The Sugar Islands (19 page)

The Americans have done much for Haiti. They have cleared and laid out streets. They have made roads. They have built fine buildings. They have established hospitals. They have established order. They have wiped out the brigand forces. The men of the hills have no fear now when they come into the towns of being conscripted into revolutionary armies. The women know that they will receive in the market what their merchandise is worth. They will not have to pay toll to sentries along the way. Planters can breed cattle without the fear that they will be plundered by the
cacos.
And all this has been done with the surplus from the Haitian revenue, with the money that was before squandered in bribery. Haiti has become one of the most pleasant tropical places in the world. No island could be lovelier. Whether you are driving along the shore towards St. Marc or southwards to Aux Cayes, or whether you are climbing on horseback the hills beyond Pétionville and Kenscoff, whether you are looking across blue water to lilac-coloured hills or looking down upon green valleys, you will be unable to find any parallel for that landscape. The climate is healthy; the healthiest in the Antilles, doctors say. There is plenty to do. There is reasonable bathing. There are horseback trips into the interior. There is the choice for the athlete of tennis, polo, cricket.

The atmosphere of Haiti is a combination of three things. There is the haphazard South Sea atmosphere of a simple, unexploited peasantry living on its own land, working just so
much as it needs to support life; where there is no need to work hard if your needs are simple. They are a happy and sweet-natured people. You feel happiness as you ride past their villages, as you pass them and are passed by them on the road. Where the streams run down into the valleys you will find them in groups of six or seven seated washing their clothes upon the stones; where the streams deepen to a pool you will see them bathing, their black, naked bodies glistening in the sun. Every few miles or so along the road you will see a woman with a tray and a few bottles, a wayside restaurant, where the women will lower their loads from their heads or dismount their mules and exchange the gossip of the hour. And always they will smile friendlily at you as you pass.

There is a beauty in their little properties that you do not find in the mathematically laid-out plantations. Stalks of sugar cane, cocoa trees, and coffee shrubs trail side by side with mangoes and bananas. You feel here the rich luxuriousness of tropic growth as you will never feel it in Martinique. You feel that life is rich and life is easy. That there is no need to worry much.

You will get the same feeling if you choose as your hotel the wooden, two-storied house half-way up the hills to the American Club that was the house, in earlier years, of a French admiral. There is a long drive leading to the house, a drive that is grass-grown now. Nor is there any fountain playing in the large stone basin. Nor can you tell where lawn and hedge divide. But the proportions of the house remain. The wide balconies, the spacious courtyard, the cameoed picture through the trees of Port au Prince. The rooms are cool and the cooking good. You never quite see how things run themselves, for there never seem to be any servants. And in the bar you will find the visitors at the hotel mixing their drinks in such proportions as they choose; but things do run themselves. Meals arrive, hot water arrives; in the end somebody signs for drinks. At the end of the month a bunch of chits arrives, and you have a pleasing sense of life crumbling round you like the garden and house; but that it will last your time.

There is the South Sea atmosphere. There is also the French atmosphere; a Parisian atmosphere of cafés and elegance and well-dressed women. There is more grace of living, more culture in Port au Prince than anywhere else in the Antilles. As you sit on
the veranda of the cafés in Port au Prince, or walk on the hills in Pétionville, with its little green square in front of you, its church and
gendarmerie
and playing children, you feel that you might be in the heart of France.

Thirdly, there is America: the America of efficiency and wide streets and motor cars, and the feeling that always goes with them, that good though the past was, the best's ahead of us.

These three atmospheres are combined in Haiti, and when there is so much else to have, it seems a waste of time to set oneself the task of discovering the ritual of a religion that is based upon nothing but the superstitions of undeveloped minds.

At the moment Haiti is one of the world's pleasant places. No one can tell what the future holds for it. In 1936 the American treaty with Haiti will be reconsidered, and many assert that then the American occupation should end. In America, the same kind of person who in London asserts that the English should evacuate Egypt and hand back India to its princes, are claiming that America's interests in Haiti are an imperialistic violation of the Monroe Doctrine. While many Haitians contend that America has served its purpose: it has restored order, placed a balance in the Treasury; that it has started the machine, that the Haitians can now carry it on themselves. Having learnt their lesson, they will be capable of administration; that if they are left with, at the most, a financial adviser they will be able to run their show.

They may be able to. It may be that they will be given the chance, that in six years' time there will be no khaki uniforms and broad-brimmed hats in Port au Prince. That once again a negro people will be allowed to make the experiment of self-government.

And then . . . will history repeat itself? Will the
cacos
return to the hills? Will the road across the arid valley of Gonaïves crumble into a bridle path? Will the bridges justify the old complaint that it was safer to go round than over them? Will the peasant be afraid to come down into Port au Prince? Will the green lawns of the Champ de Mars straggle on to the puddled and untended roads? Will angry mobs shriek for vengeance outside the white palace of the President? Will the police with the
cocomacoque
batter the skulls of the suspected?

Sometimes one feels that Haiti is set surely now on the high
road to prosperity. What else can you feel when you sit at twilight on the veranda of the Eldorado Café, looking on to the harbour, in which are anchored the ships whose presence there means riches, when Buicks and Pontiacs are sweeping with their broad beams the broad, smooth roads and the white buildings and the pretty women? Everything looks so secure, so confident, far too far down the road of civilization for anarchy. You think that then.

But you recall the hot and dusty mornings in the cockpit, where you have seen negroes taking into their mouths the torn and bleeding heads of the dying cock, to suck and lick the wounds, in the desperate hope of restoring the will to battle to the beaten beast. You remember into what paroxysms of rapture and misery and wrath you have seen those black faces contorted as the chances of victory recede. You remember the hot-blooded passion of their dancing, their contorted bodies, their clutching fingers, the fierce lustre in their eyes, and, remembering that, you wonder into what frenzies of savagery this people might not still be worked. You remember how, late at night, after the sounds of Port au Prince are still, you have heard in the hills the slow throbbing of the drums. It breaks the silence. It is slow, rhythmic, monotonous. It is like the beating of a heart, the beating of the black heart of Africa.

¹
In the original letter amusingly misspelt ‘accepted'.

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

When I first sailed for Martinique, I knew very little about the Caribbean. Before I had been there many days, I realized that it was impossible for me to understand its way of life until I had some knowledge of its history.

In
1947
the publishing house of Evans Brothers invited me to contribute to the
Windows of the World
series of travel books, a book on the Caribbean. It was a short book, addressed to ‘the tourist, the intending tourist, and those who are forced for this and the other reason to travel in their memory and imagination. It is written for those who are interested in the West Indies, but possess no detailed or specialized knowledge of them. It is hoped that it will “put them in the picture” It opens with the following historical synopsis.

Written in
1947

THANKS
to the generosity of the Carnegie Trust, most of the islands are supplied with excellent reference libraries, and it is easy for the inquisitive tourist to provide himself with a working knowledge of the history and present conditions of the group.

It is a long and tangled story: a story of courage and cruelty, of treachery and broken faith and high renown; so tangled and so long a story that no composite history of the Caribbean has been attempted. But, as the editors of fiction magazines know well, the most complicated narrative, the most intricate succession of incidents and details can be resolved into a five-line synopsis, and the story of the West Indies is briefly this:

At the end of the fifteenth century Christopher Columbus, believing that the earth was round and in an attempt to find a western route to India, discovered a group of islands that, in the light of this belief, he christened the West Indies. In their attempt to exploit his discovery, subsequent European pioneers came into such conflict with the original inhabitants of the islands that
within a very few years the Indians who had inhabited the northern islands and, a century or so later, the Caribs who had inhabited the eastern islands had been ‘liquidated'. In the meantime, sugar cane had been introduced and, in order to supply cheap labour for the plantations, a slave trade with the Guinea Coast was organized. There followed a period of very great prosperity, when the phrase ‘rich as a Creole' was in daily use. Then ‘the conscience of mankind' was roused. The slave trade was abolished. The slaves were liberated. Cane sugar slumped. The islands, instead of being an asset, became a liability, a distressed area.
[A new phase has begun. Air travel has brought the Caribbean within easy reach of the winter vacationist and the Caribbean is enjoying an immense tourist boom.]

That is the story in synopsis—a synopsis that may be amplified into four instalments.

There is the first period, roughly covering the sixteenth century, which is almost exclusively a Spanish period. During this period the Spaniards, having been granted by papal dispensation all the discoveries of the New World west of a certain line, colonized Hispaniola—the island which has since been divided into Haiti and San Domingo—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, exterminated the Indians, introduced sugar cane from the Canaries, and initiated the slave trade.

The second period, covering the seventeenth century, saw the gradual breaking-down of the Spanish monopoly. The French and English were in a position to challenge the Spanish Navy. The Spaniards, moreover, who had made the mistake as political economists of confusing bullion with wealth, lost interest in the islands on finding that there was no gold and silver there and moved farther west to Peru and Mexico. During this period the English captured Jamaica, the French captured the western and most fertile part of Hispaniola and called it Haiti, and the French and English occupied and disputed between themselves the chain of islands that stretches southwards between Florida and Demerara, exterminating in the process their Carib population. This period, which is the period also of the buccaneers, ended at the start of the eighteenth century with Spain's recognition of England's and France's conquests; the Treaty of Utrecht marking in 1713 the elimination of Spain as a monopolist on the Caribbean scene.

The third period, of the eighteenth century, saw the high-peak of West Indian prosperity. In its latter half there was much bitter fighting between the French and English. Some of the greatest and most decisive naval battles of all time were to be fought between Dominica and St. Lucia. Several of the islands were to change hands several times; cities were to be sacked and plantations burnt. But war was not total in those days. War was the concern of the professionals, of the politicians and the chiefs of staff. Byron made the grand tour during the Napoleonic Wars; no one reading Jane Austen's novels would imagine that they were contemporaneous with Trafalgar and Waterloo, and, in spite of almost continuous war during the latter half of this period, there was no diminution in the general prosperity of the sugar islands. Actual statistics convey little; the value of sterling has changed so much; populations are so much greater. But the importance of these islands can be gauged adequately from the fact that, at the peace-making in 1763, England very nearly decided to retain Guadeloupe and return Canada to France as being of less account. It is indeed probable that during the Napoleonic Wars more British soldiers lost their lives in the West Indies than in Europe.

That third period ended or, rather, may be said to have begun to end with the French Revolution. By the time the Napoleonic Wars were over, the agitation against the slave trade had grown acute. The Spanish-American colonies were in revolt and the imperial policy both of France and England was turning southwards towards Africa and eastwards to the Levant and Orient. The red light was showing for the big plantations.

The liberation of the slaves ended the prosperity of the West Indies. The big landowners were compensated for the loss of their slaves, but most of the estates were mortgaged. The planters, instead of reinvesting their capital on the spot, returned to Europe, abandoning their estates to overseers who mismanaged them either through incompetence or on purpose so that they themselves might have an opportunity later of buying them at a bargain price. There were temporary recoveries and booms, but the descent was steady and grew sharper. Each time there was a slump, another group of estates was put upon the market, to be bought up by syndicates or split up among small proprietors. The large houses were left to crumble.