Hot Countries (19 page)

Most of the passenger traffic in the West Indies is of a tourist nature. You either work down the islands to Demerara from Halifax or New York, or, sailing straight from Europe, you make a circular trip along the South American coast to Colon and back
via
Jamaica. The ships stop for from six to thirty-six hours at the various ports. Excursions are arranged for the passengers. They are met by cars. They are driven across the island. The beauty spots and historical sites are pointed out to them. They bathe. They take photographs. They acquire souvenirs. The local hotel provides them with an ill-served meal, considerably inferior to the lunch they would have had on board. In the life of the island they never mix. And when they discuss, after a five hours' acquaintanceship with each, the difference between Antigua, Nevis and St. Kitts, “The great thing about the islands,” they will say, “is that every one of them is different.”

Which they are, of course, if you visit them that way.

It would be simple to write a travel book on the West Indies—a number of people have—which would give the impression that no two islands are alike. Antigua is dry and
flattish on the leeward coast. Hills, green with sugar-cane, climb gently backward from a beach so white that the sea above it assumes the most exquisite and varied shades of colour. The town is sleepy. Its streets are wide and clean and empty. Indolent negroes lounge in the doorways of their huts and shout at you as you go past. The sole people with any apparent commercial enterprise are the small boys who hold out their hands and beg for a black penny. Nothingseems to be happening. My hotel bedroom looked down on to the main street. It was so quiet that I might have fancied myself in the wilds of Wiltshire.

Nowhere in the world will you find better bathing. A mile out of St. John, by a ruined fort whose guns once commanded the entrance to the harbour, there are neat cabins and a café where you can dance; and it is past a pleasant lawn, through a well-kept garden, that you stroll to a white, gently sloping beach, where there are neither rocks, nor coral, where you swim out through pale blue water to a raft.

History has lingered at Antigua. From Clarence House you look down on to the harbour where the fleets that chased Villeneuve across the Atlantic anchored. They say, though history scarcely supports the claim, that Nelson refitted here before Trafalgar. Certainly, in his early days he spent many months in the wooden house whose timber is now cracked and porous. For decades of years the yellow and crumbling barracks were filled with bluejackets, with the sound of drilling feet, with the laughter of men at play. The stones in the graveyard carry the names of many soldiers. On Shirley Heights you will find ranged among weeds the stone ruins of orderly room and messroom, the moss-grown gun emplacements that watched the enemy outline of Guadeloupe, the vast cistern that husbanded the scanty supply of rain.

That is how the five-hours' visitor will see Antigua.

To such a one no place could seem more different than Dominica. It is mountainous: so mountainous that the towering hills seem to be pushing the little town of Roseau into the sea. There are no roads across the island. The sand
is black. The water is grey or darkly blue. There is no bathing. The piers and bathing huts have been swept away by hurricanes. The town is bright and noisy. Picturesquely-dressed girls chatter in French
patois
to one another. It is always raining.

South of Dominica there is St. Lucia. From Martinique you see its twin, cone-shaped Pitons. The ship will not stay there for more than a few hours. You will have no time to do more than drive up into the hills and look down on to the bay, on to the ships at anchor, on to the midget town of Castries, and wonder whether Naples is any finer. Next morning you will reach Barbados.

Barbados is as flat as Antigua and no larger. It is the most densely-populated island in the world, and perhaps the ugliest. Bridgetown is hot and noisy. The glare from the streets is dazzling. Except in the north of the island, by Bathseba, you will drive through flat fields of sugar-cane. Not a foot of ground is wasted. You will wonder how anyone ever finds his way about. Every road looks the same. There are no sign-posts. There are no landmarks. The road which one morning will be high with sugar-cane will be unrecognisable when the crop has been removed. The thirty-six hours' tourist will make for the pier of the Aquatic Club and will not leave it till the last syren of his steamer hoots.

The Aquatic Club is the perfect playground. It is not really a club, since anyone who is not black can join it. You become a member for a day, a week, a year. It is a pier running out some fifty yards into the sea. There are tennis courts at its base, and cabins and a souvenir shop. There is a dancing-hall and above it a tar-floored roof which the sun worshippers have appropriated. Its atmosphere is rather like that of the hot-room of a Turkish bath. No notice excluding women has been posted, but at all hours of the day you will find its benches strewn with tanned and naked forms. At the head of the pier there is the club house. There is a bar, there are lunch tables, there is a dancing-floor. There are diving-boards and water shoots and trapezes. And as you swim a gramophone is playing, and young people are shouting and laughing
to one another. The sun shines. Everyone is carefree, happy, at ease. Time does not exist.

Trinidad is a twelve-hour journey from Barbados. You feel as though you were coming into a different world when you wake in the morning and see, green and high on either side of you, the outline of the Bocas. You anchor a mile or so away from Port of Spain, and the hills are so high that in relation to them you fancy that there is no more than a village awaiting you at their foot. The size of Port of Spain astonishes you. It is like no other town in the West Indies. Straight, wide and clean, the streets run from the savannah to the sea, their uniformity contrasting curiously with the polyglot population that throngs its side walks. Every people of the world seems to be represented here. There are Indian women in long white robes, their noses pierced with gold and brass decorations. There are Chinese signs over the shops. There are notices in Spanish. There are the inevitable negroes. There are many French. Trinidad has passed through several hands. The outline of Venezuela is only seven miles away.

It is a rich and fertile island. Ninety-five per cent of the world's asphalt comes from there. The roads are smooth and wide over which you drive through landscape infinitely varied and infinitely lovely. There are cane fields and plains of coconut. In the hills the scarlet of the immortelle shelters and shadows the immature cocoa growth. In the south there is the barren stretch of the pitch lake and wooden derricks of the oil-fields. From Trinidad comes all the Angostura of the world.

Few products have a more romantic history.

A hundred years ago, in South America, a Dr. Siegert produced a blend of aromatic and tonic bitters that he called “Aromatic Bitters.” It was produced as a medicine solely, and it is as a medicine that it appears on the tariff of the United States, although ninety per cent of its contents are honest rum. It was made by Dr. Siegert for circulation among his friends and patients. It was not till its success led to exportation that it was christened “Angostura” after the town where at that time the doctor was headquartered, and where his
factory remained till the unsettled condition of Venezuelan politics counselled a move to Trinidad. To-day the concoction that was devised as a cure for diarrhœa is the flavouring of ninety per cent of the world's cocktails. A million bottles are exported yearly. The secret of its ingredients has never been divulged. Only three men, the three partners, know them. They do the mixing of it personally in their laboratory. Chemists are unable to diagnose its consistent parts. They recognise that one out of five drugs has been employed, but they do not know which Till they find out there will remain only one Angostura. No history of the West Indies would be complete that did not contain a chapter on it. In the West Indies it is employed as no one would think of employing it in Europe. In England a bottle of Angostura will last about a year. In the West Indies they use a teaspoonful and a half at least to every cocktail. Every cocktail is coloured pink. They are described as dry or sweet, and the Englishman who orders a dry cocktail will get the surprise of his life when he tastes the pale pink liquid with its creaming froth. Particularly if he sips at it; for the West Indian custom is to finish your cocktail at a single swallow. Perhaps that is the only way dry cocktails can be drunk. I never got the habit, and until I had learnt to ask for sugar in my cocktail I used to maintain that the West Indian variety looked the best and tasted the worst of any in the world. If you want to know what one is like the coloured barman at the small bar in the Trocadero will mix you one. He came from the Siegert factory. And to take the taste out of your mouth afterwards he will shake you a Green Swizzle, a Trinidadian drink that, as far I know, you won't find anywhere else this side of the Atlantic.

Then there is the hotel. I am not sure that the Baracuda does not deserve to be the subject of a novel as much as the “Grand Babylon.” It is the hotel of legend, the hotel that people have in the back of their minds as a popular conception when they ask the traveller, “But the hotels—isn't all that part of it rather unpleasant? The discomfort, the dirt, the noise.”

At a first sight there is nothing to tell that it is going to be that kind of place. It looks out on to the wide savannah and the high hills that shelter it. It has a drive marked “In” and “Out.” There is a largish and cool verandah. There are notices of billiard-rooms, dancing-rooms and baths. There is a souvenir store. And at the desk a large, brass-bound book that swivels round for you to sign your name in. You are charged six dollars for an average room. You are reminded of Raffles, of the “Galle Face” and the “E and O.” It is not till you reach your room that suspicion comes to you. It is only a suspicion. Tropical hotels are furnished barely. There is the bed with its white mosquito net. There is a washstand, a chest of drawers, a table, a couple of wooden chairs, a mat or so. You cannot make much out of material of that kind. But there was an ill-omened atmosphere of unkemptness about that room. Two minutes later the suspicion had deepened.

“I'd better have a look at the baths,” I said.

I was conducted down some hundred and fifty feet of passage. There were a number of corners along the road. It was like being taken through a maze. At the end of the passage was the lavatory and two bathrooms that served some twenty rooms.

“But, look here,” I said, “I'll never be able to find this again. Is there nothing nearer?”

The bell-boy shook his head.

“There's a shower-bath downstairs,” he said. “You go through the billiard-room and turn to the right past the bar, and then——”

But that was too complicated. “Never mind,” I said, “you run along and bring me up an ink-pot.”

I went back to my room and began unpacking. Quarter of an hour later my clean linen had been separated from my dirty, but I lacked the ink with which to prepare my laundry list. I rang the bell. After some delay the door-handle was rattled. There was a pause; then a tap on the door. “Come in,” I called out. “Door's locked,” the answer came. “It isn't,” I shouted. Again the door-handle rattled: again ineffectively.
“Oh, all right,” I said, and opened the door myself. A bell-boy was standing in the doorway. He looked at the lock resentfully. “Door stick,” he explained to me.

“I know,” I said. “Now run and fetch an ink-pot.”

He stared and repeated the word ‘ink-pot.' Then went out, leaving the door unshut. I got up and shut it. For five minutes nothing happened. Then there was a rattle at the door. “Come in,” I called. “Door locked,” the answer came. “Oh, no,” I said, “it isn't. You try again.” Again the handle rattled. Finally it gave. Another bell-boy was standing in the doorway.

“That fellow new here,” he said. “What is it you want?”

I told him. He nodded intelligently, then went, leaving the door open, to return two minutes later with an empty ink-pot.

My room was in the corner of the wall, with Eldred's at right angles to it. It was quite easy for us to talk across to one another.

“What do you think of this place?” I said.

“That it's lucky,” he answered, “we haven't the
siesta
habit.”

It was. We should never have been able to sleep there during the day-time. The noise was incessant. Every car that passed in front of the hotel—and some two hundred cars passed every hour—honked its horn both at the “In” and “Out” opening of the drive.

“The less time,” said Eldred, “that we spend in this hotel the better. Let's go for a drive.”

We returned shortly after twelve to find every table in the verandah occupied, every passage crowded, and an alert custodian at the doorway of the dining-room with a demand for tickets.

We stared blankly. “Tickets? What tickets?”

“Lunch tickets.”

It sounded like a return of the days of rationing. “Lunch tickets?” we repeated.

“Yes, these,” and he produced from a desk a number of green perforated slips across which had been printed “Universal
Tourist Bureau. Trinidad. Lunch, Baracuda Hotel. Tips included.” And stamped across it the name of the ship, s.s.
Reputed.

Then we understood.

“But we're staying here,” we said.

“Oh, in that case”—he still looked dubious, however—“there's a tourist boat in, and when that happens we like our guests to breakfast early.”

For in Trinidad meals follow the plantation routine. Tea between six and eight; breakfast between eleven and half-past twelve. “I'm afraid,” he said, “that you'll find it rather a squash in there.”

That was not the way in which I should have described it. The dining-room looked like Pointe á Pitre after the cyclone had passed over it. Four hundred people had been or were being served with lunch. The few empty tables were covered with soiled cloths, dirty plates, dry glasses. The people who were sitting at the other tables were in tune with the atmosphere. Their faces were flushed; their manners boisterous; their glasses were half full, which is to say that they were themselves completely. It took us a long time to attract attention to ourselves. Then the wine waiter bustled up.