At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

When we had gazed our fill, we set hastily to work to collect plants, as many as the lateness of the hour and the scalding heat would allow.  A glance showed the truth of Dr. Krueger’s words:—

‘It is impossible to describe the feelings of the botanist when arriving at a field like this, so much unlike anything he has seen before.  Here are full-blowing large Orchids, with red, white, and yellow flowers; and among the grasses, smaller ones of great variety, and as great scientific interest—Melastomaceous plants of various genera; Utricularias, Droseras, rare and various grasses, and Cyperoids of small sizes and fine kinds, with a species of Cassytha; in the water, Ceratophyllum (the well-known hornwort of the English ponds) and bog-mosses.  Such a variety of forms and colours is nowhere else to be met with in the island.’

Of the Orchids, we only found one in flower; and of the rest, of course, we had time only to gather a very few of the more remarkable, among which was that lovely cousin of the Clerodendrons, the crimson Amasonia, which ought to be in all hothouses.  The low bushes, I found, were that curious tree the Chaparro, ¹⁹⁸ but not the Chaparro ¹⁹⁹ so often mentioned by Humboldt as abounding on the Llanos.  This Chaparro is remarkable, first, for the queer little Natural Order to which it belongs; secondly, for its tanning properties; thirdly, for the very nasty smell of its flowers; fourthly, for the roughness of its leaves, which make one’s flesh creep, and are used, I believe, for polishing steel; and lastly, for its wide geographical range, from Isla de Pinos, near Cuba—where Columbus, to his surprise, saw true pines growing in the Tropics—all over the Llanos, and down to Brazil; an ancient, ugly, sturdy form of vegetation, able to get a scanty living out of the poorest soils, and consequently triumphant, as yet, in the battle of life.

The soil of the Savanna was a poor sandy clay, treacherous, and often impassable for horses, being half dried above and wet beneath.  The vegetation grew, not over the whole, but in innumerable tussocks, which made walking very difficult.  The type of the rushes and grasses was very English; but among them grew, here and there, plants which excited my astonishment; above all, certain Bladder-worts, ²⁰⁰ which I had expected to find, but which, when found, were so utterly unlike any English ones, that I did not recognise at first what they were.  Our English Bladder-worts, as everybody knows, float in stagnant water on tangles of hair-like leaves, something like those of the Water-Ranunculus, but furnished with innumerable tiny bladders; and this raft supports the little scape of yellow snapdragon-like flowers.  There are in Trinidad and other parts of South America Bladder-worts of this type.  But those which we found to-day, growing out of the damp clay, were more like in habit to a delicate stalk of flax, or even a bent of grass, upright, leafless or all but leafless, with heads of small blue or yellow flowers, and carrying, in one species, a few very minute bladders about the roots, in another none at all.  A strange variation from the normal type of the family; yet not so strange, after all, as that of another variety in the high mountain woods, which, finding neither ponds to float in nor swamp to root in, has taken to lodging as a parasite among the wet moss on tree-trunks; not so strange, either, as that of yet another, which floats, but in the most unexpected spots, namely, in the water which lodges between the leaf-sheaths of the wild pines, perched on the tree-boughs, a parasite on parasites; and sends out long runners, as it grows, along the bough, in search of the next wild pine and its tiny reservoirs.

In the face of such strange facts, is it very absurd to guess that these Utricularias, so like each other in their singular and highly specialised flowers, so unlike each other in the habit of the rest of the plant, have started from some one original type perhaps long since extinct; and that, carried by birds into quite new situations, they have adapted themselves, by natural selection, to new circumstances, changing the parts which required change—the leaves and stalks; but keeping comparatively unchanged those which needed no change—the flowers?

But I was not prepared, as I should have been had I studied my Griesbach’s West Indian Flora carefully enough beforehand, for the next proof of the wide distribution of water-plants.  For as I scratched and stumbled among the tussocks, ‘larding the lean earth as I stalked along,’ my kind guide put into my hand, with something of an air of triumph, a little plant, which was—there was no denying it—none other than the long-leaved Sundew, ²⁰¹ with its clammy-haired paws full of dead flies, just as they would have been in any bog in Devonshire or in Hampshire, in Wales or in Scotland.  But how came it here?  And more, how has it spread, not only over the whole of Northern Europe, Canada, and the United States, but even as far south as Brazil?  Its being common to North America and Europe is not surprising.  It may belong to that comparatively ancient Flora which existed when there was land way between the two continents by way of Greenland, and the bison ranged from Russia to the Rocky Mountains.  But its presence within the Tropics is more probably explained by supposing that it, like the Bladder-worts, has been carried on the feet or in the crop of birds.

The Savanna itself, like those of Caroni and Piarco, offers, I suspect, a fresh proof that a branch of the Orinoco once ran along the foot of the northern mountains of Trinidad.

‘It is impossible,’ says Humboldt, ²⁰² ‘to cross the burning plains’ (of the Orinocquan Savannas) ‘without inquiring whether they have always been in the same state; or whether they have been stripped of their vegetation by some revolution of nature.  The stratum of mould now found on them is very thin. . . .  The plains were, doubtless, less bare in the fifteenth century than they are now; yet the first Conquistadores, who came from Coro, described them then as Savannas, where nothing could be perceived save the sky and the turf; which were generally destitute of trees, and difficult to traverse on account of the reverberation of heat from the soil.  Why does not the great forest of the Oroonoco extend to the north, or the left bank of that river?  Why does it not fill that vast space that reaches as far as the Cordillera of the coast, and which is fertilised by various rivers?  This question is connected with all that relates to the history of our planet.  If, indulging in geological reveries, we suppose that the Steppes of America and the desert of Sahara have been stripped of their vegetation by an irruption of the ocean, or that they formed the bottom of an inland lake’—(the Sahara, as is now well known, is the quite recently elevated bed of a great sea continuous with the Atlantic)—‘we may conceive that thousands of years have not sufficed for the trees and shrubs to advance toward the centre from the borders of the forests, from the skirts of the plains either naked or covered with turf, and darken so vast a space with their shade.  It is more difficult to explain the origin of bare savannas enclosed in forests, than to recognise the causes which maintain forests and savannas within their ancient limits like continents and seas.’

With these words in my mind, I could not but look on the Savanna of Aripo as one of the last-made bits of dry land in Trinidad, still unfurnished with the common vegetation of the island.  The two invading armies of tropical plants—one advancing from the north, off the now almost destroyed land which connected Trinidad and the Cordillera with the Antilles; the other from the south-west, off the utterly destroyed land which connected Trinidad with Guiana—met, as I fancy, ages since, on the opposite banks of a mighty river, or estuary, by which the Orinoco entered the ocean along the foot of the northern mountains.  As that river-bed rose and became dry land, the two Floras crossed and intermingled.  Only here and there, as at Aripo, are left patches, as it were, of a third Flora, which once spread uninterruptedly along the southern base of the Cordillera and over the lowland which is now the Gulf of Paria, along the alluvial flats of the mighty stream; and the Moriche palms of Aripo may be the lineal descendants of those which now inhabit the Llanos of the main; as those again may be the lineal descendants of the Moriches which Schomburgk found forming forests among the mountains of Guiana, up to four thousand feet above the sea.  Age after age the Moriche apples floated down the stream, settling themselves on every damp spot not yet occupied by the richer vegetation of the forests, and ennobled, with their solitary grandeur, what without them would have been a dreary waste of mud and sand.

These Savannas of Trinidad stand, it must be remembered, in the very line where, on such a theory, they might be expected to stand, along the newest deposit; the great band of sand, gravel, and clay rubbish which stretches across the island at the mountain-foot, its highest point in thirty-six miles being only two hundred and twenty feet—an elevation far less than the corresponding depression of the Bocas, which has parted Trinidad from the main Cordillera.  That the rubbish on this line was deposited by a river or estuary is as clear to me as that the river was either a very rapid one, or subject to violent and lofty floods, as the Orinoco is now.  For so are best explained, not merely the sheets of gravel, but the huge piles of boulder which have accumulated at the mouth of the mountain gorges on the northern side.

As for the southern shore of this supposed channel of the Orinoco, it at once catches the eye of any one standing on the northern range.  He must see that he is on one shore of a vast channel, the other shore of which is formed by the Montserrat, Tamana, and Manzanilla hills; far lower now than the northern range, Tamana only being over a thousand feet, but doubtless, in past ages, far higher than now.  No one can doubt this who has seen the extraordinary degradation going on still about the summits, or who remembers that the strata, whether tertiary or lower chalk, have been, over the greater part of the island, upheaved, faulted, set on end, by the convulsions seemingly so common during the Miocene epoch, and since then sawn away by water and air into one rolling outline, quite independent of the dip of the strata.  The whole southern two thirds of Trinidad represent a wear and tear which is not to be counted by thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of years; and yet which, I verily believe, has taken place since the average plants, trees, and animals of the island dwelt therein.

This elevation may have well coincided with the depression of the neighbouring Gulf of Paria.  That the southern portion of that gulf was once dry land; that the Serpent’s Mouth did not exist when the present varieties of plants and animals were created, is matter of fact, proven by the identity of the majority of plants and animals on both shores.  How else—to give a few instances out of hundreds—did the Mora, the Brazil-nut, the Cannon-ball tree: how else did the Ant-eater, the Coendou, the two Cuencos, the Guazupita deer, enter Trinidad?  Humboldt—though, unfortunately, he never visited the island—saw this at a glance.  While he perceived that the Indian story, how the Boca Drago to the north had been only lately broken through, had a foundation of truth, ‘It cannot be doubted,’ he says, ‘that the Gulf of Paria was once an inland basin, and the Punta Icacque (its south-western extremity) united to the Punta Toleto, east of the Boca de Pedernales.’ ²⁰³  In which case there may well have been—one may almost say there must have been—an outlet for that vast body of water which pours, often in tremendous floods, from the Pedernales’ mouth of the Orinoco, as well as from those of the Tigre, Guanipa, Caroli, and other streams between it and the Cordillera on the north; and this outlet probably lay along the line now occupied by the northern Savannas of Trinidad.

So much this little natural park of Aripo taught, or seemed to teach me.  But I did not learn the whole of the lesson that afternoon, or indeed till long after.  There was no time then to work out such theories.  The sun was getting low, and more intolerable as he sank; and to escape a sunstroke on the spot, or at least a dark ride home, we hurried off into the forest shade, after one last look at the never-to-be-forgotten Morichal, and trotted home to luxury and sleep.

CHAPTER XIII: THE COCAL

Next day, like the ‘Young Muleteers of Grenada,’ a good song which often haunted me in those days,

 
‘With morning’s earliest twinkle
Again we are up and gone,’
 

with two horses, two mules, and a Negro and a Coolie carrying our scanty luggage in Arima baskets: but not without an expression of pity from the Negro who cleaned my boots.  ‘Where were we going?’  To the east coast.  Cuffy turned up what little nose he had.  He plainly considered the east coast, and indeed Trinidad itself, as not worth looking at.  ‘Ah! you should go Barbadoes, sa.  Dat de country to see.  I Barbadian, sa.’  No doubt.  It is very quaint, this self-satisfaction of the Barbadian Negro.  Whether or not he belonged originally to some higher race—for there are as great differences of race among Negroes as among any white men—he looks down on the Negroes, and indeed on the white men, of other islands, as beings of an inferior grade; and takes care to inform you in the first five minutes that he is ‘neider C’rab nor Creole, but true Barbadian barn.’  This self-conceit of his, meanwhile, is apt to make him unruly, and the cause of unruliness in others when he emigrates.  The Barbadian Negroes are, I believe, the only ones who give, or ever have given, any trouble in Trinidad; and in Barbadoes itself, though the agricultural Negroes work hard and well, who that knows the West Indies knows not the insubordination of the Bridgetown boatmen, among whose hands a traveller and his luggage are, it is said, likely enough to be pulled in pieces?  However, they are rather more quiet just now; for not a thousand years ago a certain steamer’s captain, utterly unable to clear his quarter of the fleet of fighting, jabbering brown people, turned the steam pipe on them.  At which quite unexpected artillery they fled precipitately; and have had some rational respect for a steamer’s quarter ever since.  After all, I do not deny that this man’s being a Barbadian opened my heart to him at once, for old sakes’ sake.

Another specimen of Negro character I was to have analysed, or tried to analyse, at the estate where I had slept.  M. F– had lately caught a black servant at the brook-side busily washing something in a calabash, and asked him what was he doing there?  The conversation would have been held, of course, in French-Spanish-African—Creole patois, a language which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and declensions, etc.  A curious book on it has lately been published in Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at once no mean philologer and no mean humorist.  The substance of the Negro’s answer was, ‘Why, sir, you sent me to the town to buy a packet of sugar and a packet of salt; and coming back it rained so hard, the packets burst, and the salt was all washed into the sugar.  And so—I am washing it out again.’ . . .

This worthy was to have been brought to me, that I might discover, if possible, by what processes of ‘that which he was pleased to call his mind’ he had arrived at the conclusion that such a thing could be done.  Clearly, he could not plead unavoidable ignorance of the subject-matter, as might the old cook at San Josef, who, the first time her master brought home Wenham Lake ice from Port of Spain, was scandalised at the dirtiness of the ‘American water,’ washed off the sawdust, and dried the ice in the sun.  His was a case of Handy-Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover’s hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy; and very frequent, I am afraid, among the Negroes.  But—as might have been expected—the poor boy’s moral sense had proved as shaky as his intellectual powers.  He had just taken a fancy to some goods of his master’s; and had retreated, to enjoy them the more securely, into the southern forests, with a couple of brown policemen on his track.  So he was likely to undergo a more simple investigation than that which was submitted to my analysis, viz. how he proposed to wash the salt out of the sugar.

We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in the woods, with a good shop or ‘store’ upon a village green, under the verandah whereof lay, side by side with bottled ale and biscuit tins, bags of Carapo ²⁰⁴ nuts; trapezoidal brown nuts—enclosed originally in a round fruit—which ought some day to form a valuable article of export.  Their bitter anthelminthic oil is said to have medicinal uses; but it will be still more useful for machinery, as it has—like that curious flat gourd the Sequa ²⁰⁵—the property of keeping iron from rust.  The tree itself, common here and in Guiana, is one of the true Forest Giants; we saw many a noble specimen of it in our rides.  Its timber is tough, not over heavy, and extensively used already in the island; while its bark is a febrifuge and tonic.  In fact it possesses all those qualities which make its brethren, the Meliaceæ, valuable throughout the Tropics.  But it is not the only tree of South America whose bark may be used as a substitute for quinine.  They may be counted possibly by dozens.  A glance at the excellent enumerations of the uses of vegetable products to be found in Lindley’s Vegetable Kingdom (a monument of learning) will show how God provides, how man neglects and wastes.  As a single instance, the Laurels alone are known already to contain several valuable febrifuges, among which the Demerara Greenheart, or Bibiri, ²⁰⁶ claims perhaps the highest rank.  ‘Dr. Maclagan has shown,’ says Dr. Lindley, ‘that sulphate of Bibiri acts with rapid and complete success in arresting ague.’  This tree spreads from Jamaica to the Spanish Main.  It is plentiful in Trinidad; still more plentiful in Guiana; and yet all of it which reaches Europe is a little of its hard beautiful wood for the use of cabinetmakers; while in Demerara, I am assured by an eye-witness, many tons of this precious Greenheart bark are thrown away year by year.  So goes the world; and man meanwhile at once boasts of his civilisation, and complains of the niggardliness of Nature.

But if I once begin on this subject I shall not know where to end.

Our way lay now for miles along a path which justified all that I had fancied about the magnificent possibilities of landscape gardening in the Tropics.  A grass drive, as we should call it in England—a ‘trace,’ as it is called in the West Indies—some sixty feet in width, and generally carpeted with short turf, led up hill and down dale; for the land, though low, is much ridged and gullied, and there has been as yet no time to cut down the hills, or to metal the centre of the road.  It led, as the land became richer, through a natural avenue even grander than those which I had already seen.  The light and air, entering the trace, had called into life the undergrowth and lower boughs, till from the very turf to a hundred and fifty feet in height rose one solid green wall, spangled here and there with flowers.  Below was Mamure, Roseau, Timit, Aroumas, and Tulumas, ²⁰⁷ mixed with Myrtles and Melastomas; then the copper Bois Mulatres among the Cocorite and Jagua palms; above them the heads of enormous broad-leaved trees of I know not how many species; and the lianes festooning all from cope to base.  The crimson masses of Norantea on the highest tree-tops were here most gorgeous; but we had to beware of staring aloft too long, for fear of riding into mud-holes—for the wet season would not end as yet, though dry weather was due—or, even worse, into the great Parasol-ant warrens, which threatened, besides a heavy fall, stings innumerable.  At one point, I recollect, a gold-green Jacamar sat on a log and looked at me till I was within five yards of her.  At another we heard the screams of Parrots; at another, the double note of the Toucan; at another, the metallic clank of the Bell-bird, or what was said to be the Bell-bird.  But this note was not that solemn and sonorous toll of the Campanese of the mainland which is described by Waterton and others.  It resembled rather the less poetical sound of a woman beating a saucepan to make a swarm of bees settle.

At one point we met a gang of Negroes felling timber to widen the road.  Fresh fallen trees, tied together with lianes, lay everywhere.  What a harvest for the botanist was among them!  I longed to stay there a week to examine and collect.  But time pressed; and, indeed, collecting plants in the wet season is a difficult and disappointing work.  In an air saturated with moisture specimens turn black and mouldy, and drop to pieces; and unless turned over and exposed to every chance burst of sunshine, the labour of weeks is lost, if indeed meanwhile the ants, and other creeping things, have not eaten the whole into rags.

Among these Negroes was one who excited my astonishment; not merely for his size, though he was perhaps the tallest man whom I saw among the usually tall Negroes of Trinidad; but for his features, which were altogether European of the highest type; the forehead high and broad, the cheek-bones flat, the masque long and oval, and the nose aquiline and thin enough for any prince.  Conscious of his own beauty and strength, he stood up among the rest as an old Macedonian might have stood up among the Egyptians he had conquered.  We tried to find out his parentage.  My companions presumed he was an ‘African,’ i.e. imported during the times of slavery.  He said No: that he was a Creole, island born; but his father, it appeared, had been in one of our Negro regiments, and had been settled afterwards on a Government grant of land.  Whether his beauty was the result of ‘atavism’—of the reappearance, under the black skin and woolly hair, of some old stain of white blood; or whether, which is more probable, he came of some higher African race; one could not look at him without hopeful surmises as to the possible rise of the Negro, and as to the way in which it will come about—the only way in which any race has permanently risen, as far as I can ascertain; namely, by the appearance among them of sudden sports of nature; individuals of an altogether higher type; such a man as that terrible Dâaga, whose story has been told.  If I am any judge of physiognomy, such a man as that, having—what the Negro has not yet had—‘la carrière ouverte aux talents,’ might raise, not himself merely, but a whole tribe, to an altogether new level in culture and ability.

Just after passing this gang we found, lying by the road, two large snakes, just killed, which I would gladly have preserved had it been possible.  They were, the Negroes told us, ‘Dormillons,’ or ‘Mangrove Cascabel,’ a species as yet, I believe, undescribed; and, of course, here considered as very poisonous, owing to their likeness to the true Cascabel, ²⁰⁸ whose deadly fangs are justly dreaded by the Lapo hunter.  For the Cascabel has a fancy for living in the Lapo’s burrow, as does the rattlesnake in that of the prairie dog in the Western United States, and in the same friendly and harmless fashion; and is apt, when dug out, to avenge himself and his host by a bite which is fatal in a few hours.  But these did not seem to me to have the heads of poisonous snakes; and, in spite of the entreaties of the terrified Negroes, I opened their mouths to judge for myself, and found them, as I expected, utterly fangless and harmless.  I was not aware then that Dr. De Verteuil had stated the same fact in print; but I am glad to corroborate it, for the benefit of at least the rational people in Trinidad: for snakes, even poisonous ones, should be killed as seldom as possible.  They feed on rats and vermin, and are the farmer’s good friend, whether in the Tropics or in England; and to kill a snake, or even an adder—who never bites any one if he is allowed to run away—is, in nineteen cases out of twenty, mere wanton mischief.

The way was beguiled, if I recollect rightly, for some miles on, by stories about Cuba and Cuban slavery from one of our party.  He described the political morality of Cuba as utterly dissolute; told stories of great sums of money voted for roads which are not made to this day, while the money had found its way into the pockets of Government officials; and, on the whole, said enough to explain the determination of the Cubans to shake off Spanish misrule, and try what they could do for themselves on this earth.  He described Cuban slavery as, on the whole, mild; corporal punishment being restricted by law to a few blows, and very seldom employed: but the mildness seemed dictated rather by self-interest than by humanity.  ‘Ill-use our slaves?’ said a Cuban to him.  ‘We cannot afford it.  You take good care of your four-legged mules: we of our two-legged ones.’  The children, it seems, are taken away from the mothers, not merely because the mothers are needed for work, but because they neglect their offspring so much that the children have more chance of living—and therefore of paying—if brought up by hand.  So each estate has, or had, its crêche, as the French would call it—a great nursery, in which the little black things are reared, kindly enough, by the elder ladies of the estate.  To one old lady, who wearied herself all day long in washing, doctoring, and cramming the babies, my friend expressed pity for all the trouble she took about her human brood.  ‘Oh dear no,’ answered she; ‘they are a great deal easier to rear than chickens.’  The system, however, is nearly at an end.  Already the Cuban Revolution has produced measures of half-emancipation; and in seven years’ time probably there will not be a slave in Cuba.

We waded stream after stream under the bamboo clumps, and in one of them we saw swimming a green rigoise, or whip-snake, which must have been nearly ten feet long.  It swam with its head and the first two feet of its body curved aloft like a swan, while the rest of the body lay along the surface of the water in many curves—a most graceful object as it glided away into dark shadow along an oily pool.  At last we reached an outlying camp, belonging to one of our party who was superintending the making of new roads in that quarter, and there rested our weary limbs, some in hammock, some on the tables, some, again, on the clay floor.  Here I saw, as I saw every ten minutes, something new—that quaint vegetable plaything described by Humboldt and others; namely, the spathe of the Timit palm.  It encloses, as in most palms, a branched spadix covered with innumerable round buds, most like a head of millet, two feet and a half long: but the spathe, instead of splitting and forming a hood over the flowers, as in the Cocorite and most palms, remains entire, and slips off like the finger of a glove.  When slipped off, it is found to be made of two transverse layers of fibre—a bit of veritable natural lace, similar to, though far less delicate than, the famous lace-bark of the Lagetta-tree, peculiar, I believe, to one district in the Jamaica mountains.  And as it is elastic and easily stretched, what hinders the brown child from pulling it out till it makes an admirable fool’s cap, some two feet high, and exactly the colour of his own skin, and dancing about therein, the fat oily little Cupidon, without a particle of clothing beside?  And what wonder if we grown-up whites made fools’ caps too, for children on the other side of the Atlantic?  During which process we found—what all said they had never seen before—that one of the spadices carried two caps, one inside the other, and one exactly like the other; a wanton superfluity of Nature, which I should like to hear explained by some morphologist.

We rode away from that hospitable group of huts, whither we were to return in two or three days; and along the green trace once more.  As we rode, M– the civiliser of Montserrat and I side by side, talking of Cuba, and staring at the Noranteas overhead, a dull sound was heard, as if the earth had opened; as indeed it had, engulfing in the mud the whole forehand of M–’s mule; and there he knelt, his beard outspread upon the clay, while the mule’s visage looked patiently out from under his left arm.  However, it was soft falling there.  The mule was hauled out by main force.  As for cleaning either her or the rider, that was not thought of in a country where they were sure to be as dirty as ever in an hour; and so we rode on, after taking a note of the spot, and, as it happened, forgetting it again—one of us at least.

On again, along the green trace, which rose now to a ridge, with charming glimpses of wooded hills and glens to right and left; past comfortable squatters’ cottages, with cacao drying on sheets at the doors or under sheds; with hedges of dwarf Erythrina, dotted with red jumby beads, and here and there that pretty climbing vetch, the Overlook. ²⁰⁹  I forgot, by the by, to ask whether it is planted here, as in Jamaica, to keep off the evil eye, or ‘overlook’; whence its name.  Nor can I guess what peculiarity about the plant can have first made the Negro fix on it as a fetish.  The genesis of folly is as difficult to analyse as the genesis of most other things.