Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Dominica, the southernmost and largest of the misnamed Leeward Islands, is also entitled to several other superlatives. Most of the West Indies boast themselves the “Queen of the Antilles,” but none with more justice than this tiny Porto Rico isolated between the two principal islands of “French America.” It is the highest of the Lesser Antilles, Mt. Diablotin stretching 5314 feet into the tropical sky; the wettest, being habitually surrounded by blue-black clouds that pour forth their deluges by night or by day, in or out of season, even when all the sky about it is translucent blue; and the world’s greatest enemy of the scurvy, for it produces most of that fruit which has given the British sailor the nickname of “limy.” Incidentally, it is the most difficult of the West Indies in which to travel.

Roseau, the capital, sits right out on the Caribbean, the mountains climbing directly, without an instant’s hesitation, into the sky behind it. They are as sheer beneath water as above it and the steamer anchors within an easy stone’s throw of the wharves. Boatmen in curious little board canoes, showing their wooden ribs within and bearing such French names as “Dieu Donne,” quickly surround the new arrival, some of them bent on carrying her passengers ashore at a shilling a head, others to dive for pennies thrown into this deepest-blue of seas, which is yet so transparent that both coin and swimmer can be perfectly seen as far down as lungs will carry them. Boats of the same quaint structure and only slightly larger jockey for position along the ship’s side to receive the cargo from her hatches. They are unreliable and poorly adapted for the purpose, but their owners stick together in protecting their monopoly and every modern lighter brought to Dominica has invariably been scuttled within a week. Almost within the shadow of the steamer other men are standing stiffly erect in the extreme stern of their fishing canoes, steering them by almost imperceptible movements of their single crude paddle, while their companions cast their nets or throw stones within them to lure the fish to the surface. Immense hauls they make, too, without going a hundred yards from the shore. How many fish there must be in the sea when thousands of fishermen can ply their trade about each of these West Indian stepping-stones the year round and come home every day laden to the gunwales with their catches!

Roseau is scarcely more than a village. It is so small that all its business is carried on within plain sight from the steamer’s deck, though it strives to look very important with its few two-story stone buildings, like a Briton in foreign parts aware that he must uphold the national dignity unassisted. It is less given to wooden structures than many of its rivals, and has a more aged, solid air, at least along the water-front. An age-softened gray stone church that looks almost Spanish, with an extraordinary width within, like a market-hall filled with pews, and bilingual signs above the confessionals bearing the names of French priests, seems conscious of its mastery over the few small Protestant chapels. Higher still is one of the most magnificent little botanical gardens in the world, with hundreds of tropical specimens arranged with the unobtrusive orderliness of an English park.

I visited Dominica twice, and on the second occasion, having from early morning until midnight, hired a horse to ride across the island. Roseau Valley, a great sloping glen like a cleft in the mountains, climbs swiftly upward to the clouds behind the town, a rock-boiling river, surprisingly large for so small an island, pouring down it. At the bridge across the stream on the edge of town is what claims to be the greatest lime-juice factory on earth. I use both words with misgiving, for it is no more a factory in our sense of the term than the white lumps it ships away to a scurvy-dreading world are juice. Toward this a constant stream of limes, which we would be more apt to call lemons, is descending. Women and girls come trotting down out of the mountains with bushel baskets of them, now and then sitting down on a boulder to rest but never troubling to take the incredible load off their heads. Donkeys with enormous straw saddle-bags heaped high with limes pick their way more cautiously down the steep slope. Occasionally even a man deigns to jog to town with a load of the fruit. They lie everywhere in great yellow heaps under the low trees; they weigh down the usually rain-dripping branches. Yet when they have been grown and picked and carried all the way to town, they sell for a mere seven shillings a barrel! Small wonder the human pack-horses and even the growers are more extraordinarily ragged than any other West Indians outside of Haiti.

Cacao plants, too, are piled up the steeps on either side of the roaring river, for Dominica has that constant humidity and more than frequent rainfall they love so well. The unbroken density of the greenery is one, perhaps the chief, charm of the valley, as of all the island. Nowhere in all the climb does the eye make out the suggestion of a clearing. Where man has not pitched his lime or cacao orchards, or planted his tiny garden patch, nature forces the fertile black soil to produce to its utmost capacity. It is an un-American density, as of an Oriental jungle, all but completely concealing the miserable little huts tucked away in it all over the lower hillsides; it makes up for the constant succession of heavy showers that belie the sunny promises of the town and harbor below. For the mountains of Dominica have an annual rainfall of three hundred inches, twenty-five feet of water a year!

There are forty automobiles on the island of lemons, but they do not venture far from home. The highway up the valley lasts a bare three miles before it dwindles to a mountain trail that struggles constantly upward, now steeply along the brink of the river far below, now in stony zigzags that make no real progress, for all their pretense, except in altitude. One has a curiously shut-in feeling, as if there were no escape from the mighty ravine except by the narrow, slippery path underfoot, which is, indeed, the case. Not even the jet black inhabitants inured to mountain-climbing from birth, have attempted to scale the heights by more direct paths than this zigzag trail up the roof-steep bottom of the gorge. They speak among themselves a “creole” as incomprehensible, even to one familiar with French, as that of Haiti, though they babbled a bit of English that seemed to grow less fluent and extensive with every mile away from the capital. There the white stranger was subjected to an insolence and clamoring at his heels inferior only in volume to that of St. Kitts; up here in the mountains the passers-by yielded the trail and raised their ragged headgear with a rustic politeness that would have been more charming had it not almost invariably been followed by “A penny, please, sir” from both sexes and all ages. For all their mountaineer diffidence, they are so given to stealing one another’s crops that shops throughout the island are “Licensed to Sell Protected Produce,” that the police may have a means of detecting contraband. Perhaps they are scarcely to be blamed for their light-fingered habits, with wages that rarely reach the lofty height of a shilling a day.

The horse had leisurely English manners and the deliberate, loose-kneed action of a St. Thomas waiter, so that we made far less progress than his rangy form had promised. He showed, too, little of that endurance and mountain wisdom for which the far smaller animals of tropical America are noted. We reached the crest of the island at last, however, and paused on the edge of a small fresh-water lake said to fill the crater of an extinct volcano. Sedge-grass surrounded it and dense vegetation framed it on every side, but there was nothing remarkable about it, except, perhaps, to the Dominicans. But the wealth of flora was well worth the excursion. Tree-ferns, ferns large and small, wild bananas, lime-trees, clumps of bamboo, and a score of other plants and trees which only a botanist with tropical experience could name, completely concealed the earth, as the trunks of all the larger species were hidden under climbing parasites with immense leaves, and even the sheer banks were covered with densest vegetation.

A fog, white and luminous, yet impenetrable to the eye at more than twenty yards, covered all the island top. I urged the animal down a far steeper, more stony, trail than that we had climbed, cut deeper than a horseman’s head into the red-black mountainside and pitching headlong downward into the foggy void. A half hour of utter stillness, broken now and then by the brief song of the solitaire and the constant stumbling of the horse’s hoofs over the stones, brought us suddenly to the edge of the cloud, with a magnificent view of the jagged northern coast edged by the white breakers of the Atlantic. A few negroes again appeared, climbing easily upward, carrying their shoes on their heads, an excellent place to wear them at present prices. Now and then an aged, carelessly constructed hut peered out from the teeming wilderness, but the sense of the primeval, the uninhabited, the unknown to man, brooded over all the scene despite these and the stony trail underfoot.

Halfway down I met two Carib Indians, easily distinguishable from the bulk of the inhabitants by their features and color. They were short and muscular, with more of the aggressive air of the Mexican highlander than the slinking demeanor of the South American aborigines. They carried their home-made baskets full of some native produce on their shoulders, rather than on their heads, and apparently spoke but little English. They came from the Carib reservation on the north coast, the only one now left in all the West Indies over which, except for the four larger islands, their man-eating ancestors ruled supreme until long after the discovery. When at length, after long warfare, England entered into a treaty with them, they were given two patches of territory for their own. But the eruption of Soufrière in St. Vincent in 1902 destroyed the colony on that island, and to-day the three hundred of Dominica are the only ones left, and barely forty of these, it is said, are of pure blood. They live at peace with their neighbors, make baskets, catch fish, and are noted for their industry, as wild tribes go, in agriculture.

More than halfway down to sea-level huts began to grow frequent again, most of them completely covered with shingles and all of them devoid of any but the scantiest home-made furniture. Ragged, useless-looking inhabitants stood in the doorways staring at the extraordinary apparition of a white man, many of them calling out in cheerful voices for alms as I passed. Dominica is evidently an island without timepieces; almost everyone I met wanted to know the hour, just why was not apparent, since time seemed to have less than no value to them. My watch having been stolen in Havana and I having declined to tempt West Indians again by buying another, I could not satisfy their curiosity. Besides, the Caribbean is no place in which to worry about time; the fact that the sun rises and sets is all the division of eternity needed in such an African Eden.