The Dutch possessions in the West Indies consist of six islands in two widely separated groups. Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba lie just off the coast of Venezuela; Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin are scattered among the British islands hundreds of miles to the north. A colonial government for all of them sits in Willemsted, chief and only city of Curaçao, and spreads its feelers of red tape to each small dependency and back to the Netherlands. Fifty-seven thousand people live in the four hundred square miles of these little dots on the blue sea, but there is a sharp line of demarkation between the two groups, Dutch though they both are in nationality. The inhabitants of the southern islands are mainly Venezuelan in origin and Roman Catholic in faith; they speak a manufactured language called Papiamento, without syntax or grammar, and made up of Spanish, Dutch, English, and African words, an unintelligible jargon with a teasing way of now and then throwing in a recognizable word or phrase. Those of the northern group are English-speaking and overwhelmingly Protestant. Of them all Curaçao is by far the most important, and the oldest of Holland’s present colonies. But the mother country rates her scattered islands in the Caribbean of slight importance in comparison with her newer and far larger possessions in the East, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo; while even Surinam on the coast of Brazil, with its extensive river system, its gold, and its fertile soil, means more to the Dutchman than all the rest of his colonies in the New World.
We sailed for Curaçao late in April. The Caribbean was glaringly blue under the brilliant sun, the trade-wind persistently astern. On the way we passed not only Bonaire and Aruba, dismal-looking mounds of earth partly covered with half-hearted vegetation, with Margarita, jagged-topped and sand-bordered, surrounded by a strip of light turquoise water which seemed to add attraction to its name and typify its tropicality, and Tortuga, low and featureless, melting into the distant horizon. These last two belong to Venezuela, the fifth and last of the nations with possessions in the Caribbean. Early next morning we were awakened by the blowing of the steamer’s siren as a signal to Curaçao to open the pontoon bridge across its narrow entrance, and, gliding into the bluest of lagoons, wound a mile or more up into the country before turning around and returning to the dock. As in Barbados, one was struck by the brilliancy of the atmosphere, the lack of restful shade. What trees there were looked dry and scraggly, the country-side was everywhere dead brown, arid, and bare, except for great clumps of organ cactus. A road or two wandered away over the little hills, only one of which could be called so much as a peak, a telegraph line of several wires following the best of them, though there is no other town than the capital on the island. One wondered why this barren reef is so thickly peopled, or inhabited at all, how even the few goats in sight find sustenance. Here and there were a few windmills, behaving with strict Dutch propriety for all the brisk trade-wind. These, and the irrigation they supply, accounted for the few tiny oases one could make out in the dreary landscape. Yet the island is unusually healthful; with ten days’ rain a year few microbes can live, and the constant breeze relieves in a measure the heat of the equatorial sun.
Ships tie up to the docks in Willemsted, which is more often known by the name of the island itself, yet such is the formation of these that one must take a punt ashore, or save ten Dutch cents by swinging down the rope ladder. Negroes were languidly sculling about the densely blue harbor, using the Dutch canal-boat style of a single heavy oar over the stern of the boat, and swaying their bodies as slowly back and forth as if their vocabularies did not include the word for haste. The town crowds eagerly about the harbor entrance, looking almost miniature from the deck of the towering British freighter. The houses, distinctly Dutch in architecture despite their patently tropical aspect, are well built, rarely of wood, most of them being faced with cement or plaster, all brightly colored, with red or reddish-brown tile roofs, and cornices of contrasting shades, causing them to stand out across the indigo lagoon like the figures on stained glass windows. Now and again the bridge connecting the two halves of the town broke in twain and left a motley throng gathered at each of its entrances. When it was joined together again the procession across it formed a veritable chain of human beings. The one thing that can induce the people of Curaçao to hurry is the signal for the opening of its bridge. Then from both directions comes the scurrying of mainly bare feet, jet-black women with great baskets on their heads dart in and out among those racing from the opposite shore, automobiles honk their way even faster, scattering the pedestrians in two furrows on each side, despite the warning placard in Dutch and Papiamento to “Zeer Langsam Ryden” or “Kore Poko Poko.” One may, to be sure, take a punt across, but that costs ten cents, whereas the bridge fare is one cent if barefoot, two if shod, all of course in Dutch currency, and the whistle of an arriving or departing steamer is sure to cause a portion of the population momentarily to throw off its lethargy.
The people of Curaçao are less annoying than the majority of those in the smaller islands of the Caribbean. It may be the proverbial Dutch thrift which keeps the town cleaner and more orderly. The children do not beg, the adults appear occupied with their own affairs, and though the population is overwhelmingly negro, the impudence frequently met with elsewhere is not much in evidence. They are amusingly stolid negroes, with staid Dutch airs, as solemn the week round as their British brethren on the Sabbath, without a suggestion of the chic air of the French islanders. Unshaved Hollanders, with faces like yellow old parchment, wearing the heavy uniforms of their homeland and carrying short swords, mingle with the black throng, but are rarely called upon to exercise their authority. Dutch high officials, in more resplendent uniforms, dash by in fine automobiles as if bent on running down the people they have been sent to govern.
Curaçao is a free port, though this does not tend to lower its prices, and trade is its chief, almost its only, raison d’être. The clerks in the stores glibly quote American prices to American travelers, but they are soon out of their depth in English. Many of them can converse fluently in Spanish, but the rank and file knows nothing but Papiamento, and is astoundingly voluble in that. Or it may be that the chattering sounded more noisy because it was unintelligible, for though any one knowing Spanish can catch the drift of a conversation in the native jargon, it is quite another matter to understand it. The men coaling ship were constantly singsonging it, but little more than the rhythm was comprehensible, though now and then a familiar word burst out clearly, like the face of a friend in a strange crowd. Old women seated in their doorways or on the ground in a patch of shade, weaving coarse hats from the bundles of Venezuelan “straw” which small boys brought them on their heads, chattered ceaselessly in Papiamento even in the hottest hours of the day. Stolid Dutchmen spoke it with accustomed ease. There were few signs in the dialect, for it is rather a spoken than a written language, though there is one tiny weekly printed in Papiamento, and two or three books in it may be had in the shops. The names over the latter are mainly Spanish and Dutch, occasionally French or English; street names are in Dutch. The daily newspaper is in Spanish, with some of its notices and advertisements in Dutch or English. The official bulletin is of course in the official language, as are the placards in government offices. Why a few signs about town are also in Papiamento is a mystery, for the educated natives all read Dutch, and the others rarely read anything at all.
There are only ten cities in the West Indies which have tramways, and of them all that of Curaçao is the most amusing. For it is single and alone, a crude little car with an automobile engine, which makes the horseshoe-shaped journey around the bay and back every half hour. Even in the suburbs the houses are tile-roofed and plaster-faced, gay and cleanly without, though with the same newspapered interiors of most negro shacks in the West Indies. The streets of the town, following the contours of the bay, are seldom straight, and the vista down any of them gives curiously mixed reminiscences of Holland and at the same time of tropical cities.
We took the unescapable Ford out past the bulking, cream-colored Catholic church, with its glaring whitewashed cemetery of cement tombs decorated with tin flowers rattling in the breeze and a few withered plants, to an ostrich farm in the interior. A hundred or more of the mammoth birds, if one count the gray, disheveled chicks, live in pairs or groups in bare corrals walled with woven reeds, and furnish their Teutonic owner a steady and appreciable income. A dozen American windmills clustered together in a little hollow irrigate space enough to grow the alfalfa and other green stuff needed for their nourishment. Yet even this strange industry looks out of place in so arid a land, and as one scurries over the tolerable roads which cover the island, past occasional makeshift shanties, jolting mule-carts, and an endless vista of bare, parched ground scattered with repulsive forms of thorny vegetation, the wonder comes again that this desert-faced coral reef should have succeeded in attracting human inhabitants.
Of the unimportant islets, keys, and rocks which we did not visit for lack of time, transportation, or inclination, we passed by with most regret the three Dutch islands of the north, for, this being a strictly West Indian journey, we did not pretend to touch that collection of countless small and smaller bits of land, all British, known as the Bahamas. Saba we saw, clear cut against the sunrise, as we steamed lazily on into St. Kitts. It is only a mountain-top, towering three thousand feet above the Caribbean, and extending who knows how far below its surface, for the water is very deep all about this tiny patch of five square miles. Cone-shaped, of volcanic formation, it rises abruptly from the sea to the clouds, and, one thousand feet up, in what must once have been a crater, is the only town, aptly named “The Bottom.” Here live some fifteen hundred inhabitants; another five hundred are scattered about in tiny hamlets called “districts.” The people are mainly white, descendants of Dutch settlers, though English is the prevailing language. Some legends have it that the Sabans are really English, descended from the Devonshire exiles of the Monmouth Rebellion, but with the mixture that has gone on for many generations it is difficult to confirm this tradition. There is no real harbor; indeed, no sign of “The Bottom” and its people can be seen except from the eastern side. There the “Ladder” of eight hundred steps leads from the difficult landing to the town. Almost every one lives high up on the cone, raising Irish potatoes, onions, and other northern vegetables in the coolness of the heights. One fantastic tale has it that supplies from the outer world and the inhabitants returning with them are hauled up the slope in baskets attached to a cable anchored in the town; the unromantic truth is that the former are carried up on the heads of the latter, or on the little horses which are equally skilful in climbing the rock-cut “Ladder.” Strangely enough, Saba is famed for the boats it builds, which are constructed not at the water’s edge, but in “The Bottom.” If he is set on remaining in Dutch territory, there could be no finer place in which to house the war lord of the twentieth century than the island of Saba.