by Alec Waugh
When the danger of invasion passed, that narrow passage was replaced by a flight of steps, traces of which you can see today beside the steep, winding road that, built since World War II, runs from the crater to the one point in the island where landings can be effected all through the year. On the northern side, a flight of five hundred and thirty steps connects the crater with a second beach, Ladder’s Bay, but the seas there are generally so rough that it is rarely used.
Landings at Saba are notorious for their discomfort if not their danger. The beach is narrow, and between it and the open roadstead where you anchor there is a line of rocks. Myself, I arrived shortly after sunset; the sea was moderately rough, there was no moon, and I did not find it easy to tranship from the schooner into the rowing boat that bobbed beneath it. When I was finally settled in my seat, the boatman wrapped a tarpaulin round my shoulders. I could not think why, as it was not raining, but I was soon to discover the reason. In the dark I could not see how the boat was manoeuvred between the rocks, but suddenly the keel struck on pebbles; as it did, a wave went right over the boat. I scrambled over the side into the water and reached the shore soaked to the waist. It was in very much that way that Père Labat landed there two and a half centuries ago.
Much has been changed since then, but the main changes have all taken place since the second war and it is easy for the visitor to reconstruct for himself the curious existence that was led on this barren rock during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In Labat’s day Saba was inhabited by forty to fifty settlers and some hundred and fifty negro slaves. The plantations, he tells us, were small and well-cultivated, and the whitewashed houses very pretty and well-furnished, the settlers living as it were in a large club and frequently entertaining one another. He was, he said, received there very kindly.
In essentials Saba is not so very different now. Today the visitor to the island will be met at the beach by the Dutch Administrator in person. He will be treated as a guest. He will be driven in the Administrator’s jeep to the Government Rest House. Though he will pay five dollars a day for excellent meals, service, and accommodation, he will have the sense of visiting in a private house. No record is kept of his raids upon the icebox. When he leaves, a rough calculation is made of his consumption of beer, Cola, Dutch gin, and dessert wine. The Administrator will ensure that he is ‘shown the island’.
There is a great deal to be shown that will interest and amuse and at times surprise him. It is surprising, for instance, for a village that you have reached by a climb of eight hundred feet to be called ‘The Bottom’, but as far as Saba is concerned the administrative centre of the island is situated on the floor of the crater whereas the other villages are perched round the lip. Though Saba is a Dutch colony, the purest English in the Caribbean is spoken there; though there is a genuine feeling of loyalty for the Dutch royal family, scarcely a Saban has any links with Holland. The young men go to the oil islands, Aruba and Curaçao, to earn their livings. In New York there is a Saban colony at Richmond Hill, and the island is supported by the savings sent back to it by emigrants.
Though few new settlers come to Saba, though practically all the old inhabitants are interrelated, there has been no intermarriage between the descendants of the original settlers and of the original slaves. Sabans are pure African or pure European. The two races live on terms of the greatest amity, dividing the co-operative duties of administration; but they live in different sections of the island. The Africans live for the most part in The Bottom since they prefer the warmer air inside the crater, while the Whites chose the outer, exposed edge of the crater, where the air is cooler. There are curious customs in the island: a family in one of the villages, for instance, is allowed the highly prized privilege of burying their relatives in their own backyard.
The island’s life has developed calmly and peacefully in terms of the islanders’ own needs and wishes. In general appearance the island probably does not look very different from what it did in Labat’s day. There are no plantations, but the streets are clean, and the houses now, as then, are white and trim; the Sabans with their sailor training are experts in the use of paint, and the red shingle roofs look as though they were tiled.
The houses on Windward Side are built so close together, and on so steep a slope, that it has been said that you step from the front door of one house onto the roof of the house below. That is an exaggeration, but it gives an idea of what the village looks like.
The West Indian climate is on the whole the most equable in the world. It is never cold, and it is rarely too hot; but in all the mountainous parts it rains a great deal, and when you look across at Saba from Nevis, its peak is often hidden by cloud. In the autumn heavy rains sweep the Caribbean; the gales of wind are so frequent and so strong that an ingenious method has been adopted of preventing the windows from rattling. There are no fastenings, but long nails, fixed obliquely, hold the frames rigidly in position. It must often be very bleak in the houses of Hell’s Gate and Windward Side. A romantic novelist might well regard it as the setting for sombre dramas of hate and jealousy, born out of isolation and propinquity. But in actual fact the history of Saba contains no such drama. The official religion of the island is Protestant. Until very recently divorce could be obtained easily, but there were very few divorces.
The only story I heard of trust betrayed had a comic atmosphere. One of the chief figures of the island had been engaged for several years to a pretty girl several years younger than himself. On the eve of her marriage she went up to New York to buy her trousseau. She never returned. A few weeks later her marriage was announced to a young American who for several years had visited the island in a yacht. The girl had worked in the post office and for five years she had conducted a correspondence with him unknown to anyone. She had put the official stamp on her own letter and locked it into the mail box, and when the mail from New York came she had extricated his letters to her before they could be delivered at her parents’ house. She had not broken off her engagement, because she was not sure if she would ever see the American again, but she had been resolved to take the first opportunity of deciding how they still ‘felt about each other’. Her Saban fiancé has never married and in his cups bewails the perfidy of woman.
There are few quarrels in Saba; as in Labat’s day there is the feeling of living in a club. There is frequent entertaining. But there is no club and there are no cocktail parties as there are in the other West Indian islands. A store on Windward Side has a frigidaire and a call to buy a packet of Chesterfields may easily lead to an hour’s gossip over a glass of beer. There is a lot of calling in on friends after dinner. Scotch whisky and London gin are rarely seen in Saba, but Dutch gin, which is free of duty, is available in two-litre bottles, and from the neighbouring French island of St. Barthélemy sweet dessert wine is imported. The visitor is offered his choice of these, and his choice is accompanied by a sweet biscuit or a cake.
No opportunity for a party is overlooked. I arrived on the day of a wedding, on a Wednesday. That afternoon there had been a considerable party, but the festivities did not end when the bride and groom drove away. The honeymoon was being spent in Saba and on the Saturday a dance was given for the young couple. It was held in the second Government Rest House. There were some fifty guests; there was no one present who was not completely white. Nowhere else in the Caribbean have I seen girls with such fresh complexions. They all wore flowers in their hair, and the young men were resplendent in New York ties and tie clips. There was a five-instrument string band. The men took off their coats to dance. There was no supper, but in the entrance hall was a two-litre bottle of Bols gin. It was a very gay occasion.
In Labat’s day the principal trade was in boots and shoes, and Labat regretted that the island did not belong to Catholic shoemakers who would doubtless have called it St. Crispin. Today there is no shoe trade; there is really no trade at all except their special kind of embroidery, and it is in less and less demand now tha
t Americans and Europeans no longer fill their houses with small round tables over which they can spread elaborately decorated cloths. The island is supported almost entirely by the funds that are sent back to it by emigrants to America, Aruba, and Curaçao. There is little agriculture. Such labour as is available is employed by the Government in public works, mainly upon the roads.
This road-making was begun shortly after the Second World War, and these roads created more changes in the island’s life in five years than had taken place in the previous two hundred. In 1940 there was no transport in the island at all except a few donkeys, and no roadways except the steep flight of steps from the sea to The Bottom, and from The Bottom a narrow path up the inner lip of the crater to the two villages, Windward Side and Hell’s Gate, that are perched on the outer rim of the crater. Every beam and brick that was used for the building of the houses had to be man-handled from the beach. It is not surprising that Sabans are very proud of their homes. Before the war, when a dance was held in the Rest House, the young people used to walk over from Windward Side carrying their evening clothes with them. They changed in The Bottom; then after the dance they undertook the long ninety minutes’ climb back to their homes. Soon after the war a road ran from the beach to The Bottom. Two years later it was extended to Windward Side. It is planned to continue it to Hell’s Gate. As soon as the first road was built, the first jeep was landed. Now there are seven or eight. No other kind of car could manage the steep gradients of the roads. The jeeps are owned by the Government but can be hired out as taxis.
The arrival of these jeeps has completely altered the life of the islanders. The jeeps naturally were enthusiastically welcomed, and a regular feature of the contemporary Saban scene is a Government jeep crowded with young male employees in long-peaked caps and bright American sports shirts honking round the corners. At a first glance it would seem that the life of the islanders had been enormously embellished by the march of progress, but I am inclined to doubt it. It has made everything too easy. Girls who have once been taken to dances in a jeep are not going to take a ninety minutes’ walk both ways. But jeeps are expensive to hire; the young men have very little money; they can afford to hire them only upon special occasions; in consequence, the practice of holding regular dances at the Rest House has been abandoned. The young men do not think they are worth the cost of a jeep and the girls will not go without one. There is less fun on the island now. I also wonder whether the health of the Sabans will not begin to suffer now that they take less exercise.
Children in Victorian England who had no wireless and cinemas, who had to rely upon their own devices, had busy and happy Christmas holidays organizing nursery theatricals; modern children become bored unless they are constantly entertained. I think this will happen to the Sabans. What kept them happy, occupied and healthy was the difficulty that was presented by every project. Everything had to be worked for. It is hardly worth while hiring a jeep to visit a friend that you will most likely run into anyhow in the course of the next few days; but a glass of wine and an hour of talk in a friend’s house were very enjoyable when you had to climb an hour for them. The Sabans had always been entirely dependent upon their own resources. It is for that very reason—though, too, it is part of the Dutch heritage—that their roads are so clean, their houses so pretty. They felt they had been set a challenge. They were happy because they had a lot to do. Now they are all working for the Government.
It will be curious to see what happens to Saba in the next generation. The administration of every West Indian island has its eye upon the tourist trade, and Saba is no exception. If a helicopter service could be maintained—so it is argued—tourists would be attracted to the island: this argument is fortified by the frequency with which yachtsmen put in there. But the very difficulty of reaching Saba and of landing there makes Saba a scalp upon the yachtsman’s belt. I can’t see how Saba, which has no bathing, no sport, could attract any type of tourist but the recluse.
I foresee the future of Saba in terms of the hill villages in the South of France, Eze, and St. Paul, that are tending more and more to become museums; the young people break away to Nice and Cannes. By day Eze and St. Paul are visited by charabancs, and the squares are crowded with bright dresses, but in the evenings they are dark, gloomy, and deserted. I should not be surprised if in fifty years Saba is uninhabited. The young people will get restless and go away.
I wish that I could have seen Saba before the jeeps arrived; but I am glad that I have seen it when it was still possible to reconstruct the life that was lived there for two centuries and a half. Saba is unique in many ways and in this particularly that curiosity should have been aroused in so many travellers by an apparens mistake in the one authority, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that it normally held to be above suspicion.
Antigua
Published in HOLIDAY MAGAZINE
Written in 1951
I Need a complete break from the daily grind, and I don’t want to spend too much,’ he said.
‘Make for the West Indies,’ I advised.
‘But isn’t it ruinously expensive?’
‘Only in certain islands; there are plenty others.’
‘For instance?’
‘As of now, Antigua.’
Antigua (it is pronounced An-teega) the seat of Government of the Leewards, a scattered group of British islands, with an acreage of a hundred and eight square miles, is very beautiful. It raises sugar and to those who associate the tropics with mountains, lush foliage, and ravines, sugar may sound an unexciting crop, but there is an intimate and appealing charm about broad green valleys that curve through a landscape dotted with abandoned windmills, between low rounded hills with the spearheads of the cane stalks waving in the breeze.
In several West Indian islands the sand is grey; in others the beaches are a stretch of pebbles; but in Antigua the sand is white and the coastline is indented with such a profusion of coves that the smuggling of cigarettes from the neighbouring French islands is a profitable industry. The bathing is unmatched.
Architecturally it has much to offer. There are the naval dockyards, still in reasonable repair, where Nelson in his youth was stationed for three years and to relieve his boredom conducted the courtship of a widowed lady to a conclusion disastrous for himself.
Above the dockyards is Clarence House, where William IV lived in his sailor period. St. John’s, the capital, may appear at a first glance ‘just another collection of two-storied wooden shacks’ but a closer inspection will detect example after example of exquisite colonial craftsmanship, finely moulded cornices, unusual fanlights, gracious and harmonious lines.
Antigua has been British for close on three hundred years, and has none of the French atmosphere that you find further south. This is, for the visitor, an advantage, since the natives do not speak the patois which in the country districts of St. Lucia and Dominica makes conversation with them difficult. The Antiguans are a fascinating mixture of imported Africa and colonial England, and still retain the fetishes of the bush. ‘Is good moon for planting tannias,’ they will tell you. The moon rules their lives. If a girl cuts her hair when the moon is waxing, it will grow long and thin; at full moon it will grow short and thick. The best time is between the moons. Then it will be long and thick.
Their belief in obeah—a kind of necromancy—persists. When I arrived at the sister island of Nevis, my hosts and I were met on the wharf by their cook in a state of near-collapse. The child of a neighbour had been drowned in her daughter’s company, and the neighbour had had obeah put on her. She must return at once, she insisted, to Antigua, the island of her birth, to seek protection. Next morning we woke to find white feathers scattered high over the window netting and in a semicircle round the steps. Later the dogs discovered a neatly dismembered duck with the head and carcass missing. We presumed it was counter-obeah, placed there by the gardeners now the cook had gone.
Antigua has no local handicrafts, no wood carving, and no weaving; but such
local eccentricities provide ample recompense. You are in another world there.
There are no obvious snags about Antigua. The climate is dry; there is none of the humidity nor are there any of the maladies that are expected in the tropics. The temperature rarely rises above eighty-five degrees. Mosquito-nets are in general use; but you are not worried when you sit on a veranda in the evening. A trade wind is blowing and you need a jacket. There is no malaria. I have never heard of a white man catching elephantiasis —that plague of the South Seas. There is no regular wet season; there is a slight danger of hurricanes between late August and early October, but Antigua has an all-round climate. Hotels charge tourist-season rates from Christmas to the end of April, not because conditions are pleasanter then but because that is the time when Americans, Canadians, and English are anxious to escape from their own unpleasant climates. Antigua is pleasanter in June than it is in February.
It is accessible: in 1940, as part of the exchange treaty for fifty battleships, a section of the coast was ceded to the U.S.A. on a ninety-nine years’ lease as an army and navy base. The troops have departed now but they have left as a hostage an excellent airfield which serves as a main junction for P. A.A. and B.W.I.A. (British West Indian Airways). Antigua is an easy overnight journey from New York and is the jumping-off stage for an entire area.
There is no lack of accommodation for the visitor. Near the airport and on the shore has been built a modern hotel—The Beach—with showers and toilets in every room. In St. John’s1 a member of the Plantocracy operates in the Kensington Hotel, a fine colonial house with a quiet garden. His wife, a French Creole from Martinique has introduced a Latin flavour into the cuisine.
One does not associate provincial England with inspired cooking, and colonies tend to reproduce the characteristics of the mother country. But you can eat as well in Antigua as anywhere in the Caribbean. There are no special delicacies, no dishes that you can get nowhere else, but the fresh fruit and vegetables that are imported from Dominica and Montserrat have a flavour that canned commodities inevitably lack.
