A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  He had little legal right to deliver such a pronouncement, and it is doubtful if he had at his command sufficient power to enforce his doctrine, but he made Europe pause, and before Europe was in a position to question its validity, the United States did possess enough power to protect a doctrine that had become an essential part of her policy. Russia and France held their hand, and in the British House of Commons George Canning was ‘saving face’ with the announcement that he had called ‘a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old’.

  That was in 1823; eighteen months later, in return for a recompense of 150 million francs, France recognized the independence of Haiti; the eastern part of the island dissolved its links with Spain and the area, in terms of national allegiance, settled into the pattern it was to maintain until the end of the century.

  It has been already said that the social structure of each island has been determined by its experiences or lack of experiences during the Napoleonic Wars. The French and Spanish islands, because of their closer involvement in the war and because of their defeat in it, suffered the greatest change. St Domingue was lost to France for ever, so were St Lucia, Dominica and Grenada. Spain lost Trinidad and the eastern section of Santo Domingo. She retained Cuba and Puerto Rico. They were no longer of the same value to her, since she had lost Mexico and Peru and therefore no longer needed bastions to protect her treasure fleets, but the taste for Havana tobacco which had been acquired by the English during those few months of occupancy was to bring the islands considerable prosperity during the nineteenth century. Cuban sugar was to find a big market in the United States, and Cuban rum, which is lighter in body and texture than Jamaican and Barbadian rum, was found to have a distinctive and agreeable flavour which later was to become the basis of a number of pleasant cocktails, in particular the Daiquiri.

  Spain’s share of the New World was now limited to these two islands. For the eastern section of Santo Domingo there was to begin a long and confused period of divided rule which is not yet ended. Sometimes it was linked to Haiti, sometimes it was not. Throughout the nineteenth century it remained Spanish-speaking and Spanish in tone and manner.

  Trinidad, under Spanish rule, had been a neglected dependency. Up to 1783 a single vessel belonging to a Dutch house in St Eustatius, making two or three trips a year, was sufficient for its entire trade. In that year, however, a Grenadian, a M. de St Laurent, strongly advised Madrid to develop its potentialities. A little was done, but even so, it had a population of only seven thousand when the British captured it. Its development presented a considerable problem to the British because, with the slave trade ended, it was difficult to find a labour force to work on its estates. Resource was eventually had to indented East Indian labour, an equivalent of the old engagé system. The imported East Indians worked on a five-year contract, and many decided to stay on when it expired. They were made grants of land, some of which were to prove highly profitable, as they lay on land that contained oil; the development of the Trinidad oil fields at the end of the century laid the basis of a number of fortunes among Indian families. There was also a considerable Chinese immigration. Trinidad’s society is international in a sense that no other island’s is, and when in the 1950s the project was formed of creating a federation of the British West Indian islands, Trinidad was chosen as its capital. The project, however, was not implemented.

  East Indian labour was also introduced into St Vincent, whose Carib population had been deported to British Honduras and in which, because of the ferocity of the Caribs, colonization had been slow and slight. But here most of the Indians returned to their own country when their contracts had expired; the visitor there today will see few signs of East Indian features, the long straight black hair, the straight noses and thin lips, the small hands and feet. It is probably because of its late development that the family atmosphere in St Vincent is so strong, and the planter class so white. St Vincent is a very charming little island; it never raised sugar to the extent that the other islands did, its main products being arrowroot and sea island cotton. It has suffered grievously from the volcanic explosions of Soufrière.

  The situation in Grenada and St Lucia was highly different. Both felt the full force of the Revolution. Almost the entire original planter class in Grenada was exterminated. The survivors were absentee landlords who had no wish to return to homes that were homes no longer, and many of the actual owners of land were the heirs of revolutionary victims; they had no emotional stake in the country. St Lucia was less affected because it was under British occupation longer and Hugues’ occupancy was short-lived, but a great many of the planters perished. There did remain, however, a very definite number of white-skinned planters. Its family links with Martinique were close, and cousins came across to take over estates that had been abandoned. The atmosphere of the island is still markedly French; the peasants speak a French patois; the island is predominantly Roman Catholic, the names of the leading families are French – de Vaux, Castenet, Michellet. Barnard is one of the few English names. In Grenada also, the peasants speak a French patois, but the island is only half Roman Catholic, and fewer of the surnames of the leading families are French. It may be inferred that under British ownership there was less the resumption of an old régime than the organization of a new. Castries; the capital of St Lucia, has been gutted by fire so often that there are few remaining signs of its eighteenth-century past. But Grenada, in spite of its exposure to the terror, is architecturally one of the least damaged of the islands. The harbour of St George’s, with its red-brick, red-tiled warehouses and Georgian houses, is one of the loveliest in the area. Sir William Young in 1790 described St George’s as ‘a handsome town, built chiefly of brick, consisting of many good houses. It is divided by a ridge, which running into the sea forms on one side a carenage and on the other the bay. There is the bay town where there is a handsome square and market place and the carénage town where the chief mercantile houses are situated, the ships lying land-locked and in deep water close to the wharf. On the ridge just above the road of communication between the towns stands the church, and on the promontory or buffhead of the ridge stands a large old fort. It is built of freestone, is very substantial if not scientifically constructed and contains an entire regiment. Another regiment is quartered in the new barracks on Richmond Hill.’

  It does not look so very different now, and in 1956 when the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation decided to film a novel called Island in the Sun, which had achieved a certain measure of popularity, a group of photographers were sent down to take stills of the various islands. When the producer, Mr Darryl Zanuck, saw those of Grenada, he said, ‘This is the place,’ and most of the film was shot there.

  It might have been expected that Dominica, lying as it does between Martinique and Guadeloupe, would have been deeply affected by the Revolution, but Dominica has been always an exception. It is one of the loveliest of the islands, but also the unluckiest; nothing has ever quite gone right for it. Ceded to Britain in 1763, its start as a British colony was inauspicious. A number of estates were sold to Englishmen, but none of this purchase money was used to benefit the economy of the island; it went instead into the coffers of Queen Charlotte’s dowry. The island was too mountainous to make the cultivation of sugar profitable, except on the windward coast, and owing to the number of its rivers there was no road across or round the island; transportation to the leeward coast had to be made by ship. It is a very rainy island. The soil is fertile and its fruit is exquisite, particularly the lime. But owing to the lack of roads it had to be ‘headed’ to the coast. The rains were continually washing away such roads and bridges as there were. Trade was not made easier by the existence of a Carib colony on the windward coast.

  Dominica has not profited from British ownership. Before the American War of Independence it served illegally as an entrepôt, French and Spaniards acquiring slaves and manufactured goods in return for bullion and commodities, while Americans sent down timber and lives
tock in return for rum and molasses. This trade collapsed when the war began.

  Its sympathies were with the French; even in its neutral period it had had a number of French settlers. Its priests were appointed by their superiors in Martinique.

  When France joined the side of the rebel colonies, the French inhabitants entered the fort under the guise of friendship, made the sentries drunk, and spiked the cannon. The island did not gain from the take-over, its cattle being destroyed to feed French troops, a fate that was to be repeated during the Second World War. Her only trade at this time was with St Eustatius, in Dutch bottoms. This trade ceased as a result of Rodney’s action. While St Lucia was flourishing as a British possession, Dominica’s propinquity to Guadeloupe made commerce difficult for her during the first half of the Napoleonic period, and during the second half, when the Caribbean had become of minor strategic importance, she was overlooked.

  Perhaps that has been her problem always. Stationed between two islands of great importance, she has belonged to neither. She should have been French; as it is, she has never known where she belonged, not even as a British island. When the British Lesser Antilles were divided between the Leewards and the Windwards, Dominica was first of all classified as one of the Leewards, with Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat. But later, in the 1940s, she requested to be included in the Windward group, with their mountainous islands and French background. But even then she felt separate and apart. She was the hinge between the Leewards and Wind- wards, but she belonged to neither. Financially she has always been a liability, and yet she has appealed to the imagination in a way that larger and more prominent islands have never done. She has ‘the fatal gift of beauty’. She has attracted artists, intellectuals, eccentrics, misfits generally; a phrase has indeed grown up in the islands, ‘typical Dominica’. Her mountains are too high for her size; they attract the rain and there is not enough territory to absorb the rain. That is the explanation that is given usually, but there is more to it than that.

  To the north of Dominica is Guadeloupe, to the south Martinique. They are sister islands with different histories and different physical conformation – Martinique is mountainous throughout, traversed by fertile valleys, Guadeloupe is in fact two islands, one mountainous, the other flat. In 1815 they returned to their allegiance to their mother country in very different moods. Guadeloupe had been subject to the terror and the rule of slaves; nearly all of the planters who had been resident when Victor Hugues set up his guillotine had perished by it. The survivors were absentee proprietors who, like those in Grenada, had no wish to return after twenty years to a country that was completely different. They were content to sell out or to have their estates managed by agents. In a very short time the island had passed into the hands of limited companies based on Paris and Bordeaux. It was a prosperous island but it had no landed aristocracy.

  Martinique, on the other hand, had had its landed families cushioned by the British occupation. Sitting in the hills, managing their estates, they had dreamed of their return to Paris, but when they did return they were disappointed. It was no longer the Paris of their youth. Their old friends were dead or impoverished. The court of Louis XVIII was vulgar, the nouveaux riches were ostentatious. The young who had listened to their parents’ stories about the wonders of Versailles were disappointed. The climate was bleak; life was more pleasant on the other side of the Atlantic, and so they returned to their estates and the administration of the island stayed in the hands of the six leading families. They grew richer every year; the wealth of the island was not wasted on absentee landowners and spent in Paris. They intermarried, they were as exclusive as the most proper Bostonians, they entertained each other at large Sunday luncheons; the Rhum St James and the Rhum Negrita were honoured wherever rum was drunk, and under the shadow of Mont Pelé the city of Saint-Pierre waxed in charm and beauty, in culture and graciousness of living.

  Certain islands had suffered little change; the British Leewards had been protected by the trade winds, so had Barbados. Jamaica too had been immune. She was out of reach of Victor Hugues; the Spanish in Cuba were too weak to trouble her; and St Domingue had enough problems of her own. Jamaica was only affected by the war because she was, in early days, a base of operations against St Domingue, and during the period of Leclerc’s ill-starred campaign she provided a retreat for his officers. Lady Nugent’s journal deals largely with the period of truce, but when war is finally resumed between France and Britain, the temper of her diary does not change. She is concerned as much as ever with parties, outbreaks of fever and the moral lapses of the young British planters and officials. Life went on very much as it had before; and when the news of Waterloo reached the Caribbean there was a confident assumption on the part of land-owners and administrators alike that commerce could now be resumed pleasantly and profitably without the inconveniences of war, that the nineteenth century would repeat the eighteenth century only with a general amelioration of amenities. Hardly anyone seems to have realized that the bell had tolled for the sugar islands and the phrase ‘rich as a Creole’ was soon to be extinct.

  The abolition of the slave trade was the first nail in the coffin. It was a slow process. The French Revolution had broken out at the very moment when Wilberforce and his followers were beginning to influence public thought. Many liberal-minded persons were affected by the excesses in the French colonies; and the planters found ready support for their argument that slavery and the slave trade were essential to the prosperity of the sugar islands. The first bill that was introduced into the British Parliament to prevent the further importation of slaves into the British West Indies was defeated by a majority of two to one, but the first step had been taken. The issue was hotly argued; the planters had powerful support, and bills that were passed in the House of Commons were thrown out by the House of Lords. A great many meetings were addressed and a great many pamphlets printed; these pamphlets are not reliable as witnesses to the conditions that existed at this time in the plantations. The abolitionists were as prejudiced as the anti-abolitionists, and many of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century books on the West Indies that are found in colonial libraries should be read with reservations.

  The abolition first of the slave trade, then of slavery itself, provides one of the few completely disinterested chapters in the history of mankind. Slavery is in itself a crime, and the organization of the slave trade is one of the major crimes committed by the Christian peoples of Europe, yet it cannot be repeated too often that the right of the conqueror to enslave those whom he has defeated had been accepted from earliest times. John Hawkins never thought he was a criminal when he bought slaves on the Guinea coast. The abolition of the slave trade, on the other hand, was an act of sheer benevolence, of public-spirited, Christian fellow feeling. It was in everybody’s interest that the slave trade should continue and the institution of slavery be maintained. Its abolition was a very costly operation for the countries concerned, and eventually it destroyed the prosperity of the sugar islands.

  To Denmark lies the honour of being the first country to abolish the trade. In 1792 she issued a royal mandate that after 1802 the traffic should cease in the Danish colonies; in 1794 the United States of America forbade their subjects to engage in the trade to foreign countries, and a little later prohibited the importation of slaves into their own territories. Britain, by its bill of 1807, forbidding the landing of any slave in the colonies after March 1808, felt that the problem had been solved, but she soon found that she had only opened the door for the privateers. The profits in an illegal slave trade were soon so enormous that the traders estimated that if one voyage in three was successful, the operation would show a profit; and if the trade was regarded as a dealing in contraband rather than a felony, the traders were well content to pay their fine and hope to escape detection next time. Three years later a bill was passed, declaring that the trade was a felony, punishable by transportation. Up to a point this tactic was successful, but only up
to a point.

  In the meantime, other nations were working on parallel tracks. The subject was discussed at the first Congress of Vienna, before the Hundred Days, and it was accepted in principle that the trade should be abolished as soon as possible, but each nation was left free to make her own arrangements. France and Britain agreed that no foreigner should introduce slaves into the French colonies and that the French themselves should cease the trade after 1819. This gap was allowed because the French still cherished the hope that they would recover Haiti, for which a new supply of slaves would be required, the abolition of slavery itself being still a subject that no country was prepared to face.

  Negotiations were conducted between the various countries, Britain paying £300,000 to the Portuguese and £400,000 to the Spaniards in compensation for their losses through the ending of the trade. The Dutch and Swedes abandoned their share in the traffic, and in 1831 Britain and France agreed on a mutual right of search on certain seas. Officially the slave trade was at an end, but the fact of slavery remained.

  Indeed, in many ways, the period between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves was for the slaves themselves the worst period of all. There was now a definite lack of slaves, and because there was no chance of acquiring more slaves by legitimate means, the planters grossly overworked the slaves they had. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the population of the West Indian islands has risen at a rate that has alarmed sociologists, but during the eighteenth century the population was less than static. In Jamaica in 1690 there were 40,000 slaves; between then and 1820 800,000 were imported, yet there were only 340,000 slaves on the island. This was due partly to the inequality in the numbers of the sexes, a third as many females being transported annually; firstly because polygamy existed in Africa, secondly because men were more likely to commit civil offences than women and consequently there were more male prisoners, thirdly because women became unfit for the slave market at an earlier age.