In the large, rather pleasantly unkempt park, shaded with veritable grandfathers among trees, lepers, victims of the “big leg,” and other loathsome ailments were cutting the grass with crude shears and little toy hoes. In the outskirts, to say nothing of suspicious odors in the heart of town, stood stagnant ditches of unassorted garbage. Venders of indecent photographs marched brazenly about town, buttonholing the male tourist at every opportunity. The children did less open begging than those in the British islands, but there were white boys and girls among them whose manners and appearance showed them in a little less degraded condition than the blacks. What a place Pointe-à-Pitre alone would be to “clean up” to something approaching our standards of sanitation and domestic morals, were we so foolish as to follow a recent suggestion and purchase the French Antilles.
We drifted into a courtroom during a civil trial. The room itself appeared not to have been swept or dusted for years except in those conspicuous central portions where it was unavoidable; cobwebs festooned every corner; little heaps of débris lay under nearly every bench. Yet there were numerous statues in and about the building. The court consisted of three judges, a white man in the middle, flanked by two mulattos, all of them, as well as the more or less negro lawyers, dressed in black robes trimmed with “ermine”; that is, with moth-eaten rabbit-skin cuffs and lapels. On their heads were curious skull-caps, and beneath their robes unpressed white or khaki trousers of a cheap material, which suggested that the high cost of clothing burdened even these lofty officials. A lawyer was ranting monotonously, the gist of his remarks being that while all Guadeloupe knew that it was the desire of a gentleman recently deceased to leave his fortune to the plaintiff, it was quite impossible to carry out his desires because he had neglected to decorate his will with the required government stamp. Laboriously a yellow clerk, also in a robe, sat slowly scratching away with an old-fashioned steel pen, adding to the stacks of dog-eared hand-written papers that already filled a musty room next door almost to overflowing. Surely there was no doubt about Pointe-à-Pitre being French despite the un-Parisian complexions of its inhabitants.
If it is less beautiful than the mountainous half of Guadeloupe, Grande Terre had a materialistic advantage over the misnamed highland to the west. Its flatness makes it everywhere accessible by a network of good highways. A broad, white road stretches out along the coast through the mangroves that surround the commercial capital, and pushes on to the considerable towns of Ste. Anne, St. François, and Le Moule, while other highways crisscross the island, giving easy communication for all the sugar-mills scattered about it. More exactly they are rum-mills, for the French islanders give far more attention to their far-famed liquor, and the cane-fields that all but cover Grande Terre serve almost exclusively for filling casks and bottles. Their processes are still rather primitive, but fortunes have been won during the war, for all that. Once out upon this half of the island, the traveler finds it has a few low hills and ridges, but they are so slight that a bicycle affords easy means of communication, which can be said of few West Indian islands. Along the mangrove-lined coast are many shacks almost as carelessly thrown together as those of Haiti, yet all over Guadeloupe there is patent evidence that the negro is a far different fellow when directed by the white man than when running wild. The song of the jungle by night is broken by the constant roar of distant breakers and the noisy, merry negro voices and primitive laughter that explode now and then in the tropical darkness, while fireflies swarm so thickly that they look to the wanderer along the coast roads like the electric-lights of a large city.
All the scattered islets of the French West Indies are dependencies of Guadeloupe, being geographically nearer that island, leaving Martinique to concern herself with strictly domestic affairs. The most important of these is Marie Galante, six leagues south of Grande Terre, with fifteen thousand inhabitants and several usines to turn her canefields into rum. Les Saintes, Petite Terre, and Désirade, the latter the first landfall of Columbus on his second voyage, and owing its name to that circumstance, lie somewhat nearer the mother island. Far to the north is St. Martin, the possession of which France also shares with Holland despite its barely forty square miles of extent, making it the smallest territory in the world with two nationalities. No less interesting, though still more tiny, is the neighboring isle of St. Barthélemy, colloquially called “St. Barts.” The inhabitants are chiefly white, and among them one finds the physiognomy, traditions, and customs of their Norman ancestors. Yet though they speak French, it is only badly, the prevailing language being English, or at least the caricature of that tongue which many decades of isolation have developed.
The history of “St. Barts” recalls another nation that once had West Indian ambitions. In 1784 Louis XVI ceded the island to Sweden in return for the right to establish at Gothenburg a depot for French merchandise. But its isolation and distance from its homeland made it a burden to the Swedes, and in 1877, after all but one of its 351 inhabitants had voted in favor of a return to French nationality, it was handed back free of charge, King Oscar II making a gift to the inhabitants of the eighty thousand francs’ worth of crown property on the island. Since then the people seem again to have changed their minds, due probably to their subjection to the colored politicians of Guadeloupe. A few months ago, when the Crown Prince of Sweden called at “St. Barts” on his way to a hunting expedition in South America, he was received with open arms, and left with what the natives took to be a promise to assist them to transfer their allegiance to England or the United States, preferably the latter. Under the Stars and Stripes, they argue, their “great resources” would be fittingly developed. The island was once noted for its pineapples, but the tendency of shipping to strike farther southward and touch Barbados instead has ruined this, as it has the tree-cotton industry. Of volcanic formation, the island suffers for lack of trees and water, being forced to hoard its rainfall in large cisterns, like St. Thomas. Gustavia, the capital, was once rich and prosperous, being a depot of French and British corsairs who carried on trade with the Spanish colonies. There are still immense cellars built to bold the booty and merchandise, and zinc and lead mines that lie unexploited for lack of capital. To-day the inhabitants live for the most part in abject poverty, getting most of their sustenance from the neighboring islands and emigrating to Guadeloupe, where they are noted for their excellency as servants, despite their unfamiliarity with the native “creole.”
In the outskirts of Guadeloupe’s commercial capital
Fort de France, capital of Martinique