by Alec Waugh
For many years the island has been in the red. Its ill-luck has been persistent, and its ill-luck has been accompanied by ill-management. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island was put up for sale in lots by the British Crown. The sale realised a quarter of a million pounds. Not one penny of this sum was reinvested in the island. It was used instead for Queen Charlotte’s dowry. In the 1840s coffee was a highly successful product, but disease destroyed the crops. Limes were planted, and Rose’s Lime Juice became an internationally accepted label, while planters on the windward coast produced a concentrated lime juice from which citric acid was extracted and which could be stored safely until an opportunity came for shipping it. In the 1920s, however, wither-tip disease damaged, in many cases irremediably, the lime plantations, and the discovery in Italy of a synthetic method of producing citric acid made the marketing of the Dominican product no longer profitable. When the Panama Canal was opened, Dominica by its geographical position should have become the coaling-station for British ships, but because the capital had been built at Roseau instead of Rupert’s Bay, owing to the malarial nature of the northern section, St. Lucia got the contract.
Before World War I a Royal Mail steam-packet toured the island weekly, collecting cargo and carrying passengers. The service was not resumed after the war, and planters on the windward coast had to rely on schooners and on canoes. For weeks on end the sea would be too rough for schooners to put in to shore.
Work was begun on what was imposingly christened the Imperial Road, a broad-surfaced thoroughfare that was planned to link the windward and the leeward coasts. Heavy rains, floods, and mounting costs delayed, curtailed, and finally liquidated the enterprise. Then came the hurricanes of 1928 and 1930.
The windward coast never recovered from these hurricanes. One by one the big plantations were abandoned; there is not now a single plantation house between Hatton Garden and Pointe Mulatre. The estates are worked spasmodically by peasant proprietors who ‘head’ their produce across the mountains, supply local needs, or await the caprice of schooners.
During World War II the saga of ill-luck continued. It was typical Dominican luck that the island through lack of a suitable airbase should have been cut off completely from the general atmosphere of war, should have made no direct contribution to the war effort, should have been so isolated from the main currents of American and English thought, receiving none of the mental stimulus of being allied with great events. At the same time, it suffered very definite war damage. It was also typical of Dominican luck that, situated as it is between two French islands, it should have had to accommodate several thousand refugees, only a very small proportion of whom were honest adherents of the Free French cause, who, demanding a daily meat meal, created a cattle shortage that still continues. The interior economy of the island, a very delicately adjusted organism, was seriously disturbed.
Ill-luck was accompanied by ill-management. The blockade of Madagascar created a market for vanilla, but the traders profited so imprudently in this unexpected boom that they shipped inferior and unripened pods. American buyers now distrust Dominican produce.
It was decided finally that Dominica should be linked by air with the other islands. So an expert on aeronautics was sent to locate an airfield. He selected a strip on the north-east coast. The immediate disadvantages of this site were obvious. Not only was it already occupied with a valuable coconut plantation, but it had no direct communication with the capital. Passengers would have to motor to Portsmouth, then go by launch to Roseau, a journey that would take at least four hours. The expert maintained, however, that no other site was suitable, so the coconut palms were felled, a vast quantity of stones collected by hand labour, and simultaneously, so that there should be direct access from the airport to the capital, work was resumed on the Imperial Road. The labour and capital of the island were concentrated on these two projects. For a year the work continued. Then, when the air strip had been cleared and a valuable plantation ruined, a second aeronautic expert decreed that the site chosen was unsuitable for aircraft. Simultaneously, it was discovered that the sum of money voted for the completion of the Imperial Road was quite inadequate, so that to-day for the expenditure of a hundred thousand pounds and the slaughter of several thousand palm trees there is nothing to show except a track of cobbles through the jungle, and on the flanks of the mutilated Melville Hall estate three or four admittedly impressive piles of hand-gathered flints.
“Typical Dominica,” was the comment in St. Lucia.
“Typical Dominica.” It is a comment and a criticism that you will often hear made in the other islands.
They will make it laughingly on a note of mockery, of affectionate, fraternal mockery. There is a Dominica legend in the Caribbean.
“Everyone goes crazy there,” they say. “All that rain and those mountains shutting them in and everything going wrong. Did you hear about that fellow who tried to dig a hole through the centre of the earth because his wife was buried in Australia? He dug it with a cutlass, carrying the earth up in a calabash. You can still see the hole. That’s typical.”
It is typical, they will also say, that the island should have attracted so many English and American eccentrics, that square-pegs after long efforts to fit themselves into round holes should have made their homes there. Dominica is the only small island with an expatriate colony. It has been called The Tahiti of the Caribbean’.
I visited Dominica first in February 1929, a few weeks after the first hurricane had struck it.
I stayed a week. It rained incessantly. Roseau even in the sunlight is a scrubby little place. It is clean, but that is the most that can be said for it. It has no harbour; it happens to be the capital only because it is there that the chief valley meets the sea. Seven blocks long and eight blocks wide, it is a cluster of small two-storey houses built on stone foundations which have contrived to resist successive hurricanes because, it is claimed, at the time when they were built it was the practice to mix syrup with the mortar. Unpainted wooden balconies project over the pavements; there are no gardens, no trees, no flowers.
There are admittedly a few attractive corners, particularly in the south, where a number of fine trees stand on a slight prominence of ground and police headquarters are housed in an old fort. The verandah of the library has a charming view of the bay and of Scot’s Head. Beyond the Botanical Gardens, which are really fine, you can climb to the summit of Morne Bruce and see in the Roseau valley the lime trees of the Bath estate, stretching in even rows to be divided every so many yards by the windbreaks of the galba trees. There are attractive corners. But in a morning you can see them all.
I made a trip by foot and horse across the island. The mountains were concealed in cloud; incessant rain symbolised adversity. In Hot Countries I compared the scenery to a reading of Endymion. “Like Endymion,” I wrote, “it is lush and featureless. Like Endymion, it becomes monotonous. Hour after hour it is the same.”
I was there for the carnival. There were cocktail parties every night. I was meeting for the first time the ‘sour cocktail’ of which Angostura bitters is the chief ingredient. Compounded of rum, it is mixed in a large jug and beaten with a swizzle stick until it froths. It is pretty and pink, and looks like liquid candy. But it is very sour. It cannot be sipped. It should be gulped while it is frothing. I had not yet acquired the knack of gulping swizzles. Round followed round, exhaustingly and bewilderingly. It was the only time in my life when I found myself defeated by straightforward run-of-the-mill drinking. In a sense, it was all extremely gay, but beneath the gaiety I was conscious of an almost desperate defeatism. Dominica seemed to be flinging up the sponge; the hurricane was being accepted as the final straw. There was no point in trying any longer. The island was in the red for keeps. It was up to the Imperial Exchequer to take care of it.
I had some good times in Dominica. I made two real friends there. But even so I was glad to get away. I was depressed by the all-pervading apathy. Yet in retrospect,
in continuing terms of that framework of anomalies and contradictions, out of all the islands I had visited, it was of Dominica that I found myself thinking most. I kept feeling that it was my own fault, that it was due to some deficiency in myself that I had got so little from my visit. Dominica had something, I suspected, which the other islands lacked, something which I had failed to find.
I was to hear much talk of Dominica during the 1930s. In London and New York, the Dominica legend was taking shape. The expatriate colony was growing. Stephen Haweis, for example, went there, and Elma and Lennox Napier and John Knapp. Stephen Haweis, the son of a distinguished Victorian clergyman, is an excellent and well-known painter. Lennox Napier held a gallant military record, and till his death during World War II played a prominent part in the island’s political and social life. Elma, the daughter of Sir William Gordon-Cumming, one of the chief figures in the Tranby Croft baccarat scandal, widely travelled and the authoress of several books, is very much a person in her own right. The name John Knapp will not convey anything to those who did not know him personally. A scholarly, well-bred American, at one time a schoolmaster at Groton, he never attempted to make anything of his life. He was a complete escapist. But he was a gifted and a charming man. I had met him in Tahiti. Outside his house a notice-board announced in high white lettering that visitors were not welcome. He sought solitude and privacy. He failed to find them in Tahiti. He did find them in Dominica.
In England I was to meet Jean Rhys. Her novels have not reached a large public, but they have a personal flavour. Jean Rhys in her writing is herself and no one else. There are no echoes. The central character in her best-known novel is a composed and assured person, unable to fit herself into organised society, who recognises this idiosyncrasy in herself and is undisturbed by it. She told me she had been born in Dominica. Rereading After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, I could see how many flashbacks to Dominica—imperceptible to the unacquainted reader —occurred in it. I could see how Dominica had coloured her temperament and outlook. It was a clue to her, just as she was a clue to it. People who could not fit into life elsewhere found what they were looking for in Dominica. Jean Rhys, who had been born there, chose as her central character one who could not adjust herself to life outside.
Dominica clearly had something which the other islands lacked. When I came back on this first post-war visit to the Caribbean, I was resolved that whatever else I might be forced to miss, I would not hurry my second visit there.
It is not easy to get to Dominica. The amphibian air-service, a six-seater plane based on St. Vincent, calls there at the time of writing only once a week, and you have to get to St. Vincent to connect with it. There are fewer ships now on Caribbean routes; by no means all of them stop at Dominica. The ships sailing from the north are booked solid with round-trip passengers. Inter-island passengers have to travel ‘deck’, unless the casual sailing of a schooner or a motor-launch coincides with their time schedule. It is idle to pretend that travelling in a small motor-launch, in the open sea, on a rough day is pleasant.
I was lucky in that I was making the journey from St. Lucia, an island so close that there are those who claim to have seen it from Scot’s Head. I was lucky, too, in that mine was a morning sailing; I had not to spend a night aboard. It was a bright clear day. From the decks of the Lady Nelson I could pick out the bays and valleys of Martinique; Diamond Rock glittered in the sunlight. For once there were no clouds over Mount Pelé; its jagged summit lifted over the skeleton of St. Pierre, the deep track of its lava running brown towards the sea. As we passed out of the protection of the land, the ship began to rock. There is a heavy swell in the twenty-mile channel between Dominica and Martinique. I was grateful that I was not making the journey in a schooner. Slowly the tall shadows of Dominica became distinct.
Always before, I had arrived in darkness. I had never seen how cosily the little villages of Soufrière and Pointe Michele cluster about their churches. It was the first time I had seen Dominica in the sunlight. I had not believed that anything could be so green. I had never thought of green as being a colour that could dazzle you. I had not believed there could be so many shades of green, that a single colour could combine so many varieties of tone and texture, could achieve such an effect of patchwork.
Very often one’s first hours in a place set the tone for an entire visit. This happened now. As I was about to clamber down the gangplank, a young man in shorts and an open shirt pushed his way towards me.
“You are Mr. Alec Waugh?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Fine! I was afraid I’d missed you. I’m taking you up to Springfield.”
“Where’s Springfield?”
“John Archbold’s place.”
“Who’s John Archbold?”
“A planter here. He’s expecting you for cocktails.”
I had never heard either of John Archbold or of Springfield. The man who was proposing to take me there was white and an American.
“There must be some mistake. You must have got the wrong man,” I said.
“Not if you are Alec Waugh.”
Even so, I was unconvinced. I have a namesake—in no way related to me—who works in pictures, and whose bills, love-letters, and income-tax returns have constantly found their way into my mail box over the last twenty years. It was not impossible that John Archbold had confused us, but I did not see any reason on that account to decline what would probably prove an agreeable invitation.
We set off in a station-wagon. I was not the only guest. Three other passengers had been collected off the Lady Nelson. They were making the round trip and were continuing north that night. My escort believed that I, too, was a round-trip passenger. He seemed surprised and possibly a little disconcerted when I told him that I was planning to stay a month.
Springfield is seven miles out of Roseau on the Imperial Road. From its verandah you can see a narrow triangle of horizon, framed between two cliffs. The mountains rise on either side of it, high and vertical, but not so close as to make you feel shut in. In the immediate foreground is the deep gorge of a river with banana plants climbing up its sides. The long living-room behind has the solid, practical comfort of deep armchairs and substantial tables. My host was in the middle thirties, tall, fair-haired, cleanshaven; he was wearing a recently pressed Palm Beach suit and a canary-yellow foulard tie. He fixed us drinks and we sat on the verandah. The air had cooled rapidly as we swung up the abrupt, steep curves. I was glad that my socks were thick and that I had brought a cardigan. I do not imagine that even in midsummer it would be really hot.
One of the party was asking John Archbold how he had come to settle here. He gave a typical beachcomber answer. He had come on a cruise, meaning to leave that evening, and suddenly, like that, had bought himself an estate. He was specialising now in oranges. He was concerned about finding a suitable label for his produce. At the moment he could think of nothing more effective than Liquid Sunshine, and that, he recognised, was not satisfactory.
Presently his wife Lucie joined us. She was tall, dark-haired, and very lovely, in white linen trousers and a white silk shirt. She was clearly too young to be the mother of the studious ten-year-old girl who was reading in a corner of the verandah. I learned later that John had been a widower, and was now, remarried, on his honeymoon.
“Time for your supper, Anne,” said Lucie..
Nothing could have been more ‘typically beachcomber’ than this story of a man who had come to an island for five hours and stayed fifteen years; yet nothing could have been farther from the beachcomber atmosphere than the domesticity of the scene and the keenness with which John Archbold was planning for his estate.
Slowly the night darkened round us and the air got colder.
“Time to be moving,” said the man who had met me at the boat.
I rose with the others.
“No, no,” said Archbold. “You’re staying on for dinner, if you can manage it.”
It was the first chance I had had o
f explaining my predicament.
“Didn’t you get my letter then?” he asked.
I shook my head. I was travelling ‘deck’; the letter explaining that an old friend of mine, Charlesworth Ross, the present Commissioner of Montserrat, had cabled an introduction, had remained in the purser’s office. I was to get the letter the next day.
“You’d better stay on. We’ve got a duck,” said Lucie.
By the time I was back in Roseau, I had made two new friends.
That first evening at Springfield set the tone for my entire visit. As it was with John Archbold, so was it, I soon found, with the rest of the expatriate colony. Two other Americans live on the Imperial Road, one married to a compatriot, the other to an English girl. Both work their plantations seriously. There are also two American boys recently released from uniform who have started a lumber business. One of them has an American wife, the other while I was there married the daughter of the manager of the Royal Bank. It was the most charmingly intimate wedding I have been to, with the planters bringing down from their estates great sprays of orchids and gardenias, and with half the native population peering through the windows of the church and lining up in the road outside to roar with laughter at the surprising headgear of the guests.
John Archbold is in a slightly different position from his compatriots, in that he is a rich man with many responsibilities in the United States, who can only devote three or four months a year to Dominica; throughout the entire war he was away on active duty with the U.S. Navy, but he has this in common with the others— that he is working his estate seriously, and by his presence on the island is contributing substantially both to its congeniality and its prosperity.
