CHAPTER VII

HITHER AND YON IN THE HAITIAN BUSH

Of many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in the company of gendarme officers, the first was to the _caco_-infested district of Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on an inspection trip there had a seat left after his assistant and a native gendarme had been accommodated. Among the four of us there were as many revolvers and three rifles, all ready for instant action. One can, of course, hire private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from the decided expense, a Haitian chauffeur under military orders is much to be preferred to one who is subject to his own whims; moreover, there is much more to be seen and heard in gendarme company, and, lastly, if one chances to “pop off” a _caco_, there is not even the trouble of explaining, for one’s companions will do that in their laconic report to headquarters.

There are few roads in the West Indies as crowded as that broad new highway across the plain which is a continuation of the wide main street of Port au Prince. By it all traffic from the north and west enters the capital. The overwhelming majority of travelers are market-women, most of them barefooted and afoot, but a large number are seated sidewise on their donkeys or small mules, balancing on their toes the slippers, which are never known to fall off under any provocation. Pedestrians carry their invariably heavy and cumbersome loads on their heads, the haughtier class in crude saddle-bags, and the sight of this river of jogging humanity, often completely filling the broad highway as far as it can be seen in the heat-hazy distance, is one of which we never tired as often as we rode out through it.

At the time of the outbreak against the French the population roughly was made up of thirty thousand whites, as many “people of color,” and four hundred and fifty thousand blacks. There has been, of course, no census since that time, but signs indicate that Haiti has now two and a half million inhabitants, for however unproductive the semi-savage hordes may be in other ways, they are diligent in the process of multiplication. White people are more rare to-day, even if one counts our forces of occupation, than before the revolt, the mixed race has not greatly increased, so that fully nine tenths of the population are full-blooded Africans. Close observers are convinced that, thanks mainly to the constant revolutions, there are three females to every male, and of the latter a considerable number are now roaming the hills of the interior as _cacos_. Furthermore, the men take little part in selling the country produce. The result is that the stream of humanity pouring into the capital is almost entirely made up of jet-black women and girls.

The throng was particularly dense on the morning of our journey to Las Cahobas, for it was Friday, and the great weekly market in Port au Prince begins at dawn on Saturday morning. An American once stationed himself at the typical negro arch of triumph, straddling the entrance from the Cul-de-Sac to the capital, and counted thirty thousand travelers in an hour, of whom all but about two hundred were market-women. They were somewhat less multitudinous during our stay in Haiti, for the Americans had recently set a maximum scale of prices for foodstuffs, and many of the women had gone on strike and refused to bring their produce to town. They had another grievance in the requirement to sell most things by weight. For generations they had sold only by the “pile,” consisting of three articles of such things as eggs, plantains, yams, and the like, or of tiny heaps in the case of grains and similar produce; few of them, moreover, could afford to buy scales, and they resented the right given purchasers to appeal to gendarmes stationed in the market-places for the verifying of weights. But only those who had seen it under still more crowded conditions would have realized that the highway was not thronged to its full density on this particular morning.

Through the main street, out past the only modern sugar-mill in Haiti, for miles across the plain, our constantly honking Ford plowed through this endless procession of black humanity, casting it aside in two turbulent furrows of donkeys, mules, women, and multifarious bundles. There is nothing more amusing, and pathetic, too, than the behavior of the primitive masses of Haiti before an automobile. This is scarcely to be wondered at in a country where any wheeled traffic except a very rare ox-cart crawling along on its creaking and wobbling wheels was unknown up to a few years ago, and where the half-dozen automobiles of Port au Prince could not make their way into the country until the Americans had begun the reconstruction of the roads. But it is proof, too, of the close relationship of the Haitians to their savage brethren in central Africa. Just like this, one can easily imagine, the latter would act at the sudden apparition of a strange machine which the great mass of Haitians firmly believe is run by voodoo spirits devoted to the white man.

The highway, like most of those the Americans have built, is of boulevard width, and there is ample room for even such a throng as this to pass an automobile in safety. But the primitive-minded natives are terror-stricken at sight of one bearing down upon them. The mounted women invariably tumble off their animals and fall to beating, pushing, and dragging them to the extreme edge of the road, at the same time shrieking as if the Grim Reaper had suddenly appeared before them with his sickle poised. The pedestrians succumb to a similar panic, so that the journey out the flat highway presents a constant vista of dismounting women and a turmoil of animals and frightened human beings tumbling over one another in their excited eagerness to get well out of reach of the swiftly approaching demon of destruction. Farther on, where the road begins to wind, and the cuts into the hills are often deep, the scene is still more laughter-provoking, for the startled animals invariably bury their noses in the sheer road-banks and will not, for all the cajolery or threats in the world, swing in sidewise along them. If they are donkeys, the women pick up their hind quarters and lift them out of the way by main force; when they are too large for this courageous treatment, the riders put a shoulder to the quivering rumps, abandon those useless tactics to drag at the halters as the machine draws nearer, and finally bury their faces also in the bank, as if to shut out the horrible experience of seeing their precious animals mutilated beyond recognition.

Still more distracting to drivers is the behavior of persons approached from the rear. A horn is of little use in this case. The Haitian’s hearing is acute enough, but his mind does not synchronize in its various faculties; he is aware of a disagreeable noise behind him, but that noise does not register as a warning of danger and a call for action. Then, when at last he realizes that it means something and is addressed to him, or when the bumper or fender touches his ragged coat-tail, he is electrified into record-breaking activity. Unfortunately, his psychology is that of the chicken, and in eight cases out of ten he darts across the road instead of withdrawing to the side of it. This happens even when he is far out of danger at the edge of a wide street or highway, and every automobile trip through the crowded parts of Haiti is a constant succession of interweaving pedestrians bent on getting to the opposite side of the road.

An American estate manager who drives a heavy car at a high rate of speed, yet who is noted for his freedom from accidents, was bowling alone one September afternoon far out in the country. The road was twenty-two feet wide, and he was driving to the right of it, without an animate object in sight except for one ragged countryman plodding along the extreme left in the same direction. Seeing no reason to do so, he did not blow his horn. Suddenly the pedestrian caught sight of the car out of the tail of an eye and darted across the road. The machine struck him squarely and knocked him, as was afterward proved by measurement, fifty-two feet, then ran completely over him. The driver hurried him back to a hospital, where it was found that the only injuries he had sustained were a few minor bruises and a gash on the head. This was treated, and a few days later he was discharged, and returned to his hut, where he died the next week of blood poisoning caused by the native healer whom he insisted on having redress his almost healed wound.

Though somewhat stony and grown with an ugly, thorny vegetation, the great Cul-de-Sac plain is noted for its fertility. Here the aborigines cultivated cotton and tobacco; at the time of French expulsion it had nearly seven thousand plantations, chiefly of sugar-cane, which was brought to Haiti from the Canary Islands early in the sixteenth century. The French had covered it with a thorough irrigation system, with a _grand bassin_ in the hills above and streams of water spreading from it like the fingers of the hand to all parts of the plain. There were numerous splendid highways between towns and estates, and the ninety thousand acres were dotted with fine residences, hundreds of sugar-mills, and many coffee, cotton, and indigo works. To-day the roads which our forces of occupation, or the two American companies that are beginning to reclaim some of the plain, have not found time to restore are rutty successions of mud-holes so narrowed by ever-encroaching vegetation as to resemble the trails of blackest Africa, or have disappeared entirely. There are a few rude bridges, usually patched upon the crumbling remains of once fine French structures, but as a rule streams are forded. Except where the newcomers have constructed new ones, the saying in Haiti is, “Never cross a bridge if you can go around it.” Many of the former estates are completely overgrown with brush and broken walls, trees rise from former courtyards, the remnants of once sumptuous halls are the haunts of bats, night birds, and lizards. In some of the less dilapidated ruins negro families now cluster; most of them live in shanties patched together of jungle rubbish, their only furnishings a sleeping-net and a German enamelware pot. Whatever else he lacks, the Haitian always has the latter, its holes stopped with corncobs until they become too large, when the pot is filled with earth, planted with flowers, and set up in a conspicuous position about the hovel. Everywhere are to be found reminders of the prosperous days when Haiti was France’s richest colony. Large, semispherical iron sugar-kettles, rusted, broken, and full of holes, lie tumbled everywhere along the highway and across the plain. Old French bells bearing pre-Napoleonic dates and quaint inscriptions, ruined stone aqueducts, mammoth grass-grown stairways, rust-eaten machinery, inexplicable stone ruins of all shapes and sizes, are stumbled upon wherever the visitor rambles.

The characteristic sour stench of a dirty little sugar- and rum-mill only rarely assails the nostrils. The natives have lost not only the energy, but almost the knowledge, required for the growing and making of sugar, producing only _rapadoue_, dark-brown lumps of crude, coagulated molasses, which, wrapped in leaves, are to be found in every Haitian market. The American companies found the people so ignorant of agricultural methods that it was impossible to introduce the _colono_ system. The men and women who work in the sugar- and cotton-fields of these new enterprises are as patched and ragged a crew as can be found on the earth’s surface. The average daily wage for adult male laborers in Haiti is a _gourde_, or twenty cents, a day, women and boys in proportion. The new companies have raised this to thirty cents. In theory the laborers are fed by their employers, but it would be considerable exaggeration to call the one gourdful of rice-and-bean hash which a disheveled, yet dictatorial, old negro woman was dishing out to each of a long line of gaunt and soil-stained workmen on one of the estates at which we stopped one evening the nourishment needed for a long day in the fields. Except for a sugar-cane, a lump of _rapadoue_, or possibly a bit of rice or plantain, which they find for themselves in the morning, this is the only food of the Haitian field laborer. So lazy have they become in their masterless condition that this one meal a day has come to be the habitual diet of the masses and all they expect of their employers; but the impression on both sides that this is all they need is probably costing the companies more in lack of efficient labor than they themselves realize. Only at one season during the year does the average Haitian get more than these slim pickings; that is in mango-time, and then the roads and trails are carpeted with the yellow pits.

Dusty, thorny, and hot, the Cul-de-Sac plain continued as level as the sea at its edge to where we began to climb the steep slope of wrinkled, rusty mountains shutting it off abruptly on the north and offering a panorama of rare beauty from Port au Prince, particularly when sunrise or sunset gives them a dozen swiftly changing colors. As we rose above it, the reedy edged first of two large lakes, one of which stretches on into the Republic of Santo Domingo, broke the red-brown carpet with a contrasting shimmer of blue at the eastern end, and the mountains behind the capital stood forth in silhouette against the transparent tropical sky. The aboriginal name “Haiti” means a high and mountainous land; like its inhabitants, its scenery and vegetation are more savage than those of Cuba. So steep was the new road climbing diagonally up the face of the range that we were twice compelled to dismount and call upon a gang of road laborers to push the machine over the next stony rise. The stream of market-women continued to pour down this in cascades. Many of the heavy black faces would have made splendid gargoyles. Almost all of the women wore gowns of blue denim; the year before, the driver said, they had all worn purple, but the style had changed only in color. Once we met a lone marine, and higher up paused at a camp where there were several of them. But they were not the spick-and-span “leather-necks” we know taking their shore leave along Broadway. They wore only the indispensable parts of their uniforms, on the faces of those old enough to produce it was a week’s growth of beard, and they clutched their rifles with the alert and ready air of expecting to use them at any moment, for we were now entering a region constantly harassed by _cacos_.

We grasped our own weapons and closely watched the brush-covered banks on each hand, as well as every approaching traveler. There are only two ways of telling a _caco_ from a harmless Haitian; if he is armed or if he runs. Then the orders are to fire, for the “good citizens” do not carry weapons and are very careful to move slowly and be prepared to flourish their _bon habitant_ card at sight of a white face or a gendarme uniform. Several times I fancied for an instant that we had been attacked, until I grew accustomed to the thump of stones with which the road was ever more thickly strewn striking the bottom of the car with reports startlingly like rifle-shots. From the crest of the first range we descended into the Artibonite Valley, remarkable for its colors. A constant series of rusty red humps, more beautiful at a distance, no doubt, than to a hungry marine climbing over them expecting at any moment to run into a _caco_ ambush, patches of scenery almost equal to the Alps in color, slender pines standing out against the red and tumbled background, here and there a clump of palm-trees to give contrast and a suggestion of peaceful tropical languor, spread before us farther than the eye could see.

As far as the marine-garrisoned town of Mirebalais the road was passable, though it had steadily deteriorated from the modern highway of the plain to a road made only by the feet of animals and men. It would have been an exceedingly optimistic stranger, however, who could ever have attempted to drive an automobile over the mountain trail that lay beyond, yet over which the doughty Ford climbed as if military orders forbade it to give up so long as it retained a gasp of life. Here and there we forded a considerable stream, meeting at one of them a group of marines driving pack-laden donkeys and cattle, in some cases astride the latter, more often splashing thigh-deep through the water, and with a score of produce-bearing natives plodding at their heels for protection. Farther on we passed an airplane camp, from which “God’s wicked angels,” as the natives call them, periodically bombard the retreats of the _cacos_. Rumor has it that these warriors of the air have not always made certain of the character of the gatherings they attack, and the _cacos_ once sent a protest to England against the Americans for using a means of warfare which the “Haitians fighting for their liberty” cannot combat or imitate.

The name of Las Cahobas, the old Spanish form of the word for mahogany-trees, is an indication of the fact that it was formerly within the territory of Santo Domingo. It is a miserable little town in which the palm-trunk huts that are the lowest form of dwelling in Cuba are considered residences _de luxe_. A whitewashed jail where the hundred or more black inmates, most simply dressed in two-piece suits of red-and-white striped cotton, seem only too glad to get their three meals a day, two of them with meat rations, was the chief sight of interest. Some of the gendarme guards had become so thoroughly Americanized under their marine officers that they “rolled their own,” closed their tobacco-sacks with their teeth, and returned them to hip-pockets exactly as required by our military manuals. It is remarkable what can be done with a backward race under proper guidance. The officers themselves, nearly all enlisted men in the organization from which they had been loaned, were, like most of those I met throughout the country, forceful, energetic, efficient chaps, many of whom spoke the native “creole” as if they had been born in the district. In the North we scarcely think of a corporal or sergeant of marines as standing particularly high in the social scale; in these Haitian villages they have almost the power of absolute monarchs, and are treated with corresponding respect by their native subjects. Even the village accounts are periodically brought to them to be audited. So accustomed do the Haitians become to obeying the commander of the district in which they live that it is difficult to get them to change their allegiance. A marine major who had long reigned in a certain region summoned all the native authorities to meet a newly arrived lieutenant colonel, explaining that the latter was thereafter the commander in chief; yet as long as the major remained, he never broke the natives of the habit of appealing to him first of all whenever any official matter turned up.

On the edge of Las Cahobas, as here and there along the road to it, was a Haitian cemetery. These are invariably bare and sun-scorched, the graves covered with vault-shaped structures ranging from heaped-up cobbles to almost elaborate stone and plaster mounds. Without crosses or any other indication of the Christian faith, they seem to be direct importations from the interior of Africa, and though one knows that the stones are piled there primarily to keep the energetic Haitian pigs from rooting up and feasting on the corpses, it is hard to think of them as anything but the African’s protection against the voodoo spirits which must be forcibly prevented from escaping out of bodies committed to the earth. The usual Haitian funeral is accompanied with strange rites destined to exorcise these same spirits, after which others of a totally different nature enliven the proceedings, for the corpse is generally carried on the heads of men who dance and sing in a drunken orgy all the way to the burial-ground.

Market-women were still straggling toward town when we returned. The view of the Cul-de-Sac plain toward sunset, carpeted with brown and green vegetation, speckled here and there with little houses, the lakes on the left and the ocean on the right reflecting the colors of the purple and lilac clouds which hung above the mountains, was as striking as any I had seen in many a day. Nearer the capital the road was still almost crowded, while here and there under the trees beside it the women, their big straw hats off now, but still wearing their brilliant bandanas, had camped for the night, and were cooking their humble dinners on fagot fires. Once we found a woman bareheaded, but this was because she was tearing her hair and shrieking in what seemed to be physical agony. As she caught sight of my uniformed companions, she rushed out upon them and reported that she had been robbed by _cacos_ of the produce she had expected to spread out in the big market-square before the cathedral by the dawn of Saturday. Such things happen even on the broad highway into Port au Prince, while more often still gendarmes are sent out along the road by some colonel or major whose wife has invited guests, with orders to buy the chickens and turkeys needed before they reach the close competition of the market. In either case the women are deeply disgruntled, for the mere selling is only half their pleasure in offering their wares.

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Of the other two highways out of Port au Prince one climbs into the hills to Pétionville, from which a trail leads to cool and refreshing Furcy, among its pine-trees, four thousand feet above the sea. A longer road is that to the southern peninsula. Leaving the capital at the opposite end of the main street from that to the Cul-de-Sac, it passes the “navy yard” and skirts the bay for miles beyond. It, too, is apt to be crowded with market-women, and with donkeys, women, and men carrying rock salt from Léogane. Half-way to that town there is a clearing in the dense woods famed as the scene of frequent voodoo rites, and for a long space the road is bordered by the scraggly tree-bushes of an abandoned castor-bean plantation from which our Government once hoped to produce oil for its airplanes. Léogane is a town of considerable size, the usual grass-grown square of which is faced by a quaint old church of what might almost be called Haitian architecture. Churches were the only buildings spared by the infuriated slaves in their revolt against the French, as the priests were the only white people who escaped attack, but neglect and the tropical climate have in most cases completed the work of destruction. The town and the region about it is one of the few places in Haiti where the malarial mosquito abounds. Here, too, are to be found many bush-grown ruins of French plantations. Far to the westward along the tongue of land forming the southern horn of Haiti, and to be reached only by horse or boat, is the town of Jérémie, near which the elder Dumas was born, the son of a French general and a negro slave.

The gendarme officer with whom I was traveling on this occasion, however, had come to inspect Jacmel, on the southern coast. At two and a half hours by Ford from the capital, the last part of it by a narrow dirt roadway winding through high hills, we changed to moth-eaten native horses and rode away down the River Gauche, which we forded one hundred and eighteen times during the next four hours. The black soil was fertile, and cultivated in scattered patches even to the tops of the hills. Coffee in uncared-for luxuriance often bordering the way showed what this region had been under the French. It was still well populated, for the people of the southern peninsula have never revolted, and _cacos_ are unknown, though there is much petty thieving. At every turn of the trail startled, respectful negroes raised their hats as we passed, only a few of them having the half-sullen air of their fellow-countrymen elsewhere at sight of Americans. Their little huts of thatch, or _tache_, as _yagua_ is called in Haiti, were everywhere tucked away in the bush, cattle and pigs were numerous, though all animals except the goats had a half-starved appearance. Bananas and oranges grew in profusion; the trail was strewn with the peelings of the native pear-shaped grape-fruit. Frequent patches of Kafir-corn, called _pitimi_, the “creole” abbreviation of _petit maïs_, waved their lofty heads of rice-like grain in the breeze. Immovable donkeys now and then blocked the trail, indifferent alike to the shrieks of their drivers and to the commanding voice of the native gendarme who accompanied us. Here and there washing parties of women were beating their rags on stones at the edge of the stream and spreading them out in the sun to bleach, their almost nude black bodies glistening in the sunshine and their tongues cackling incessantly until a glimpse of us reduced them to sudden silence. Several times we passed voodoo signs—a chicken with its entrails removed hanging by one leg from a pole, the white skull of a horse decorated with bits of red rag set on the top of a cactus-bush. Now and then we came across the most primitive form of cane-crusher except the human teeth. It consisted of a grooved stick driven through a tree or post, with a bit of sapling fastened at one end. While one negro held a sugar-cane, another rolled the sapling back and forth along it, the juice running down the groove into a gourd or pot. Wherever the breeze reached us the weather was agreeable; in the breathless pockets of the hills the humid heat hung about us like a hot wet blanket.

The marine-gendarme commander of Jacmel met us with an automobile farther out along the trail than one had ever been driven before, and the astounded natives fled shrieking before it as if the malignant spirits they fancied they could hear groaning under its hood were visibly pursuing them. In the town itself the people greeted their benevolent despot with just such antics as one might fancy their forefathers performed before their African chiefs. Jacmel, however, has a number of “citizens of color” of education and moderate wealth. The hills about it grow two crops of coffee a year, cotton and cacao alternate all the year round, veritable forests of cotton-trees cover the sites of old French plantations, and there is considerable shipping, though the bay is deep and dangerous. But its prosperity is mainly due, of course, to its lifelong freedom from _cacos_ and revolutions. It is a hilly town of six thousand inhabitants, with sharp lines of caste, more stone buildings than are usual in Haiti, a Protestant as well as a Catholic church, an imposing _hotel de ville_, with the familiar misstatement “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” on its façade, “summer” homes in its suburbs, and a tile-roofed market. Strangers but seldom disrupt the languid tenor of its ways, however, and not only is there no hotel, but not even a place to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, unless one accept the hospitality of marines or gendarme officers. Some years ago a foreign company erected an electric light plant, fitted up all Jacmel with elaborate poles or underground wires, operated for one night, collected their government subsidy and as much as possible from the citizens, and fled. To this day the town continues to worry along with such lights as might be found in an African village. In 1896 it was completely wiped out by fire, the land and sea breeze joining to pile the flames so high that the population was forced to flee to the hills, leaving all their possessions behind.

On our return to Port au Prince the road, particularly from Léogane in, was even more densely thronged than usual; for it was the last day of the year, and New Year’s is not only Haiti’s day of independence, but the one on which presents are given, after the French custom. Women carrying on their heads heaps of native baskets higher than themselves, others with as disproportionate loads of gourds, donkeys laden to the point of concealment with anything there was any hope of selling for gifts at that evening’s big market, filled the tumultuous wake behind us. I called that afternoon on the mulatto President of Haiti in the unfinished palace, and caught him and the minister of finance in the act of shaking and rearranging the rugs in preparation for the coming festivities. No doubt a president whose duties are assumed by men from the outside world must find something to do to pass the time. Next day, however, there was no such informality in his manner as he was driven in silk-hat solemnity to a Te Deum in the cathedral. Four prancing horses drew the presidential carriage, preceded and followed by a company of native horsemen in more than resplendent uniforms and drawn sabers. At the door he was met by the archbishop and all the higher officers of our forces of occupation, who fell in behind the august ruler as he marched down the central aisle, flanked at close intervals by negro firemen in brilliant red shirts of heavy flannel and shining metal helmets. In their wake came all the élite of Port au Prince, some in silk hats and full dress, nearly all in brand-new garb, for New Year’s takes the place of Easter in this respect in Haiti, and so generously perfumed that the clouds of incense arising about the altar made no impression upon the nostrils. Outside, the great open square and the adjacent streets were compact seas of upturned black faces. The booming of cannon frequently punctuated the ceremony, though the beating of tomtoms would have been more in keeping, and the cost of the powder might then have been spent in running the trade school which had just been abandoned for lack of funds. Faces running all the gamut from white to black were to be seen in the glaringly yellow interior, but none of the former were Haitian, and the latter were in the decided majority. The clergy were white, the acolytes black; the formality and solemnity which reigned could scarcely have been equaled in the elaborate functions in Notre Dame of Paris.

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A Cuban bon mot has it that “The Haitian is the animal which most nearly resembles man.” Without subscribing to so broad a statement, it must be admitted that they are close to the primitive savage despite a veneer of civilization which all but hides the African in the upper class and is so thin upon the masses as to be transparent. Tradition has it that when the uprising against the French was planned the conspirators gave every slave some grains of corn, telling him to throw one away every day and attack when none remained, for in no other way could they have known the date. To this day the intelligence of the masses is of that caliber. Readily capable of imitation, they initiate nothing, not even the next obvious move in the simplest undertakings. They have not a trace of gratitude in their make-up, no sexual morality, unbounded superstition, and no family love. Mothers gladly give away their children; if they ever see them again there is no evidence of gladness shown on either side. They have a certain naïve simplicity and some of the unintentional honesty that goes with it; they have of course their racial cheerfulness, though even that is less in evidence than among most of their race. A French woman who has spent nearly all her life in Haiti long tried to discover some symptoms of poetical fancy or love for the beautiful among the full blacks. One day she found a servant sitting in the back yard looking up into the tree-tops. Asked what he was thinking about, he answered, “I am not thinking; I am listening to the breeze in the cocoanut-palms.” That is the sum total of sentiment during long years of observation. Family relations are little short of promiscuous. Girls who have reached the age of ten are made to understand that they must be on the lookout for lovers; mothers refuse to support them after they have grown old enough to live with a man. An old maid is considered a freak of nature in Haiti, and such freaks are exceedingly rare in the Black Republic.

More temperamental than our own negroes, the Haitians are incredibly childlike in their mental processes. A certain gendarme officer whose butler was frequently remiss in his duties had him enrolled in the native corps in order to bring military discipline to bear upon him. A few days later the servant requested that he be given the right to carry arms, like other gendarmes. The officer good naturedly gave him a harmless old revolver that had been captured from the _cacos_. A few days later reports began to leak into headquarters that the national force was terrorizing the inhabitants of a certain section of Port au Prince. The detectives got busy, and found that the gendarme-butler, his day’s service over, was in the habit of patrolling that part of town in which he was born and where he was well known, strutting back and forth among his awed fellow-citizens during the evening, and from midnight on beating on house doors and commanding the inmates, “in the name of the law,” and at the point of his revolver, to come outside and line up “for inspection.” He had no designs upon their possessions, but was simply indulging his love for display and authority. When his employer took his putative weapon away from him again, he wept like a child of six. His grief, however, was short lived, for when the President called at the home of the officer on New Year’s afternoon, he found the butler so dressed up that he inadvertently shook hands with him as one of the guests.

Abuse of authority is a fixed fault in the Haitian character, as with most negroes. Of the several reasons why there are only two or three native lieutenants in the gendarmerie, lack of intelligence and dishonesty are less conspicuous than the inability to wield authority lightly. The Haitians of the masses have only three forms of recreation, dances, cock-fights, and voodooism. They have not even risen to the level of the “movies,” for though there are two cinemas in the capital and one in Cap Haïtien, these are too “high brow” for any but the upper class. Of pretty native customs we found only one—that of hanging up little colored-paper churches with candles inside them at Christmas-time. The Haitians are inveterate gamblers, which is only another way of saying that they abhor work. As the negro admires the successful and dominant, so he has supreme contempt for the broken and discredited. The Germans who once ruled the commercial roost in Haiti and who were interned after our entry into the war would find no advantage in returning, even if they were permitted to, for they have lost for life the respect of the natives by allowing themselves to be arrested. The profiteering Syrians who have largely inherited their control of commerce have far more standing to-day despite their slippery methods.

Between the primitive bulk of the population and the slight minority of educated citizens, mainly “people of color,” there is a wide gulf. Haiti has no middle class, not even a skilled labor class. Those who have ambition or wealth enough to go in for “higher education” will have nothing to do with anything even suggestive of manual labor. The ability to read, write, and speak French automatically brings with it a contempt for work and workers. As in all Latin America, an agricultural school is worse than useless, because it serves only to spoil what might have been good foremen, and the mere possession of a scrap of paper announcing the holder a graduate of such an institution is prima-facie evidence that he intends to loaf in the shade all the rest of his days. The result is that the population is made up of poverty-stricken, incredibly ignorant laborers and peasants, and of lawyers, “doctors” of this and that, and the political-military class which tyrannizes and fattens on the African masses.

Superficially, the educated class of Haiti is pleasant to meet, though the first impression seldom lasts. It has all the outward manners of the French, with none of their solid basis. In discussions of literature and art these “_gens de couleur_” could give the average American business man cards and spades; in actually doing or producing something worth while they are completely out of their depth. Once in a blue moon one runs across a full-blooded negro who shows outcroppings of genius. We were invited to meet such a one at the home of a “high yellow” senator on New Year’s eve, a pianist who had studied in Paris. I had been told that there were several fine musicians in Haiti, but, in the light of other experiences, had inwardly scoffed at the idea. It required but very little time to be convinced that here at least was one. The man not only played the best classics in a manner that would have been applauded in the highest class of concert halls, but gave several pieces of his own composition which could hold their place in any program. He had played a few times in the United States, but the drawback of color had proved insurmountable, and as there is naturally no income to be derived from such a source in Haiti, Ludovic Lamothe now holds a minor clerkship in the ministry of agriculture! When he had finished, the senator himself sat down at the piano and gave an exhibition which, I have no hesitancy in asserting, could scarcely have been duplicated by any member of our own upper house, and one which reminded us by contrast of the uproarious rag-time that was even at that moment reigning along Broadway. Yet it was such men as these that our marines once evicted from the Haitian senate with, “Come on, you niggers, get out of here!” Even the Southerner who had been induced to come with us, and whose muscles seemed to tense with inward horror as our host greeted him with a handshake and introduced him to the pianist, gradually shrank down into his chair in unconscious acknowledgment of his own ignorance of the higher things of life as compared with these cultured “niggers.”

We met a few other men of this type at the yearly “Haitian ball” in the chief native club, which American civilians attend, to the unbounded disgust of the forces of occupation. Yet the primitive African now and then showed itself in the whitest of them. Those who know them well say that even Haiti’s élite, educated in Europe or the United States, are apt to forget their Christian faith when troubles assail them and go to a “Papa Loi” for a _wanga_, or charm, and pay for a voodoo ceremony. In Paris lives a certain Mme. Thebes, in high repute among those who believe in sorcery and prophecy. If the stories which gradually leak out from the confidences of returning natives to their friends are trustworthy, she tells all Haitians that they are some day to become president of their country, not a bad guess under old conditions, though the supernatural madame does not seem to have kept up with the times. More than one revolution has been started on the strength of her prophecies. Some of these upper-class “people of color” are descendants of the same families who fled to Philadelphia and New Orleans at the time of the slave revolt. The members who remained behind were or have since become intermixed with the blacks. At least one American connected with the forces of occupation was introduced at a presidential reception to a colored family of the same name, which turned out to be relatives. As the American chanced to be a Southerner, it is easy to imagine whether the discovery brought joy and mutual social calls.

Stories of human sacrifices, cannibalism, and occult poisonings are always going the rounds in Haiti, though it is difficult to find any one of unquestioned integrity who has actually seen such things himself. I met two gendarme officers who asserted they had found the feet of a black baby sticking out of a boiling pot, and there are numbers of well-balanced Americans in Haiti who are firmly convinced that all three of the crimes above mentioned are practised. Certainly many of the natives look hungry enough to eat their own children. The body of a marine was once found in a condition to bear out the charge of cannibalism, but it has never been proved that this was not the work of hogs or dogs. Most frequent of all, say the believers, are the cases of blood-sucking, the victims being preferably virgins. Not long before our occupation a baby in the best district of Port au Prince died for loss of blood, which an old neighbor later confessed to having inflicted while the mother was out of the room. The daughter of a former minister is said to have been similarly treated by her grandmother and a prominent man. The rite over, they pronounced her dead, and she was buried with much pomp, the grandmother, according to the story, replacing with coffee the embalming fluid that was poured down her throat. Five years later a rumor of her existence having reached a priest through the confessional, what is believed to be the same girl was discovered in a hill town. She was wild, unkempt, demented, and had borne three children. The coffin was dug up, and in it was found her wedding dress,—for though she was only eight or nine at the time, it is the custom in Haiti to bury young girls in such garments,—but the autopsy proved the remains to be those of a man, the legs cut off and laid alongside the body. That there are Haitian Obeah practitioners who have so remarkable a knowledge of vegetable poisons that they can destroy their enemies or those of their clients without being detected seems to be generally admitted. Some of these poisons are said to be so subtle that the victims live for years, dying slowly as from some wasting disease, or going insane, deaf, blind, or dumb, with the civilized medical profession helpless to relieve them. Men of undoubted judgment and integrity, some of them Americans, claim to have positive proof of such cases.

The less gruesome forms of Obeah and voodooism are known to be practised in Haiti. The former is a species of witchcraft by men and women who are supposed to possess supernatural powers, and who certainly have far greater sway over the masses of the people than priests or presidents. For a small sum they will undertake to help in business matters, to create love in unresponsive breasts, possibly to put an enemy out of the way, and some of the “stunts” they perform are beyond comprehension. Voodooism, unlike the other, is a form of religion, the deity being an imaginary “great green serpent,” with a high priest known as “Papa Loi” and a priestess called “Maman Loi.” Chicken snakes and a harmless python are kept as sacred beings in Haiti, and fed by the faithful. In theory the serpent deity demands sacrifices of a “goat without horns”; in other words, a child, preferably white. But there is no positive evidence to prove that anything more than goats, sheep, or roosters are actually sacrificed. These simpler rites are carried on almost openly, and are accompanied by all sorts of childish incantations, with such nonsensical fetishes as red rags, dried snakes and lizards, human bones, or portions of human organs, stolen perhaps from graveyards. The most frequent form of revenge among the Haitian masses is the burying of a bottle filled with “charms” of this nature, over which are recited various incantations at certain phases of the moon, in the hope of bringing destruction or lesser punishment on the object of the enmity. So firm is the belief of the negroes in the power of Obeah that they sometimes succumb to fear and die merely because some one has cast such a spell upon them. A French priest who was traveling through the country called at a cabin one night to ask the occupant to show him the way. The man refused, whereupon the priest, being denied the customary form of expressing displeasure, began to recite a quotation from Ovid. To his surprise the native dashed out of his hut, fell at his feet, and offered to do anything he demanded, if only he would not “put Obeah” on him. Perhaps the most serious result of these practices is the appalling number of children who die under the ministrations of voodoo “doctors.”

A group of Americans once offered to pay for a voodoo supper if they were allowed to attend it. White men are seldom admitted to the native ceremonies; some have suffered for their intrusion. In this case there was the added fear that the officials who saw the rites would forbid them thereafter; but a Frenchman finally persuaded the natives that it would be to their advantage to let the Americans see one of their festivities in order to prove that they were harmless. How much was left out because of the guests there is of course no means of knowing.

About seventy dollars was spent for corn-meal, _tafia_ (crude native rum), sacrifices, and other things required, and to pay the chief performers their fees. The temple was decorated with flags and various fetishes. The ceremony began with a tomtom dance by the priests, who were soon joined by the high priestess, wearing a white skirt, a red waist, and a brilliant bandana, and waving spangled flags. Then a goat, scrubbed to spotless white, its horns gilded, and a red bow on its head, was brought in. The priestess danced about it with a snaky motion, holding her shoulders stiffly and giving her waist the maximum of movement. Then she got astride the goat and rode round and round, clinging to its horns. Every few minutes the priests gave her _tafia_ until she had worked herself into a real or feigned paroxysm of excitement. To say that she was intoxicated would perhaps be putting it too strongly, for the average Haitian is so soaked in rum from birth that it has little visible effect upon him.

At length a priest caught up a handful of corn-meal and, with what appeared to be two careless gestures, formed a perfect cross with it on the ground. Candles were placed at the ends of the cross, then _tafia_ and other liquors were poured along the lines of corn-meal, the priestess meanwhile continuing to ride the goat with hideous contortions. Finally she dismounted, slipped off the white skirt, leaving her entirely clothed in red, and while a priest held the goat by the front feet she pierced a vein in its neck and drank all the blood she could contain. For a time she seemed to be in a stupor; then she began to “prophesy” in loathsome, incomprehensible noises, which a priest “translated,” probably in terms of his own choosing. While this pair howled, the goat was prepared and put in caldrons to cook, with rice, beans, _tafia_, salt, pepper, and lard. Old women stirred the contents of these with their bare hands, which had been bleached almost white by frequent emersions in similar boiling messes. When the food was cooked, the priestess came suddenly out of her trance and fell to with all the negroes present, who were still sitting about in a circle eating sacred goat meat and drinking _tafia_ when the white spectators finally left.

“The only thing wrong with the Haitians is lack of education,” says a recent investigator, which can scarcely be doubted, since it is true of all mankind. By some oversight, perhaps, no mention of schools and courts was made in the treaty under which we are administering the country. The French maintained no schools for the negroes, and it goes without saying that conditions scarcely improved during the century and a quarter of independence. An American superintendent, who is quite properly a Catholic and of Louisiana creole stock, has been appointed, and is in theory directly responsible to the native minister of public instruction. But the higher American civilian officials, clinging perhaps too closely to the letter of the treaty, have not seen fit to assign any great amount of the public revenues of Haiti to this purpose. There are thirteen hundred teachers in the country, probably the majority of whom are in no way qualified for their task, and of the fifty thousand pupils enrolled barely one in three is in regular attendance. In other words, not ten per cent. of the children of school age get even primary instruction, and less than one per cent. ever reach the secondary schools. The law school in Port au Prince, with thirty students, is reported to be efficient; the medical school is frankly a farce. Teaching methods are in all but a few cases primitive, consisting of little more than monologues by the “teacher,” to which the pupils listen only when nothing else occupies their attention. A thorough reform in this matter is essential to the task we have undertaken in Haiti, unless we subscribe as a nation to the old Southern attitude that the negro is better off without education. The present generation is hopeless in this as in many other regards; it remains to be seen whether we will and can lift the next out of the primitive savagery which at present reigns.

The popular language of Haiti bears no very close resemblance to the tongue from which it is largely descended. The slaves came from different parts of Africa, in some cases belonging to enemy tribes, and “creole” is the natural evolution of their desire to talk with one another. The resultant dialect has French as a basis, but it is so abbreviated, condensed, and simplified, and includes so many African words, that it has become almost a new language. It is quite distinct from the patois of Canada and even of the French West Indies, though there are points of resemblance. It has not even the inflection of real French, and only now and then does one knowing that language catch an intelligible word. Haitian voices have a softness equal to those of our Southern darkies, and are in marked contrast to the rasping tones of Cuba. It is a local form of politeness to use a squeaky falsetto in greetings, and women of the masses curtsy to one another when they shake hands, probably a survival from slave days originally adopted as a sign of their equality to their expelled mistresses. Gender, number, case, modes, tenses, and articles have almost completely disappeared. As a rule, only the feminine form of adjectives has survived. Plurality is indicated, when it is necessary, by a participle. Many words have been abbreviated almost out of recognition. _Plaît-il?_ has become “Aiti?” The Dominicans over the border are called “Pagno.” The word _bagaille_, probably a corruption of _bagage_, means almost anything; servants told to “pick up” that _bagaille_ grasp whatever is nearest at hand; _bon bagaille_ and _pas bon bagaille_ are the usual forms of good and bad. “Who” has grown to be “Qui monde ça?” Many words have changed their meanings entirely; the urchin who approaches you rubbing his stomach and mumbling “grand gout,” wishes to impress upon you the very probable fact that he has “large hunger.” On the whole, it is probably an advantage, in learning Haitian “creole,” not to know real French.

* * * * *

The automobile in which we took our final leave of Port au Prince plowed its way for several miles along the thronged highway across the Cul-de-Sac plain, then turned west through an endless semi-desert bristling with thorny _aroma_. A dead negro lying a few yards from the road on the bare ground awakened no surprise from our native chauffeur or the gendarme in plain clothes beside him. There were no vultures flying about the body. Those natural scavengers were once introduced into Haiti, but the natives killed and ate them. Soon we came out on the edge of the sea, along the foot of those same cliffs we had seen while rolling in the doldrums on the Haitian navy three weeks before. What had then seemed a sheer mountain wall was in reality a flat narrow plain backed by sloping hills. Naked black fishermen were plying their trade thigh-deep in the blue water. Gonave island and the southern peninsula were almost golden brown under the early sun. For a long time the thorny desert continued, for southern Haiti had for months been suffering from drought. There were several ruins of ox-and-kettle sugar-mills, here and there evidences of former plantation houses; miserable native huts leaning drunkenly against their broken walls. Once we passed a massive old stone aqueduct. The parched and sun-burned landscape was now and then broken by green oases of villages. A little railroad followed us all the way to St. Marc, but there was no sign of trains. The town was carpeted in dust, a ruined stone church towered above the low houses, a dust-and-stone-paved central square had a grandstand and a fountain screaming in the national colors. Down on the edge of the deep bay crooked, reddish logwood dragged in by donkeys was being weighed on large crude wooden scales. This chief product of the region to-day lay in heaps along the dusty road beyond. Cannon bearing the Napoleonic device and date, left by the ill-starred expeditionary force under Leclerc, served as corner-posts of the bridges. The dense green of mango-trees contrasted with the dry mountain-walled plain; nowhere was there a sprig of grass, seldom a sign of water. _Pitimi_ grew rather abundantly, however, and there was some cotton. About the mouth of the Artibonite, sometimes called the “Haitian Nile,” was a spreading delta of greenery. Miserable thatched huts of mud plastered on reeds were numerous, yet blended so into the dull, dry landscape as scarcely to draw the attention. Negroes carrying huge loads of reed mats now and then jogged past in the hot dust; everywhere was what a native writer calls “l’aridité désolante de la campagne.” Yet though the drought occasionally flagellates portions of it, there is scarcely a spot in Haiti which would not produce abundantly under anything like proper cultivation.

Arid hills, with parched, purple-brown scrub forests, shut in the town of Dessalines, with its pathetic little forts that were long ago designed to protect the general of the same name. A small, dust-covered, baking-hot town well back from the sea in a kind of bay of the plain, it was indeed a negro capital. Farther on the dust and aridity largely disappeared. There was considerable cotton showing signs of languid cultivation, some fields were being hoed, others irrigated, as we snaked in and out along the wrinkled skirts of the rocky range on the right. Crippled beggars lined the way even here; in fact, there is a suggestion of India in the numbers of diseased mendicants squatting beside the dusty, sunny roads of Haiti. Women and children were bathing in brackish streams. Then it grew arid again, and we found Gonaïves, more than a hundred miles from the capital, in a very dry setting on the edge of a smaller bay. It claims twenty-five thousand inhabitants, some of whom live in moderate comfort. As in Port au Prince, one was assailed on all sides by the modern Haitian motto, “Gimme fi’ cents,” which is really not so serious a demand as it sounds, since it only means five centimes. It was in Gonaïves that independence was declared in 1804, and from here Toussaint l’Ouverture was sent to France in chains. The town is engaged chiefly in commerce. From it we turned back north by east into the country. A pathetic little railroad again began to follow us. The first few miles over a range of foot-hills were burned as dry as all the southern slope; then, as we climbed higher, it grew rapidly greener, the dust disappeared, we forded several small rivers many times, and were completely shut in by fresh and verdant vegetation before we reached Ennery.

This is a stony, sleepy little hamlet among the mountains, famed in Haitian history as the place where Toussaint was living when the French general Brunet wrote him, asking for an interview, at which he was traitorously arrested and sent to end his days in a French dungeon. There we left the road to Cap Haïtien and, still fording, rising constantly over long humps of ground, always turning, gradually gained coffee-growing elevation. A fine new road, passing one large marine camp, carried us higher still, until green mountains stood all about us, the air grew pleasant as that of our Northern spring-time, and at length we found ourselves among pine-trees. Just after sundown, in the soft gray-blue evening of the temperate tropics, we sighted the little white church of St. Michel, beyond which we spun across a floor-level plateau a little farther to the residence of an American estate manager. To say that we had covered a hundred and fifty miles comfortably, with one short and one long stop, between daylight and dark gives some idea of what American occupation has done for Haitian roads.

The great plains, fourteen hundred feet high, were flooded with moonlight all through the night, in which I several times awoke shivering for all my heavy blankets. By day the sea-flat plateau proved to be covered with brown grass beneath which was the blackest of loamy soil. Gasolene tractors were turning this up, working by night as well as by day, and operated by Haitians who had been trained on the spot under American overseers. It was virgin soil, for this region was Spanish territory in the time of the French and had been used only as grazing land. The new company would soon have hundreds of acres planted in cotton, with other crops to follow. Such enterprises, multiplied many fold, are among the most immediate needs of Haiti.

Colonel W—— of the Marine Corps and Major General W——, Chef de la Gendarmérie d’Haiti, who are one and the same person, set out that afternoon on an inspection trip through the heart of Haiti, and invited me to go along. The region being _caco_-infested and a “restricted district” in which white women were not allowed to travel, Rachel was to continue by automobile on the well-guarded highway to Cap Haïtien. The colonel and I left the plantation by car also, skimming for more than an hour across the wonderful grassy plain without any need of a road. Groups of horses were grazing here and there, but there were no cattle. Occasionally we met a lone gendarme plodding along in the shoes to which he was still far from accustomed. An unfinished road carried us on from where the plain began to break up into rolling country, with clusters of trees in the hollows. Now and then the colonel brought down one of the deep-blue wild pigeons which flew frequently past, but the flocks of wild guineas usually found in this region had evidently been warned of his marksmanship. Four-footed game does not exist in Haiti, and even its harmless reptiles are rare; Noah evidently did not touch the West Indies. Gradually the forest appeared, growing thicker and thicker, until we were inclosed in tunnels of vegetation, fording many small rivers. Suddenly a great hubbub ahead caused us to make sure that our rifles were in readiness, but it was only a cock-fight in the woods, the men standing, the women seated on little home-made chairs outside the male circle about the ring, made of barrel staves driven upright into the ground. In the next mile we passed a dozen black men, each with a rooster under one arm, hurrying to the scene of conflict.

At the town of Maissade we halted at a marine camp on a hill overlooking the surrounding country, and commanded by Captain Becker, a famous hunter of _cacos_. His tent was almost filled with captured war material: rifles of every kind in use a century ago corded like so much stove-wood; revolvers and pistols enough to stock a museum devoted to the history and development of that arm; French swords dating back to the seventeenth century; rapiers such as flash through Dumas’s stories; heaps of rusted machetes, battered bugles, bamboo musical instruments, and hollow-log tomtoms from voodoo temples; drums abandoned by Leclerc; ragged pieces of uniform decorated with ribbons; dozens of hats and caps of “generals,” of felt, cloth, and straw, all more or less ragged, and all bearing such signs of rank as might be adopted by small boy warriors. Then there were beads and charms, Obeah vials found on the bodies of dead _cacos_, mysterious articles of unknown purpose and origin. The captain dissected one of the charms. It consisted of a bullet wrapped in a dirty bit of paper on which were scrawled a few strange characters, the dried foot of a lizard, and what was apparently a powdered insect, all inclosed in a brass cartridge-shell, with a string attached to it long enough to go around the neck of the original owner, whom it was supposed to protect against bullets. The captain had shot him a few days before, and as he fell he cried out in “creole,” “O Mama, they’ve got me!” then died cursing the Obeah man for making an imperfect charm. Some of the _cacos_ in the region had recently surrendered, and had been made “division commanders,” with the duty of helping to hunt down their former comrades. One of them had showed the marine who shot him the bullet which he had dug out of his flesh with a machete, and now followed him everywhere like a faithful dog.

In the town itself the gendarme detachment was in command of a native lieutenant who was rated an excellent officer, but he had barely a touch of negro blood. Beyond was a road of boulevard width along which we spun at thirty-five miles an hour. Wild pigeons, parrots, and negroes far less ragged than those of Port au Prince enlivened the striking scenery, and at sunset we drew up before the gendarmerie of Hinche, the birthplace of the departed Charlemagne. There was something amusingly anachronistic in the sight of half a hundred marines playing baseball and basketball on the plain about their camp at the edge of town, for Hinche itself had little in common with such scenes.

All Haitian towns have a close family resemblance. There is always a big, brown, bare, dusty central _place_, with a tiny bandstand with steps painted in the national colors and surmounted by a single royal palm-tree, called the “_patrie_.” From this radiate wide, right-angled dirt streets lined by low houses, some of plastered mud, a few whitewashed, many of split palm trunks, most of them of _tache_, nearly all with earth floors, all except the few covered with corrugated iron in the center of town being roofed with thatch. Some have narrow sapling-pillared porches paved with little cobblestones, these sometimes also whitewashed; and where houses are missing are broken hedges of organ cactus on which hang drying rags of clothing. Facing the _place_ is a more or less ruined church, farther off a large open market-place, with perhaps a few ragged thatch-roof shelters from the sun. Then there is sure to be a spick-and-span gendarmerie, with large numbers of docile prisoners and proud black gendarmes, perhaps a group of marines, or at any rate of their native prototypes, here and there stalking through the dusty streets, ignoring the respectful greetings of the teeming black populace squatted in their doorways or on their dirt floors. Little fagot fires on the ground behind or beside the huts, a well-worn path down to the river, and an indefinable scent of the tropics and black humanity living in primitive conditions complete the picture. Men who have seen both assert that a Congo village is a paradise compared with a Haitian hamlet.

The curate came over to smoke a cigarette and drink a sip of rum with us after supper. He was a large, powerful Frenchman from Brittany, of remarkably fine features, sparkling blue eyes, and no recent hair-cut or shave, dressed in an ecclesiastical bonnet and enormous “congress” shoes run down at heel, and the long black gown which seems so out of place, yet is really very convenient, in the tropics. For twelve years he had shepherded Hinche and the neighboring region, being much of the time the only white man in it. He expected to complete twenty-five years’ residence, then go home in retirement. He traveled freely everywhere within his district, _caco_ sentinels and the bands themselves hiding when he passed rather than molest him. Cannibalism was certainly practised to this day, in his opinion, especially among the hills, where there were many negroes older than he who had never come to town. There was less superstition in this district, he asserted, because the people came somewhat under the more civilized Dominican influence. While we talked, two former _cacos_, now “division chiefs,” came in to report to the efficient young American gendarme commander, simple old souls with childlike eyes and Napoleon III beards whom one would scarcely have suspected of harming a chicken. The day before two native women had brought in a _caco_ whom they had cudgeled into submission, and that afternoon an old man, unarmed, had presented the commander with another, leading him by a rope around the neck.

In these circumstances we set out on horseback next morning in no great fear of the bandits, though we kept our rifles and revolvers handy. With us went a curious dwarf who lived in the next town and who had attached himself to the Americans like a stray mastiff, which he closely resembled in expression and in his devotion to them. He was of full size from the waist upward, but his legs were scarcely a foot long, and his bare feet hardly reached to the edges of the saddle in which he sat, once he had been placed there, with all the assurance of a cow-boy of the plains. Then there was “Jim,” looking like the advance agent of a minstrel show. “Jim” was a descendant of American negroes, his grandparents having come from Philadelphia to Samaná, Santo Domingo, where a number of black colonists from our northern states settled at the invitation of the Haitians when they ruled the whole island. He spoke a fluent English, with a mixture of Southern and foreign accent, as well as “creole” and Spanish, and having served the colonel as interpreter years before during the marine advance from Monte Cristi to Santiago, had come to Haiti to join him again when he took charge of the gendarmerie. He had been assigned to plain-clothes duty, but “Jim’s” conception of that phrase did not include the adjective, and he had set forth on what promised to be anything but a dressy expedition in a garb well suited for a presidential reception. This was already beginning to show the effects of scrambling through the underbrush in quest of the wild pigeons which had fallen before the colonel’s shotgun.

The mayor of Hinche, a first cousin of Charlemagne, saw us off in person, holding the colonel’s stirrup and bidding him farewell with bared head. We forded the Guayamoc River and wound away through foot-hills that soon gave way to a brown, level savanna which two years before had been covered with cattle, now wholly disappeared. Once we climbed over a large hill of oyster-shells, which geologists would no doubt recognise as proof that the region was formerly under the sea; but the French colonists of long ago were probably as fond of oysters as are their fellow-countrymen to-day, and it is worthy of note that these were all half-shells. We passed one small village in a hollow, with a mud hut full of gendarmes; the rest of the morning the dry and arid, yet lightly wooded, country was almost wholly uninhabited. For long spaces the scornful cries of black crows were the only sounds except the constant switching required to keep our thin Haitian horses and mules on the move.

Thomasique, where we halted for lunch at the mud-hut gendarmerie, was a dismal little hamlet of lopsided thatched hovels. The commander of the district had found a new use for captured _caco_ rifles, using the barrels as gratings for his outdoor cooking-place. The _juge de paix_, the magistrate, and the richest man of the town, ranging in color from quadroon to _griffe_, called to pay their respects to the general, frankly admitting by their attitude that the young American lieutenant of gendarmes was their superior officer. Under his guidance the revenues of Thomasique had increased five fold in a single month. It was evident from the manner of the judge that he had something on his chest, and at length he unburdened himself. The Government, it seemed, had not paid him his salary—of one dollar a month—for more than half a year, and he respectfully petitioned the general to take the matter up with the president upon his return to Port au Prince. There was probably a connection between his lack of funds and the auditing of the village accounts by the lieutenant.

The country was more broken beyond. Pine-trees of moderate size grew beside girlishly slender little palms with fan-shaped leaves. A high bank of blue gravel along a dry river-bed would probably have attracted the attention of a miner or a geologist. In detail the country was not pretty; in the mass it was vastly so. Brown, reddish, and green hills were heaped up on every hand; the play of colors across them, changing at every hour from dawn through blazing noonday into dusk and finally moonlight, made up for the monotony of the near-by landscape. There were almost no signs of humanity, the silence was sometimes complete, though here and there we passed the evidences of former gardens in dry _arroyos_. Toward sunset we burst suddenly out among banana-groves, starting up a great flock of wild guineas, and at dark rode into Cerca la Source, a more than usually whitewashed little town nestled among real mountains. It was Sunday, and the great weekly cock-fight having just ended at the barrel-stave pit in a corner of the immense open _place_, the hubbub of settling bets had not yet subsided, and for a half hour afterward scores of negroes with pretty game-cocks under their arms wandered about in the moonlight shouting merry challenges to one another for the ensuing Sabbath.

Beyond Cerca la Source a steep mountain trail climbs for hours through the stillness of pine-forests where birds, except the cawing crows, are rare and almost no human habitations break the vista of tumbled world over which even the native horses make their way with difficulty. A telephone wire known among the marines as the “beer-bottle line,” those being the only insulators to be had when it was constructed by our forces of occupation, is the one dependable guide through the region. Four hours brought us to a score of sorry huts in a little hollow known as La Miel. Even that had its hilltop gendarmerie and prison, commanded by a native sergeant, who had his force drawn up for inspection when we arrived, though he had no warning of the colonel’s approach or any other proof of his official character other than the blouseless uniform he wore. A white rascal owning a marine uniform could play strange tricks in Haiti. Even here there was a big French bell of long ago supported by poles at some distance from the broken-backed church, and Spanish influence of the Dominicans beyond the now not very distant border showed itself in such slight matters as the use of “_yo_” for “_ge_” and “_buen_” instead of “_bon_.” There followed a not very fertile region, with more pine-trees and long, brown, tough grass, with only here and there a _conuco_, shut in by the slanted pole fences native to Santo Domingo, planted with weed-grown _pois Congo_, _manioc_, and tropical tubers. In mid-afternoon, where the vegetation grew more dense, it began to rain, as we had been warned it would here before our departure from Port au Prince. The first sprinkle increased to a steady downpour by what would probably have been sunset, the trail became toboggans of red mud down which our weary animals skated for long distances, or sloughs so deep and slopes so steep that we were forced to dismount and wade, or climb almost on all fours. Dripping coffee-bushes under higher trees sometimes lined the way, the best information we got from any of the rare passers-by was that our destination was a “little big distance” away. That it remained until we finally slipped and sprawled our way into it.

It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the early spring. The place was more than three thousand feet above the sea, and the cold seemed to penetrate to the very marrow even within doors. It was ruled with an iron hand by an “old-timer” who had been so long a sergeant in the Marine Corps that he had come to divide all the world into exact gradations of rank. My companion he unfailingly addressed as “the General,” never by the familiar pronoun “you,” and he took personal charge of everything pertaining to his comfort, even to removing his wet garments and extracting the bones from his chosen portions of chicken. Nothing would induce him to eat before the general had finished or to sit down in his presence. Myself he treated almost as an equal, or as he might have another sergeant who slightly outranked him in length of service, with now and then a hint of scorn at my merely civilian standing. He was probably as small a man as ever broke into our military service, yet the stentorian voice in which he invariably gave his commands to the great hulking negro who served as cook in the unsheltered “kitchen” outside and as general factotum about the hut never failed to cause that person to prance with fear. The natives he addressed in the same tone, and the whole town seemed to spring to attention when he opened the door and bawled out into the night for the mayor to “Report here on the double quick.” How the Haitians managed to understand his English was a mystery, but they lost no time in obeying every order. After the general had retired, the lieutenant, for such was his rank in the gendarmerie, confided to me that he had several books on “creole” and was preparing to learn it. As I had been on the lookout for something of the kind since my arrival in Haiti, hitherto in vain, I expressed a desire to see them. The lieutenant cast aside a soaked tarpaulin and handed me half a dozen French grammars such as are used in our own schools.

The colonel’s clothing was dry and newly pressed when we set out again next morning, though my own was still dripping. “Jim’s” plain clothes were by this time worthy a still more commonplace adjective, for in addition to the mishaps of the trail, he had spent the night in them on the bare earth floor of the gendarme barracks. There came a few more red mud toboggans, then we came out on a vista of half northern Haiti, to which we descended by a rock trail worn horseback deep in the mountain-side and so steep that even “Jim” for once deigned to dismount. The rain ceased a few hundred feet down, though the sky remained dull and overcast, in striking contrast to the speckless blue heavens of southern Haiti, for the seasons are reversed in the two parts of the country. A few hours’ jog across another savanna of denser vegetation than the plateau of St. Michel brought us to the considerable town of Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border, where an automobile bore us away to the west. The great Plaine du Nord, once completely covered with sugar-cane and dotted with French plantation houses and mills, was now a wilderness teeming with blue-legged wild guineas, here and there some bush-grown stone ruins, through which a mud road and a single telephone wire forced their way. We passed the populous towns of Terrier Rouge and Le Trou, famed for their _caco_ sympathies, and Limonade, in the grass-grown old church of which Christophe, Emperor of northern Haiti, was once stricken with apoplexy, and brought up in the mud and darkness at Cap Haïtien.

Meanwhile Rachel had reached “the Cape,” as it is familiarly called, by the usual route. Leaving Ennery, this had begun at once to climb the mountain Puilboreau, winding in and out along its wrinkled face. The vegetation was rather monotonous, with a yellowish tinge to the several shades of green, now and then an orange cactus blossom, a purple morning glory, a pink vine, or the old-gold bark of a tree adding a touch of color. The view back down the valley, with its tiny specks of houses, remained unbroken until they reached the summit three thousand feet above the sea at Bakersville, so called for the marine who had charge of this difficult bit of road building, when there burst forth as far-reaching a scene to the north. The Plaisance Valley lay under the heavy gray veil of a rain-cloud, the harbor of Cap Haïtien visible far below, and far off on the horizon was the faint line of what seemed to be Tortuga, chief of Haiti’s “possessions” and once the favorite residence of buccaneers. The change of landscape was abrupt; heavy, dense green vegetation smelling of moisture surrounding the travelers on every hand as they wound down the mountain-side by a mud-coated highway, passing here and there gangs of road laborers. This northern slope was more thickly inhabited, thatched huts conspicuous by their damp brown against the greenery occasionally clustering together into villages in which some of the mud walls were whitewashed or painted. Market-women bound for “the Cape,” men grubbing in the fields, women paddling clothes—sometimes those in which they should have been dressed—in the streams, all gave evidence of the slighter dread of _cacos_ on this northern slope. Then came another climb and a descent into the valley of the Limbé, some miles along which brought them to the village of the same name and to the greatest difficulty to the automobilist in Haiti.

The fording of the Limbé is certain to be the chief topic of conversation between those who have traveled from Port au Prince to Cap Haïtien. At times it is impassable, and has been known to delay travelers for a week. This time men and women were crossing with bundles on their heads and the water barely up to their armpits. A gang of prisoners was brought from the village gendarmerie, the vitals of the car removed and sent across on their heads, then with the passengers sitting on the back of the back seat, the baggage in their laps, the reunited gang, amid continual shrieks of “_Poussez!_” and an excited jabbering of “creole,” eventually dragged and pushed the dismantled automobile to the opposite shore. An hour and a half passed between the time it halted on one bank and started out again from the other, which was close to a record for the crossing. From there on the wide, but muddy, road, now thronged with people returning from market with their purchases or empty baskets, passed many ruins of old plantations, and the crumbling stone and plaster gate-posts which once flanked the only entrances to them.

* * * * *

Cap Haïtien, the second city of Haiti, sometimes called the “capital of the North,” is situated on a large open bay in which the winds frequently play havoc. On its outer reef the flagship of Columbus came to grief on Christmas eve, 1492, and the discoverer spent Christmas as the guest of the Indian chief who then ruled the district. The wreckage of the _Santa Maria_ was brought ashore near the present fisher village of Petit Anse, and here was erected the first European fort in the New World. In the days of Haiti’s prosperity Cap Haïtien was known as the “Paris of America” and rivaled in wealth and culture any other city in the western hemisphere. Then it had an imposing cathedral, several squares and _places_ decorated with fountains and statuary, and was noted for its fine residences and urbane society. Old stone ruins still stretch clear out to the lighthouse on a distant point. Destroyed by the revolting blacks, by Christophe in his wars against Pétion, by an earthquake or two, and by more than a century of neglect and tropical decay, it retains little evidence of its former grandeur. Some of its wide streets, however, are still stone-paved, and bear names which carry the imagination back to medieval France. A few of its citizens live in moderate comfort; the overwhelming majority are content to loll out their days in uncouth hovels. It is so populous that it supports a cinema, and some of its business houses are moderately up to date and prosperous, though these are in most cases owned by foreigners. The acrid smell of raw coffee everywhere assails the nostrils; coffee spread out on canvas or on the cement pavement of one of its few remaining squares is constantly being turned over with wooden shovels by barefooted negroes who think nothing of wading through it; here and there one passes a warehouse in which chattering old women sit thigh-deep in coffee, clawing over the berries with their fleshless black talons. Its market-place is large and presents the usual chaos of wares and hubbub of bargaining; its blue vaulted cathedral easily proves its antiquity, and American marines are everywhere in evidence. On the whole, its populace is somewhat less ragged than that of Port au Prince, but whatever it lacks in picturesqueness is made up for by the view of its surrounding mountains crowned by the great Citadel of Christophe.

Election day came during our stay at “the Cape.” In olden times such an event was worth coming far to see, provided one could keep out of the frequent mêlées accompanying it. Under the Americans it is tame in the extreme. To obviate the necessity of counting more votes than there are inhabitants, the marines have introduced a plan charming in its simplicity. As he casts his ballot, each voter is required to dip the end of his right forefinger in a solution of nitrate of silver. The nail of course turns black, for the finger-nails even of a negro are ordinarily light colored,—and remains so until election day is over. Far be it from me to suggest that such a scheme might be adopted to advantage in our own country. A few district commanders, to make doubly sure, use iodine. The rank and file accept this formality as cheerfully as they do every other incomprehensible requirement of their new white rulers, most of them making the sign of the cross with the wet finger. But the haughty “_gens de couleur_” are apt to protest loudly against this “implied insult to my honor,” and if they can catch the American official off his guard, are sure to dip in the wrong finger or merely make a false pass over the liquid, meanwhile scowling into silence the low-caste native watchers.

Haiti has long dreamed of some day uniting the several bits of miniature railroad scattered about the country into a single line between the two principal cities. The existing section in the north, twenty odd miles in length, connects Cap Haïtien with Grande Rivière and Bahon. Its fares, like those of the equally primitive lines out of Port au Prince, are so low that for once the assertions of the owners that they lose money on passengers can be accepted without a grin of incredulity. To raise them, however, is not so simple a matter as it may seem, for the Haitian masses are little inclined as it is to part with their rare _gourdes_ for the mere privilege of saving their calloused feet. There were far more travelers along the broad highway out of “the Cape” than in the little cars themselves in which we followed it through a region that might have been highly productive had it been as diligently tended by man as by nature. The train stopped frequently and long at forest-choked clusters of negro huts varying only in size. Such scenes had grown so commonplace that we found more of interest in the car itself, particularly among the marines who sprawled over several of the seats. The majority of our forces of occupation are so decidedly a credit to their country that it needed the contrast of such types as these to explain why the “Gooks,” as the natives are popularly known among their class, generally resent our presence on Haitian soil. Loudmouthed, profane, constantly passing around a grass-bound gallon bottle of rum, and boasting of their conquests among the negro girls, they were far less agreeable traveling companions than the blackest of the natives. Their “four years’ cruise in Hate-eye,” one would have supposed in listening to them, was a constant round of these things and “fighting chickens,” with an occasional opportunity of “putting a lot of families in mourning” thrown in. Yet underneath it all they were good-hearted, cheerful, and generous, despite the notion prevalent among too many Americans that boisterousness and rowdyism is a proof of courage and manhood.

Grande Rivière is a town of some consequence in Haiti, prettily situated in a river valley among green hills. Its grassy _place_ and the unfailing “_patrie_” in its center are decided improvements on most of those in the republic; the several large church bells under a roof of their own at some distance from the building itself still retain their musical French voices. A dyewood establishment is its chief single industry. The crooked logwood, carved down to the red heart before it leaves the forests, is gnawed to bits by a noisy machine, boiled in a succession of vats, the red water running off through sluiceways, and the waste tossed out to dry and serve as fuel, and the concentrated product, thick as molasses, is inclosed in barrels for shipment. Scarcely an hour passes between the picking up of a log and the rolling away of the barrel containing its extract.

But of all the sights in any Haitian town the market-place is surest to attract the idle traveler. It was Saturday, or beef day, and two long lines of venders were dispensing mere nibbles of meat to the clamoring throng of purchasers, no portion of the animal being too uninviting to escape consumption. Of a hundred little squares on the ground dotted with “piles” of miscellaneous wares the inventory we made of one is characteristic of all, and its sum total of value probably did not reach two dollars. There were long, square strips of yellow soap, brooms and ropes made of jungle plants, castor-beans (the oil from which is used in native lamps), unhulled rice, all kinds of woven things from baskets to saddle-bags, peanuts, green plantains, pitch-pine kindling for torches, huge sheets of cassava bread, folded twice, rock salt, gay calicoes, all tropical fruits, unground pepper, old nails, loose matches, cinnamon bark, peanut and _jijimi_ sweets, pewter spoons, scissors, thread, little marbles of blue dye, unassorted buttons, cheap knives, safety-pins, yarn, tiny red clay pipes and the reed stems to go with them, rusted square spikes of the kind used a century ago, shelled corn, ground corn, _pitimi_, several kinds of beans, tiny scraps of leather, four tin cans from a marine messroom, five bottles of as many shapes and sizes, one old shoe, and a handful of red berries used in Haiti as beads.

* * * * *

A bare five days from New York stands the most massive, probably the most impressive single ruin in America. One might go farther and say that there are few man-built structures in Europe that can equal in mightiness and in the extraordinary difficulties overcome in its construction this chief sight of the West Indies. Only the pyramids of Egypt, in at least the familiar regions of the earth, can compare with this gigantic monument to the strength and perseverance of puny man, and the pyramids are built down on the floor of the earth instead of being borne aloft to the tiptop of a mountain. It is curious, yet symbolical of our ignorance of the neighbors of our own hemisphere, that while most Americans know of far less remarkable structures in Europe, not one in a hundred of us has ever heard of the great Haitian Citadel of Christophe.

We caught our first view of it from “the Cape.” The January day had broken in a flood of tropical sunshine, which brought out every crack and wrinkle of the long mountain-range cutting its jagged outline in the Haitian sky to the southward of the city. On the top of its highest peak, called the “Bishop’s Bonnet,” stood forth a square-cut summit which only the preinformed could have believed was the work of man. Twenty-five miles away it looked like an enormous hack in the mountain itself, a curious natural formation which man could never have imitated except on a tiny scale. It is a standing joke in Cap Haïtien to listen in all solemnity to newcomers laughing to scorn the assertions of the residents that this distant mountain summit was fashioned by human hands.

Now and again as we journeyed toward it on the little railroad to Grande Rivière we had a glimpse of the citadel through the dense tropical vegetation, yet so slowly did it increase in size that its massiveness became all the more incredible. Where we descended at a cross-trail in the forest a group of small Haitian horses was already awaiting us. The gendarme officer in charge of them was a powerful young American beside whom a native of the color known as _griffe_, in civilian garb, looked like a half-grown boy. For the pilots assigned us on this excursion were none other than Captain Hanneken and Jean Batiste, now Lieutenant, Conzé, the exterminators of Charlemagne.

The trail broke out at length into a wide clearing which stretched away as far as the eye could follow in each direction, its grassy surface cut up by several wandering paths along which plodded a few natives and a donkey or two. It was once the “royal highway” between Christophe’s main palace and Cap Haïtien, outdoing in width the broadest boulevards of Europe. An hour or more along this brought us to Milot, a small town lined up on each side of the road like people awaiting a procession of royalty. At the back of it the highway ended at a great crumbling ruin which had about it something suggestive of Versailles.

Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci, for such it was, is wholly uninhabitable to-day, yet there is still enough of it standing to indicate that it was once one of the most ornate and commodious structures in the western hemisphere. Two pairs of mammoth gate-posts, square in form and nearly twenty feet high, guard the entrance to the lower yard-platform, bounded by a heavy stone wall. On the inside these are hollowed out into unexpected sentry-boxes, for Christophe was a strong believer in many guards. Higher up, sustained by a still stronger wall, is another grassy platform, from which a stairway as broad and elaborate as any trodden by European sovereigns leads sidewise to a balustraded entrance court, also flanked by sentry-boxes. Crumbling walls in which many small bushes have found a foothold tower high aloft above this to where they are broken off in jagged irregularity. The palace was evidently five stories high, built of native brick and plaster, and the architecture is still impressive despite its dilapidated condition and for all its African-minded ostentation. The roof has completely given way, and in the vast halls of the lower floor grow wild oranges and tropical bush. Those higher up, of which only the edges of the floors and the walls remain, are said to have included a great ball-room, an immense billiard-hall, separate suites for the emperor and his black consort, and apartments for the immediate royal family. At some distance from the palace proper stand the lower walls of the former lodgings of minor princes, a host of courtiers, the stables, and the caserns. The several _parterres_, once covered with rare flowers watered by irrigating canals, are mere tangles of jungle. The _caimite_-tree under which the black tyrant is said to have sat in judgment on his subjects, after the example of Louis IX of France, still casts its mammoth shade in the back courtyard; a small chapel lower down that was probably used by the lesser nobles serves Milot as a church; with those exceptions there is little left as Christophe saw it. Our forces of occupation are threatening to tear down the walls, which are soon likely to fall of themselves, to clear away the vegetation, and to build barracks of the materials that remain.

The narrow trail that zigzags from the back of the palace up the mountain may not be the one by which those condemned under the _caimite_-tree were carried or dragged to their death before the ramparts of the citadel, but there remain no evidences of any other route. Much of the way it is all but impassable even during a lull in the rainy season, for the dense vegetation shuts out the sun that might otherwise harden the mud in which the hardiest native horses frequently wallow belly-deep and now and then give up in frank despair. For a time it leads through banana- and mango-groves, with huts swarming with negro babies here and there peering forth from the thick undergrowth; higher still there is a bit of coffee, but the last two thirds of the journey upward is wholly uninhabited. Only once or twice in the ascent does one catch a glimpse of the goal until one emerges from a brown jungle of giant grasses, to find its grim gray walls towering sheer overhead.

Before this mammoth structure the memory of Sans Souci sinks into insignificance. As the latter is ornate and cheerful in architecture, the citadel is savage in its unadorned masculine strength. The mighty stone walls, twenty feet thick in many cases, are square-cut and formidable in their great unbroken surfaces. The northern side is red with fungus, the rest merely weather-dulled. Even the cannon of to-day would find them worthy adversaries. Time, which has wrought such havoc on the palace at the mountain’s foot, has scarcely made an impression on the exterior of this cyclopean structure, and even within only the wooden portions have given way. Great iron-studded doors groaning on their mammoth hinges give admittance to an endless labyrinth of gloomy chambers, dungeon-like in all but their astonishing size. Cannon of the largest makes known when the fortress was constructed are to be found everywhere, some of them still pointing dizzily out their embrasures, stretching in row after row of superimposed batteries, others lying where the rotting of their heavy wooden supports has left them. Many bear the royal arms of Spain’s most famous monarchs, several those of Queen Elizabeth, and the rest evidences of English and French origin. Tradition has it that Christophe mounted three hundred and sixty-five cannon of large caliber in the citadel, and it is small wonder that his successors have not had the courage to attempt to remove them. The imagination grows numb and helpless at the thought of transporting these immense weapons by mere man power to the summit of a steep mountain three thousand feet above the plain below. Yet not only these, but the uncounted mammoth blocks of stone of which the acres of thick walls are constructed, the mortars, the iron chests, the smaller cannon, the heaps of huge iron cannon-supports, the pyramids of cannonballs that are found wherever the footsteps turn in the clammy chambers or the jungle-grown courtyards, were all brought here by sheer force of human arms.

Higher and higher the visitor mounts by great dank stairways through story after story of immense rooms, the vaulted stone ceilings of a few partly fallen in, most of them wholly intact, all dedicated to the grim business of war, to come out at last in an upper courtyard with the ruins of a chapel and the mammoth stone vault in which Christophe lies buried. Some of the marvels of the place are the stone basins always full of clear running water, the source of which no man has ever been able to discover. Here the group of prisoners whom the captain had sent ahead with the paraphernalia and provisions for an elaborate picnic lunch were shivering in their thin striped garments until their black faces seemed to be blurred of outline. Yet they had less cause to tremble than their fellows of a century ago who were herded in this same inclosure to await their turn for being thrown from the ramparts above. For such was Christophe’s favorite method of capital punishment. The throwing-off place is a long stone platform ten feet wide at the very top of the citadel. From its edge the sheer wall drops to a sickening depth before it joins the mountain-slope almost as steep, forming that great hack in the summit which looks from “the Cape” like a natural precipice. Men hurled from this height must have fallen nearly a thousand feet before they struck the bushy boulder-strewn face of the mountain, down which their mutilated remains bounded and slid to where they brought up against a ledge of rock or a larger bush, there to lie until their whitened bones crumbled into dust. Multitudes of his subjects are said to have met this fate under the black tyrant, some in punishment for real crimes, more for having unintentionally aroused his enmity or to satisfy his whims. The story goes that Christophe and his British ambassador once got into a friendly argument on the subject of soldierly discipline. The black emperor contended that there was no order which his troops would not unhesitatingly obey, and to prove his point he led his guest to the top of the citadel, where he set a company to drilling and at a given command caused it to march off the edge of the wall. This particular tale should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, but there is unquestionable evidence of similar playful acts on the part of the heartless monarch.

Once the visitor can withdraw his eyes from the jagged Golgotha below, the view spread out before him is rivaled by few in the world. All Haiti seems to be visible in every detail: the ocean, the entire course of meandering rivers, high mountains, deep valleys, a sea of greenery, form a circular panorama bounded only by the limitless horizon. Little houses in tiny clearings on the plain below, a dozen towns and villages, “the Cape,” Ouanaminthe, even the hills of Santo Domingo, stand forth as clearly as if they were only a bare mile away, some flashing in the tropical sunshine, others dulled by the great cloud shadows crawling languidly across the landscape.

Henri Christophe was a full-blooded negro who passed the early days of his life as the slave of a French planter. When the blacks rose against their masters he led the revolt on his own plantation and quickly avenged his years of bondage. Serving first as a common soldier under Toussaint l’Ouverture, he rose to the rank of general and became one of the chief supporters of Dessalines. The assassination of the latter in 1806 left Christophe commander-in-chief of the Haitian forces and led to his election as the first President of Haiti. His first official act was to protest against the newly adopted constitution on the ground that it did not give him sufficient power. Civil war broke out between him and the mulatto general Pétion, who drove him into the north and became president in his place, leaving Christophe the official ranking of an outlaw. Pétion, however, was never able to conquer his rival. Proclaiming himself president under a new constitution drawn up by an assembly of his own choosing, the rebel took possession of the northern half of the country and ruled it for thirteen long years with one of the bloodiest hands known to history.

In 1811 he proclaimed himself king, honored his black consort with the title of queen, and proceeded to form a Haitian nobility consisting of his own numerous children as “princes of the royal blood,” three “princes of the kingdom,” eight “dukes,” twenty “counts,” thirty-seven “barons,” and eleven “chevaliers,” each and all of them former slaves or the descendants of slaves. These jet-black “nobles,” many of whom added to their titles the names of such native towns as Limonade, Marmalade, and the like, soon became the laughing-stock of more advanced civilizations, though candor forces the admission that Christophe was only following the example of those who ennobled the robber barons of Europe in earlier centuries, with the slight difference in the matter of complexions. As “King Henry” he surrounded himself with all the pomp and ceremony of royalty, erected nine palaces, of which Sans Souci was the most magnificent and the only one that has not completely disappeared, built eight royal châteaux, maintained great stables of horses and royal coaches, innumerable retainers and servants, and a tremendous bodyguard. Later, feeling that he had not done himself full honor, he named himself hereditary emperor under the title of “Henri I,” and having come within an ace of conquering the entire country, settled down to govern his portion of it in a manner that would have been the envy of Nero.

The name of Christophe, in so far as it is known at all, is synonymous with unbridled brutality. Yet there is a certain violent virtue in the efforts by which the ex-slave sought to force his unprogressive black subjects to climb the slippery ladder of civilization. He founded schools, distributed the estates of the exiled Frenchmen among the veterans of his army, reëstablished commercial relations with England and the United States, created workshops in which the word “can’t” was taboo. His methods were simple and direct. Causing a French carriage to be placed at the disposition of his workmen, he ordered them to produce another exactly like it within a fortnight on pain of death. Similar tasks were meted out in all lines of endeavor, the tyrant refusing to admit that what white men could do his black subjects could not do also. His despotism, however, was not bounded by the mere desire for advancement. When he passed, the people were compelled to kneel, and death was the portion of the man who dared look upon his face without permission. Thievery he abhorred, and inflicted capital punishment for the mere stealing of a chicken. It came to be a regular part of his daily life to order men, women, and even children thrown from the summit of the citadel.

Tradition asserts that thirty thousand of his black subjects perished in the building of this chief monument to his ambition. All the French and Belgian architects and the skilled mechanics who worked on it are said to have been assassinated when it was finished. The tale is still going the rounds in Haiti that the emperor once came upon a gang of workmen idling about one of the massive blocks of stone destined for the citadel above, and demanded the reason for their inaction.

“It is too heavy, Sire,” replied the workmen; “we cannot carry it to the mountain-top.”

“Line up,” ordered the tyrant; then turning to his bodyguard, he commanded, “Shoot every fourth man. Perhaps you will feel stronger now,” he remarked to the survivors as he rode onward.

On his return, however, the stone was no higher up the hill.

“It is quite impossible, your Majesty,” gasped the foreman; “it will not budge.”

“Throw that man from the precipice,” said the despot, “and repeat the order of this morning.”

The remaining workmen, according to the tale, succeeded in carrying the stone to its destination.

Such stories always hover about those mighty monuments that seem impossible without supernatural aid, yet no one who has beheld the success with which the forces of gravity have been derided in this incredible undertaking, incredible even in the enormousness of the structure itself without taking into account its extraordinary situation, will question its cost in such details as a few thousand more or less human lives. Obsessed with the idea that the French would try to reconquer the country, Christophe had resolved to erect a stronghold that would be an impregnable place of resistance against them, or at worst a “nest-egg of liberty,” which would afford certain refuge to the _défenseurs de la patrie_ until better days dawned for them. There he stored vast quantities of grain and food, of ammunition, flints, bullets, powder, soggy heaps of which are still to be found, clothing, tools, and a gold reserve amounting to more than thirty million dollars. His enemies saw in the citadel only a pretext to indulge his innate barbarism, to decimate his people for the mere pleasure of playing Nero. It may be that this is not a just verdict. Christophe felt that he incarnated the soul of his black brethren and that belief made him wholly insensible to any other consideration. The mere fact that his lack of perspective and his ignorance of such details as the feeding of a long-besieged garrison made his seemingly impregnable fortress an utter waste of effort may speak poorly for the instruction which his French masters gave him, but it does not belittle the actual accomplishment of his superhuman undertaking.

Christophe as violently died as he had lived. Stricken with apoplexy in the church of Limonade, he attempted to cure himself by heroic measures, such as rum and red-pepper baths. Finding this of no avail and refusing to outlive his despotic power over his subjects, he shot himself through the head. Barely was his body cold, if we are to believe current stories, when his officers and retainers sacked the palace of Sans Souci in which it lay, the wealth of many Haitian families of this day being based on the spoils from this and his other royal residences. The corpse was carried to the citadel and covered with quick lime, but tradition asserts that it retained its life-like appearance for many years afterward and was on view to all who cared to peer through the glass heading of the vault until a later ruler decreed this exposition “indecent,” and ordered the remains to be covered with earth.