A principal street of Fort de France with its Cathedral
The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as the women
Empress Josephine was born where this house stands
Unlike the smaller British islands, the French Antilles have not put all their faith in sugar. Cane products, however, form by far the most important industry. If their exports of sugar decreased by half during the war, it is because the making of rum proved more advantageous, especially as France requisitioned their sugar at less than half the price in the open market. In the very years when the United States was adopting its prohibition amendment, Martinique and Guadeloupe increased their rum production by some forty per cent. The present almost unprecedented prosperity of the islands is mainly due to the distilled cane juice they sent overseas while their sons were battling at the front. But here, too, there are loud protests at the inequality of distribution of that prosperity. Three-fourths of the island, the Martiniquais complain, belongs to five families, of pure French blood, who intermarry among themselves, keeping the estates and the chief usines in a sort of closed corporation. If a bit of land is offered for sale, the complaint continues, these families bid it in at any price demanded in order to freeze out “les petits.” The fact that the latter may also be white men does not alter the attitude of the monopolists. Moreover, the small planter is ruthlessly exploited by the large distillers, who pay him fifty to sixty francs a ton for his cane and sell their rum at seven francs a liter. One finds, therefore, among the middle-class whites a considerable number of still patriotic but disgruntled citizens.
A little story which was going the rounds during our stay in Martinique shows that the game of “high finance” can be played even on a twenty by forty mile island. A “high yellow” native who had never been credited with extraordinary intelligence “cleaned up” three million francs during the last year of the war by the following simple little scheme. France decreed that the freight rate between Martinique and French ports should be three hundred francs a ton. The ships secretly refused space at that price. The “high yellow” individual entered into a private agreement with the steamship companies to pay the price asked, 1200 francs a ton. While his competitors were complaining that they could not ship, this man’s rum was being carried to Europe, where it was sold at a high price, but not one at which, his rivals pointed out to one another, he could make any profit at such exorbitant freight rates. The man persisted, however, paying for each shipment by check as soon as it was landed. With the last barrels he, too, went to France. There he wrote a polite note to the steamship company, requesting that he be refunded the nine hundred francs a ton he had paid over the legal rate. The company laughed loudly at his colonial naïveté. He put his check stubs in the hands of a lawyer, and, to cut short the story, the company suddenly recognized the bitter truth in the assertion that he who laughs last shows superior mirth.
I halted that night in Lorrain, on the edge of a small bay with precipitous shores into which the Atlantic threshed constantly, and next morning caught the lumbering auto de poste, having had the foresight to reserve a place in it some days earlier. Even though we clung to the coast, the road climbed continuously over the buttresses of the central mountain chain, for these smaller West Indian islands have virtually no real flat lands. From the tops of the higher ridges we could plainly make out Dominica on the horizon behind us. Some of the hillsides were built up in terraced gardens, though without stone facings, in which grew among other favorite native vegetables, gname, as Martinique calls the malanga of Cuba or the poi or taro of the South Seas. The chauffeur had small respect for any possible nerves among the passengers, and tore about the constant curves and incessant ups and downs of the ridge-braced coast as if speed were far more essential than ultimate arrival. The coast-line, ragged as a shattered panel, with pretty, old-as-France towns nestled in each scolloped bay, presented many a beautiful vista. Here and there we crossed a little cane railroad, some of the fields that fed them so precipitous that the bundles of cane were shot down across the ravines on wire trolleys. At Trinité, with its long peninsula stretching far out into the Atlantic, we turned inland and climbed quickly into the hills. Here there were a few Chinese and Hindu features, but the overwhelming majority were negroes, though full-blooded Africans were almost rare. The Frenchman is inclined to overlook the matter of color in his attachments, with the result that mulattoes are much more numerous in the French than in the British islands. There is a great difference, too, in what might be called public discipline. To cite one of many examples: one of our fellow-passengers crowded into the coach with an immense plate-glass mirror without a frame. A mishap at any of the sharp turns or steep descents might easily have shattered it and seriously injured the score of persons huddled within the vehicle. But though the one white traveler besides myself kept repeating during all the rest of the journey, “Mais c’est excessivement dangereux,” the mirror remained. In the British islands the mere attempt to enter a public vehicle with such an object would probably have resulted in a solemn case in a magistrate’s court that same morning. Near Gros Morne were several hills completely covered with pineapples, the cultivators climbing along the rows as up and down a ladder. Then suddenly we came out high above the great bay of Fort de France, the square chimneys of a dozen rum usines dotting the almost flat lands about it, and descended quickly through ever more populous villages to the capital.
I returned to St. Pierre one morning for a walk through the heart of the island. An excellent road in rather bad repair unites the ruined city and the capital, a distance of twenty-five miles. It climbs quickly into beautiful, cool, green mountains. When one says mountains in the West Indies the word must be taken with a rather diminutive meaning, for though they are real mountains in formation, and sometimes in massiveness, the greater part of them is under water. Old sugar estates dating from the high-priced Napoleonic days, with half perpendicular cane-fields, surrounded the first few steep kilometers. Then the ascent grew more leisurely, though it mounted steadily for some three hours up the valley of the Carbet. If one was to believe the French guidebook in my pocket, I was engaged in a perilous undertaking.