Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

A twelve-hour run from St. Croix, with a glimpse of the tiny Dutch islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, peering above the sea like drowning volcanoes, brought us to what the British so familiarly call St. Kitts. Columbus named it St. Christopher, one legend having it that he discovered it on his own patron saint’s day, another that he saw in its form a resemblance to that worthy carrying in his arms the infant Jesus. The resemblance is not apparent to the critical eye, but the admirals of those days, you recall, were not compelled to take their grape-juice unfermented. Besides, we must not be too hard upon the busy “old man” of the caravel fleet. With a sailor thrusting his head into the cabin every hour or so to say, “Another island, vuestra merced; what shall we call it?” it was natural that the Genoese, having no modern novels at hand, should curse his gout and hobble across to the saints’ calendar on the opposite bulkhead.

St. Kitts has more nearly the form of a heaping plate of curry and rice—curious this should not have occurred to the galley-fed seaman—culminating in Mt. Misery, four thousand and some feet high, with an eight hundred foot crater nicely proportioned to hold the curry and still steaming with clouds of vapor that habitually conceal its summit. 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 be 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.

Though St. Kitts was the first island of the West Indies to be settled by the English, antedating even ultra-British Barbados in that regard by nearly two years, its capital bears the French name of Basse Terre. It is an uninteresting town of some seven thousand inhabitants, scarcely one in a hundred of whom boast of a family tree wholly free from African graftings, and most of them living in unpainted, weather-blackened, shingle cabins hidden away in the forests of cocoanut palms. Even the larger houses in the center of town are chiefly built of clapboards or shingles, painted only by the elements, and with narrow little eaves that give them the air of wearing hats several sizes too small for them. The sums that are uselessly squandered on window-glass would easily suffice to give the entire town a sadly needed coating of paint, were it not that all such improvements are taxed out of existence, as in most of the British West Indies. The only pleasant spot in town is a kind of Spanish plaza run wild, generously shaded with royal palms and spreading tropical trees, beneath which the grass stands ankle-high and hens pilot their broods about among the brown windrows of fallen leaves. Its unshaven condition rather enhances a certain rustic beauty that is not marred by an unexpectedly artistic old stone fountain in its center. Beyond the last lopsided negro hovels Basse Terre is surrounded by cane-fields, with Mt. Misery piled into the sky close behind them.

We had the misfortune to first land in British territory on a Sunday. Basse Terre was as dead as if a general funeral were just over. It was not simply that we bemoaned with the tourist-minded fellow-countrymen from the steamer the fact that every “Liquor Store” was tight and genuinely closed; the dreary lifelessness of the whole place got on our nerves. The very trade wind seemed to refrain from any unnecessary exertion; the citizens appeared to have given even their minds a holiday and replied to the simplest questions with a vacant stare. It was a “holy day” as truly as a French or Spanish Sunday is a “day of feast,” or “festival.” I imagine heaven is much like an English community on a Sunday—so piously dull that a new inmate would soon be on his knees imploring the gatekeeper to let him go to the only other available place.

At eleven o’clock four species of church service broke out, the Anglican, Catholic, Moravian, and what a black policeman in a white blouse and helmet and the deliberate airs of a London “bobby” referred to in a Sunday whisper as the “Whistling.” We went. One was forced to, in self-defense and for the utter absence of any other form of amusement. Then we understood why the community could endure the apparent lack of recreation and exercise of its deadly Sabbath. Negroes striving to maintain the cold, calm, rather bored English manner from opening hymn to benediction supplied the former, and the ups and downs of the Anglican service furnished the latter.

We found St. Kitts more down-at-heel, more indolent, less self-relying than even our Virgin Islands. The shingle shacks of Basse Terre were more miserable than those of St. Thomas; the swarms of negroes loafing under the palm trees about them were as ragged as they were lazy and insolent. Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus,” you may recall, came from St. Kitts. His replica, except in the genuineness of his ailment, could be seen in any patch of shade. A white stranger strolling through the poorer section was the constant target of foul language and even more loathsome annoyances from both sexes and all ages; in the center of town his footsteps were constantly dogged by clamoring urchins who replied to the slightest protest with streams of curses even in the presence of white residents and the serenely unconscious negro policemen. The inhabitants were incorrigible beggars, from street loafers to church wardens; even the island postmaster begged, under the pretense of selling a historical pamphlet; the country people left their “work” in the fields to shout for alms from the passer-by.

A highway encircles the island, which is twenty-three miles long and five wide. It flanks Brimstone Hill, sometimes called the “Gibraltar of the West Indies” in memory of the part it played in the wars between the French and English for the control of the Caribbean. Cane-fields spread with monotonous sameness on either side of the moderately well-kept roads, with here and there an old stone tower that was once a windmill and what seems many chimneys to one who recalls how seldom two are seen in the same horizon in Cuba. On the whole, the island is not to be compared with St. Croix; despite its abundance of sugar it has a poverty-stricken air, for St. Kitts seems to have lost its “pep,” if ever it had any.

It took two days to unload our one-day’s cargo in the harbor of Basse Terre. The local stevedores were on strike and their places had been taken by less experienced men from the neighboring island of Nevis. This had magnified the constant enmity between the St. Kittens—or whatever is the proper term—and the inhabitants of “that other country,” as they called it; but it was an enmity without violence, except of words, torrents of words in what close observers assert are two distinct dialects, though the islands are separated only by a narrow channel. The strikers, to all appearances, felt they had won their chief aim by being allowed to lie on their backs in the shade of the cocoanut palms.

The steamer’s loss was my gain, for the delay gave me time to visit the island Columbus named “Nieve” from the snow-like clouds hovering about it. Open sailing scows, perhaps three times the size of a lifeboat, were constantly plying across the bay between the two capitals. The wind was on the beam in both directions, and a dozen times I was convinced that the waves that splashed continuously over the leeward gunwale of the creaking old tub would fill her at the next squall sweeping through the deep channel between the islands. But each time the simple son of Nevis at the tiller met my questioning gaze with “Not blow too bad to-day, boss,” now and then adding the reassuring information that several boats were lost here every year. High on the windward gunwale the plunging of the crude vessel was exhilarating in spite of the apparent danger, but the negro women in their flashy dresses, tin bracelets, and much cheap jewelry, who sprawled together in the bottom of the boat in supreme indifference to the bilge-water and filth that sloshed back and forth over them seemed to find nothing agreeable in the experience.

The craft half righted herself at length under the lee of the island, heaped up into the clouds in similar but more abrupt and compact form than St. Kitts. One scarcely needed to go ashore to see the place, so nicely were its sights spread out on the steeply tilted landscape. Like its neighbor it was but slightly wooded on its lower slopes, but made up for this by the dense vegetation of its monkey-infested heights. One made out a few groves of cocoanuts, patches of cotton, and green stretches of sugar-cane, with here and there a windmill tower, one of which still survived, its slowly turning arms giving a mild suggestion of the Azores. Charlestown soon appeared out on the end of a low point, a modest little town with a few red roofs peering through the cocoanut trees. Gingertown, five miles in the interior, and the village of Newcastle farther down the coast are the only other places of any size, though the island is everywhere well populated. Time was when Nevis was a famous watering place for Europe and America, with thermal baths and medicinal waters, and an important capital named Jamestown, from which all this region of the Caribbean was ruled. But the city was destroyed one day by an earthquake and submerged beneath the sea, where some of its coral-encrusted ruins can still be seen not far from the shore. Natural causes led to the island’s gradual isolation, and to-day, though its hot baths are exploited by an American owned hotel, it becomes highly excited at the arrival of a stranger from the outside world.