From that point one may see the important island of Tobago, the chief of Trinidad’s dependencies and the most recent of England’s possessions in the West Indies. It is reputed to have been the most fiercely contested bit of ground in the western hemisphere, having been constantly disputed by the French, Spanish, and English, until it finally fell to the latter in 1803. To this day it is surrounded by the ruins of old forts. French names still survive in its capital, Scarborough, and the splendid system of roads it once boasted have been allowed to go back to bush under British rule. In 1889 it was annexed to Trinidad, though it retains its own elective financial board. Like many of the British West Indies, Tobago has seen the insolence and aggressiveness of its negroes greatly increased by the example of those who were debauched in France, and was forced to suppress one riot with considerable bloodshed. The island may be reached weekly by government steamer from Port of Spain.
At St. Joseph the more important branch of the railway turns south and, sending an offshoot through a fertile cacao district and the oil regions about Tabaquite to Rio Claro, follows the coast of the Gulf of Paria to the edge of the southern chain of hills. A so-called express train connects the capital with the metropolis of the south once a week, but on account of the English “staff system” in vogue, its speed is frequently checked and sophisticated passengers get on or off as it slows up at each station to exchange the iron hoop which is the engineer’s passport for the ensuing section. Broad, flat vegas spread on either hand beyond the old Spanish capital, the northern range of hills withdrawing to the edge of the horizon. Great pastures with huge spreading trees, some of them gay with blossoms, and thick clumps of bamboo alternate with extensive cane-fields, most of them covered with the young shoots after the recent cutting in this April season. Here and there stands a large usine, or sugar-mill, with long rows of coolie dwellings, some housing a dozen families side by side, while outside the estate are crowded together the tin-roofed shacks of the negro and Hindu workmen who prefer to house themselves, rather than submit to the exacting sanitary rules of the company. The fields that are still uncut have those fat yellow canes with long joints that are the joy of the sugar grower, for the Caroni plain is famed for its fertility. Humped Indian bulls and their tropic-defying offspring dot the pastures and corrals. From Canupia a road leads to Alligator Village, where Hindus may be seen standing naked and motionless on their flimsy little rafts made of woven palm-fronds catching cascadura, the choicest delicacy of Trinidad. The natives have a saying that whoever tastes the flesh of this cross between a turtle and a lizard must return to end his days in the island.
Cacao plantations, shaded by forests of high trees, gradually replace the cane-fields as the train speeds southward. Parasites and climbing lianas, that death-dealing vine called matapalo by the Spaniards and “Scotch attorney” by the Trinidadians, which finally chokes to death the tree that sustains it, usurping its heritage of nourishment, give the forest wall the appearance of a great carelessly woven tapestry. Wattled huts as primitive as those of Haiti, many of them of spreading cone shape, thrust their thatched roofs above the vegetation, giving many a vista a touch that carries the mind back to India. Chaguanas, Carapichaima, Couva—the towns nearly all bear Spanish names—are populous, though California has a mere handful of hovels. Near the last the low wooded foothills of the central range begin to peer above the flat cane and cacao lands to the left; then the train bursts suddenly out on the edge of the gulf amid a flurry of cocoanut palms. Claxton’s Bay and Point-à-Pierre again recall Trinidad’s mixture of tongues, and at length the staff-hampered “express” staggers into San Fernando.
The second city of Trinidad has but ten thousand inhabitants. It is strewn over a clump of wooded knolls at the base of Naparima Hill, rising six hundred feet above it. Its population is so overwhelmingly East Indian that even the English residents are forced to learn Hindustanee. “His Worship,” the mayor, is a Hindu; on certain days of the week the visitor who strolls through its wide, asphalted streets might easily fancy himself in a market city of central India. Such signs as “Sultan Khan, Pawn Broker,” “Samaroo, Barber,” or “Jagai, Licensed to Deal in Cacao and Licenseable Produce” are triply as numerous as the shops bearing such patently negro mottoes as “To Trust is to Burst.”
A toy train runs from San Fernando through rolling fields of cane to Prince’s Town, which name it adopted in honor of a visit long years ago by the present king and his brother. The “staffs” in this case are human. Every mile or less the engineer halts to take on board from a kind of sentry-box a uniformed negro wearing a bright red cap—which, no doubt, makes it possible to reduce his wages by half—stenciled with the number of the section for which he is responsible. Prince’s Town lies in the Naparima plain, the second of Trinidad’s great fertile vegas; or one may visit another portion of it by continuing to the end of the main line. On the way are Débé, almost wholly a Hindu town, with a stream of many castes pouring down its highway, and Penal, with its miles of Hindu vegetable gardens and its mud-and-reed huts that seem to have been transported direct from India. Then comes a long run through an almost uninhabited wilderness, though with considerable cacao on its low, jungle-like hills, and finally Siparia, a rapidly growing frontier village where busses and automobiles are waiting to carry travelers to the slightly developed southern side of the island.
As we raced back down the hill again my hitherto private first-class compartment—no, I shall not divulge the secret of why I chanced to be displaying this sign of opulence and snobbishness—was invaded by the first American I had met in Trinidad outside the capital. He was an oil-driller from one of the newly developed fields. But though he had been drawing three times the salary of a college professor, he had “threw up the job because me an’ that there field-man didn’t hitch. He’s only a Britisher, anyway.” What might have been a pleasant conversation was disrupted by my new companion with such remarks as “Panama? Where’s that? Up towards New Orleans?” “Hindus? Is them Hindus with rings in their noses? I thought them was East Indians.” There is a saying in Trinidad, as in many other parts of the world, that only fools or Americans ride first-class. This man was both, for he was “afraid to go second for fear my friends’ll see me an’ think I’m goin’ broke”—an impression that would not have been at fault, as he had “blowed” his princely wages as fast as he earned them.
The favorite excursion from Port of Spain is that by government steamer through the Bocas Islands, which are scattered along the northwestern horn of Trinidad. First comes a cluster of jagged rocks with a few large trees, called Five Islands, government-owned and occupied by from one to three houses each, which may be rented by the week when they are not in use as quarantine stations. On one of them is the principal prison of the colony, and convicts in charge of a guard row out for the supplies and mail from town. Indeed, the journey is a constant succession of rowboat parties, not to say mishaps, for it is frequently blowing a gale about the Bocas, and as the steamer nowhere ventures close to shore, passengers and groceries are often subjected to thorough duckings, if nothing worse. The larger islands are privately owned, and dotted with pretentious “summer” homes of those who cannot spend the hottest months in Grenada or Barbados. An entire bay of one of them belongs to the son of the inventor of one of Trinidad’s most famous products, “Angostura Bitters.” I am not in a position to divulge the secret of its manufacture, beyond stating that it contains rum, mace, nutmeg, and powdered orange skins, which latter detail accounts for the fact that the market-women of Port of Spain pare their oranges as we do an apple and that the stone fences of the town are always littered with orange-peelings drying in the sun.
Monos Island lies beyond the mainland, and between that and the last and largest, rejoicing in the name of Chacachacare, are several bocas, or channels, through which pass steamers touching at Trinidad. The colony was in an uproar at the time of our visit because the government had proposed to turn Chaca—but why repeat it all?—over to the lepers. Thanks largely to its Hindu population, Trinidad has more than its share of these sufferers, and though they are “isolated” in an asylum on the mainland or in their own homes, they are frequently found mingling with holiday throngs. Trinidadians protested against advertising the prevalence of leprosy by housing the invalids on the most conspicuous part of the colony, and the charge of graft was as freely bantered back and forth as in our own merry land under similar conditions. From Chacachacare one may see a great stretch of Venezuela across the straits, the spur of the Andes on which sits Caracas rising higher and higher into the sky and disappearing at length in the direction of lofty Bogotá.