CHAPTER XX

ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN

The Dutch possessions in the West Indies consist of six islands in two widely separated groups. Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba lie just off the coast of Venezuela; Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin are scattered among the British islands hundreds of miles to the north. A colonial government for all of them sits in Willemsted, chief and only city of Curaçao, and spreads its feelers of red tape to each small dependency and back to the Netherlands. Fifty-seven thousand people live in the four hundred square miles of these little dots on the blue sea, but there is a sharp line of demarkation between the two groups, Dutch though they both are in nationality. The inhabitants of the southern islands are mainly Venezuelan in origin and Roman Catholic in faith; they speak a manufactured language called Papiamento, without syntax or grammar, and made up of Spanish, Dutch, English, and African words, an unintelligible jargon with a teasing way of now and then throwing in a recognizable word or phrase. Those of the northern group are English-speaking and overwhelmingly Protestant. Of them all Curaçao is by far the most important, and the oldest of Holland’s present colonies. But the mother country rates her scattered islands in the Caribbean of slight importance in comparison with her newer and far larger possessions in the East, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo; while even Surinam on the coast of Brazil, with its extensive river system, its gold, and its fertile soil, means more to the Dutchman than all the rest of his colonies in the New World.

We sailed for Curaçao late in April. The Caribbean was glaringly blue under the brilliant sun, the trade-wind persistently astern. On the way we passed not only Bonaire and Aruba, dismal-looking mounds of earth partly covered with half-hearted vegetation, with Margarita, jagged-topped and sand-bordered, surrounded by a strip of light turquoise water which seemed to add attraction to its name and typify its tropicality, and Tortuga, low and featureless, melting into the distant horizon. These last two belong to Venezuela, the fifth and last of the nations with possessions in the Caribbean. Early next morning we were awakened by the blowing of the steamer’s siren as a signal to Curaçao to open the pontoon bridge across its narrow entrance, and, gliding into the bluest of lagoons, wound a mile or more up into the country before turning around and returning to the dock. As in Barbados, one was struck by the brilliancy of the atmosphere, the lack of restful shade. What trees there were looked dry and scraggly, the country-side was everywhere dead brown, arid, and bare, except for great clumps of organ cactus. A road or two wandered away over the little hills, only one of which could be called so much as a peak, a telegraph line of several wires following the best of them, though there is no other town than the capital on the island. One wondered why this barren reef is so thickly peopled, or inhabited at all, how even the few goats in sight find sustenance. Here and there were a few windmills, behaving with strict Dutch propriety for all the brisk trade-wind. These, and the irrigation they supply, accounted for the few tiny oases one could make out in the dreary landscape. Yet the island is unusually healthful; with ten days’ rain a year few microbes can live, and the constant breeze relieves in a measure the heat of the equatorial sun.

Ships tie up to the docks in Willemsted, which is more often known by the name of the island itself, yet such is the formation of these that one must take a punt ashore, or save ten Dutch cents by swinging down the rope ladder. Negroes were languidly sculling about the densely blue harbor, using the Dutch canal-boat style of a single heavy oar over the stern of the boat, and swaying their bodies as slowly back and forth as if their vocabularies did not include the word for haste. The town crowds eagerly about the harbor entrance, looking almost miniature from the deck of the towering British freighter. The houses, distinctly Dutch in architecture despite their patently tropical aspect, are well built, rarely of wood, most of them being faced with cement or plaster, all brightly colored, with red or reddish-brown tile roofs, and cornices of contrasting shades, causing them to stand out across the indigo lagoon like the figures on stained glass windows. Now and again the bridge connecting the two halves of the town broke in twain and left a motley throng gathered at each of its entrances. When it was joined together again the procession across it formed a veritable chain of human beings. The one thing that can induce the people of Curaçao to hurry is the signal for the opening of its bridge. Then from both directions comes the scurrying of mainly bare feet, jet-black women with great baskets on their heads dart in and out among those racing from the opposite shore, automobiles honk their way even faster, scattering the pedestrians in two furrows on each side, despite the warning placard in Dutch and Papiamento to “Zeer Langsam Ryden” or “Kore Poko Poko.” One may, to be sure, take a punt across, but that costs ten cents, whereas the bridge fare is one cent if barefoot, two if shod, all of course in Dutch currency, and the whistle of an arriving or departing steamer is sure to cause a portion of the population momentarily to throw off its lethargy.

The people of Curaçao are less annoying than the majority of those in the smaller islands of the Caribbean. It may be the proverbial Dutch thrift which keeps the town cleaner and more orderly. The children do not beg, the adults appear occupied with their own affairs, and though the population is overwhelmingly negro, the impudence frequently met with elsewhere is not much in evidence. They are amusingly stolid negroes, with staid Dutch airs, as solemn the week round as their British brethren on the Sabbath, without a suggestion of the chic air of the French islanders. Unshaved Hollanders, with faces like yellow old parchment, wearing the heavy uniforms of their homeland and carrying short swords, mingle with the black throng, but are rarely called upon to exercise their authority. Dutch high officials, in more resplendent uniforms, dash by in fine automobiles as if bent on running down the people they have been sent to govern.

Curaçao is a free port, though this does not tend to lower its prices, and trade is its chief, almost its only, _raison d’être_. The clerks in the stores glibly quote American prices to American travelers, but they are soon out of their depth in English. Many of them can converse fluently in Spanish, but the rank and file knows nothing but Papiamento, and is astoundingly voluble in that. Or it may be that the chattering sounded more noisy because it was unintelligible, for though any one knowing Spanish can catch the drift of a conversation in the native jargon, it is quite another matter to understand it. The men coaling ship were constantly singsonging it, but little more than the rhythm was comprehensible, though now and then a familiar word burst out clearly, like the face of a friend in a strange crowd. Old women seated in their doorways or on the ground in a patch of shade, weaving coarse hats from the bundles of Venezuelan “straw” which small boys brought them on their heads, chattered ceaselessly in Papiamento even in the hottest hours of the day. Stolid Dutchmen spoke it with accustomed ease. There were few signs in the dialect, for it is rather a spoken than a written language, though there is one tiny weekly printed in Papiamento, and two or three books in it may be had in the shops. The names over the latter are mainly Spanish and Dutch, occasionally French or English; street names are in Dutch. The daily newspaper is in Spanish, with some of its notices and advertisements in Dutch or English. The official bulletin is of course in the official language, as are the placards in government offices. Why a few signs about town are also in Papiamento is a mystery, for the educated natives all read Dutch, and the others rarely read anything at all.

There are only ten cities in the West Indies which have tramways, and of them all that of Curaçao is the most amusing. For it is single and alone, a crude little car with an automobile engine, which makes the horseshoe-shaped journey around the bay and back every half hour. Even in the suburbs the houses are tile-roofed and plaster-faced, gay and cleanly without, though with the same newspapered interiors of most negro shacks in the West Indies. The streets of the town, following the contours of the bay, are seldom straight, and the vista down any of them gives curiously mixed reminiscences of Holland and at the same time of tropical cities.

We took the unescapable Ford out past the bulking, cream-colored Catholic church, with its glaring whitewashed cemetery of cement tombs decorated with tin flowers rattling in the breeze and a few withered plants, to an ostrich farm in the interior. A hundred or more of the mammoth birds, if one count the gray, disheveled chicks, live in pairs or groups in bare corrals walled with woven reeds, and furnish their Teutonic owner a steady and appreciable income. A dozen American windmills clustered together in a little hollow irrigate space enough to grow the alfalfa and other green stuff needed for their nourishment. Yet even this strange industry looks out of place in so arid a land, and as one scurries over the tolerable roads which cover the island, past occasional makeshift shanties, jolting mule-carts, and an endless vista of bare, parched ground scattered with repulsive forms of thorny vegetation, the wonder comes again that this desert-faced coral reef should have succeeded in attracting human inhabitants.

* * * * *

Of the unimportant islets, keys, and rocks which we did not visit for lack of time, transportation, or inclination, we passed by with most regret the three Dutch islands of the north, for, this being a strictly West Indian journey, we did not pretend to touch that collection of countless small and smaller bits of land, all British, known as the Bahamas. Saba we saw, clear cut against the sunrise, as we steamed lazily on into St. Kitts. It is only a mountain-top, towering three thousand feet above the Caribbean, and extending who knows how far below its surface, for the water is very deep all about this tiny patch of five square miles. Cone-shaped, of volcanic formation, it rises abruptly from the sea to the clouds, and, one thousand feet up, in what must once have been a crater, is the only town, aptly named “The Bottom.” Here live some fifteen hundred inhabitants; another five hundred are scattered about in tiny hamlets called “districts.” The people are mainly white, descendants of Dutch settlers, though English is the prevailing language. Some legends have it that the Sabans are really English, descended from the Devonshire exiles of the Monmouth Rebellion, but with the mixture that has gone on for many generations it is difficult to confirm this tradition. There is no real harbor; indeed, no sign of “The Bottom” and its people can be seen except from the eastern side. There the “Ladder” of eight hundred steps leads from the difficult landing to the town. Almost every one lives high up on the cone, raising Irish potatoes, onions, and other northern vegetables in the coolness of the heights. One fantastic tale has it that supplies from the outer world and the inhabitants returning with them are hauled up the slope in baskets attached to a cable anchored in the town; the unromantic truth is that the former are carried up on the heads of the latter, or on the little horses which are equally skilful in climbing the rock-cut “Ladder.” Strangely enough, Saba is famed for the boats it builds, which are constructed not at the water’s edge, but in “The Bottom.” If he is set on remaining in Dutch territory, there could be no finer place in which to house the war lord of the twentieth century than the island of Saba.

* * * * *

St. Eustatius, or “’Statia,” as it is familiarly called, is another single mountain near St. Kitts, an extinct volcano with its top cut off and rising from the sea in magnificent white cliffs. Six other islands and all the eight square miles of ’Statia can be seen from its summit. Its anchorage is safe, and a steep path cut in the face of the cliff leads to Orangested, the capital, its old fort now used as court house, post-office, and prison, and the Dutch Reformed church rising above its ancient vaults. Once upon a time ’Statia was a rich and coveted prize, and many nations strove for possession of the “Golden Rock.” First colonized by the Dutch, it was successively seized by the English, the French, then went on round the circle again, finally reverting to Holland. To-day its glory is faded and gone, and with its deterioration its allegiance has become a bit unsteady. Emigration to the United States is unceasing, that to Holland is slight. The proportion of whites is small, though the local government is well organized under a governor-general from Holland. Several large dilapidated graveyards testify to its one-time grandeur and activity, that of the Jews being long unused, if any other proof of ’Statia’s decline were needed. The limited rains and consequent lack of water are largely to blame for its rapid depopulation. The ’Statians drink rain-water, gathered from the roofs and gutters and hoarded in cisterns, their animals the salty stuff from wells. A few vegetables, more tropical than those of Saba, are grown: yams, cassava, arrow-root, sweet-potatoes, also a bit of sisal and sea-island cotton. Once St. Eustatius was a port of call for South American whalers, but even that glory is gradually being wrested from it.

* * * * *

The island of St. Martin is only forty square miles in extent, yet it has been a colony of two great European nations since 1648. The French and Dutch are reported to have landed simultaneously. Said they, “Let’s not fight in such a climate over such a bagatelle; we’ll let two men start together and walk around the island, and from here to where they meet shall be the boundary.” But the Frenchman was tall and the Dutchman short, so the latter demanded the right to choose the direction. This granted, he set out to the south, where the ground was level and fertile. Possibly he stopped now and then for a drink with the Indians. At any rate, the Frenchman won two thirds of the island. A treaty was signed, and the larger portion of the island long flourished under a private company, which eventually gave it to the French crown. It was several times taken by the English, who, if unable to retain possession, at least left it their language. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues again won it for France and divided it along a rugged range of hills, giving Holland the southern third once more, and annexing the French part to the island of Guadeloupe. The terms of the original treaty remain in force to this day, and the two communities carry on their tiny share of the world’s affairs and their common salt industry in perfect amity, despite their two faiths, two sets of laws, and two official languages.

* * * * *

Rather because it has long been an habitual pastime than in the hope of seeing the quest greatly rewarded, I kept a constant lookout for native literature during our journey through the West Indies. Four sections in the Biblioteca Nacional of Havana are devoted to Cuban writers, totaling perhaps five hundred volumes. With the exception of about a score of these, however, the collection is made up of ponderous tomes of what might be called history were they not filled with long-winded political squabbles completely devoid of interest to the general reader, and of slender volumes of the lyric poetry which pours forth in a constant stream in all Latin-American communities. The latter, unfortunately, with their inevitable verses on the Niagara Falls, the details of feminine charms, and the horrors of unrequited love, are much more noted for their mellifluous flow of language than for original thought or imagery. Of the twenty left, possibly five would hold the interest of American readers beyond the first few pages. As “every one” writes poetry, no matter what his more useful occupation, there is comparatively little work done in imaginative prose. Nor is there any great demand for such works; the majority of Cubans never open a book, and those who do are apt to turn to translations of the trashier French novels. For, like all Latin-America, the island takes its intellectual cue from France; the “Collection of American Authors” in the Cuban library contains the name of no man born north of the Rio Grande. The natives themselves vote “Cecilia Valdés” their best work of fiction, though many years have passed since its writing. To-day three or four residents of the island are producing occasional volumes of the usual Spanish-American type of novel, over-florid in description, heavy with details, and intimate beyond the point of decency according to our standards, yet with a nicety of style seldom attained by our own present-day novelists and now and then catching a true reflection of a tropical landscape or a native idiosyncrasy. Nothing that Cuba has produced, however, stands out in full world’s stature, such as “Maria” in Colombia or “Innocencia” in Brazil.

In Haiti little or nothing of an original nature has been written. We found one small volume in the native jargon, its name, “Cric-Crac,” quite aptly describing its contents. In Santo Domingo there are literary aspirations similar to those of Cuba, and as constant, if less voluminous, a flow of “poetry.” But while several so-called novels have been, and still are, produced, they are worth reading only because of their scattered pages of often unintentional local color. Porto Rico is a disappointment in a literary way, as in some others. Though the island teems to-day, as it has for centuries, with rich material ready for the picking by the writer of fiction, we found nothing unquestionably indigenous of an imaginative character except a collection of “Cuentos Populares” and the inevitable, almost maudlin, verses of scattered parentage natural to all Spanish-American communities.

A very readable little book called “Phases of Barbadian Life,” written, however, by a native of British Guiana, and two pamphlet novels on Trinidad, were the total reward of our quest in the smaller English islands. One of the latter, “Rupert Gray,” by name, is worth perusal for the amusing side-lights it throws on the lucubrations of the African mind, by which it was conceived and brought into being. There is an added interest in reading these books, slight as is their literary merit, arising from the suspense in guessing whether the heroine is black, “colored,” or white, and the uncertainty as to the degree of sympathy which should accordingly be shown for her mishaps. In Jamaica a man who styles himself a “writer of novels” rather than a novelist has produced several modern tales in which the island life, traditions, and the character of the masses is portrayed with a facile touch in as readable a style of the King’s English as may be found anywhere. Of them all perhaps “Susan Proudleigh” and “Jane” are the most nearly excellent.

In a bit of a shop entitled “Au Bon Livre” in Martinique we picked up a small novel based on the disaster of St. Pierre, called “Coeurs Martiniquais,” a simply told, vivid little story. In the French islands we found also a book in the native patois entitled “Extraits des Bambous,” but to all outward appearances it was little more than a translation or an adaptation from La Fontaine’s fables. The French and British islands are much less given to perpetrating poetry than those in which the Spanish tongue is spoken, and show an equal disinclination to producing the heavy volumes on subjects too ponderous for the authors themselves which burden the dusty book-shelves of Ibero-American lands. On the whole, the West Indies are a virgin field for the literary artist who cares to turn his attention to them.

* * * * *

At various periods during the last hundred years “feelers” have been thrown out from one side or the other to sound the attitude toward the purchase of the British, French, and possibly the Dutch, West Indies by the United States. The more than attractive price which we squandered for the Virgin Islands, together with the recent suggestions of certain European statesmen that this would be an easy way for England and France to wipe out some of their crushing war debts, has revived the question, and we found it everywhere a topic of conversation in the smaller Antilles. That the mother countries themselves would consent to such a bargain, if the price corresponded to the one we recently paid for vastly less valuable possessions, is probable, despite the soothing platitudes of princes and ministers, to the general effect that “a mother does not sell her children.” What the islands themselves have to say on the subject is perhaps more to the point in these modern days of alleged “self-determination”; and they are backward in expressing themselves.

“In a way we should like to join America,” said a white resident of one of the first British islands we visited, “but we have not been entirely pleased with the way America has treated her new West Indian colonies. St. Thomas was too harshly handled; you should have broken them in gradually and left a good impression on the rest of us.” (All West Indians apparently labor under the impression that the United States is eager to add them to our population if only the mother countries and they themselves will consent.) “Then, too, we would never stand for prohibition. The negroes would burn every field of sugarcane on the islands if they were denied their rum. You would have to kill them all off. A man, even a woman, must have his liquor in the tropics. Three or four cocktails or whiskies a day take the place of the bracing cold of the North. Without it the nerves go bad. We are much more in touch with, I might even say we have more sympathy for, the United States than for England, but for those two reasons we might hesitate to advocate American ownership. Then, many of the blacks are against it because they feel that the United States has never treated the negro fairly.”

“We are doing no business except in the absolute necessities,” added another white colonial, a man with a string of twenty-six stores throughout the Lesser Antilles. “With so bad an exchange we can’t buy in the United States; England has never shipped us the goods we want at prices we can pay; we must wait until Germany gets back into the market. I am almost the only merchant in this island in favor of transferring our allegiance to America. The rest have a ridiculous sentimentality for England or are too conservative to know what is for their own good. Our prosperity would increase by leaps and bounds under the American flag. Look at the prosperity of Cuba and Porto Rico. The preferential tariff has increased their sugar output eight times over. Yet British Guiana alone could produce more sugar than Cuba under a government that would develop her resources.”

The other side of the case was most vehemently espoused by a mulatto journalist of Guadeloupe. His editorials accused the “materialistic Yankees” of “wishing to buy the rest of the world cheap,” and cited the drop in value of the franc and the pound sterling as proof of their nefarious projects; for it is a general impression in the West Indies that the rate of exchange is set by American capitalists quite at will. In private conversation he was more courteous, though none the less insistent.

“We are quite ready to admit,” he asserted, “that the United States would give us more material advancement in two years than France has in two centuries. We are friendly to Americans, grateful to them; America was the first to give after the Pélée disaster; we might even fight for America; but we feel a love for France as for a mother. We are French and we wish to remain French; we wish to keep our French liberty, which is liberty as we understand it. From our point of view the United States is the greatest autocracy in the world; it has no real republican form of government, no real freedom of the people. Take your white slave law and the prohibition amendment, for example; they are abhorrent to our idea of liberty. The idea of a great federal government chasing a pair of lovers because they happen to cross a state-line, or putting a free citizen in jail merely for selling a bottle of wine, a perfectly legitimate action in any part of the world since the dawn of history! _C’est fantastique._ The Americans violate our very conception of civil liberty. In Panama and Haiti they come into a house and break up household utensils, throw disinfectants about. We grant that our health might improve under such drastic sanitary measures, but the suffering to our pride would far more than offset that advantage. And above all,” he concluded, “under French rule we people of color have what America never has and never will give us, equality of opportunity and standing with the whites.”

These two views are typical of a hundred we heard on the subject, and form the boundaries of opinion among West Indians. Roughly speaking, the French islands and Barbados, possibly Trinidad, are decidedly against changing their allegiance, and the rest of the British West Indies looks rather favorably upon the idea. When a rumor came to Martinique soon after the armistice that France was contemplating such a move, frantic cables were sent to Paris, and mobs gathered before the American consulate. “Have we not fought and died for France, not to be thus treacherously abandoned?” demanded the enraged citizens. In Barbados the people froth at the mouth at the mere suggestion of losing their British standing. “Little England” has always been proud of her loyalty; when Charles I was beheaded, the island was so strongly royalist that it immediately declared allegiance to Charles II. Trinidad is farther away and has a prosperity of her own, which may be why the problem is not taken very seriously there. In the other British colonies it is largely an economic question, with no great amount of patriotism or sentiment entering into the matter. Scores of Jamaican negroes replied to the query of whether they had heard of the proposed change with, “Oh, we all wishin’ dat hard, sir.” Even Englishmen living in Jamaica expressed themselves as feeling it would be better for the island, much as they would regret it from a sentimental point of view. “The trouble with the English,” said a Jamaican of standing, “is that if they have a dollar, they put it in the bank and sit on it, whereas the American makes it get out and work for him. We are backward because England will not spend the money to develop our resources. The men who work for the big American companies here on the island get three or four times the salaries of those employed by British corporations.”

There are exceptions to the rule in both groups of islands. Thus the working classes are more apt to favor the proposed change than are business men or employers. They feel that the interests of their group are more generously considered under the Stars and Stripes. The poorer white people of the French Antilles are like-minded for another reason; they chafe under the overwhelming political power of the great colored mass of the population. Then there are further ramifications. Many working-men who would otherwise be decided advocates of the transfer stick at the American conception of the color-line. Strangely enough, prohibition is the hardest pill for many to contemplate swallowing, which perhaps is not so strange, after all, in countries where the making of rum is one of the chief industries.

That there would be certain advantages to the United States in acquiring possession of, or political control over, all the islands on our southeastern seaboard goes without saying. Politicians of “imperialistic” tendencies will in all probability explain them to us in detail from time to time as the years roll by. But there is little doubt that they are outweighed by the disadvantages, at least all those of a material nature. Sentimentally it would be pleasant to see our flag flying over all the Caribbean; it would be still more so to feel that no European nation has a foothold on the western hemisphere. That day is in all probability coming, though it is still perhaps far off. As a merely financial proposition, Holland, France, and even England could afford to pay us for taking their possessions in tropical America off their hands. But with the Virgin Islands as an example, we would be paying dearly long after we had parted with any acceptable price which would bring the European West Indies under our flag. Merely to raise them to the American standard in sanitation would be a colossal task, to say nothing of adding materially to our already troublesome “color question.” As some joker has put it, “We could well afford to buy all the West Indies on the basis of the price paid to Denmark, if the sellers would agree to remove all the population”; any other arrangement would probably prove a poor bargain.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. P. xi, corrected the page references of the illustrations but left them in the original order in the List of Illustrations. 2. P. 344, changed “thought there were evidences” to “though there were evidences”. 3. P. 320, changed “yams, okre” to “yams, okra”. 4. Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling. 5. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 6. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. 7. Superscripts are denoted by a caret before a single superscript character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}.

End of Project Gutenberg's Roaming Through the West Indies, by Harry A. Franck