Rock River Road, Penal.
Occasionally the other side of the house is heard from:
The Public are hereby warned that the undersigned will not be responsible for any debts contracted by my husband, Emmanuel Paul, as we are no longer associated as husband and wife.
Margaret Paul,
Lance Noir, Toco.
The Spanish influence may be seen in the custom of doctors and dentists advertising “Lady in Attendance,” to add reassurance to their female clientele.
The Government of Trinidad runs an excellent railway and coast steamer service. The cars are of three classes, with cross-seats, as in Europe, though with a few compartment partitions. Shades resembling cap-visors project over the windows, and the trains are as clean and orderly as those of Porto Rico. First class is small and exclusive, occupying only one third of a coach, and the rare traveler in it is apt to be taken for an important government official and saluted by all railway employees and stared at with envy and astonishment by the “garden” variety of voyagers. Even the few white citizens usually travel second-class, though this is by no means free from African and Asiatic mixtures. The bulk of the train is made up of third-class coaches, their hard wooden benches crowded with every possible combination of negro, Hindu, Chinese, Venezuelan, Portuguese, and French blood, with an occasional poor white, and presents a truly cosmopolitan conglomeration of garb and tongue. Employees are as varied in origin. A big-bearded “collector,” or station-agent, with Hindu features which seem strangely out of place under his placarded cap, rebukes a Chinese-Hindu passenger in the amusing “English” of the West Indies, then slaps a jet black “head guard” on the back with a “How goes?” and gets the reply, “Oh, getting on poc’ á poc’.” In addition to these vigilant ticket-seekers, there are inspectors whose official caps read “Head Examiner,” a title which more than one stranger has misconstrued.
Trains are frequent. They are drawn by large oil-burning Montreal engines with white “drivers” and set forth from Port of Spain, like our own fliers, over a roadbed in excellent condition for the first twenty miles or more. Beyond that, as the line breaks up into its several branches, the engines get smaller and smaller; the engineers become mulattoes, then blacks, with only a tropical sense of the value of time; the tracks are more and more congested with train-loads of cane in the cutting season, with the result that a well-arranged time-table is often disrupted. Swampy stretches of mangroves to the right and left flank the first few miles. Groups of prisoners, in yellow, white, or orange-colored caps, according to whether they are misdemeanants, felons, or “long-timers,” are turning some of these into solid ground. Cocoanut plantations soon supersede the swamps, to be in turn replaced by cane, as flat lands spread farther and farther away on the left to the base of high hills or low mountains rather arid in appearance, despite the density of their brush and forest, red trails here and there climbing their wooded flanks.
Ten minutes out the considerable town of San Juan imposes the first halt, its platform seething with a multi-colored throng struggling with every manner of queer luggage. A few miles farther on, at the base of El Tucuche, the highest peak of Trinidad, is the old Spanish capital of the island, San José de Oruña, now called St. Joseph. Unlike the British, the conquistadores preferred to build their principal towns some miles back from the sea. It did them little good in this case, however, for St. Joseph was burned to the ground by that prince of buccaneers, Sir Walter Raleigh, and here the Spanish governor, Chacón, surrendered the island to a superior British force in 1797 without a fight, which may be one of the reasons why a street of the old capital is named for him. St. Joseph lies a bit up hill from the station, with a magnificent view of the vast Caroni plain, a floor-flat vega dense with vegetation, dotted with villages, and here and there the stacks of sugar-mills, called usines in Trinidad. Scattered, somewhat hilly, with the languid, capacious air of a village, the old capital is interesting to-day for its flora and its historical reminiscences. Veritable grandfathers of trees, with long beards, their immense branches thickly grown with orchids and other flowering parasites, shade it at every hour of the day. Humming-birds flit in and out among its masses of red and purple bougainvillea. The trade wind, which seldom reaches Port of Spain, sweeps down through a break in the brownish-green hills which hem the former capital in; if it is uncomfortably hot at noonday, it is because all Trinidad is aware of its proximity to the equator. Of Spanish ruins it has none, but there are numerous Venezuelan inhabitants, and the Castilian tongue and customs have to some extent survived. Here, too, are strange interminglings of races and tongues—“El Toro Store” on Piccadilly Street; a rum-shop called “The Trinidadians’ Delight” on Buena Vista Street. In its dry and stony cemetery are monuments with Chinese, Spanish, Hindu, French and English names, some of the last all too evidently those of negroes.