The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  There was little variety in the general strategy of a raid.

  There was a privateer to be boarded; a town to be descended on; a garrison put to the sword; churches to be plundered; cellars emptied; girls ravished; old men tortured till they divulged the hiding places of their neighbours’ gold; a final ransom to be levied; with the holds full, a sailing back to the taverns of Port Royal. In retrospect one raid seemed very like another.

  This one, too, would have, had not the corpses left behind on the swampland of Maracaibo numbered the shrivelled frame of the old captain.

  With a heavy heart for all the plunder he had brought back with him, Roger set his face towards Tortuga. He had no stomach for the riots in Port Royal with which his companions would swill and wanton away the rewards of courage. While they caroused there with dark wenches in the wine shops he remained on the ship alone, abrood upon his past. He wondered how he would maintain life now that his old friend was gone. He would have to make some new friend, he supposed. But he felt old and opposed to change. The captain and he were used to one another. They knew each other’s ways. It would be hard to begin afresh. When he returned to Tortuga he handed his share of the booty to the trader with whom he transacted the majority of his bargains.

  ‘You can credit me with that,’ he said. ‘I’ll be coming down to drink it away in a day or two.’

  He was too tired and too heartsore to take any interest in the local gossip that they brought him. A new governor had been appointed to Tortuga, they informed him, a man called D’Ogeron. Roger shrugged his shoulders. What was D’Ogeron to him?

  He could not have been expected to see in D’Ogeron’s appointment the first serious attempt of the French Government to regulate and regularize West Indian trade. The appointment had been made in much the same spirit as Elizabeth’s appointment of Kildare three-quarters of a century earlier to the governorship of Ireland. D’Ogeron for twenty years had been a boucanier in the Caribbean. Since all Tortuga could not have ruled him, there was a chance that he might rule all Tortuga. When the trade with the French Antilles was handed over by Colbert to the Occidental Company, D’Ogeron was its choice. It was a sound choice. D’Ogeron was practical, hard and middle-aged. He knew the material with which he had to deal. The boucaniers as far as they trusted anyone, were prepared to trust him. Roger, as their spokesman, explained the situation. They were French, nine-tenths of them. They were ready to admit the suzerainty of the King of France. But they had fought for Tortuga before anyone in Paris had realized that it existed. They had made favourable trading treaties with the Dutch. They proposed to keep in force those treaties, Paris or no Paris. If France chose to protect them, they would acknowledge the suzerainty of Louis. More than that Paris could not expect.

  The gist of tins, in more diplomatic language, D’Ogeron set out in a despatch to Colbert. Colbert, reading it in his large study three thousand miles away, shrugged his brocaded shoulders. Provincials and Colonials, they were all the same, he thought. They just would not realize that the King was France; that Paris was the King’s home; that the departments and the colonies existed so that the glory of the Sun King should shed its gathering radiance over Europe. Colonies existed as aids to the royal debts.

  Colbert did not think it necessary to explain this to D’Ogeron. D’Ogeron would learn that soon enough on his own account.

  D’Ogeron did.

  The boucaniers were not forbidden to trade with Holland; but as any Dutch vessel visiting them was considered contraband by the French Marine, their freedom to trade with Holland profited them little. Still, as long as enough ships came into the rock-girt harbour, they did not mind what flag they flew. They explained as much to D’Ogeron. He thanked them for the explanation.

  D’Ogeron was ill at ease. ‘The matter about this place,’ he thought. Then paused. There were so many things that were the matter with it. From the beginning it had been a mess. The Spaniards had been too thorough.

  The Indians had been, D’Ogeron was ready to concede, a hopeless people. What could you do with a race that had been trained through centuries to believe in happiness and freedom? They were well out of the way, no doubt. His task was simpler now that, what with suicides and autos-da-fé and deaths from weariness in the mines, there remained scarcely a trace of the two million original inhabitants of the island. The Africans who had been brought from the Guinea Coast to exchange the freedom they had enjoyed in their native land for the Christian gospel of personal salvation were a far more satisfactory race. At the same time, D’Ogeron insisted, the Spaniards need not have been quite so thorough. The Indians, for instance, who had escaped from the mines and taken refuge in the hills, might surely have been left to starve. It had really been rather unnecessary to import bloodhounds to chase them down. The hounds had certainly done their work. But the result of their efficiency was that a century and a half later the savannahs of San Domingo were populated with a vast progeny of wild dogs with a fancy for human flesh. After dark one’s life simply was not safe.

  ‘Suppose,’ D’Ogeron suggested to his second-in-command, ‘that we were to kill a number of horses, fill their carcasses with poison, leave them about and let the dogs eat of them and die.’

  The second-in-command nodded his head. A number of horses were slain and their intestines poisoned. The savannahs were thick with stiff and groaning hounds. But even though one horse might account for a hundred dogs, the process was too slow. The dogs bred faster than they died.

  ‘The only way to get rid of them,’ said D’Ogeron, ‘is to cultivate the entire island until there is nowhere for them to hide. This place is underpopulated.’

  ‘We want women,’ said D’Ogeron, ‘white women.’

  He explained this in his next despatch to Paris.

  It was not an impossible request.

  At the time black slaves were not the only human cargo shipped to the sugar islands. White men in return for a free passage signed on as engagés for three years. Their treatment when they arrived was in some circumstances considerably worse than that meted out to slaves. The employer knew that he only possessed the engagés’ services for three years. He was uninterested in his subsequent future. He made the most of his three years. A number of the boucaniers were escaped engagés. If men could be persuaded to come out, surely, thought D’Ogeron, women could. It was most necessary that the island should be populated. Women from Europe might domesticate certain of the boucaniers. ‘I will fetch chains from France for the fettering of these rascals,’ was the way he put it. He did not ask that the women should be beautiful, virtuous, or well-bred. He merely asked that they should be capable of childbearing and unscathed of pox.

  D’Ogeron got his women; fifty of them; shipped with a cargo of claret from Bordeaux. When he saw them his heart sank. They were the gleanings of the sorriest stock in Paris. They had been little enough to look at when they started. Now, after six weeks on a two-hundred-ton trader, for the first fortnight of which they had been profoundly sick; during the last month of which they had itched with scurvy; during the last fortnight of which they had been sunburnt, so that the skin on their cheeks and noses had begun to peel; during no period of which they had attended to their personal cleanliness; after six weeks of discomfort, of dirt, of unwholesome food they looked in their tawdry, draggled finery infinitely less appetizing than the erect, firm-breasted negresses who had gathered on the quay to watch the unloading of this unusual cargo. They were women and they were white. But that was the most that could be said for them. D’Ogeron was not the man to make the worst of a bad job, however. He did his best to cleanse and decorate his cargo; then sent messages to Tortuga.

  Five hundred or so of the boucaniers came over. In a mute, suspicious group they stood glaring at the nervous, simpering but hard-eyed, hard-mouthed group that had gathered on the veranda of the Governor’s house.

  ‘My friends,’ said D’Ogeron, ‘with great courage and with the cherishing kindness that distinguishes their sex from our
s, these gracious ladies having heard in their country, which is your country, too, of your hard and lonely lot, were moved with compassion and have come across these many miles to share and make sweet that loneliness for you. As you see there are fifty here. Each has consented to take unto her from among your number a husband whom she will obey and honour. It is fitting that the choice should be made not by her, but for her, and by you. So, as there are more of you than there are of them we have agreed that those of you who wish shall draw lots among yourselves as to the right and precedence of choice. I am confident, as a consolation for those who will be disappointed in the fall of the lots, that the example of these brave ladies will not be overlooked in France and that in a few months others will have come to follow them.’

  And he looked blandly and encouragingly at the half-circle of surly, bearded faces.

  Roger in the centre of the group, as the group’s spokesman, made no comment. He did not know that the idea particularly pleased him. Still, if wives were going, he had better have one. When D’Ogeron had finished, he moved his glance along the row of women who flanked the Governor. Slowly his eye travelled along the line. The woman on whom his glance settled finally was by no means the youngest of the group. Long ago such beauty as she may ever have had had left her. Her body was plump and loose. Her cheeks were flabby, and her mouth was lax. But there was a friendliness in the straight, level look of her hazel eyes. Roger had a feeling as his eyes met hers that they talked the same language, he and she; that each knew what the other was about; that similar streams had brought them to this fair island. By no means the best favoured, she looked the likeliest to suit him. With a clatter he brought the butt of his musket on to the gravelled path.

  ‘The others can draw lots or not draw lots as they may choose,’ he said, ‘but that’s my woman there.’

  He pointed proprietorially at the smiling, limp-lipped woman.

  D’Ogeron had expected and was prepared for some such outburst.

  ‘If the lot falls to you to choose first,’ he said, ‘this lady will certainly be yours to choose. But in the meantime we had better draw the lots.’

  ‘The lots,’ said Roger, ‘may go to hell. That is my woman.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said D’Ogeron, ‘that one of your friends may have contracted a similar predilection.’

  ‘Then if any one has they can contest her with me.’ And he swung round, a burly, strong-shouldered figure, with his head flung back and his eyes blazing out of his lined face. There was a murmur and a movement, but no protest among his fellows. He was their spokesman and, as far as they admitted one, their leader. He had the right to the first pick. There were forty-nine left anyhow for the rest of them.

  ‘So that’s that,’ said Roger. And on the veranda of D’Ogeron’s bungalow, he swore the marriage oath of the Buccaneer; the oath that from history’s dawn had been sworn by the outlaws, the Bohemians of life, to one another.

  ‘I take thee,’ he cried, ‘without knowing or caring to know who thou art. If anybody from whence thou comest would have had thee, thou wouldst not have come in quest of me. But no matter. I do not desire thee to give me an account of thy past conduct, because I have no right to be offended at it at the time when thou wast at liberty to live either ill or well according to thine own pleasure, and because I shall have no reason to be ashamed of anything thou wast guilty of when thou didst not belong to me. Give me only thy word for the future. I acquit thee of the past.’ Then with a heavy clatter he smote the palm of his hand against the band of his musket, brandishing it above his head. ‘This will revenge me,’ he cried, ‘of thy breach of faith. If thou shouldst prove false this will surely be true to my aim.’

  §

  It turned out better than D’Ogeron, when he had looked at his motley cargo, had dared to hope.

  To those who were prepared to undertake the duties of a plantation the Compagnie Occidentale was prepared to make certain loans, to be paid back out of the plantation’s revenue. Roger was persuaded by his woman that this was a sound proposal. With the proceeds of the raid on Maracaibo that he had deposited with the Tortuga trader, a supply of slaves was bought. In the flat plains behind Port de Paix, he set himself to the task of creating a plantation.

  The first, the Homeric period of the Buccaneers was over.

  From Tortuga during the next decades would set forth the expeditions of which two and a half centuries hence, wide-eyed European schoolchildren would be reading. Thence would Morgan set out to Carthagena and to Panama. The great era of piracy was yet to dawn. But Roger, who had been the forefather of that era, who had endured the difficult and cruel days, was to hear vaguely in his bungalow in the Plain du Nord, the rumours of those engagements. The white fetters from France were about his neck. He was to beget children; to gather wealth; to see the founding of a name that was to be famous through a famous island.

  He did not pride himself on the achievement. It was wealth that was easy come by. He happened to be in the lift when it was going up. Such credit as there was, was due far less to his efforts than to those of the hazel-eyed woman for whose sake he had beaten the palm of his hand against his musket.

  She was the most, or to be more exact, the first efficient person he had ever met. She had a passion for organizing expenditure. To Roger money as a thing in itself had never been real. You acquired it, masses of it, on a raid. You anchored off Port Royal. You drank and wenched and most of it got taken from you. Then you went back to your savannahs; you roasted pigs; you shot bulls; you dried their skins. On the beach of Cayona they made some calculations on a sheet of paper; they handed you some rum and some ammunition. You supposed it was all right. That was how Roger had seen money. He could not understand these rows of figures that impassioned his wife so fiercely.

  For hours she would sit calculating the price of slaves, the food of slaves, the clothes of slaves, and the number of francs they gave you for rum and sugar in Port de Paix. It meant nothing to him.

  ‘Then in that case you can leave everything to me,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you’ll never become the rich man you’re going to be.’

  She explained to him at great length the extent and nature of his future riches. She was always explaining things to him. He had no idea that anyone could be so voluble. He had never done much talking. During his years on Tortuga, he had averaged ten sentences a day. Sometimes he would talk a little more. Usually he would talk considerably less. He could not understand why people should want to talk except when they had something definite to say. Animals didn’t. They could neigh if they were frightened or cold or amorous or hungry. Otherwise they kept quiet. He couldn’t think why human beings should not as well. If there were no other sounds; no wind in the banana plants; no ripple of water on the beach; no drum beat of rain upon the palm fronds; no sound of crickets in the fields; then it might be companionable to hear the sound of human voices, occasionally. But when there were so many other things to listen to, he did not see why human beings should add their noises to the universal orchestra.

  As the years passed, he often found himself regretting the still evenings when he and the captain had sat side by side on the doorstep of their cabin silent for hours upon end. He was philosophical about it. Men solaced you mentally; women physically. You couldn’t have a thing both ways. And at least his wife left him to himself. She was content enough that he should spend the days riding round the plantation, supervising the work desultorily. He was happy doing that. He loved riding slowly with the sun hot upon his back, through the long fields of sugar-cane, to the cocoa-covered hills where the red flowers of the immortelle protected the young shoots. He loved to watch the negroes move along through the lines of cane, cutting at the green spears with their long, rounded knives; and the women, with their skirts tucked up above their knees, treading the cocoa seeds, polishing them with their hard-soled feet.

  His happiness was at its height during the season of the sugar crop. It was a happy time. Even the most meagre of the negr
oes looked healthy when once the mills were set, not for that but for the thick, drained juice that negroes sweated in the fields and boiling houses; the thick and golden juice that time would mellow and ferment into that magic potion that could cure all griefs and heighten every happiness.

  His love of wine was the sole issue that ever disturbed the harmony of his married life. His wife liked rum; unquestionably. She was in that respect appropriately companionable. But she was more interested in money than in rum. And as the price of sugar was considerably higher than the price of rum, she would persist in an attempt to improve and increase the output of sugar, even if it meant injuring the rum. She would, for instance, suggest that the skimmings should be sent back to the clarifiers instead of to the still-house; and when it was very pertinently explained that the rum crop would thereby be reduced by a third whatever the corresponding gain in sugar, she had the effrontery to suggest an increase of the amount of dunder which would doubtless affect the flavour of the rum but would restore the bulk.

  On that point Roger was very firm.

  ‘My rum shall not be interfered with.’

  ‘But it shan’t,’ his wife explained. ‘Not yours, at any rate. That rum’s for sale. None of it shall come into the house. We will have some especially good rum laid down for you.’

  But Roger shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he asserted. ‘No. It’s too great a risk. You never know where you’ll end if you start monkeying with liquor. I’m not even sure that it isn’t a mistake to use just skimmings. I’m not sure we shouldn’t use the cane juice itself.’

  On that last point, Sara was able to dissuade him.

  It would be too sweet, very much too sweet,’ she explained. But as for the skimmings . . . well, if he insisted. Gracefully but reluctantly she yielded.