The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses

by James Anthony Froude

Industries so various and so active required labour, and I saw many of the blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent contradiction to the general West Indian experience, he told me that he had never found a difficulty about it. He paid them fair wages, and paid them regularly without the overseer's fines and drawbacks. He knew one from the other personally could call each by his name, remembered where he came from, where he lived, and how, and could joke with him about his wife or mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an innocent affection, stayed with him all the week without asking for holidays, and worked with interest and goodwill. Four years only had elapsed since Dr. Nicholls commenced his undertakings, and he already saw his way to clearing a thousand pounds a year on that one small patch of acres. I may mention that, being the only man in the island of really superior attainments, he had tried in vain to win one of the seats in the elective part of the legislature.

There was nothing particularly favourable in the situation of his land. All parts of Dominica would respond as willingly to similar treatment. What could be the reason, Dr. Nicholls asked me, why young Englishmen went planting to so many other countries, went even to Ceylon and Borneo, while comparatively at their own doors, within a fortnight's sail of Plymouth, there was this island immeasurably more fertile than either? The explanation, I suppose, is the misgiving that the West Indies are consigned by the tendencies of English policy to the black population, and that a local government created by representatives of the negro vote would make a residence there for an energetic and self-respecting European less tolerable than in any other part of the globe. The republic of Hayti not only excludes a white man from any share of the administration, but forbids his acquisition or possession of real property in any form. Far short of such extreme provisions, the most prosperous industry might be blighted by taxation. Self-government is a beautiful subject for oratorical declamation. If the fact corresponded to the theory and if the possession of a vote produced the elevating effects upon the character which are so noisily insisted upon, it would be the welcome panacea for political and social disorder. Unfortunately the fact does not correspond to the theory. The possession of a vote never improved the character of any human being and never will.

There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment might be ventured without any serious risk. Let the suffrage principle be applied in its fullness where the condition of the people seems best to promise success. In some one of them—Dominica would do as well as any other—let a man of ability and character with an ambition to distinguish himself be sent to govern with a free hand. Let him choose his own advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into fatal and inexcusable errors, with interference from home. Let him have time to carry out any plans which he may form, without fear of recall at the end of the normal period. After ten or fifteen years, let the results of the two systems be compared side by side. I imagine the objection to such a trial would be the same which was once made in my hearing by an Irish friend of mine, who was urging on an English statesman the conversion of Ireland into a Crown colony. 'You dare not try it,' he said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we would be the most prosperous island of the two, and you would be wanting to follow our example.'

We had exhausted the neighbourhood of Roseau. After a few days Captain C. was again able to ride, and we could undertake more extended expeditions. He provided me with a horse or pony or something between both, a creature that would climb a stone staircase at an angle of forty-five, or slide down a clay slope soaked by a tropical shower, with the same indifference with which it would canter along a meadow. In the slave times cultivation had been carried up into the mountains. There were the old tracks through the forest engineered along the edges of precipices, torrents roaring far down below, and tall green trees standing in hollows underneath, whose top branches were on a level with our eyes. We had to ride with mackintosh and umbrella, prepared at any moment to have the floods descend upon us. The best costume would be none at all. While the sun is above the horizon the island seems to lie under the arches of perpetual rainbows. One gets wet and one dries again, and one is none the worse for the adventure. I had heard that it was dangerous. It did no harm to me. A very particular object was to reach the crest of the mountain ridge which divides Dominica down the middle. We saw the peaks high above us, but it was useless to try the ascent if one could see nothing when one arrived, and mists and clouds hung about so persistently that we had to put off our expedition day after day.

A tolerable morning came at last. We started early. A faithful black youth ran alongside of the horses to pick us up if we fell, and to carry the indispensable luncheon basket. We rode through the town, over the bridge and by the foot of Dr. Nicholls's plantations. We passed through lime and banana gardens rising slowly along the side of a glen above the river. The road had been made by the French long ago, and went right across the island. It had once been carefully paved, but wet and neglect had loosened the stones and tumbled them out of their places. Trees had driven their roots through the middle of the track. Mountain streams had taken advantage of convenient cuttings and scooped them into waterways. The road commissioner on the official staff seemed a merely ornamental functionary. We could only travel at a foot pace and in single file. Happily our horses were used to it. Along this road in 1805 Sir George Prevost retreated with the English garrison of Roseau, when attacked in force from Martinique; saved his men and saved the other part of the island till relief came and the invaders were driven out again. That was the last of the fighting, and we have been left since in undisturbed possession. Dominica was then sacred as the scene of Rodney's glories. Now I suppose, if the French came again, we should calculate the mercantile value of the place to us, and having found it to be nothing at all, might conclude that it would be better to let them keep it.

We went up and up, winding round projecting spurs of mountain, here and there coming on plateaus where pioneering blacks were clearing patches of forest for their yams and coffee. We skirted the edge of a valley several miles across, on the far side of which we saw the steaming of the sulphur springs, and beyond and above it a mountain peak four thousand feet high and clothed with timber to the summit. In most countries the vegetation grows thin as you rise into the higher altitudes. Here the bush only seems to grow denser, the trees grander and more self-asserting, the orchids and parasites on the boughs more variously brilliant. There were tree ferns less splendid than those in New Zealand and Australia, but larger than any one can see in English hot-houses, wild oranges bending under the weight of ripe fruit which was glowing on their branches, wild pines, wild begonias scattered along the banks, and a singularly brilliant plant which they call the wild plantain, but it is not a plantain at all, with large broad pointed leaves radiating out from a centre like an aloe's, and a crimson flower stem rising up straight in the middle. It was startling to see such insolent beauty displaying itself indifferently in the heart of the wilderness with no human eye to look at it unless of some passing black or wandering Carib.

The track had been carried across hot streams fresh from boiling springs, and along the edge of chasms where there was scarcely foothold for the horses. At length we found ourselves on what was apparently the highest point of the pass. We could not see where we were for the trees and bushes which surrounded us, but the path began to descend on the other side. Near the summit was a lake formed in an old volcanic crater which we had come specially to look at. We descended a few hundred feet into a hollow among the hills where the lake was said to be. Where was it, then? I asked the guide, for I could discover nothing that suggested a lake or anything like one. He pointed into the bush where it was thicker with tropical undergrowth than a wheatfield with ears of corn. If I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at the risk of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming creatures, I should find myself on the water's edge.

To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near a wonder which I could not see after all, was not what I had proposed to myself. There was a traveller's rest at the point where we halted, a cool damp grotto carved into the sand-stone. We picketed our horses, cutting leafy boughs off the trees for them, and making cushions for ourselves out of the ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we should see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky we might catch a glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds rolled, down off the mountains, filled the hollow where we stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the question seemed rather how we were to return than whether we should venture farther.

While we were considering what to do, we heard steps approaching through the fog, and a party of blacks came up on their way to Roseau with a sick companion whom they were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating our luncheon in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and stare at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me than good manners would have allowed if they had possessed such things; the 'I am as good as you, and you will be good enough to know it,' sort of tone which belongs to these democratic days showing itself rather notably in the rising generation in parts of these islands. I defended myself with producing a sketch book and proceeding to take their likenesses, on which they fled precipitately.

Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our cigars, I speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of redcoats who must have bivouacked on that very spot, when the clouds broke and the sun came out. The interval was likely to be a short one, so we hurried to our feet, walked rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane had torn a passage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake as we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple of hundred feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round a promontory under the crags and woods of the opposite hills: they call it a crater, and I suppose it may have been one, for the whole island shows traces of violent volcanic disturbance, but in general a crater is a bowl, and this was like a reach of a river, which lost itself before one could see where it ended. They told us that in old times, when troops were in the fort, and the white men of the island went about and enjoyed themselves, there were boats on this lake, and parties came up and fished there. Now it was like the pool in the gardens of the palace of the sleeping princess, guarded by impenetrable thickets, and whether there are fish there, or enchanted princesses, or the huts of some tribe of Caribs, hiding in those fastnesses from negroes whom they hate, or from white men whom they do not love, no one knows or cares to know. I made a hurried pencil sketch, and we went on.