Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolution

by John Dryden Kuser

By the third day ever-increasing quantities of sargasso weed appeared and floated past. Torn from their beds along tropical coasts, these bits of weed act as the shelter for multifarious forms of aquatic life which live as long as the weed lives and die when it finally decays. And so, although no sign of bird or other life appeared above the water surface, we were surrounded every moment by thousands of individuals of dozens of species.

Our ship was the "Advance" of the American government-controlled Panama R. R. Steamship Company, which operates the service between New York, Haiti and Panama. Two steamers run to Panama via Port-au-Prince, Haiti, three are exclusively for Haitian ports, while the others do not stop at Haiti en route to Panama. Beside the Panama line there is the Dutch line of boats which runs from New York to Haiti on regular sailings, but aside from these two there are no other lines which regularly run ships to Haiti. And so the quickest way of travelling from Haiti to another of the West Indies is via Panama.

SIFTING COFFEE ALONG A PRINCIPAL STREET

Coming south, the first land appeared on the fourth day, when the lighthouse of San Salvador, re-named Watling's Island by the British, showed the northern point of land long before the rest of the flat surface was visible. Bird Rock, the Fortune Islands and Castle Island were passed during the next twelve hours, and finally the high mountains of eastern Cuba were twenty miles off our starboard. Before these were out of sight, the peak of Mole St. Nicholas, Haiti, arose on the port bow. But we were by no means yet at Port-au-Prince, our destination, for it is a seven-hour sail from this point to the harbor in the lower part of the bay. The bay itself is over 100 miles long, and in the center of it is the Island of Gonave, 10 by 40 miles, to which all convicts were exiled from Haiti in the French days, and many of whose present inhabitants are descendents of these exiles.

After we had passed Gonave, the mountain ranges on both sides became very close and we could see the smoke of many fires high up on their slopes. These fires, we later found out, were those of the charcoal burners, who play an important rôle on the island. The charcoal is obtained by placing the wood which has been gathered under a covering of earth in such a way as to eliminate the undesired gases and leave the charcoal. After sufficient time, the earth is removed and the charcoal carried for miles into town on the backs of "burros." Charcoal is used entirely in Haiti for kitchen fuel. Of the fires we saw in the hills, all were probably not those of charcoal burners, as it is the common thing for the natives to burn off a section of the land which they desire to use and to ascribe the fire to spontaneous combustion.

At last the vari-colored lights of Port-au-Prince peeped forth from among the foothills on the right and we followed the channel in by alignment with two huge red range lights, one on the top of the Cathedral and the other on Fort National. The beauty of coming into Port-au-Prince is by daylight, when, not unlike Serrento, it shows a background of 2800 foot mountains rising behind, and with the pellucid green sea stretching out from the town. A Haitian launch came alongside for the custom officials to board. Our passports were taken to be kept for overnight and recorded, and we were then allowed to proceed to the dock which is at the end of a long pier jutting out from the land.

As we spun along to the house where we were to visit we went over streets smoother and wider than all but a few in the United States. These streets, throughout most of the town, were put down under contract with an American firm in 1914, before American occupation of Haiti, and are of excellent quality. From the business district we came out into the Champ de Mars, a laid-out park with a bronze of Dessalines, the "Founder of Haitian Independence," in the center; and at the end a grandstand from which to watch the sports or national festivities. Next to the Champ de Mars is the new palace of the President of Haiti. It is now at a stage of near-completion, and one wing is already occupied by the President and his family. This building is the fourth palace to be built on the same site, one of the others having been set on fire and destroyed, and the other two ruined through explosions. In the latter cases the President had been unable to trust anyone with the keeping of the national supply of ammunition and was forced to keep it in his own palace, so that in both cases the Presidents were killed by means of their own powder. On the lower side of the palace are the marine barracks and the gendarme caserne, opposite one another, and above the Champ de Mars is the marine brigade headquarters.

At this point starts the residential section of the town for both wealthy Haitians and Americans and other foreigners. We rode over narrow, quaint streets, after passing the marine headquarters, until we came to Avenue Christophe and our house, of old French style and with peaked roof, which was at one time used as the Presidential palace. Most of the houses of Port-au-Prince are of this old French style and show few traces of the original Spanish. Around all the better houses there are dense tropical growths with mangoes, oranges, and guanavena or sour-sap hanging over the porches. Many of the yards have also one or two royal palms, with their great white trunks reaching over fifty feet and with leaves clustered at the top. At the very tip of the tree's trunk is the heart, for which many trees are cut down, as "heart of palm" is one of the delicacies of the tropics. In the country districts both the royal and cocoanut palm are common. The two are somewhat similar but can be easily told apart by the crooked growth of the latter and also its darker and rougher trunk.