Unaware that the illuminated postal-card menu on the table at the Queen’s Park Hotel, Port of Spain, could in any sense lift the veil from our enchantments, we read the following bill of fare:
Mayonnaise of Fish, with Lettuce
Oysters en Poulet
Scrambled Eggs with Asparagus Tips
Irish Stew
Haricot of Oxtail
Brain Fritters
Curry of Veal à l’Indien
Boiled Turkey and Rice
Ham and Spinach
Fried Sausages and Potatoes
Salad
Assorted Cold Meats
String Beans Rice Mashed Potatoes
Macaroni au Gratin
Chocolate Ice-cream Cakes
Cheese
Eight of us sat down at a table on the veranda, white-walled, white-ceilinged, and white pillared. A white-gravelled walk led out into the white sun, through a stiff, boxed-in, English garden, stuffed with plants in green tubs, and redeemed only by those natural things that will grow and be beautiful in spite of all conventions. Thirsting for cool ices and delectable fruits, looking wistfully for our vanishing fancies of West Indian ambrosia, we turn in a listless, disappointed way to that bill of fare, where ham and spinach and Irish stew and fried sausages send our hopes a-scampering off like a lot of frightened children.
What man in his sane mind would order an haricot of ox-tail in the tropics, when he needs but lift his hand for the food of Paradise; what man, with any sense of the fitness of things, would eat curried veal, when, for the asking, he might sup a libation fit for the gods? Alas! The asking never brought it, and we—that is, one, at least—settled down to scrambled eggs, and felt and looked unutterable scorn upon the one next at table who began at mayonnaise of fish, and took every course to cheese. Ah! friends, this was a case where the one who didn’t know fared ill. She lost her first opportunity of paying her respects to the Spanish Main.
Hungry and disillusioned, the one and the only thing to do is to forget those steaming sausages and the Irish stew as quickly as possible. We shall not stay here a moment longer. Hotels are makeshifts at the best. Let us leave these unromantic, unscrupulous venders of ham and spinach!
There, over yonder on the other side of the savannah, there is a delicious retreat where we can make good our escape.
II.
We shall never again see anything which can compare in beauty, of its kind, with the Jardin des Plantes of Martinique. No, we never shall—still, we must be just to all. Trinidad’s Botanical Garden is beautiful in its own way, and we were impressed with the idea that it possessed some features which that of Martinique lacked. However, that might have been owing to the fact that we did not view the Martinique Garden in its entirety. Had we done so, we might have found the same species in both places.
From casual observation there seemed to me to be one distinctive characteristic of tropical vegetation; the trees did not appear to grow so much in great social orders as do those of temperate zones. In the North, vast families of the same species of trees gather together and keep together with as rigid a pertinacity as any Scotch clan; the beech, birch, oak, maple, pine, hemlock, walnut, hickory, all have their pet homes and their own relations, and no amount of coddling or persuasion will ever induce them to a wide change of habitat; but in the far South, the tropical trees seem willing to settle anywhere in this land of endless summer. Of course, one finds that certain trees love the swamps, and others prefer the high lands; and some will grow in greater magnificence in some places where the conditions are absolutely congenial, than in other places where they are not so. There is the mangrove; it loves the wet and the mire—the mosquito-ridden, miasmatic river borders—and wherever, on these coasts, you find a swamp, whether in the very hottest spots, or in others only moderately so, there you’ll find the mangrove sending out ærial roots, reaching down into the muck for new strength, forming—banyan-like—a family of new trunks, all under one leafy canopy, quite content if only it has the water about its roots and a certain degree of heat.
Away up there in Haïti, we find the ceiba, and down here in Trinidad it is equally at home. These conditions make the formation of a botanical garden, representing the world-growth of sunlit vegetation, peculiarly favourable. Trinidad is said to possess the most superb collection of tropical plants in existence; and though gathered from all lands, growing not as strangers or even stepchildren, but as rightful heirs to the immeasurable vital force which pours forth from a rich soil warmed by a blazing sun the year around.