The Barbadian, for instance, digs his wells not to get water, but to get rid of it. They are to be found everywhere, often at the very edge of the highway and always open and unprotected. They are big round holes cut far down into the jagged coral rock, splendid places, it would seem, into which to throw something or somebody for which one has no use. This is exactly their purpose, for they are designed to carry off the floods of the rainy season. Barbados has no rivers and no lakes, or rather, these are all underground, some of them in immense caverns. In former days the mass of the population depended for its water supply on shallow, intermittent ponds, the better class on private arrangements. Now two central pumping stations and more than a hundred miles of underground pipe furnish the entire island with excellent, if lukewarm, water from the unseen rivers. Instead of the roadside shrines of the French islands, the limestone embankments of Barbadian highways have faucets at frequent intervals. Water is free to those who fetch it from these. The better class residents are everywhere supplied by private pipes at a nominal sum per house. Business places pay thirty cents per thousand gallons, which is considered so expensive that only one estate on the island is irrigated though drought is frequently disastrous in the west and south.
The stodgy windmills everywhere fanning the air are used exclusively for the grinding of cane. It is a rare patch of landscape that does not show at least half a dozen of these toiling away six days of the week. The fact that they have survived in Barbados, of all the West Indies, may be as much due to its unfailing trade wind as to the crowded conditions which make the innovation of labor-saving devices so unpopular. Methods long since abandoned elsewhere are still in vogue in Barbadian sugar-mills. The cane is passed by hand between the iron rollers in the stone windmill tower. The big hilltop yard about this is covered with drying bagasse, or cane pulp, which is finally heaped up about the boiling-house in which it serves as fuel. The juice runs in open troughs from the windmill to this latter building, where it is strained and left to settle until the scum rises to the surface. Then, this being skimmed off, it is boiled in open copper kettles. A negro watches each of them, dipping out the froth now and then with a huge soup-ladle and tossing the boiling liquid into the air when it shows signs of burning. Toward the end of the process the “sugar-master” is constantly trying the syrup between a finger and thumb, in order to tell when the crystals are forming and when to “strike” the contents of the kettle, which must be done at the right moment if the sugar is to be worth shipping. From beginning to end the work is done by hand, and a Barbadian sugar-mill has little resemblance, except in its pungently sweet odor, to the immense centrals of Cuba.
In the early days the sugar-men had much trouble in transporting their product because of the deep gullies and bad roads. Once upon a time camels were used, but though they answered the purpose splendidly, being very sure-footed and capable of carrying the price of a “red leg” each, they died for lack of a proper diet. To this day Barbadian sugar or molasses is shipped in the cumbersome 110–gallon hogsheads which were adopted in the days of camels, though the hauling is now done on mule or auto-trucks.
With an unlimited supply of cheap labor, it is natural that the Barbadian planters should cling to the old processes. Indeed, the estate owner who attempts to bring in new machinery is heartily criticized by his competitors, while the establishment of new mills is out of the question, there being already too many factories for the available acreage. The sugar planters, nine out of ten of whom are as white as the Anglo-Saxon can be after many generations of tropical residence, hold all Barbados, leaving only the steeper hillsides and the less fertile patches as “spots” on which the “red legs” and the negroes plant their yams, arrow-root, sweet potatoes, and cassava. They live in luxurious old manor houses, usually on high knolls overlooking their not particularly broad acres, half-hidden in groves of mahogany-trees, which are protected by law from destruction. With few exceptions they are the descendants of English colonists, and still keep the British qualities their ancestors brought with them, keep them so tenaciously that in some ways they are more English than the modern Englishman himself. There are suggestions that they are as short-sighted as most conservatives in taking the last ounce of advantage of the crowded conditions to keep the laboring masses at ludicrously low wages. Molasses, which the Barbadians call “syrup,” has advanced from seven cents to a dollar a gallon in the past few years, yet the planters are still paying about a shilling per hundred “holes” of cane, making it impossible for the hardest workers to earn more than “two and six” a day, though the prices, even of the foodstuffs grown on the island, have nearly all trebled. The pessimists foresee trouble and cite the continual presence of a battleship in Barbadian waters as proof that even the government fears it. But though they constitute only one eighth of the population and the percentage is steadily decreasing, the whites have always ruled in Barbados. As early as 1649 the slaves planned to kill them all off, and kept the secret of the conspiracy so well that it would probably have succeeded but for a servant who gave the planters warning on the eve of the attack. In 1816 there came another fierce negro rebellion, which was put down with an iron hand. Since then the blacks have been given little real voice in the government, despite their overwhelming majority, and the traveler of to-day finds Barbados the one island of the British West Indies in which the negroes are not beginning to “feel their oats.”
Some attribute the patent difference between the Barbadian and other negroes of the western hemisphere to his origin in Sierra Leone, while the rest came from the Kru or the Slave Coast, but there is little historical evidence to support this contention. Still others credit his superior energy and initiative to the absence of malaria in the island. Most observers see in those qualities merely a proof that the negro develops most nearly into a creditable member of society under physical conditions which require him either to work or starve. Whoever is right, the fact remains that Barbados is one of the few places where emancipation was not disastrous, and that the Barbadians are probably, on the whole, the most pleasant mannered people in the West Indies, if not in the western hemisphere. Except for rare cases of rowdyism, they are always courteous, yet without cringing. Even those in positions bringing them into official contact with the public are, as is too often the reverse in many another country, extremely obliging, cheerful, yet never patronizing, rarely brusk, yet efficient and prompt, fairly true to their promises, for a tropical country, and have little of that aggressive insolence which is becoming so wide-spread among the negroes in our own country and the other British West Indies. The crowded condition of the country evidently makes the constant meeting of people a reason to cut down friction to the minimum, while the necessity of earning a livelihood where work is scarce leads them to be careful not to antagonize any one.
That they are amusing goes without saying. The magnificent black “bobby” in his white blouse and helmet, for instance, does not reply to your query about the next tramway with, “Goin’ to Hastings? Better geta move on then,” but with a mellifluous, “Ah, your destination is Hastings? Then you will be obliged to proceed very rapidly; otherwise you are in danger of being detained a half-hour until the next car departs.” Yet they are not a people that grows upon one. As with all negroes, there is a shallowness back of their politeness, a something which reminds you every now and then that they have no history, no traditions, no ancient culture—such as that which is apparent, for instance, in the most ragged Hindu coolie—behind them.
Small as it is, there are many more points of interest in Barbados. There is Speightstown, for example, where whaling is still sometimes carried on; Holetown, with its monument to the first English colonists; a marvelous view of all the ragged Atlantic coast from the parish churchyard of St. John’s, in which lies buried a descendant of the Greek emperors who was long its sexton; Mt. Hillaby, the highest point of the island, from which one may look down upon all the chaotic jumble of hills in St. Andrew’s Parish, better known as “Scotland,” or in the south the broad, parched flatlands of Christ Church, the only one of the eleven parishes not named for some saint of the Anglican calendar. Or there is amusement, at least, among the huts tucked away into every jagged coral ravine, in noting the curious subterfuges adopted to wrest a livelihood from an overburdened and rather unwilling soil. Every acre of the island being under cultivation, there is, of course, no hunting; wild animals are unknown, except for a few monkeys in Turner’s Woods. These are rarely seen, for so human have they become in their own struggle for existence that they post a guard whenever they engage in their forays and flee at his first intimation of danger. Negro boys earn a penny or two a day for keeping the monkeys off the cane-fields. There being no streams or lakes, the island has no disciples of Isaac Walton, but the Barbadians are inveterate fishermen, for all that. Time was when the little boats which are constantly pushing out to sea in water so clear that one may see every crevice of the coral bottom sixty feet below brought back more fish than the island could consume. Then one might buy a hundred flying-fish for a penny; to-day these favorites of the Barbadian table cost as high as two pence each, while the equally familiar dolphins cost twice that a pound. “Sea eggs,” which are nothing more or less than the sea-urchin of northern waters, are a standard dish in this crowded community, for the same reason, perhaps, that the French have discovered the edible qualities of snails.
Barbados is the only foreign land ever visited by the father of our country. In the winter of 1751–52, nearly a quarter of a century before the Revolution, Captain George Washington, then adjutant general of Virginia at one hundred and fifty pounds a year, accompanied his brother on a journey in quest of his health. Major Lawrence Washington of the British army, owner of Mt. Vernon, fourteen years older than George, had been suffering from consumption since he served in the expedition against Cartagena in South America. They sailed direct to Barbados, then a famous health resort, by schooner. The skipper must have been weak on navigation, for, says George’s journal, “We were awakened one morning by a cry of land, when by our reckonings there should have been none within 150 leagues of us. If we had been a bit to one side or the other we would never have noticed the island and would have run on down to ——”, the future father of our country does not seem to have a very clear idea just where. In fact, schoolmarms who have been holding up the hatchet-wielder as a model for their pupils—unless some millionaire movie hero has taken his place in the hearts of our young countrymen nowadays—will no doubt be horrified to learn that George was not only weak in geography, but even in spelling. He frequently speaks of “fields of cain,” for instance, and sometimes calls his distressing means of conveyance a “scooner,” or a “chooner.” But let him speak for himself:
Nov. 4, 1751—This morning received a card from Major Clark welcoming us to Barbados, with an invitation to breakfast and dine with him. We went—myself with some reluctance, as the small pox was in the family. Mrs. Clark was so much indisposed [the italics are mine] by it that we had not the pleasure of her company. Spent next few days writg letters to be carried by the Chooner Fredericksburg to Virginia.