A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  ‘And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one is upright and another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is greater or less than another. The vote is equal, the dignity co-eternal.

  ‘Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the majority so declare it and justice is justice because the majority so declare it.

  ‘And if the majority affirm one thing today, that is right; and if the majority affirm the opposite tomorrow, that is right.

  ‘Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and there is no other, etc.

  ‘This is the Radical faith which, except every man keep whole and undefiled, he is a Tory and an enemy of the state and without doubt shall perish everlastingly.’

  His face was set against ‘the wind of change’. He foresaw disaster in Ireland. He was alarmed by the stories that had reached him about the despondency of the West Indian planters. As a historian he reverenced the Caribbean past. ‘In those waters the men were formed and trained who drove the Armada from the Channel into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries which followed, France and England fought for the ocean empire and England won it – won it on the day when her own politicians’ hearts had failed them and all the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar and avenged Yorktown. . . . For England to allow these colonies to drift away from her because they have no immediate marketable value would be a sign that she had lost the feelings with which great nations always treasure the heroic traditions of their fathers.’ And it was appropriate that on the day Froude left England the morning papers were occupied with Gladstone’s comment on Tennyson’s Locksley Hall, which had just been published. ‘Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what in its day had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Gladstone on the other hand those revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off of intolerable abuses and of awakening to higher and truer perceptions of duty.’ Froude was in accord with the poet, not the politician.

  Even in his own day Froude was a reactionary, and it may seem to the contemporary reader that there is nothing to be learned now, nearly eighty years later, from a study of his reactions. But, on the contrary, he has a great deal to tell us. Prejudiced though he may have been, he had an acute, sharp mind. Though he had, as a historian, spent much of his life in libraries, he had mixed in the big world. As a traveller he knew what to look for, and he understood what he was seeing. His book presents the best picture – one could say the only picture – of conditions in the West Indies at the point when the power of the plantocracy was reaching the final stage of its decline and the experiment of representative government was being made, with the first steps to universal suffrage being taken.

  It was this experiment that in particular roused Froude’s ire. He foresaw the day when each colony would be administered by a black assembly, with the white man elbowed out of power. And he was accurate in his prophecy, up to a point. In the British West Indies today there is scarcely a white man seated as an elected member in a legislative assembly, and if there is racial discrimination it is against the white man, not the black; but where he was inaccurate as a prophet was in his belief that this switch of power must lead to anarchy.

  The example of Haiti had strengthened this belief. Sir Spencer St John’s exposure had just appeared, with its account of cannibalism and witchcraft, and Froude told an inquirer that one of the main reasons of his trip was to visit Haiti. Few tourists can have given less time to a major project. He spent an hour ashore at Jacmel before breakfast, the only passenger to make the excursion. He affected to be horrified. When he returned to the ship, he found the passengers impatiently awaiting breakfast, which had been held back on his account, yet’ before breakfast could be thought of or any other thing I had to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great Negro Republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.’

  That is ridiculous, yet in his actual description of Jacmel he was objective. He complained of the state of the streets, but as he had looked for nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the degree of civilization was higher than he had expected. ‘The houses were of white stone and of some pretensions, but ragged and uninviting; paint nowhere and the woodwork of the verandahs mouldy and worm-eaten. ... It was market day ... a great open space in front of the cathedral was covered with stalls, with blankets stretched on poles to keep the sun off, where hundreds of Haitian dames were sitting or standing disposing of their wares – piles of salt fish, piles of coloured calicoes, knives, scissors, combs and brushes. Of home produce there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables and butcher’s meat on slabs. . . . Children were running about in thousands, not in the least as if they were in fear of being sacrificed, and babies hung upon their mothers as if natural affection existed in Jacmel as much as in other places.’ He went into the cathedral; it was airy and cool, mass was being said, and there was a large congregation.

  He spent a little longer in Port-au-Prince, but not long enough to take a meal there. He anathematized it as the central ulcer of which Jacmel was the symptom, ‘a miserable cross-birth of ferocity and philanthropic sentiment’. Yet once again his actual description of the town was sufficiently objective. He called it ‘a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and places, fiacres and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under their parasols were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. . . . There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in tawdry European costume and officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and gilding.’ Once again he complained about the smell. Cursory though his visits were to Jacmel and Port-au-Prince, his trained writer’s sense enabled him to give a vivid picture of them. He prophesied the inevitablity of American intervention.

  Right through the West Indies he was oppressed by a sense of departed glory, and Haiti was the apotheosis of his dread. What Haiti was, Jamaica would become. ‘The palaces of the English planters and merchants fall to decay; their wines and their furniture, their books and their pictures are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle to keep afloat and one by one they go under in the waves.’

  He yearned to put back the clock. He believed that it could be put back. The Irish were happier under the landlords, the West Indians under the planters. Why could not the English rule here and in Ireland as they did in India and Malaya, since the days of the planters and the landowners were over? ‘“But what would you do?” I am asked impatiently. “You can suggest no remedy and mere fault-finding is foolish and mischievous.”

  ‘I might answer a good many things,’ he wrote. ‘Government cannot do everything . . . but there is a difference between governors whose hands are tied with local councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an organised nation can be made out of the blacks when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, seventy per cent, of the children now born among them are illegitimate.5 You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate, it is true, or make the earth more fertile. Already it is as fertile as any in the earth and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot, to remain there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there, which now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.’

  His arguments throug
hout were logical. At one point he says, ‘If you choose to take a race like the Irish or like the Negroes whom you have forced into an unwilling subjection and have not treated when in that condition with perfect justice – if you take such a race, strike the fetters off them and arm them all at once with all the powers and privileges of loyal citizens, you ought not to be surprised if they turn against and rend you. When you are brought in contact with races of men who are not strong enough or brave enough to defend their own independence, and whom your own safety cannot allow to fall under any other power, our right and our duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission.’ How logical such arguments are, and how unfeasible. Yet even as he marshalled them, he half recognized that there was an alternative solution.

  Grenada was one of the first islands that he visited. It represented to him a shocking contrast to Barbados, where there still remained some of the opulence that Labat had described. Labat had said of Grenada that if Barbados had such a harbour as Grenada’s it would be without a rival in the world, and Labat had added that if Grenada belonged to the English, who knew how to profit from natural advantages, it would be a rich and powerful colony. How different it was now! ‘The forts,’ so Froude wrote, ‘had been dismantled and deserted; the castle on which we had seen our flag flying was a ruin, the walls were crumbling and in many places had fallen down. One solitary gun was left but that was honey-combed and could be fired only with half a charge to salute with. The harbour is the best in the West Indies. There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boatyard where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet mended. Once there had been a line of wharves, but the piles had been eaten by worms and the platforms had fallen through. Round us when we landed were unroofed warehouses, weed-choked courtyards, doors gone and window frames fallen in or out... . Nature had been allowed by us to resume possession of the island.’

  He was given by a temporary resident a gloomy account of existing conditions. The few English that remained were selling their estates, and Grenada had become an island of small proprietors; the ideal country, Froude commented, of modern social reformers, the special target of his detestation. He delivered himself of a melancholy jeremiad. What a ridiculous mockery to set up a constitution in such a place! ‘There are but two alternatives,’ he repeats, ‘before not only Grenada but all the English West Indies – either an English administration pure and simple like the East Indian or a falling eventually into a state like that of Haiti, where they eat the babies and no white man owns a yard of land.’

  And yet, and yet . . .

  ‘It was dark night,’ he continues, ‘when we drove back to the port. The houses along the road which had looked so miserable on the outside were now lighted with paraffin lamps. I could see into them and was astonished to see signs of comfort and even signs of taste – armchairs, sofas, sideboards with cut glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon the walls. The old state of things is gone, but there is a new state of things which may have a worth of its own.’ Here, unexpectedly, almost in a footnote, he prophesied what has happened. Grenada is today one of the most prosperous of the small islands; it is also one of the happiest, with the least colour consciousness. Perhaps because its decline was so early and so swift, it reached the down point of the curve the first and its recovery was consequently quickest.

  14 Where Black Rules White

  One of Froude’s declared objectives was to visit Haiti. Bryan Edwards, writing of the Caribs in the Leeward Islands, made this prophecy: ‘What they are now,’ he wrote, ‘the freed negroes of Ste Domingue will hereafter be; savages in the midst of society, without peace, security, agriculture or property, ignorant of the duties of life and unacquainted with all the soft endearing relations which render it desirable; averse to labour, though frequently perishing of want; suspicious of each other and towards the rest of mankind; revengeful and faithless; remorseless and bloody minded; pretending to be free while groaning beneath the capricious despotism of their chiefs and feeling all the miseries of servitude without the benefit of subordination.’

  In 1830 Edwards was chastised severely by the Quarterly Review for making this prophecy, but within a few years it appeared to have been abundantly fulfilled. Politically, the story of Haiti is one of tyranny and mismanagement. Of the twenty-four presidents who held office between the departure of the French and the landing of American marines in 1915, two were murdered, one committed suicide, two died in office, only two retired into civilian life; the remaining seventeen, with as much of the national treasury as they could lay their hands on, fled to Jamaica. In 1907, when Kingston was heavily mauled by an earthquake, the Haitians generously dispatched a shipload of provisions for the destitute, with a naïve letter saying how happy they were to be able to do something for an island that had shown so much hospitality to those of their own countrymen to whom chance had proved capricious. The object of the majority of presidents was to transfer as much money as they could into a neutral bank while the going was still good. ‘Graft,’ wrote an English chargé d’affaires in his report to the Colonial Office, ‘is the chief national pastime of the country.’

  Much of what was written about Haiti during the nineteenth century has to be accepted with reservations. Haiti figured, to the white planters of Jamaica and Barbados, in much the same way that the Soviet Union did in the 1920s and 1930s to the conservatives of Europe and the United States – as a grim example of what must happen when law and order collapse, and power passes into the hands of the illiterate. Just as the mandarins of Wall Street and Whitehall welcomed and gave credence to every account of how tractors broke down in the Ukraine while the citizens of Moscow shivered ill-clad and ill-fed in the winter winds, so did the legislators of the Antilles propagate every report they could discover of the abject, impoverished condition of the ‘Black Republic’. ‘This is what has happened there,’ they said. ‘The same thing will happen here if we are not careful; if we are not very careful.’

  And very certainly those planters had a good deal to give them satisfaction. Disorder spreads quickly in countries of easy growth. Houses and roads crumbled. ‘God had spoilt the roads,’ said the Haitians. ‘God would mend them.’ ‘When you see a bridge always go round it.’ So the proverb ran. There was no organized industry. Nearly all the land was in the hands of peasant proprietors. Coffee, which grew wild over the hills, was the chief export. When the wind blew down the pods, the peasants gathered them, put them on their heads or on their donkeys and carried them to a middleman, from whom by various stages of bribery they reached the customs shed. No rich families needed to be supported by the land. All that was asked of the land was that it should provide the peasantry with the modest quota of their daily bread, and furnish a sufficient annual sum in export tax to meet the expenses of government. The land was amply capable of doing that, but it could not finance a succession of revolutions, changing presidents and corrupt officials.

  In the early part of the century, Haiti and Santo Domingo were united, but by the middle of the century they had drifted apart; Santo Domingo to develop a casual, comic-opera, Spanish-style republic, where nothing in particular happened and little was achieved, but a certain semblance of civilized prosperity was maintained. Santo Domingo had never enjoyed the high-pressure importance that Haiti had; it had been neglected by the Spaniards, stagnating as Trinidad had done. Very few slaves had been introduced and its industries had been neglected. It had not very far to fall. There was not such an abrupt change of régime and there had been no great measure of discontent. Santo Domingo slid along. In Haiti the atmosphere of comic opera alternated with grisly tragedy.

  A moment of high comedy was achieved in the middle of the century when the presidency fell vacant, not through revolution, but by a natural process of death. The claims of two rivals being equally persuasive, their supporters compromised by electing an inconspicuous general, Faustin Soulouque, whom they imagined would prov
e an obedient servant. To their shocked surprise, however, the general’s vanity was more substantial than were his abilities. He was brave, unscrupulous and tenacious, and he stayed in office for twelve years.

  Black himself, he ordered a massacre of the mulattoes, converted the country into a kingdom, and declared himself an emperor, Faustin I. The preparations for his coronation lasted thirty months and cost a quarter of a million dollars, a hundred thousand of which were spent on the imperial crown. During the ceremony he created four princes, fifty-nine dukes and a large number of counts, barons and chevaliers. He also established a legion of honour and an imperial order of St Faustin. Lavish insignia were provided and elaborate regulations for court procedure were drawn up. ‘I am the state,’ said the Emperor, ‘and my will is law.’

  His reign lasted longer than most of the presidencies, but after eleven years a revolution started in the north, and the Emperor considered it prudent to follow the traditional example and sail for Jamaica. The titles of nobility lapsed into desuetude.

  Spencer St John, who was British Resident in Haiti for six years, between 1861 and 1867, has left an entertaining account of his experiences. The national army consisted then of six thousand generals, seven thousand regimental officers and six thousand other ranks. There was no discipline. The sentries had chairs to sit upon. Justice was casual. Prisoners had to prove their innocence. Policemen arrested a man by battering him into unconsciousness with a large iron-studded cane called a cocomacaque. Ordinarily the Negro, who has a great imitative capacity, and therefore a sense of precedent, makes an excellent lawyer. But in Haiti, judges were appointed for political purposes, and instances would arise in court when, it being a case of one witness’ word against another’s, the judge would turn with a puzzled look toward the prisoner who was accused of theft with no evidence against him other than the plaintiff’s testimony. ‘But she says she saw you steal her purse – you can’t get way from that, you know.’