The Sugar Islands (32 page)

Montserrat includes within its narrow confines all of the separate and varied features that distinguish and adorn the other islands. Much of its sand is black, but it has white beaches too. Its interior is mountainous, its highest mountain being over three thousand feet; but the mountains do not jostle one another
as they do in Dominica. They stand alone, with the ground sloping downwards, gently, through forest and coconut groves to the trim cotton fields and the rows of lime trees. The green upon its flanks is as vivid as in Dominica. But the whole thing has a designed, architectural effect that Dominica lacks. Moreover, because the mountains are not clustered close, you have a sense of breadth and distance. In Dominica you look down and you look up, but you never look across. In Montserrat you look from one plateau to another, over deep, broad valleys.

I made a trip on foot across the island; it took a bare four hours; and the paths were neither abruptly steep nor slippery. It was easy going. We passed the crater of a volcano. The air was sickly with the smell of sulphur. It was a vast vat of a cauldron, with its rocks stained green and yellow and the tepid steaming water cloudily, milkily white like Syrian Arak. St. Lucia can offer nothing more impressive. And when we crossed the centre and could see the white line of foam along the windward beach, there was that same sense of entering a new barbaric kingdom that I had felt in Dominica.

At one time Montserrat was predominantly a sugar island, but the collapse of sugar was not followed by the collapse of a whole way of living. The planters, finding that they could no longer profitably market sugar, switched over to limes and cotton. Plantations were not abandoned nor the ground let run to waste. The old stone windmills stand now as picturesque relics over the countryside, and the houses are built among the ruins of old aqueducts and the round mills that the oxen worked. Only in Barbados will you find as well preserved the fabric of the old world of sugar. There is a good hotel in Montserrat.

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1947

For
those travelling to the West Indies from Europe by the Elder and Fyffe line, Barbados is the first West Indian island and for many it must, as an introduction to the tropics, be a disappointment. It has none of the high-mountained splendour of Trinidad nor the luxurious foliage of Colombo. With its nickname of ‘Little England', it seems at a first glance another lsle of Wight; less foreign than Alderney or Guernsey. The negroes who clamber on to the ship to dive for pennies seem as out of place, as inappropriate, as the white soles of their feet against the ebony of their ankles. It takes time to appreciate its particular and peculiar charm, its ‘lived-in' atmosphere.

Barbados is the most English of the islands. No other flag has ever flown there. Not once has it been invaded. Undiscovered by Columbus, it was visited by some Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century, who christened it Los Barbados because of its bearded fig trees and considerately left some pigs behind them for the benefit of any sailors who might be shipwrecked there. When the first English settlers arrived it was to find themselves unopposed. Caribs are believed to have lived there once, but in February 1627 it was on an uninhabited island that the first English stores were landed.

The Barbadian story is one of a steadily maintained tradition, unbroken since the days of the first settlement. In a sense it has less ‘history' than any of the other islands. It was affected inevitably by the various wars with France, suffering considerably during the American War of Independence through its inability to trade with the Thirteen Colonies, and in the Napoleonic Wars it was only saved from invasion at the last moment. But it has been spared the sieges, the massacres, the riots of which practically every other island except Antigua has been the victim. Hurricanes and slumps alone have disturbed the rhythm of its existence. Its lack of drama is, however, due as much as other
islands' excess of drama, to the caprice of history. It is the most eastern island. The prevailing wind blows from the east. It was very difficult in the days of sail for an enemy to attack it from the west. The defender was always at an advantage.

Its lack of history has made Barbados unique. It has also given it a personal intimate charm that none of the other islands have to the same extent. It may not be attractive at a first sight—or, rather, it may be disappointing at a first sight because it is not attractive in a particular, in an expected way. For although there is a very real beauty about the broad brown river that curves by the Da Costa warehouses, between the low wooden wharves, past the cluster of barges and of schooners, the tourist leaning against the taffrail may well grumblingly inquire where are the bright colours, where is the sense of spectacle by which the agency folders had lured him to the ticket counter.

And, indeed, for a twenty-four-hour stay it can hardly fail to be a disappointment. There is not a great deal to do or see. The island is mainly flat. There is a lack of fine views. There is a monotony about the endless fields of sugar cane. There are sandy beaches, and the aquatic club, which is open to visitors, has a good pier and a café, whose gramophone will play to you while you swim. But it is very crowded. If you ask the advice of a tourist tout, he will suggest that you drive across the island to the Crane or to Sam Lord's for lunch. It is an hour's drive. The sugar cane is so high on either side of the road that you will not see a lot. You will lunch well, sampling the local speciality, fried flying-fish; you will sit on a terrace and watch the Atlantic breakers beat against the rocks. It is all quite impressive, but it is not what you expected when you booked your ticket. I have heard more than one round-trip tourist say, ‘Oh yes, I had a grand time in the end, but I must say that I felt a little alarmed when I saw Barbados. If it's all going to be like that, I thought—‘ I have not, however, met anyone who has stayed there any length of time and who took the preliminary precaution of acquiring suitable letters of introduction who did not come to appreciate the intimate quality of the island.

Barbados has an integrated family atmosphere that the other islands lack. In many ways it is more prosperous. It is one of the most densely populated territories in the world—over a thousand to the square mile. The Blacks outnumber the Whites by nine
to one. But though Barbados is almost the only island where the colour line is still strictly drawn,
¹
the loyalty of the negroes to their island is very great. They have known no other masters, and when slavery was abolished they continued to work happily on their old estates as hired men, nor did their masters show any great haste to hurry back to England and invest their compensation money there. Barbados has few of the labour disputes that so constantly distract Trinidad and Jamaica.

There are many old-established families in Barbados. E. S. P. Haynes, when he heard that I was going out, gave me a letter of introduction to some cousins of his there. They lived some twenty miles out of Bridgetown in a fine Georgian plantation house; on one of the walls I saw a reproduction of the portrait of a venerable gentleman in eighteenth-century breeches and scarlet coat which hangs over the mantelpiece of my friend's London dining-room. ‘That's a very familiar picture,' I remarked. My host nodded.‘You've seen that in Ted's dining-room, of course. It's the head of the junior branch that went back to England.' I have always thought of my solicitor with his long legal background as a direct scion of the eighteenth century. It was strange to hear him spoken of as part of a junior branch. It was strange, too, to hear of the elder son staying in a colony and the younger son going to England to seek his fortune. But that reversal of customary roles is not untypical of Barbados.

And indeed it is very appropriate that it should be in connection with a figure so Augustan as my solicitor that I should have had just that experience. For the eighteenth century marked the great period of West Indian prosperity, and in Barbados the eighteenth century is still alive. It was in that period that the majority of the plantation houses were built—thick-walled brick houses of formal, dignified proportions. The rooms are high and cool and rather dark as a protection against the sun; against the walls there is the glow of old, well-polished wood and the gleam of brass. On the desks are the inkwells of an earlier day and at night the tables are bright with silver. There is a parade, slightly starched atmosphere about it all that is very welcome after the general informality of the tropics. A planter from Jamaica arriving in Barbados would feel very much like a New Yorker visiting in Boston.

Barbados is very well provided with hotels, from the
grand luxe
of the Marine, Four Winds, St. Peter, and the Colony St. James, to unpretentious, inexpensive boarding-houses where the accommodation is invariably clean and the food well served. The bathing is excellent and the climate pleasant. The dry, cool season lasts from December to the end of May. There is no malaria. Sugar is the chief product, though cotton has recently become important.

¹
In 1897 Barbados was the only island that would not include coloured players in its cricket team against Lord Hawke's touring side.

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1948

Asmall
British island in the Leeward Group, a flat arid stretch of land, Very subject to drought, fifteen miles long and at no point more than three miles wide, it can only be reached by sloop from the French-Dutch island of St. Martin. It is a curious island. It has never known prosperity: its climate is too dry, its soil too stony. It has some extensive saltponds, it exports cattle to the French islands and a little sea-island cotton to Great Britain. But even in the eighteenth century it could only find employment for two thousand five hundred slaves. A traveller in 1825 could find nothing to compliment but the quality of its yams. The only white people there today are transients—priests, ministers, a doctor, government officials. The arrival of a white man is so unusual that I ought not to have been surprised when the boatman said to me on the way across, ‘I presume, Sah, you Jehovah's Witness.'

Anguilla has no town. In a quarter called the valley, there is a concentration of houses but there is nothing resembling a main street, and there are only two shops, one of which because it houses a cotton gin is called a factory. Yet surprisingly enough five thousand people live there under conditions of relative comfort. Many of the small bungalows that smatter the landscape are built of concrete with cisterns under the verandas, while most of the others are solid wooden structures with shingle roofs and outside ovens. Over five hundred subscribers are registered at the public library; the large Anglican church is packed on Sundays with a well-dressed congregation and High Mass is celebrated with an impressively smooth drill. The explanation of this apparently anomalous situation is that the island's intrinsic poverty forces its young men to emigrate to the rich Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba whence they send back gilders to their families. Some time ago complaints were made that the captain of one of the sloops was tampering with the mail
bags and the authorities were surprised to learn from the extent of the claims submitted how much money was being posted home. Though Anguilla is an apparent liability to the British taxpayer, it is possible that in another ledger, in terms of hard currency, it is an asset.

from
HOT COUNTRIES

Written in
1929

Trinidad
is a twelve-hour journey from Barbados. You feel as though you were coming into a different world when you wake in the morning and see, green and high on either side of you, the outline of the Bocas. You anchor a mile or so away from Port of Spain, and the hills are so high that in relation to them you fancy that there is no more than a village awaiting you at their foot. The size of Port of Spain astonishes you. It is like no other town in the West Indies. Straight, wide, and clean, the streets run from the savannah to the sea, their uniformity contrasting curiously with the polyglot population that throngs its sidewalks. Every people of the world seems to be represented here. There are Indian women in long white robes, their noses pierced with gold and brass decorations. There are Chinese signs over the shops. There are notices in Spanish. There are the inevitable negroes. There are many French. Trinidad has passed through several hands. The outline of Venezuela is only seven miles away.

It is a rich and fertile island. Ninety-five per cent, of the world's asphalt comes from there. The roads are smooth and wide over which you drive through landscape infinitely varied and infinitely lovely. There are cane fields and plains of coconut. In the hills the scarlet of the immortelle shelters and shadows the immature cocoa growth. In the south there is the barren stretch of the pitch lake and the wooden derricks of the oil-fields. From Trinidad comes all the angostura of the world.

Few products have a more romantic history.

A hundred years ago, in South America, a Dr. Siegert produced a blend of aromatic and tonic bitters that he called ‘aromatic bitters'. It was produced as a medicine solely and it is as a medicine that it appears on the tariff of the United States, although ninety per cent, of its contents are honest rum. It was made by Dr. Siegert for circulation among his friends and
patients. It was not till its success led to exportation that it was christened ‘angostura' after the town where at that time the doctor was headquartered and where his factory remained till the unsettled condition of Venezuelan politics counselled a move to Trinidad. Today the concoction that was devised as a cure for diarrhoea is the flavouring of ninety per cent, of the world's cocktails. A million bottles are exported yearly. The secret of its ingredients has never been divulged. Only three men, the three partners, know them. They do the mixing of it personally in their laboratory. Chemists are unable to diagnose its consistent parts. They recognize that one out of five drugs has been employed, but they do not know which. Till they can find out there will remain only one angostura. No history of the West Indies would be complete that did not contain a chapter on it.