The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  About most West Indian towns there is a similarity of appearance. Their setting is invariably magnificent, a succession of high hills rising above a harbour with charming residential bungalows dotted along their slopes. But the shops and streets and offices that are grouped about the port are unattractive. Once they were stone-built and tiled and handsome. But they have been the victims, nearly all of them, of hurricanes and earthquakes. Today they are for the most part ramshackle improvisations of wood and corrugated iron, shabby where they are not squalid, with little sense of dignity or of the past, with ragged beggars sleeping in their shadows. Most of the larger stores will have a teashop attached to them, and it is probably in one of these that the tourist will find himself sitting over an ice on mornings when he is not driving out into the country. Perhaps, however, his friends will have some special and unlikely rendezvous. My two chief friends in St. Lucia used, for example, to meet every morning in a windowless room opening out of a grocery which they called ‘Hell’s Kitchen’; they went there, they explained, because they were tired of seeing the same people everywhere they went. Only some half-dozen of us had the right of entry. We drank beer instead of coffee, and the girl who was responsible for the idea presented each of us with a red-painted cork. We were supposed to carry this cork with us at all times. And if you met a fellow member in a neutral setting, your production of your cork constituted a challenge. It was like ‘Seeing a hand’ at poker. If the challengee had her cork, then the challenger had to pay the first round next morning. But if the challengee had not got her cork, then it was for her to pay. There is a great lack of privacy in the tropics: Hell’s Kitchen is symptomatic of the need one feels to be alone, or, rather, not to be overlooked.

  Coffee will be followed by a swim. In practically every capital there is an excellent bathing beach. I have never known better bathing than in the West Indies. There are none of the coral and sea urchins against which in Tahiti you have to be so much upon your guard that it is foolish to bathe barefooted. The water is fresher and has more bite than that of the Mediterranean. There is no reason to be afraid of sunstroke, and the precautions that you take against sunburn on the Riviera are adequate in the Caribbean. An hour on the beach sends you back with a good appetite to lunch.

  The lunch, if it is taken in an hotel, will probably be a disappointment to the gourmet. The English as a race are not enterprising gastronomically. They are afraid of local dishes and ask to be given abroad the same meals that they enjoy at home. Hotel proprietors catering for this taste concentrate upon fried dolphin and on joints. They usually overcook the meat, which would not under the best conditions be very satisfactory, since, owing to a lack of cold storage, it is usually eaten on the day that it is killed. The local vegetables—yams, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, plantains—are starchily flavourless. Only the fruit—pawpaws and soursop and avocado pears—is really appetizing. That is not to say that there are not a number of excellent West Indian dishes to be sampled: ‘mountain chicken’, which is another name for bullfrog, can, if properly flavoured, be delightful. In Trinidad admirable small oysters grow on marine trees. Barbados has its ‘pepper pot’, and in private houses where the local spices are properly employed one eats extremely well. But lunch in the average small hotel, though ample and nourishing, leaves no memory on the palate, and it is not surprising that the early hours of the afternoon for those who do not have to work in offices are devoted to the siesta.

  The three hours after tea are the most delightful of the day. It is then that the tennis courts are crowded, that nets are pitched on the cricket fields; that caddies are summoned to the links. The heat of the day has lessened, a breeze is blowing from the hills. There seems to be more colour in the flowers; the leaves and grasses that by day had become polished surfaces to reflect the sunlight resume their own fresh greens. All day one has walked at the pace of a slow-motion film. At last one can move with freedom. One has the sense of having one’s limbs restored to one. And later, in the swift-fallen dusk, it is with a contented feeling of languor that one sits out on the veranda of the club over one’s punch or swizzle.

  Rum is the vin du pays of the Caribbean. And there are two main schools of thought on the best way of serving it.

  The planter’s punch is famous throughout the world. It is made with heavy, dark rum—not the light Cuban Bacardi from which the Daiquiri is made—and the old formula of ‘one of sweet and two of sour, three of strong and four of weak’ is the basis of it. Grated nutmeg is often scattered on the top. It is served in a tumbler and it is a drink to be sipped slowly. It is a picnic and a pre-lunch drink.

  The swizzle, however, is a very different business. It has to be gulped in at the most two mouthfuls, to be enjoyed. It is made usually with a lighter rum, and whatever proportions of sweet and sour may be compounded with it, the prevailing flavour is of angostura bitters. In London a bottle of angostura will last you for six months. In the West Indies it will last a week. The swizzle is mixed in a jug. Angostura is added till the liquid is a pale pink; then it is beaten, not stirred, with a swizzle-stick, a thin stick a foot and a half long, clustered at the head with a bunch of divided twigs. The stick is rotated swiftly between the palms of the hands till the mixture froths. It is pretty and pink and looks like liquid candy. But it is very sour. It cannot be sipped and it should be gulped when it is frothing. Dominica specializes in the swizzle. It is a matter of opinion as to whether one prefers punch or swizzle. There are two schools of thought. But it is safe to say that no drink can be anything but good that has a basis of West Indian rum.

  A West Indian day ends as it begins, at an early hour. For the visitor arriving with letters of introduction the ninety minutes after sundown on the club veranda will often be followed by a dinner party—a formal party at which the women will wear long dresses and the men black ties, but such parties are exceptional in the general routine of a West Indian day. There is no night life in an urban sense, and except on occasions most residents who have been up since dawn, who have done a full day’s work and taken two hours’ exercise are glad to go to bed directly after dinner. The ninety minutes on the club veranda over the drinks short or long represent the climax of the day.

  The conversation will follow an habitual pattern: there will be local gossip, there will be discussion of the latest party at G.H., there will be commercial talk of the price of cocoa, of the slump in sugar. Political talk will be concentrated on the policy of the Imperial Government. It is conversation in which the tourist can take little part. At the start of the evening, he will be asked, for good manners’ sake, a number of questions about his trip. About ‘how things are in England’, but unless he is an extrovert who wants to dominate the conversation and become its centre, he will find himself gradually slipping into the background, which he will be content to do, since he is here to learn, to absorb an atmosphere, to receive rather than to create impressions.

  He will sit back in his chair, watching and listening, sipping at his rum and soda, letting his attention wander, noticing sights and sounds that to the residents are too familiar to be remarked, noting how the dark green of the mountains changes into purple, watching the fireflies dart above the flowers, hearing the croak of frogs and in the hills the distant beat of drums; he will be conscious of the heavy smell of jasmine. How often during the war when evenings fell upon bomb-scarred London or on the brown burnt wastes of the Syrian desert have I not dreamed myself back on to a long veranda, looking on to the row of palms that flanks a broad, green savannah.

  Au revoir, Martinique

  from HOT COUNTRIES

  Written in 1929

  Boat days are of too regular occurrence in Fort de France to be the carnivals that they are in Papeete. But, even so, they are gay enough in the late days of spring when a French ship is sailing for St. Nazaire or Havre, and those who can afford to are flying from the parched heat of summer. On the Pellerin there was not a cabin vacant. The decks were crowded. The noise from the smoking-room grew den
ser as coupe after coupe was drained. But I was tired; too tired to join wholeheartedly in the revelry.

  It was only ten days since Eldred Curwen and I had driven from Port au Plina at four o’clock on a late April morning. But those ten days, probably because they had come at the end of five months of travelling, had been intolerably exhausting. To begin with, there had been the long twelve hours’ drive across the Haitian frontier into San Domingo, with the sun beating down through the thin canvas of the hood; there had been the heat and noise of San Domingo; the journey on the neatest of small ships, the Antilles, past Puerto Rico, past St. Martin and St. Barthélemy, those two forgotten little islands, only touched at by one boat once a month, half French half Dutch and speaking English; where cows and bullocks swim out at the edges of canoes towards the ship, to be drawn up by the horns on to the deck for shipment to Guadeloupe. Strange little islands. The arrival of the boat is the one incident in the life of a community which has no cars, nor cinemas, nor newspapers, nor news. The whole island puts on its smartest frocks, rows out to the ship for its three hours’ sojourn, to dance in the small saloon, to be stood liqueurs, to be photographed, to take and leave addresses; then when the siren goes to scamper back into their canoes for four more uneventful weeks.

  After St. Barthélemy there was Guadeloupe. The hurried rush at Basse Terre to bathe in the hot springs at Dolé; at Pointe à Pitre a casual investigation of the cyclone’s damage, and afterwards there were four days of the noise and heat of Fort de France. I was very weary when the time came to move my luggage from the Hôtel Bédiat to the boat, so weary that I stayed in my cabin unpacking slowly while the sirens went and the gongs were beaten along the passage. It was not till I could feel the vibration of the engines that I came on deck.

  It was a coloured scene. In the background the charbonniéres, black and weary, chattered together behind the stacks of coal. Between them and the water half the population of the town was gathered to wave farewell to friends and relations. The Frenchmen in their helmets and white suits, the coloured people in their bright print dresses, the negroes with their handkerchiefs tied in their hair. And hands were being waved and messages shouted, and the conventional familiar thought came to me: What did it mean, this parting? What was behind those waved hands and shouted messages? Relief, excitement, sadness; to everyone it must have a different meaning. Some heart must be breaking down there on the quay. And I felt sad and stood apart as the ship swung away from the docks, past the fort, into the Caribbean.

  It was after six; in two more minutes the sun would have sunk into the sea. And it would be against a sky of yellow hyacinth that Belmont, leaning against the veranda of the little bungalow, would see the lighted ship pass by on its way to Pointe à Pitre. Through the dusk I tried to distinguish the various landmarks along the road: the white church of Case Navire, the palm trees of Carbet, the fishing tackle of Fond Lahaye. It was too dark. Martinique was a green shadow.

  A few minutes more and the sun would have set into the sea; already it had set in the London that I was bound for. In the suburbs people would be mixing themselves a nightcap. In Piccadilly the last act of the theatres would have just begun. At the dinner parties that preceded dances there would be a gathering of wraps and coats. But westward, in the coloured countries, it would be shining still; pouring in the full radiance of early summer over the Golden Gate; streaming southwards a hundred miles or so through the open windows of a Spanish colonial house, on to a long, low room with circled roof, on to black Chesterfields, on to a black-and-white squared carpet, on to blue Chinese porcelain, on to walls bright with the colouring of old Spanish maps. Lunch would just be over. The room would be filled with talk, with talk of plans, of golf or tennis, or a driving under the pines along the rugged Californian coast. There would be laughter there and hospitality and friendship; a bigness and an openness of heart.

  Montserrat

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1948

  Montserrat was discovered by Columbus in 1493 and named after the mountain monastery in Catalonia. Colonized by the British under Sir Thomas Warner in 1632, it came under French rule between 1664 and 1668, and 1782 and 1784. A number of Irishmen were settled here by Oliver Cromwell, and Sir Algernon Aspinall states that there were at one time three thousand Irish families in the island. A shamrock adorns the centre gable of Government House. Its chief products are sea-island cotton and lime juice; it also exports tomatoes. It was very seriously damaged by a series of earthquakes in the early and middle nineteen-thirties, and when I paused there in 1938 for a few hours on my way up to Boston, the capital, Plymouth, had an air of St. Pierre with shacks going up among stone foundations. It has recovered, however, very gallantly, and with a population of fourteen thousand has a relatively balanced budget.

  Montserrat is a port of call for both the Alcoa and the Canadian National Steamship Lines. But it has not an airfield yet. It is not often visited by tourists. If you were to plan to spend a week there, you would almost certainly have to make the trip at least one way in a small open motor launch. Myself, I had to take the launch both ways and one of the trips was exceedingly unpleasant. I should never indeed have gone there unless my old friend, Charlesworth Ross, who was at the time commissioner, had asked me to be his guest. Had I failed to accept his invitation, I should have failed to see one of the loveliest islands in my experience, an experience including Colombo and Penang.

  Montserrat includes within its narrow confines all of the separate and varied features that distinguish and adorn the other islands. Much of its sand is black, but it has white beaches too. Its interior is mountainous, its highest mountain being over three thousand feet; but the mountains do not jostle one another as they do in Dominica. They stand alone, with the ground sloping downwards, gently, through forest and coconut groves to the trim cotton fields and the rows of lime trees. The green upon its flanks is as vivid as in Dominica. But the whole thing has a designed, architectural effect that Dominica lacks. Moreover, because the mountains are not clustered close, you have a sense of breadth and distance. In Dominica you look down and you look up, but you never look across. In Montserrat you look from one plateau to another, over deep, broad valleys.

  I made a trip on foot across the island; it took a bare four hours; and the paths were neither abruptly steep nor slippery. It was easy going. We passed the crater of a volcano. The air was sickly with the smell of sulphur. It was a vast vat of a cauldron, with its rocks stained green and yellow and the tepid steaming water cloudily, milkily white like Syrian Arak. St. Lucia can offer nothing more impressive. And when we crossed the centre and could see the white line of foam along the windward beach, there was that same sense of entering a new barbaric kingdom that I had felt in Dominica.

  At one time Montserrat was predominantly a sugar island, but the collapse of sugar was not followed by the collapse of a whole way of living. The planters, finding that they could no longer profitably market sugar, switched over to limes and cotton. Plantations were not abandoned nor the ground let run to waste. The old stone windmills stand now as picturesque relics over the countryside, and the houses are built among the ruins of old aqueducts and the round mills that the oxen worked. Only in Barbados will you find as well preserved the fabric of the old world of sugar. There is a good hotel in Montserrat.

  Barbados

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1947

  For those travelling to the West Indies from Europe by the Elder and Fyffe line, Barbados is the first West Indian island and for many it must, as an introduction to the tropics, be a disappointment. It has none of the high-mountained splendour of Trinidad nor the luxurious foliage of Colombo. With its nickname of ‘Little England’, it seems at a first glance another lsle of Wight; less foreign than Alderney or Guernsey. The negroes who clamber on to the ship to dive for pennies seem as out of place, as inappropriate, as the white soles of their feet against the ebony of their ankles. It takes time to appreciate
its particular and peculiar charm, its ‘lived-in’ atmosphere.

  Barbados is the most English of the islands. No other flag has ever flown there. Not once has it been invaded. Undiscovered by Columbus, it was visited by some Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century, who christened it Los Barbados because of its bearded fig trees and considerately left some pigs behind them for the benefit of any sailors who might be shipwrecked there. When the first English settlers arrived it was to find themselves unopposed. Caribs are believed to have lived there once, but in February 1627 it was on an uninhabited island that the first English stores were landed.

  The Barbadian story is one of a steadily maintained tradition, unbroken since the days of the first settlement. In a sense it has less ‘history’ than any of the other islands. It was affected inevitably by the various wars with France, suffering considerably during the American War of Independence through its inability to trade with the Thirteen Colonies, and in the Napoleonic Wars it was only saved from invasion at the last moment. But it has been spared the sieges, the massacres, the riots of which practically every other island except Antigua has been the victim. Hurricanes and slumps alone have disturbed the rhythm of its existence. Its lack of drama is, however, due as much as other islands’ excess of drama, to the caprice of history. It is the most eastern island. The prevailing wind blows from the east. It was very difficult in the days of sail for an enemy to attack it from the west. The defender was always at an advantage.

  Its lack of history has made Barbados unique. It has also given it a personal intimate charm that none of the other islands have to the same extent. It may not be attractive at a first sight—or, rather, it may be disappointing at a first sight because it is not attractive in a particular, in an expected way. For although there is a very real beauty about the broad brown river that curves by the Da Costa warehouses, between the low wooden wharves, past the cluster of barges and of schooners, the tourist leaning against the taffrail may well grumblingly inquire where are the bright colours, where is the sense of spectacle by which the agency folders had lured him to the ticket counter.