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CHAPTER IX.
ST. PIERRE -- PELÉE.
DURING MY week of idleness I had found time to coax
the Yakaboo into an amiable mood of tightness -- not by
the aid of cabarets, however, but with white lead and
varnish and paint for which she seemed to have an
insatiable thirst. I was always glad to be sailing again
and, to show the fickleheartedness of the sailor, I had
no sooner rounded Negro Point in a stiff breeze than Fort
de France -- now out of sight -- took her place among
other memories I had left behind.
The thread of my cruise was once more taken up and I
was back into the canoe, enjoying the lee coast panorama
with my folded chart in my lap for a guide book. It was
early in the afternoon when I made out the little beacon
on Sainte Marthe Point beyond which lay the roadstead of
St. Pierre. A heavy, misty rain squall -- a whisk of
dirty lint -- was rolling down the side of Pelée
and I was wondering whether or no I should have to reef
when something else drew my attention. Pulling out from a
little fishing village beyond Carbet was a boatload of my
old friends the douanes, a different lot, to be sure, but
of the same species as those of Fort de France. They were
evidently making desperate efforts to head me off and as
long as they were inshore and to windward of me they had
the advantage. Little by little I trimmed my sheets till
I was sailing close-hauled.
There were eight or ten of the dusky fellows and they
fetched their boat directly on my course and a hundred
feet away. This was some more of their confounded
nonsense and I decided to give them the slip. I motioned
to them to head into the wind so that I might run
alongside, and while they were swinging the bow of their
heavy boat, I slipped by their stern, so close that I
could have touched their rudder, eased off my sheets, and
the Yakaboo, spinning on her belly, showed them as
elusive a stern as they had ever tried to follow. It took
them a few seconds to realize that they had been fooled
and they then proceeded to straighten out their boat in
my wake and follow in hot pursuit. They hoisted their
sail but it only hindered their rowing, for the heeling
of the boat put the port bank out of work altogether
while the men to windward could scarcely reach the water
with the blades of their oars. It would only be truthful
to say that I laughed immoderately and applied my fingers
to my nose in the same manner that midshipman Green
saluted his superior officer.
I was soon lost to their sight in the squall which had
now spread over the roadstead. Rain and mist were ushered
along by a stiff breeze. Under this friendly cover I held
on for a bit and then came about on the inshore tack,
thinking that the douanes would little suspect that I
would come ashore under their very noses. It was not a
bad guess for I afterwards learned that they had sent
word to the next station to the north to watch for
me.
Although I could not see more than a hundred feet
ahead of me, I knew by the floating pumice that I must be
well into the roadstead of St. Pierre. I snatched up a
piece out of the sea and put it in my pocket as a
souvenir. Then we passed out of the mist as from a wall
and I saw the ruins of St. Pierre before me, not a
quarter of a mile away. A heavy mist on the morne above
hung like a pall over the ruined city cutting it off from
the country behind.
It was truly a city of the dead, the oily lifeless
waters of the bay lapping at its broken edges and the
mist holding it as in a frame, no land, no sky -- just
the broken walls of houses. The mist above me began to
thin out and the vapors about the ruins rolled away till
only those on the morne remained and the sun shining
through arched a rainbow over St. Pierre, one end planted
by the tumbled statue of Our Lady and the other in the
bed of the Roxelane. It was like a promise of a better
life to come, to those who had perished. At first glance,
the extent of the ruins did not seem great, but as I ran
closer to shore I saw that for a mile and a half to the
northward broken walls were covered by an inundation of
green foliage which had been steadily advancing for
nearly ten years.
You may but vaguely recall the startling news that St.
Pierre, a town hitherto but little known, on a West
Indian island equally little known, was destroyed in one
fiery gasp by a volcano which sprang to fame for having
killed some twenty-five thousand people in the space of a
minute or two.
For nearly a month the volcano had been grumbling, but
who could suspect that from a crater nearly five miles
away a destruction should come so swift that no one could
escape to tell the tale? When I was in Fort de France, I
found a copy of Les Colonaries, of Wednesday, May the
7th, 1902, the day before the explosion of Pelée.
Under the heading, "Une Interview de M. Landes," it
says : -- "M. Landes, the distinguished professor of
the Lyceum, very willingly allowed us to interview him
yesterday in regard to the volcanic eruption of Mount
Pelée . . . Vesuvius, adds M. Landes, only had
rare victims (this is a literal translation). Pompeii was
evacuated in time and they have found but few bodies in
the buried cities. Mount Pelée does not offer more
danger to the inhabitants of St. Pierre than Vesuvius to
those of Naples."
The next morning, a few minutes before eight o'clock,
that awful holocaust occurred, a bare description of
which we get from the survivors of the Roddam, the only
vessel to escape of sixteen that were lying in the
roadstead. Even the Roddam which had steam up and backed
out, leaving her ground tackle behind, paid her toll and
when she limped into Fort de France two hours later, a
phantom ship, her decks were covered with ashes still hot
and her woodwork was still smoking from the fire.
The story of the survivors was quickly told. The
volcano had been rumbling, according to its custom of
late, when about a quarter before eight there was an
explosion in which the whole top of the mountain seemed
blown away. A thick black cloud rose up and from under it
a sheet of flame rolled down the mountainside, across the
city, and out over the roadstead. There had been barely
time to give the signal to go astern and the few
passengers of ready wit had hardly covered their heads
with blankets when the ship was momentarily engulfed in
flame. It was all over in a few seconds and those who had
not been caught on deck or in their cabins with their
ports open, came up to the blistering deck to behold the
city which they had looked at carelessly enough a few
minutes before, now a burning mass of ruins.
Fortunately some one had been near the capstan and had
tripped the pawls so that the chain had run out freely.
Otherwise the Roddam would have met the fate of the cable
ship Grappler and the Roraima and the sailing vessels
that were unable to leave their moorings. After she had
backed out, the Roddam steamed into the roadstead again
and followed the shore to discover, if possible, some
sign of life. But the heat from the smoldering city was
so great that there could be no hope of finding a living
being there. The steamer then turned southward to seek
aid for her own dying victims.
It was the suddenness of the catastrophe that made it
the more awful. One man whom I met in Fort de France told
me that he was talking at the telephone to a friend in
St. Pierre when the conversation was interrupted by a
shriek followed by a silence which brought no answer to
his question. Rushing from his office, he found others
who had had the same experience. There was no word to be
had from St. Pierre and the noise of the explosion which
came from over the hills confirmed the fear that some
terrible disaster had befallen the sister city. It was
not until the Roddam steamed into port that the people of
Fort de France learned just what had
happened.
![](artfengler/faf_canoe_row.jpg)
Native canoe - St. Lucia.
I have said that there was no survivor of St. Pierre
to tell the tale thereof, but I may be in error. They
tell a fanciful tale of a lone prisoner who was rescued
from a cell, deep down in the ground, some days after the
first explosion and before subsequent explosions
destroyed even this retreat. His name is variously given
as Auguste Ciparis and Joseph Surtout, and in a magazine
story "full of human interest and passion," which could
not have been written by the man himself, as Ludger
Sylbaris. I was told in confidence, however, by a
reputable citizen of Fort de France, that the story was
in all probability gotten up for the benefit of our
yellow journals.
Reviewing these things in my mind, I ran alongside the
new jetty built since the eruption and hauled up the
Yakaboo under the roofing that covers the shore end.
There were about ten people there, nearly the entire
population of what was once a city of forty thousand.
These people, I found, lived in a few rooms
reconstructed among the ruins, not with any hope of
rebuilding but because at this point there is a natural
outlet for the produce of the rich valleys behind St.
Pierre which is sent in droghers to Fort de France. Among
them I found a guide, a huge Martinique saccatra, who
knew Pelée well, he said, and we arranged to make
the ascent in the morning.
I have always been fond of moonlight walks in strange
places and as I cooked my supper I said to myself, "That
is how I shall first see the dead city -- by moonlight."
As I struck in from the jetty I knew that no negro dared
venture forth in such a place at night and that I was
alone in a stillness made all the more desolate by the
regular boom of the surf followed by the rumble as it
rolled back over the massive pavement of the water front.
There was no human sound and yet I felt the ghost of it
as I heard the noise of the sea and knew that same sound
had mingled for over a century with the sounds of the
cafés of the Rue Victor Hugo where I was now
walking, and had been a roar of second nature to the ears
of the thousands who had lived in the cubes of space
before my eyes, now unconfined by the walls and roofs
which had made them rooms.
The moon rode high, giving a ghostly daylight by which
I could distinguish the smallest objects with startling
ease. The streets were nearly all of them cleared, the
rubbish having been thrown back over the walls that stood
only breast high. Here and there a doorway would be
partly cleared so that I could step into the first floor
of a house and then mounting the debris, travel like a
nocturnal chamois from pile to pile, and from house to
house. There was not the slightest sign of even a
splinter of wood. A marble floor, a bit of colored wall,
the sign of a café painted over a doorway and the
narrow sidewalks reminded me of Pompeii and had there
been the familiar chariot ruts in the roadways the
illusion would have been complete. There was a kinship
between the two ; they had alike been wicked cities
and it seemed that the wrath of God had descended upon
them through the agency of a natural phenomenon which had
hung over them and to which they had paid no heed.
I wondered how many of the dead were under these piles
of debris. At one place I came to a spot where some
native had been digging tiles from a fallen roof. There
was a neat pile of whole tiles ready to be taken away
while scattered about were the broken pieces which would
be of no use. Where the spade had last struck protruded
the cranium of one of the victims of that fateful May
morning.
I picked my way to the cimitière where I loafed
in the high noon of the moon which cast short shadows
that hugged the bases of the tombs and gravestones. There
was a feeling of comfort in that moonlight loaf in the
cimitière of St. Pierre and had I thought of it in
time I might have brought my blankets and slept there. In
comparison with the ruined town about it, there was the
very opposite feeling to the spookiness which one is
supposed to have in a graveyard.
I sat on the steps of an imposing mausoleum and loaded
my pipe with the Tabac de Martinique which I smoked in
blissful reverie. Here would I be disturbed by no mortal
soul and as for the dead about and beneath me were they
not the legitimate inhabitants of this place? Those poor
fellows over whom I had unwittingly scrambled might have
some reason to haunt the places of their demise, but
these of the cimitière had no call to play pranks
on a visitor who chanced in of a moonlight night. I was
not in a joking mood -- neither did I feel serious.
A sort of moon dreaminess came over me -- I felt
detached. I saw my form hunched against the face of the
mausoleum with my long legs stretched out before it, but
it did not seem to be I. I was a sort of spirit floating
in the air about and wondering what the real life of the
dead city before me had been. I should have liked to have
the company of the one whose bones rested (comfortably, I
hoped) in the tomb behind me and to have questioned him
about the St. Pierre that he had known. But I could only
romance to myself.
The mere bringing down of my pipe from my mouth so
that my glance happened to fall on its faithful outline
with its modest silver band with my mark on it brought me
to myself. The pipe seemed more a part of my person than
my hands and knees and I knew that I was merely living
through an incident of a canoe cruise. I sat there and
smoked and idled till the moon began to shimmer the sea
before me and with her light in my face I found my way
back to the jetty and the Yakaboo.
I was awakened at five by my guide who had with him a
young boy. It was always a case of Greek against Greek
with these fellows and I reiterated our contract of the
night before. His first price was exorbitant and I had
beaten him down as far as I dared -- to fifteen francs. I
find that it is a mistake to pull the native down too far
for he is apt to feel that you have taken advantage of
him and will become sullen and grudging in his
efforts.
While I ate my scanty breakfast I impressed upon him
the fact that I was paying for his services only and that
if the boy wished to follow that was his affair. He
prided himself on a very sparse knowledge of English
which he insisted upon using. When I had finished he
turned to his boy and said, "E -- eh? il est bon
garçon!" To which I replied, "Mais oui!" which
means a lot in Martinique. The boy came with us and
proved to be a blessing later on.
The moon had long since gone and we started along the
canal-like Rue Victor Hugo with the pale dawn dimming the
stars over us one by one. We crossed the Roxelane on the
bridge, which is still intact, and then descended a
flight of steps between broken walls to the beach and
left the town behind us. Another mile brought us to the
Sêche (dry) Rivière just as the rose of dawn
shot through the notches of the mountains to windward.
When we came to the Blanche Rivière, along the bed
of which we began the ascent of the volcano as in Saint
Vincent, the sun stood up boldly from the mountain tops
and gave promise of a terrific heat which I hoped would
burn up the mist that had been hanging over the crater of
Pelée ever since I had come to Martinique. I did
not then know of the prophetic line which I discovered
later under an old outline of Martinique from John
Barbot's account of the voyage of Columbus -- "the Mount
Pelée in a mist and always so."
Were I to go into the detail of our ascent of
Pelée you would find it a monotonous repetition
for the most part of the Souffrière climb.
Pelée was a higher mountain and the climb was
harder. There was scarcely any vegetation even on the
lower slopes, much to my relief, for Martinique is the
home of the fer-de-lance. I had with me a little tube of
white crystals which I could inject into my abdomen in
case I were bitten by one of these fellows but I cannot
say that even for the novelty of using it did I relish
having my body a battle ground for the myriad agents of
Pasteur against the poison of one of these vipers.
The sun did not burn up the mist and at a height of
3600 feet we entered the chilly fog, leaving our food and
camera behind us. The remaining eight hundred feet made
up the most arduous climbing I have ever experienced. We
were now going up the steep sides of the crater cone made
of volcanic dust, slippery from a constant contact with
mist and covered with a hairlike moss, like the slime
that grows on rocks in the sea near human habitations. I
took to falling down so many times that it finally dawned
upon me that I would do much better if I crawled and in
this way I finished the last four hundred feet. At times
I dug my toes well into the side of the crater and rested
half-lying, half-standing, my body at an angle of
forty-five degrees.
Although I could scarcely see three yards ahead of me
there was no need of the guides to show the way there was
only one way and that was up. The negroes were a little
ahead of me and I remember admiring the work of their
great toes which they stuck into the side of the mountain
as a wireman jabs his spikes into a telegraph pole. When
I had entered the cloud cap I had come out of the hot sun
dripping with perspiration and I put on my leather jacket
to prevent the direct contact of the chilly mist upon my
body. I was chilled to the bone and could not have been
wetter. I could feel the sweat of my exertions streaming
down under my shirt and could see the moisture of the
condensed mist trickling down the outside of my coat. No
film would have lived through this.
As an intermittent accompaniment to the grunts of the
negroes I could hear the chatter of their teeth. Suddenly
they gave a shout and looking upward I saw the edge of
the rim a body length away. Another effort and I was
lying beside them, the three of us panting like dogs, our
heads hanging over the sulfurous pit. What was below was
unknown to us -- we could scarcely see ten feet down the
inside of the crater, while around us swirled a chilly
mist freezing the very strength out of us. A few minutes
were enough and we slid down the side of the crater again
to sunlight and food.
Looking up at Pelée from the streets of St.
Pierre, one felt that surely no destruction from a crater
so far off could reach the city before safety might be
sought ; but as I sat upon the very slope of the
crater I could easily imagine a burst of flaming gas that
could roll down that mountainside and engulf the city
below it in a minute or two of time.
It was half way down the mountain that the boy proved
a blessing for we lost our way and suddenly found
ourselves at the end of a butte whose precipitous sides
fell a sheer five hundred feet in all directions around
us, except that by which we had come. For an hour we
retraced our steps and cruised back and forth till at
last the boy discovered a crevasse into which we lowered
ourselves by means of the strong lianes which hung down
the sides till we reached the bottom where we found a
cool stream trickling through giant ferns. We lapped the
delicious water like thirsty dogs. Again we were in the
dry river bottom of the Blanche and we took to the beach
for St. Pierre in the heat of the middle afternoon.
The climb had been a disappointment for I had
particularly wished to find if there were any trace left
of the immense monolith which had been forced above the
edge of the crater at the time of the eruption and had
subsided again. I also wanted a photograph of the crater
which is less than a fourth the size of the
Souffrière of Saint Vincent. But, as you may know,
this is distinctly a part of the game and there is no
need of casting glooms here and there over a cruise for
the want of a picture or two.
So I forgot the photograph which I did not get of
Pelée's crater and thought of the refreshing glass
or two of that most excellent febrifuge "Quinquina des"
which I might find at the little inn that had been
erected over the ashes of its former self. This inn had
been one of the meaner hotels of St. Pierre, close to the
water front and facing the Rue Victor Hugo. When
Pelée began to rumble, the proprietor had sent his
wife and son to a place of safety, but he himself had
remained, not that he did not fear the volcano but to
guard his little all from the marauding that was sure to
follow a more or less complete evacuation of the city. It
had cost him his life and now the widow and her son were
eking out an existence by supplying the wants of the few
who chance to pass that way.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we reached
the inn and it was still very hot. I stood for a few
minutes, quite still, in the sun in order to cool off
slowly and to dry my skin before I entered the grateful
shade of the roof that partly overhung the road. In doing
this I won great respect from my saccatra guide and the
boy, both of whom did likewise, for they feared the
effect of the exertions of the climb and the subsequent
walk along the hot beach quite as much as I did.
It was here that I received my most forlorn impression
of St. Pierre. The widow's son, a likable young fellow of
about eighteen, had stepped out into the road to talk to
me when a pathetic form in a colorless wrapper slunk from
out the shadows of the walls and spoke to him. It was
evidently me about whom she was curious, and he answered
her questions in the patois which he knew I could not
understand.
She was a woman of perhaps forty, partly demented by
the loss of her entire family and all her friends in the
terrible calamity of nine years before. Her wandering eye
bore the most hopeless expression I have ever seen and
her grey, almost white hair, hung, uncombed for many a
day, over her shoulders. Her feet were bare, she wore no
hat and for all that I could see the faded wrapper was
her only covering. Her questions answered, she stood
regarding me silently for a moment and then passing one
hand over the other palms upward so that the fingers
slipped over each other, she said, "Il est fou --
fou."
That night I read myself to sleep in the cockpit of
the Yakaboo with my candle lamp hung over my head from
the stumpy mizzen mast. But between the pages of the
wanderings of Ulysses, which Whitfield Smith had given me
at Carriacou, slunk the figure of the woman who had
called me "crazy" -- utterly forlorn. Remove the whole of
Mount Pelée and you take away the northern end of
Martinique whose shores from St. Pierre to the Lorain
River describe an arc of 225° with the crater of the
volcano for its center. When I left St. Pierre the next
morning, then, I was in reality encircling the base of
Pelée along 135° of that arc to Grande
Rivière. There lived Monsieur Waddy of the Union
Sportive who had made me promise that I would spend at
least one night with him before I sailed for the next
island.
"You can make the depart for Dominique from Grande
Rivière," he told me. "I will keep a lookout for
you." This would be entirely unnecessary, I told him.
Could I get the canoe ashore all right? "Oh, yes! I shall
watch for you." There was some reservation in that "Oh,
yes !" For his own good reasons he did not tell me of the
terrific surf that boomed continually on the beach where
he lived -- but it did not matter after all.
The trade in the guise of a land breeze lifted us out
of the roadstead of St. Pierre and we soon doubled Point
La Mare. A mile or so up the coast the white walls of
Precheur gleamed in the morning sunlight. One cannot read
far concerning these islands without making the
friendship of Père Labat through the pages of his
five little rusty old volumes. They are written in the
French of his day -- not at all difficult to understand
-- and the reading of them compelled me to form a
personal regard for this Jesuit priest from his
straightforward manner of writing.
We were now in the country of Père Labat and
Precheur, before us, was where in 1693 he had spent the
first few months of his twelve years in the West Indies.
Du Parquet, who owned Martinique at that time, gave this
parish to the Jesuit order of "Le Precheur" in 1654 and
it was only natural that here Labat should become
acquainted with the manners and customs of the people
before he took up his duties in the parish of Macouba
near Grande Rivière. But here the wind failed me,
it was Père Labat having his little joke,
doubtless, and the lack of it nearly got me into trouble.
I had been rowing along the shore for some time,
following with my eyes the beach road that the priest had
known so well, and had come to Pearl Rock. There is a
channel between the rock and the shore and as I looked at
my chart, folded with that particular part of the island
faced upwards, it seemed to me that the name was somehow
familiar.
Then I began to recollect some tale about an American
privateer that had dodged an English frigate by slipping
through this very place at night. I was trying to recall
the details when a premonition made me look around.
There, silently waiting for me not four strokes away, was
a boatload of those accursed douanes! They had been
watching for me since, two days before, they had received
a message from their confrères down the coast that
I had either been lost in the squall off St. Pierre or
was hiding somewhere along the north coast. With an
instinct that needed no telegram from my brain, my right
arm dug its oar deep into the water while my left swung
the canoe around like a skater who turns on one foot
while the other indolently floats over its mate. The left
oar seemed to complete the simile.
While the douanes were recovering from their surprise
at this unexpected movement of the canoe which had been
on the point of boarding them, I pulled with the
desperation of a fly trying to crawl off the sticky field
of a piece of tanglefoot -- but with considerably more
success as to speed. With a few yanks -- one could not
call them strokes -- I was clear of the douanes and I
knew they could not catch me. But they tried hard while I
innocently asked if they wished to communicate with me.
"Diable!' they wanted to see my papers and passport. I
did not feel inclined to stop just then, I told them --
they were easing up now -- and if they wished to see my
papers they could do so when I landed at Grande
Rivière. And so the second batch of douanes was
left in the lurch.
Along the four miles of coast from Pearl Rock to
Grande Rivière there is no road, and the slopes of
Pelée, which break down at the sea, forming some
of the most wonderful cliffs and gorges I have ever seen,
are as wild as the day when Columbus first saw the
island. But if you would care to see these cliffs you
must go by water as I did, for were you to penetrate the
thickets of the mountain slopes you would not go far --
for this is the haunt of the fer-de-lance. In starting
the cultivation of a small patch of vanilla, which grows
in a nearly wild state, Waddy killed a hundred of these
vipers in the space of three months. But I gave no
thought to the snakes -- it was the cliffs that held
me.
Imagine a perpendicular wall ranging from two to four
hundred feet in height and covered with a hanging of
vegetation seemingly suspended from the very top. No bare
face of rock or soil, just the deep green that seemed to
pour from the mountain slope down the face of the cliff
and to the bright yellow sandy beaches stretching between
the promontories. A surf, that made my hands tingle,
pounded inshore and I watched with fascinated gaze the
wicked curl of the blue cylinder as it stood for an
instant and then tumbled and crashed up the beach. I was
wondering how Waddy would get me through this when the
measured shots from a single-loading carbine made
themselves heard above the noise of the surf.
I turned the Yakaboo around that I might view the
shore more easily and found that we were lying off a long
beach terminating in Grande Rivière Point a few
hundred yards beyond. A group of huts flocked together
under the headland as if seeking shelter from the trades
that were wont to blow over the high bluff above them.
Where the beach rounded the point, the usual fringe of
coco palms in dispirited angles stood out in bold relief.
A line of dugouts drawn far up the beach vouched for
Waddy's statement that here the natives caught the
"thon."
Off the point a series of reefs broke the heavy swell
into a fringe of white smother -- inside was my salvation
of deep blue quiet water. The blue of the sea and sky,
the white of the clouds and broken water, the yellow of
the deeper shoals and the beaches, the dark green
background of vegetation lightened by the touches of red
roofs and painted canoes, the sketchy outline of the
point and the palms made a picture, ideally typical, of
this north coast village.
A crowd of natives were dragging down a huge dugout
which proved to be fully thirty feet long and made of a
single log while a detached unit, which I recognized as
the figure of Waddy, stood firing his carbine into the
air. It was a signal, he explained later, to attract my
attention and to call the people together to launch the
dugout. When Waddy saw that I had turned the canoe he
waved his large black felt hat frantically at the dugout
and I waved back in understanding and waited.
But even under the protection of the barrier reef,
there was a goodly surf running on the beach -- too much
for the Yakaboo -- and I saw them wait, like all good
surf men, till there was a proper lull, and then rush the
dugout into the sea. For a moment she hung, then, as the
centipede paddles caught the water, she shot ahead, her
bow cutting into the menacing top of a comber mounting up
to break. Up she went, half her length out of the water,
her bow pointing skyward, and then down again as the sea
broke under her, her bow men swung through a dizzy arc.
If that were close work in a lull what were the large
seas like?
In a few minutes they were alongside. Clearing away
the thwarts half the natives -- she was full of them --
jumped overboard and swam ashore. I then unstepped my rig
and passed over my outfit bags with which we made a soft
bed in the dugout for the Yakaboo. I followed the outfit
and we slid the empty canoe hull athwartships over the
gunwale and then with a man under her belly like an
Atlas, we swung her fore and aft, lifted her up while the
man crawled out and then set her down gently in her nest.
She looked like some strange sea-fowl making a ludicrous
effort to hatch out an assortment of yellow eggs of
various sizes and shapes.
In this way Waddy had solved the surf problem for me.
If the Carib Indians were good boatmen, the Martinique
tuna fishermen were better. First we paddled up shore to
regain our driftage, and then in around the edge of the
reef to a deep channel that ran close to the beach. We
followed the channel for a hundred yards where we turned,
hung for an instant -- the seas were breaking just ahead
and astern of us -- and at a signal from the people on
shore, paddled like mad. With the roar of the surf under
us we passed from the salt sea into the sea of village
people who dragged the dugout and all high and dry on the
beach. It had been another strange ride for the Yakaboo
and she looked self-satisfied, as if she enjoyed it.
As I jumped to the sands, Waddy received me, glowing
and triumphant. It seemed that I was a hero! and great
was his honor to be my host.
The Yakaboo and her yellow bags were carried to a sort
of public shed where the crowd assembled with an air of
expectancy which explained itself when I was
ceremoniously presented to His Honor the Mayor. This
dignitary then made a speech in which the liberty of the
town was given me, to which I replied as best I could.
Thus was I received into the bosom of the little village
of Grande Rivière. Then up the hot dusty road to
Waddy's large rambling house on the headland where a
second reception was held, only the elect being
present.
It was at this point, however, that the liberty of the
town which had been presented me "paragorically
speaking," as "Judge" Warner used to say, was about to be
taken away from me. The street door was suddenly burst
open and a band of hot dusty douanes came in to arrest
the man who had defied their compatriots near Pearl Rock.
But the Mayor, the priest, the prefect of police, and my
fiery little host -- an Achilles as to body if we may
believe that the ancient Greeks were not large men --
stayed the anger of the douanes while Waddy's servant --
oh, the guile of these Frenchmen! -- poured out a fresh
bottle of wine which effectually extinguished the flame
of their ire. My papers were duly examined and all was
well again. When the douanes were at last on their way I
told my protectors how I had dodged them at St. Pierre
and Pearl Rock. This called for another bottle.
But I cannot keep you standing here in Waddy's house,
for the little man was as eager to show me the sights of
Grande Rivière as any schoolboy who races ahead of
his chum, of a Saturday morning, two steps at a time, to
the attic where some new invention is about to be born.
He waved the select committee of the bottle very politely
out of the front door and then grabbing his big hat he
raced me up the steep road to the top of the cliff above
the town. Time was precious. One could walk fast and talk
at the same time.
In the first hundred yards I learned that he was born
in Martinique, educated in Paris, and had specialized in
botany and medicine. Cut off from the world as he had
been for the better part of his life (I had all this as
we cleared the houses of the village) he had developed
the resourcefulness of a Robinson Crusoe. He would have
made an excellent Yankee. He could make shoes, was a
carpenter, something of a chemist, a philosopher, an
expert on tuna fishing, and a student of literature. It
seemed that his divertissement was the growing of vanilla
and the raising of a large family.
He did not give out all this in a boastful way but
merely tore through the facts as if he were working
against time, so that we might understand each other the
sooner and interchange as much of our personality as
possible in the few hours I was to stay at Grande
Rivière. By the time we reached the top of the
cliff I had the man pat while he had me out of breath. He
was the third I had met who would make life worth while
in these parts.
And here, looking up the valley of the Grande
Rivière, I saw one of the most beautiful bits of
scenery in all the islands. The river came down from
Pelée through a cañon of green vegetation.
On the opposite wall from where we stood, a road
zigzagged upwards from the valley to disappear through a
hole near the top of the cliff. Some day I shall travel
that road and go through the hole in the wall to visit
Macouba beyond where Père Labat spent his first
years in the parish and where he practised those sly
little economies of which he was so proud. He tells of
how he brought home some little chicks, poules d'Inde he
calls them, and gave them out among his parishioners to
be brought up, in material payment for the spiritual
comfort and the blessings which he, Père Labat,
afforded them. And how his children came back to him,
grown up and ready for his table. His sexton lived close
to the sea by the river (probably just such a stream as
this with a ford and the houses of the town close to its
banks) and this gave him the idea of buying ducks and
drakes and going in with the sexton on a half and half
basis. When the ducks matured, Père Labat, who was
steadily increasing his worldly assets, bought out the
sexton at a low price. The sexton probably shared in the
eating of the ducks for he was a singer and a good
fellow, a Parisian, the son of an attorney named Rollet,
made famous by Boileau in a shady passage of his
"Satires." The son had changed his name to Rallet, fled
the scenes of his father's disgrace and came to
Martinique where he found peace and happiness in the
parish of Père Labat. Although the priest and poor
Rallet have been a-moldering these two hundred years I
could not help hoping that it was a good cook who
prepared their ducks and chickens.
The shadow of evening had already crossed the valley
bottom and it followed a lone figure that was slowly
toiling up the road toward the hole in the wall. We
scrambled down again through the village, where the odor
of French cooking was on the evening air, past a little
wayside shrine to the beach where I had landed. We had
left the evening behind us for a time and were back in
the last hour of afternoon. It was hot even now, although
the dangerous heat of the day was over. I had caught my
breath on our coming down and my long legs made good
progress over the soft sands -- there is a knack in beach
walking, the leg swings forward with a slight spring-halt
motion, the knee is never straightened and the foot is
used flat so that it will sink as little as possible in
the sand. I had my little Achilles in the toils and I
talked while he fought for breath.
For a quarter of a mile we trudged the sands till the
green wall closed in on us and met the sea. A little
spring trickled down through an opening in the rocks and
we drank its cool water from cups which Waddy made of
leaves. It was here that my friend was wont to come when
he wished to be alone and he led me up through a crevasse
to the top of a gigantic rock that overhung the surf some
thirty feet. He could have paid me no greater compliment
than to take me to this place, sacred to his own moody
thoughts, where, like a sick animal or an Indian with a
"bad heart" he could fight his troubles alone. Below us
the surf curled over in a mighty roll that burst on the
beach with a deafening roar, sending up a fine mist of
salty vapor like the smoke of an explosion. This was
Père Labat's country and as I watched the regular
onslaught of several large seas I thought of a paragraph
he wrote some two hundred years ago. "The sea always
forms seven large billows, waves or surges, whichever you
would call them, that break on the shore with an
astonishing violence and which can be heard along the
windward side where the coast is usually very high and
where the wind blows continually on the sea. The three
last of these seven waves are the largest. When they have
subsided after breaking on shore there is a little calm
which is called Emblie and which lasts about the time it
takes to say an Ave Maria, after which the waves begin
again, their size and force augmenting always till the
seventh has broken on the shore."
We watched the sun go down and then silently crawled
down to the beach. It was Waddy's wish that we should
walk back in the darkness. The advance of night seemed to
drive the last fitful twilight before it -- one can see
the light fade away from a printed page -- and the stars
came out. The moon would not rise yet awhile. "Look!"
said Waddy, and he turned me toward the dark cliffs above
us. Hanging over us was a deep velvet darkness that I
could almost reach out and feel, and against this like
the jewels of a scarf, was the glimmer of thousands of
fire-flies -- moving, blinking spots of light as large
and luminous as Jupiter on the clearest night. They lived
in the foliage of the cliff and it was Waddy's delight to
come here of a night and watch them. "Chaque bête a
feu clairé' pou nâme yo!" he said. (Each
firefly lights for his soul.)
Dinner was waiting for us and with it the proud maman
and two of the children. Some were away at school and
some were too young to come to the table (at least when
there were visitors) and we did justice to that of which
she was proud, the food. That night we discussed till
late the various means by which the "Touring Club" could
see more of the Antilles as I was seeing them, but Nature
finally had her way and I fell asleep talking -- so Waddy
said.
CHAPTER X.
A LAND CRUISE --
THE CALM OF GUADELOUPE.
I AWOKE in the morning to find that I had carelessly
slipped into the second day of a windy quarter. There was
no doubt about it ; the trade was blowing strong at
six o'clock. I was impatient to be off shore before the
surf would be running too high even for the thirty-foot
dugout. After gulping down a hasty breakfast and bidding
profuse adieux to Madame Waddy, I reached the beach with
my friend just in time to see one of the fishing boats
capsize and to watch the natives chase down the shore to
pick up her floating gear.
It took nearly the whole male population of the
village to turn the dugout and get her bow down to the
surf. With a shout and a laugh the people carried the
Yakaboo and placed her lightly in her nest. Ten of the
strongest paddlers were selected and they took their
places in the dugout forward and aft of the canoe while
I, like the Queen of the Carnival, sat perched high above
the rest, in the cockpit. For nearly half an hour -- by
my watch -- we sat and waited. There were thirty men, on
the sands, along each gunwale, ready for the word from
Waddy. There was little talking ; we all watched the
seas that seemed to come in, one after another, with
vindictive force.
I was beginning to swear that I was too late when a
"soft one" rolled in and we shot from the heave of a
hundred and twenty arms plunging our bow into the first
sea. Her heel was still on the sand and I feared she
wouldn't come up for we shipped two barrels of brine as
easily as the Yakaboo takes a teacupful. But with the
first stroke she was free and with the second she cleared
the next sea which broke under her stern. We were in the
roar of the reef and if Waddy yelled good-bye it had been
carried down the beach like the gear of the fishing boat.
But he waved his hat like a madman and followed us along
shore as we ran down the channel and turned out to
sea.
Once clear of all dangers, eight of the men fell to
bailing while the two bow men and the steersman kept her
head to it. Then we swung the Yakaboo athwartships while
I loaded and rigged her. We slid her overboard and I
jumped in. The men held her alongside where she tugged
like an impatient puppy while I lowered the centerboard.
"Let 'er go!" I yelled -- an expression that seems to be
understood in all languages -- and I ran up the mizzen,
sheeting it not quite home. Then the jib. I shall never
forget the sensation as I hauled in on that jib -- it
seems out of proportion to use the word "haul" for a line
scarcely an eighth of an inch in diameter fastened to a
sail hardly a yard in area. The wind was strong and the
seas were lively.
When that sheeted jib swung the canoe around she did
not have time to gather speed, she simply jumped to it. I
made fast the jib sheet and prepared to steer by the
mizzen when I discovered that the canoe was sailing
herself. I looked back toward shore and waved both arms.
Waddy was a crazy figure on the beach. The day was
delirious. A tuna dugout that had been lying into the
wind fell away as I started and raced ahead of me, reefed
down, her lee rail in the boil and her wild crew to
windward. My mainsail was already reefed and I let the
canoe have it. By the high-tuned hum of her board I knew
that the Yakaboo was traveling and the crew of the tuna
canoe knew it, too, for we passed them and were off on
our wild ride to Dominica.
My channel runs were improving. The sea, the sky, and
the clouds were all the same as on the other runs, but
the wind was half a gale. What occupied my mind above
all, however, was the discovery that the canoe would sail
herself under jib and mizzen. I had thought that no boat
with so much curve to her bottom could possibly do such a
thing -- it is not done on paper. The fact remained,
however, that the two small sails low down and far apart
kept the canoe on her course as well as I could when
handling the mainsheet.
I checked this observation by watching my compass
which has a two-inch card floating in liquid and is
extremely steady. I also learned that I did not have to
waste time heading up for the breaking seas, except the
very large ones, of course. Sometimes I could roll them
under -- at other times I let them come right aboard and
then I was up to my shoulders in foam. The canoe was
tighter than she had ever been and it was only the
cockpit that gave trouble. When she began to stagger from
weight of water, I would let go the main halyard and she
would continue on her course while I bailed. In all the
two thousand miles of cruising I had hitherto done, I
learned more in this twenty-five mile channel than all
the rest put together. Some day -- I promised myself -- I
would build a hull absolutely tight and so strong and of
such a form that I could force her through what seas she
could not easily ride under. Also, what a foolish notion
I had clung to in setting my sails only a few inches
above deck ; they should be high up so that a foot
of water could pass over the deck and not get into the
cloth. In this run, if the Yakaboo had been absolutely
tight and her sails raised and if I had carried a small
deck seat to windward, I could have carried full sail and
she would have ridden to Dominica on a cloud of
brine-smelling steam. As it was, she was traveling much
faster than at any time before and I did not know that
the most glorious channel run was yet to come.
I laid my course for Cape Cachacrou (Scott's Head), a
peculiar hook that runs out to westward of the south end
of Dominica. For the first two hours I could not see the
Head, then it popped up like an island and began slowly
to connect itself with the larger land. The going was
excellent and in short time the head was right over our
bow, with Dominica rising up four thousand feet to
weather. We were not more than half a mile off shore when
I took out my watch. I figured out later that our rate
had been six miles an hour including slowing up to bail
and occasionally coming to a dead stop when riding out a
big sea bow on. I could ask no better of a small light
craft sailing six points off the wind, logy a part of the
time and working in seas that were almost continually
breaking.
Fate was indulgent, for she waited till I had stowed
my watch in its berth to starboard. Then she sent a sea
of extra size -- it seemed to come right up from below
and mouth the Yakaboo like a terrier -- and before we got
over our surprise she gave us the tail end of a squall,
like a whiplash, that broke the mizzen gooseneck and sent
the sail a-skying like a crazy kite. I let go all my
halyards and pounced after my sails like a frantic
washerwoman whose clothes have gone adrift in a backyard
gale. The mainsail came first and then the jib. The
truant mizzen which had dropped into the sea when I
slipped its halyard came out torn and wet and I rolled it
up and spanked it and stowed it in the cockpit.
The sea had come up from the sudden shoaling where in
a third of a mile the bottom jumps from a hundred and
twenty fathoms to twelve, and as for the squall, that was
just a frisky bit of trade that was not content with
gathering speed around the end of the island but must
slide down the side of a mountain to see how much of a
rumpus it could raise on the water. I had run unawares --
it was my own stupid carelessness that did it -- on the
shoals that extend to the southeast of Cachacrou Head
where the seas jumped with nasty breaking heads that
threatened to turn the Yakaboo end for end any
minute.
With the mizzen out of commission I might as well have
stood in pink tights on the back of a balky farm horse
and told him to cross his fingers as sail that canoe. I
might have hoisted my jib and slowly run off the shoals
to the westward, but that would have meant a hard tedious
beat back to shore again for a good part of the night. I
chose to work directly across the shoals with the oars.
But it was no joking matter. My course lay in the trough
of the sea and it was a question of keeping her stern to
the seas so that I could watch them and making as much as
I could between crests.
Most of my difficulty lay in checking her speed when a
comber would try to force her along in a mad toboggan
ride and from this the palms of my hands became sore and
developed a huge blister in each that finally broke and
let in the salt water which was about it' plenty. For an
hour I worked at it, edging in crabwise across the shoals
till the seas began to ease up and I pulled around the
Head to the quiet waters under its hook. Have you walked
about all day in a stiff pair of new shoes and then come
home to the exquisite ease of an old pair of bedroom
slippers? Then you know how I felt when I could take a
straight pull with my fingers crooked on the oars and my
raw palms eased from their contact with the handles.
Cachacrou Head is a rock which stands some two hundred
and thirty-four feet up from the sea and is connected
with the coast of Dominica by a narrow curved peninsula
fifty yards across and half a mile in length. There is a
small fort on the top of the Head and here on the night
of September the seventh, in 1778, the French from
Martinique, with a forty-nine gun ship, three frigates
and about thirty small sloops filled with all kinds of
piratical rabble, captured the fort which was in those
days supposed to be impregnable. It was the same old
story ; there is always a weak point in the armor of
one's enemy -- thirst being the vulnerable point in this
case. The night before the capture some French soldiers
who had insinuated themselves into the fort, muddled the
heads of the English garrison with wine from Martinique,
and spiked the guns. The capture then was easy. By this
thin wedge, the French gained control of Dominica and
held the island for five years.
Rowing close around the Head, I found a sandy bit of
beach just where the peninsula starts for the mainland
and with a feeling that here ended a good day's work,
hauled the Yakaboo up on the smooth hard beach. The sun
-- it seems that I am continually talking about the sun
which is either rising or setting or passing through that
ninety degree arc of deadly heat the middle of which is
noon (it was now four o'clock) -- was far enough on its
down path so that the Head above me cast a grateful shade
over the beach while the cool wind from the mountains
insured the absence of mosquitoes.
The lee coast of Dominica stretching away to the north
was in brilliant light. You have probably gathered by
this time that the Lesser Antilles are decidedly unsuited
for camping and cruising as we like to do it in the North
Woods. In a few isolated places on the windward coasts
one might live in a tent and be healthy and happy, such
as my camp with the Caribs ; but to cruise and camp,
that is travel and then rest for a day on the beach --
this is impossible. In this respect my cruise was a
distinct failure.
When I did find a spot such as this, where I could
still enjoy a part of the afternoon in comparative
comfort, I enjoyed it to the utmost. I did not unload the
Yakaboo immediately -- I merely took those things out of
her that I wanted for my present use. Tabac de Diable,
for instance, and my pipe, and then a change of
clothes ; but before I put on that change I shed my
stiff briny sea outfit and sat down in a little
sandy-floored pool in the rocks. There I smoked with my
back against a rock while the reflex from the Caribbean
rose and fell with delightful intimacy from my haunches
to my shoulders.
For some time I rested there, with my hands behind my
head to keep the blood out of my throbbing hands and the
salt out of my burning palms. Across the bay was the town
of Souffrière, not unlike the Souffrière of
Saint Lucia, from a distance, while a few miles beyond
was Point Michelle and another few miles along was
Roseau, the capital town of the island. Away to the north
Diablotin rose nearly five thousand feet, within a
hundred feet of the Souffrière of Guadeloupe, the
highest mountain of the Lesser Antilles.
After a while I got up, like a lazy faun (let us not
examine the simile too closely for who would picture a
sea faun smoking a Three-B and with a four days' stubble
on his chin?). On a flat-topped rock near the canoe I
spread out my food bags. Near this I started a fire of
hardwood twigs that soon burned down to a hot little bed
of coals over which my pot of erbswurst was soon boiling.
This peameal soup, besides bacon and potatoes, is one of
the few foods of which one may eat without tiring, three
times a day, day in and day out, when living in the open.
It is an excellent campaign food and can be made into a
thin or thick soup according to one's fancy. I have eaten
it raw and found it to be very sustaining. At home one
would quickly tire of the eternal peameal and the salty
bacon taste -- but I never eat it when I am at home nor
do I use in general the foods I take with me when
cruising. The two diets are quite distinct.
While the pot was boiling, I betook myself to a cozy
angle in the rocks which I softened with my blanket bag,
and fell to repairing my mizzen. My eye chanced to wander
down the beach -- is it chance or instinct? and finally
came to rest on a group of natives who stood watching me.
Modesty demanded something in the way of clothes so I put
on a clean shirt and trousers and beckoned to them. They
were a timid lot and only two of them advanced to within
fifty feet of the canoe and then stopped. I talked to
them, but it was soon evident that they did not
understand a word I said, even the little patois I knew
got no word from them. Finally they summoned enough
courage to depart and I was left to my mending.
I had finished my sail and was enjoying my pea-soup
and biscuits when my eye detected a movement down the
beach and I saw a lone figure which advanced without
hesitation and walked right into my camp where it smiled
down at me from an altitude of three inches over six
feet.
"My name ess Pistole Titre, wat you name and
frum war you cum?"
I told him that my name was of little importance and
that I had just come from Martinique.
"Frum war before dat?"
"Saint Lucia."
"Frum war before dat?"
"Saint Vincent.
"Frum war before dat?"
"Grenada."
"An' you not afraid?"
"Why should I be afraid? The canoe sails well."
"I no mean de sea, I mean jumbie. How you don't
know w'en you come to strange ilan de jumbie no take
you?"
There might be some truth in this but I answered, "I
don't believe in jumbies." This he interpreted into, "I
don't believe there are jumbies HERE." The fact that I
did not believe in jumbies, the evil spirits of the
Africans, was utterly beyond his conception -- of course
I believed in them, everybody did, but by some occult
power I must know their haunts and could avoid them
though I had never visited the place before.
"I know jumbies no come here, but how you
know? You wonderful man," he concluded.
While this conversation was going on, I was secretly
admiring his huge lithe body -- such of it as could be
seen through an open shirt and by suggestive line of
limb ; he might have been some bronze Apollo come to
animation, except for his face. His face was an
expression of good-will, intelligence, and energy that
came to me as a refreshing relief from the shiny fulsome
visage of the common native.
The jumbies disposed of for the time being, Pistole
sat down on a rock and made rapid inroads on a few soda
biscuits and some pea-soup which I poured into a
calabash. The native can always eat, and the eating of
this salty soup with its bacon flavor seemed the very
quintessence of gastronomic delight. When he had finished
he pointed to a steep upland valley and told me he must
go there to milk his cows. He would bring me a bottle of
fresh milk, he said, when he came back again, for he was
going to fish that night from the rocks under the Head.
As he walked away along the beach, the breeze brought
back, "An' he no 'fraid jumbies. O Lard!"
My supper over, I turned the canoe bow toward the
water and made up my bed in the cockpit. It would be too
fine a night for a tent and I tied my candle light part
way up the mizzen mast so that I could lie in my bed and
read. At sunset I lit my lamp for the beach under the
Head was in darkness. While the short twilight moved up
from the sea and hovered for a moment on the highest
mountain tops my candle grew from a pale flame to a
veritable beacon that cast a sphere of light about the
canoe, shutting out night from the tiny rock-hedged beach
on which we lay. But Ulysses did not make me drowsy and I
blew out my light and lay under that wonderful blue
ceiling in which the stars blinked like live diamonds.
The Dipper was submerged with its handle sticking out of
the sea before me and Polaris hung low, a much easier
guide than in the North. Just overhead Orion's belt
floated like three lights dropped from a sky rocket.
Through the low brush over the peninsula the Southern
Cross tilted to westward.
As I lay there stargazing, the rattle of a displaced
stone told me of the coming of Pistole who laid down a
long bamboo pole and seated himself on his haunches by
the canoe. I relit my lamp that I might observe him
better. Suspended from a tump line passing over the top
of his head was a curious basket-like woven matting. From
its depths he drew forth a bottle, known the world over,
a four shouldered, high-sided termini that proclaimed gin
as its original contents, but which was now filled with
milk and corked with a wisp of upland grass.
I stuck the bottle in the sand beside the canoe where
the morning sun would not strike it and then dug around
in my cozy little burrow and brought forth a bag of
tobacco. Pistole did not smoke. He was supporting his
mother and an aunt ; it was hard work and he could
not afford luxuries. Here certainly was a paradox, a
native who forbore the use of tobacco!
Pistole came here often, he said, when there was not
much moon, to fish at night from the rocks, using the
white squid that shines in the water for bait. Sometimes
he filled his basket to the top with little rock fish and
at other times he got nothing at all. He lighted his
flambeau from my candle lamp and departed, leaving the
pleasant odor of the burning gommier like an incense. I
watched his progress as the light bobbed up and down and
was finally extinguished far out on the rocks.
Tired as I was, my throbbing hands kept me awake till
Pistole returned some time later -- the fish did not seem
to be biting -- and he lay down in the sand by the canoe.
Had he seen a jumbie or was there a sign of lajoblesse?
The huge creature edged in as close to the planking of
the Yakaboo as he could get, like a remora fastened to
the belly of a shark. The monotone of his snores brought
on sleep and when I awoke the sun was well up above the
mountains of Dominica. A lengthy impression in the sand
was all that remained of the native who had long since
gone to tend his cattle.
There is one morning when I feel that I have a right
to spread myself and that is on Sunday. It is from long
force of habit that began with my earliest school days.
There was no need for an early start and as for my
breakfast, I spared neither time nor trouble.
First I very slowly and very carefully reversed
Pistole's bottle so as not to disturb the cream and then
I let out the milk from under it. This was for the
chocolate. The cream which would hardly pour and which I
had to shake out of the bottle I set aside for my
oatmeal. This I had started the night before and it only
needed heating and stirring. I made the chocolate with
the native "stick" and sweetened it with the Muscovado
sugar and I even swizzled it and sprinkled nutmeg on the
heavy foam on top after the old Spanish manner. That
"head" would have put to shame the "Largest Schooner in
Town." I also made a dish of scrambled eggs and smoked
flying fish that Waddy had given me. It was a breakfast
fit for a king and I felt proud of myself and
congratulated my stomach on its neat capacity as I
stretched out by a rock like a gorged reptile and lit my
pipe. There was nothing, just then, that could increase
the sum of my happiness. I should have been glad to have
spent the day there but I knew that the sun would soon
make a hell's furnace of this delightful spot so when my
pipe was finished I washed my dishes and loaded the
canoe. I was having my "last look around" when I saw a
crowd of natives coming up the beach with Pistole at
their head. They were probably coming to see the canoe
and to say good-bye so I sat down on a rock and waited
for them. Pistole, who had apparently been appointed
spokesman, said that they all lived in a village, not far
off, but hidden from view by the bush. They were very
anxious to show me their village -- would I come with
them?.
Pistole led the way along the peninsula to a crescent
of beach that might have been on the lagoon of an atoll
in the South Sea islands. Under the coco palms that hung
out over the beach almost to the water's edge were the
canoes of the village. Behind the scrubby growth that
fringed the beach was a double row of huts with a wide
path between them parallel to the shore. Down this path
or avenue I was led in review while the homes of the
persons of distinction were pointed out to me. These
differed from the ordinary huts in that they were sided
with unpainted boards. One or two were built of American
lumber, painted and with shingled roofs. Half the village
followed us while the other half sat in its respective
doorways. Oh! the luxury of those door steps ; to
those who sat there it was like beholding a Memorial Day
procession from the carpeted steps of a city house. This
world is merely one huge farce of comparison. At the end
of the avenue -- let us give it as much distinction as
possible -- we retraced our steps and the march came to
an end at the house of Pistole's mother. This, I might
say, was one of the finest and contained two rooms. The
big native was very proud of his mother and aunt who
received me with the graciousness of women of royalty and
brought out little cakes and glasses of cocomilk and rum.
The heat was growing outside and I must get off the
beach, so I said "Good-bye" and went back to the canoe
followed by a small caravan bearing offerings of the
village, waternuts and pineapples.
The wind was roaring down the mountainsides, for this
quarter continued fresh, and I left the beach with the
reefed mainsail only. The sea was like a floor and with a
small gale for a beam wind the reefed sail lifted the
Yakaboo along like a toboggan. I held in for the town of
Souffrière in order to keep the smooth water and
when I was part way across the bay the lightish water
under me suddenly turned to a deep blue -- the color of
sea water off shore. There was a sharp well-defined line
which I crossed again and was once more in lighter water.
It was L'Abime, Dominica's submarine crater.
In less than an hour I lowered sail off the main jetty
of Roseau.
It was not quite twelve. The whole town had begun
breakfast at eleven and was still eating. I may not be
absolutely correct in saying that the whole town was
eating for there was one individual who was on duty and
enjoying a nap in the shade of the custom-house at the
shore end of the jetty. There was another also -- but he
did not belong to the town -- the captain of the coasting
steamer Yare, a jolly little Irishman whom I came to know
better in St. Thomas. He was not at breakfast and he
yelled a welcome from the bridge of his steamer at her
Sunday rest by the big mooring buoy in the roadstead. I
ran up my ensign on the mizzen halyard and yelled at the
man inshore. He rubbed his eyes but did not seem to know
why he should be disturbed.
"Where is the harbor-master?"
"At him breakfus' -- w'at you want?"
"I want to land. Don't you see my ensign?"
"O Lard! I t'at it wuz de Umium Jack."
At this Wilson, of the Yare, sent out a great roar
across the water. "You don't think that ebony ass knows
the difference between one flag and another, do you?" he
inquired much to the offense of the e. a. With some
sheepishness, the revenue man came down to the landing
place where I prepared to tie up the Yakaboo while
awaiting the answer from the harbormaster. But no, I
could not even fasten my painter to one of the iron
piles, -- I must lie off in the roads till word came that
my papers had been passed upon. There might be the chance
that I had yellow fever aboard. In an hour the boatman
returned with word that I might come ashore. In view of
what followed I should add that when I handed my papers
to the boatman I told him that I had already landed at
Scott's Head under stress of weather and that he should
report this to the harbor-master. Some days later while I
was fitting a new goose-neck to the mizzen of the Yakaboo
in the courtyard of the Colonial Bank, word was brought
that I was "wanted" by the Acting Colonial Treasurer. I
knew from the tone of the demand that something was in
the air. When I was ushered into the presence of that
august little personage, I was asked with considerable
circumlocution why I landed at Scott's Head before making
official entry at Roseau.
"Who told you?" I whispered, as if he were
about to disclose an interesting bit of gossip.
"The police officer of Souffrière telephoned
this morning that he saw your camp at Scott's Head on
Sunday morning." (It was now Friday, five days later.)
I said that I hoped the lazy officer at
Souffrière had been duly reprimanded for not
having reported me sooner.
"What!" the little man shouted. "You are the one to
be reprimanded for having landed and not having
mentioned the fact when you gave up your papers at
Roseau. Do you know that you are liable to two weeks'
quarantine?"
By this time my ire should have been goaded to the
loud-talking point. I leaned forward in a confidential
way and whispered (he seemed to dislike this whispering),
"Let's have in the boatman who took my papers on Sunday
morning." They might have been the dying words of some
unfortunate victim of a street accident asking for his
wife or his mother.
The boatman came in due time accompanied by loud tones
of authority which issued from his thick-soled boots. The
weight of the Empire was in every step. Then I stood up
and looked hard into a pair of hazel eyes while I asked
the owner if I had not mentioned, when I handed him my
papers, the fact that I had spent the night at Scott's
Head under stress of weather. I owned those eyes while he
spoke the truth and said, "Yes."
"Don't you know, Mr. S -- ," I asked, "that under
stress of weather -- my mizzen having blown away -- I may
land at any convenient beach and then proceed to the
nearest port as soon as repairs are effected?" One would
think that we were talking about some great steamer
instead of a sailing canoe. I did not, however, mention
my visit to the village on the peninsula.
When the Yakaboo was ready for sea again, I chucked
her into the basement of the Colonial Bank and started on
a land cruise through the hills of the island. I would
hire a small horse and circumnavigate the island on its
back, carrying with me a couple of blankets, a pail and a
frypan. But the idyll stops there.
Soon after I arrived at Roseau, word came to me that a
Mr. B of Chicago was visiting his uncle on a plantation
near the town. It turned out that I knew this man and in
the course of time we met. When he heard of my plan to
ride around the island, he embraced the idea with great
warmth -- as some would put it -- in fact he not only
embraced it ; he adopted it and when it came back to
me it was entirely changed. It no longer belonged to me,
it was a sad little stranger whom I knew not. Instead of
camping near the roadside with a bully fire at night and
the horses tethered close by, this was all done away with
by means of letters of introduction. Our blankets and our
pots and pans were whisked away by folded pieces of paper
inside of other pieces of paper. Our food we need no
longer trouble about. I felt like asking, "Please, ma'am,
may I take a little eating chocolate and my pipe and
tobacco?"
It was on Friday then, oh, unlucky day for the skipper
of the Yakaboo! that I obtained a pony from the
harbor-master. I did not see the horse till the next
morning -- a few minutes before the start which was
scheduled for eight o'clock. I have inferred that there
is but little humor or the sense of it in the English
islands, at least, but this animal was a pun -- the
lowest form of humor. To have called him a joke would
have put a burden on him that would eventually have
swayed his back till a fifth wheel would have been
necessary to keep his poor paunch off the ground. And as
for that poor paunch -- there was the seat of all the
trouble. It had not been filled often enough nor full
enough and as in nature we come to liken the things we
eat, this poor beast was becoming of necessity an
ethereal being. I asked the man who brought it if they
taxed horses in the island by the head or by the pound.
The colored groom very politely informed me -- for was I
not traveling in the West Indies in search of information
? -- that there was, of course, a tax on every horse in
the island, and as for the pound, there was a small fee
levied on every animal that got astray and was brought
there. If you were sitting with me in my cozy little
cabin and we were discussing that horse I should say,
"Poor brute, I felt damn sorry for him," in that earnest
tone which you would understand.
I am not heavy in build, however, neither did I have
any luggage to add weight, for a porter had been engaged
to carry our extra duffle on his head. With a small cargo
of chocolate to port and a supply of tobacco and matches
to starboard, I adjusted the stirrups and mounted my poor
animal. Even then I felt him go down below his Plimsoll
marks. I wore my ordinary sea outfit which I had
carefully washed. I had one suit of "store clothes" but I
was not going to befoul them on any uncurried West Indian
skate for any man, no matter how exalted his position
might be. B-- , rather chunky of build, arrived well
mounted at the stroke of the hour and at a brisk canter.
If he were not what one might call au fait, he bore some
aspects of the gentleman-rider even if he wore his
trousers stuffed into leggings instead of "breeks." He
had apparently noticed that there was a figure mounted on
a horse by the roadside but until he was close upon me he
did not realize that this was to accompany him on his
ride around the island. When he recognized me his face
fell like a topsail taken aback and he instinctively
looked around to see if any one saw him with me.
"Good God!" he muttered, "you're not going to
ride in that rig, are you?"
"You don't expect me to wear a hunting coat on this
caricature, do you? Let's be off."
"Yes, let's be off," he said, as he put spurs to
his horse and raced along the road toward Laudat.
"Let's be off," I whispered into the ear of my
Rosinante -- for he was a she -- and with a thwack I
started her clattering after my friend.
By careful husbanding the strength of my animal we
reached Laudat at ten o'clock. That is, I did. My friend
had arrived there several times and had gone back
occasionally to note my progress.
Laudat is a little settlement nearly half way across
the island where one takes the trail for a rather arduous
climb to the Boiling Lake in the Souffrière
mountains. Through the courtesy of a priest in Roseau a
rest house was put at our disposal. Here we feasted on
raspberries, coffee and bread, after which we started for
the Boiling Lake. I shall not weary you with a laborious
description of a laborious climb along a narrow trail,
muddy and slippery and root-crossed, nor of the
everlasting din of the anvil bird that somehow makes a
noise like the ringing of steel against iron, nor of the
Boiling Lake. The next day we finished our crossing and
followed the road along the windward side to the estate
of Castle Bruce where we stopped for the night.
The following day we rode to Melville Hall where we
were received by the Everingtons. It was along this
coast, somewhere between Crumpton and Pagoua Points that
Columbus tried to land on the morning of November 3rd,
when he gave Dominica its name and then proceeded to the
northward and set foot the same day on the shores of
Maria Galante which he named after his ship. From
Melville Hall we rode to Hampstead and then across the
northeast corner of the island to Portsmouth.
Lying in the smooth waters of Prince Rupert Bay were
three American whalers, a remnant of a fleet of sixteen
that had gathered there to transship oil. As you may
remember from your early American history, the English
government has always been extremely fond of gaining
revenue through petty taxation. They even tax rowboats in
some of the islands and in Saint Vincent the crude little
catamaran on which the Black Carib boy is seated
(photo) is
taxed thrupence per foot. Imbued with this idea, a petty
official of Dominica once suggested to the skipper of an
American whaler that he should be made to pay a tax for
the use of the shelter of the island. To this the Yankee
skipper replied, "Go ahead and make your law and your
tax, we'll tow one of our own damn islands down here and
use that."
I have said little about my Rosinante, who seemed,
somehow, to improve on the good food she was getting. She
bore up well ; I rode her with a loose girth and
took the best possible care of her. If I could only nurse
her for a month or so I might make a presentable beast of
her. As it was, I felt that I was riding a rather tough
skin in which an old piece of machinery was moving with
considerable lost motion. I remember speculating as to
what price the harbor-master would charge me if the mare
died while in my care and wondering what return I might
gain from her carcass. There was this comfort, her skin
was tough and should she drop on some precipitous path
her bones and eternal economy would not burst out and go
clattering down into the valley below. I was sure of what
might be left of her and in a pinch I could skin her and
sell the flesh to the natives, break up the bones for
fertilizer and use her hoofs for gelatin. It was an
absorbing bit of speculation but did not interest B-- ,
whose mind was usually occupied with problems of much
higher finance. But there was no real cause for worry. On
the last day we covered fully twenty-five miles of road
that was mostly up and down hill. I gained as much
respect for her as most any West Indian I had met.
It was the loose girth which caused me to lose my last
shred of dignity. We were descending a steep path down
the side of a valley in the bed of which flowed a small
fordable stream. There was no mishap until we reached the
river bank which dropped away steeply to the water's
edge. For some unaccountable reason I and Rosinante were
ahead. Slowly Rosinante felt her way down the bank and
then stood, bow down, like the Yakaboo scending a sea. In
a detailed description I should have said that she was
built for'ard somewhat like a cow -- lacking shoulders.
The saddle of its own accord had begun to slide forward.
I reached for her tail and missed it. Her forefeet were
in ten inches of water while her after props were still
on dry land. Even then I might have saved myself by
taking to the after deck. Slowly she lowered her muzzle
to the stream. There was nothing for it, the saddle slid
down the sharp ridge of her neck and I landed with my
hands in the water as if I too would drink. As I rolled
off into the stream I thought I caught Rosinante in the
act of winking her eye -- or was it only a fly that
bothered?.
Our land cruise ended that evening and I bade goodbye
to my friend. Rosinante was returned to the harbor-master
and I went back to the Yakaboo.
Traveling up the Dominica shore I had my first taste
of calm. It was not the blazing calm that I was to
experience a few days later but it was a good foretaste.
In light weather there is usually a calm spot along the
northern half of the coast line up to Prince Rupert Bay.
Just around the bluff the trade strikes the sea again and
here I set sail and ran into Toucan Bay where there is a
little coast village. Here was the last bit of beach
whence I could make my departure for Guadeloupe and I
hauled the canoe out on the sand at the far end from the
village.
The people came down to the beach and insisted upon
carrying my canoe well up from the water. They asked me
where I was going to sleep and I pointed to the cockpit
of the Yakaboo. At this one of the head men said that I
must sleep in the village. He would see to it that a room
in one of the houses was cleaned out for me and that his
wife would cook my evening meal. I conceded this last
point and taking up my food bags walked with him to the
village.
While my supper was cooking, a woman came to me and
asked if I would see her son. He was dying, she thought
(the native is always dying with each complaint, however
slight), and the coast doctor would not reach the village
for several days. I told her that I was no medicine man,
but she would not believe that I could travel alone as I
did without some mystic power to cure all diseases. I
found the boy, about eighteen years old, in great
distress, suffering possibly from acute gastritis -- a
not uncommon ailment of the West Indian negro. I muttered
some Latin à la Bill Nye and gave him a pill that
could do no harm and might do some good. I dare say my
diagnosis and prescription were not much wider of the
mark than those of many practitioners of high repute. I
was playing safe, for if the boy died subsequently I knew
it not. I returned to my supper of chocolate and jack
fish and then made up my bed in the canoe.
Long before the sun began to throw his light over the
mountains of Dominica I had folded my blankets and was
eating a scanty breakfast, for the day promised well and
I was anxious to be sailing. My channel runs, so far, had
been boisterous and exhilarating, like a race from tree
to tree in a game of blindman's buff, the trees being
distant conical patches of grey-blue land ; but this
run of the Saints was a pleasant jaunt. Seventeen miles
to the northwest lay Les Saintes, a group of picturesque
islands that stood out fresh and green even as I cleared
Dominica. Ten miles farther on my course was Guadeloupe.
Nineteen miles to the northeast lay the larger island of
Marie Galante and when I opened the Atlantic to the north
of her I could make out the hump of distant Desirade.
It was in these waters that Rodney caught up with the
French fleet under De Grasse on the morning of April
12th, 1782. It is difficult for us to realize that in
these islands that now appear to us to be of such little
importance, a battle such as this -- the Battle of the
Saints -- should be one of the turning points which led
directly to the supremacy of Great Britain on the sea.
England stood alone against the world. The American
colonies had declared their independence and Cornwallis
had surrendered at Yorktown. France and Spain were eager
to end, once for all, the power of England's navy. The
Dutch had been defeated off the Dogger Bank and the year
before, Rodney had captured their island of St. Eustatius
and unroofed Oranjetown, as you shall see when I take you
there in the Yakaboo.
The French fleet was considered a perfect fighting
machine and while De Grasse had thirty-three ships to
Rodney's thirty-five they were considered to have the
advantage on their side, due to greater tonnage and a
larger number of guns per ship. But the French were weak
in one point and that was sailing to windward -- this was
offset in a measure by their superior ability to run off
the wind and escape from their foes, should the battle go
against them. On the morning of April 12th, Hood led the
British fleet, which was apparently to windward, while
Rodney in the Formidable was in the center. The French
fleet was in a line parallel to the English and a safe
distance to leeward. The wind was evidently light. Then,
we are told, "a sudden gale of wind gave the British
admiral his chance -- abruptly turning his flagship to
larboard he broke through the French line." This "gale of
wind" was probably the usual freshening of the trade at
about eight o'clock, which Rodney's ships received first
because he was to windward of the French. By breaking
into the line as he did, the whole of Rodney's fleet was
concentrated on two-thirds of the French and the English
could use both broadsides at one time while the French
could only use one. In the cannonading which followed, a
rooster which had escaped from the coops on board the
Formidable stood on the bowsprit and crowed defiantly.
"It was a good omen to the sailors, who worked their guns
with redoubled vigor." Six of the French ships were
captured and the rest fled to leeward, mostly in a
crippled condition.
Rodney at this time was sixty-three years old, a
roué ; a gambler, and crippled with gout. But
he was considered the best admiral whom the British had.
Some years before, he had fled to France to escape debt
and it was a Frenchman, Marshall Biron, who paid his
debts and made him return to England because he did not
want to have his country deprived of the glory of beating
the British with their best admiral at their head. It had
been too rash a gamble. Although Rodney's tactics, in the
Battle of the Saints, were conceived on the spur of the
moment, unknown to him, they were first evolved by a
Scottish minister, John Clark of Eldin, and were a lesson
to Nelson who embodied them in the "Nelson touch" at
Trafalgar.
I passed close to the Saints and looked with great
longing on a pretty little fishing village on the lee
coast of Terre d'en Bas. There were some white people on
the beach where several smart looking fishing boats were
drawn up on the sand. I would have given much to have
been allowed to land there, but I knew there was no port
of entry in the Saints and remembering my Martinique
experiences I held my course for Basse Terre on
Guadeloupe. Soon after, the wind left us and I rowed into
the roadstead of Basse Terre at the very peak of the heat
of a calm day, that is, three o'clock in the
afternoon.
It was the eighth of May and getting on toward June
when the light winds and calm weather of the hurricane
season begin. There is no doubt as to the degeneracy of
the white man in the tropics due to the heat. First comes
the loss of temper. I noticed this in my own case. I had
become short tempered and swore at the slightest
provocation.
When I rowed in close to the seawall of the town and
located a small building where a douane boat was hung in
davits under a roof to protect it from the sun and over
which a customs flag hung limp from a staff, I felt that
I was reasonably correct in guessing that this was the
office of the harbor-master. There were a few loafers on
a jetty that stood half-heartedly just far enough out
from shore to clear the surf. I addressed these as best I
could and asked for the harbor-master. They did not seem
to understand, neither did they care. I asked again and
louder, then I flung my wretched French to the oily sea
and used the most concise and forcible English I could
command -- not that I thought it would do any good but
just to let off the steam of my ire. A miracle occurred!
A head and shoulders became visible in one of the windows
of the customs' office, for such it was, and
yelled :.
"Keep your shirt on, old man, we're not fussy here.
Come right ashore and I'll take your papers after we've
said, 'How do you do.' " This was the greatest shock
I had yet received in the Caribbean. When I recovered
myself -- I had been standing in order to swear the
better -- I sat down to row ashore. Basse Terre is built
along an open roadstead somewhat like St. Pierre but with
a retaining wall built up from a steep shelving beach to
the level of the streets fifteen feet above. I beached
the Yakaboo under the sea wall where a number of boatmen
lifted her up and carried her to a place of safety. The
English-speaking harbor-master, who really was an
American, came out, grabbed my hand, and led me into his
office.
"It's a darn small ensign you carry, but it does my
heart good to see it," he said, and then he began to
introduce me to some of his cronies who had been helping
him to pass away a hot calm afternoon with a gossip and a
smoke. There were Henri Jean-Louia (Homme de Lettres,
Chargé de mission agricole par la Chambre
d'agriculture de Point-à-Pitre et le Conseil
général de la Guadeloupe), and Hubert
Ancelin (Négociant-Commissionaire,
Secrétaire-Trésorier des Chambres de
Commerce et d'Agriculture, Agent de la Compagnie "Quebec
Line") -- I am reading the titles of these dignitaries
from the cards they gave me -- and there was a small
French-looking man with a great deal of dignity who
seemed very much interested in everything we said.
Jean-Louia, the newspaper man, asked me if I would
care for a little refreshment. I replied that since I was
no longer in a whisky-and-soda country any liquid
refreshment he might choose would be very acceptable. In
a short time some cakes and a bottle of champagne were
brought in. My health was proposed (there were certainly
no outward signs of my immediate decline) and we drank
the delicious wine in delicate champagne glasses. Bum
that I was, -- you shall have an accurate description
later, -- if I had been suddenly dropped into the middle
of a ball room I would not have felt more incongruous
than drinking champagne and eating bits of French pastry
less than a quarter of an hour from the time I had left
the Caribbean and the Yakaboo.
But I must bring forward the little man who has shown
great interest in our conversation. He was dressed in
white duck, trousers loose and baggy, coat with military
cut, and he wore mustachios, -- a typical Frenchman. I
had been doing my uttermost with the meager vocabulary
that I could claim my own when I bethought myself of the
little man who had listened but had not said a word.
Neither had he been introduced to me as yet. I turned to
Magras and said in English, "And who is this little
Frenchman?" at which the "little Frenchman" piped up,
"I'm no Frenchman, I'm a Yankee but I suppose I've been
down here so darn long I look like one. My name is
Flower," he continued, "and I came to ask if you would
care to spend the night with me at my house."
This certainly was a day of misjudgments and for a
second time I could have been floored by a mere breath. I
thanked Mr. Flower and told him that I should be
delighted to spend the night with him.
There were still two hours of daylight when I left the
harbormaster's office with Mr. Flower, who with the
energy characteristic of the small man in the tropics,
led me through unshaded deserted streets to the outskirts
of the town to the half-ruined Fort Richepance on the
banks of the Galion River. Basse Terre cannot be said to
be picturesque ; there is an arid barren aspect
about the town that would not appeal to the tourist. That
it has been a place of some importance one can see from
the military plan of the wide streets, squares and
substantial stone, brick and concrete houses. It was
evidently not laid out by a civil governor. One might
easily reconstruct a past full of romance and stirring
incidents, for Basse Terre was the West Indian hotbed of
revolution bred from the ferment in Paris. It was here
that Victor Hugues began his notorious career. Born of
mean parents in some part of old France he was early
placed out as an apprentice. Whatever his character may
have been, he was a man of spirit for he soon became
master of a small trading vessel and was eventually made
a lieutenant in the French navy. Through the influence of
Robespierre he was deputed to the National Assembly. In
1794 he was appointed Commissioner at Guadeloupe. Should
his life history be written it would be a fascinating
tale of cupidity, intrigue, murder and riot -- a
reflection of the reign of terror in the mother country.
Had he been less of a rogue France instead of England
might today have been the dominant power in the Lesser
Antilles.
The next day I experienced my first real calm in the
tropics. My log reads : -- "Tuesday, May 9th, 1911.
Off at 8 :30 (could not disturb my host's domestic
schedule in order to make an early start) and a long
weary row along the lee shore of Guadeloupe. Blistering
calm with shifting puffs at times. Deshaies at 6 P.M.
Distance 27 miles. Beautiful harbor but unhealthy --
turned in at local jail."
I tried to sail in those shifting puffs but it was a
waste of time. The lee coast of Guadeloupe is noted for
its calms and on this May day when the trade to windward
must have been very light, there was at times not a
breath of air. I settled down for a long row. The heat
did not become intense till eleven when what breeze there
had been ceased and on all the visible Caribbean I could
detect no darkened ruffle of its surface. The sun was
well advanced into his danger arc. I had on a thick pair
of trousers, a red sleeveless rowing shirt and a light
flannel over-shirt open at the collar to let in as much
air as possible. I made a nest of a bandana handkerchief
and put it on my head. On top of that I lightly rested my
hat. To protect the back of my neck I wore a red bandana
loosely tied with the knot under my chin -- just opposite
to the fashion of the stage cowboy who wears his
handkerchief like a napkin.
Then, with the least possible effort, I rowed the
canoe along shore, rarely turning my head but keeping the
corner of my eye along the shore which is nearly straight
in its general trend -- a little west of north. From time
to time I would stop and hold both oars in one hand while
with the other I gently lifted the cloth of my trousers
clear of the burning skin beneath. For a time I rowed
with my sleeves down but the burn of the salt sweat and
the friction of the cloth more than counteracted the
benefit I might gain by shading my forearms and I rolled
up my sleeves again.
My forearms, one would suppose, had, after these three
months of continual exposure, all the tan possible, but I
found that after a while the skin was blushing a deep red
and somewhat swollen and painful. The glare from the
water was intense and to protect my eyes I screwed my
face into the grin of a Cheshire cat, to elevate my
cheeks and bring down my eyebrows. Try it and half close
your eyes and you will know just what I mean. The sea
heaved in long shallow groundswells as though laboring
heavily for breath.
The dazzling beaches quivered in the heat waves while
the mountains stood up sharp and strong in the fierce
sunlight. There was not the slightest sign of fish and it
seemed as though the sun had driven them to the coolest
depths below. At twelve o'clock I stopped for a few
minutes to eat a "pine" the natives had given me at
Toucan Bay. This pineapple which, I believe, was
originally brought from Antigua where the best pines of
the West Indies are found, has a golden flesh, sweeter
than the white fibrous fruit which we of the North know
and yet with all of the tang. The core is soft and partly
edible and one can eat the whole of one of these fruits
with a pleasing absence of that acrid taste which leaves
the after effect of putting one's teeth on edge. There
are many fruits to which we refer as "delicious" and
"refreshing" in our paucity of descriptive adjectives but
these two words cannot be applied in a better sense than
in describing the pineapple of the Lesser Antilles.
Two o'clock came and then, thank the Lord, the sun
began to go appreciably to the westward so that by
slightly raising the mainsail I could get some
protection. My long pull at last came to an end when at
six o'clock I rowed into a beautiful little bay and
beached the canoe at the very doorsteps of the village of
Deshaies. The bay was a deep pocket walled by green hills
on three sides and open to seaward where the sun with a
guilty red face was hurrying to get below the horizon so
that he could sneak around again as fast as possible in
order to have some more fun scorching inoffensive canoe
people.
The bay, a snug enough harbor for small coasters,
struck into the land like a tongue of the ocean mottled
with shoals and coral reefs while the green of the hills
was barred from the blue water by a narrow strip of white
sand. The charm of the place was strong and I forgot the
hot toil of the day while I stood on the beach by the
Yakaboo and looked about me. Scarcely two canoe lengths
from the water's edge stood the outposts of the village,
those meaner houses of the fishermen, the beachcombers,
and the keepers of small rum shops.
The people, of the lighter shades of the mulatto, were
loafing as to the male portion on this common back porch
of beach, while the women were busy over ovens and
coalpots, preparing the evening meal. With the apathy of
the island native they had watched me row into their
quiet harbor and had waited till I was actually on the
beach at their very door steps before they got up from
their haunches to flock around the canoe. But now there
was great excitement. They looked at me and at the canoe
and there was nothing they saw about either of us that
was at all familiar. To give them a thrill I pulled on
the mizzen halyard and let it go again -- the sail fanned
out, crawled up the mast, slid down again, and folded
up.
Surprise and curiosity showed in all their features
but they made no move to touch my things, they merely
looked. Some one with an air of importance dispatched a
boy for some one else who had official authority and soon
after the acting mayor came down to the beach. The mayor,
it seemed, was laid up with an attack of fever. The
acting mayor was a dapper little person, very civil, and
not at all officious. Could he do anything for me? I told
him that from the evening set I believed there was
promise of a strong wind on the morrow and that I was now
preparing my canoe for an early start in order to jump
the thirty-eight miles of open water to Montserrat before
the trade might grow into a gale. Therefore I did not
want to make a camp. I also said that I feared I had come
to a fever hole -- at which he grinned assent -- and if
he could find some place where I could sleep without the
company of mosquitoes I would be deeply indebted to
him.
He told me that he would place the town "hotel" at my
disposal and said that while he was attending to my
papers he would get the key. As for the Yakaboo, she
would be perfectly safe where she lay on the beach. In
the meantime I would stretch my legs and see a bit of the
town during the few remaining minutes of twilight.
Deshaies was of a régime which had lasted until
recent years and the substantial houses of its main
street reminded me of those of our "before the war"
cities in the Southern states. Dilapidation was
everywhere ; there were no actual ruins. The old
prosperity was gone and the town was waiting dormant till
the coming of that more stable inheritance which is the
natural right of a soil wonderfully fertile.
There were iron grills and balconies and bits of paved
roadway and courtyard and there were faces among those
easy-going people that took my mind back to Mayero and
the descendants of the Saint-Hilaire family. But the
banded Anopheles were coming from the Deshaies River bed
in millions and I returned to the beach where I found the
acting mayor waiting for me. He had borrowed a sheet of
my note paper which he now returned, a neatly written
document to the effect that I had landed that evening at
Deshaies sans rien d'anormal -- on my way to Montserrat.
Then he showed me a great iron key and led me across the
street to that "hotel" which is less sought after than
needed.
It was the town lock-up ! -- consisting of a detached
building of one story and having two rooms, perhaps more
properly cells, which were heavily barred and shuttered.
In the first room a deal table stood in the middle of the
floor. On this I put my food bags and my candle lamp
which I lit, for it was now dark outside. There was but
one thought in my mind, to get as much rest as possible,
for the next day might prove a hard one.
I borrowed a coalpot and while I cooked my supper I
chatted with the acting mayor. He was to be married, he
said, and that night there was to be a dance in honor of
his betrothal. He would deem it a great honor if I would
come to the dance, but I declined, saying that unless I
was very much mistaken the morrow would be the last day
for two weeks in which I might safely cross the channel
and that I feared to remain in this fever hole any longer
than I could possibly help. To avoid the possibility of
being annoyed by rats, I carried my food back to the
canoe where I stowed it safely under the hatches.
The acting mayor bade me good night and left me to
smoke my evening pipe on the doorstep of the jail. After
a while the preliminary scale of a flute and the open
fifths of a violin announced that the ball was about to
begin and I closed the ponderous door of the jail on the
strains of the first dance. I had long since put out my
light lest it attract mosquitoes and as I made up my bed
on the floor I heard the scampering of rats in the
darkness. I must confess to a childish horror of rats
that is even greater than that of snakes and I finally
put a new candle in my lamp so that it might burn all
night. I was awakened at five o'clock in the morning by
the acting mayor who was returning from the dance. The
town did not awaken at five, it seemed, and there was no
glowing coalpot to be had. To my disgust there was not a
stick in the canoe and on the beach there were nothing
but soggy coco-tree fronds. At last a door creaked and
from the woman who opened it I bought some charcoal. In
spite of my precautions of the night before, it was an
hour and twenty minutes before I finally shoved off in
the Yakaboo.