It seems that the Hindoo “coolie” is imported by the ship-load into Trinidad, and indentured for a period of ten years; at the expiration of which time he may return to India at his company’s expense, if he so chooses (and he usually does choose to do so, taking home with him a goodly store of gold). He makes a most valuable and reliable labourer, and has really been the salvation of the vast sugar and cacao estates on the island. It has been next to impossible to exact any continuous labour from the negro, without some system of slavery, and had it not been for the Hindoo, the resources of Trinidad would have been practically undeveloped.
The coolies were in evidence everywhere. In fact, they seemed to form a considerable proportion of the population. We do not wonder any longer at the emaciated pictures of the famine-stricken East Indians, for here, in a land of plenty, where food, almost ready cooked, is only waiting to drop, the Hindoo is the sparest, leanest creature imaginable. His ever-bare legs are not like flesh and blood, but small-boned and thin to emaciation, and almost devoid of calves below the knee; they have the hard statuesque look of bronze stilts. And the arms, too, are thin, and terminate in slender little hands that seem incapable of heavy and prolonged labour.
II.
Port of Spain, compactly, squarely built, and well paved, extends for quite a distance over a flat, alluvial plain to a grassy savannah, two and a half miles wide; one side of which, facing the Botanical Garden and the Governor’s Mansion, brings you to the base of the mountain.
The city is neither beautiful nor clean. Its architecture, dominated by the taste of the Englishman, is about as unattractive as that of our own country. The business streets are dusty, shadeless, and devoid of cleaners, except for the vulture, who, with his long, bare legs, his skinny neck and head, and huge black body, plays the part of city scavenger. These ungainly, hideous, repulsive creatures stalk around everywhere; they are under the horses’ feet; they roost on the eave troughs asleep in the sun, sit reflectively on chimney-tops, or come swooping down after some horrible piece of carrion in the street.
How can a civilised people be willing to turn the civic house-cleaning over to a lot of vultures? No wonder that plagues and fevers rage upon these beautiful islands. Under existing conditions, they surely have the right of way.
