I may add that our first care was to take our erring chronometer to be readjusted, and the mainspring broke the next day. That is how near we had been to disaster in the Atlantic.
While a new mainspring was being fitted and rated, we gladly surrendered ourselves to the tender mercies of the most charming, hospitable people one could wish to meet. My recollections of our two-weeks' sojourn are a trifle vague owing to the rapidity with which one pleasure succeeded another. I remember lying at anchor with awnings up in the most beautiful bay it is possible to imagine, and sleeping twenty-four hours on end. From then onward life consisted of "swizzles," car rides over a fairy-island, and more swizzles, pony races to the accompaniment of swizzles, surf bathing followed by swizzles, and evenings at the Savannah Club, where conversation was punctuated and sometimes drowned by the concoction of yet more swizzles by a hard-worked army of coloured folk behind a gleaming mahogany bar.
There is no escaping the "swizzle" in Barbados—even if one wished to, which personally I did not. It is a delightful, healthful drink composed of the very best rum, angostura bitters, syrup, fresh lime, nutmeg, and ice—the whole "swizzled" to the creamy consistency of—— But I forget that I may be addressing a country in the grip of total abstinence, and whatever my faults I have never been accused of making a man's mouth water without supplying the deficiency.
Before the war the Barbados estate owner was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now he is probably the most prosperous landed proprietor in the world. It matters not whether he be white or black, or any one of the intermediary shades, he is keeping up a luxurious establishment, driving his car in a cloud of dust and dignity from one end of the island to the other, or installing a manager (usually some hopeless wight who was absent on duty during the war) and taking up residence in Park Lane or Fifth Avenue according to taste. And "sugar" is the answer. Sugar is king of Barbados, and it were easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye than for the outsider to buy, beg, borrow, or steal a square foot of his domain.
It is difficult to see just what will happen to Barbados in the future unless some outlet is found for the Negro population. Already this minute island is the second most densely populated spot in the world—the first being a certain district of China—and there seems no other alternative than for it to populate itself into the sea. The United States is imposing drastic restrictions on Negro immigration, as evidenced by the surging and expectant, though mostly disappointed, crowds that assemble outside the American Consulate in Bridgetown daily. The self-governing British Dominions will have none of them. Where are they to go? Meantime, they grow—Lord, how they grow!—in numbers and insolence.
Hot foot from a ball at one of the hotels, we literally fled aboard ship and sailed by stealth; otherwise I am convinced that we should be at Barbados tennising, surfing, dancing, pony racing, and "swizzling" to this day.
Even then we weighed anchor one evening only to drop it the next off Soutrier, a town on the fairy island of St. Lucia where we had been invited to stay on a plantation. Our host, as kindly a soul as ever lived, insisted that it would do us all a power of good to leave the dream ship in charge of one of his boys—or a dozen of them if we preferred—and have a real rest and change at his house. And a rest and change it undoubtedly was. From doing everything for ourselves, our régime changed abruptly to one of being prevented by an army of well-trained house-boys from so much as turning a hand.
The West Indian planter is a man to be envied. He lives in one of the beauty spots of the world, and neither the servant problem nor "high cost of living" affects him to anything like the same extent as others. This home that we of the dream ship had invaded was a miracle of cool, well-ordered comfort, set high on the wooded hillside, commanding by day an endless vista of palm-clad mountain and sparkling Caribbean, and by night encompassed with perfumed darkness, the glint of fireflies, and the vocal efforts of the whistling frog—a nimble little fellow, green as an emerald and no larger than a pea.
The plantation, which only five years previously had been virgin jungle, was devoted to limes and cocoa, both of which grow to perfection in the West Indies, and as a commercial enterprise threaten in time to dethrone King Sugar. Here on St. Lucia, as elsewhere in the West Indies, there is unlimited scope for the smaller man who stands no chance on Barbados and the more thickly settled islands. Indeed, after having spent most of my life roaming about the world, I can never understand why a man with strictly limited capital will buy or lease land, however cheap, in the furthermost corners of the earth, thousands of costly miles from his market, and where he will most certainly have to pay anything from a dollar to five dollars a day for indifferent labour, while in the West Indies there is still land to be had as rich as any in the world, plantation labour—and good labour at that—is a shilling per day per head, and New York is five, and London ten days distant. I can only attribute it to the lure of "green fields that are ever far off."
THROUGH THE PANAMA CANAL