French West Indies

“ The result is a division of responsibility from power and frequent deadlocks that make the apparent autonomy of the island a continual process of “standing pat.”
The few white officials are slow, antiquated, precedence-ridden, in striking contrast to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly informed rulers of our own dependencies. Indeed, a journey to the West Indies is apt to cause the American to rearrange his notions of the relative efficiency of the English, and the French or ourselves, as colonizers. ”

“ The French and British islands are much less given to perpetrating poetry than those in which the Spanish tongue is spoken, and show an equal disinclination to producing the heavy volumes on subjects too ponderous for the authors themselves which burden the dusty book-shelves of Ibero-American lands. On the whole, the West Indies are a virgin field for the literary artist who cares to turn his attention to them. ”

“ At the close of the Thirty Years' War, too, a host of French and English adventurers, who had fattened upon Germany and her misfortunes, were left without a livelihood, and doubtless many resorted to emigration as the sole means of continuing their life of freedom and even of licence. Coming to the West Indies these men, so various in origin and character, hoped soon to acquire there the riches which they lost or coveted at home; and their expectations deceived, they often broke in a formal and absolute manner the bonds which attached them to their fellow humanity. ”

“ A population fantastic, astonishing,—a population of the Arabian Nights. It is many-colored; but the general dominant tint is yellow, like that of the town itself—yellow in the interblending of all the hues characterizing mulâtresse, capresse, griffe, quarteronne, métisse, chabine,—a general effect of rich brownish yellow. You are among a people of half-breeds,—the finest mixed race of the West Indies.
Straight as palms, and supple and tall, these colored women and men impress one powerfully by their dignified carriage and easy elegance of movement. ”

“ Now, there are two powerful forces working underground in the West Indies. One is the Spanish and negro combination, which desires to shake off all the British, French and Dutch possessions, and to create a Creole Empire of the Islands. The other is an English plan, to weld all the British islands in the West Indies into a single Confederation and to buy as many of the smaller isles from France and Holland as may seem possible. Both are hostile to the extension of American power in the Gulf of Mexico. Possibly, some European power is back of this plot. ”

“ The French did something in their own way, and the Dutch were not far behind. Indeed, the French may claim to have set the example for the Elizabethan freebooters, for in the first half of the sixteenth century privateers flocked to the Spanish Indies from Dieppe, Brest and the towns of the Basque coast. The gleam of the golden lingots of Peru, and the pale lights of the emeralds from the mountains of New Granada, exercised a hypnotic influence not only on ordinary seamen but on merchants and on seigneurs with depleted fortunes. ”

“ Large numbers of Chinese workmen were imported in the middle of the last century; Hindu coolies, indentured for five years, were introduced in 1839, and though the Government of India has recently forbidden this species of servitude, fully one third of the inhabitants are East Indians or their more or less full-blooded descendants. Toward the end of the eighteenth century large numbers of French refugees took up their residence in Trinidad, and the island to-day has more inhabitants of this race than any of the West Indies not under French rule. ”

“ Schools are closely centralized, as in France, and not particularly numerous or effective, though there is less illiteracy than the census of the French islanders who helped to dig the Panama Canal seemed to indicate. Among the surprises in store for the visitor is the profound patriotism of almost all classes. Twenty thousand Martiniquais went to France as conscripts, while the British West Indies sent only volunteers, yet only one British island can in any way compare with their French neighbors in loyalty to the homeland. ”

“ We see how the British colonies on the continent have outgrown those of the French; notwithstanding, they have ever engaged the savages to keep us back. Their advantages over us in the West Indies, are, 1st. A capital neglect in former reigns, in suffering them to have a firm possession of so many valuable islands, that we had a better title to than they. 2. The French, unable to push their settlements effectually on the continent, have bent their views to islands, and poured vast numbers into them. ”

“ Even the palms are powerless to lend the place a redly tropical look;—the streets are narrow without being picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;—the manners, the costumes, the style of living, the system of business are thoroughly English;—the population lacks visible originality; and its extraordinary activity, so oddly at variance with the quiet indolence of other West Indian peoples, seems almost unnatural. Pressure of numbers has largely contributed to this characteristic; but Barbadoes would be in any event, by reason of position alone, a busy colony. ”

“ With their great wealth and resources, moreover, they had few manufactures and offered a tempting field for exploitation by English merchants. The French colonies, on the other hand, were easily supplied with merchandise from France, and in event of a war would prove more dangerous as neighbours than the Spaniards. To allow the French to become lords of San Domingo would have been to give them an undisputed predominance in the West Indies and make them masters of the neighbouring seas. ”

“ The Spaniards nevertheless did, as we have seen, engage in active reprisal, especially as they knew the cutting of logwood to be but the preliminary step to the {211} growth of English settlements upon the coasts of Yucatan and Honduras, settlements, indeed, which later crystallized into a British colony. The Queen-Regent of Spain sent orders and instructions to her governors in the West Indies to encourage privateers to take and punish as pirates all English and French who robbed and carried away wood within their jurisdictions ”

“ From the shores to the steeper heights of the mountain the swiftly sloping island is covered with sugar-cane; above that the woods are said to 340be full of monkeys, descendants of the pets which British soldiers brought with them when St. Kitts was a bone of contention between the French and the English. With one slight exception, this and the neighboring island of Nevis are the only West Indies inhabited by our racial ancestors, which are so troublesome that their direct descendants below have given up trying to plant their gardens more than half-way up the mountains. ”

“ The island was alternately Spanish and French till Picton took it in 1797, since which time it has remained English. The Carib part of the population has long vanished. The rest of it is a medley of English, French, Spaniards, negroes, and coolies. The English, chiefly migratory, go there to make money and go home with it. The old colonial families have few representatives left, but the island prospers, trade increases, coolies increase, cocoa and coffee plantations and indigo plantations increase. Port of Spain, the capital, grows annually ”

“ The West Indies are a small limb in the great body corporate of the British Empire, but there is no great and no small in the life of nations. The avoidable decay of the smallest member is an injury to the whole. Let it be once known and felt that England regards the West Indies as essentially one with herself, and the English in the islands will resume their natural position, and respect and order will come back, and those once thriving colonies will again advance with the rest on the high road of civilisation and prosperity. ”

“ In studying the West Indies it is necessary to use a map at each meeting to keep clearly in mind the location of islands: the Bahamas, the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and the Caribbean or Leeward and Windward Islands. A brief study of Columbus should introduce the whole series. Follow with the story of the Spanish possession, and then take the coming of the English and the Dutch, their colonies, growth of power, and the wars which ensued. ”

“ In our dreams of Empire we prefer to think of Canada, Africa, and strenuous Australasia. Commercially and politically our West Indies are, according to the general idea, more than half derelict, and wholly without the attractions of wealth and promise. ”

“ Our trade has suffered, and is suffering extensive injuries in the West Indies from the cruisers and agents of the French republic; and communications have been received from its minister here, which indicate the danger of a further disturbance of our commerce by its authority ”

“ Acres of the most fertile country in the world lie fallow within the confines of this island, whose name is written large in Britain’s naval history. Virgin forests of wild fruit trees still cover vast tracts of a country which one day will be claimed by English husbandmen. Like Jamaica, Dominica cries out for men—new men, new energy, new enterprise. In England we associate our West Indian islands with only a dead prosperity. In the West Indies one encounters ample evidence of present wealth and great promise of future riches. ”

“ Possibly if the Panama or Nicaragua Canal is ever finished things may be a little better, but at present the outlook is very dismal.
In attempting to compress the story of the West Indies and Spanish Main within the covers of one volume we have undertaken a task by no means easy. Every island and every province has its own tale, and to do them all justice would require a hundred books. [Pg xiv] Every West Indian will find something missing—some event unmentioned which is of the greatest importance to his particular community. ”

“ It must have been an extraordinary community, and to understand it we must remember the conditions prevailing. Bryan Edwards, in his History of the British West Indies, published in 1793, called them "the principal source of the national opulence and maritime power of England"; and without the stream of wealth pouring into Great Britain from Barbados and Jamaica, the long struggle with France would have been impossible.
The term "as rich as a West Indian" was proverbial, and in 1803 the West Indies were accountable for one-third of the imports and exports of Great Britain. ”

“ The successful propagation of this plant drew to the islands crowds of adventurers, many of them men of considerable wealth. The West Indies were for many years used by the English government as penal settlements, the prisoners working on the plantations as slaves. In 1655 a British force made an unsuccessful attack on Haiti, but a sudden descent on Jamaica was more fortunate in its result, and that rich and beautiful island has since remained in the possession of Great Britain. ”

“ Round you spread the tropics. Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. ”

“ Latterly the West Indies have sunk into neglect by Europe. Except for the difficulties of the planters their history is almost a blank sheet. Few know .anything about the beautiful islands or the grand forests of the mainland. Even the discovery of gold in Guiana, which goes to confirm the reports of Ralegh, three centuries ago, is only known to a few. Ruin and desolation have fallen upon them since the peace of 1815 and the emancipation. Even the negro—the protégé of the benevolent—is no longer the object of interest he once was. ”

“ Let men who have such materials, and such models, proscribe all tawdry and poor European art—most of it a bad imitation of bad Greek, or worse Renaissance—and trust to Nature and the facts which lie nearest them. But when will a time come for the West Indies when there will be wealth and civilisation enough to make such an art possible? Soon, if all the employers of labour were like the gentleman at whose house we were that day, and like some others in the same island. ”

“ From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our then vital conquests. ”

“ What a race, of mingled Spaniard and Indian, might have grown up throughout the West Indies. What a life, what a society, what an art, what a science it might have developed ere now, equalling, even surpassing, that of Ionia, Athens, and Sicily, till the famed isles and coasts of Greece should have been almost forgotten in the new fame of the isles and coasts of the Caribbean Sea. ”