Thursday 8th. Came Captn Crofton with his proposals which tho extravagantly dear my Brother was obliged to give. £15 pr Month is his charge exclusive of Liquors & washings which we find. In the evening we remov’d some of our things up and ourselves; it’s pleasantly situated pretty near the sea and abt a mile from the Town, the prospective agreable by Land and pleasant by Sea as we command the prospect of Carlyle Bay & all the shipping in such a manner that none can go in or out with out being open to our view.
The Washingtons evidently lived near the same spot now inhabited by American tourists, any two of whom would be only too happy nowadays to pay forty-three dollars a month for board and lodging, “Liquor” or no liquor. Capt. Crofton, the rascally profiteer, must have made a small fortune out of his “paying guests,” for they were always being invited out to meals at the “Beefstake & Tripe Club” or elsewhere. Church members, however, will be glad to see the next entry, despite of that unhappy break about the “Liquor”:
Sunday 11th. Dressed in order for Church but got to Town too Late. [What man ever kept his sense of time in the tropics?] Went to Evening Service.
Thursday 15th. Was treated with a play ticket to see the Tragedy of George Barnwell acted. [George, you see, was no money-strewing tourist. But then, he was not an American in those days.]
Saturday 17th. Was strongly attacked with the small Pox sent for Dr. Lanahan whose attendance was very constant till my recovery and going out which was not ’till thursday the 12th December.
December 12th. Went to Town visited Maj. Clarke (who kindly visited me in my illness and contributed all he cou’d in send’g me the necessary’s required by ye disorder).
Kind of him, surely, after his other little contribution to “ye disorder” in the shape of that first invitation. The only real result of the Washingtons’ trip to Barbados was that our first President was pockmarked for life, for Lawrence got no good out of the trip. George went back to Virginia and Lawrence to Bermuda, where he grew steadily worse, and finally went home to die at Mt. Vernon the following summer bequeathing the estate to his younger brother.
Washington speaks constantly in his journal of the hospitality of Barbados. That characteristic remains to this day, where it is carried to an extreme unknown in England and rarely in the United States. Of all the Lesser Antilles, one leaves Barbados, perhaps, with most regret.
CHAPTER XVI
TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT
AS his steamer drops anchor far out in the immense shallow of the Gulf of Paria, the traveler cannot but realize that at last he has come to the end of the West Indies and is encroaching upon the South American continent. The “Trinity” of fuzzy hills, to-day called the “Three Sisters,” for which Columbus named the island have quite another aspect than the precipitous volcanic peaks of the Lesser Antilles. Plump, placid, their vegetation tanned a light brown by the now truly tropical sun, they have a strong family resemblance to the mountains of Venezuela hazily looming into the sky back across the Bocas. Fog, unknown among the stepping-stones to the north, hangs like wet wool over all the lowlands, along the edge of the bay. The trade wind that has never failed on the long journey south has given place to an enervating breathlessness; by seven in the morning the sun is already cruelly beating down; instead of the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the vast expanse of harbor has the drab, lifeless color of a faded brown carpet. Sail-boats, their sails limply aslack as they await the signal to come and carry off the steamer’s cargo, give the scene a half-Oriental aspect that recalls the southern coast of China.