Here, There and Everywhere Part 9

The particular white battalion quartered in Bermuda during my first visit there was very fortunate in its ladies, for it had an unusual proportion of married officers. I have the greatest admiration for these plucky little women who accompany their husbands all over the globe, and who always seem to manage, however narrow their means, to create a cheerful and attractive little home for their menkind. They all appeared able to dress themselves well, though, if the truth were known, they were probably mostly their own dressmakers, and, owing to the servant difficulty in Bermuda, their own cooks as well; they had transformed their little white-washed houses into the most inviting little dwellings, and in spite of having to do a great part of their own housework, they always managed to look pretty and charming. The average wife of the average officer of a Line regiment is a wonderful little woman.

The supper-parties in the married officers' quarters at Prospect Camp were the cheeriest entertainments I have ever been at. Every one had to contribute something. My own culinary attainments being confined to the preparation of three dishes, I was compelled to repeat them monotonously. The subalterns were made to carry the dishes from the kitchen, and to "wash-up" afterwards, yet I am sure that the average London hostess would have envied the jollity, the fun and high spirits that made those informal supper-parties so delightful, and would have given anything to introduce some of this cheery atmosphere into her own decorous and extremely dull entertainments, where the guests did not have to cook their own dinners.

I gave a dinner-party at an hotel to eleven people, all officers or officers' wives. The conversation turned on birthplaces, and the answers given were so curious, that I wrote them all down. Not only were all my guests soldiers and soldiers' wives, but they were nearly all the sons and daughters of soldiers as well. One major had been born at Cape Town; his very comely wife in Barbados. The other major had been born at Meerut in India, his wife at Quebec, and her unmarried sister in Mauritius; and so it was with all of them. Of those twelve people of pure British blood, I was the only one who had been born in England or in Europe; even the subaltern had been born in Hong-Kong. I do not thing that stay-at-homes quite realise the existence of this little world of people journeying from end to end of the earth in the course of their duty, and taking it all as a matter of course.

I regret that the Imperial West India Direct Line should now be defunct, for this gave a monthly direct service between Bristol and Bermuda, and I can conceive of no pleasanter winter quarters for those desirous of escaping the rigours of an English January and February.

Ten days after leaving Bristol, ten days it must be confessed of extremely angry seas, the ship dropped her anchor in Gra.s.sy Bay, and the astonished arrival from England found ripe strawberries, new peas, and new potatoes awaiting his good pleasure. No visitor could fail to be delighted with the pretty, prosperous little island, and with its genial and hospitable inhabitants. For Americans, too, the place was a G.o.dsend, for in forty-eight hours they could escape from the extreme and fickle climate of New York, and find themselves in warm sunshine, tempered, it is true, by occasional downpours, for Nature, realising that the inhabitants were dependent on the rainfall for their water supply, did her best to avoid any shortage of this necessity of life.

Canadians had also a great liking for the islands, for not only were they on their own soil there, but in sixty hours they could transport themselves from the ice and snow of Montreal and Toronto to a climate where roses and geraniums bloomed at Christmas, and where orange and lemon trees and great wine-coloured drifts of Bougainvillaa mocked at the futile efforts of winter to touch them. The Bishop of Bermuda, who also included Newfoundland in his See, declared that climatically his diocese was absolutely ideal, for he pa.s.sed the six winter months in Bermuda and the remainder of the year in Newfoundland, thus escaping alike the rigorous winters of the northern island and the fierce summer heat of the southern one. The Bishop himself was a Newfoundlander, as were many of the Church of England clergy in Bermuda. A humorous friend of mine, a sapper in charge of the "wireless," shared to the full my liking for the islands and their pleasant inhabitants, but positively detested Prospect Camp where he was stationed. Prospect, though healthy enough, is wind-swept, very dusty, and quite devoid of shade. He declared that the well-known hymn should be altered, and ought to run:

"What though the Ocean breezes Blow o'er Bermuda's isle; Where every man is pleasing And only Prospect vile."

Few people seem to realise that Bermuda is a first-cla.s.s fortress, a dockyard, and an important naval coaling-station. A glance at the map will show its strategic importance. Nature has made it almost inaccessible with barrier-reefs, and there is but one narrow and difficult entrance off St. George's. This entrance is jealously guarded by a heavy battery of 12 in. and 6 in. guns, and the ten-mile long ship-channel inside the reefs from St. George's to the Dockyard is very difficult and complicated, though I imagine that, with modern guns, a ship could lie outside the reefs and sh.e.l.l the islands to pieces.

The first time that I was in Bermuda, a German Training Squadron arrived, with a number of naval cadets on board, and announced their intention of remaining ten days. The German officers at once exhibited a most un-Teutonic keenness about sea-fishing. The Governor, fully alive to the advantage a possibly hostile power might reap from an independent survey and charting of the tortuous and difficult ship-channel between St. George's and the Dockyard, at once held a consultation with the Senior Naval Officer, in the Admiral's absence, and, as a result of this consultation, three naval petty officers were detailed to show the Germans the best fishing-grounds. At the same time naval patrol boats displayed a quite unusual activity inside the reefs. Both patrol boats and petty officers had their private orders, and I fancy that these steps resulted in very few soundings being taken, and in the ship-channel remaining uncharted by our German visitors. I was returning myself, after dark, in the ferry-boat plying between the Dockyard and Hamilton, when there were four German officers on the bridge. Imagining themselves secure in the general ignorance of their language, they were openly noting the position of the leading lights, as the little steamer threaded her way through the smaller islands and "One rock" and "Two rock pa.s.sage," and all these observations were, I imagine, duly entered in their pocket-books after landing. In conversation with the German officers I was much struck with the essentially false ideas that they had with regard to the position of the motherland and her dependencies. They seemed convinced that every Dominion and dependency was merely waiting for the first favourable opportunity to declare its complete independence, and they hardly troubled to conceal their opinion that Britain was hopelessly decadent, and would never be able to wage a campaign again. Bermuda, in view of its wonderful strategic position, had, I am convinced, been marked down as a future German possession, when they would have endeavoured to make a second Heligoland of it.

Nowhere could a little population be found more loyal to the motherland than in Bermuda, or prouder of its common heritage.

A friend of mine, a lady who had never left the islands, wrote some lines which I thought so fine that I set them to music. Her words, though, are so much better than my setting, that I will quote them in full.

THE SONG OF THE BERMUDIANS THE KEEPERS OF THE WESTERN GATE

Queen of the Seas! Thou hast given us the Keys, Proudly do we hold them, we thy Children and akin, Though we be nor rich nor great, We will guard the Western Gate, And our lives shall pay the forfeit ere we let the foeman in.

Empty are our hands, for we have nor wealth nor lands, No grain or gold to give thee, and so few a folk are we; Yet in very will and deed, We will serve thee at thy need, And keep thine ancient fortalice beyond the Western Sea.

The sea is at our doors, and we front its fretted floors, Swept by every wind that listeth, ringed with reefs from rim to rim, Though we may not break its bars, Yet by light of sun or stars Our hearts are fain for England, and for her our eyes are dim.

Sweet Mother, ponder this, lest thy favour we should miss; We, the loneliest and least of all thy peoples of the sea.

With bared heads and proud We bless thy name aloud, For gift of lowly service, as we guard the gate for thee.

Those lines, to me, have a fine ring about them. The words, "In very will and deed, We will serve thee at thy need," were not a mere empty boast, as the splendid record of little Bermuda in the years of trouble from 1914 to 1918 shows, when almost every man of military age, whether white or coloured, voluntarily crossed the Atlantic to help the motherland in her need; so let us wish all success to the sun-kissed, cedar-clad little islands, and to their genial inhabitants.

CHAPTER VIII

The demerits of the West Indies cla.s.sified--The utter ruin of St. Pierre--The Empress Josephine--A transplanted brogue--Vampires--Lost in a virgin forest--Dictator-Presidents --Castro and Rosas--The mentality of a South American--"The Liberator"--The Basques and their national game--Love of English people for foreign words--Yellow fever--Life on an Argentine _estancia_--How cattle are worked--The la.s.so and the "bolas"--Ostriches--Venomous toads--The youthful rough-rider--His methods--Fuel difficulties--The vast plains--The wonderful bird-life.

Any one desirous of seeing an exceedingly beautiful, and comparatively unknown, corner of the world, should take the fortnightly Inter-colonial steamer from Trinidad, and make the voyage "up the islands." The Lesser Antilles are very lovely, but there is something rather melancholy about them, for they are obviously decaying in prosperity; the white planters are abandoning them, and as the coloured people take their place, externals all begin to a.s.sume a shabby, unkempt appearance. I am speaking of the conditions anterior to 1914; the great rise in the price of sugar since then may have resulted in a back-wash of prosperity affecting both the Windward and the Leeward Islands.

I should always myself cla.s.sify the West India islands according to their liability to, or immunity from, the various local drawbacks.

Thus Barbados, though within the hurricane zone, is outside the earthquake zone, and is free from poisonous snakes. Trinidad, only 200 miles away, is outside the hurricane area, but is most distinctly inside the earthquake zone, is prolific in venomous snakes and enjoys the further advantage of being the home of the blood-sucking vampire bat. Jamaica is liable to both hurricanes and earthquakes, but has no poisonous snakes. St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Martinique are really over-full of possibilities, for, in addition to a liability to earthquakes and hurricanes, they each possess an active volcano, and Martinique and St. Lucia are the habitat of the dreaded and deadly Fer-de-Lance snake.

The Administrator of St. Vincent had been good enough to ask me to dinner by telegram. The steamer reached St. Vincent after dark, and it was a curious experience landing on an unknown island in a tailcoat and white tie, driving for two miles, and then tumbling into a dinner-party of sixteen white people, not one of whom one had ever seen before, or was ever likely to meet again. It was as though one had been dropped by an aeroplane into an unknown land, and when the steamer sailed again before midnight, it was all as though it had never been. The orchids on that dinner-table were very remarkable, for orchid-growing was the Administrator's hobby. He grafted his orchids on to orange trees, and so obtained enormous growths. We measured some of the flower-sprays, the biggest being nine feet long. As they were brown and yellow Oncidiums, they were more curious than beautiful.

The appalling desolation of St. Pierre, in the French island of Martinique, cannot be imagined without having been seen. Of a very handsome city of 40,000 inhabitants there is absolutely nothing left except one gable of the cathedral. There is no trace of a town having ever existed here, for the poisonous manchineel tree has spread itself over the ruins, and it is difficult to realise that twenty years ago the pride of the French West Indies stood here. The rich merchants and planters of St. Pierre had all made their homes in the valley of the little river Roxelana. After the sides of Mont Pele had gaped apart and hurled their white-hot whirlwind of fire over the doomed town on that fatal May 8, 1902--a fiery whirlwind which calcined every human being and every building in the town in less than one minute--molten lava poured into the valley of the Roxelana until it filled it up entirely, burying houses, gardens and plantations alike. There is no trace even of a valley now, and the stream makes its way underground to the sea. Napoleon the Great's first wife, Josephine de la Pagerie, was a native of Martinique and retained all her life the curious indolence of the Creole. Her gross extravagance and her love of luxury may also have been due to her Creole blood. Her first husband, of course, had been the Vicomte de Beauharnais, and her daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, married Napoleon's brother, Louis, King of Holland. This complicated relationships, for Queen Hortense's son, Louis Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III., was thus at the same time nephew and step-grandson of Napoleon I. M. Filon, in his most interesting study of the Empress Eugenie, points out that Napoleon III. showed his Creole blood in his constant chilliness. He chose as his private apartments at the Tuileries a set of small rooms on the ground floor, as these could be more easily heated up to the temperature he liked. According to M. Filon, Napoleon III. shortened his life by persisting in remaining so much in what he describes as "those over-gilt, over-heated, air-tight little boxes."

The well-known greenhouse climbing plant lapageria, with its waxy white or crimson trumpets of flowers, owes its name to Josephine de la Pagerie, for on its first introduction into France it was called La Pageria in her honour, though with the English p.r.o.nunciation of the name the connection is not at first obvious.

It is not so generally known that Madame de Maintenon, as Francoise d'Aubigne, spent all her girlhood in Martinique.

The coloured women of Martinique have apparently absorbed, thanks to their two hundred years' a.s.sociation with the French, something of that innate good taste which seems the birthright of most French people, and they show this in their very individual and becoming costumes. The Martinique negress is, as a rule, a handsome bronze-coloured creature, and she wears a full-skirted, flowing dress of flowered chintz or cretonne, with a _fichu_ of some contrasting colour over her breast. She hides her woolly locks under an ample turban of two shades, one of which will exactly match her _fichu_, whilst the other will either correspond to or contrast with the colour of her chintz dress, thus producing what the French term "une gamme de couleur," most pleasing to the eye, and with never a false note in it. Beside these comely, amply breasted bronze statues, the British West Indian negress, with her absurd travesty of European fashions, and her grotesque hats, cuts, I am bound to say, a very poor figure indeed.

The flourishing little island of Montserrat has one peculiarity. The negroes all speak with the strongest of Irish brogues. Cromwell deported to Montserrat many of the "Malignants" from the West of Ireland, who acquired negro slaves to cultivate their sugar and cotton. These negroes naturally learnt English in the fashion in which their masters spoke it. The white men have gone; the brogue remains. I was much amused on going ash.o.r.e in the Administrator's whaleboat, he being an old acquaintance from the Co. Tyrone, to hear his jet-black c.o.xswain remark, "'Tis the lee side I will be going, sorr, the way your Honour will not be getting wet, for them back-seas are mighty throublesome." This in Montserrat was unexpected.

There is a curious uninhabited rock lying amongst the Virgin Islands.

It is quite square and box-like in shape, and is known as "The Dead Man's Chest." Before seeing it I had always thought that the eternal chant of the old pirate at the "Admiral Benbow," in _Treasure Island_:

"Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest, Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

referred literally to a seaman's chest, though reflection might have shown that one chest would afford rather scanty seating-ground for fifteen men.

At Nevis, the curious can see in Fig Tree Church the register attesting the marriage of "Horatio Nelson, Captain of H.M.S.

_Boreas_, to Frances Nisbet, widow," on March 11, 1789. William IV., at that time Duke of Clarence, was Nelson's best man on that occasion.

Nevis possesses powerful hot mineral springs, and a hundred years ago and more was the great health resort of white people in the West Indies. Here the planters endeavoured to get their torpid livers into working order again, and the local boast was that for every pearl necklace and pair of diamond shoe-buckles to be seen at the English Bath, there were three to be seen in Nevis. To add to its attractions it was a.s.serted that the drinking, gambling, and duelling in Nevis left Bath completely in the shade.

Though one was constantly hearing of diminishing trade in the Lesser Antilles, certain questions kept suggesting themselves to me. For instance, in islands abounding in water power, why ship copra in bulk to England or the United States, instead of crushing it locally and exporting the oil, which would occupy one-tenth of the cargo-s.p.a.ce?

Why, in an island producing both oranges and sugar, ship them separately to Europe to be made into marmalade, instead of manufacturing it on the spot? The invariable answer to these queries was "lack of capital"; no one seemed to guess that lack of enterprise might be a contributory cause as well.

I have alluded to the vampire bat of Trinidad. Six weeks before my arrival there, the Governor's aide-de-camp had most imprudently slept without lowering his mosquito curtains. He awoke to find himself drenched in blood, for a vampire bat had opened a vein, drunk his fill, and then flown off leaving the wound open. The doctor had to apply the actual cautery to stop the bleeding, and six weeks afterwards the unfortunate aide-de-camp was still as white as a sheet of paper from loss of blood. At Government House, Port-of-Spain, there is a very lofty entrance-hall, bright with electric light. The vampires constantly flew in here, to become helpless at once in the glare of light, when they could be easily killed with a stick. The vampire is a small, sooty-black bat with a perfectly diabolical little face. An ordinary mosquito net is quite sufficient protection against them, or, to persons who do not mind a light in their room, a lamp burning all night is an absolute safeguard against their attacks.

Every stable in Trinidad has a lighted lamp burning all night in it, and those who can afford them, drop wire-gauze curtains over their horses' stalls as a protection against vampires.

The Trinidad negro being naturally an indolent creature, all the boatmen and cab-drivers in Port-of-Spain are Barbadians. As we know, the Badians have an inordinate opinion of themselves and of their island. Whilst I was in Trinidad, General Baden-Powell came there in the course of his world-tour inspection of Boy Scouts. On the day of General Baden-Powell's arrival, all the Badian boatmen and cab-drivers struck work, and the vampire-bitten aide-de-camp, who was in the town, met serried phalanxes of dark faces hurrying to the landing-stage. On asking a Badian what the excitement was about, the negro answered with infinite hauteur.

"You ask me dat, sir? You not know dat our great countryman General _Badian_-Powell arrive to-day, so we all go welcome him."

Charles Kingsley in _At Last_ goes into rhapsodies over the "High Woods" of Trinidad. I confess that I was terribly disappointed in them. They are too trim and well-kept; the Forestry department has done its work too well. There are broad green rides cut through them, reminiscent of covers in an English park, but certainly not suggestive of a virgin forest. One almost expects to hear the beaters' sticks rattling in them, and I did not think that they could compare with the splendid virgin forests of Brazil.

I was in Brazil just thirty years ago with Patrick Lyon, brother of the present Lord Strathmore. We were staying at Petropolis, and Lyon, fired by my accounts of these virgin forests, declared that he must see one for himself. He had heard that the forests extended to within three miles of Petropolis, and at once went to hire two horses for us to ride out there. There were no horses to be had in the place, but so determined was Lyon to see these untrodden wilds, that he insisted on our doing the three miles on foot, then and there. It was the height of the Brazilian summer, and the heat was something appalling. We struggled over three miles of a glaring white shadeless road, grilled alive by the sun, but always comforting ourselves by dwelling on the cool shades awaiting us at the end of our journey. At length we reached the forest, and wandered into a green twilight under the dense canopy of leaves, which formed an unbroken roof a hundred feet over our heads. With "green twilight" the obvious epithet should be "cool"; that is exactly what it was not, for if the green canopy shut out the sun, it also shut out the air, and the heat in that natural leafy cathedral was absolutely overpowering. We wandered on and on, till I began to grow giddy and faint with the heat. I asked Lyon how he was feeling, and he owned that the heat had affected him too, so we sat down on a rock to recuperate.

"It is a solemn thought," observed Lyon, after a long silence, "that we are perhaps the first human beings to have set foot in this forest.

We simply must pull ourselves together, for it might be months before any one pa.s.sed here, and you know what that means." I a.s.sented gloomily, as I formed melancholy mental pictures of ourselves as two mature Babes-in-the-Wood, speculating whether, in the event of our demise in these untrodden wilds, any Brazilian birds, brilliant of plumage but kindly of heart, would cover us up with leaves. These great forest tracts were producing an awe-inspiring effect on us as we realised our precarious position, when we suddenly heard Toot! toot!

toot! and to our inexpressible amazement we saw a tramcar approaching us through the trees. The car came within twenty feet of us, for the track had been quite hidden by some rising ground; we hailed it, and returned to Petropolis prosaically seated on the front bench of a tramcar. We afterwards found that the untrodden wilds of our virgin forest were traversed by a regular hourly service of tramcars; alas for vanished illusions!

There is a street in Port-of-Spain which used to be known as the "Calle de los Presidentes," or Presidents' Street, for it was here that fugitive Presidents of Venezuela were wont to take refuge when the political atmosphere of that republic grew uncomfortable for them.

Most of these gentlemen thoughtfully brought with them as much of the national till as they were able to lay their hands on, to comfort them in their exile. Spanish-American republics seem to produce Dictator-Presidents very freely. When I was in Venezuela in 1907 Cipriano Castro had grasped supreme power, and governed the country as an autocrat. Castro, who was an uneducated half-caste, ruled by corruption and terror; he repudiated all the national obligations, quarrelled with the United States and with every European Power, and disposed of his political opponents by the simple expedient of placing them against a wall with a file of soldiers with loaded rifles in front of them. For eight years this ignorant, bloodthirsty savage enjoyed absolute power, until he was forced in 1908 to flee to Europe.

I do not know whether he followed the national custom by taking most of the exchequer with him. A typical sample of Castro's administrative powers was to be seen at La Guayra, the wretched, poverty-stricken seaport of Caracas. Dominating the squalid little place was a huge and imposing fort with heavy guns, over which the gaudy Venezuelan tricolour of yellow, blue, and red fluttered bravely. This fort was an elaborate sham, built of coloured plaster, and the guns were of painted wood only; but Castro thought that it was calculated to frighten the foreigner, and it possibly flattered the national vanity as well.

A most remarkable example of a Dictator-Tyrant was Juan Rosas, who, for seventeen years, from 1835 to 1852, ruled the Argentine Republic as an unchallenged despot. Rosas was born in 1793, and began life as a gaucho. He seized supreme power in 1835, and is credited with having put twenty-five thousand people to death. The "Nero of South America"

was ably backed-up by his seconds-in-command, Oribe and Urquiza, two most consummate scoundrels. Whether Rosas "saw red," as others since his day have done, or whether it was the play on his own name which pleased him, I cannot say, but he had a perfect mania for the colour red. He dressed all his troops in scarlet ponchos, and ordered every male inhabitant of Buenos Ayres who wore a coat at all, to wear a scarlet waistcoat, whilst all ladies were bidden to wear a knot of scarlet ribbon and to carry a red fan. In the Dictator's own house at Palermo all the carpets and stuffs were scarlet. An elderly lady in Buenos Ayres, who remembered Rosas' dictatorship perfectly, showed me some of the scarlet fans, specially made in Spain for the Argentine market after Rosas had promulgated his edict. My friend described to me how Rosas placed several of his rough police at the doors of every church, and any lady who did not exhibit the obligatory red bow on her black dress (in Spanish-speaking countries the women always go to Ma.s.s in black), received a dab of pitch on her cheek, on to which the policeman clapped a rosette of red paper. She told it all so graphically that I could almost see the stream of frightened, black-clad women issuing from the church, whilst their husbands and lovers stood expectantly below (South American men rarely enter a church), every man-jack of them with a scarlet waistcoat, like a flock of swarthy robin redb.r.e.a.s.t.s. I have seen some of these waistcoats; the young bloods wore scarlet silk, the older men red cloth. Rosas, like a mediaeval monarch, had his court fool or jester, a dwarf known as Don Eusebio. Rosas dressed him in scarlet and gave him the rank of a general, with a scarlet-clad bodyguard, and woe betide any one who treated the Dictator's fool with scant respect. Rosas was undoubtedly as mad as Bedlam, but he was an abominably bloodthirsty madman who successfully exterminated all his opponents. The Dictator was accessible to every one at his house at Palermo, and the marvel is that he managed to escape a.s.sa.s.sination. His enormities became so intolerable that in 1852 the Brazilians and Uruguayans invaded the Argentine, and at the critical moment General Urquiza, Rosas' trusted second-in-command, betrayed him and went over to the enemy, so the Dictator's power was broken.

Rosas took refuge in the British Legation, and for some reason which I have never fathomed, he was shipped to England on H.M.S. _Locust_.

He settled down at Swaythling near Southampton, where he died in 1877 after twenty-five years peaceful residence. He was a peculiarly bloodthirsty scoundrel.

Some of these Spanish-American dictators have been beneficent despots, such as Jose Francia, who, upon Paraguay proclaiming her independence in 1811, got elected President, and soon afterwards managed to secure his nomination as Dictator for life. He ruled Paraguay autocratically but well until his death in 1840, and the country prospered under him.

Under the iron rule of Porfirio Diaz, from 1877 to 1911, Mexico enjoyed the only period of comparative calm that turbulent country has known in recent years, and made continued economic progress.