Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced apaches from Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies, already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we, too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own, including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony.
I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap. Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound; there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect. Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean, and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter. Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species.
Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town, whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central Place des Palmistes unless I could find better than this. There were “Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy, worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls, bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities, and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them, it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it. Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to throw out when a new one was indispensable.
The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear, rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as umbrellas, but worn as hats.
The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and libérés, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best, considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room, including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss.
The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then. Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by influence and example.
Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky” (which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France.
I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress, as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black. The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes, it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene, with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that would not have been tolerated in an American community.
The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or less successful attempts were made during the next half century to establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and later the Directorate, sent out déportés to take their place; but with Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to 1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.” Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since. Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of agriculture in French Guiana.
