There is little, indeed, to excite the senses as the crowded launch plows for half an hour toward the uninviting shore. Seen from the harbor, Port of Spain, with its long straight line of wharves and warehouses, looks dismal in the extreme, especially to those who have left beautiful St. Georges of Grenada the evening before. Yet from the moment of landing one has the feeling of having gotten somewhere at last. The second in size and the most prosperous of the British West Indies may be less beautiful than the scattered toy-lands bordering the Caribbean, but a glance suffices to prove it far more progressive. Deceived by its featureless appearance from the sea, the traveler is little short of astounded to find Port of Spain an extensive city, the first real city south of Porto Rico, with a beauty of its own unsuggested from the harbor. Spread over an immense plain sloping ever so slightly toward the sea, with wide, right-angled, perfect asphalt streets, electric-cars as up-to-date as those of any American city covering it in every direction, and having most of the conveniences of modern times, it bears little resemblance to the backward, if more picturesque, “capitals” of the string of tiny islands to the north. The insignificant “Puerto de los Españoles,” which the English found here when they captured the island a mere century and a quarter ago, was burned to the ground in 1808; another conflagration swept it in 1895, so that the city of to-day has a sprightly, new-built aspect, despite the comparative flimsiness of its mainly wooden buildings. There are numerous imposing structures of brick and stone, too, along its broad streets, and many splendid residences in the suburbs stretching from the bright and ample business section to the foot of the encircling hills.
Long before he reaches these, however, the visitor is sure to be struck by the astonishing variety of types that make up the population. Unlike that of the smaller islands, the development of Trinidad came mainly after African slavery was beginning to be frowned upon, and though the negro element of its population is large, the monotony of flat noses and black skins is broken by an equal number of other racial characteristics. Large numbers of Chinese workmen were imported in the middle of the last century; Hindu coolies, indentured for five years, were introduced in 1839, and though the Government of India has recently forbidden this species of servitude, fully one third of the inhabitants are East Indians or their more or less full-blooded descendants. Toward the end of the eighteenth century large numbers of French refugees took up their residence in Trinidad, and the island to-day has more inhabitants of this race than any of the West Indies not under French rule. Many of the plantation-owners are of this stock, improvident fellows, if one may believe the rumors afloat, who mortgage their estates when times are hard. Then, instead of paying their debts when the price of sugar and cacao make them temporarily rich, they go to Europe “on a tear.” Martinique and Guadeloupe have also sent their share of laborers, and there are sections of Trinidad in which the negroes are as apt to speak French as English. Portuguese, fleeing persecution in Madeira, added to this heterogeneous throng, while Venezuelans are constantly drifting across the Bocas to increase the helter-skelter of races that makes up the island’s present population.
All this mixture may be seen in a single block of Port of Spain. Here the stroller passes a wide-open, unfurnished room where turbanned Hindus squat on their heels on the bare floor, some with long shovel-beards through which they run their thin, oily fingers, some in the act of getting their peculiar hair-cuts, nearly all of them smoking their curious tree-shaped pipes, all of them chattering their dialects in the rather effeminate voices of their race. On the sidewalk outside are their women, in gold nose-rings varying in size from mere buttons to hoops which flap against a cheek as they walk, silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, anklets clinking above their bare feet, the lobes of their ears loaded down with several chain-links, as well as earrings, their bare upper arms protruding from the colorful cheap shrouds in which they wrap themselves, a corner of it thrown over their bare heads. There are wide diversities of type, even of this one race. Here a group of Madrassis, several degrees blacker than the others, is stretched out on another unswept floor, there a Bengalee squats in a doorway arranging his straight black hair with a wooden comb. Mohammedans and Brahmins, sworn enemies throughout the island as at home, pass each other without a sign of recognition. Men of different castes mingle but slightly, despite the broadening influence of foreign travel; they have one and all lost caste by crossing the sea, but all in equal proportion, so that their relative standing remains the same. The influence of their new environment has affected them in varying degrees. Two men alike enough in features to be brothers, the one in an elaborate turban, loose silky blouse, and a flowing white mass of cloth hitched together between his legs in lieu of trousers, the other in a khaki suit and a Wild West felt hat, stand talking together in Hindustanee. Women in nose-rings, bracelets, and massive silver necklaces weighing several pounds are sometimes garbed in hat, shirt-waist, and skirt, sometimes even in low shoes with silver anklets above them.
Next door to these groups, or alternating between them, is a family of the same slovenly, thick-tongued, jolly negroes who overrun all the West Indies. The difference in color between these and the Hindus, even the swarthy Madrassis, is striking; the one is done in charcoal, the other in oil colors. As great is the contrast between the coarse features of the Africans and those of the East Indians, so finely modeled that they might be taken for Caucasians, except for their mahogany complexions. Even in manners the two races are widely separated. While the negro is forward, fawningly aggressive, occasionally insolent, the Hindus have a detached air which causes them never to intrude upon the passer-by, even to the extent of a glance. They might be blind in so far as any evidence of attention to the other races about them goes. Abutting the negro residence is perhaps a two-story house with a long perpendicular signboard in Chinese characters, a shop below, a residence above, with many curious Celestial touches. Then comes a building placarded in Spanish, “Venezuelans very welcome,” where not a word of English is spoken by the whole swarming family. On down the street stretch all manner of queer mixtures of customs, costumes, races, language, end names. Sing How Can keeps a provision shop next to Diogenes Brathwaite’s “Rum Parlor,” flanked on the other side by Rahman Singh, the barber, who in his turn is shut in by the leather sandal factory of Pedro Vialva. Women in the striking costume of the French islands stroll past with a graceful, dignified carriage; a man in a red fez pauses to talk to a man with a veritable cloth-shop wound about his head. Negro Beau Brummels speaking a laboriously learned English with an amusing accent, stately black policemen in spotless white jackets and helmets and those enormous shoes, shining like the proverbial “nigger’s heel,” worn by all British negroes in uniform, solemnly swinging their swagger-sticks with what suggests the wisdom of the ages until a chance question discloses how stupid they are under their impressive and patronizingly polite manner; now and then a disgruntled Venezuelan general whom Castro or Gomez has forced to seek an asylum under the Union Jack; a pair of sallow shopkeepers sputtering their nasal Portuguese—all mingle together in the passing throng. Then there are intermixtures of all these divergent elements, mainly of the younger generation—a negro boy with almond eyes, a youth who looks like a Hindu and a Chinaman, but is really neither, a flock of children with unusually coarse East Indian features and woolly hair playing about a one-room shop-residence the walls of which are papered negro-fashion with clippings from illustrated newspapers; farther on a Portuguese rum-seller with a mulatto baby on his knee; a few types who look like conglomerations of all the other races, until their family trees must sound like cocktail recipes. Both the Chinese and the Hindu residents of Trinidad are thrifty; many of them are well-to-do, for the former have indefatigable diligence in their favor, and the latter, who neither gamble nor steal, have no very serious faults, except the tendency to carve up their unfaithful wives. But there are failures among both races, even in this virgin island. Outcasts who were once Hindu or Chinese, sunk now to indescribable filth and raggedness, slink about with an eye open for a stray crust or cigarette butt. Under the saman trees in Marine Square East Indian derelicts dressed in nothing but a clout, a ragged jacket sometimes dropped in a vermin-infested heap beside them, are sleeping soundly on the stone pavement upon which white men, sipping their cocktails in the Union Club, look down as placidly as if they were gazing out the windows along Piccadilly.
The turn-out of most Barbadians
A Barbadian windmill
Two Hindus of Trinidad