Hot Countries

by Alec Waugh

  It was like nothing that in my dreams of the South Seas I had ever pictured. New Guinea and certain islands of the Solomon group may be more primitive. They are the only parts of the world that are. The islands of the New Hebrides are mountainous; it is only along the narrow strip of beach, where the cultivation of coffee and copra is possible, that any form of civilisation exists. The bush is savage: cannibal in certain islands, and the planters are few whose bodies do not bear the scar of rifle shot and knife wound. There is always a war of some sort going on there.

  “They call it a war, at least,” the district officer at Santo told me. “It’s more like a feud between two gangs of bootleggers in Chicago. They wait till they find one of the other side alone and then try to do him in. They’re not allowed to carry arms, of course. But what’s to be done? The natives who you know have rifles are usually more or less peaceable. If you disarm them, you are putting them at the mercy of the real bandits.”

  He took me up into the bush at Santo. The natives lived in conditions of savagery, and, as the conditions of savagery, I suspect, always are, those conditions were practical and clean. There was none of the atmosphere of squalor that you find where savage people had been forced to adopt European customs. The long huts in which they sleep, thirty or forty of them—the men and women in Santo sleep apart—are well-kept and airy dormitories. They wear scarcely any clothes, which is the only healthy way of living in a hot climate of which it is said that for six months it rains and then the wet season starts.’ On the beach, where the missionary influence is active, the natives wear the Mother Hubbard, a garment that falls from neck to ankle. It is as unhealthy as it is unsightly. The natives wear it in the rain and let it dry on them. When one is estimating the causes of the degeneracy of the island stock of Melanesia and Polynesia, it is hard to say who has contributed most to that degeneracy. The traders introduced rum and syphilis, the missionaries tuberculosis, those three determining maladies. It is only in the bush that you find the old stock untainted. There the women conceal only what is essential with the slenderest strip of fibre. The men consider themselves entitled to more adornment; in a cord round their waist that keeps their narrow loin-cloth in position, they arrange to decorate their rumps a bunch of ferns, or if there are no ferns, feathers.

  Life is simply arranged. Women work in the gardens. Each wife has a certain plot of ground that is hers to cultivate. The men do a little hunting when they feel disposed. Their pigs are their first concern. They breed or claim to breed, but anyhow possess, a curious form of hermaphrodite pig which they prize highly. The pig in Santo is the gauge of income and the medium of exchange. It is with pigs that you buy your wives. You may have as many wives as you have pigs to buy them with, and here, as in Europe, it is the complaint of the young women that only the old men have the price of purchase. A good wife is worth twelve pigs. On the protruding roots of trees you will find cut the notches that are the proof of the transaction. Most of the quarrels are waged round pigs. After a year of marriage the young wife returns to her parents in revolt. The husband demands the return of his twelve pigs. The parents maintain that a year of such a consort was worth at least six pigs. The husband retorts that two is the extreme limit of her value. That in the New Hebrides is how a war begins. The district officer has to keep a record of the island feuds. He keeps it in a file marked “Pig Book.”

  “They never quarrel about anything else,” he said; “and half the time I’ve not the least idea what they’re fighting over. They come down here, the two disputants, and a crowd of friends. I let them chatter for a while; then when I’ve heard enough, I put one disputant at one end of the garden, the other at the other. Then I take the friends, settle them in the centre and say, ‘Now, look here, you’ve got to decide this among yourselves.’ I don’t let them go till they’ve decided. After a few hours they’ve begun to feel hungry, and come to some compromise or other. As long as they’re satisfied, I am.

  “It’s a queer world,” he added. “Half of it’s comic opera. You see that fellow over there? He’s one of my policemen. Two years ago I sent him to Port Vila to serve a term of imprisonment. He came back a year later as a policeman. He liked the life apparently. And being a policeman was the nearest thing he could find to being a permanent prisoner.”

  Yes. There is much that is comic opera in the New Hebrides. But for the most part it is bitter earnest. The inhabitants of a country are the expression of that country, of its soil, its climate, its arid or fertile qualities. And the Melanesian, harsh, hostile and uncouth, expresses in the grim, surly set of nose and mouth the nature of the countries he inhabits. During my stay in Santo I learnt how determined is the struggle that the pioneer has to make, and the fine qualities of endurance and fortitude without which success there is impossible. When T.O. Thomas, the planter whose guest I was there, arrived first at Hog Harbour, it was to find jungle. The plantation of forty thousand trees that stretches along the coast is the outcome of twenty years of resolute development. Foot by foot, yard by yard. It was a long struggle. The planter stands alone. He has to build his house, to recruit his labour, to plant and supervise his property. Four or five times a year one of the Messageries boats will anchor thirty miles away in the Segond Channel. Every ten weeks he will send a launch to collect his mail from the Dupleix. At unequal intervals some trading schooner will call to collect his copra and sell him canned goods and cotton, wine and medicines. Apart from that he is alone. He is the king and parliament of the section of country to which his plantation has brought prosperity and order. He has to maintain justice. The machinery of the law is many miles away. He is the Selfridge of his district. Most mornings you will see workmen from his plantation, “fellars belong bush,” naked girls and children from the hills, gathered round his store to buy such small articles as their means afford; clothes usually—highly coloured sheets of cotton for their Mother Hubbards; food occasionally and soap. He has to be the Harley Street as well. He has a surgery and dispensary. Without medical training he has to deal with the tropical diseases of whose nature medical science is still ignorant. The fevers and loathsome sores, the wounds that have gangrened with neglect. Thomas was once faced with the alternative of amputating a man’s arm or letting him die of blood poisoning. He operated, and successfully. Only a man of exceptional capacities could undertake that task. Everything is against him. Nature is against him. It is always hot and it is always raining. Nowhere have I been more pestered by mosquitoes. They arrived at dawn to vanish, curiously enough, at dusk. There was scarcely an instant of the day when three or four were not simultaneously banqueting upon me. Killing them seemed a waste of effort. Sometimes I would just watch with a weary fascination their bodies swell and redden as they sucked into my arms and knees. And yet as regards mosquitoes Hog Harbour is one of the most favoured lagoons in the group. It is fever-free. And there can be few parts of the world where malaria is a more venomous foe. The malaria there is, indeed, so bad that during the war the military medical authorities would not accept any recruit from the New Hebrides.

  After I had left Thomas’s plantation, I went round some of the islands in the Saint André, a seven-hundred-ton trading schooner that collected copra and sold canned goods. It was a friendly little ship. You paid your hundred francs a day passage money. It was a vin compris ticket. And when you arrived in the saloon for breakfast you found whisky and gin and vermouth set out ready. Every two or three hours or so it would stop at the edge of some lagoon. And the planters would come on board to arrange their sales and make their purchases. Some of them were pathetic figures. Weak-kneed, heavy-eyed, white-faced, unshaved, they would have seemed typical “white cargo” characters had you not known that only a few hours earlier they had been alternately shivering and sweating on a bed of pain. Nature in the East Pacific is kind and cherishing; but in the Hebrides it is impossible to look on her otherwise than as on a foe. She has her beauties, inevitably; where has she not between Cancer and Capricorn? Nowhere have I seen more ex
quisite effects of colouring than in the lagoons of Santo. In many parts of the tropics the sands are black. But in Hog Harbour they are a dazzling white. Coral is scattered on the shore. Language has not the vocabulary with which to describe the softness, richness and variety of its blending shades. And at night, when the air is cool, when the mosquitoes are at rest, when the large moth-like butterflies flutter above the lamp in the hexagonal-shaped summer-house, there is that utter peace which is the compensation for twelve hours’ slavery. There are those sights; there are those moments. But for the most part as he rides round his plantation watching the Kanakas slice open the fallen nuts, the planter cannot feel Nature to be anything but a foe.

  Nor is it only Nature that is against him. The missionaries are against him. Here, as in so many other places, the missionaries use their great power with the native to persuade him that the trader and the planter are his enemy. They make trouble between the native and the planter. The native knows that the missionary will always take his side against the planter. Half the plantation difficulties may be traced to missionary influence. Nature and the missionary are against the planter. And in the case of the British planter his own government is against him, too.

  In an Empire as vast as ours there must be always, I suppose, one section whose interests are ignored and shelved. Fifty years ago it was the West Indies. To-day the interests of the West Indies are very adequately guarded. But by the time that the authorities in Whitehall have realised that the New Hebrides exist, it will be too late. There will not be a British plantation left there.

  The group is run by a condominium, a joint French and British rule. It should be an equitable arrangement. The French have New Caledonia as an administrative centre; the British have Australia. Most of the British planters in the West Pacific are, not unnaturally, Australians. At the moment the situation stands like this. When it is not actually impossible, it is extremely difficult for the planter to find enough local labour to work his plantation satisfactorily. The French planter remedies this difficulty by importing labour from Indo-China. This the British planter is not allowed to do. He works under an enormous disadvantage. It is only a sense of patriotism that prevents him from taking immediately the action that in many cases is ultimately forced on him, and in the future will become increasingly inevitable, that of turning his plantation into a company, in collaboration with a French shipping firm. Nominally he will hold a section of the shares; actually he will hold them all. But since the company has been registered as French he will be able to import indented labour. As a return, all the shipping of his copra will be done through French instead of British traders, and the plantation will have ceased to be British ground. In fifty years it is unlikely that there will remain a single private plantation in British hands.

  It may be that it could not be otherwise, that it is impossible to make special cases with the regulation restricting indented labour. It may be that it is no great matter. The New Hebrides are few and far. I do not suppose they are particularly profitable to any except those whose interests are directly bound up with them. One cannot, though, be detached from the welfare of a life that one has once been, for however brief a while, a part of; one cannot help feeling a little sad that plantations one has oneself seen, whose development has been achieved by one’s countrymen at the cost of so much endurance, so much loss of health, should pass into even an ally’s hands.

  IX

  The Black Republic

  The New Hebrides are the wildest and most lawless part of the world in which I have ever been. Yet nothing could have seemed more tranquil than those green bush villages where naked savages tended their gardens and fed their pigs, in tune, seemingly, with a harmonious universe.

  Which is the way with lawless places.

  To-day, when I read of towns and villages taken or lost by Mexican rebels, I can scarcely believe that troops are actually deploying over the lifeless and arid plains through which I drove; that those cool villages among the hills are emptied by rifle fire; that the quiet cafés in whose shade I drowsed away the intolerable heat of a sequence of April mornings are the resort and refuge of desperate and dying men. I am not easily bored, but I was in Mexico. It seemed that nothing had happened, that nothing ever could happen there. No place seemed less potential of dramatic life.

  As it was in Mexico and the New Hebrides, so was it to be in Haiti.

  When I told my friends in London that I was going there they raised their eyebrows. “Haiti,” they said. “But that’s the place where they kill their presidents and eat their babies. You’d better buy yourself a large-sized gun.”

  I did not buy myself a gun. It is those who go through the world unarmed who stand the best chance of passing unmolested. But it was certainly with the feeling that drama and adventure awaited me that I saw from the deck of the Araguaya the blue outline of the Haitian Hills. I was familiar with Haiti’s story, a long and a dark story—so long and dark that no historian can trace to its certain source the river of black merchandise that flowed during the early years of the eighteenth century to the slave factories of the Guinea coast.

  For the most part it was composed, that merchandise, of the riff-raff of Western Africa; of inferior tribes that had been subjugated by their neighbours, of weaklings who had sold themselves into slavery to pay their debts. And those who judge the coloured people of the world by the negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States of America should not forget that it is from the worst elements of Africa that they have grown. For the most part, the negroes who were shipped to the New World had in their country, through their own vulnerability, degenerated into a condition of slavery. There were, however, others of a different caste: proud princes of Dahomey taken in battle, in raids instigated by the slave traders—the conditions of slavery had made highly profitable the spoils of war—men of authority, used to the dignity and exercise of power; men of war, fearless and skilled in battle; the best that Africa could produce; fitted to match a colonial civilisation that luxury and easily come by wealth had weakened; men who were to write Haiti’s history.

  They were shipped, the black cargo of slaves and princes, packed close in holds three feet in height, in which it was impossible to sit or stand. There was no light, no air, no sanitation. They were bound by chains that as the ship rolled cut into their flesh. They were fed twice a day on rice, sustained by water that as often as not was tainted. Twice a week a ration of brandy or rum was issued to them. Eight in every hundred died upon the journey. During the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, pamphlet after pamphlet, debate after parliamentary debate expressed the horrors of “the middle passage.” But the clearest picture of slave conditions that I have seen is to be found in a small handbook, published in 1811, on the treatment of negro slaves. It was written for the young planter, and was not unlike those tips for the newly-joined subaltern that were issued to one in the 1914-18 war. It consisted of practical advice. The anonymous author regarded the negro as so much machinery for the management of estates. His concern was the development of that machinery to the highest level of efficiency. One of the early chapters describes the treatment necessary for slaves on their arrival. He assumes as a matter of course that for days they will be unfit for work. They will be sick, weak, poisoned. He catalogues the diseases from which as a result of their journey they are likely to be suffering. They will need very careful treatment. He presents his facts without comment: he accepts the conditions as a matter of course. He intends no criticism; the criticism that is implicit in that acceptance is a more potent witness than the statistics of a thousand pamphleteers.

  To those who are interested in the question of the slave trade that handbook is an invaluable informant. Its argument that the slaves are the most valuable part of a plantation is usually overlooked by those who dilate on the cruelty of plantation life. A negro was worth between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds. One does not by wanton cruelty lessen the value of one’s prope
rty. On the well-run estates the negro was happy and well cared for. He had his own hut, his own garden, whose produce he could sell, and from which he could make enough to purchase his freedom if he cared. His old age and his children were provided for. The negress would show her babies proudly to her master. “Good nigger boy to work for Massa,” she would say. There were a number of suicides, but that was due to the negro’s belief that when he died he would go back to Africa. In some plantations you would see cages containing severed hands and feet. This was not a warning of future punishment; it was a proof to the negro that though the gods of Africa might be able to transport to Africa the bodies of the dead, they could not transport the limbs that the white man had cut off. “Do you want,” said the planter, “to go home without hands and feet? Why not wait till you die of old age and can return there complete; for I shall certainly cut off the hands and feet of every one of you that kills himself.”

  There were punishments, and brutal punishments, but they were used in an age of punishment, when the flogging of sailors and soldiers was regarded as a necessary piece of discipline. Examples had to be made in a country where the white man was outnumbered by the black in the proportion of ten to one. It was useless to threaten punishment. The negro cannot picture to himself the reality of pain. He lives in the minute. The negro of the Southern States enjoys the preliminaries of his lynching, the publicity, the excitement of a whole town turning out to see him. The slave who, having had one ear lopped off, was threatened with the loss of the other, fell on his knees and besought his master to spare him on the grounds that he would then have nowhere to put his cigarette. And it is not difficult to understand the loathsome refinements of the torture that was applied. There is no person in the world whose stupidity can exasperate you more than the negro’s can.