LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Shade-grown tobacco in Porto Rico[Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress[16]
A policeman of Havana[16]
Cuba’s new presidential palace[17]
Venders of lottery tickets in rural Cuba[32]
The winning numbers of the lottery[32]
Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects[33]
Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abajo district. The large building is a tobacco barn, the small ones are residences of the planters[33]
A Cuban shoemaker[56]
Cuban soldiers[56]
Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground[57]
The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos[57]
A principal street of Santa Clara[64]
The Central Plaza of Santa Clara[64]
A dairyman, Santa Clara district[65]
Cuban town scenery[65]
A Cuban residence in a new clearing[114]
Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land[114]
Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar-mill[115]
A station of a Cuban pack train[115]
Cuban travelers[80]
A Cuban milkman[80]
A street of Santiago de Cuba[81]
Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba[81]
The entire enlisted personnel of the Haitian Navy[112]
A school in Port au Prince[112]
The central square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on market day[113]
Looking down upon the market from the cathedral platform[113]
A Haitian gendarme[128]
The president of Haiti[128]
A street in Port au Prince[129]
The unfinished presidential palace of Haiti, on New Year’s Day, 1920[129]
A Haitian country home[144]
A small portion of one collection of captured caco war material[144]
The caco in the foreground killed an American Marine[145]
Captain Hanneken and “General Jean” Conzé at Christophe’s Citadel[145]
Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over Haiti[160]
A Haitian wayside store[160]
The market women of Haiti sell everything under the sun—A “General” in a Haitian market[161]
There are still more primitive sugar-mills than these in Haiti[161]
A corner of Christophe’s Citadel. Its situation is such that it could only be well photographed from an airplane[176]
The ruins of Christophe’s palace of San Souci[176]
The mayor, the judge, and the richest man of a Haitian town in the bush[177]
Cockfighting is a favorite Haitian sport[177]
The plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its American bullet hole[192]
Railroading in Santo Domingo[192]
The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago[193]
Dominican guardias[193]
Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose revolution finally caused American intervention in Santo Domingo[208]
A bread seller of Santo Domingo[208]
The church within a church of Moca[209]
The “holy place” of Santo Domingo on top of the Santo Cerro where Columbus planted a cross[209]
A Dominican switch engine[224]
A Dominican hearse[224]
American Marines on the march[225]
A riding horse of Samaná[225]
Advertising a typical Dominican theatrical performance[240]
A tree to which Columbus tied one of his ships, now on the wharf of Santo Domingo City[240]
The tomb of Columbus in the cathedral of Santo Domingo City[241]
Ponce de Leon’s palace now flies the Stars and Stripes[256]
Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico[256]
Air-plants grow even on the telegraph wires in Ponce[257]
A hat seller of Cabo Rojo[257]
There is school accommodation for only half the children of our Porto Rico[272]
The home of a lace-maker in Aguadilla[273]
The Porto Rican method of making lace[273]
The place of pilgrimage for pious Porto Ricans[288]
Porto Rican children of the coast lands[288]
The old sugar-kettles scattered through the West Indies have many uses[289]
A corner in Aguadilla[289]
The priest in charge of Porto Rico’s place of pilgrimage[296]
One reason why cane-cutters cannot all be paid the same wages[296]
A procession of strikers in honor of representatives of the A. F. of L.[297]
“How many of you are on strike?” asked Senator Iglesias[297]
The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico[304]
A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He gathers the grass with a wooden hook and cuts it with a small sickle[304]
Porto Rican tobacco fields[305]
Charlotte Amalie, capital of our Virgin Islands[305]
A corner of Charlotte Amalie[320]
Picking sea-island cotton, the second of St. Croix products[320]
A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar mill and the stone tower of its cane-grinding windmill[321]
A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking purposes[321]
Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica[352]
A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from the mountain[352]
Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent[353]
Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue of Nelson[353]
The Prince of Wales lands in Barbados[368]
The principal street of Bridgetown, decorated in honor of its royal visitor[368]
Barbadian porters loading hogsheads of sugar always take turns riding back to the warehouse[369]
There is an Anglican Church of this style in each of the eleven parishes of Barbados[369]
The turn-out of most Barbadians[384]
A Barbadian windmill[385]
Two Hindus of Trinidad[385]
Trinidad has many Hindu temples[400]
Very much of a lodge[400]
At the “Asphalt Lake”[401]
There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt field[401]
As I passed this group on a Jamaican highway, the woman reading the Bible was saying “So I ax de Lard what I shall do”[416]
“Draw me portrait please, sir!” The load consists of school books and a pair of hobnail shoes[416]
A very frequent sight along the roads of Jamaica[417]
Our baggage following us ashore in one of the French islands[417]
Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica[432]
A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe[432]
A woman of Guadeloupe[433]
The town criers of Pointe à Pitre[433]
In the outskirts of Guadeloupe’s commercial capital[448]
Fort de France, capital of Martinique[448]
The savane of Fort de France, with the Statue of Josephine, once Empress of the French[449]
Women of Martinique[464]
A principal street of Fort de France with its cathedral[464]
The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as the women[465]
Empress Josephine was born where this house stands[465]
The St. Pierre of to-day with Pélée in the background[472]
The cathedral of St. Pierre[473]
The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses into the corners of old stone ruins[473]
The harbor of Curaçao[480]
A woman of Curaçao[480]
The principal Dutch island is not noted for its verdure[481]
A Curaçao landscape[481]
MAP
The itinerary of the author[48]

ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES

CHAPTER I
OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES

We concluded that if we were to spend half a year or more rambling through the West Indies we would get sea-water enough without taking to the ships before it was necessary. Our first dream was to wander southward in the sturdy, if middle-aged, gasolene wagon we must otherwise leave behind, abandoning it for what it would bring when the mountains of central Cuba grew too difficult for its waning vigor. But the tales men told of southern highways dampened our ardor for that particular species of adventure. They were probably exaggerated tales. Looking back upon the route from the eminence of automobile-infested Havana, we are of the impression that such a trip would have been marred only by some rather serious jolting in certain parts of the Carolinas and southern Georgia, and a moderately expensive freight-bill from the point where lower Florida turns to swamps and islands. If our people of the South carry out the ambitious highway plans that are now being widely agitated, there is no reason that the West Indian traveler of a year or two hence should hesitate to set forth in his own car.

The rail-routes from the northeastern states are three in number, converging into one at something over five hundred miles from the end of train travel. Those to whom haste is necessary or more agreeable than leisure may cover the distance from our greatest to our southernmost city in forty-eight hours, and be set down in Havana the following dawn. But with a few days to spare the broken journey is well worth the enhanced price and trouble. A truer perspective is gained by following the gradual change that increasing length of summer gives the human race rather than by springing at once from the turmoil of New York to the regions where winter is only a rumor and a hearsay.

In the early days of October the land journey southward is like the running backward of a film depicting nature’s processes. The rich autumn colors and the light overcoats of Pennsylvania advance gradually to the browning foliage and the wrap-less comfort of the first autumn breezes, then within a few hours to the verdant green and simpler garb of full summer. There are reservations, however, in the change of human dress, which does not keep pace with that of the landscape. Our Southerners seem to be ruled in sartorial matters rather by the dictators of New York fashions than by the more fitting criterion of nature, and the glistening new felt fedora persists far beyond the point where the lighter covering would seem more suitable to time and place.

To the Northerner the first item of interest is apt to be the sudden segregation of races in the trains leaving Washington for the South. From the moment he surreptitiously sheds his vest as he rumbles across the Potomac the traveler finds his intercourse with his African fellow-citizens, be they jet black or pale yellow, circumscribed by an impregnable wall that is to persist until all but a narrow strip of his native land has shrunk away behind him. Only as superior to inferior, as master to servant, or as a curiosity akin to that of the supercilious voyager toward the “natives” of some foreign land, is his contact henceforth with the other race. Stern placards point out the division that must be maintained in public buildings or conveyances; custom serves as effectually in private establishments; the very city directories fetch up their rear with the “Colored Department.”

The tourist’s first impression of Richmond will largely depend on whether his train sets him down at the disreputable Main Street station or at the splendid new Union Depot on the heights of Broad Street. Unfortunately, the latter is as yet no more nearly “union” than it is, in spite of a persistent American misnomer, a “depot,” and his chances of escaping the medieval landing-place are barely more than “fifty-fifty.” But his second notion of the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy cannot but be favorable, unless his tastes run more to the picturesque than to modern American civilization. He may at this particular season grumble at a sweltering tropical heat that appears long before he bargained for it, but the hospitable Richmonder quickly appeases his wrath in this regard by explaining that some malignant cause, ranging from the disturbance of the earth’s orbit by the war just ended to a boiling Gulf Stream, has given the South the hottest autumn in—I hesitate to say how many decades. Nor, if he is new to the life below Mason and Dixon’s Line, will he escape a certain surprise at finding how green is still the memory of the Confederacy. The Southerner may have forgiven, but he has not forgotten, nor does he intend that his grandchildren shall do so.

In that endless stretch of sand, cotton, and pine-trees which is locally known as “Nawth Cahlina, sah,” there are other ways of passing the time than by watching the endless unrolling of a sometimes monotonous landscape. One can get into conversation, for instance, with the train-crew far more easily than in the more frigid North, and listen for hours to more or less verdant anecdotes, which the inimitable Southern dialect alone makes worth the hearing. Or, if wise enough to abandon the characterless cosmopolitan Pullman for the local atmosphere of the day coach, one may catch such scraps as these—of special interest to big-game hunters—from the lips of fellow-passengers: