The last two hours, from Jiggerfoot Market to the summit, was a laborious climb, but unlike many such it was lightened by frequent streams of clear, cold water. Then all at once I found myself at the gap, or abra, as the Spaniards would call it, and upon me burst a view worth many times the exertion. All the Liguanea plain from St. Thomas parish to Spanish Town and beyond, far beyond, into the farthermost hills of St. Catherine’s lay spread out like a colored map on a draughtsman’s table, Kingston in full sight from the scattered rocks far outside its harbor, with the sea breaking white upon them, to its last suburbs among the foothills, the sand reef called the Palisadoes curving like a fishhook about the harbor, the remnants of what once boasted itself the most wicked town on earth at its point, the water about it so clear that one might easily have fancied he saw the sunken city of the buccaneers. There is spring water at the very edge of the gap and if one has thought to bring a pocket lunch there is nothing to hinder a long contemplation of this marvelous panorama, except the gradually penetrating cold of the mountains, which seems indeed an anachronism within plain sight of sweltering Kingston.
This sent me striding downward again sooner than I had expected. A hill covered with an abandoned cluster of big barracks soon cut off Kingston and most of the plain, and left the eyes to contemplate a nearer scene. Ahead, the road, leisurely and still grassy, had clawed itself a foothold in the rocky hillside, sheer and wooded with scrub growth everywhere except where landslides had scratched a white line down its face. Birds sang lustily, as if tuning up their voices for a later public appearance; human kind was pleasantly conspicuous by its absence. Beyond, on the steep flank of Catherine’s Peak, the soldier town of Newcastle, where British “Tommies” live in an agreeable climate and still keep an eye on Kingston, went down like a giant’s stairway into the gorge, an immense gorge always at my very feet, with little strings of roads winding in and out along its bottom as if in vain quest of an exit. And though the plain below had been faintly hazy and there were banks of clouds in the sky high above, the twin peaks of Blue Mountain range, 7360 higher than the sea, stood out as plainly as though one might have thrown a stone over them.
Five miles constantly downward by a mountain trail, though it is twice that by the highway, brings one from Newcastle to Gordontown, a somnolent hamlet closely shut in by high hills and noisy with the little river which furnishes Kingston its water. Down the bank of this I hurried on to the plain of Liguanea, where rocking street-cars carry one quickly into the insolent capital, for the mangoes were already ripening and it was high time we sailed away from the island Columbus called Santa Gloria.
THE FRENCH WEST INDIES AND THE OTHERS
CHAPTER XVIII
GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES
There is a suggestion of the pathetic in the name by which the French call their possessions in the New World—“L’Amérique Française.” It recalls the days when the territory they held on the western hemisphere was really worth that title, when Canada and Louisiana promised to grow into a great French empire in the west, and nothing suggested that a brief century would see their holdings reduced to a few fragments wedged into the string of British islands that form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean. The “French America” of to-day, except for Cayenne, a mere penal colony backed by a tiny slice of unexplored South American wilderness, consists of the minor islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and half a dozen islets dependent on the former. It is far better entitled to the more modest official name of “French Antilles.”
Guadeloupe—if I may be allowed an unpleasant comparison—is shaped like a pair of lungs, the left one flat and low, the other expanded into splendid mountain heights. They are really two islands separated by the short Salt River, across which is flung a single wooden bridge, and by some geographical oversight, their names have been twisted. The lowland to the east masquerades under the false title of Grande Terre, while the truly great land of magnificent heights and mighty ravines to the south and west is miscalled Basse Terre. The misnomers suggest that they were named by some bureaucrat seated before a map, rather than by explorers on the spot.
Columbus landed on what the natives called Turukéra or Karnkéra on his second voyage—a busy time, indeed, he must have had keeping his log on that journey—and recalled the promise he had made to the monks of Nuestra Señora de Guadeloupe in Estremadura to name an island in honor of their patron Lady. He found human flesh cooking in pots on the beach and knew that he had discovered at last a land of the Caribs, the warlike cannibals of whom he had heard in Hispaniola. Among other things he saw here his first pineapple—and no doubt, like all newcomers, was surprised to find they do not grow on trees. Ubiquitous old Ponce de Leon attempted to colonize the island in 1515, but was driven out by the imminent danger of being served up in a native barbecue. The first French to land were some missionaries who brought the aborigines bodily nourishment instead of the spiritual provender they had planned. It was not until the days of Richelieu that letters patent were issued giving a private company a monopoly of the island, which was gradually covered with French colonists and sugar-cane. African slavery followed as a matter of course, with its concomitant slave revolts, one of which came near to turning Guadeloupe into another Haiti, and for almost two centuries the history of the island was a constant succession of attempts on the part of England to add it to her possessions, as she did most of the French Antilles. Then in 1814 a treaty left it definitely French, slavery was abolished in 1848, and since that day Guadeloupe has followed the political reverses and successes of la mére patrie.
Basse Terre, the capital, is a modest little town on the southwest corner of the mountainous half of the island bearing the same name. Dating from the early days of French colonization, it once enjoyed a considerable importance, most of which disappeared with the founding of Pointe-à-Pitre, in a similar corner of the flat and more productive Grande Terre. The rape of its commerce by the parvenu has left it merely the seat of government, the Washington of the colony, more subservient to its business-bent metropolis than it likes to admit. This French custom of endowing their islands with separate official and commercial capitals has its advantages over the British scheme of collecting all the eggs in one basket. Martinique would have been left in a far sadder state had the destruction of St. Pierre wiped out its governmental as well as its business center. But there are also certain drawbacks to this more thoughtful plan; the traveler, for instance, who had hoped to find certain sources of information in Basse Terre is likely to learn that they live at “la Pointe,” and vice versa.
Built in the form of a spreading amphitheater and climbing a little way up the surge of ground that culminates in the volcano Soufrière, rival of Pélée in all but its destructiveness, a scant ten miles behind it, the official capital is half hidden under a smothering foliage of trees, which stretch away in a vast carpet of verdure into the mountains beyond. Its open roadstead is commonly an unbroken expanse of Caribbean blue, often without even a schooner riding at anchor to suggest the olden days of maritime industry. Though the French mail-packets make this their last port of call before turning their prows into the Atlantic, or the first on the outward journey, they usually come and are gone in the night, with few inhabitants the wiser. The latter seem to worry little at this comparative slight, and dawdle on through a provincial life as if they had lost all hope or desire to wrest from “the Point” its frequent communion with the outside world. An old fort half covered with vegetation, a rambling government building constructed in the comfort-scorning, built-to-stay style of most French official structures of bygone centuries, are almost the only signs to distinguish it from half a dozen mere bourgs scattered about the edge of the island. A governor sent out from France dwells in a villa up in the hills; his few white assistants are bureaucrats tossed at random about the French colonies from Madagascar to Cayenne by a stroke of the pen in Paris, and they have little in common with the racial mulattoes who dwell in their uninviting, chiefly wooden houses lining the few long and rather unkempt streets of the drowsy capital, except an ardent, almost unquestioning patriotism for la France.