LITMIR.BIZ

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pulp which (as those who remember the delectable pages of Tom Cringle know) bears a startling likeness to brains.  Bunches of grapes, at St. Kitts, lay among these: and at St. Lucia we saw with them, for the first time, Avocado, or Alligator pears, alias midshipman’s butter; 9 large round brown fruits, to be eaten with pepper and salt by those who list.  With these, in open baskets, lay bright scarlet capsicums, green coconuts tinged with orange, great roots of yam 10 and cush-cush, 11 with strange pulse of various kinds and hues.  The contents of these vegetable baskets were often as gay-coloured as the gaudy gowns, and still gaudier turbans, of the women who offered them for sale.

      Screaming and jabbering, the Negroes and Negresses thrust each other’s boats about, scramble from one to the other with gestures of wrath and defiance, and seemed at every moment about to fall to fisticuffs and to upset themselves among the sharks.  But they did neither.  Their excitement evaporated in noise.  To their ‘ladies,’ to do them justice, the men were always civil, while the said ‘ladies’ bullied them and ordered them about without mercy.  The negro women are, without doubt, on a more thorough footing of equality with the men than the women of any white race.  The causes, I believe, are two.  In the first place there is less difference between the sexes in mere physical strength and courage; and watching the average Negresses, one can well believe the stories of those terrible Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey, whose boast is, that they are no longer women, but men.  There is no doubt that, in case of a rebellion, the black women of the West Indies would be as formidable, cutlass in hand, as the men.  The other cause is the exceeding ease with which, not merely food, but gay clothes and ornaments, can be procured by light labour.  The negro woman has no need to marry and make herself the slave of a man, in order to get a home and subsistence.  Independent she is, for good and evil; and independent she takes care to remain; and no schemes for civilising the Negro will have any deep or permanent good effect which do not take note of, and legislate for, this singular fact.

      Meanwhile, it was a comfort to one fresh from the cities of the Old World, and the short and stunted figures, the mesquin and scrofulous visages, which crowd our alleys and back wynds, to see everywhere health, strength, and goodly stature, especially among women.  Nowhere in the West Indies are to be seen those haggard down-trodden mothers, grown old before their time, too common in England, and commoner still in France.  Health, ‘rude’ in every sense of the word, is the mark of the negro woman, and of the negro man likewise.  Their faces shine with fatness; they seem to enjoy, they do enjoy, the mere act of living, like the lizard on the wall.  It may be said—it must be said—that, if they be human beings (as they are), they are meant for something more than mere enjoyment of life.  Well and good: but are they not meant for enjoyment likewise?  Let us take the beam out of our own eye, before we take the mote out of theirs; let us, before we complain of them for being too healthy and comfortable, remember that we have at home here tens of thousands of paupers, rogues, whatnot, who are not a whit more civilised, intellectual, virtuous, or spiritual than the Negro, and are meanwhile neither healthy nor comfortable.  The Negro may have the corpus sanum without the mens sana.  But what of those whose souls and bodies are alike unsound?

      Away south, along the low spit at the south end of the island, where are salt-pans which, I suspect, lie in now extinguished craters; and past little Nevis, the conical ruin, as it were, of a volcanic island.  It was probably joined to the low end of St. Kitts not many years ago.  It is separated from it now only by a channel called the Narrows, some four to six miles across, and very shallow, there being not more than four fathoms in many places, and infested with reefs, whether of true coral or of volcanic rock I should be glad to know.  A single peak, with its Souffrière, rises to some 2000 feet; right and left of it are two lower hills, fragments, apparently, of a Somma, or older and larger crater.  The lava and ash slide in concave slopes of fertile soil down to the sea, forming an island some four miles by three, which was in the seventeenth century a little paradise, containing 4000 white citizens, who had dwindled down in 1805, under the baneful influences of slavery, to 1300; in 1832 (the period of emancipation) to 500; and in 1854 to only 170. 12  A happy place, however, it is said still to be, with a population of more than 10,000, who, as there is happily no Crown land in the island, cannot squat, and so return to their original savagery; but are well-ordered and peaceable, industrious, and well-taught, and need, it is said, not only no soldiers, but no police.

      One spot on the little island we should have liked much to have seen: the house where Nelson, after his marriage with Mrs. Nisbet, a lady of Nevis, dwelt awhile in peace and purity.  Happier for him, perhaps, though not for England, had he never left that quiet nest.

      And now, on the leeward bow, another gray mountain island rose; and on the windward another, lower and longer.  The former was Montserrat, which I should have gladly visited, as I had been invited to do.  For little Montserrat is just now the scene of a very hopeful and important experiment. 13  The Messrs. Sturge have established there a large plantation of limes, and a manufactory of lime-juice, which promises to be able to supply, in good time, vast quantities of that most useful of all sea-medicines.

      Their connection with the Society of Friends, and indeed the very name of Sturge, is a guarantee that such a work will be carried on for the benefit, not merely of the capitalists, but of the coloured people who are employed.  Already, I am assured, a marked improvement has taken place among them; and I, for one, heartily bid God-speed to the enterprise: to any enterprise, indeed, which tends to divert labour and capital from that exclusive sugar-growing which has been most injurious, I verily believe the bane, of the West Indies.  On that subject I may have to say more in a future chapter.  I ask the reader, meanwhile, to follow, as the ship’s head goes round to windward toward Antigua.

      Antigua is lower, longer, and flatter than the other islands.  It carries no central peak: but its wildness of ragged uplands forms, it is said, a natural fortress, which ought to be impregnable; and its loyal and industrious people boast that, were every other West Indian island lost, the English might make a stand in Antigua long enough to enable them to reconquer the whole.  I should have feared, from the look of the island, that no large force could hold out long in a country so destitute of water as those volcanic hills, rusty, ragged, treeless, almost sad and desolate—if any land could be sad and desolate with such a blue sea leaping around and such a blue sky blazing above.  Those who wish to know the agricultural capabilities of Antigua, and to know, too, the good sense and courage, the justice and humanity, which have enabled the Antiguans to struggle on and upward through all their difficulties, in spite of drought, hurricane, and earthquake, till permanent prosperity seems now become certain, should read Dr. Davy’s excellent book, which I cannot too often recommend.  For us, we could only give a hasty look at its southern volcanic cliffs; while we regretted that we could not inspect the marine strata of the eastern parts of the island, with their calcareous marls and limestones, hardened clays and cherts, and famous silicified trees, which offer important problems to the geologist, as yet not worked out. 14

      We could well believe, as the steamer ran into English Harbour, that Antigua was still subject to earthquakes; and had been shaken, with great loss of property though not of life, in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, when 5000 lives were lost in the town of Point-à-Pitre alone.  The only well-marked effect which Dr. Davy could hear of, apart from damage to artificial structures, was the partial sinking of a causeway leading to Rat Island, in the harbour of St. John.  No wonder: if St. John’s harbour be—as from its shape on the map it probably is—simply an extinct crater, or group of craters, like English Harbour.  A more picturesque or more uncanny little hole than that latter we had never yet seen: but there are many such harbours about these islands, which nature, for the time being at least, has handed over from the dominion of fire to that of water.  Past low cliffs of ash and volcanic boulder, sloping westward to the sea, which is eating them fast away, the steamer runs in through a deep crack, a pistol-shot in width.  On the east side a strange section of gray lava and ash is gnawn into caves.  On the right, a bluff rock of black lava dips sheer into water several fathoms deep; and you anchor at once inside

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