r LIBRAPY UM!VCR?iTY OF C . ," : -tlA ■~\ EX-LIBRIS LOUISE ARNER BOYD r /Ul /^ 0/^t ^. 6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP Lv^.D. ADAMS ] \ 11. tnkiM-. h'ronlispicce. THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP AN ACCOUNT OF A VOYAGE TO THE WEST INDIES SIR FREDERICK TREVES, Bart. 'y G.C.V.O., C.B.. LL.D. SERJEANT SURGEON TO H.M. THE KING SURGEON IN ORDINARY TO H.M. QUEEN ALEXANDRA AUTHOR OF 'the other SIDE OF THE LANTERN* ' THE TALE OF A FIELD HOSPITAL' ' UGANDA FOR A HOLIDAY ' ETC WITH 54 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, AND 4 MAPS POPULAR EDITION NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 1913 PREFACE. That fervent spirit of adventure and romance which set aglow the heart of every lad in every sea town of England, when Elizabeth was queen, found both its source and its end among the West Indies and by the Spanish Main. The palm-covered island, the secret creek, the white-walled Spanish town formed the scene of ever-inspiring dreams. The boy from the grandmotherly coaster, who found his way into Plymouth Sound, would sit on a bollard on the quay and listen to sun- browned men talking of Indians and sea fights, of Plate ships and pieces of eight, until his soul so burned within him that he turned upon his own homely craft, and shipped as powder-boy on the first galliasse making for the heroic West. In these fair islands were gold and pearls, they said, as well as birds and beasts beyond the imagination of man. Here under the steaming sun of the tropics the pirate harried the sea, and here, in blood, smoke, and cutlass hacks his tale was writ. In coves among the islands he careened his ship and hid his treasure, in blue sea alleys he watched for Spanish merchantmen, and in fever-stricken jungles he rotted and died. For over a century the famous Buccaneers were the terror of the Spanish Main, while to every sturdy British lad, for all these years, the call of the sea rover was as the call of the wild. The very first glimpse of the New World that met the gaze of Columbus was a glimpse of a West Indian island. For some three centuries after his coming, the coasts the great navigator tracked out were the scene of a sea life whose common round was one of vi THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. ever desperate adventure. For three centuries ships poured west- ward from nearly every port in Europe, laden wdth arms and men, searching for strange riches and for a sight of the marvels of the new earth. Through the island channels lay the passage to El Dorado, to Manoa, the city of the lake, where the streets were paved with gold, and down these sea-ways, radiant with hope, sailed Raleigh, the dreamer, on his road to fortune. It was among these islands and along the Main that there came to Drake the strength and craft that crushed, in fulness of time, the Spanish Armada. Here was served the apprenticeship of Dampier, of Frobisher, of Hawkins, and of a host of mighty sailormen who have made the ocean memorable. It was to the West Indies that Nelson look his first voyage, a voyage from which the puny lad " returned a practical seaman." It was here that he held his first command. It was here that he learnt from the quarter-deck of his little brig the elements of war. In the seclusion of these gorgeous islands, indeed, the long sea stor}' of England was begun. The West Indies became the nursery of the British Navy, the school where the thews were hardened and the sea lessons learned. Here was fostered and fed that soul of adventure and reckless daring which inspired the early colonist and made invincible the man with the boarding pike. Here grew, from puny beginnings, the germ of the great Sea Power of the World. In the proud romance of the sea, in the ocean songs and epics, in the sea stories which have been told and retold to generations of British lads, in the breeding of stout-hearted men and the framing of far-venturing ships, the islands have been no less than the Cradle of the Deep. Thatched House Lodge, Richmond Park, Kingston-on-Thames. March 1908. CONTENTS. PAGK I. FROM THE CITY OF FOG TO AN ISLAND OF ETERNAL SUMMER = . . I II. SEVENTY YEARS AGO .... o ... 3 III. BARBADOS 7 IV. THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES . . . 17 V. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ANOTHER AT BARBADOS 24 VI. THE ISLANDERS 28 VII. THE PLANTERS AND THE POOR WHITES • • • 37 VTIL THE DAY WHEN THE SUN STOOD STILL . . . . 43 IX. A MYSTERIOUS SHIP 49 X TRINIDAD 56 XL HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD . . 62 XII. ST. JOSEPH 6S XIIL EL DORADO 72 XIV. THE HIGH WOODS . . 78 XV. THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST 82 XVL THE PITCH LAKE .89 XVII. THE BOCAS . . . . XVIII. THE FIVE ISLANDS XIX. A GLANCE AT THE MAP 94 • • 98 lOI XX. GRENADA 106 XXL THE FAIR HELEN OF THE WEST INDIES ... 109 XXIL CUL DE SAC BAY 114 XXIII. THE MORNE FORTUNE 117 viii THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. PAGE XXIV. CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE 123 XXV. THE SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE . . . .130 XXVI. MARTINIQUE 137 XXVII. "NO FLINT" GREY AND THE STONE SHIP , . 143 XXVIII. THE CITY THAT WAS 148 XXIX. THE LAST NIGHT IN ST. PIERRE 154 XXX. THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN 158 XXXI. DOMINICA 162 XXXH. VICTORINE AND HER FOREFATHERS . . . . 168 XXXIII. THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS PASSAGE . . .175 XXXIV. ST. KITTS 177 XXXV. ST. KITTS IN ALL ITS GLORY 183 XXXVI. STRANGE WARES 189 XXXVII. THE LITTLE CAPTAIN OF THE "BOREAS" , . 193 XXXVIII. THE ENVIRONS OF ST. KITTS 196 XXXIX. SABA THE ASTONISHING 201 XL. ST. THOMAS 204 XLI. MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER . . .208 XLII. A HARBOUR ENTRY 215 XLIII. THE MAN WITH A GLOVE IN HIS HAT . . .223 XLIV. THE SAN JUAN OF TO-DAY 227 XLV. THE WHITE HOUSE 230 XLVI. MONA THE PROTESTANT 236 XLVH. THE ISLAND OF MISRULE 238 XLVIII. A CITY OUT AT ELBOWS 244 XLIX. THE TOMB OF COLUMBUS 249 L. DRAKE AT SAN DOMINGO 251 LL THE BUCCANEERS 257 LII. "OUR WELL BELOVED" 263 LIII. ON THE WAY TO JAMAICA 267 LIV. SPANISH TOWN 273 CONTENTS ix PAGE LV. KINGSTON IN RUINS ...,.<,,. 279 LVI. A RECORD OF TEN SECONDS 285 LVII. ADMIRAL JOHN BENBOW 289 LVIII. PORT ROYAL AS IT WAS . , , « o . . 293 LIX. PORT ROYAL AS IT IS . , . , . 298 LX. TOM BOWLING'S CHANTRY .«,,... 303 LXI. COLON 307 LXII. THE GOLD ROAD 310 LXIII. SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD . . .316 LXIV. OVER THE ISTHMUS TO PANAMA 325 LXV. MORGAN'S RAID ..,-,.,,. 330 LXVI. OLD PANAMA ..,.,..,,. 334 LXVIL "GROG'S" VICTORY 340 LXVIII. HOW DRAKE WRESTLED WITH THE SHADOW . . 343 LXIX. CARTAGENA HARBOUR 348 LXX. THE CITY OF CARTAGENA ..,,,,. 355 LXXI. OFF TO THE FRONT ... c , ... 359 LXXII. THE SARGASSO SEA 363 LXXIII. THE VANISHING ISLAND AND THE GIANT WHO DIED TWICE 366 LXXIV. "THE SOUGH OF AN OLD SONG" . . , . . 372 INDEX ,375 ILLUSTRATIONS. •( VICTORINE Frontispiece 1. BARBADOS HARBOUR 1 2. MANCHINEEL GROVE, BARBADOS ^Tofacep. 7 3. VIEW FROM ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, BARBADOS 4. NEGRO HUTS, BARBADOS .... 5. PRINCIPAL'S HOUSE, CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BAR- BADOS 6. MAIN STREET, HOLE TOWN, BARBADOS . 7. LANDING PLACE OF THE «' OLIVE BLQSSOME," BARBADOS 8. A PLANTER'S HOUSE, BARBADOS. A CIRCLE OF CABBAGE PALMS 9. A WEST INDIAN GRAVEYARD, BARBADOS. THE SILK COTTON TREE 10. PLANTER'S HOUSE, SHOWING THE HURRICANE WING 11. WEST INDIAN JUNGLE 12. A JUNGLE STREAM, TRINIDAD | 13. ST. JOSEPH, TRINIDAD [ 14. TRASH HUTS ON THE EDGE OF THE HIGH WOODS 15. THE SHORE NEAR THE PITCH LAKE .... 16. THE PITCH LAKE 17. STREET IN GRENADA 18. MARKET SQUARE, GRENADA 19. CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA 20. GRAVEYARD, MORNE FORTUNE .... 21. SOUFRIERE, ST. LUCIA 22. THE QUAY, ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE 23. THE MAIN STREET, ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE 24. ROSEAU VALLEY, DOMINICA .... 19 21 23 37 41 57 69 79 89 93 107 "7 127 155 161 167 Xll THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 25- 26. 27- 28. 29. 30- 31- 32. 33- 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39- 40. 41. 42. 43- 44. 45- 46. 47- 48. 49. SO. 51- 52. 53- 54- BRIMSTONE HILL, ST. KITTS BRIMSTONE HILL, ST. KITTS SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO | FORT SAN CRISTOBAL, SAN JUAN I CASTLE OF HOMENAJE, SAN DOMINGO . RIVER FRONT, SAN DOMINGO TOMB OF COLUMBUS, SAN DOMINGO KING'S HOUSE, SPANISH TOWN ^ STREET IN SPANISH TOWN [ RODNEY'S MONUMENT, SPANISH TOWN . . . GUNS FROM VILLE DE PARIS ^ STREET IN SPANISH TOWN ) EFFECTS OF EARTHQUAKE, KINGSTON . THE QUEEN'S STATUE, KINGSTON x PARISH CHURCH, KINGSTON ) PORT ROYAL \ FORT CHARLES, PORT ROYAL ) NELSON'S QUARTERS, PORT ROYAL .... THE GOLD ROAD, PANAMA A SQUARE IN PANAMA CITY A CHURCH IN PANAMA CITY THE COUNTRY AROUND PANAMA THE BRIDGE, OLD PANAMA I THE SEA WALL, OLD PANAMA ) OLD PANAMA | HARBOUR OF OLD PANAMA ) CARTAGENA HARBOUR FORT SAN LAZAR, CARTAGENA | A STREET IN CARTAGENA PLAZA DE LOS MARTIRES, CARTAGENA . . To /ace p. 177 183 221 239 247 251 273 277 279 285 289 293 299 315 325 329 331 335 339 349 355 359 MAPS CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA To face p. 113 MARTINIQUE ,.143 CARTAGENA ,.353 WEST INDIES AND SPANISH MAIN .... At end of volunu THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. I. FROM THE CITY OF FOG TO AN ISLAND OF ETERNAL SUMMER. London in mid-December, on the eve of the departure of the mail steamer for the West Indies, was a disconsolate place. The least woeful spot, perhaps, was Regent Street at high noon. The road was covered with a sour, chocolate-coloured mud which spat viciously from under the Juggernaut wheels of motor omnibuses. Above there was no suggestion of either atmosphere or sky, but merely a pall of fog as cheerless as a poor-house blanket. The street began in mist and ended in mist, while into the same gelid shadow the carriages vanished. Things were seen as through a glass darkly, so that the housetops looked like distant battlements. There was a smell abroad as of mildew, seasoned by the stench of petrol and the acrid filth of the street. The shop windows were steamed over by a clammy sweat. Within were half-suffocated lights, for the day showed no distinctions of morn, afternoon or eventide. The people who walked the pavements kept their eyes upon the slimy stones. They seemed narcotised by a cold, the shrewd- ness of which no thermometer could register. The only sounds that cheered them were the hissing of wheels, the hammering of hoofs, and the occasional jingle of hansom-cab bells. The only patch of colour I can remember in this last walk in London was derived from a yellow and red poster dealing B 2 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. with Christmas festivities. It was carried by a damp, sepia- tinted man, and the gaudy colours were reflected in the pool of liquid mud over which he stood stupefied. There was also a barrow filled with holly — a pile of shining leaves and scarlet berries — but beyond these the houses, the vehicles, and the people were all chilled down to the general grey of cellar mould. Then came an indefinite sea journey, in no way unlike so many others, marked by recollections of a fading port, the thud of engines, the scud of the wave under the ship's bow, the landing from a boat on a hot, white quay crowded with negroes. As the last association with any land was concerned with a walk along Regent Street, so the next took the form of swimming in a pool within the coral reef at Barbados. It was again high noon. The rays of the tropical sun were keen as a hot sword-blade. The sea was sensuously warm. On the shore, on the edge of a coral cliff some twelve feet high, was a bathing-hut of brown wood with warped sun-shutters, and a flight of blistering steps leading to the water. The little cliff was hollowed out into caverns by the tide, while over its brink hung creepers in long festoons. The cabin was shaded by the leaves of a sea-grape tree. A clump of bananas, a hibiscus bush covered with crimson flowers, and some acacias kept company with the hut. As I floated in the pool I could watch a humming-bird busy with the blossoms of the sea-grape, and could follow the flight of many dragon-flies. The sky above was the deepest blue, the sea beyond the reef was the colour of a pansy, while upon the reef itself the surf broke in a line of white. The sea within the reef was a wondrous green, and so clear was the water and so white the sand that in swimming one's shadow could be seen on the weedless bottom. In the distance, where the small cliff ended, there came a beach, curved like a sickle, with palms and impenetrable trees along the rim of the strand. The air was heavy with the smell of the sea, while upon the ear there fell no sound except that of the surf on the reef. II. SEVENTY YEARS AGO. A JOURNEY to Barbados in a mail steamer of 6000 tons provides little to comment upon unless it be the grumbling of the passengers. There are always many to find fault. Some will complain that the ship goes too fast, or not fast enough. Others are aggrieved because the electric fan in their cabin hums like a giant bee, or because the grand piano is out of tune, or because quails are not cooked in a manner they approve of. Those who are most ready with grievances may perhaps be appeased by an account of the journey from England to Barbados by mail ship as it was accomplished only seventy years ago. In 1836 one William Lloyd,^ doctor of medicine, started for Barbados with three male friends. They were simple tourists, travelling for pleasure, and, incidentally, for that improvement of the mind which was regarded as desirable in those days. The departure was from Falmouth, and the ship was the mail barque Skylark^ Captain Ladd. She was lying in the bay, ready to start. It must be stated that the doctor himself commenced to grumble from the beginning. He complained that " the demand of the boatmen was half-a-guinea each — an excessive charge, allowed by the rules of the port" It cost the tourists, therefore, 2/. to get on board ! The bulwarks of the ship were " forbiddingly high," so that it was impossible to look over. Those who desired to gaze upon the sea had to hang over the gunwale, like boys over an orchard wall. The poop was not safe for tourists, " having no defence at the sides." ' Letters from the West Indies. 4 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. There was one general cabin in the Skylark for all the passengers — to live in, dine in, and sleep in. It was so low that it was impossible to stand upright in it ; moreover, it was dark. This was due at the moment to the fact that "the top of the cabin lights was covered with meat in a recently slaughtered state." No doubt, when the mail barque got away to sea the joints were removed and the blood-smeared panes of glass were cleaned. The tourists noticed also that "joints were hung around in various parts of the vessel, interspersed with cauliflowers, cabbages and turnips." Now, in this low-roofed cabin, with the blood-dimmed skylight, there were only twelve berths provided. The number of passengers, on the other hand, was eighteen — viz. fifteen gentlemen and three ladies. Six of the party had, therefore, to shift as best they could during the month the voyage lasted. When the ship was well in the tropics the doctor makes the following note : " Our nights are sad from the skylights being closed, the passengers who sleep on the table, on the benches and on the floor being afraid of cold from the night air." That cabin must have been little less than a torture-chamber. A fetid oil- lamp, swinging to and fro as the ship rolled, would reveal the sleepers on the table. The heat would be suffocating and the air thick with the fumes of the last meal, of stale wine, of tobacco, of damp clothes, and of eighteen perspiring human beings. Above the creaking of the bulkheads there would, no doubt, be heard the sigh of the tired woman who could not sleep, the gasp of the fevered man who wanted air, and the snoring of the heavy people on the floor. The passengers must have hated this too familiar, ever-frowsy " black hole," for it is needless to say, that in the mail barque of 1836 there was no smoking-room, no library, no music room, and, of course, no bath-room. When the weather was unfavourable there was nothing for the fifteen gentlemen and the three ladies to do but to sit below in the gloom, and like St. Paul, " hope for the day." The doctor found the meals particularly trying. Upon this topic he writes as follows : " It is a trial to be long at dinner when SEVENTY YEARS AGO. S one is panting for breath ; the right plan would be to dine off one dish and then away, whereas we have soup, then a wait for fish, then a long wait for a course of meat, then a tedious wait for a course of pastry, then a tiresome wait for the dessert, and long before that is finished we are wiping our foreheads." One thing is clear — there was no stinting in the matter of food on the good ship Skylark. The order of the day was as follows : coffee, 6 A.M.; breakfast, 8 A.M.; lunch, 12; dinner, 4 P.M., with coffee after ; tea, 7 P.M. ; and supper, 9 P.M. The doctor remarks — and the remark is true to this day — "there is some temptation to eat and drink too much at sea." There was undoubtedly too much wine consumed on board the Skylark ; so much, indeed, that it led to " headache and other feverish symptoms." William Lloyd, however, although in common with his fellows he panted for breath whenever he found himself in that awful cabin, was disposed to make the best of things. The passage from Falmouth to Barbados occupied twenty-six days, from which it may be inferred that the Skylark was a good sailing vessel and had a strong N.E. trade wind behind her all the way. " We had a pleasant voyage," writes the cheerful doctor, " though our captain quarrelled three successive days with his sailing-master, who was at last put in arrest." Captain Ladd seems to have had quite an ample idea of his position. At Falmouth he made his appearance before the passengers with a theatrical effect worthy of a leading actor. The barque was ready to sail, the last package was on board, the sailing-master was striding to and fro on the poop, all the passengers, eager to be away, were watching the shore for a sign of the great man who was to lead them westward. Just at the critical moment " the captain arrived in his cocked hat and uniform with the mails " — his Majesty's mails, no less. The Skylark reached Barbados after sundown on the twenty-sixth day. At 10.30 P.M. " Captain Ladd, with his cocked hat and sword, hastened to pay his devoirs to the captain of the Belviderc frigate then in the harbour." The 6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. eighteen passengers having witnessed the first act of this impressive ceremony retired to the loathsome cabin " for a last stewing," as the doctor puts it While they were " endeavouring to woo a little hot sleep " Captain Ladd clanks on board again and arouses everybody with the news that " a fever was raging at Bridgetown." This choice information was probably yelled down the hatchway in a husky voice scented with rum. The captain having dropped this bomb into the sweltering hole where the tourists lay, and having made them thereby perspire the more, no doubt divested himself of his sword and cocked hat and sank into sleep, with the happy sense of " something attempted, something done." BARBADOS . HARBOUR. MANCHINEEL GROVE, BARBADOS. III. BARBADOS. The Royal Mail steamer reaches Barbados at daybreak. On the present occasion of her coming the sun had just risen, yet there was still a full moon shining, like a disc of steel, in the grey. The steamer crept to her buoy in Carlisle Bay, and by the growing light there could be seen an island of low pale-green downs, fringed at the water's edge by a belt of trees, with red-roofed, white-walled houses dotted between them. The green uplands were brakes of sugar-cane. There was no indication of a definite town ; no evident landing-place. But for a few palms and casuarina trees, negroes in boats, and a number of bright-hulled schooners from " down the islands," the place might have been a bay in England. As seen from the ship it did not fulfil the florid conception of the tropics nor the idea of a coral island. Barbados is about the size of the Isle of Wight, and at the commencement of the seventeenth century it represented — with the exception of Newfoundland — the sole colonial possession of England. Indeed, in 1605, it could have been said that the empire of Great Britain beyond the seas was constituted only by a vague line of half-frozen coast and this tropical Isle of Wight, for the two represented England's insignificant share in the New World. Barbados is the only West Indian island which has been English from the days of its beginning until now. The manner in which it became a part of the empire is curious. In 1605 a certain Sir Oliver Leigh, of Kent, incited by tales of rich lands in the West, equipped a ship called the Olive Blossome, and sent her across the seas. In due course 8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. the lumbering craft came in sight of Barbados, and the sailors, attracted by a sandy cove and shady trees, rowed ashore and landed on the beach. " Finding no opposition," these good men from Ramsgate, Deal and Dover took possession of the island in the name of their country. The ceremony attending the annexation was unaffected. On the beach they put up a cross, to give the function a religious tone, while one of their number carved on the bark of a tree the inscription, "James K. of E. and of this island." The cross was probably made from the staves of a beer-barrel, and the graving on the tree, no doubt, was done by a dagger sharpened on a leather jerkin. It may be imagined that when the ritual was over these pioneers of empire bathed — for the sandy shore would have reminded them of Thanet — chased the land crabs, or threw stones at the monkeys who still haunt this corner of the island. They then jumped into their boat, each with a handful of strange flowers, pushed off to the Olive Blossome and sailed away, for they were bound for the Main. The annexation ceremony took place near to the spot on which Hole Town now stands (page 22), and compared with the pomp and glamour observed by the Spaniards on like occasions, the proceeding was little more than a schoolboy affair, a frolic of a party of Deal boatmen. It may be said by some that Trinidad holds precedence of Barbados in the matter of annexation, for in 1595 "the Honorable Robert Duddely, Leiftenance of all Her Majestie's fortes and forces beyonde the seas," took possession of that island, with infinite solemnity, in the name of his Queen. He nailed to a tree " a peece of lead " inscribed with the Queen's arms, and an announcement in the Latin tongue. He caused, moreover, trumpets to be blown and a "drome" to be beaten. Unfor- tunately, the island was at that time in the possession of Spain, and in spite of the " peece of lead " continued a colony of that BARBADOS. 9 State for long years after. Robert Duddely's affair was indeed little more than a common act of trespass, in which he was fortunately not detected. It was some twenty years after the coming of the Olive Blossojne that the first settlers made their home and built their log huts in Barbados. They sailed from England in a vessel named the William and John, belonging to Sir William Courteen. They made for the same sandy bay — by that time almost legendary — found the place of the cross and the writing on the tree. In a clearing in a forest near by they began the first town, Hole Town, erected a fort and made themselves masters of at least the west coast of the island. Things, however, in Barbados were neither quiet nor well established for many years after Courteen's settlers founded their little city. For it happened in 1627 that King Charles, in a moment of incoherent liberality, granted all the Caribbee Islands (twenty-two in number including Barbados) to the Earl of Carlisle. Now, few of these islands were in the King's gift, and he might as well have presented the Earl at the same time with the Atlantic Ocean, the Equator, and the North and South Poles. However, in July 1628, a confident body of settlers landed on the south of the island, under the protection of the Earl of Carlisle, and established another town, which they called Bridge- town, because they found there a bridge which the Indians had built across a creek of the sea. The bay in which they beached their boats is called Carlisle Bay to this present time. As may be supposed, Courteen's settlers — being the old and original inhabitants of the island — thought so ill of this counter- enterprise, that they fell upon Carlisle's men and beat them grievously. Later on it transpired that the King, when in a previous island-scattering mood, had already promised Barbados to the Earl of Marlborough. Lord Carlisle thereupon approached the Lord of Marlborough and found that peer (who probably had vague ideas as to what and where Barbados was) most ready to forego all claims to the property in consideration of a sum of 300/. sterling paid in cash annually. 10 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. It may be conjectured that one party to this bargain sauntered down St. James's chuckHng over the solid gold coin he had obtained for an estate as shadowy as Prospero's island, while the other luirried to his ship-master to assure him that at last — and for the paltry sum of 300/. — Barbados was his. Yet scarcely had the money been counted out upon the Earl of Marlborough's table when Sir William Courteen forced himself into the lordly presence and pointed out, possibly with some emphasis and heat, that Barbados was his, and that he was possessed of it prior to 1627, at which time the generous King gave it away, with adjacent parts of the globe, as if it had been a mere bonbonniere. Thus began squabbles to which the cudgel play in the environs of Bridgetown and " The Hole " — as the scoffers called the metropolis of Barbados — was a small tiling. Barbados is very densely populated. Its inhabitants number some 200,000, nearly all of whom are negroes.^ The patriotism of the Barbadians is unbounded, and in these unsentimental days, is pleasant to contemplate. " They cling to their home,'' as Froude remarks, " with innocent vanity, as though it was the finest country in the world." If they do leave it, it is only for a time. Many of these loyalists have been attracted recently to the Canal enterprise at Panama by the high wages which obtain there. But the stay of the exiles on the Isthmus is short. They go thither in order that they may enjoy Barbados the better. The heavy toil and the hard climate are forgotten when they return to the island and can indulge — if only for one day — in the supreme luxury of driving through the town in a buggy, in a black coat and bowler hat, lit up by a necktie of fulminating colours. There will be then so wide a grin on the ci-devant navvy's face that the rows of white teeth can hardly hold the penny cigar. The anticipation of this one triumphal progress through familiar streets will have kept alive for months the germ of hope in many a labourer's breast at Colon. ' The population of the Isle of Wight is, by comparison, 82,418. T >7':^: iM \!l BARBADOS. ii Barbados, too, is intensely and seriously English. " It was organised," writes Froude, " from the first on English traditional lines, with its constitution, its parishes, and parish churches and churchwardens, the schools and parsons, all on the old model, which the unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed." In the heart of the capital is Trafalgar Square, and in the centre of that square (just as in the Mother Country) is a statue to Nelson. London, indeed, may be said to have imitated Bridge- town in this particular, for the monument in Barbados was the first erected to the hero of Trafalgar. In defence of the English metropolis, however, it must be stated — and it is to be hoped with- out jealousy — that this rival statue is not impressive, while the famous mariner is made to look bored and jaundiced, although he is no longer " pea green " as he was when Froude saw him. The city of Bridgetown is full of bustle, dust and mule teams, but it is not attractive. The suburbs, on the other hand, are beautiful — beautiful as only the outskirts of a town in the tropics can be. There are villas lost in ample gardens, avenues of palms, white roads barred by black shadows and made glorious by mahogany and banyan trees, by the cordia with its orange- coloured blossoms, by the scarlet hibiscus, by walls buried under blue convolvulus flowers, by over-stretching boughs from which hang magenta festoons of Bougainvillea. Here can be seen that most stately of all palms, the palmiste or cabbage palm, with such trees as the tamarind, the mango, the shaddock, and the curious frangipani, looking as bare as a plucked bird. On the outskirts of the town, and indeed all over the island will be found in rows, in clumps, in halting lines, or in infrequent dots the dwellings of the negroes. These are tiny huts of pewter-grey wood, raised from the ground on a few rough stones and covered by a roof of dark shingles. They are as simple as the houses a child draws on a slate — a thing of two rooms, with two windows and one door. The windows have sun shutters in the place of glass ; there is no chimney, for the housewife does her cooking out of doors in the cool of the evening. 12 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. Such is the original Uncle Tom's Cabin, scarcely changed these two hundred years. More picturesque little toy houses can hardly be imagined, but it makes one gasp to think how many human beings crowd into these tiny rooms after sundown, for the negro sleeps with firmly closed doors and shutters to keep out "jumbies" and ghosts, which are both numerous and trying in the West Indies, centipedes, which are ten inches long, snakes, vampire bats, and other horrors of the tropical night. These fragile huts are those which are referred to in descriptions of hurricanes in which it is said that " over 3000 houses have been blown down, six villages have been levelled with the earth, and 10,000 people are homeless." It is not uncommon to meet a house on the highway in the act of being " removed." It is placed on a cart flat-wise, like a puzzle taken to pieces, the four walls being laid one above the other as if they were pieces of scenery from a theatre. The roof is indistinguishable as such, the tiles are in the bottom of the cart, and while the owner of the residence will carry the front door on his head, other kind friends will assist with the window shutters, the doorstep and the fowlhouse. About each tiny pewter-grey house will be the comfortable green of bananas and guinea-corn, a clump of rustling cane, with possibly a papaw or a bread-fruit tree to shade the threshold. In what may be called the policies are half-naked children, some fowls, a pig tied by the neck, or a goat tethered in like fashion. The climate of Barbados in the winter is healthy and agreeable. The little island lies far out to sea in the very heart of the trade wind. That genial breeze blows steadily from November to May. To sit in a draught in scant attire so that a strong east wind may play upon the sitter like a douche is one of the chief objects of life in Barbados. The thermometer varies from about 76° to 82° F. There are no sudden lapses of temperature, none of that mean chill at sundown which falls like a footpad upon the sojourner in the Riviera. It is possible to be out and about all day. There is no need of any sun-helmet The straw hat of the river Thames is all the head-covering required in this or any other West Indian BARBADOS. 13 island. The badge of the raw tourist is a white helmet and a mosquito-bitten face. The one is as superfluous as the other when the management of mosquito-curtains has been learnt As a matter of fact, mosquitos and insects generally give very little trouble in Barbados, The climate, as a whole, may be judged by the circumstance that the medical men of Bridgetown cling all the year round to the black frock coat and tall hat, which are the delight of the profession in Great Britain. The air is comparatively dry. The roads throughout the island are excellent, while the sea-bathing cannot be surpassed. The sky in the dry season is now and then clouded over, and there is occasional rain, two features which will be appreciated by those who have been wearied by the unfailing sunshine of the " cold weather " in India. The island has an excellent water supply, while both malaria and yellow fever are practically unknown. Barbados has had no experience of earthquake, it possesses no volcano, and the hurricane season is limited to the months of summer and autumn. The island, therefore, presents an admirable climate for those who cannot, or will not, winter in northern latitudes. While on the subject of health matters, it may be noted that the West Indian islands still suffer — in spite of every care and of ceaseless investigation — very seriously from leprosy. The disease is limited to the " coloured " sections of the creole population, being rare in the white creole. At Barbados is an excellent lazaretto, maintained by the Government. It is a model institution of its kind, and reflects great credit upon its medical chief, Dr. Archer. The lazar-house is situated by the sea, in a pleasant garden facing to the west. Around the garden is a very high and woeful wall, like the wall of a convent or a prison. Those who are within the garden are captives for life. All have had forced upon them a vow never to look upon the world again, for there is no way out to the high road except through the gate that leads to the burial-ground. It is a garden that sees only the setting of the sun. All who walk its weary paths are condemned to die. There 14 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. is no ray of hope in the lepers' pleasance. The shipwrecked man on a raft may search, day after day, for the gleam of a sail, but on the horizon of these poor castaways there will be never a speck to be seen. The days are horrible in their mockery for they are nearly always sunny ; the trees are bright with blossoms and alive with birds. The birds are free to come and go, are busy with their mating and the building of their nests. The men and women who hobble and sigh and curse in the shadow of the trees have no one thing to look forward to but a lingering death. If the days are hideous the nights at least bring forgetfulness and peace. " How sweet to sleep and so get nearer death," must be the cry of each one of these lamentable outcasts. If all were old and had lived their lives the fate would not be so tragic, but in this garden of Gethsemane there are budding maidens and sturdy lads. Among the newcomers I saw a girl of seventeen. She had all the freshness of perfect health, but certain loathly spots had appeared upon her skin, and then had come — the inquisition, the wrenching from home, the banishment to the house in the garden. She had, a week or so ago, such a life before her as is dreamed of by a girl of seventeen. She had a lover, perhaps, but now the iron gate of her Paradise has shut with a clang behind her and she is doomed to a slow rotting of the body, inch by inch. She can see in the lazar-house, depicted with brutal candour, the future of her days. Her fingers will slough off like the hands of this poor woman who looks at her with such compassion. Her face will become hideous with toad-skin growths until she will be as little human looking as the dulled, distorted creature who sits on a bench waiting for the laggard end. She will change to a thing as repulsive and gargoyle-like as that horror in the corner of the ward whose sightless eyes can happily no longer see the vileness of her own deformity. The fresh young face will become the Medusa's head. She is looking at her forecast as if it were shadowed in a wizard's mirror — and she is but seventeen. In the road beyond the garden wall can be heard the laughter BARBADOS. 15 of those who pass by to the town, while within is being dragged out, act by act, one of the saddest tragedies of human life. It was a relief to pass from the lazaretto to even such a haven for the helpless as the lunatic asylum. This is a new, admirably administered building under the competent charge of Dr. Manning. The best remembered feature in the asylum is an open quad- rangle covered with grass. Around each side of it runs a low shed or verandah upon which open the barred windows of many rooms. In this strange caravanserai are gathered a great number of insane folk, mostly negroes. In the centre of the quadrangle a grey-headed mulatto is kneeling in the sun and praying with breathless eagerness. He is a religious monomaniac. A comparatively young man, sweating with excitement, and puffing out his cheeks like a dog who dreams in his sleep, is calling out that he is Lord Nelson, and that he wants boots. Lying senseless in the shade is a man recovering from a fit. Drooping on benches are listless melancholies, while among them is a man who sits bolt upright and for ever pats his hand to the moaning of some fragment of a song. A very cheerful being, squatted on the ground, is professing to make a hat out of grass roots collected with infinite assiduity. There are, besides, idiots and dotards and the absolutely mindless. One figure amidst this nightmare crowd attracted my atten- tion. He was a white man of about forty, with long fair hair. He was clad simply in a shirt and trousers. His feet were bare. He never ceased to walk round and round the shaded alley, per- sistently, laboriously. His lips were compressed, while there was a look of forlorn determination in his eyes. He had been in the asylum seven years. He was a Scotsman, and was reputed to be a sailor from Aberdeen. He had been left behind sick, and apparently dying, by a ship whose master had never called at the island again. Every effort to trace the man's friends had failed. Since he had been in the asylum he had never uttered a word, nor had he once replied to the persistent questions put to him. For seven years he had kept silence. For seven years he had tramped, day after day, round this walled quadrangle, picking his i6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. way through the mumbling crowd. To what far-away goal he was travelling, along what endless road, amidst what horrors and under what crushing vow, who could say ? Here he was, a derelict ; one of the " missing," one of those who had gone under. In some Highland village they may still tell how " Jamie " went to sea and was never heard of again, or how he was put ashore ill on a West Indian island and died there. He must have died, his mother will say, or he would have written or come home. He has never written ; he will never come home, but will tramp, a lonely man, round and round this circle of purgatory until his foot falters and he stumbles into the dark. IV. THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. Barbados is a coral island. A coral reef encircles the greater part of its homely girth, its roads are made of coral of the whitest, while much of the stone of its houses has been fashioned by the coral polyp. Those who know only the land around Bridgetown will say that the country is flat and monotonous, and that it consists merely of blinding highways toiling through tiresome tracts of cane and cotton, of cotton and cane. It is true that the trees are limited to the wilds, to the villages, and to the planters' settlements, but there are downs of golden- green grass as well as hollows dappled with yams, sweet potatoes, and maize. Moreover, a hundred acres of rustling sugar-canes thrown into waves and eddies by the rollicking trade wind is no mean sight, while a field of sea-island cotton in bloom is, from afar, not unlike a thicket of Gloire de Dijon roses. Towards the north of the island are hills, some of which rise to the height of i lOO feet. They are part of a great upland which is cleft, as by a hatchet, along its eastern side so as to leave a raw inland cliff, whose precipitous wall faces the Atlantic for many a mile. From any point on the brink of the escarpment a marvellous view extends. The most perfect prospect is from a spot called Hackelston's Cliff. Here, from a height of nearly looo feet, one looks down suddenly upon an immense leafy plain stretching away to the sea, upon a green under-world submerged fathoms deep in a blue iiaze. C i8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. The view is like a view from a balloon. On the flat are squares of pale green to mark the cane brakes, glistening splashes of holly- leaf green to show the bread-fruit trees, a waving patch of banana fans, dots of grey where are negro cabins, and now and then the curve of a white road shaded by palms. Beyond is the beach where the great purple combers from the ocean roll in to break upon the reef with a noise like the crack of a gun. This little world lying at one's feet is shut in towards the north by maniature mountains, a range of dwarfed Scottish Highlands made up of diminutive peaks and ridges, of cols and valleys all glorious with every tint that grass in shadow and in the sun can give. From the crest of Farley Hill it is possible to look down upon this tumbled country as upon a contour map, and to imagine Ben Nevis and Lochnagar en modele^ with the tracks of tarns, the clefts of summit passes, and the cups of mountain lakes. Near by Hackelston's Cliff I came upon a grinning negro lad who enjoyed an office most boys would have taken much to heart. He might have been called the " warden of the monkeys." At the foot of the precipice, in one of the few shreds left of the primeval forest, dwell a number of apes who creep up the cliff on occasion and make desperate raids among the bananas and sweet potatoes. It was the warden's duty to watch for the marauders, to spy them out as they peered over the brim of the cliff, to let them advance almost to the fields, and then to fall upon them with shrieks and stones and drive them over the precipice in jabbering disorder. It was with sincere feeling that the warden said "he liked his work." Not far from Hackelston's Point is St. John's Church, one of the oldest churches of the island. It is a solid English-looking building, with a square tower, battlements and heavy buttresses. It stands on the very brink of the cliff, over-looking the same far- away flat and the same long lines of beach and reef. About it is a graveyard, facing seawards, full of ancient tombs, many of which belong to two centuries ago. More than one monument testifies to the deadly climate of times gone by, and tells of wives who died " in a moment " and " in the bloom of youth." THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 19 One tablet bears the following unusual inscription : Here lyeth ye Body of FERDINANDO PALEOLOGUS Descended from ye Imperial lyne OF YE Last Christian Emperors of Greece. Churchwarden of this Parish, 1655-1656. Vestryman 20 years. Died Oct. 3RD, 1678. This imperial vestryman should sleep soundly, for the church- yard in which he rests is passing beautiful. Here fall the shadows of royal palms, of lofty crotons, of swaying casuarinas, of hibiscus bushes aflame with crimson blossoms. By the church wall stand Eucharis lilies, over the rusted railings fall jessamine and stephanotis, while between the gravestones are ferns and grasses and an uninvited company of homely flowers. During the church service, when all is still, there can be ever heard— borne by the trade wind — the muffled roar of the surf Far away to the north of the island, fifteen miles from the town, and on the flat between the inland cliff and the sea, is a dell full of trees. What lies hidden in this quiet oasis no stranger could guess. It can hardly shelter a planter's house as no sugar- mill chimney is in sight. There is no church spire to be seen nor is there, indeed, even a glimpse of a roof. The visitor who follows the road into the wood finds himself in an avenue of palms. This avenue skirts a lawn and such a lake as may be found in many an English park. So far there is little that is amazing, but, sauntering in the drive, are some youths in college caps and gowns. As unexpected are these undergraduates as would be cocoanut trees in Oxford. At the end of the walk is a solemn edifice of dull stone, severely academic, and not to be distinguished from the buildings familiar to an English university town. The place is, indeed, Codrington College (a college of the University of Durham), which was founded as long ago as 17 10. Opening upon the avenue is a stone cloister, through the pillared arches of which can be seen the Atlantic and the waves c 2 20 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. breaking on the coral reef. In the shadow of the arcade is an English girl in white talking to a small parrot perched on her finger, and exciting by such speech the jealousy of a yapping dachshund at her feet. This lady of the porch is the principal's daughter. It would seem as if there had been transported to this far-away West Indian island a corner of a cathedral close, and when the organ in the chapel pours forth a hymn of the old country the impression is made magical. The college chapel is exquisite — for its walls are lined with mahogany and cedar wood, while its benches are of that old type which recall the village church of bygone days. The marble floor has been cracked and scarred by the hurricane of 1831, which tore off the chapel roof and filled its aisles with wreckage. The library is stored with books of a kind one would hardly expect to meet with on a coral island — works on theology and conic sections, together with the writings of Sallust and Cicero, of .^schylus and Euripides. A pleasant sanctuary this for the budding scholar who will recall in after life that he first read the Odes of Horace under West Indian palms, and was disturbed in his imaginings of ancient Rome by the vagaries of humming- birds. The college gardens are the most beautiful in the island, are vivid with the tints of tropical flowers, and hide, moreover, in their depths a swimming pool which is as the shadow of a rock in a weary land. Hard by the college is the principal's lodge, the original Codrington mansion, which was built in 1660 and has seen and survived some famous hurricanes. It is a picturesque building of weather-worn stone with, in front of it, a stately loggia whose arches and columns are overgrown with ferns, woodbine, jessamine and stephanotis. Within is a doorway, flanked on either side by classic pillars worthy of an abbey, upon whose stones the sun and the rain of two hundred and fifty years have wrought tints of warm brown, while weeds have picked out the joints of the masonry with many a splash of green. The slaves who built this place may well have wondered at the magnificence of it. THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 21 The founder of the college, Christopher Codrington, was "Captain-General of the Leeward Caribbee Islands." It was his wish that the school should be devoted to " the study and practice of divinity, physic, and chirurgery." In 1742 the original college was opened, and in 1875 was affiliated to the University of Durham. It has done admirable work, can boast a long list of distinguished alumni, and under the present able principal, Archdeacon Bindley, flourishes with persistent vigour.^ The shore scenery of Barbados shows great variety. On the north and east of the island the coast is wizen and rugged. Here are low cliffs of coral rock wrought into fantastic capes and hollows by the sea, or so gnawed at that a great gap in the bank has been in places bitten out. At Crane comes such a gap wherein is a gusty beach edged about with cocoanut palms and nearly filled with bushes of the sea-grape or with sprawling masses of creepers. Here, as elsewhere, the sea assumes strange and unexpected tints ; it may be violet, purple or maroon, with streaks of lettuce- green or forget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch of brilliant lustre such as shines on a beetle's back, or may shimmer into a lake of lapis lazuli. In calm days the water over the reef will be lilac- or even claret-coloured, or may take the hue of the nether side of a mushroom, while within the reef is that vivid green which can be looked down into from the stern of a steamer among the coiling eddies thrown up by the screw. It is indeed in these West Indian islands that The rainbow lives in the curve of the sand. At Bathsheba immense curiously shaped rocks fringe the beach, so that the whole coast in this romantic part of the island is as the co^st of Cornwall in miniature. Along the south and west borders of the island winds a quiet strand, with many a creek and cove. Certain of the curving bays are shaded by thickets of trees which crowd to the very margin of the shore. Some are ' See Article \>y the Venerable Archdeacon Bindley, D. D., in .1/iic//n7/au\ Magazine, December 1892. 22 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. inviting, modest-looking trees, which call to mind the orchard trees in England. They bear, moreover, a small green fruit, an apple, which might tempt a thirsty man. Woe to him if he yields, if even the temptress be Eve ! For these are the manchineel, the poison trees ; the shade they offer is tainted ; their leaves will blister the skin ; their fruit will turn to worse than ashes in the mouth ; their innocence is feigned, for the orchard by the sea is an upas grove, shunned by every living thing except the land crab. Nelson, in his early days, was made very ill by drinking from a pool into which some branches of manchineel had been thrown. In the opinion of some his health "received thereby a severe and lasting injury." On the west coast is Hole Town, the most inviting little settlement in the island. It was once the capital of Barbados (page 9). It is now a lovable town of two tiny streets, sleeping out its life in a bower of leaves by the shore. A shop, a post- office, and a worn jetty represent the public buildings in this most unambitious hamlet. The two small streets open on the sea, on a smooth cove of biscuit-coloured sand. Trees line the whole sweep of the bay from cape to cape. They hide the half-forgotten town although it lies so near the water that when the west wind blows the spray will scud along the child-like boulevard. The beach is such an one as the sea seems to love, for each wave as it comes, lingers over it, fondles it, sweeping slowly up the smooth slope and dropping reluctantly back again. An air of great leisure settles upon this lotus-eater's town. But few of its folk are to be seen. In the shade of the trees, at the edge of the shore, a solitary man is building a boat. There is such simplicity in his methods, and such scantiness in his clothing, that he might be Robinson Crusoe fashioning his canoe on the famous island. On this very beach landed the inquisitive crew of the Olive Blossome just 300 years ago (page 8), and as the cove was then so it is now, the same inviting curve of tree-encircled sand, the same listless solitude. On just such a tree as stands THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 23 there yet the famous legend was writ, while here, within a halo of green, is a place well fitted for the wooden cross. Beyond the nodding town are low downs, so like some uplands in Kent that they may well have enticed the Englishmen to make a landing. By the side of the high road a recently erected obelisk records the coming ashore of the boat and the annexation of the island ; while on one of the postage stamps of the colony is a picture of the gallant Olive Blossome herself, with all her sails set and with the flag of England aloft on her poop. 24 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. V. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ANOTHER AT BARBADOS. George Washington visited Barbados in 1751, when he was a lad of nineteen. He came over from Virginia with his brother Lawrence, who had developed a lung trouble, for which he was advised to try the West Indies. The journey across the Gulf of Mexico and along the Caribbean Sea occupied them a little more than a month. The two brothers stayed at a house overlooking Carlisle Bay, about a mile from Bridgetown, and owned by a Captain Crofton, the commandant of Fort James. They had not been in the island more than fourteen days when George was laid low with the smallpox. The attack was not severe, but he bore the marks of the disease upon his face to the end of his days. Jt was at Barbados that George Washington, for the first time in his life, visited a theatre. It pleased him. The play he saw acted was the austere tragedy of " George Barnwell." This drama was supposed to be of a very improving nature, and especially suited to young men. It pointed a moral boisterously and with as much directness as is employed in driving a pile into the solid earth. George Barnwell was an idle apprentice who, after robbing his master, passed through the various Hogarthian stages of vice, and finally committed murder, for which crime he was hanged. His last moments were peculiarly embittered by the reflection that his sweetheart was to be hanged at the same time, he having- as an item of his wickedness — led her astray. During his sojourn in the island George Washington enjoyed the hospitality of the " Beefsteak and Tripe Club." He was introduced to this exclusive company by the judge of the High Court of Barbados. The members of the club met every GEORGE WASHINGTON AT BARBADOS. 25 Saturday at one or other of their respective houses. Over the beefsteaks and the tripe the future statesman made the acquaintance of " the first people of the place." There seems to have been no meanness about the members of the club, and no stint in the matter of food or drink, George Washington, indeed, went away rather distressed by the spendthrift habits of his hosts, and by their luxuriant mode of living. A heavy dinner of beefsteaks, tripe and rum, held at three of the clock on a tropical afternoon, was a luxury for which the simple Virginian had little taste. Barbados has welcomed many other illustrious persons besides George Washington. Nelson was for a period stationed in Carlisle Bay. His stay there was very irksome, for he was at the time in love with the pretty widow at Nevis. He chafed because he was kept so far away from her presence, and exclaims wearily in his letters, " Upwards of a month from Nevis ! " — as if a month were a lifetime. He blamed the little colony for holding him from the arms of his Fanny, and took a sarcastic pleasure in heading some of his love letters " Barbarous Island." Not a few of the natives of Barbados have attained to various positions of eminence, but among those who can only claim to have become notable, prominence must be given to Major Stede Bonnet. The major was among " the first people of the place." He was a gentleman by birth who had had the advantage of a liberal education. He was rich — being, indeed, " the master of a plentiful fortune." Naturally, he was much respected in the island, where he enjoyed all the privileges of a prominent citizen. Although the records are silent upon the subject, it is conceivable that he was one of the pillars of the little church at Bridgetown. Some time in the year 17 16 Major Stede Bonnet began to act strangely. He incontinently purchased a sloop, fitted her with ten guns at his own expense, and engaged a crew of no less than seventy men. This was very surprising to his friends as the gallant officer had no knowledge of the sea, while yachting was not then an accepted diversion for people of quality. It 26 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. was hardly to be supposed that a gentleman occupying the major's position would condescend to engage in commerce, and still more curious was it that, at this particular moment, England did not chance to be at war. To all inquiries as to his intent the major merely answered " Wait." The mystery of the sloop was not lessened when the shipwrights began to paint her new name under the stern. Everybody went down to the careenage to spell it out, letter by letter, as it developed. The name was the Revenge. By the time that the members of the Beefsteak and Tripe Club were talking of nothing else but the major and his vessel, the Revenge slipped out of Carlisle Bay, one very dark night, and disappeared into space. The sloop became the theme of the quay-side. Barbados had much to say about vanishing ships, while sympathetic neighbours who called upon the forlorn Mrs. Stede Bonnet had more questions to ask that lady than she was disposed to reply to. The more astute females of Bridgetown whispered that Mrs. Stede Bonnet had something on her mind. She had. In a few months the awful truth reached the island. Major Stede Bonnet, the wealthy landowner, the respected and polished soldier, had become a pirate. The Revenge was cruising off America, taking prizes right and left. She had become the terror of New York and Philadelphia, for the major had the boldness to make Gardner's Islet, off Long Island, his occasional headquarters. " This humour of going a-pyrating," writes Johnson in his " History of the Pyrates," " it was believed proceeded from a disorder of the mind, which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts to be found in the married state." Things were beginning to be explained. The respectable matrons of Barbados gathered up their skirts and fell away from Mrs. Stede Bonnet when they met her in the streets of Bridgetown. They could not drink a dish of tea with a pirate's wife ! They could hardly be constrained to sit in church under the same roof as the associate of corsairs. There were many friends of bygone days who now MAJOR STEDE BONNET. 27 owned that " they had never quite liked her," that they had always thought " there was something curious about her." Those among them who were of the sect of the Pharisees audibly thanked God that they had not driven their husbands " to go a-pyrating." There is no doubt but that the home of the Bonnets was broken up for ever. The major's grievances must have been very deep to have led him to give to his ship such a name as the Revenge. In the meantime the soldier-pirate was not happy. He fell in with one Edward Teach, who is allowed by all connoisseurs to have been the greatest scoundrel who ever flourished in the buccaneering profession. Mr. Teach not only took the poor major into partner- ship against his will, but practically absorbed him, ship, crew and all. He concluded the distasteful alliance by robbing him of the more substantial of his possessions. This, as the Stede Bonnet biographer asserts, " made him melancholy." The melancholia would appear to have marred the major's efficiency as a practical pirate, for he was captured off Carolina in 171 8. He was taken ashore, but managed to escape in a canoe. So highly was he valued, however, that 70/. was offered for his arrest. He was finally seized on Swillivant's Island on the sixth day of November in the year named. He was tried at Charles- ton four days later, was sentenced to death and promptly hanged at a prominent place called White Point. It was Judge Trot who passed sentence on him, and it seems clear that this gentleman added great unrest to the major's last hours, for before disposing of the culprit he treated him to an address of such length that it occupies six closely crammed pages of print. In this discourse the learned judge improved the occasion by quoting very liberally from the Scriptures, and by giving fluent advice as to the leading of the Higher Life, of which same advice the major was to be so shortly prevented from availing himself In this harangue, which is said to have been most impressive, Judge Trot made no allusion to that "disorder of the mind," or to those "discomforts in the married state " which led the major to seek refuge in the distrac- tions of buccaneering, and which may have been advanced in some palliation of his offence. 28 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. VI. THE ISLANDERS. The negro population of Barbados have learnt stern lessons on such subjects as the survival of the fittest, the effects of a generous birth-rate and the limitations of an island. They have crowded the fatherland to its brink, have grubbed up and tilled every yard of its surface, and have only left it when they have been practically pushed into the sea. They have become, by force of circumstances and against their natural inclination, both a hard-working and a frugal folk. They have learnt that patriotism and a clinging to home may mean both an empty stomach and a bare back. Only of late years has the Barbadian accepted the inevitable, and reluctantly sought life elsewhere. There is now scarcely a quay on a West Indian island where the grinning Barbadian face will not be met with. They have migrated to America and have turned in thousands to Panama, whereby it has come to pass that labour is now not too plentiful in the colony, and the English housewife has begun to experience that dearth of good servants which has long been acute in England. The negro in Barbados — as in other islands of the West Indies — is the descendant of slaves brought over from the adjacent coast of Africa. The days of their bondage are not so long ago, for slavery was abolished in English colonies as recently as 1834. Traces of old days are constantly to be come upon. Certain of the substantial little houses built for the " blacks " are yet to be found, while on all sides the products of slave labour are in evidence. THE ISLANDERS. 29 Turning over old island newspapers, one meets with such an announcement as this : "58 Negro Slaves and 24 Head of Cattle for Sale," in the reading of which it is impossible not to be struck with the delicacy which places the slaves before the cattle. In the "Barbadian" for December 17, 1824, I noticed the following paragraph, which is bracketed with one dealing with the sale of " A Handsome Horse " : "For Sale! " A young Negro Woman, a good house-servant, with her infant child, two months old." If the infant ever reached the age of seventy he would have been living in 1894, and, should he have had a child, the same might be flourishing on the island at this moment, possibly as a waiter or a chambermaid at the hotel. If he or she talked of "grandmother," it would be of this same young negro woman who was so good a house-servant, and who was offered for sale with the handsome horse. The subjoined item from the " Barbados Mercury " of the dat<* of August 4, 1787, is also of interest : " Run away from the subscriber, a tall black man namtd ' Willy ' : whoever will deliver him to the subscriber shall receive one moidore reward." Now I take the moidore to be equivalent to the sum of twenty- seven shillings, therefore, Willy, in spite of his tallness, would have been little more in value than a pet dog. Indeed, I have seen the reward of two pounds offered for a runaway cat. It is much to be hoped that Willy never came back to the subscriber, but that he hid his pound and a half's worth of flesh in the jungle by the Inland Cliff and there ended his days in peace. When slavery was abolished, Parliament voted a sum of money to be paid to owners as compensation for setting their slaves at liberty. The total sum thus expended in the salvation of men was nearly nineteen millions sterling. The number of slaves set free was no less than 770,280. 30 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. They were probably the only human beings who ever came to know precisely what they were worth, or what was their value in the eyes of others, for in the carrying out of the Act the value of each type of slave had to be defined with great exactness. A first-class field hand was priced at ;^94, a domestic servant at ;^82. It may be imagined that many a dignified black butler, who appraised himself at, at least, ^800, must have been hurt by this low figure. The vexation of the handsome negress who found that she was valued at some £2 less than her ill -looking co-workei must have been peculiarly bitter. Children under six fetched ^^13 Y^s. ^d. on an average. "Aged, diseased, and otherwise non-effective adults" were lumped together, like soiled goods at a sale, and priced at £\o Sj. ^\d. each. In this estimate of the value of a marred human life there is a lamentable pathos about the farthing. Although the Barbadian blacks must have been compounded at the outset from different African tribes, it is remarkable that, by reason of their exclusiveness, they have developed into a definite race, with an easily recognised physiognomy and dialect A head that is large and round and that is associated with an " open countenance " constitutes the " Barbadian head " ; while the English the people affect to speak is the most curious phase that tongue can ever have assumed. To untrained British ears it is not intelligible, while even the cry of the children, who hold out their hands and grin " gimme a pension," needs to be explained as a demand for a penny. The Barbadian negro is a fine specimen of humanity. The man may not be noteworthy, but the woman is a model of anatomical comeliness. She has well-moulded limbs, perfect teeth and the eyes of the " ox-eyed Juno." Her neck and shoulders belong to the women of heroic days, while the carriage of her head and the swing of her arms as she walks along the road are worthy of the gait of queens. She is as talkative as a parrot, her smile is that of a child at a pantomime, and without her the West Indian island would lose half of its picturesqueness. She is the life of the gaudy market square, while her black face may appear THE ISLANDERS. 31 almost beautiful w hen seen against the pale green background of a thicket of cane. She works hard and is strong. Her disposi- tion is to carry everything, great or little, upon her head. Thus I have met an old woman bearing aloft on her skull a full-sized chest of drawers and not far behind her a young housewife with a slice of green melon on the black mat of her hair — an offering to her husband in the fields. The normal costume of the negress is a frock of white, stiffened with cassava, and a white scarf or kerchief bound turban- wise about her forehead. Her woolly hair is covered by the linen cap, and as her white teeth are always gleaming — for she needs must smile — she forms a graceful figure sketched boldly in black and white. It is curious to see in these dark faces classic types of woman- hood which custom has made the European to associate only with a fair skin. Here, for instance, sitting on a cabin step, crooning over her baby, is a rapt Madonna in ebony. Leaning over a railing and swinging a scarlet hibiscus blossom before her lover's face is a coal-black Juliet, in an ecstasy of fondness. In the market place, in a vortex of violent speech, is a terrible virago with the seams of her features cut out of jet, urging her husband, a timid Macbeth, to avenge certain wrongs incident to the selling of yams. Unhappily, the negress of Barbados is discarding her own charming costume in order to assume, with great seriousness, the attire of Europe. The result is deplorable, for so eager is the blackamoor to be done with the past that she becomes, in a sense, almost too European. Unconsciously she intensifies every feature of northern dress, making each item ridiculous. She caricatures the lady of the London parks, so that any who wish to see their faults displayed through the medium of exaggeration can have the distorting mirror held up to them in Barbados. The coloured lady omits nothing. She holds her skirts in the manner of the moment, but, as the mincing mode is apt to be overdone and as clothing in the tropics is thin, the effect is often curious. Although accustomed to a blazing sun the whole year 32 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. through, and although her race comes from near the " Hne," the modern negress cannot be seen on Sunday without a sunshade which she will hold up even if the sky be grey. She must not fail to wear a veil, though no exposure to the eye of day can spoil her complexion or add a deeper tint to the shadows of her skin. The chief difficulties in the way of perfect mimicry are anatomical, being dependent upon the waist, hair and feet. The European waist has been trained for centuries to follow certain lines of deformity, but the waist of the negress is that of the Venus of Milo and it resents the disfigurement very stoutly. The hair problem is much more grave, and is indeed almost insurmountable. The astrachan-like wool on the black lady's head can be changed by no known art into anything that could be coiled or braided. The fight with the woolliness of wool in Barbados is desperate and discouraging. A young girl's hair is worked out into little tags which hang about her worried skull like black curl papers. These are intended to represent tresses, but although they could not deceive an infant they are diligently toiled at by ambitious mothers. By a bolder display and higher flight of art a bow is fixed somehow to the nape of the neck, to foster the delusion that it ties up raven locks. Some ingenious women have cut or carved out of the solid wool on their heads the figures of braided coils, just as a pattern is clipped out of a poodle's back. These carvings are made realistic by the addition of many combs which suggest that they prevent the " coming down " of hair which would not be ruffled by a hurricane nor disturbed by the thickest bramble bush. There is an article of the European coiffure called a "slide," a species of brooch used to keep in order any wayward hairs about the nape of the neck. No self-respecting negress is without one of these controllers of stray locks, although in her case it is the hair that keeps the slide in place and not the slide the hair. Indeed there is more suggestion, more pretence, more fancy about the head adorning of a negress than about a Japanese garden. The skull of the mulatto shows varying grades between wool and hair, and as the difference widens so does the brown woman THE ISLANDERS. 33 attain nearer to the standard of perfection. She becomes an object of envy, since a higher walk in Hfe and a loftier social status may be reached by even three inches of reasonably straight hair. To the Barbadian, indeed, combs are more than coronets and lanky locks than Norman blood. The foot problem is also serious. The negro having found no need for boots has wisely worn none, but as bare feet are de trop in Park Lane so they must not tread the coral paths of Barbados. There is no affectation about the feet of a negress, no pretence that they may be mistaken for " little mice stealing in and out beneath her petticoat." They are practical feet of serviceable size, but by some means or another, groans or no groans, they must be forced into cheap American shoes, and the graceful elastic walk must degenerate into the mechanical-toy mode of progress affected by the higher civilisation. This attempt to be up to date involves such general suffering that it is not considered demode with the smart set for a lady, when returning from a gymkhana, to take off her shoes and open- work stockings and carry them in her hands. I am told that in courts of law the manner in which evidence is given is apt to be affected by boots ; so that an uneasy witness is often invited by the Bench to remove her foot-gear. If a bride faints at the altar, as is not uncommon, a sympathetic whisper runs through the assembly, not to " give her air " or " unloosen her dress," but to " take off her boots " ; and when the operation has been carried out in the vestry the nuptials can proceed, although the young wife may never recover from the degradation of having been married in stockings. If the negress must wear boots, she should wear them on the top of her well-balanced head. A pair of crimson satin shoes with gilded heels would look never so well as on the cushion of her woolly hair. The black man has less wide fields for display than has the black woman. He is, however, strong in the matter of neckties, scarf pins and finger rings. He is strong, too, in waistcoats, which are at times so violent in colour as to be almost explosive. He D 34 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. bases his model in dress upon a blending of Margate sands with the racecourse at Epsom. He cannot appear without a cigarette, nor without a cane which he carries like a Guardsman. The West Indian negroes generally are a healthy, cheerful and sober people. Professional beggars are unknown among them, as also are " slum children " and the counterpart of the Whitechapel woman. The white folk who live in their midst are prone to say that the more you know of the negro the less you like him. He has certain estimable child-like qualities, it is true, but he is un- trustworthy and idle, while his misconceptions of honesty and truth are inconvenient. If left to himself he tends to degenerate, for the spirit of the wild has not yet died out of him. In up-country districts in any of the islands the black man is respectful to strangers, but in the seaport towns he is apt to be insolent when the opportunity offers. At Roseau in Dominica, for example, the quayside nigger would appear to have lapsed into savagery if the experience of certain ladies who recently landed there can be taken as an instance. An account of the islanders would scarcely be complete with- out mention of certain other living things which serve to give character to the colony. Conspicuous among these are the black birds — the Barbadian crows. The full and proper title of these fowls is Quiscalus Fortirostris. They go about in companies, being very sociable. They are jet black and have white eyes. Their neatness and trimness are immaculate. They look like a number of dapper little serving-men in black liveries, or may be compared to smart vivacious widows with indecorous high spirits. Their curiosity and fussiness can only be matched by their unceasing energy. There is nothing that goes on in the streets or by the roadside which fails to interest them, while every detail of their lives appears to evoke an endless chattering. The Barbados sparrow is another very sociable and pushing bird. He is greenish-grey in tint, but what he lacks in brilliancy of plumage he makes up in impudence. He comes to the early breakfast in the bedroom, hops on to the table or a chair-back, and if he is not served at once with sugar or banana will call out THE ISLANDERS. 35 petulantly like an old man at a club who is kept waiting for his lunch. He is a thief by conviction, and steals for the mere pleasure of stealing. The sugar-bird is not so common as either of these two. Archdeacon Bindley, however, tells of his habits and of his ability to make himself at home. He drops on to the breakfast table as if he had been invited, and after he has helped himself out of the sugar-basin will, as likely as not, proceed to take a bath in his host's finger-bowl.' Another flying thing is the flying-fish, which is as common in the fish market at Bridgetown as is the herring at Yarmouth The visitor will eat him with curiosity at first, but when it becomes evident that no meal in the island is complete without flying-fish, under some guise or another, the novelty abates. Finally, Barbados would appear to be that West Indian island which is favoured above all others by the land crab. His burrows are to be seen not only along the shore but by the side of every road that skirts the habitations of man. He takes up his abode in the garden, digs his tunnels in the environs of the house, and has turned more than one graveyard into a miniature rabbit warren. He is an unclean beast, his habits are nasty, and any contemplation of his precise mode of living is of a kind that makes the flesh creep. He appears occasionally upon the dinner table as an article of diet. I have eaten him under these circumstances, and the memory of this indiscretion is the only blot in my West Indian experiences. I feel that I have lost all right to criticise people who eat raw fish, snails, snakes and lizards. The land crab, when he is fully grown, is about the size of the palm of the hand. In Barbados he is usually of a cherry-red colour, a tint which compels the impression that he is distended to bursting with unwholesome blood. He is shy — more shy than he was when Amyas Leigh and Salvation Yeo landed at Barbados on their journey westward. At that time he and his tribe "sat in their house-doors and brandished their fists in defiance at the invaders." He is agile, his legs are long and like stilts of tin. ' The Pilot, October 5, 1901. 36 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. When he walks he moves with a parched, scratching sound that is horrible to hear, and that suggests the fumbling about of a witch's nails, I can imagine no more awful awakening than that which would befall the exhausted man who, having dropped asleep by the roadside or on the shore, woke to find these dry, crackling, carrion- eaters crawling about him as if he had been long dead. I 1 1 JjL. jd^|^^|^^HJHQMlB|wr^ ^jfa^ ■■i^ttii ^H^^^Eb^^^^^^kT^ I ^■1' ^r .^I^^^HI Hi ^^HH^HfiS^r^^KU & ^gJI B^VT T'^^^K H^^^^^^^^^^H ^D^H^^^fT^^B^^H ^^Is^^^l ^^1 Ml rfl ■^ ^^HB " ■ **^\L^Sa a^