The cradle of the deep : an account of a voyage to the West Indies

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LIBRAPY

EX-LIBRIS

Preface

That fervent spirit of adventure and romance which set aglow the heart of every lad in every sea town of England, when Elizabeth was queen, found both its source and its end among the West Indies and by the Spanish Main.

The palm-covered island, the secret creek, the white-walled Spanish town formed the scene of ever-inspiring dreams. The boy from the grandmotherly coaster, who found his way into Plymouth Sound, would sit on a bollard on the quay and listen to sunbrowned men talking of Indians and sea fights, of Plate ships and pieces of eight, until his soul so burned within him that he turned upon his own homely craft, and shipped as powder-boy on the first galliasse making for the heroic West.

In these fair islands were gold and pearls, they said, as well as birds and beasts beyond the imagination of man. Here under the steaming sun of the tropics the pirate harried the sea, and here, in blood, smoke, and cutlass hacks his tale was writ. In coves among the islands he careened his ship and hid his treasure, in blue sea alleys he watched for Spanish merchantmen, and in fever-stricken jungles he rotted and died. For over a century the famous Buccaneers were the terror of the Spanish Main, while to every sturdy British lad, for all these years, the call of the sea rover was as the call of the wild.

The very first glimpse of the New World that met the gaze of Columbus was a glimpse of a West Indian island. For some three centuries after his coming, the coasts the great navigator tracked out were the scene of a sea life whose common round was one of vi THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP.

ever desperate adventure. For three centuries ships poured westward from nearly every port in Europe, laden wdth arms and men, searching for strange riches and for a sight of the marvels of the new earth.

Through the island channels lay the passage to El Dorado, to Manoa, the city of the lake, where the streets were paved with gold, and down these sea-ways, radiant with hope, sailed Raleigh, the dreamer, on his road to fortune.

It was among these islands and along the Main that there came to Drake the strength and craft that crushed, in fulness of time, the Spanish Armada. Here was served the apprenticeship of Dampier, of Frobisher, of Hawkins, and of a host of mighty sailormen who have made the ocean memorable.

It was to the West Indies that Nelson look his first voyage, a voyage from which the puny lad " returned a practical seaman." It was here that he held his first command. It was here that he learnt from the quarter-deck of his little brig the elements of war.

In the seclusion of these gorgeous islands, indeed, the long sea stor}' of England was begun. The West Indies became the nursery of the British Navy, the school where the thews were hardened and the sea lessons learned. Here was fostered and fed that soul of adventure and reckless daring which inspired the early colonist and made invincible the man with the boarding pike. Here grew, from puny beginnings, the germ of the great Sea Power of the World.

In the proud romance of the sea, in the ocean songs and epics, in the sea stories which have been told and retold to generations of British lads, in the breeding of stout-hearted men and the framing of far-venturing ships, the islands have been no less than the Cradle of the Deep.

Thatched House Lodge, Richmond Park,

Kingston-on-Thames. March 1908.

Contents

PAGK

I. FROM THE CITY OF FOG TO AN ISLAND OF ETERNAL

SUMMER = . . I

I. From The City Of Fog To An Island Of Eternal Summer

London in mid-December, on the eve of the departure of the mail steamer for the West Indies, was a disconsolate place.

The least woeful spot, perhaps, was Regent Street at high noon. The road was covered with a sour, chocolate-coloured mud which spat viciously from under the Juggernaut wheels of motor omnibuses. Above there was no suggestion of either atmosphere or sky, but merely a pall of fog as cheerless as a poor-house blanket. The street began in mist and ended in mist, while into the same gelid shadow the carriages vanished. Things were seen as through a glass darkly, so that the housetops looked like distant battlements.

There was a smell abroad as of mildew, seasoned by the stench of petrol and the acrid filth of the street. The shop windows were steamed over by a clammy sweat. Within were half-suffocated lights, for the day showed no distinctions of morn, afternoon or eventide.

The people who walked the pavements kept their eyes upon the slimy stones. They seemed narcotised by a cold, the shrewdness of which no thermometer could register. The only sounds that cheered them were the hissing of wheels, the hammering of hoofs, and the occasional jingle of hansom-cab bells.

The only patch of colour I can remember in this last walk in London was derived from a yellow and red poster dealing

B with Christmas festivities. It was carried by a damp, sepiatinted man, and the gaudy colours were reflected in the pool of liquid mud over which he stood stupefied. There was also a barrow filled with holly — a pile of shining leaves and scarlet berries — but beyond these the houses, the vehicles, and the people were all chilled down to the general grey of cellar mould.

Then came an indefinite sea journey, in no way unlike so many others, marked by recollections of a fading port, the thud of engines, the scud of the wave under the ship's bow, the landing from a boat on a hot, white quay crowded with negroes.

As the last association with any land was concerned with a walk along Regent Street, so the next took the form of swimming in a pool within the coral reef at Barbados.

It was again high noon. The rays of the tropical sun were keen as a hot sword-blade. The sea was sensuously warm. On the shore, on the edge of a coral cliff some twelve feet high, was a bathing-hut of brown wood with warped sun-shutters, and a flight of blistering steps leading to the water. The little cliff was hollowed out into caverns by the tide, while over its brink hung creepers in long festoons.

The cabin was shaded by the leaves of a sea-grape tree. A clump of bananas, a hibiscus bush covered with crimson flowers, and some acacias kept company with the hut. As I floated in the pool I could watch a humming-bird busy with the blossoms of the sea-grape, and could follow the flight of many dragon-flies.

The sky above was the deepest blue, the sea beyond the reef was the colour of a pansy, while upon the reef itself the surf broke in a line of white. The sea within the reef was a wondrous green, and so clear was the water and so white the sand that in swimming one's shadow could be seen on the weedless bottom. In the distance, where the small cliff ended, there came a beach, curved like a sickle, with palms and impenetrable trees along the rim of the strand. The air was heavy with the smell of the sea, while upon the ear there fell no sound except that of the surf on the reef.

II. Seventy Years Ago

A JOURNEY to Barbados in a mail steamer of 6000 tons provides little to comment upon unless it be the grumbling of the passengers. There are always many to find fault. Some will complain that the ship goes too fast, or not fast enough. Others are aggrieved because the electric fan in their cabin hums like a giant bee, or because the grand piano is out of tune, or because quails are not cooked in a manner they approve of.

Those who are most ready with grievances may perhaps be appeased by an account of the journey from England to Barbados by mail ship as it was accomplished only seventy years ago.

In 1836 one William Lloyd,^ doctor of medicine, started for Barbados with three male friends. They were simple tourists, travelling for pleasure, and, incidentally, for that improvement of the mind which was regarded as desirable in those days. The departure was from Falmouth, and the ship was the mail barque Skylark^ Captain Ladd. She was lying in the bay, ready to start. It must be stated that the doctor himself commenced to grumble from the beginning. He complained that " the demand of the boatmen was half-a-guinea each — an excessive charge, allowed by the rules of the port" It cost the tourists, therefore, 2/. to get on board ! The bulwarks of the ship were " forbiddingly high," so that it was impossible to look over. Those who desired to gaze upon the sea had to hang over the gunwale, like boys over an orchard wall. The poop was not safe for tourists, " having no defence at the sides."

' Letters from the West Indies.

There was one general cabin in the Skylark for all the passengers — to live in, dine in, and sleep in. It was so low that it was impossible to stand upright in it ; moreover, it was dark. This was due at the moment to the fact that "the top of the cabin lights was covered with meat in a recently slaughtered state." No doubt, when the mail barque got away to sea the joints were removed and the blood-smeared panes of glass were cleaned. The tourists noticed also that "joints were hung around in various parts of the vessel, interspersed with cauliflowers, cabbages and turnips."

Now, in this low-roofed cabin, with the blood-dimmed skylight, there were only twelve berths provided. The number of passengers, on the other hand, was eighteen — viz. fifteen gentlemen and three ladies. Six of the party had, therefore, to shift as best they could during the month the voyage lasted.

When the ship was well in the tropics the doctor makes the following note : " Our nights are sad from the skylights being closed, the passengers who sleep on the table, on the benches and on the floor being afraid of cold from the night air." That cabin must have been little less than a torture-chamber. A fetid oillamp, swinging to and fro as the ship rolled, would reveal the sleepers on the table. The heat would be suffocating and the air thick with the fumes of the last meal, of stale wine, of tobacco, of damp clothes, and of eighteen perspiring human beings. Above the creaking of the bulkheads there would, no doubt, be heard the sigh of the tired woman who could not sleep, the gasp of the fevered man who wanted air, and the snoring of the heavy people on the floor. The passengers must have hated this too familiar, ever-frowsy " black hole," for it is needless to say, that in the mail barque of 1836 there was no smoking-room, no library, no music room, and, of course, no bath-room. When the weather was unfavourable there was nothing for the fifteen gentlemen and the three ladies to do but to sit below in the gloom, and like St. Paul, " hope for the day."

The doctor found the meals particularly trying. Upon this topic he writes as follows : " It is a trial to be long at dinner when

SEVENTY YEARS AGO. S

one is panting for breath ; the right plan would be to dine off one dish and then away, whereas we have soup, then a wait for fish, then a long wait for a course of meat, then a tedious wait for a course of pastry, then a tiresome wait for the dessert, and long before that is finished we are wiping our foreheads." One thing is clear — there was no stinting in the matter of food on the good ship Skylark. The order of the day was as follows : coffee, 6 A.M.; breakfast, 8 A.M.; lunch, 12; dinner, 4 P.M., with coffee after ; tea, 7 P.M. ; and supper, 9 P.M.

The doctor remarks — and the remark is true to this day — "there is some temptation to eat and drink too much at sea." There was undoubtedly too much wine consumed on board the Skylark ; so much, indeed, that it led to " headache and other feverish symptoms."

William Lloyd, however, although in common with his fellows he panted for breath whenever he found himself in that awful cabin, was disposed to make the best of things. The passage from Falmouth to Barbados occupied twenty-six days, from which it may be inferred that the Skylark was a good sailing vessel and had a strong N.E. trade wind behind her all the way. " We had a pleasant voyage," writes the cheerful doctor, " though our captain quarrelled three successive days with his sailing-master, who was at last put in arrest."

Captain Ladd seems to have had quite an ample idea of his position. At Falmouth he made his appearance before the passengers with a theatrical effect worthy of a leading actor. The barque was ready to sail, the last package was on board, the sailing-master was striding to and fro on the poop, all the passengers, eager to be away, were watching the shore for a sign of the great man who was to lead them westward. Just at the critical moment " the captain arrived in his cocked hat and uniform with the mails " — his Majesty's mails, no less.

The Skylark reached Barbados after sundown on the twenty-sixth day. At 10.30 P.M. " Captain Ladd, with his cocked hat and sword, hastened to pay his devoirs to the captain of the Belviderc frigate then in the harbour." The eighteen passengers having witnessed the first act of this impressive ceremony retired to the loathsome cabin " for a last stewing," as the doctor puts it While they were " endeavouring to woo a little hot sleep " Captain Ladd clanks on board again and arouses everybody with the news that " a fever was raging at Bridgetown." This choice information was probably yelled down the hatchway in a husky voice scented with rum.

The captain having dropped this bomb into the sweltering hole where the tourists lay, and having made them thereby perspire the more, no doubt divested himself of his sword and cocked hat and sank into sleep, with the happy sense of " something attempted, something done."

BARBADOS . HARBOUR.

MANCHINEEL GROVE, BARBADOS.

III. Barbados

The Royal Mail steamer reaches Barbados at daybreak. On the present occasion of her coming the sun had just risen, yet there was still a full moon shining, like a disc of steel, in the grey. The steamer crept to her buoy in Carlisle Bay, and by the growing light there could be seen an island of low pale-green downs, fringed at the water's edge by a belt of trees, with red-roofed, white-walled houses dotted between them. The green uplands were brakes of sugar-cane. There was no indication of a definite town ; no evident landing-place. But for a few palms and casuarina trees, negroes in boats, and a number of bright-hulled schooners from " down the islands," the place might have been a bay in England.

As seen from the ship it did not fulfil the florid conception of the tropics nor the idea of a coral island.

Barbados is about the size of the Isle of Wight, and at the commencement of the seventeenth century it represented — with the exception of Newfoundland — the sole colonial possession of England. Indeed, in 1605, it could have been said that the empire of Great Britain beyond the seas was constituted only by a vague line of half-frozen coast and this tropical Isle of Wight, for the two represented England's insignificant share in the New World.

Barbados is the only West Indian island which has been English from the days of its beginning until now.

The manner in which it became a part of the empire is curious. In 1605 a certain Sir Oliver Leigh, of Kent, incited by tales of rich lands in the West, equipped a ship called the Olive Blossome, and sent her across the seas. In due course the lumbering craft came in sight of Barbados, and the sailors, attracted by a sandy cove and shady trees, rowed ashore and landed on the beach. " Finding no opposition," these good men from Ramsgate, Deal and Dover took possession of the island in the name of their country.

The ceremony attending the annexation was unaffected. On the beach they put up a cross, to give the function a religious tone, while one of their number carved on the bark of a tree the inscription,

"James K. of E. and of this island."

The cross was probably made from the staves of a beer-barrel, and the graving on the tree, no doubt, was done by a dagger sharpened on a leather jerkin.

It may be imagined that when the ritual was over these pioneers of empire bathed — for the sandy shore would have reminded them of Thanet — chased the land crabs, or threw stones at the monkeys who still haunt this corner of the island. They then jumped into their boat, each with a handful of strange flowers, pushed off to the Olive Blossome and sailed away, for they were bound for the Main.

The annexation ceremony took place near to the spot on which Hole Town now stands (page 22), and compared with the pomp and glamour observed by the Spaniards on like occasions, the proceeding was little more than a schoolboy affair, a frolic of a party of Deal boatmen.

It may be said by some that Trinidad holds precedence of Barbados in the matter of annexation, for in 1595 "the Honorable Robert Duddely, Leiftenance of all Her Majestie's fortes and forces beyonde the seas," took possession of that island, with infinite solemnity, in the name of his Queen. He nailed to a tree " a peece of lead " inscribed with the Queen's arms, and an announcement in the Latin tongue. He caused, moreover, trumpets to be blown and a "drome" to be beaten. Unfortunately, the island was at that time in the possession of Spain, and in spite of the " peece of lead " continued a colony of that

State for long years after. Robert Duddely's affair was indeed little more than a common act of trespass, in which he was fortunately not detected.

It was some twenty years after the coming of the Olive Blossojne that the first settlers made their home and built their log huts in Barbados. They sailed from England in a vessel named the William and John, belonging to Sir William Courteen. They made for the same sandy bay — by that time almost legendary — found the place of the cross and the writing on the tree. In a clearing in a forest near by they began the first town, Hole Town, erected a fort and made themselves masters of at least the west coast of the island.

Things, however, in Barbados were neither quiet nor well established for many years after Courteen's settlers founded their little city. For it happened in 1627 that King Charles, in a moment of incoherent liberality, granted all the Caribbee Islands (twenty-two in number including Barbados) to the Earl of Carlisle. Now, few of these islands were in the King's gift, and he might as well have presented the Earl at the same time with the Atlantic Ocean, the Equator, and the North and South Poles.

However, in July 1628, a confident body of settlers landed on the south of the island, under the protection of the Earl of Carlisle, and established another town, which they called Bridgetown, because they found there a bridge which the Indians had built across a creek of the sea. The bay in which they beached their boats is called Carlisle Bay to this present time.

As may be supposed, Courteen's settlers — being the old and original inhabitants of the island — thought so ill of this counterenterprise, that they fell upon Carlisle's men and beat them grievously. Later on it transpired that the King, when in a previous island-scattering mood, had already promised Barbados to the Earl of Marlborough. Lord Carlisle thereupon approached the Lord of Marlborough and found that peer (who probably had vague ideas as to what and where Barbados was) most ready to forego all claims to the property in consideration of a sum of 300/. sterling paid in cash annually.

It may be conjectured that one party to this bargain sauntered down St. James's chuckHng over the solid gold coin he had obtained for an estate as shadowy as Prospero's island, while the other luirried to his ship-master to assure him that at last — and for the paltry sum of 300/. — Barbados was his.

Yet scarcely had the money been counted out upon the Earl of Marlborough's table when Sir William Courteen forced himself into the lordly presence and pointed out, possibly with some emphasis and heat, that Barbados was his, and that he was possessed of it prior to 1627, at which time the generous King gave it away, with adjacent parts of the globe, as if it had been a mere bonbonniere.

Thus began squabbles to which the cudgel play in the environs of Bridgetown and " The Hole " — as the scoffers called the metropolis of Barbados — was a small tiling.

Barbados is very densely populated. Its inhabitants number some 200,000, nearly all of whom are negroes.^ The patriotism of the Barbadians is unbounded, and in these unsentimental days, is pleasant to contemplate. " They cling to their home,'' as Froude remarks, " with innocent vanity, as though it was the finest country in the world." If they do leave it, it is only for a time. Many of these loyalists have been attracted recently to the Canal enterprise at Panama by the high wages which obtain there. But the stay of the exiles on the Isthmus is short. They go thither in order that they may enjoy Barbados the better. The heavy toil and the hard climate are forgotten when they return to the island and can indulge — if only for one day — in the supreme luxury of driving through the town in a buggy, in a black coat and bowler hat, lit up by a necktie of fulminating colours. There will be then so wide a grin on the ci-devant navvy's face that the rows of white teeth can hardly hold the penny cigar. The anticipation of this one triumphal progress through familiar streets will have kept alive for months the germ of hope in many a labourer's breast at Colon.

' The population of the Isle of Wight is, by comparison, 82,418.

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BARBADOS. ii

Barbados, too, is intensely and seriously English. " It was organised," writes Froude, " from the first on English traditional lines, with its constitution, its parishes, and parish churches and churchwardens, the schools and parsons, all on the old model, which the unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed."

In the heart of the capital is Trafalgar Square, and in the centre of that square (just as in the Mother Country) is a statue to Nelson. London, indeed, may be said to have imitated Bridgetown in this particular, for the monument in Barbados was the first erected to the hero of Trafalgar. In defence of the English metropolis, however, it must be stated — and it is to be hoped without jealousy — that this rival statue is not impressive, while the famous mariner is made to look bored and jaundiced, although he is no longer " pea green " as he was when Froude saw him.

The city of Bridgetown is full of bustle, dust and mule teams, but it is not attractive. The suburbs, on the other hand, are beautiful — beautiful as only the outskirts of a town in the tropics can be. There are villas lost in ample gardens, avenues of palms, white roads barred by black shadows and made glorious by mahogany and banyan trees, by the cordia with its orangecoloured blossoms, by the scarlet hibiscus, by walls buried under blue convolvulus flowers, by over-stretching boughs from which hang magenta festoons of Bougainvillea. Here can be seen that most stately of all palms, the palmiste or cabbage palm, with such trees as the tamarind, the mango, the shaddock, and the curious frangipani, looking as bare as a plucked bird.

On the outskirts of the town, and indeed all over the island will be found in rows, in clumps, in halting lines, or in infrequent dots the dwellings of the negroes. These are tiny huts of pewter-grey wood, raised from the ground on a few rough stones and covered by a roof of dark shingles. They are as simple as the houses a child draws on a slate — a thing of two rooms, with two windows and one door. The windows have sun shutters in the place of glass ; there is no chimney, for the housewife does her cooking out of doors in the cool of the evening.

Such is the original Uncle Tom's Cabin, scarcely changed these two hundred years. More picturesque little toy houses can hardly be imagined, but it makes one gasp to think how many human beings crowd into these tiny rooms after sundown, for the negro sleeps with firmly closed doors and shutters to keep out "jumbies" and ghosts, which are both numerous and trying in the West Indies, centipedes, which are ten inches long, snakes, vampire bats, and other horrors of the tropical night.

These fragile huts are those which are referred to in descriptions of hurricanes in which it is said that " over 3000 houses have been blown down, six villages have been levelled with the earth, and 10,000 people are homeless."

It is not uncommon to meet a house on the highway in the act of being " removed." It is placed on a cart flat-wise, like a puzzle taken to pieces, the four walls being laid one above the other as if they were pieces of scenery from a theatre. The roof is indistinguishable as such, the tiles are in the bottom of the cart, and while the owner of the residence will carry the front door on his head, other kind friends will assist with the window shutters, the doorstep and the fowlhouse.

About each tiny pewter-grey house will be the comfortable green of bananas and guinea-corn, a clump of rustling cane, with possibly a papaw or a bread-fruit tree to shade the threshold. In what may be called the policies are half-naked children, some fowls, a pig tied by the neck, or a goat tethered in like fashion.

The climate of Barbados in the winter is healthy and agreeable. The little island lies far out to sea in the very heart of the trade wind. That genial breeze blows steadily from November to May. To sit in a draught in scant attire so that a strong east wind may play upon the sitter like a douche is one of the chief objects of life in Barbados. The thermometer varies from about 76° to 82° F. There are no sudden lapses of temperature, none of that mean chill at sundown which falls like a footpad upon the sojourner in the Riviera. It is possible to be out and about all day. There is no need of any sun-helmet The straw hat of the river Thames is all the head-covering required in this or any other West Indian island. The badge of the raw tourist is a white helmet and a mosquito-bitten face. The one is as superfluous as the other when the management of mosquito-curtains has been learnt As a matter of fact, mosquitos and insects generally give very little trouble in Barbados,

The climate, as a whole, may be judged by the circumstance that the medical men of Bridgetown cling all the year round to the black frock coat and tall hat, which are the delight of the profession in Great Britain. The air is comparatively dry. The roads throughout the island are excellent, while the sea-bathing cannot be surpassed. The sky in the dry season is now and then clouded over, and there is occasional rain, two features which will be appreciated by those who have been wearied by the unfailing sunshine of the " cold weather " in India. The island has an excellent water supply, while both malaria and yellow fever are practically unknown. Barbados has had no experience of earthquake, it possesses no volcano, and the hurricane season is limited to the months of summer and autumn. The island, therefore, presents an admirable climate for those who cannot, or will not, winter in northern latitudes.

While on the subject of health matters, it may be noted that the West Indian islands still suffer — in spite of every care and of ceaseless investigation — very seriously from leprosy. The disease is limited to the " coloured " sections of the creole population, being rare in the white creole.

At Barbados is an excellent lazaretto, maintained by the Government. It is a model institution of its kind, and reflects great credit upon its medical chief, Dr. Archer. The lazar-house is situated by the sea, in a pleasant garden facing to the west. Around the garden is a very high and woeful wall, like the wall of a convent or a prison. Those who are within the garden are captives for life. All have had forced upon them a vow never to look upon the world again, for there is no way out to the high road except through the gate that leads to the burial-ground. It is a garden that sees only the setting of the sun.