The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  A one-man river-mill looks very different from the elaborate arrowroot factories of St. Vincent, but the principle is the same.

  I stayed on at La Plaine until the Friday. Then, when it was finally decided to carry Lucie back to Roseau on a stretcher, I arranged to push on by myself along the coast to a point where I could cut in across the interior to the Imperial Road. It was a three days’ journey. One night I stopped at the police post at Castle Bruce, one night I spent at Marigot, back in civilization to the extent that I was in a village from which a surfaced road ran to a point from which I could take a launch to Roseau, to a point, that is to say, from which communication could be maintained with the outside world.

  I was six hours on the road the first day, seven hours on the second. During the second morning I passed through the Carib reserve, where survive, now peacefully making their canoes and plaiting their waterproof baskets, the thousand relicts of the once-warlike race that not only exterminated the original Indian settlers but resisted the British and French forces so effectively that the contesting powers agreed for a time to treat Dominica as neutral territory.

  In many ways the journey along the coast was a repetition of what I had seen already at La Plaine—a series of rivers running to the sea past ruined factories. Once Rosalie rum was famous; now at the river’s foot there is just a chimney and a crumbling aqueduct and a slatternly cluster of untended cottages. It was the same at St. Sauveur. It was the same at Castle Bruce; with the cliffs between the valleys rising straight out of the sea, their vegetation crushed and beaten by Atlantic gales, and the shrubs that crown them combed back tightly against the rocks like the crinkled hair of a mulatto girl. I saw nothing that I had not seen already at La Plaine or that from my four days at La Plaine I might not have guessed that I would see; but Matthew Arnold said of Byron’s poetry that to appreciate it you must judge it in the mass. The same thing is true of Dominica. You have to see it on foot and by the hour. Then, in terms of your own physical exhaustion, you can recognize how extensive has been the ruin there and how complete; how much, moreover, there was there to destroy.

  Economically the windward coast lies prostrate; at the same time it is not possible to travel day by day and hour after hour along its lovely valleys without being attracted to the casual friendliness of the life that is lived there now. No one bothers anyone. No one is rich, but they all get along, cultivating their small gardens in the mountains, working their one-man mills. The smallest village has its cricket pitch. It all had a garden effect, such as is rarely seen in villages on the leeward coast. The villagers are house-proud, as though the farther they had got away from the alien Western conditions to which they had been transported, the closer had they returned to the cleanliness and order of the bush. Native peoples are invariably clean in their own surroundings. Everyone that you pass along the road has a smile and a good morning.

  The police sergeant at Castle Bruce showed me his monthly charge-sheet. He had little crime, he said. In a large district he had had only one case of manslaughter in three years; there was little battery and assault; rape was unknown; robbery of houses rare; officially the worst and most general crime was praedial larceny, the robbing of crops and produce; but the chief entry in the ledger was the unusual offence of stupefying fish. The villagers rub bark over the streams, which has the effect of drugging the larger fish and making them easy prey. The shredded bark did not poison the large fish; but what merely drugs a big fish kills off the smaller fish and those forms of water life on which the big fish live; if the process were not discouraged, the rivers would soon be fishless.

  I arrived at Castle Bruce in the early afternoon. I had brought with me for my supper a tin of corned beef which I was proposing to embellish with produce from the local store. The police sergeant looked doubtful when I told him this. It was a Friday and I could get no bread, he said. ‘What about fruit?’ I asked. ‘Jelly nuts or pawpaws or bananas?’ Again he shook his head. He was doubtful, very doubtful.

  He sent his constable with me into the village. Its only store was run by a retired cricketer. Behind the shop was a freshly painted bungalow. Standing half-way up the hill, it was clearly the ‘Big House’ of the community.

  ‘You have heard of course of Mr. T. O. Murphy,’ said the constable. He spoke with awe.

  Murphy was coal black in a way that only a Barbadian can be. Such teeth as he still possessed were very white. He was powerful and short and stocky. His shop was adorned with relics of his career. A pair of batting gloves dangled above his door like scalps over the entrance to a Red Indian’s wigwam. There were pads in one corner of the veranda, and a bat leaned against the desk. It was an old bat, bound and pegged, but it told its story. There was a lovely spoon in the middle of its drive. That bat had hit many balls hard and far.

  It was by now half-past four. ‘What about a punch,’ I said. It was two punches later before I told him about my ungarnished supper. It is very rare for two cricketers not to like each other, and by then we were good friends. He shook his head, however, when I asked about buying jelly nuts. It was doubtful, very doubtful, he insisted. He turned towards the kitchen and shouted something out in patois. There was a scuffle of youthful feet. Anything that could be done would be done, I felt very sure.

  He took me round his property. It was very small, less than an acre, but it was thickly planted with every variety of local produce. His chief source of income, apart from his shop, was a mill for manioc. In many ways it was like the toutlemoi mill at La Pleine. There was the same one-man pedal for a grated wheel against which the root was fed through a hole in a wooden frame, but it was a more elaborate construction. There was an amateurish but apparently effective balance by which the pulp was pressed under the weight of stones. There was also a furnace composed of a large flat tayche—originally a cauldron from a sugar factory— broken in half over a charcoal fire. Here the dried starch was spread and sifted. Murphy did not cultivate manioc himself, but rented out the mill to his fellow villagers.

  We went back to the bungalow for a final punch. As we sat there sipping the white local rum, his emissaries one by one returned with news of failure. Three hours earlier I would not have believed it possible that the chance visitor to a West Indian village, however small, would find it difficult to buy local produce. I suppose the explanation is that not one visitor would pass that way a week, that not one visitor a month would not provide himself with all the food he needed, and that local economy was so accurately balanced that they only produced exactly what they needed for themselves. I could understand how their domestic economy must have been dislocated during World War II by the Free French from Martinique and Guadeloupe who insisted on a daily meat meal.

  On the next day I went through the Carib section. It looked no different. On the surface the life led there is identical with that which exists on either side. At one time they had a language of their own—or rather they had two languages, for the men spoke one language and the women spoke another, but very few of the original words are now in use. At one time they built a slightly different kind of cabin with a second floor under the roof on which they slept, but now they have adopted the familiar style. They are Roman Catholics, and they play cricket.

  They are very pacific nowadays. The corporal in charge of the police post at Saiybia told me that he had very little trouble with them. They enjoy their rum as much as the next man does, but they keep their squabbles to themselves. When a Carib feels the need to let off steam, he calls a friend across and exchanges a couple of punches with him, without rancour or ill temper. That and no more than that, and he feels a great deal better.

  They still make excellent canoes. I saw one under construction. Long and narrow, scooped from a single trunk, it was being dried over a fire with the inside filled with boulders to prevent the wood from shrinking. I also saw a local craftsman at work on one of the baskets that are in universal use throughout the island. They are made in two layers, with large leaves arranged between t
o make them waterproof. The cover is decorated by the weaving of different-coloured fibres. Their only disadvantage for the northener is the weakness of the handle, which is, of course, no disadvantage to the islander, who carries his luggage not by the handle but on his head. I bought one of the baskets, a 2 ft. 6 in. by 1 ft. 6 in. affair, for seven shillings. I tried to talk to the man who made it, but he spoke only patois. I was equally unsuccessful with the councillor to whom the corporal introduced me. A short, dapper little man with a drooping black moustache, he looked like a Maupassant character out of the original Albin Michel edition. He spoke a little English, and I could understand what he said to me. But his vocabulary was small, and I could not be sure he was understanding what I said. He was a courtly, gracious man, and he appeared to be in agreement with me. His replies, however, rarely bore much relation to my original enquiries.

  On my return to Roseau I was to learn that an English motion-picture company was planning to stage in Dominica a section of a film about Christopher Columbus, starring Fredric March, for which two galleons, exact replicas of the Santa Maria and the Pinta, had been constructed in Barbados at a cost of thirty thousand pounds, and that a team of experts had selected as the most photogenic a beach near Castle Bruce. One of the experts, Basil Keyes, was an old wartime friend with whom I had often swum in the Bain Militaire at Beyrouth. He told me that Dominica had been chosen as the site of Columbus’s first landing in the interests of historical accuracy, since it was the only island in which the Carib population still survives; a decision which shows that film executives grow to pattern, and that J. Arthur Rank’s London studios are related by ties closer than those of blood to Goldwyn’s Hollywood. Since his arrival, Keyes had realized that complete historical accuracy was unlikely to be achieved, since the mid-Bahamas, where Columbus landed, were dead flat, whereas Dominica’s cliffs on the windward coast rise sheer, since the coconut palm had not then been introduced in the Caribbean, and since it was not by the warlike Caribs but the docile Arawak Indians that the Spaniards were made welcome. Keyes was accepting these facts with equanimity. He had made films before; he knew that historical accuracy is a question of what your audience knows. On one point only he insisted. On no account must a breadfruit tree appear. All the world had seen Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Everyone knew about the Bounty’s business in Tahiti. He was also concerned as to whether the Catholic priests would allow their flocks to appear in the attire in which Columbus had been received. ‘Tellement nue had been Labat’s startled description of a seventeenth-century Carib. Keyes asked the opinion of the officer in charge of the police. ‘There is only one way to deal with Caribs,’he was told. ‘Don’t give them any rum until they’ve done their job.’

  A few months later I received the following letter from Elma Napier’s daughter—Daphne Agar:

  I realize with horror that I promised to write you if the ‘Columbus’ company came here—well, they did come and I didn’t write! Neither did I go round to Woodford Hill and watch them at their antics, which were considerable. I was a little shocked at the ‘goings on’ and at the untold gold which was scattered around the Northern District—fine for the Northern District, of course, but no one out here will ever believe again that England is in any financial difficulty. The Caribs made an average of £12 per day per family, so were only too delighted to take their clothes off or do anything else anyone wanted—they don’t see money like that from year’s end to year’s end. Every car in the district was commandeered, so no private individual could travel at all. The people who catered for the sailors made fortunes; also the purveyor of Cola, for every actor averaged about five a day, and not one of them had an opener so the beach was strewn with broken bottles. They had perfect weather and the shots they took are reported excellent, but as the conclusion everyone reached was that they would never pass the censor, all the effort is probably in vain. The galleons never came here, and as I expect you read, the Santa Maria got burned the other day.

  The Carib section is bounded on the north by a stream so trivial that you would not recognize it as a boundary. The landscape is no different after you have passed. Valley succeeds valley. You climb and you descend. There is a cluster of cottages at each valley’s foot and the creeper-covered chimney of an abandoned factory. There is a church and there is a cricket pitch, and women are washing out their clothes beside the stream. Villagers pass you on the road, each with his basket on his head. Mile after mile it is the same, and then suddenly at the foot of a sharp descent there is a river broader than the rest, across which is flung a very narrow one-plank-wide suspension bridge. You cross it and you are in another world; a broad and surfaced road stretches on either side of you.

  To the right the road runs to the coast, turns north at Marigot, skirts Elma Napier’s property at Pointe Baptiste, cutting across to Portsmouth. To the left it leads to the unfinished road.

  A car had been ordered to meet me at Hatton Garden, the point where the track joins the road. I was on time; the car was not. I was tired and I was thirsty. On the opposite side of the road was a large plantation of grapefruit trees. My guide pointed it out to me. He also pointed to a group of girls who were coming down the road, ‘When they pass, I get fruit,’ I thought he said. I hoped I had misheard him. But I had not. The moment the girls had passed he made for the plantation; he looked disappointed when I called him back, his face bearing an expression which seemed to say, ‘I thought you had more sense.’

  Presently the car arrived. I was spending the night in Marigot in a hotel rest-house. I arrived in the late afternoon. A fleet of fishing-boats had just come in and the bay was crowded. To my surprise everyone was talking English. By one of those caprices of history which make the study of the islands so perpetually fascinating, Marigot is as English as Barbados, with no French patois spoken, and a Methodist church upon the hill. Charlesworth Ross suggested as an explanation that a number of Antiguans who had originally come across to work at Portsmouth on a forestry project had later moved to Marigot to avoid malaria. Certainly there is little of the atmosphere of Dominica there.

  Not that it is, by any means, without its charm. Like every village on the windward coast, or for that matter like every village throughout the whole West Indies, it carries its own relics of departed glory—the walls still stand of the stone house that once stored sugar, and, thirty yards out from the waterfront, project the flight of steps which once supported the jetty which fed the ships. But Marigot even now has a prosperous air of bustle. It has a cinema, and a local industry in the form of pottery, which supplies the island with earthenware. Its store was well stocked with liquor; girls were selling cassava cakes and bread and grapefruit. There were men playing dominoes along the sidewalk.

  The site of the abandoned airfield was a mile away. I walked across to it. There it stretched, a broad, long avenue cut through a coconut plantation. Beside it in broad, high piles were the stones with which it had been intended to pave the runway. The tangle of grass and weeds was already ankle-high. There was as little to show here as there had been fifteen years earlier in Coral Gables that many thousands of pounds had been wasted. On the near side of the airstrip were the ruins of a sugar factory. There were the familiar chimneys, the rusted machinery, the crumbling aqueduct. There was an ironically symbolic contrast in this juxtaposition of an ancient and a modern failure.

  I returned by road. I could have motored to Portsmouth and taken the launch to Roseau, but I had already made the trip by launch. I was curious, moreover, to go over the unfinished section of the Imperial Road. It was all cut out, I had been told. Much of it was already paved. There were only five miles to be completed.

  Peter Fleming had been over the road with Louis de Verteuil a short while earlier. He had remarked to Louis that it was ‘a nice little walk’, but then Peter Fleming is not a person to magnify discomfort. He looks at discomfort through the large lenses of his glasses. He is a younger and a much fitter man than I am; what I would regard as downright dange
rous would be merely inconvenient to him. He went, Louis told me, on a rainless day. He also followed for the first part of his journey not the line of the modern road but the old Carib trail; and the Caribs were sensible people who did not cause themselves any more trouble than they needed. They knew that the longest way round can often be the quickest in the end. I look forward to reading what Peter Fleming has to say about the unfinished section of the Imperial Road, if he considers the details of so puny an expedition worth recording, but nothing he may say about ‘a nice little walk’ will alter my own opinion of that road. It was worse than a duckboard track at Passchendaele through a waste of shell-holes.

  It took me two and three-quarter hours to do five miles. It was raining all the time. I lost count of the rivers that I waded through and slithered over. Down the sides of the valleys, where it is planned eventually to bridge the footpath, it is so narrow, so overgrown, and with so deep a drop on the other side, that you have to consider each step with the greatest caution or your foot will land on the green roof of a ravine. It is hard to distinguish between a solid root and a broken branch. The planned stretch of the road is either a greasy surface or a weed-covered accumulation of sharp stones. ‘The road is sliding,’ the guide kept saying, and he spoke the truth. Every so often the road had been blocked by landslides. We did not pass a single villager. In the solitude it loved, the siffleur montagne emitted its sharp, shrill cry. There was one superb spectacle along the road, an avenue cut straight as a ruled pencil line right through the forest. On either side of it the tall trees towered as it stretched in narrowing perspective towards the succession of mountain ranges that form Roseau’s background. But I would not for the sake of it make that journey twice. I have never felt more personal emotion for an inanimate object than I did for John Archbold’s station-wagon when I saw it waiting for me at the point where the track became a road again.