At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

by Charles Kingsley

Very interesting was the first glimpse of Hindoos; and still more of Hindoos in the West Indies—the surplus of one of the oldest civilisations of the old world, come hither to replenish the new; novel was the sight of the dusky limbs swarming up and down among the rocks beneath the Matapalo shade; the group in the water as we landed, bathing and dressing themselves at the same time, after the modest and graceful Hindoo fashion; the visit to the wooden barracks, where a row of men was ranged on one side of the room, with their women and children on the other, having their name, caste, native village, and so forth, taken down before they were sent off to the estates to which they were indentured. Three things were noteworthy; first, the healthy cheerful look of all, speaking well for the care and good feeding which they had had on board ship; next, the great variety in their faces and complexions. Almost all of them were low-caste people. Indeed few high-caste Hindoos, except some Sepoys who found it prudent to emigrate after the rebellion, have condescended, or dared, to cross the ‘dark water’; and only a very few of those who come west are Mussulmans. But among the multitude of inferior castes who do come there is a greater variety of feature and shape of skull than in an average multitude, as far as I have seen, of any European nation. Caste, the physiognomist soon sees, began in a natural fact. It meant difference, not of rank, but of tribe and language; and India is not, as we are apt to fancy, a nation: it is a world. One must therefore regard this emigration of the Coolies, like anything else which tends to break down caste, as a probable step forward in their civilisation. For it must tend to undermine in them, and still more in their children, the petty superstitions of old tribal distinctions; and must force them to take their stand on wider and sounder ground, and see that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that.’

The third thing noteworthy in the crowd which cooked, chatted, lounged, sauntered idly to and fro under the Matapalos—the pillared air-roots of which must have put them in mind of their own Banyans at home—was their good manners. One saw in a moment that one was among gentlemen and ladies. The dress of many of the men was nought but a scarf wrapped round the loins; that of most of the women nought but the longer scarf which the Hindoo woman contrives to arrange in a most graceful, as well as a perfectly modest covering, even for her feet and head. These garments, and perhaps a brass pot, were probably all the worldly goods of most of them just then. But every attitude, gesture, tone, was full of grace; of ease, courtesy, self-restraint, dignity—of that ‘sweetness and light,’ at least in externals, which Mr. Matthew Arnold desiderates. I am well aware that these people are not perfect; that, like most heathen folk and some Christian, their morals are by no means spotless, their passions by no means trampled out. But they have acquired—let Hindoo scholars tell how and where—a civilisation which shows in them all day long; which draws the European to them and them to the European, whenever the latter is worthy of the name of a civilised man, instinctively, and by the mere interchange of glances; a civilisation which must make it easy for the Englishman, if he will but do his duty, not only to make use of these people, but to purify and ennoble them.

Another thing was noteworthy about the Coolies, at the very first glance, and all we saw afterwards proved that that first glance was correct; I mean their fondness for children. If you took notice of a child, not only the mother smiled thanks and delight, but the men around likewise, as if a compliment had been paid to their whole company. We saw afterwards almost daily proofs of the Coolie men’s fondness for their children; of their fondness also—an excellent sign that the morale is not destroyed at the root—for dumb animals. A Coolie cow or donkey is petted, led about tenderly, tempted with tit-bits. Pet animals, where they can be got, are the Coolie’s delight, as they are the delight of the wild Indian. I wish I could say the same of the Negro. His treatment of his children and of his beasts of burden is, but too often, as exactly opposed to that of the Coolie as are his manners. No wonder that the two races do not, and it is to be feared never will, amalgamate; that the Coolie, shocked by the unfortunate awkwardness of gesture and vulgarity of manners of the average Negro, and still more of the Negress, looks on them as savages; while the Negro, in his turn hates the Coolie as a hard-working interloper, and despises him as a heathen; or that heavy fights between the two races arise now and then, in which the Coolie, in spite of his slender limbs, has generally the advantage over the burly Negro, by dint of his greater courage, and the terrible quickness with which he wields his beloved weapon, the long hardwood quarterstaff.

But to return: we rowed away with a hundred confused, but most pleasant new impressions, amid innumerable salaams to the Governor by these kindly courteous people, and then passed between the larger limestone islands into the roadstead of Chaguaramas, which ought to be, and some day may be, the harbour for the British West India fleet; and for the shipping, too, of that commerce which, as Humboldt prophesied, must some day spring up between Europe and the boundless wealth of the Upper Orinoco, as yet lying waste. Already gold discoveries in the Sierra de Parima (of which more hereafter) are indicating the honesty of poor murdered Raleigh. Already the good President of Ciudad Bolivar (Angostura) has disbanded the ruffian army, which is the usual curse of a Spanish American republic, and has inaugurated, it is to be hoped, a reign of peace and commerce. Already an American line of steamers runs as far as Nutrias, some eight hundred miles up the Orinoco and Apure; while a second will soon run up the Meta, almost to Santa Fé de Bogotá, and bring down the Orinoco the wealth, not only of Southern Venezuela, but of central New Grenada; and then a day may come when the admirable harbour of Chaguaramas may be one of the entrepôts of the world; if a certain swamp to windward, which now makes the place pestilential, could but be drained. The usual method of so doing now is to lay the swamp as dry as possible by open ditches, and then plant it, with coconuts, whose roots have some mysterious power both of drying and purifying the soil; but were Chaguaramas ever needed as an entrepôt, it would not be worth while to wait for coconuts to grow. A dyke across the mouth, and a steam-pump on it, as in the fens of Norfolk and of Guiana, to throw the land-water over into the sea, would probably expel the evil spirit of malaria at once and for ever.

We rowed on past the Boca de Monos, by which we had entered the gulf at first, and looked out eagerly enough for sharks, which are said to swarm at Chaguaramas. But no warning fin appeared above the ripple; only, more than once, close to the stern of the boat, a heavy fish broke water with a sharp splash and swirl, which was said to be a Barracouta, following us up in mere bold curiosity, but perfectly ready to have attacked any one who fell overboard. These Barracoutas—Sphyrænas as the learned, or ‘pike’ as the sailors call them, though they are no kin to our pike at home—are, when large, nearly as dangerous as a shark. In some parts of the West Indies folk dare not bathe for fear of them; for they lie close inshore, amid the heaviest surf; and woe to any living thing which they come across. Moreover, they have this somewhat mean advantage over you, that while, if they eat you, you will agree with them perfectly, you cannot eat them, at least at certain or uncertain seasons of the year, without their disagreeing with you, without sickness, trembling pains in all joints, falling off of nails and hair for years to come, and possible death. Those who may wish to know more of the poisonous fishes of the West Indies may profitably consult a paper in the Proceedings of the Scientific Association of Trinidad by that admirable naturalist, and—let me say of him (though I have not the honour of knowing him) what has long been said by all who have that honour—admirable man, the Hon. Richard Hill of Jamaica. He mentions some thirteen species which are more or less poisonous, at all events at times: but on the cause of their unwholesomeness he throws little light; and still less on the extraordinary but undoubted fact that the same species may be poisonous in one island and harmless in another; and that of two species so close as to be often considered as the same, one may be poisonous, the other harmless. The yellow-billed sprat, [{102}] for instance, is usually so poisonous that ‘death has occurred from eating it in many cases immediately, and in some recorded instances even before the fish was swallowed.’ Yet a species caught with this, and only differing from it (if indeed it be distinct) by having a yellow spot instead of a black one on the gill-cover, is harmless. Mr. Hill attributes the poisonous quality, in many cases, to the foul food which the fish get from coral reefs, such as the Formigas bank, midway between Cuba, Hayti, and Jamaica, where, as you ‘approach it from the east, you find the cheering blandness of the sea-breeze suddenly changing to the nauseating smell of a fish-market.’ There, as off similar reefs in the Bahamas and round Anegada, as we’ll as at one end of St. Kitts, the fish are said to be all poisonous. If this theory be correct, the absence of coral reefs round Trinidad may help to account for the fact stated by Mr. Joseph, that poisonous fish are unknown in that island. The statement, however, is somewhat too broadly made; for the Chouf-chouf, [{103a}] a prickly fish which blows itself out like a bladder, and which may be seen hanging in many a sailor’s cottage in England, is as evil-disposed in Trinidad as elsewhere. The very vultures will not eat it; and while I was in the island a family of Coolies, in spite of warning, contrived to kill themselves with the nasty vermin: the only one who had wit enough to refuse it being an idiot boy.

These islands of the Bocas, three in number, are some two miles long each, and some eight hundred to one thousand feet in height; at least, so say the surveyors. To the eye, as is usual in the Tropics, they look much lower. One is inclined here to estimate hills at half, or less than half, their actual height; and that from causes simple enough. Not only does the intense clearness of the atmosphere make the summits appear much nearer than in England; but the trees on the summit increase the deception. The mind, from home association, supposes them to be of the same height as average English trees on a hill-top—say fifty feet—and estimates, rapidly and unconsciously, the height of the mountain by that standard. The trees are actually nearer a hundred and fifty than fifty feet high; and the mountain is two or three times as big as it looks.

But it is not their height, nor the beauty of their outline, nor the size of the trunks which still linger on them here and there, which gives these islands their special charm. It is their exquisite little land-locked southern coves—places to live and die in—

‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot.’

Take as an example that into which we rowed that day in Monos, as the old Spaniards named it, from monkeys long since extinct; a curved shingle beach some fifty yards across, shut in right and left by steep rocks wooded down almost to the sea, and worn into black caves and crannies, festooned with the night-blowing Cereus, which crawls about with hairy green legs, like a tangle of giant spiders. Among it, in the cracks, upright Cerei, like candelabra twenty and thirty feet high, thrust themselves aloft into the brushwood. An Aroid [{103b}] rides parasitic on roots and stems, sending downward long air-roots, and upward brown rat-tails of flower, and broad leaves, four feet by two, which wither into whity-brown paper, and are used, being tough and fibrous, to wrap round the rowlocks of the oars. Tufts of Karatas, top, spread their long prickly leaves among the bush of ‘rastrajo,’ or second growth after the primeval forest has been cleared, which dips suddenly right and left to the beach. It, and the little strip of flat ground behind it, hold a three-roomed cottage—of course on stilts; a shed which serves as a kitchen; a third ruined building, which is tenanted mostly by lizards and creeping flowers; some twenty or thirty coconut trees; and on the very edge of the sea an almond-tree, its roots built up to seaward with great stones, its trunk hung with fishing lines; and around it, scattered on the shingle, strange shells, bits of coral, coconuts and their fragments; almonds from the tree; the round scaly fruit of the Mauritia palm, which has probably floated across the gulf from the forests of the Orinoco or the Caroni; and the long seeds of the mangrove, in shape like a roach-fisher’s float, and already germinating, their leaves showing at the upper end, a tiny root at the lower. In that shingle they will not take root: but they are quite ready to go to sea again next tide, and wander on for weeks, and for hundreds of miles, till they run ashore at last on a congenial bed of mud, throw out spider legs right and left, and hide the foul mire with their gay green leaves.

The almond-tree, [{104}] with its flat stages of large smooth leaves, and oily eatable seeds in an almond-like husk, is not an almond at all, or any kin thereto. It has been named, as so many West Indian plants have, after some known plant to which it bore a likeness, and introduced hither, and indeed to all shores from Cuba to Guiana, from the East Indies, through Arabia and tropical Africa, having begun its westward journey, probably, in the pocket of some Portuguese follower of Vasco de Gama.