Charlestown had little of the insolence of St. Kitts, though it was by no means free from beggars. Its masses were more naïve in manner, even more ragged of garb. Nine pence a day is the average adult male wage of even those who succeed in finding work. Obeah, or African witchcraft, seemed still to maintain a hold, for even the native bank clerk who piloted me about town acknowledged a belief in certain forms of it. Two or three blocks from the little triangular park that marks the center of town are the ruins of a gray stone building in which Alexander Hamilton is reputed to have been born. British visitors are more interested in the house where Nelson lived and the little church in which he was married to the widow Nisbet, two miles up the sloping hillside. Love for England does not greatly flourish in Nevis, if one may take surface indications as evidence.
“We are ruled over by an autocrat, a white Barbadian magistrate,” complained an islander of the better class, while the group about him nodded approval. “England takes everything from us and does nothing for us. If it were not for the prohibition that would come with it, we would be glad to see the island under American rule.”
A forty-mile run during the night brought us to Antigua. Steamers anchor so far off shore that a government launch is required to do the work performed in most of the Lesser Antilles by rowboats. For though there is a splendid double harbor on the opposite side of the island, the English cling to their invariable Caribbean rule of building the capital and only city on the leeward shore. Two pretty headlands are passed on the way in, the more prominent of them occupied by a leper asylum; both are crowned by fortresses dating back to the days when England fought to maintain her hold on the West Indies. From the bay St. John’s presents an agreeable picture in the morning sunlight, an ancient two-towered cathedral bulking above the greenery constituting the most conspicuous landmark. It is much more of a town than Basse Terre, though with the same wooden, shingled, often unpainted houses, and wide, unattractive, right-angled streets. What energy it may once have had seems largely to have departed, and for all its size it has the air of a half-forgotten village. Its shops open at seven, close from nine to ten for breakfast, and put up their shutters for the day at four. On closer inspection the cathedral proves to be two churches, one of wood enclosed within another of stone, as a protection against earthquakes. The negro women of the market-place are given to the display of brilliant calicos, but the population as a whole has little of the color,—except in complexion—the dignity, and that suggestion of Gallic grace of the French islanders.
Antigua, thirteen by nine miles, is lower and less mountainous than St. Kitts, being of limestone rather than volcanic formation, with less luxuriant vegetation, having been almost wholly denuded of its forests. In consequence, it suffers somewhat for lack of rainfall, though it is almost everywhere cultivated, and offers many a pretty vista of rolling landscape, usually with a patch of sea at the end of it. Sugar-cane is by far its most important product, though corn-fields here and there break the lighter green monotony, and limes and onions are piled high in crates on St. John’s water-front. The island roads are tolerable. Automobiles, mainly of the Ford variety, make it possible for the traveler to see its “sights” in a few hours with less damage to the exchequer than in many of the West Indies. Women in rather graceless colored turbans are more numerous than men in the cane-fields, where wages average 4½ pence per hundred holes of cane, whether for planting, hoeing, or cutting, making the daily wage of the majority about fifteen cents. What they do with all that money is a problem we found no time to solve, though there were evidences that a fair proportion of it is invested in native rum. Like all the world, Antigua has had her share of labor troubles during the past few years. Two seasons ago much cane was burned by the incensed workers, but the killing of several and the wounding of some thirty more by government troops has settled the wage problem on its old basis. Though many abandoned estates, with the familiar square brick chimneys and armless windmill towers, dot the landscape, two sugar factories to-day consume virtually all the cane. They are rather old-fashioned institutions, with no such pretty, well-planned bateys and comfortable employee-houses as are to be found in Cuba and Porto Rico. The hauling is chiefly done by tippy two-wheeled carts, drawn by mules in tandem, occasionally by oxen, specially designed, it would seem, to spill their loads each time an automobile forces them to the edge of the road. Mangos and bamboo, in certain sections clumps of cactus and patches of that troublesome thorny vegetation which the Cubans call aroma, are the chief landscape decorations, except on the tops of the scrub-fuzzy, rather than forested hills. Shacks covered with shingles from mudsill to roof-tree, interspersed with fewer thatched and once whitewashed huts, all of them somewhat less miserable than those of St. Kitts, house the country people in scattered formation or occasional clusters bearing such misnomers as All Saints’ Village. Like most of the Lesser Antilles, Antigua was once French, but it has retained less of the patois than the other islands of similar history.
The goal of most mere visitors to Antigua is English Harbor on the windward coast, two almost landlocked blue basins in which Nelson refitted his fleet in preparation for the battle of Trafalgar. Here stand several massive stone buildings, occupied now only by the negro caretaker and his family. In the great stone barracks is a patch of wall decorated by the none too artistic hand of the present King George, then a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, wishing in vari-colored large letters “A Merry Christmas 2 You All,” the space being reverently covered now by a padlocked pair of shutters. More popular with the romantic-minded is the immense anchor serving as gravestone of one, Lieutenant Peterson. The lieutenant, runs the story, was the rival of his commanding officer for the hand of the island belle. On the eve of a naval ball he was ordered not to offer the young lady his escort. He appeared with her at the height of the festivities, however, she having declined in his favor the attentions of the commander, whereupon the latter shot the lieutenant for disobeying orders and caused him to be buried that same night in the barracks compound.
Patriotism for the empire to which they belong is not one of the chief characteristics of the Antiguans. Indeed, there is “no love whatever” for England, if we are to believe most of those with whom I talked on the subject.
“There never was any, even in the old days,” asserted a man whose parents emigrated from England half a century ago. “Before the war,” he continued, “England would not buy her sugar in the West Indies because she could get it cheaper from the beet-growers in Germany and Austria, thanks to their government bounty. The sugar we sent to England often lay on the wharves over there for months, until we had to send money to pay wharfage and storage, and feed our sugar to the hogs here at home. Once we enjoyed home rule; now our laws are made by the Secretary for the West Indies in London, who thinks we wear breech-clouts and speak some African dialect. They take everything from us in taxes and do nothing for us in return. Our governor thinks his only duty is to hold us down. He tries to be a little tin god, permits no one else to ride in the public launch with him when he goes out to a ship, and all that sort of thing. He came here two years ago from a similar position in one of our African colonies, where he was accustomed to see everyone bring him gifts and bow their heads in the sand whenever he passed. He got a surprise when he landed here. Except for a few nigger policemen, no one paid him any attention whatever, except that the drunken fellows shouted after him in the streets and called him foul names. We had no conscription here, yet we sent a large contingent. The well-to-do whites paid their way home to enlist; the poor ones went over with the niggers and were slowly picked out after they got over there. And England has not done a thing for a man of them. The blacks are angry because they got no promotion and all the dirtiest jobs. Mighty few of us would go again to fight for the blooming Empire.”
Antigua is the capital of what the British call, for political purposes, the Leeward Islands, comprising all their holdings between Santa Cruz and Martinique. Geographically this is a misnomer, the real leeward islands being the Greater Antilles, from Cuba to Porto Rico inclusive, and all the Lesser Antilles the windward islands, as the Spaniards recognized and still maintain. But the unnatural division serves the purpose for which it was made. St. John’s is the seat of the governor and the archbishop of all the group, with the principal prison and asylum. Anguilla, far to the north, near the Dutch-French island of St. Martin, is of coral formation, comparatively low and flat. The same may be said of Barbuda, large as Antigua and reputed to have gone back to nature under the improvident descendants of the slaves of the Codrington family that long reigned supreme upon it. Montserrat, on the other hand, is very mountainous, a flat-topped, pyramidal fragment of earth thirty-five square miles in extent, its lower slopes planted with limes and cacao, its upper reaches forest-clad. White ribbons of roads set forth from Plymouth, the capital, in what looks like a determined effort to scale the precipitous heights, but soon give up the attempt. The population of the island is mainly negro-Irish, it having been settled by emigrants from the “Old Sod,” so that to this day Irish names predominate, freckled red-heads with African features are numerous, and the inhabitants are noted throughout the West Indies for their brogue and their gift of blarney.