by Aaron Thier
“I feel a sort of inward discontent and restlessness that are perfectly unnatural to me—at moments, when I exert myself, I go even beyond my usual spirits, but the instant I give way, a sort of despondency takes possession of my mind. I argue with myself against it, but all in vain.”
“It helps to take a nap during the heat of the day. A kind of siesta, if you like.”
She was wearing a large, lacy dress that hid her feet. No wonder she was hot! But there was no reasoning with her. I was dressed inappropriately myself, in a flannel suit, and I was sweating heavily even though the cold plantain wine was very refreshing.
“Add to these discomforts the great immorality of the European population,” she continued, “debased by ignorance, licentiousness, and low, frivolous, and groveling pursuits.”
To this I had no response. I stared at her over the lip of my wineglass.
I was saved from this conversation by the dinner gong, but my luck didn’t improve. At the table, I was seated next to a man named James Cavendish, an even more committed monologuist than poor Lady Nugent. His only theme was “the color question,” in particular as it applied to the treatment of laborers on the Big Anna® plantations he managed. This was just the kind of incriminating garbage I wanted to hear, but in the event I could barely stand to listen to him. Mr. Cavendish’s contention was that locals were better off working in the cane fields than they would have been if they were left to fend for themselves. He seemed convinced that cane cutters lived idyllic lives.
“There are always those dissatisfied with their condition,” he said, “whether because of the frustration of their personal ambitions or because of some innate defect in their character. But the great majority of the islanders are as happy as innocents in the garden.”
He spoke in a wheedling and pedantic tone, as if trying to convince himself that what he said was true, and either he refused to make eye contact or else his eyes didn’t point in the same direction. In other ways, too, he was a strange sight. He was bald in front, but he wore his hair very long in back and on the sides. This, combined with his small round spectacles, made him look disconcertingly like Ben Franklin, which irritated me. I have always been an admirer of Big Ben.
“Are the laborers of St. Renard capable of becoming happier in consequence of the gift of liberty?” he continued. “Are they capable of appreciating and enjoying its blessings, or would they even exchange their present condition for the turbulence, the dangers, the insecurity of a savage state of independence?”
I was finding it very difficult to dissemble my anger and disgust. Thankfully, the first course was served promptly. And what a first course! It consisted exclusively of beef: baked beef cheeks; boiled rump roast; an unidentifiable cut called “chine”; tongue and tripe baked into a pie with sweet minced herbs, suet, and currants; a Spanish dish called olió podrido, which was made from the head of the poor animal; and a dish of marrow bones.
To be polite, I ate little bites of everything, and even though I tried to pace myself, I was full by the time London came to clear my plates. I’d also had two glasses of plantain wine, a glass of claret, and a few sips of something called “mobbie.” If I hadn’t had so much practice drinking with Tripoli students that fall, I’d have been unconscious.
London and a few other waiters—a woman named Phinea and two men named Quaw and Bristol—now brought the second course, which consisted of two pork dishes, a dish of boiled chickens, a shoulder of mutton, a loin of veal, a shoat, three turkeys, two capons, two hens, four ducklings, eight turtledoves, and three rabbits. All this carnage! I found myself craving a bit of lettuce or a carrot. There were also several more elaborate dishes, including the shoulder of a young goat dressed in a sauce made from the animal’s own blood; a whole kid roasted with a kind of stuffing or pudding in its stomach; and a suckling pig in a spicy sauce made from brains, sage, nutmeg, and claret.
Mr. Cavendish had emptied a huge tumbler of brandy and put away two ducklings and a dove, and now his face was brick red and his eyes had drifted even farther apart. He was gesturing at London and Quaw.
“I see them take up their baskets,” he went on, “as if it were perfectly optional whether they took them up or left them there.”
But now, maybe because I’d had so much to drink, I lost my temper:
“They haven’t got any baskets! They’re just doing a job, like anyone!”
A cockeyed smile crept over his face. It was the smile of a man who knows that the sun revolves around the earth.
“I can hardly persuade myself that it’s really work that they’re about,” he said softly.
I tried to ignore him, and I made a special effort to thank London when he came to top off my glass of plantain wine. I was trying to thank all the servants by name whenever they did anything, but I kept getting their names confused.
“They saunter along with their hands dangling . . .” Mr. Cavendish continued.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
“They stop to chat with everyone they meet, and if they meet no one, they stand still and look round to examine whether there is nothing to be seen that can amuse them.”
But London, who must have been listening, had a solution. With a few deft movements, he pulled Mr. Cavendish’s collar open and emptied a dish of chicken fat into his hair and down his back.
There was a moment of dreadful stillness as Mr. Cavendish struggled to process this astonishing development, and then he leapt to his feet and knocked his chair over. He was too slow: London had danced out of reach and was already on the other side of the table. Mr. Cavendish was left standing there, his long hair slick with chicken fat and his pink gumball eyes starting from their sockets. He literally wet himself with rage before charging out of the room.
I started laughing and looked around for someone to share this delightful moment with, but no one seemed to have noticed. Mr. Price was now explaining to London the many virtues of sea bathing, Lady Nugent was carrying on about the climate, and a man in a dressing gown was shouting about the maroons. Everyone was in his or her own world.
And there was more food to come. Phinea and Quaw and Bristol were carrying out dishes of ham, pickled oysters, caviar, anchovies, olives, some custards and sauces, and preserves made from plantains, bananas, and something called “gnaver.” There was also a plate of dried neat’s tongue, which was a little like beef jerky, and a bowl of dehydrated caviar that Mr. Price called botargo.
Everyone was talking at once, and everyone was blind drunk. The man in the bathing suit vomited into a trash can. Several people had fallen asleep.
Suddenly a wiry little fellow in a gray slouch hat and emerald vest grabbed my sleeve, jerked his head at Quaw, and hissed, “Do you think they’ve heard the revived name of Haiti, by which San Domingo is called at present?”
I felt like I was going crazy. I asked London for another glass of plantain wine.
“London!” I shouted. “London! I really admire your courage.”
“Don’t know what you mean, boss.”
I winked at him, or at least I tried to. It would have made me a lot happier if I could be sure that he knew I wasn’t a racist, but how do you say it?
Dessert was cheesecake, cream puffs, bananas, watermelon, prickly pears, anchovy pears, custard apples, and pineapples.
I called London over and whispered, “I don’t really belong here, you know. I’m not one of them.”
He poured my plantain wine without looking at me.
“I’m not a racist!”
“Me neither, boss.”
So I let it go. What did he care anyway? The plantain wine was singing in my head, and outside the wind had come up. The dark crowns of the palm trees were dancing against a blue-black sky.
A sturdy middle-aged man sat down in Mr. Cavendish’s place and introduced himself as Richard Ligon. He explained that he was doing some consulting work for Big Anna®, and somehow I got the idea that he was a botanist.
“So what’s a gnaver?”
I asked him.
“The seeds of the gnaver, or guava, have this property: that when they have passed through the body, wheresoever they are laid down, they grow. These fruits have different tastes, some rank, some sweet, according to the several constitutions they have passed through.”
“That’s crazy,” I muttered. “A seed’s a seed. What’s the matter with everybody?”
I couldn’t figure out how any of the other guests were connected with Big Anna®. There was no talk of company business.
“Does anybody know about the Field Studies Program?” I said. “Does anybody know how my students are getting on? I’d maybe like to head out there and check on them. Does anybody know Megan?”
Nobody heard me, or nobody cared. The man in the emerald vest grabbed my shirt once again and said, “The late Pope gave these islands and the content hereof to the Catholic sovereigns of Castile and Aragon, as is certified in writing, and you may see the documents if you should so desire!”
A few minutes later, I heard another man mention “that Indian-lover Morehead Tripoli,” but John Morehead Tripoli had been dead for more than two hundred and fifty years.
Little did I know that the most mystifying and upsetting part of the evening was still to come. When we were through with dessert, Mr. Price rose and clapped his hands. It was now time, he said, for the ladies to adjourn to the withdrawing room.
And so they went, one after another, in silence and even with a kind of dread. When they were gone, a troop of female servants entered from the kitchen. They carried bottles of rum and brandy and Madeira. It was heartbreaking to see their forced smiles. The rest of the men shoved their chairs back and roared for more drink. One older fellow, sweating bullets in a black wool waistcoat and wool trousers, collapsed with a groan, and nobody moved to help him. Boxes of cigars were circulating, and bottles of “Kill-Devil” rum, and someone was playing a maniacal, seesawing waltz on the accordion. Later I was certain that I recognized former House majority leader Tom DeLay, but by then I’d had so much plantain wine that I could hardly stand.
“Now to close up all that can be said of fruits,” Mr. Ligon told me, “I must name the pine, or pineapple, for in that single name, all that is excellent in a superlative degree, for beauty and taste, is totally and summarily included . . .”
And so he continued, on and on, while the servant girls danced and the room filled with smoke and the world folded up around me.
I woke up in a big bed on the second floor. I never found out how I’d gotten there, but it seemed impossible that I’d made it on my own power. I was relieved to find myself alone and the house quiet.
I meant to sneak away—I thought I’d walk back to San Cristobal if I had to—but I ran into Mr. Price on my way out. He was wearing a nightgown and white silk breeches, and his big hard belly was mounded up in drifts and ridges on his abdomen. It looked like it had been sculpted that way and baked in a kiln.
He insisted that I join him for breakfast, and I didn’t have the strength to refuse. I had to sit there as he drank two bottles of porter and wolfed down a leg of mutton. Pieces of glass and hunks of meat and bone lay all over the floor, and the man in the black wool waistcoat was still lying where he’d fallen. Was he dead? Bristol was poking at him with a mop.
Mr. Price himself was very cheerful. Evidently he thought his dinner had been a great success.
“And you, young man,” he said to me. “Remember that shareholders in the Royal African Company are always welcome in my house.”
I went outside and sat down on the steps. From there I could see the bright blue Caribbean Sea, ruffled slightly in the morning breeze, and the coral reef just offshore. I put my head in my hands and tried to gather myself. I was grateful for the violent sun, which seemed to quiet my nerves a little bit, and for the refreshing sea breeze.
After a while, London came up the hill from what I assumed were his own quarters. Seeing me in this wretched condition, and maybe remembering that I’d tried to be friendly to him the night before, he brought me a little tin bucket of water and sat down next to me.
“I am not happy with my life here, man. But it’s a change coming.”
“I hope so.”
“It’s a change coming,” he said again. “It have a lot of angry people in the island and soon we go do something.”
Excerpted from
A True & Exact Historie of These Ilands of the West Indies, with an Account of the Carwak Indians, and Observations upon the Newlie-Discover’d Iland of Saint Reynard, or Guanahani
by
John Morehead Tripoli
CHAPTER 7th
Maroon’d on Saint Reynard ~ Frensy Feavor ~ Carwak Indians
Their Manner of Spending Time ~ The Bloody Flux ~ Monkie upon a Chain ~ Vortex of Dissipation ~Yarico ~ Castrat’d by Land Crabs
We were put off that floating Coffin the ship Tatterdemalion about Noon, there being at that tyme 12 of us, including myself, who was the onlie Officer, and such a gang of stew’d and blackburnt scarcrows has ne’er been seen. Theyr was not a Man among us but was stricken with Agues, Feavors, Rotten Limbs, Contry Disease, &c., half or about 6 being so seek they would not rise from the sand, except if it were to scream & run about, tearing at theyr hare, and such is the Madness which is occazioned by these Frensy Feavors that a young Sailor this day with a short knife absolutely castrated himself & was dead as a haring by Sun set. Being very seek myself & nearly starv’d, I cant recall but one half of all that befell us that day, for I was in torments, pursue’d verily by Ghosts phantomes & spirits, and did repent of my actions aboard the shippe, on account of which I was landed heare. In all that day we did not shift more than 10 ft. from the Ocean See.
But tho I have said that on this day I was Seek, and hardlie expect’d to see the Sun rise, but the next day I was well and now survey’d all that I saw about me, being well-pleased by Saint Reynard that greene isle, esp. by the Coco Tree which grew there in abundance. But hardlie had I collect’d my Wits and roused my companions /, tho two had died in the night, and were sweld like Drown’d Carion by the heat of the Climate / but we had Guests, viz. about 10 of the Carwak Indians, who live upon this the iland of Saint Reynard tho they be all but extinct on many of the other West India illands. They were quite naked with not even that strip of linnen to conceal what decency forbids us to expose. We held our posishun, as indeede we must, for wee were cutt off in our retreat by the See, and the waves, & by seekness, but wee gave evidence of our extreame weakness by the circumstance that a Young Sailor /, being the verry same Hapless Youth who on board shippe was punish’d for his part in the Mutiny by having all his teeth brok’n out / chanc’d to dye at that instant tumbling into the sand so that our whole number was now melted down to about 8, and most of us in a verry weakly condition indeed.
In as little time as a Girl might lose her Maidenhead we were surrounded & all things being hopeless I suddenly took hart & thanked Heaven in the expectation of now being dispatch’d to Eternity, my sufferings end’d at last, for which end I now in eagerness heartily composed my soul. Yet now I had a great Surprize, namely that the Carwak chief address’d me in my own tongue, and bid me well-come to Guanahani, which is how the Carwak call Saint Reynard. He had learnt English I know not how, and also spoak French which he had learnt off the boucaniers who infest the iland at a sertain season. Also as I must not omit to mension that one of our number /, a Sailor nam’d Brigg /, being Extremely Fat, & Corpulent, & no more able to support the fatigues and Excessive heat than snow the sunshine, dyed as we spoke with this Carwak chief, his Desolution hasten’d by that dreadfull Distemper the bloody flux, which was now come among us, and our hole number now reduc’d to I think about 7.
The Carwak are now grown verry few, because of the Inhuman Cruelties inflict’d upon them by the Spaniard, and in the worst of tymes are reduc’d to these theyr onlie amusements, namely, Lamentation and Toaping. Firstly, they drink Perino, which is a spirituous liquor made from the Cassavie / the Cassavie
as I have discribed is a Poysonus Shrub or Bush, but from the rut can be obtained a farinaceous substance which is also theyr chief food, and supplys the want of bread /, and secondly they have a grate love for Kildevil, this being a strong liquor which is made from the dregs and feculence of the sugar boylers and which they have from the Boucaniers, who bringe it from the other ilands to trade with them for the Ghost Apple, of which I will say much in time. Also they drink Mobbie and Oui-cou.
Despite the grate bounty of the iland, where, as it seem’d to me, Nothing is wanting that Nature can afford, many of the Carwak do truly die of affamation, if not of Ilnness, for they say that the iland is all over run by Annimals of all kinds, viz the Goat, Wild Hogge, and others, which trampel theyr gardens wherein they produse the Cassavie, and dye from eating of it, and further, these Annimals not having existed in the island before the European came, the Carwak do not believe them eatable, tho I believe all Quadrepedes are eatable, tho they be frivivorous or Man-eaters. Another thing I will say upon this subject, is that, tho the Carwak profess’d themselves hungrie, yet I did find myself well-nourish’d during my days with them, for often there was spred out before me such Frutes, namely the prickled apple, queene pine, & Zapote, that made one composition of Charm and Ambrosia.
In the Carwak village I now again relapsed, and was verry Seek, as before, but the Chief gave me to drink the ground dried pisle of the Green Turtle, and by this I was cured, at least for the day. The girls treat’d me kindly also and I was much taken with theyr charms. They nursed me & bathed me & never in all my time in the West India ilands was I so happy, for who would not undergo a little Pain to see the Pretty Girls sigh for their sufferings? I will also say, that, though they are call’d in Englande the Troublesome Sex, on the iland they are the most gracious & smiling Angeles, and trulie the most beautiful I had seen since leaving Englande, having been none too favourbly impress’d by the Pumpkin-colour’d whores I had seen upon other ilands in that tropick Sea. Let prudes and Coquets say what they will, but I b’lieve there are grate practical arguments to plead in favour of going Quite Naked, as they do, for to a Natural State is annex’d a superior mobility.
