"Good-morning, Mr. Chow Chung; I have come to you with the melancholy news of the death of our esteemed fellow-citizen, Hang Wang Kai. A fine man, and a great loss! What I liked about him was that he was such a thorough Chinaman of the good old stamp. A wealthy man, sir, a very wealthy man. The family are clients of mine, and they have just rung me up, asking me to cast a horoscope to ascertain the wishes of the stars with regard to the date of burial of our poor friend. How inscrutable are the decrees of the heavenly bodies! They may recommend the immediate interment of our friend: on the other hand, they may wish it deferred for two, five, ten, or even twenty years, in which case our friend would be one of the fortunate tenants of your delightful Garden of Repose. Quite so. Casting a horoscope is very laborious work, and I can but obey blindly the stars' behests. Exactly. Should the stars recommend our poor friend's temporary occupation of one of your attractive little Maisonettes, I should expect, to compensate me for my labours, a royalty of 20 per cent. on the gross (I emphasize the gross) rental paid by the family for the first two years. They, of course, would inform me of any little sum you did them the honour to accept from them. From two to five years, I should expect a royalty of 30 per cent.; from five to ten years, 40 per cent.; on any period over ten years 50 per cent. Yes, I said fifty. Surely I do not understand you to dissent? The stars may save us all trouble by advising Hang Wang Kai's immediate interment. Thank you. I thought that you would agree. These terms, of course, are only for the Chinese and Colonial rights; I must expressly reserve the American rights, for, as I need hardly remind you, the Philippine Islands are now United States territory, and the constellations may recommend the temporary transfer of our poor friend to American soil. Thank you; I thought that we should agree. It only remains for me to instruct my agents, Messrs. Ap Wang & Son, to draw up an agreement in the ordinary form on the royalty basis I have indicated, for our joint signature. The returns will, I presume, be made up as usual, to March 31 and September 30. As I am far too upset by the loss of our friend to be able to talk business, I will now, with your permission, withdraw."
Had I been born a citizen of Canton, I should unquestionably have articled my son to an astrologer, convinced that I was securing for him an assured and lucrative future.
CHAPTER IV
The glamour of the West Indies—Captain Marryat and Michael Scott—Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century—The West Indian planters—Difference between East and West Indies—"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"—Training-school for British Navy—A fruitless voyage—Quarantine—Distant view of Barbados—Father Labat—The last of the Emperors of Byzantium—Delightful little Lady Nugent and her diary of 1802—Her impressions of Jamaica—Wealthy planters—Their hideous gormandising—A simple morning meal—An aldermanic dinner—How the little Nugents were gorged—Haiti—Attempts of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti—Presents to Lady Nugent—Her Paris dresses described—Our arrival in Jamaica—Its marvellous beauty—The bewildered Guardsman—Little trace of Spain left in Jamaica—The Spaniards as builders—British and Spanish Colonial methods contrasted.
Since the earliest days of my boyhood, the West Indies have exercised a quite irresistible fascination over me. This was probably due to my having read and re-read Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log over and over again, until I knew them almost by heart; indeed I will confess that even at the present day the glamour of these books is almost as strong as it used to be, and that hardly a year passes without my thumbing once again their familiar pages. Both Captain Marryat and Michael Scott knew their West Indies well, for Marryat had served on the station in either 1813 or 1814, and Michael Scott lived for sixteen years in Jamaica, from 1806 to 1822, at first as manager of a sugar estate, and then as a merchant in Kingston. Marryat and Scott were practically contemporaries, though the former was the younger by three years, being born in 1792. I am told that now-a-days boys care for neither of these books; if so, the loss is theirs. What attracted me in these authors' West Indian pictures was the fact that here was a community of British-born people living a reckless, rollicking, Charles Lever-like sort of life in a most deadly climate, thousands of miles from home, apparently equally indifferent to earthquakes, hurricanes, or yellow fever, for at the beginning of the twentieth century no one who has not read the Colonial records, or visited West Indian churches, can form the faintest idea of the awful ravages of yellow fever, nor of the vast amount of victims this appalling scourge claimed. Now, improved sanitation and the knowledge that the yellow death is carried by the Stegomyia mosquito, with the precautionary methods suggested by that knowledge, have almost entirely eliminated yellow fever from the West India islands; but in Marryat and Scott's time to be ordered to the West Indies was looked upon as equivalent to a death sentence. Yet every writer enlarges upon the exquisite beauty of these green, sun- kissed islands, and regrets bitterly that so enchanting an earthly paradise should be the very ante-room of death.
In spite of the unhealthy climate, in the days when King Sugar reigned undisputed, the owners of sugar estates, attracted by the enormous fortunes then to be made, and fully alive to the fact that in the case of absentee proprietors profits tended to go everywhere except into the owners' pockets, deliberately braved the climate, settled down for life (usually a brief one) in either Jamaica or Barbados, built themselves sumptuous houses, stocked with silver plate and rare wines, and held high and continual revel until such time as Yellow Jack should claim them. In the East Indies the soldiers and Civil Servants of "John Company," and the merchant community, "shook the pagoda tree" until they had accumulated sufficient fortunes on which to retire, when they returned to England with yellow faces and torpid livers, grumbling like Jos Sedley to the ends of their lives about the cold, and the carelessness of English cooks in preparing curries, and harbouring unending regrets for the flesh-pots and comforts of life in Boggley Wollah, which in retrospect no doubt appeared more attractive than they had done in reality. The West Indian, on the other hand, settled down permanently with his wife and family in the island of his choice. Barbados and Jamaica are the only two tropical countries under the British flag where there was a resident white gentry born and bred in the country, with country places handed down from father to son. In these two islands not one word of any language but English was ever to be heard from either black or white. The English parochial system had been transplanted bodily, and successfully, with guardians and overseers complete; in a word, they were colonies in the strictest sense of the word; transplanted portions of the motherland, with most of its institutions, dumped down into the Caribbean Sea, but blighted until 1834 by the curse of negro slavery. It was this overseas England, set amidst the most enchanting tropical scenery and vegetation, that I was so anxious to see. Michael Scott, both in Tom Cringle and The Cruise of the Midge, gave the most alluring pictures of Creole society (a Creole does not mean a coloured person; any one born in the West Indies of pure white parents is a Creole); they certainly seemed to get drunk more than was necessary, yet the impression left on one's mind was not unlike that produced by the purely fictitious Ireland of Charles Lever's novels: one continual round of junketing, feasting, and practical jokes; and what gave the pictures additional piquancy was the knowledge that death was all the while peeping round the corner, and that Yellow Jack might at any moment touch one of these light-hearted revellers with his burning finger-tips.
Lady Nugent, wife of Sir George Nugent, Governor of Jamaica from 1801 to 1806, kept a voluminous diary during her stay in the island, and most excellent reading it makes. She was thus rather anterior in date to Michael Scott, but their descriptions tally very closely. I shall have a good deal to say about Lady Nugent.
The West Indies make an appeal of a different nature to all Britons. They were the training-ground and school of all the great British Admirals from Drake to Nelson. Benbow died of his wounds at Port Royal in Jamaica, and was buried in Kingston Parish Church in 1702, whilst Rodney's memory is still so cherished by West Indians, white and coloured alike, that serious riots broke out when his statue was removed from Spanish Town to Kingston, and his effigy had eventually to be placed in the memorial temple which grateful Spanish Town erected to commemorate his great victory over de Grasse off Dominica on April 12, 1782, as the result of which the Lesser Antilles remained British instead of French. For all these reasons I had experienced, since the age of thirteen, an intense longing to see these lovely islands with all their historic associations.
In 1884 I travelled from Buenos Ayres to Canada in a tramp steamer simply and solely because she was advertised to call at Barbados and Jamaica. Never shall I forget my first night in that tramp. I soon became conscious of uninvited guests in my bunk, so, striking a light (strictly against rules in the ships of those days), I discovered regiments and army corps of noisome, crawling vermin marching in serried ranks into my bunk under the impression that it was their parade ground. For the remainder of the voyage I slept on the saloon table, a hard but cleanly couch. We lay for a week at Rio de Janeiro loading coffee, and we touched at Bahia and at Pernambuco. At this latter place as at Rio an epidemic of yellow fever was raging, so we had not got a clean bill-of-health. As the blunt-nosed tramp pushed her leisurely way northward through the oily ultra-marine expanse of tropical seas, I thought longingly of the green island for which we were heading. We reached Carlisle Bay, Barbados, at daybreak on a glorious June morning, and waited impatiently in the roadstead (there is no harbour in Barbados) for the liberating visit of the medical officer from the shore. He arrived, gave one glance at our bill-of-health, and sternly refused pratique, so the hateful yellow flag remained fluttering at the fore in the Trade wind, announcing to all and sundry that we were cut off from all communication with the shore. Never was there a more aggravating situation! Barbados, all emerald green after the rainy season, looked deliciously enticing from the ship. The "flamboyant" trees, Ponciana Regia, were in full bloom, making great patches of vivid scarlet round the Savannah. The houses and villas peeping out of luxuriant tangles of tropical vegetation had a delightfully home-like look to eyes accustomed for two years to South American surroundings. Seen through a glass from the ship's deck, the Public Buildings in Trafalgar Square, solid and substantial, had all the unimaginative neatness of any prosaic provincial townhall at home. We were clearly no longer in a Latin-American country. It was really a piece of England translated to the Caribbean Sea, and we few passengers, some of whom had not seen England for many weary years, were forbidden to set foot on this outpost of home. It was most exasperating; for never did any island look more inviting, and surely such dazzling white houses, such glowing red roofs, such vivid greenery, and so absurdly blue a sea, had never been seen in conjunction before. Barbados is almost exactly the size of the Isle of Wight, but in spite of its restricted area, all the Barbadians, both white and coloured, have the most exalted opinion of their island, which in those days they lovingly termed "Bimshire," white Barbadians being then known as "Bims." Students of Marryat will remember how Mr. Apollo Johnson, at Miss Betty Austin's coloured "Dignity ball," declared that "All de world fight against England, but England nebber fear; King George nebber fear while Barbados 'tand 'tiff," and something of that sentiment persists still to-day. As a youngster I used to laugh till I cried at the rebuff administered to Peter Simple by Miss Minerva at the same "Dignity ball." Peter was carving a turkey, and asked his swarthy partner whether he might send her a slice of the breast. Shocked at such coarseness, the dusky but delicate damsel simpered demurely, "Sar, I take a lily piece turkey bosom, if you please." Dignity balls are still held in Barbados; they are rather trying to one of the senses. In the "eighties" it was a point of honour amongst "Bims" to wear on all and every occasion a high black silk hat. During our enforced quarantine we saw a number of white Bims sailing little yachts about the roadstead, every single man of them crowned with a high silk hat, about the most uncomfortable head-gear imaginable for sailing in. Another agreeable home-touch was to hear the negro boatmen all talking to each other in English. Their speech may not have been melodious, but it fell pleasantly enough on ears accustomed for so long to hear nothing but Spanish. From my intimate acquaintance with Marryat, even the jargon of the negro boatmen struck me with a delightful sense of familiarity, as did the very place-names, Needham Point and Carlisle Bay. I was fated not to see Barbados again for twenty-two years.
In the early part of the eighteenth century a French missionary, one Father Labat, visited Barbados and gave the most glowing account of it to his countrymen. According to him the island was brimful of wealth, and the jewellers' and silversmiths' shops in Bridgetown rivalled those of Paris. I should be inclined to question Father Labat's strict veracity. This worthy priest declared that the planters lived in sumptuous houses, superbly furnished, that their dinners lasted four hours, and their tables were crowded with gold and silver plate. The statement as to the length of the planters' dinners is probably an accurate one, for I myself have been the recipient of Barbadian hospitality, and had never before even imagined such an endless procession of fish, flesh, and fowl, not to mention turtle, land-crabs, and pepper-pot. West Indian negresses seem to have a natural gift for cooking, though their cuisine is a very highly spiced and full-flavoured one.