The Sugar Islands (34 page)

I ought to have known better.

Punctually at seven o'clock I was awoken by a clattered tray.

I made no protest. I got up and drank my tea, ate my toast, and sat with my head nodding, my eyelids heavy, waiting for eight o'clock, for the tap upon Eldred's door, the clink of plates and for Eldred's indignant protest of ‘Oh, really!'

I did not wait in vain.

¹
The sequel to this incident is told in Evelyn Waugh's
Ninety-One Days

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1938

I First
saw it on a wet mid-November morning. I was on my way to Grenada. I was planning to return later to St. Vincent. I woke to the sight through my cabin porthole of a semicircle of jagged mountains banked with cloud. At the base of the mountains ran the wharf—a long colonnade, bisected by a wooden jetty. It was raining steadily. A dozen streams, pouring their silt into the harbour, sent a long tide of mud towards the ship. ‘Another wasted morning,' the purser grumbled. Despondently, he leant against the taffrail. We had lost two days already at Barbados. West Indians only work when it is fine. Today they had not even bothered to send out lighters. Heaven knew how many more hours we would not have to waste before we docked finally at Kingston. Inaction fretted the purser. Impatiently, he tapped the top of his white buckskin shoe against the deck, answering at random the passengers' enquiries. St. Vincent? A poky little place. Pretty enough if you liked scenery, but nothing more. One of those small places that had gone to seed. One of the Empire's liabilities. What did they raise here? Oh, most everything. Sugar, coconuts, bananas, with arrowroot and sea-island cotton as their steady standbys. Was there anything to see on shore? Was there ever anything to see in the Caribbean except sunlight? And this was November: a month too soon for that.

His tone of denigration matched the scene. I never had seen anything less typical of a boat day in a tropic port. There was none of the traditional noise or bustle; no boys diving for pennies; no boatmen plying vociferously for hire; no bargaining vendors of fruit and cushions; only a couple of silent salesmen standing in a corner of the deck beside a small store of local mahogany, bead bags, Coronation stamps, and shark's-bone walking sticks. The two anchored schooners in the harbour, motionless beside their moorings, were appropriate interpretations of the atmosphere of general inanimation. It was not till I was actually on
shore that I found the explanation. During a long voyage one loses one's sense of the calendar. I had forgotten—everyone else on board had forgotten—that it was a Sunday morning.

The town of Kingston was entirely deserted. Our ship, already two days late, had not been expected till the evening. Everyone who was not in church was sleeping late. The rain was falling with persistent heaviness. The chauffeurs of the four or five taxis that were drawn before the Customs solicited my patronage with no real expectation of success. The solitary guide, a tall, cadaverous African who presented himself with the introduction, ‘And what can Robert Taylor do for you?' soon wearied of following me through deserted streets, past shuttered windows.

Kingstown on that Sunday morning was the emptiest town that I have ever seen. It was also, in spite of the rain that puddled its pavements and flooded the runnels of its roads, one of the very cleanest. Perhaps, had the two been less empty, had its streets been crowded with chattering longshoremen and grubby urchins, with carts and lorries, with all the bustle of a West Indian day, I might not have noticed how clean it was and maybe I should have missed a clue to the true nature of St. Vincent's life. Perhaps cleanliness is more than anything a symbol of St. Vincent.

None of the other islands has a history at all similar. Where other islands were being occupied by French, English, Spanish, and Dutch settlers, the Caribs here put up such a fierce opposition to their invaders that St. Vincent was regarded as a no-man's-land, and in 1748 was declared neutral at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Though the Caribs had repulsed their European visitors, they had welcomed, however, at the end of the seventeenth century, a cargo of shipwrecked negro slaves. These Africans intermarried with the Caribs and their descendants were known as black Caribs in contrast to the original red Caribs. The black Caribs, who probably strengthened the stock and certainly introduced a cause of hatred against the Whites, gradually obtained supremacy over their red cousins. Whereas in the other islands the main issue through the eighteenth century was a conflict between the French and English, here in St. Vincent it was a conflict between White and Brown, and it was not till the end of the century that the Caribs were finally subdued.

During the last years they fought stubbornly against both the
French and English. The first real English settlement was made in 1762, and though the French captured it in 1779, it was returned to England after the Treaty of Versailles and was in English hands at the time of the French Revolution. The Caribs ardently welcomed Victor Hugues' emissaries with their incitement ‘to break the chains forged for them by their English tyrants', and a Brigands' war broke out, as bloodthirsty and destructive as that which had ravaged Grenada and St. Lucia. When the revolt was crushed, it was decided to deport the majority of the surviving Caribs.

As one of the consequences of this long war against the Caribs, St. Vincent never fully shared in the eighteenth-century boom of the sugar islands. It had not the same long-established planter aristocracy. There was not so much to be destroyed during the Brigands' war, and when the slaves were emancipated there was not the same inducement to the settlers to brood over ‘departed glory'. They were the product of a later movement. They did not feel the same compulsion to abandon their estates to overseers when the former feudal conditions were changed. In consequence, more purely white families are to be found in St. Vincent than in many of the other islands. On my return from Grenada I spent a week in St. Vincent and was struck in particular by a greater freshness, a greater youthfulness of outlook. There was less of a living in the past. I have a feeling that I was lucky to see St. Vincent in the way I did on that first empty, rain-washed morning.

The Botanical Garden in the capital, Kingstown, is famous, and it was here that Captain Bligh planted his cuttings of breadfruit trees after his second journey to Tahiti.

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1948

The
Fourth Presidency in the colony of the Leewards, this scattered group of the British Virgin Islands is one of the most remarkable units in the Commonwealth and a parallel could be drawn with the New Hebrides in the South Pacific which is run by a British and French condominium. Here the link is with America. Across a few miles of water lies the former Danish island of St. Thomas, which has to import practically everything it eats and is grateful for Tortola's meat and vegetables. The entire trade of the British islands is with St. Thomas. The American dollar is the only accepted currency. (When the pound was devalued in 1949 the salaries of the officials had eventually to be readjusted, a Whitehall emissary who tried to argue that the British West Indian dollar was legal tender being invited to go into the town and see what he could buy with it.)

The British Virgin Islands are beautiful and fertile and though they are in the red to the extent that they cannot meet the costs of their administration, the islanders themselves are relatively prosperous. They all have their own small properties, and when they are out of funds, they take advantage of the law that allows them to work for a period of twenty-eight days in the American islands. There is a constant ‘coming and going' that presents a continual immigration problem to the authorities on both sides.

At the end of the war there were very few white residents in the islands, but several British families have come out to settle and American capital has built on Guana Island a club much smaller than but similar to Milreef. It is not unlikely that in a few years the islands will become valuable as a tourist asset. St. Thomas becomes noisier and more crowded every year and there is a possibility that gambling will be legalized. The quieter kind of vacationist may well turn for refuge to Tortola.

ISLANDS

The U.S. Virgin Islands
Saba
Antigua
An Island to be Explored
‘ Typical Dominica'

from
WHERE THE CLOCKS CHIME TWICE

Written in 1950

The
car that meets you at St. Thomas airport will have a left-hand drive, but the chauffeur will hug the left side of the road. It is over thirty years since Denmark sold her West Indian islands to the U.S. Government, but the cattle cannot be trained to accept new traffic orders, so the old rule of the road holds good. That is symbolic of these islands—the persistence of old customs under a new régime; a persistence that makes each of the three islands—St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. John— different from its neighbours.

I can best indicate those differences by describing my first day in each of the three islands. I went to St. Thomas first. Through the windows of the circling aircraft I glimpsed a high green island, the hillside dotted with white bungalows, a land-locked harbour, schooners and yachts and sailing-boats at anchor; a township built over and between three rounded hills, and climbing back into the mountains. In the Customs shed a police official was organizing the chauffeurs and the porters in a singsong British West Indian accent.

From the village shacks that flanked the road, the unmistakable but indescribable West Indian smell—a combination of heaven knows what olfactory ingredients—smote upon my nostrils. It was St. Kitts, Grenada, Guadeloupe again, but as we neared the town, Charlotte Amalie, there were signs of considerable and unfamiliar activity; roads were being built, construction companies were at work; half-way up the hill was the concrete skeleton of a vast hotel now open as The Virgin Isle, designed to accommodate a hundred and sixty guests. In the nineteen-thirties, when the U.S. Virgins had shared in the general Caribbean slump, Herbert Hoover had dismissed the area as an orphanage, a poor-house; but there were signs of a boom now all right.

We passed through an outlying fishing section. The side roads were cleaner, the houses and gardens better tended than
those of Castries, Georgetown, or St. John's, Antigua. The faces of the villagers were a good deal whiter. Later I was to learn the explanation. This was ‘French Town', a group of fisherfolk who, having come over generations earlier from St. Barts, had stayed together, intermarrying, retaining their language and their habits in true French fashion.

The car swung into the main thoroughfare, a typical West Indian street, with crowded pavements, honking horns, deep gutters; cleaner than most, perhaps, but typical except for this—there was a greater proportion of white faces, there were brighter colours, a greater air of elegance. At the end of the street was the fort that in some form or another you will find in every West Indian island. Built of rust-red brick, it bore the date 1671—the year of the Danish Occupation; from within its battlements rose a clock tower that had an Italian, a Mediterranean look, reminding me of Cagnes.. It stood, this fort, as the backcloth to a kind of
place
—Emancipation Square—a garden running down to the waterfront, with a bandstand flanked by stores, the veranda of the Grand Hotel, and the imposing municipal façade of the Post Office.

Northwards, up the hill, a hundred feet or so above the main-street level, stood a colonial two-storied house, bearing beneath its roof the painted letters: HOTEL 1829. It was approached by two circular drives that met before a flight of steps leading to a veranda. The steps widened at their foot, the balustrade curving outwards. Most entrances are built upon this pattern. It is a style known as ‘welcoming arms'. The veranda, that ran the whole length of the house, opened on to the main rooms; the narrow passage that divided them led to a stone-paved courtyard from two circular flights of steps mounted to a first-floor terrace. The steps enclosed a garden. It was a style of architecture, this enclosing of a mounting series of terraced gardens, that I had not seen in the West Indies or elsewhere, but that reminded me, as the clock tower had, of Italy. Charlotte Amalie is built, it should be remembered, on the sides of hills, and from the window of my room I saw another architectural feature that was new to me—a straight street of steps running vertically up a hill—steps that I was to notice later were cut in some instances low and deep so that a donkey could clamber up them.

I had reached St. Thomas shortly after breakfast. Letters of
introduction had gone ahead of me, and within three hours I was sipping a very dry Martini on the balcony of a bungalow situated on the far side of the mountain range that divides the island. A thousand feet below me the bright blue meadow of a bay washed in varying shades of green and turquoise against a long white-sanded beach. Beyond it stretched an archipelago of islands, some British, some American, some a bare grazing ground for goats.

It was a typically American kind of party; three-quarters of an hour of dry Martinis with the talk getting gayer, the laughs longer, with Christian names taking the place of‘Miss' and ‘Mr.' Then there was an arrangement of dishes on a buffet table, a lobster salad with hot rolls and cheese, coffee and a coconut-layer cake. It was the American style of meal, the American style of entertaining transported to the Caribbean as I have seen it transported to Antibes and Cannes. It was not the party itself but the guests who comprised the party that for me made the occasion special; something that I had not met before in the West Indies.

There were eleven of us. Two other tourists and eight residents; Leo Riordan, the manager of the new hotel, and his wife were the host and hostess; there was a couple who had come down from New York to help him; the agent for Pan-American; a dress designer who ran with her painter-husband a successful fashion store called ‘Elverhoj', and finally the proprietor of the town's Hamburg Heaven.