A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Sam proceeded to move south, and at each main point of pause along the way, an American naval officer was on hand to ensure that he followed the admiral’s instructions. H. P. Davis in Black Democracy describes the campaign as a ‘personally conducted’ revolution. Theodore offered no resistance; on February 22 he escaped in a Dutch boat to Jamaica. On March 9 Sam was installed as President.

  In the north, however, Sam’s revolution was only partially accepted, and the original insurgents were making trouble under Dr Rosalus Bato, who had been minister of the interior under Theodore, to such an extent that on June 19 a French cruiser landed marines to protect its consulate and bank. Sam, in Port-au-Prince, realized that his position was precarious. He acted promptly and ruthlessly, ordering the arrest of some 170 of his chief opponents. The foreign legations were filled with refugees. Once again a revolution moved toward Port-au-Prince. Sam was far from being a coward, but believing he had no support, he fled to the French Embassy, and the commandant of the prison promptly ordered the death of every political prisoner in the jail. Such prisoners, including members of the best and most influential families, were, without trial and in cold blood, massacred and mutilated in their cells with cutlasses. This was the provocation that Washington required.

  It is uncertain whether or not this slaughter was the outcome of a direct order from the President. In the pocket of the prison commandant, who was subsequently shot, was found a note from Sam, written in the French legation, complaining that he had been misled as to the military position, and ending with the words, ‘as regards yourself take such measures as your conscience shall dictate. Too much to say.’ That could have meant anything. But it is hard to believe that the prison commandant could have acted so brutally without authority. In any case, the indignant populace were not in a mood for legal ‘pretty points’, and when they saw the smoke of an American warship within their harbour, they realized that unless they acted quickly their chances of dealing with their President were slight, and the mob surged to the French legation. ‘A small body of well-known citizens after courteously explaining to the French minister that the people were no longer to be balked of their revenge, entered the house, dragged Sam down the stairs and threw him over an iron gate to the mob.’ His body was cut to pieces, and the trunk was being paraded through the streets as the American marines marched in. The independence of the first Negro republic was temporarily at an end.

  The subsequent story has been often told, but nowhere better, in the opinion of the present writer, than in H. P. Davis’ Black Democracy. The next twenty years were the most prosperous, in fact the only prosperous years that the island has known since the fall of the Bastille. Under American control, order was achieved, the finances straightened out, health services installed, roads improved, hotels organized; a law was passed allowing foreigners to own property.

  By the middle twenties, Haiti was in the news. A number of excellent books had been written about it: there were Frank Crane’s Roaming through the Caribbean, and Blair Niles’ travelogue; then John Vandercook’s fine novel, Black Majesty, about Henri Christophe; finally there was William Seábrook’s sensational The Magic Island, with its stories of cannibalism and voodoo. Articles about the citadel at Cap Haitien appeared in the American papers and a great many tourists were anxious to see it for themselves. The tutelary period ended, however, in the middle thirties, and the country gradually slipped back toward anarchy and chaos. The tourist trade from the USA continued for a while; there was a market for Haitian wood carving, particularly for salad bowls, there was a vogue in painting for Haitian primitives, and a number of avant-garde American artists and writers went down, a parallel with their predecessors who, after the First World War, had settled on the Left Bank in Paris. But the difficulties and the cost of living became too great; the insecurity and lack of order, the insolence and rapaciousness of the Haitians became too irksome. At the time of writing, this distracted community would seem to be about to dissolve once again in chaos.

  In the meantime, a very different destiny had marked the fortunes of the Spanish section of the island. During the eighteenth century, what is now known as the Dominican Republic had been as much neglected by the Spaniards as Trinidad had been. There had been no large importation of slaves. Its population had been small, and brown had predominated over black. During the nineteenth century it had for long periods been overrun by the Haitians, and it was only the collapse of order in Haiti that restored it to independence. Its finances foundered, and in 1905 the USA took them over. A president was assassinated in 1911 and in 1916 the USA assumed military control. The occupation did not prove popular, and eight years later it was withdrawn. The country drifted again toward insolvency until in 1931 General Trujillo assumed command.

  Opinions are divided about the merits of his régime. His military dictatorship was tyrannical and ruthless. There was no liberty of opinion and it was corrupt to the extent that he and his friends appropriated large quantities of public funds. Yet at the same time order was maintained, works of reconstruction were undertaken, and the ‘common man’ was better off than he had ever been.

  During this period, relations with Haiti deteriorated. In the national census only eleven per cent, of the population was classified as being completely Negroid, and the Dominicans scoffed at the ‘inferior African culture’ of their neighbours and denounced the lower salaries that they accepted. This led to friction on the border, where the frontier was not clearly marked and where Haitians were in the habit of crossing over to help the Dominican farmers gather in their harvest. In protest against this custom, Trujillo’s troops in 1937 rounded up and slaughtered several thousand Haitians. International pressure alone prevented a war, and the Dominican Republic agreed to pay an indemnity of 750,000 dollars to the families of the victims. Only a part of this sum was actually paid, however. In 1961 Trujillo was, in his turn, assassinated, and at the time of writing, chaos is firmly re-established.

  3

  In 1917 the USA entered the First World War on the side of Britain, France and Italy, and it was presumably her involvement with European politics that forced her to reconsider her own defences. During the Civil War, she had been concerned over the ease with which European ships had traded with the Confederate south, and she had almost concluded arrangements for the purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands, so that her eastern approaches might be protected. Congress, however, had failed to ratify the deal. Now negotiations were resumed, and in return for a cash settlement, the islands of St Thomas, St Croix and St John flew the stars and stripes from their mastheads.

  Two years later the Volstead Act became the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquids became illegal. This measure had an unfortunate effect on the prosperity both of the United States’ new possessions and the recently acquired Puerto Rico. Rum was one of the chief products both of St Croix and Puerto Rico, and a West Indian island that did not offer its visitor the opportunity of resisting the midday heat with the cool, mellow and fragrant sustenance of a rum punch stood little chance of attracting tourist trade.

  To many individuals, prohibition brought substantial subterranean wealth, and the harbours of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and the beaches of the French islands, St Pierre and Miquelon, served as important bases for the rum-runners. But Cuba and Jamaica were the only West Indian islands to profit from this trade. The Windward and Leeward Islands, Trinidad and Barbados lay too far to the south. Indeed, during the 1930s, the Caribbean was as a whole a depressed area; houses were crumbling, sugar factories were abandoned, plantations were turned over to casual husbandry, but in all that area the American possessions were among the most depressed. President Hoover was to describe them as a ‘poor house’, a remark he was not permitted to forget.

  Wars, by and large, bring prosperity to those whom they do not actually destroy. In August 1939 a team of West Indian cricketers was touring England. They cancelled their last two match
es and sailed for home. They were very wise. Within a few weeks, the Atlantic was infested with submarines. Throughout the war a great many of the ships that sailed from West Indian harbours did not reach their destination, and the Lady Nelson, one of the four smart Canadian passenger ships that had for the last ten years linked the smaller islands with Boston and Montreal, was sunk in St Lucia harbour. But these sinkings did not impoverish the British West Indians themselves, since the ships and their merchandise were insured. There was also, of course, an improved market for West Indian produce.

  In the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt made a deal, which the governments behind them ratified, to exchange for fifty Liberty ships and a million rifles, bases on a ninety-nine years’ lease at St Lucia, Antigua, Trinidad and Bermuda. Whether this deal was legal, whether, that is to say, the British government had the right to cede West Indian territory to a foreign power without the permission of the local legislatures was not considered at the time, and there has been a certain amount of argument in recent years in relation to the base at Trinidad. But the Liberty ships were extremely welcome to Britain at the time, and so to the West Indians were the American dollars that were poured out freely at the bases. St Lucia has rarely been so gay socially as it was at that time.

  The situation in the French islands was very different, since the officer in command there, Admiral Robert, remained loyal to the Vichy government. When the Battle of France began, Martinique and Guadeloupe were protected by a patrol squadron, headed by a cruiser and an auxiliary cruiser. In mid-June an aircraft carrier started from Halifax for France with 105 planes. Halfway across the Atlantic, she was ordered to sail to Martinique. At the same time the Banque de France decided to transfer across the Atlantic its reserves of gold, estimated at 250 million dollars. The Canadian authorities in Halifax tried to get the gold transferred to Montreal, but the commander of the ship, the Emile Benin, dodged the Canadian customs and sailed – it has been said on his own initiative – to Martinique. The gold was transferred to the vaults of Fort de France, and its presence there immeasurably increased Admiral Robert’s power and prestige.

  After the armistice, British agents tried to persuade Admiral Robert to rally to the Free French cause, but Admiral Robert was resolute in his loyalty to Vichy, and an attempt to produce a pro-Gaullist coup d’état misfired. The French islands presented, therefore, a permanent problem, not only to the British but to the USA. Washington was naturally resolved to prevent these islands being amalgamated with the Third Reich, and a conference was held of Latin American governments in which it was resolved to prevent any change of ownership in Caribbean colonies. In the meantime, Britain, who was allied militarily with the exiled government of the Netherlands, landed troops in Curaçao and Aruba to protect the oil refineries, and imposed a blockade on the French islands, nominally to prevent ships and planes being transferred to Germany, but actually to watch the store of gold. All mail was stopped and the cable to St Thomas cut.

  The position of Martinique and Guadeloupe soon became highly serious. They lacked medical supplies, they were short of food, they could not conduct trade. On humanitarian grounds it was agreed that the neutral USA should intervene. In December, President Roosevelt made a tour of the islands; he did not receive Admiral Robert officially, but it was presumed that they had met at sea, since Admiral Robert left the island within an hour of the President’s arrival at Fort de France, and shortly afterward the British abandoned the blockade and the French agreed to accept the authority of a US destroyer patrol. The French called these ships ‘the guardian angels’, since they did not stop foodstuffs and medical supplies. Moreover, commerce with France was re-established on a minor scale.

  Even so, the residents of the islands, particularly of Guadeloupe, suffered great privations. Robert insisted that his troops and the police should be well fed in order to ensure their loyalty. This meant that the workers in the cane fields were undernourished.

  A number of them escaped to Dominica to enlist with the Free French Army, not out of loyalty to de Gaulle, but because they were hungry. By the regulations of enlistment they were entitled to a regular diet of meat meals. This involved Dominica in a cattle shortage that lasted for a number of years after the war. Dominica, as on so many other occasions, fared unfortunately during this war. Lacking a suitable air base, she was cut off from the general atmosphere of the war. She received none of the mental stimulus of being allied with great events, and had to accommodate several thousand refugees.

  After December 1941, when the USA came into the war, the position of Martinique and Guadeloupe became more constrained. It worsened in the winter of the following year, after the North African landings, with the whole of France under Axis control. The full story of what happened during the two grim years that followed has never been told, officially or fully. It is still not known to what extent, if any, the islands were used as refuelling bases for German submarines. The American and British authorities were apparently in doubt as to what action they should take, and residents in St Lucia assert that at one point an invasion of Martinique was planned but at the last moment was called off. The full story will be, no doubt, told some day. In the meantime, it can be truly stated that the four years of June 1940 to August 1944 were for the actual residents among the most harassed that those two islands had known during their dramatic lives. But the four years passed for them, as the hurricanes and earthquakes do, and by the late 1940s, these two great islands were living once again, happily and hopefully, in the future as in the present.

  4

  A new existence started for the family of islands in 1945. It was not simply that peace had followed war, but that a new medium had added a dimension to the area. Air travel had brought the islands within a few minutes of one another and a few hours of the metropolitan mainland. Pan American was their fairy godmother: other lines have followed, BWIA in particular; but Pan American was the forerunner. The tourist potentialities of the area became apparent; at the very time when the climate in the northern hemisphere was at its worst, that in the Caribbean was at its best. When rain and snow and sleet held captive the cities of the north, the golden beaches were a few hours away. Hotels opened everywhere – even on the barren desert of Aruba. Once wealth had flowed away from the West Indies; now it flooded back. Prosperity returned; and all the time, while the tourists were spending their money at the bars and beaches, at the galas and gaming tables, the inhabitants of the islands were working out their own basic problems of self-government. It is a story that cannot yet be told, because it is only now being evolved. Another historian will tell it at the century’s close. The story that this book set out to tell ended on the first day of the twentieth century.

  Maps

  Footnotes

  1 In the original letter amusingly misspelled ‘accepted’.

  2 ‘Is there any Haitian so vile, so unworthy of his regeneration as to doubt that the orders of the Almighty have been fulfilled in the extermination of these tigers gorged with blood? If there is such a one let him hide his shame far from here. The air we breathe, the pure air of triumphant liberty, was not made for his gross lungs.’

  3 ‘Never shall any colonist or European set foot here as a master or landowner.’

  4 White.

  5 This is a surprising statement, since Froude in an earlier chapter had discussed very temperately the fact that marriage had never been a popular institution among the West Indian peasantry.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1964 by Alec Waugh

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  ISBN: 9781448200450

  eISBN: 9781448201778

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