The next of the stepping-stones is St. Vincent, for though Barbados, a hundred miles due east of it, intervenes in the steamer’s itinerary, it is neither geographically, geologically, nor politically a member of the Windward group. St. Vincent was the last of the West Indies to come into possession of the white man, for here the fierce Caribs offered their last resistance and were conquered only by being literally driven into the sea. It is ruggedly mountainous and unbrokenly green with rampant vegetation, its jagged range cutting the sky-line like the teeth of a gigantic saw. It, too, has its Soufrière, which erupted on the afternoon before Pélée in Martinique, killing more than fifteen hundred and devastating one end of the island. Rain falls easily on St. Vincent, and even the capital is habitually humid and drenched with frequent showers. This is named Kingstown, and lies scattered along the shore at the foot of a wide valley sloping quickly upward to the jagged labyrinth of peaks about which black clouds playfully chase one another the year round. It is a gawky, ragged, rather insolent place of unenterprising negroes, with a few scrawny leather-skinned poor whites scattered among them. Some of these are of Portuguese origin, and there is a scattering of East Indians. So colorless is the place, except in scenic beauty, that the appearance of a woman of Martinique in full native regalia in its streets resembles a loud noise in a deep silence. Even the sea comes in with a slow, lazy swo-ow among the weather-blackened fishing boats that lie scattered along its beach. So quiet and peaceful is it everywhere out of sound of the clamoring market-place that it would seem an ideal spot in which to engage in intellectual labors, but there is no evidence that St. Vincent has ever enriched the world’s art.
Roads climb away from the capital into the pretty, steep hills that surround it, among which are tucked red-roofed estates and negro cabins. The island looks more prosperous in the country than in the town. Its cotton is said to be unsurpassed for the making of lace, and was selling at the time of our visit, for $2 a pound. In addition, it produces cottonseed oil, arrow-root, cacao, and, above all, nutmegs. The nutmeg grows on a tree not unlike the plum in appearance—residents of Vermont have no doubt seen it often—the fruit resembling a small apricot. Inside this is a large nut prettily veined with the red mace that is another of the island’s exports, and the nut being cracked discloses a kernel which, dried and cured, is carried down from the hills in baskets on the heads of negroes and shipped to the outside world as the nutmeg of commerce. The natives, if the swarthy West Indians of to-day are entitled to that term, make also pretty little covered baskets in all sizes, which sell for far less after the steamer has blown her warning whistle than when she has just arrived.
The eight-hour run from St. Vincent to Grenada, capital of the Windward group, is close to the leeward of a scattered string of islands called the Grenadines, some of them comparatively large, mountainous in their small way, others mere jagged bits of rock strewn at random along the edge of the Caribbean, all of them looking more or less dry and sterile. Grenada is rugged and beautiful, though it does not rival Dominica in either respect. It has variously been called the “Isle of Spices,” the “Planter’s Paradise,” and the “Island of Nutmegs.” What claims to be the largest nutmeg plantation on earth—the West Indians have something of our own tendency for superlatives—lies among its labyrinth of hills; it produces also cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cacao. Though it is admittedly far more prosperous than St. Vincent, it shows few signs of cultivation from the sea, for none of its principal products in their growing state can be recognized from the forest and brush that cover many an uncleared West Indian isle. The high prices paid for nutmegs during the war, particularly by fruit preservers in the United States, has brought fortunes to many of its planters, despite the fact that the tree takes seven years to mature. Many of the negroes, too, own their small estates and increase their incomes by making jelly from the nutmeg fruit. Yet from the sea all this is hidden under a dense foliage that completely covers the nowhere level island. Along the geometrical white line of the beach are several villages; higher up are seen only scattered huts and a few larger buildings, except where the two considerable towns of Goyave and Victoria break the pretty green monotony.
But if Grenada must yield the palm for beauty to some of its neighbors, St. Georges, the capital, unquestionably presents the loveliest picture from the sea of any port in the Lesser Antilles, if not of the West Indies. Nestled among and piled up the green hills that terminate in a jagged series of peaks above, its often three-story houses pitched in stages one above the other, larger buildings crowning here and there a loftier eminence, the whole delightfully irregular and individualistic, it rouses even the jaded traveler to exclamations of pleasure. The steamer chugs placidly by, as if it had suddenly decided not to call, passes a massive old fortress, then suddenly swings inshore as though it had forgotten its limitation and aspires to climb the mountain heights. A narrow break in the rock wall opens before it, and it slides calmly into a magnificent little blue harbor and drops anchor so close to the shore that one can talk to the people on it in a conversational tone. Why the vessel does not tie up to the wharf and have done with it is difficult to understand, for the blue water seems fathoms deep up to the very edge of the quay. Strictly speaking, it is not a wharf at all, but one of the principal streets of the town, and passengers in their staterooms have a sense of having moved into an apartment just across the way from the negro families who lean out of their windows watching with cheerful curiosity the activity on the decks below.
The sun was just setting in a cloudless sky when we landed in St. Georges, yet we saw enough of it before darkness came to veil the now all too familiar negro slovenliness, though it could not disguise the concomitant odors. The same incessant cries for alms, the same heel-treading throngs of guides marked our progress, until we had shaken them off in a long tunnel through a mountain spur that connects the two sections of the water-front. For despite its distant loveliness, the town was overrun by the half-insolent, half-cringing black creatures who so mar all the Caribbean wonderland, until one is ready to curse the men of long ago who exterminated the aborigines and brought in their place this lowest species of the human family. On shore St. Georges was different only in its steep, cobbled streets and its rows of houses piled sheer one above another. Every other shop announced itself a “Dealer in Cacao and Nutmegs.” In the clamoring throngs of venders squatted along the curb the only unfamiliar sight was the blue “parrot-fish,” with so striking a resemblance to the talkative bird as to be mistaken for it at first glance. But even here there were evidences of Grenada’s greater prosperity. White men were a trifle more numerous; numbers of private automobiles climbed away into the hills by what at least began as excellent highways; a telephone line on which we counted seventy-six wires disappeared into the interior over the first crest behind the town. Then a full moon came up over the fuzzy hills, lending a false beauty to many a commonplace old house-wall, restoring the romance to the heaped-up town, and flooding the world with a silver sheen long after we had steamed away in the direction of Trinidad.
CHAPTER XV
“LITTLE ENGLAND”
The “Ancient and Loyal Colony of Barbados” lies so far out to sea that it requires a real ocean voyage to reach it. Low and uninteresting at first glance, compared to many of the West Indies, it is by no means so flat as most descriptions lead one to suppose. Seen from the sea it stretches up to a fairly lofty central ridge that is regular from end to end, except for being a trifle serrated or ragged in the center of the island. Dutch looking windmills, the only survivors of the cane-crushers that have fallen into disuse and left only the vine-grown ruins of their stone towers in all the rest of the Lesser Antilles, are slowly turning here and there on the even sky-line. Though the island is entirely of coral and limestone formation, glaringly yellow-white under the blazing sunshine at close range, there is a suggestion of England in the velvety slopes of its varied-green fields as seen from far out in the bay. First settled by the English in 1624, it boasts itself the oldest British colony that has remained unceasingly loyal to the crown and accepts with pride the pseudonym of “Little England.”
Barbados has come nearer than any other land to solving the vexing “negro problem.” Cultivated in all its extent, with a population of 140,000 negroes and 20,000 whites on a little patch of earth twenty-one miles long and fifteen wide, or 1200 human beings to the square mile, without an acre of “bush” on which the liberated slaves could squat, the struggle for existence is so intense that the black man displays here an energy and initiative unusual to his race. The traveler hears rumours of the Barbadian’s un-African activity long before he reaches the island; he sees evidences of it before his ship comes to anchor in Carlisle Bay. Not only is the harbor more active, more crowded with shipping than any other in the Lesser Antilles, but it has every air of a place that is “up on its toes.” All the languor, the don’t-care-whether-I-work-or-not of nature’s favored spots are here replaced by a feverish anxiety to please, an eager energy to snap up any job that promises to turn a nimble shilling. Scores of rowboats surround the steamer in a clamoring multitude, their occupants holding aloft boards on which are printed the names of their craft—unromantic, unimaginative names compared to those of the islands that were once or are still French, such as “Maggie,” “Bridget,” “Lillie White,” “Daisy,” “Tiger.” In face of the fierce competition the boatmen strive their utmost to win a promise from a passenger leaning over the rail, to impress the name of their craft on his memory so that he will call for it when he descends the gangway, to win his good-will by flattery, by some crude witticism,—“Remember the ‘Maggie,’ mistress; Captain Snowball”; “The ‘Lillie White,’ my lady; upholstered in and out!” “The ‘Daisy,’ my gentleman; rowboat extraordinary to His Majesty!” Meanwhile the divers for pennies, a few girls among them, are besieging the passengers from their curious little flat-bottomed boats of double wedge shape to toss their odd coins into the water and “see the human porpoises” display their prowess. Yet, unlike the pandemonium in the other islands, there is no scramble of venders and beggars up the gangway to the discomfiture of descending passengers; no crowding of boatmen about it fighting with one another for each possible fare, to the not infrequent disaster of the latter. A bull-voiced negro police sergeant, in a uniform that suggests he has been loaned from the cast of “Pinafore,” keeps perfect order from the top of the gangway, permitting boats to draw near only when they are called by name and ruling the clamoring situation with an iron hand. For there is this difference between the harbor police of Barbados and those of all the other ports, that they speak to be obeyed, permit no argument, and if they are not respected, they are at least duly feared.
Bridgetown was static. The entire population was massed about the inner harbor; beyond the bridge that gives the town its name stood an immense new arch with the words “Welcome to Barbados” emblazoned upon it. We thought it very kind of them to give us such unexpected attention, until we discovered they were not waiting for us at all, but for one whom some loyal but not too well schooled Barbadian had named in chalk on a nearby wall the “Prints of Whales.” This was the first time in half a century, it seems, that a member of the royal family to which the “ancient and loyal” little colony has shown unbroken allegiance had come to visit it. The black multitude was agog with poorly suppressed excitement; white natives were squirming nervously; even the few Englishmen in the crowd were so thawed by the “epoch-making event” that they actually spoke to strangers. The harbor officer was so eager to lose none of it that he let us pass without examination; an enterprising black youth won a sixpence by finding us a place on a crowded barge a few yards from the royal landing-stage. The tramways had been stopped; black troops lined the vacant expanse of white main street that stretched away toward the government house. Nelson’s one-armed statue in Trafalgar Square had been given an oil bath; buildings were half hidden behind the fluttering flags of all the Allies—the Stars and Stripes rarest among them. Even nature had contributed to the occasion by sending an unexpected little shower to lay the white limestone dust that habitually rouses the ire of new arrivals. The island newspaper announced a special holiday in honor of “the Prince, who will confer upon the loyal inhabitants of this ancient colony the privilege of receiving a message from his august father”; it still carried the advertisements of the closed shops, imploring the citizens not only to buy flags and decorations but to “get new clothes in honor of our royal visitor.”