The English in the West Indies

Front matter

THE WORKS OF JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

History of England, from the fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Twelve volumes. Per vol $1.50

The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth

Preface

My purpose in writing this book is so fully explained in the book itself that a Preface is unnecessary. I visited the West India Islands in order to increase my acquaintance with the condition of the British Colonies. I have related what I saw and what I heard, with thegeneral impressions which I was led to form.

In a few instances, when opinions were conveyed to me which were important in themselves, but which it might be undesirable to assign to the persons from whom I heard them, I have altered initials and disguised localities and circumstances.

The illustrations are from sketches of my own, which, except so far as they are tolerably like the scenes which they represent, are without value. They have been made producible by the skill and care of the engraver, Mr. Pearson, to whom my warmest thanks are due.

J. A. F.

Onslow Gardens : November 15. 1887.

Chapter I. Page

Colonial policy— Union or separation — Self-government — Varieties of condition — The Pacific colonies — The West Indies— Proposals for a West Indian federation — Nature of the population — American union and British plantations — Original conquest of the West Indies ......... 1

Chapter II

In the train for Southampton — Morning papers — The new ' Locksley Hall' — Past and present — The 'Moselle' — Heavy weather — The petrel — The Azores . . . . . . .11

Chapter III

The tropics — Passengers on board — Account of the Darien canal — Planters' complaints — West 'Indian history — The Spanish conqUest — Drake and Hawkins — The buccaneers — The pirates — French and English — Rodney — Battle of April 12 — Peace with honour — Doers and talkers ...... 23

Chapter IV

First sight of Barbadoes — Origin of the name — Pere Labat — Bridgetown two hundred years ago— Slavery and Christianity — Economic crisis — Sugar bounties — Aspect of the streets — Government House and its occupants — Duties of a governor of Barbadoes 37

Chapter V

West Indian politeness — Negro morals and felicity — Island of St. Vincent — Grenada — The harbour — Disappearance of the whites — An island of black freeholders — Tobago — Dramatic art — A promising incident ....... 48 viii THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES

Chapter VI. Page

Charles Kingsley at Trinidad — 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer' — A French forban — Adventure at Aves — Mass on board a pirate ship — Port of Spain — A house in the tropics — A political meeting — Government House — The Botanical Gardens — Kingsley's rooms — Sugar estates and coolies ...... 59

Chapter VII

A coolie village — Negro freeholds — Waterworks — Pythons — Slavery — Evidence of Lord Rodney — Future of the negroes — Necessity of English rule — The Blue Basin — Black boy and crayfish . 75

Chapter VIII

Home Rule in Trinidad — Political aspirations — Nature of the problem — Crown administration — Colonial governors — A Russian apologue — Dinner at Government House — ' The Three Fishers ' — Charles Warner — Alternative futures of the colony . . 85

Chapter IX

Barbadoes again — Social condition of the island — Political constitution — Effects of the sugar bounties — Dangers of general bankruptcy — The Hall of Assembly — Sir Charles Pearson— Society in Bridgetown — A morning drive — Church of St. John's — Sir Graham Briggs — An old planter's palace — The Chief Justice of Barbadoes . 100

Chapter X

Leeward and Windward Islands — The Caribs of Dominica — Visit of Pere Labat — St. Lucia— The Pitons — The harbour at Castries — Intended coaling station — Visit to the administrator — The old fort and barracks— Conversation with an American— Constitution of Dominica — Land at Roseau ..... 129

CHAPTER XL

Curiosities in Dominica — Nights in the tropics — English and Catholic churches — The market place at Roseau — Fishing extraordinary — A storm — Dominican boatmen — Morning walks — Effects of the Leeward Islands Confederation — An estate cultivated as it ought to be — A mountain ride— Leave the island- Reflections ..... 150

CONTENTS ix

Chapter XII. Page

The Darien canal — Jamaican mail packet — Captain W. — Retrospect of Jamaican history. — Waterspout at sea — Hayti — Jacmel — A walk through the town — A Jamaican planter — First sight of the Blue Mountains — Port Royal — Kingston — The Colonial Secretary — Gordon riots — Changes in the Jamaican constitution 176

CHAPTER XHI.

The English mails — Irish agitation — Two kinds of colonies— Indian administration — How far applicable in the West Indies — Land at Kingston— Government House — Dinner party — Interesting officer — Majuba Hill — 'Mountain station — Kingston curiosities — Tobacco — Valley in the Blue Mountains . . . . 204

Chapter XIV

Visit to Port Royal— Dockyard — Town — Church — Fort Augusta — The eyrie in the mountains — Ride to Newcastle — Society in Jamaica — Religious bodies — Liberty and authority . . 222

Chapter XV

The Church of England in Jamaica — Drive to Castleton — Botanical Gardens — Picnic by the river — Black women — Ball at Government House — Mandeville — Miss Roy — Country Society — Manners — American visitors — A Moravian missionary — The modern Radical creed . ...... 237

Chapter XVI

Jamaican hospitality — Cherry Garden — George William Gordon — The Gordon riots — Governor Eyre — A dispute and its consequences—Jamaican country-house society — Modern speculation — A Spanish fable— Port Royal — The commodore — Naval theatricals — The modern sailor ...... 255

Chapter XVII

Present state of Jamaica — Test of progress— Resources of the island — Political alternatives — Black supremacy and probable consequences — The West Indian problem ..... 277

Chapter XVIII

Passage to Cuba — A Canadian commissioner — Havana — The Moro — The city and harbour— Cuban money — American visitors — ■ x THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES

PAGE

The Cathedral — Tornb of Columbus — New friends — The late rebellion— Slave emancipation — Spain and progress — A bull fight 288

Chapter XIX

Hotels in Havana — Sights in the city — Cigar manufactories — West Indian industries — The Captain-General — The Jesuit college — Father Viriez — Clubs in Havana — Spanish aristocracy — Sea lodging house ......... 309

Chapter XX

Return to Havana — The Spaniards in Cuba — Prospects — American influence — Future of the West Indies — English rumours — Leave Cuba — The harbour at night — The Bahama Channel — Hayti — Port au Prince — The black republic — West Indian history . 331

Chapter XXI

Return to Jamaica — Cherry Garden again — Black servants — Social conditions — Sir Henry Norman — King's House once more — Negro suffrage — The will of the people — The Irish python — Conditions of colonial union — Oratory and statesmanship . 350

Chapter XXII

Going home — Retrospect — Alternative courses — Future of the Empire — Sovereignty of the sea — The Greeks — The rights of man — Plato — The voice of the people — Imperial federation — Hereditary colonial policy — New Irelands — Effects of party government 362

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Mountain Crater, Dominica Frontispiece

Blue Basin, Trinidad To face page 82

Morning Walk, Dominica. ....

Port Royal, Jamaica

Valley in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica Kingston and Harbour, from Cherry Garden Havana, from the Quarries ....

Port au Prince, Hayti .....

154 194 220 4 266

« 294 « 327

THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES.

Chapter I

Colonial policy — Union or separation — Self-government — Varieties of condition — The Pacific colonies — The West Indies — Proposals for a West Indian federation — Nature of the population— American union and British plantations— Original conquest of the West Indies.

The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from our great self-governed dependencies have met and consulted together, and have determined upon a common course of action for Imperial defence. The British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British Empire. This is the answer which the democracy has given to the advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union while it lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no wish to part we shall not part, and the wish can never rise if when there is occasion we can meet and deliberate together with the same regard for each other's welfare which has been shown in the late conference in London.

Events mock at human foresight, and nothing is certain but the unforeseen. Constitutional government and an independent executive were conferred upon our larger colonies, with the express and scarcely veiled intention that at the earliest moment they were to relieve the mother country of responsibility for them. They were regarded as fledgelings who are fed only by the parent birds till their feathers are grown, and are then expected to shift for themselves. They were provided with the full plumage of parliamentary institutions on the home pattern and model, and the expectation of experienced politicians was that they would each at the earliest moment go off on their separate accounts, and would bid us a friendly farewell. The irony of fate has turned to folly the wisdom of the wise. The wise themselves, the same political party which were most anxious twenty years ago to see the colonies independent, and contrived constitutions for them which they conceived must inevitably lead to separation, appeal now to the effect of those very constitutions in drawing the Empire closer together, as a reason why a similar method should be immediately adopted to heal the differences between Great Britain and Ireland. New converts to any belief, political or theological, are proverbially zealous, and perhajDS in this instance they are over-hasty. It does not follow that because people of the same race and character are drawn together by equality and liberty, people of different races and different characters, who have quarrelled for centuries, will be similarly attracted to one another. Yet so far as our own colonies are concerned it is clear that the abandonment by the mother country of all pretence to interfere in their internal management has removed the only cause which could possibly have created a desire for independence. We cannot, even if we wish it ourselves, shake off connections who cost us nothing and themselves refuse to be divided. Politicians may quarrel ; the democracies have refused to quarrel ;

Colonial Self- Government. 3

and the result of the wide extension of the suffrage throughout the Empire has been to show that being one the British people everywhere intend to remain one. With the same blood, the same language, the same habits, the same traditions, they do not mean to be shattered into dishonoured fragments. All of us, wherever we are, can best manage our own affairs within our own limits ; yet local spheres of selfmanagement can revolve round a common centre while there is centripetal power sufficient to hold them ; and so long as England ' to herself is true' and continues worthy of her ancient reputation, there are no causes working visibly above the political horizon which are likely to induce our self-governed colonies to take wing and leave us. The strain will come with the next great war. During peace these colonies have only experienced the advantage of union with us. They will then have to share our dangers, and may ask why they are to be involved in quarrels which are not of their own making. How they will act then only experience can tell ; and that there is any doubt about it is a sufficient answer to those rapid statesmen who would rush at once into the application of the same principle to countries whose continuance with us is vital to our own safety, whom we cannot part with though they were to demand it at the cannon's moutb.

But the result of the experiment is an encouragement as far as it has gone to those who would extend self-government through the whole of our colonial system. It seems to lead as a direct road into the ' Imperial Federation ' which has fascinated the general imagination. It removes friction. We relieve ourselves of responsibilities. If federation is to come about at all as a definite and effective organisation, the spontaneous action of the different members of the Empire in a position in which they are free to stay with us or to leave us as they please, appears the readiest and perhaps the only means by which it can be brought to pass.

So plausible is the theory, so obviously right would it be were the problem as simple and the population of all our colonies as homogeneous as in Australia, that one cannot wonder at the ambition of politicians to win themselves a name and achieve a great result by the immediate adoption of it. Great results generally imply effort and sacrifice. Here effort is unnecessary and sacrifice is not demanded. Everybody is to have what he wishes, and the effect is to come about of itself. When Ave think of India, when we think of Ireland, prudence tells us to hesitate. Steps once taken in this direction cannot be undone, even if found to lead to the wrong place. But undoubtedly, wherever it is possible the principle of self-government ought to be applied in our colonies and will be applied, and the danger now is that it will be tried in haste in countries either as yet unripe for it or from the nature of things unfit for it. The liberties which we grant freely to those whom we trust and who do not require to be restrained, we bring into disrepute if we concede them as readily to perversity or disaffection or to those who, like most Asiatics, do not desire liberty, and prosper best when they are led and guided.

In this complex empire of ours the problem pi'esents itself in many shapes, and each must be studied and dealt with according to its character. There is the broad distinction between colonies and conquered countries. Colonists are part of ourselves. Foreigners attached by force to our dominions may submit to be ruled by us, but will not alwaya consent to rule themselves in accordance with our views or interests, or remain attached to us if we enable them to leave us when they please. The Crown, therefore, as in India, rules directly by the police and the army. And there are colonies which are neither one nor the other, where our own people have been settled and have been granted the land in possession with the control of an insubordinate population,

Varieties of Character. 5

themselves claiming political privileges which had to be refused to the rest. This was the position of Ireland, and the result of meddling theoretically with it ought to have taught us caution. Again, there are colonies like the West Indies, either occupied originally by ourselves, as Barbadoes, or taken by force from France or Spain, where the mass of the population were slaves who have been since made free, but where the extent to which the coloured people can be admitted to share in the administration is still an unsettled question. To throw countries so variously circumstanced under an identical system would be a wild experiment. Whether we ought to try such an experiment at all, or even wish to try it and prepare the way for it, depends perhaps on whether we have determined that under all circumstances the retention of them under our own flag is indispensable to our safety.

I had visited our great Pacific colonies. Circumstances led me afterwards to attend more . particularly to the West Indies. They were the earliest, and once the most prized, of 1 all our distant possessions. They had been won by the most desperate struggles, and had been the scene of our greatest naval glories. In the recent discussion on the possibility of an organised colonial federation, various schemes came under my notice, in every one of which the union of the W x est Indian Islands under a free parliamentary constitution was regarded as a necessary preliminary. I was reminded of a conversation which I had held seventeen years ago with a high colonial official specially connected with the West Indian department, in which the federation of the islands under such a constitution was spoken of as a measure already determined on, though with a view to an end exactly the opposite of that which was now desired. The colonies universally were then regarded in such quarters as a burden upon our resources, of which we were to relieve ourselves at the earliest moment. They were no longer of value to us ; the whole world had become our market ; and whether they were nominally attached to the Empire, or were independent, or joined themselves to some other power, was of no commercial moment to us. It was felt, however, that as long as any tie remained, we should be obliged to defend them in time of war ; while they, in consequence of their connection, would be liable to attack. The sooner, therefore, the connection was ended, the better for them and for us.

By the constitutions which had been conferred upon them, Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape, were assumed to be practically gone. The same measures were to be taken with the West Indies. They were not prosperous. They formed no outlet for British emigration. The white population was diminishing ; they were dissatisfied ; they lay close to the great American republic, to which geographically they more properly belonged. Representative assemblies under the Crown had failed to produce the content expected from them or to give an impulse to industry. The free negroes could not long be excluded from the franchise. The black and white races had not amalgamated and were not inclinine: to amalgamate. The then recent Gordon riots had been followed by the suicide of the old Jamaican constitution. The government of Jamaica had been flung back upon the Crown, and the Crown was impatient of the addition to its obligations. The official of whom I speak informed me that a decision had been irrevocably taken. The troops were to be withdrawn from the islands, and Jamaica, Trinidad, and the English Antilles were to be masters of their own destiny, either to form into free communities like the Spanish American republics, or join the United States, or to do what they pleased, with the sole understanding that we were to have no more responsibilities.

I do not know how far the scheme was matured. To an outside spectator it seemed too hazardous to have been seriously

Whites and Blacks. 7

meditated. Yet I was told that it had not been meditated only but positively determined upon, and that further discussion of a settled question would be fruitless and needlessly irritating.

Politicians with a favourite scheme are naturally sanguine. It seemed to me that in a West Indian Federation the black race would necessarily be admitted to their full rights as citizens. Their numbers enormously preponderated, and the late scenes in Jamaica were signs that the two colours would not blend into one, that there might be, and even inevitably would be, collisions between them which would lead to actions which we could not tolerate. The white residents and the negroes had not been drawn together by the abolition of slavery, but were further apart than ever. The whites, if by superior intelligence they could gain the upper hand, would not be allowed to keep it. As little would they submit to be ruled by a race whom they despised ; and I thought it quite certain that something would happen which would compel the British Government to interfere again, whether we liked it or not. Liberty in Hayti had been followed by a massacre of the French inhabitants, and the French settlers had done no worse than we had done to deserve the ill will of their slaves. Fortunately opinion changed in England before the experiment could be tried. The colonial policy of the doctrinaire statesmen was no sooner understood than it was universally condemned, and they could not press proporsals on the West Indies which the West Indians showed so little readiness to meet.

So things drifted on, remaining to appearance as they were. The troops were not recalled. A minor confederation was formed in the Leeward Antilles. The Windward group was placed under Barbadoes, and islands which before had governors of their own passed under subordinate administrators. Local councils continued under various condition.;, the popular element being cautiously and silently introduced. The blacks settled into a condition of easy-going peasant proprietors. But so far as the white or English interest was concerned, two causes which undermined West Indian prosperity continued to operate. So long as sugar maintained its price the planters with the help of coolie labour were able to struggle on ; but the beetroot bounties came to cut from under them the industry in which they had placed their main dependence ; the reports were continually darker of distress and rapidly approaching ruin. Petitions for protection were not or could not be granted. They were losing heart — the worst loss of all ; while the Home Government, no longer with a view to separation, but with the hope that it might produce the same effect which it had produced elsewhere, were still looking to their old remedy of the extension of the principle of self-government. One serious step was taken very recently towards the re-establishment of a constitution in Jamaica. It was assumed that it had failed before because the blacks were not properly represented. The council was again made partially elective, and the black vote was admitted on the widest basis. A power was retained by the Crown of increasing in case of necessity the nominated official members to a number which would counterbalance the elected members ; but the power had not been acted on and was not perhaps designed to continue, and a restless hope was said to have revived among the negroes that the day was not far off when Jamaica would be as Hayti and they would have the island to themselves.

To a person like myself, to whom the preservation of the British Empire appeared to be the only public cause in which just now it was possible to feel concern, the problem was extremely interesting. I had no prejudice against self-government. I had seen the Australian colonies growing under it in health and strength with a rapidity which rivalled the

The American Union. 9

progress of the American Union itself. I had observed in South Africa that the confusions and perplexities there diminished exactly in proportion as the Home Government ceased to interfere. I could not hope that as an outsider I could see my way through difficulties where practised eyes were at a loss. But it was clear that the West Indies were suffering, be the cause what it might. I learnt that a party had risen there at last which was actually in favour of a union with America, and I wished to find an answer to a question which I had long asked myself to no purpose. My old friend Mr. Motley was once speaking to me of the probable accession of Canada to the American republic. I asked him if he was sure that Canada would like it. ' Like it ? ' he replied. ' Would I like the house of Baring to take me into partnership ? ' To be a partner in the British Empire appeared to me to be at least as great a thing as to be a state under the stars and stripes. What was it that Canada, what was it that any other colony, would gain by exchanging British citizenship for American citizenship ? What did America offer to those who joined her which we refused to give or neglected to give ? Was it that Great Britain did not take her colonies into partnership at all? was it that while in the United States the blood circulated freely from the heart to the extremities, so that 'if one member suffered all the body suffered with it,' our colonies were simply (as they used to be called) 'plantations,' offshoots from the old stock set down as circumstances had dictated in various parts of the globe, but vitally detached and left to grow or to wither according to their own inherent strength ?

At one time the West Indian colonies had been more to us than such casual seedlings. They had been regarded as precious jewels, which hundreds of thousands of English lives had been sacrificed to tear from France and Spain. The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the Naval Empire of Great

Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the golden stream which flowed from Panama into the exchequer at Madrid, and furnished Philip with the means to carry on his war with the Reformation. The Pope had claimed to be lord of the new world as well as of the old, and had declared that Spaniards, and only Spaniards, should own territory or carry on trade there within the tropics. The seamen of England took up the challenge and replied with cannon shot. It was not the Crown, it was not the Government, which fought that battle : it was the people of England, who fought it with their own hands and their own resources. Adventurers, buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, call them by what name we will, stand as extraordinary but characteristic figures on the stage of history, disowned or acknowledged by their sovereign as suited diplomatic convenience. The outlawed pirate of one year was promoted the next to be a governor and his country's representative. In those waters the men were formed and trained who drove the Armada through the Channel into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries which followed, France and England fought for the ocean empire, and England won it — won it on the day when her own politicians' hearts had failed them, and all the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar, and avenged York Town. If ever the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic poem — and since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such treatment or better deserving it — the West Indies will be the scene of the most brilliant cantos. For England to allow them to drift away from her because they have no immediate marketable value, would be a sign that she had lost the feelings with which great nations always treasure the heroic traditions of their fathers. When those traditions come to be regarded as something which concerns them no longer, their greatness is already on the wane.

CHAPTER H.

In the train for Southampton- -Morning papers — The new ' Locksley Hall' — Past and present — The 'Moselle' — Heavy weather — The petrel — The Azores.

The last week in December, when the year 1886 was waning to its close, I left Waterloo station to join a West Indian mail steamer at Southampton. The air was frosty ; the fog lay thick over city and river ; the Houses of Parliament themselves were scarcely visible as I drove across Westminster Bridge in the heavy London vapour — a symbol of the cloud which was hanging over the immediate political future. The morning papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson's new ' Locksley Hall ' and Mr. Gladstone's remarks upon it. I had read neither ; but from the criticisms it appeared that Lord Tennyson fancied himself to have seen a change pass over England since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his mind. The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the ground had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him. The day Avhich had followed that ' august sunrise ' had not been ' august ' at all ; and ' the beautiful bold brow of Freedom ' had proved to have something of brass upon it. The ' use and wont ' England, the England out of which had risen the men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tennyson had despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in despising ; and the new notions which were to remake the world were not remaking it in si shape that pleased him. Like Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling over the roots of the tree which he had helped to plant.

The contrast in Mr. Gladstone's article was certainly remarkable. Lord Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what in its time had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Mr. Gladstone these revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off of long intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer perceptions of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her history had England made more glorious progress, never had stood higher than at the present moment in material power and moral excellence. How could it be otherwise when they were the years of his own ascendency ?