding generously to his stipend—nor the dwarfish priest in his garden-framed residence behind the church was interested in Napoleonic history. Their problems were more modern.

“How can a man live,” they condoled with each other, while I studied the decorations of the priestly parlor, “with rum advanced from fifty centimes to _six francs_ a liter?”

Women carrying sewer-pipes and bricks on their heads had loaded the “canoe” which carries the mails daily from Trois Islets to the capital across the bay until its gunwales were barely visible above the water. When a dozen negro passengers and sailors had added their weight to this imminent possibility of disaster, we were rowed out beyond the islets, where the captain of the trusting contrivance stood for some time at the bow blowing on a conch-shell for the wind that at length saw fit to waft us safely across to Fort de France.