The savane of Fort de France, with the Statue of Josephine, once Empress of the French
CHAPTER XIX
RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE
Martinique, though considerably smaller than Guadeloupe, from which it is separated by the British island of Dominica, probably means more to the average American, possibly because within the memory of the present generation it was the scene of the greatest catastrophe in the recorded history of the Western hemisphere. Some forty miles long and averaging about half of that in width, it is essentially volcanic in origin, untold centuries of eruptions having given it an almost unbrokenly mountainous character, heaping up those many mornes and pitons, as its large and small cone-shaped peaks are called, which stretch from its one end to the other. Its latest census, now ten years old, credited it with 184,000 inhabitants, ten thousand of whom consider themselves pure white. Martinique is fond of calling herself the “Queen of the French Antilles,” a title not wholly without justification, and to cite the fact that Cayenne and Guadeloupe are subservient to her in certain governmental matters as proof that she is the favorite American child of the mother country.
The traveler who disembarks in the harbor of Fort de France, capital of Martinique since 1680, is sure to have impressed upon him the fact that the negro with French training is even more inefficient under excitement than the excitable Gaul himself. Barely has the steamer come to anchor when her gangway becomes a shrieking, struggling, all but immovable mass of barefoot boatmen, of more or less negro policemen, custom employees, hotel runners, porters, ships’ agents, embarking and disembarking passengers, and venders of minor local products, all ignorant of that sophomoric law of physics that descending and ascending bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Bags, bundles, crates, valises, and trunks are dragged helter-skelter down this seething sloping bedlam, one of the latter now and then eluding the grasp of the struggling boatman, who is forced to dedicate one hand to his own safety, and splashing into the sea, there to float serenely about for some moments until it is rescued single-handed by the same hare-brained individual. For the bateliers of the French Antilles do not believe in mutual coöperation. Three trunks suffered this particular fate during our landing, but our own luck was less trying, the only mishap being that the boat loaded with all our worldly baggage, forced beyond the grasp of its owner by his clamoring rivals, began to float serenely out to sea.
By some stroke of genius, indispensable to those who have been denied the lesser gift of common sense, the fellow succeeded in rescuing his craft before the swift tropical night had completely blotted it out, and a quarter of an hour later we scrambled up the end of a long, slender, not to say drunken and decrepit, wooden pier all but invisible in the thick darkness. A youth beside whom Rachel looked tall required assistance in placing the trunk on his head, but once under it he requested that the valises be piled on top of it and scurried away as if he had nothing on his mind but the aged felt hat that served him as a pad. The douane was dirty, ramshackle, and lighted only with a pair of weak oil torches, but its officials were so courteous that we were not even required to lower our possessions from the bearer’s head to the floor. A hotel facing the savanna resembled the hang-outs of Parisian apaches, but it was in some ways preferable to spending the night in the park. Luckily the “choice room” into which we were shown was only dimly lighted by a flickering candle.
“Et le bain?” I queried, as the chambermaid was hurrying away to resume her rôle as waitress.
“Bath?” she murmured reminiscently, thrusting her turban-crowned African face back into the room. “Oh, yes, there is a tub below but—but it doesn’t function.”
“No water?”
“Plenty of water, monsieur, but the stopper has been lost.”