A bare five days from New York stands the most massive, probably the most impressive single ruin in America. One might go farther and say that there are few man-built structures in Europe that can equal in mightiness and in the extraordinary difficulties overcome in its construction this chief sight of the West Indies. Only the pyramids of Egypt, in at least the familiar regions of the earth, can compare with this gigantic monument to the strength and perseverance of puny man, and the pyramids are built down on the floor of the earth instead of being borne aloft to the tiptop of a mountain. It is curious, yet symbolical of our ignorance of the neighbors of our own hemisphere, that while most Americans know of far less remarkable structures in Europe, not one in a hundred of us has ever heard of the great Haitian Citadel of Christophe.
We caught our first view of it from “the Cape.” The January day had broken in a flood of tropical sunshine, which brought out every crack and wrinkle of the long mountain-range cutting its jagged outline in the Haitian sky to the southward of the city. On the top of its highest peak, called the “Bishop’s Bonnet,” stood forth a square-cut summit which only the preinformed could have believed was the work of man. Twenty-five miles away it looked like an enormous hack in the mountain itself, a curious natural formation which man could never have imitated except on a tiny scale. It is a standing joke in Cap Haïtien to listen in all solemnity to newcomers laughing to scorn the assertions of the residents that this distant mountain summit was fashioned by human hands.
Now and again as we journeyed toward it on the little railroad to Grande Rivière we had a glimpse of the citadel through the dense tropical vegetation, yet so slowly did it increase in size that its massiveness became all the more incredible. Where we descended at a cross-trail in the forest a group of small Haitian horses was already awaiting us. The gendarme officer in charge of them was a powerful young American beside whom a native of the color known as griffe, in civilian garb, looked like a half-grown boy. For the pilots assigned us on this excursion were none other than Captain Hanneken and Jean Batiste, now Lieutenant, Conzé, the exterminators of Charlemagne.
The trail broke out at length into a wide clearing which stretched away as far as the eye could follow in each direction, its grassy surface cut up by several wandering paths along which plodded a few natives and a donkey or two. It was once the “royal highway” between Christophe’s main palace and Cap Haïtien, outdoing in width the broadest boulevards of Europe. An hour or more along this brought us to Milot, a small town lined up on each side of the road like people awaiting a procession of royalty. At the back of it the highway ended at a great crumbling ruin which had about it something suggestive of Versailles.
Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci, for such it was, is wholly uninhabitable to-day, yet there is still enough of it standing to indicate that it was once one of the most ornate and commodious structures in the western hemisphere. Two pairs of mammoth gate-posts, square in form and nearly twenty feet high, guard the entrance to the lower yard-platform, bounded by a heavy stone wall. On the inside these are hollowed out into unexpected sentry-boxes, for Christophe was a strong believer in many guards. Higher up, sustained by a still stronger wall, is another grassy platform, from which a stairway as broad and elaborate as any trodden by European sovereigns leads sidewise to a balustraded entrance court, also flanked by sentry-boxes. Crumbling walls in which many small bushes have found a foothold tower high aloft above this to where they are broken off in jagged irregularity. The palace was evidently five stories high, built of native brick and plaster, and the architecture is still impressive despite its dilapidated condition and for all its African-minded ostentation. The roof has completely given way, and in the vast halls of the lower floor grow wild oranges and tropical bush. Those higher up, of which only the edges of the floors and the walls remain, are said to have included a great ball-room, an immense billiard-hall, separate suites for the emperor and his black consort, and apartments for the immediate royal family. At some distance from the palace proper stand the lower walls of the former lodgings of minor princes, a host of courtiers, the stables, and the caserns. The several parterres, once covered with rare flowers watered by irrigating canals, are mere tangles of jungle. The caimite-tree under which the black tyrant is said to have sat in judgment on his subjects, after the example of Louis IX of France, still casts its mammoth shade in the back courtyard; a small chapel lower down that was probably used by the lesser nobles serves Milot as a church; with those exceptions there is little left as Christophe saw it. Our forces of occupation are threatening to tear down the walls, which are soon likely to fall of themselves, to clear away the vegetation, and to build barracks of the materials that remain.
The narrow trail that zigzags from the back of the palace up the mountain may not be the one by which those condemned under the caimite-tree were carried or dragged to their death before the ramparts of the citadel, but there remain no evidences of any other route. Much of the way it is all but impassable even during a lull in the rainy season, for the dense vegetation shuts out the sun that might otherwise harden the mud in which the hardiest native horses frequently wallow belly-deep and now and then give up in frank despair. For a time it leads through banana- and mango-groves, with huts swarming with negro babies here and there peering forth from the thick undergrowth; higher still there is a bit of coffee, but the last two thirds of the journey upward is wholly uninhabited. Only once or twice in the ascent does one catch a glimpse of the goal until one emerges from a brown jungle of giant grasses, to find its grim gray walls towering sheer overhead.
Before this mammoth structure the memory of Sans Souci sinks into insignificance. As the latter is ornate and cheerful in architecture, the citadel is savage in its unadorned masculine strength. The mighty stone walls, twenty feet thick in many cases, are square-cut and formidable in their great unbroken surfaces. The northern side is red with fungus, the rest merely weather-dulled. Even the cannon of to-day would find them worthy adversaries. Time, which has wrought such havoc on the palace at the mountain’s foot, has scarcely made an impression on the exterior of this cyclopean structure, and even within only the wooden portions have given way. Great iron-studded doors groaning on their mammoth hinges give admittance to an endless labyrinth of gloomy chambers, dungeon-like in all but their astonishing size. Cannon of the largest makes known when the fortress was constructed are to be found everywhere, some of them still pointing dizzily out their embrasures, stretching in row after row of superimposed batteries, others lying where the rotting of their heavy wooden supports has left them. Many bear the royal arms of Spain’s most famous monarchs, several those of Queen Elizabeth, and the rest evidences of English and French origin. Tradition has it that Christophe mounted three hundred and sixty-five cannon of large caliber in the citadel, and it is small wonder that his successors have not had the courage to attempt to remove them. The imagination grows numb and helpless at the thought of transporting these immense weapons by mere man power to the summit of a steep mountain three thousand feet above the plain below. Yet not only these, but the uncounted mammoth blocks of stone of which the acres of thick walls are constructed, the mortars, the iron chests, the smaller cannon, the heaps of huge iron cannon-supports, the pyramids of cannonballs that are found wherever the footsteps turn in the clammy chambers or the jungle-grown courtyards, were all brought here by sheer force of human arms.
Higher and higher the visitor mounts by great dank stairways through story after story of immense rooms, the vaulted stone ceilings of a few partly fallen in, most of them wholly intact, all dedicated to the grim business of war, to come out at last in an upper courtyard with the ruins of a chapel and the mammoth stone vault in which Christophe lies buried. Some of the marvels of the place are the stone basins always full of clear running water, the source of which no man has ever been able to discover. Here the group of prisoners whom the captain had sent ahead with the paraphernalia and provisions for an elaborate picnic lunch were shivering in their thin striped garments until their black faces seemed to be blurred of outline. Yet they had less cause to tremble than their fellows of a century ago who were herded in this same inclosure to await their turn for being thrown from the ramparts above. For such was Christophe’s favorite method of capital punishment. The throwing-off place is a long stone platform ten feet wide at the very top of the citadel. From its edge the sheer wall drops to a sickening depth before it joins the mountain-slope almost as steep, forming that great hack in the summit which looks from “the Cape” like a natural precipice. Men hurled from this height must have fallen nearly a thousand feet before they struck the bushy boulder-strewn face of the mountain, down which their mutilated remains bounded and slid to where they brought up against a ledge of rock or a larger bush, there to lie until their whitened bones crumbled into dust. Multitudes of his subjects are said to have met this fate under the black tyrant, some in punishment for real crimes, more for having unintentionally aroused his enmity or to satisfy his whims. The story goes that Christophe and his British ambassador once got into a friendly argument on the subject of soldierly discipline. The black emperor contended that there was no order which his troops would not unhesitatingly obey, and to prove his point he led his guest to the top of the citadel, where he set a company to drilling and at a given command caused it to march off the edge of the wall. This particular tale should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, but there is unquestionable evidence of similar playful acts on the part of the heartless monarch.
Once the visitor can withdraw his eyes from the jagged Golgotha below, the view spread out before him is rivaled by few in the world. All Haiti seems to be visible in every detail: the ocean, the entire course of meandering rivers, high mountains, deep valleys, a sea of greenery, form a circular panorama bounded only by the limitless horizon. Little houses in tiny clearings on the plain below, a dozen towns and villages, “the Cape,” Ouanaminthe, even the hills of Santo Domingo, stand forth as clearly as if they were only a bare mile away, some flashing in the tropical sunshine, others dulled by the great cloud shadows crawling languidly across the landscape.