Two Years in the French West Indies Part 12

confesses the Englishman, in surprised dismay; "but we will pay you back for that!"...

... Returning to Martinique with new t.i.tles to distinction, Labat was made Superior of the order in that island, and likewise Vicar-Apostolic.

After building the Convent of the Mouillage, at St. Pierre, and many other edifices, he undertook that series of voyages in the interests of the Dominicans whereof the narration fills six ample volumes. As a traveller Pere Labat has had few rivals in his own field;--no one, indeed, seems to have been able to repeat some of his feats. All the French and several of the English colonies were not merely visited by him, but were studied in their every geographical detail. Travel in the West Indies is difficult to a degree of which strangers have little idea; but in the time of Pere Labat there were few roads,--and a far greater variety of obstacles. I do not believe there are half a dozen whites in Martinique who thoroughly know their own island,--who have even travelled upon all its roads; but Labat knew it as he knew the palm of his hand, and travelled where roads had never been made. Equally well he knew Guadeloupe and other islands; and he learned all that it was possible to learn in those years about the productions and resources of the other colonies. He travelled with the fearlessness and examined with the thoroughness of a Humboldt,--so far as his limited science permitted: had he possessed the knowledge of modern naturalists and geologists he would probably have left little for others to discover after him. Even at the present time West Indian travellers are glad to consult him for information.

These duties involved prodigious physical and mental exertion, in a climate deadly to Europeans. They also involved much voyaging in waters haunted by filibusters and buccaneers. But nothing appears to daunt Labat. As for the filibusters, he becomes their comrade and personal friend;--he even becomes their chaplain, and does not scruple to make excursions with them. He figures in several sea-fights;--on one occasion he aids in the capture of two English vessels,--and then occupies himself in making the prisoners, among whom are several ladies, enjoy the event like a holiday. On another voyage Labat's vessel is captured by a Spanish ship. At one moment sabres are raised above his head, and loaded muskets levelled at his breast;--the next, every Spaniard is on his knees, appalled by a cross that Labat holds before the eyes of the captors,--the cross worn by officers of the Inquisition,--the terrible symbol of the Holy Office. "It did not belong to me," he says, "but to one of our brethren who had left it by accident among my effects." He seems always prepared in some way to meet any possible emergency.

No humble and timid monk this: he has the frame and temper of those medieval abbots who could don with equal indifference the helmet or the cowl. He is apparently even more of a soldier than a priest.

When English corsairs attempt a descent on the Martinique coast at Sainte-Marie they find Pere Labat waiting for them with all the negroes of the Saint-Jacques plantation, to drive them back to their ships.

For other dangers he exhibits absolute unconcern. He studies the phenomena of hurricanes with almost pleasurable interest, while his comrades on the ship abandon hope. When seized with yellow-fever, then known as the Siamese Sickness (_mal de Siam_), he refuses to stay in bed the prescribed time, and rises to say his ma.s.s. He faints at the altar; yet a few days later we hear of him on horseback again, travelling over the mountains in the worst and hottest season of the year....

... Labat was thirty years old when he went to the Antilles;--he was only forty-two when his work was done. In less than twelve years he made his order the most powerful and wealthy of any in the West Indies,--lifted their property out of bankruptcy to rebuild it upon a foundation of extraordinary prosperity. As Rufz observes without exaggeration, the career of Pere Labat in the Antilles seems to more than realize the antique legend of the labors of Hercules. Whithersoever he went,--except in the English colonies,--his pa.s.sage was memorialized by the rising of churches, convents, and schools,--as well as mills, forts, and refineries. Even cities claim him as their founder. The solidity of his architectural creations is no less remarkable than their excellence of design;--much of what he erected still remains; what has vanished was removed by human agency, and not by decay; and when the old Dominican church at St. Pierre had to be pulled down to make room for a larger edifice, the workmen complained that the stones could not be separated,--that the walls seemed single ma.s.ses of rock. There can be no doubt, moreover, that he largely influenced the life of the colonies during those years, and expanded their industrial and commercial capacities.

He was sent on a mission to Rome after these things had been done, and never returned from Europe. There he travelled more or less in after-years; but finally settled at Paris, where he prepared and published the voluminous narrative of his own voyages, and other curious books;--manifesting as a writer the same tireless energy he had shown in so many other capacities. He does not, however, appear to have been happy. Again and again he prayed to be sent back to his beloved Antilles, and for some unknown cause the prayer was always refused. To such a character, the restraint of the cloister must have proved a slow agony; but he had to endure it for many long years. He died at Paris in 1738, aged seventy-five.

... It was inevitable that such a man should make bitter enemies: his preferences, his position, his activity, his business shrewdness, his necessary self-a.s.sertion, yet must have created secret hate and jealousy even when open malevolence might not dare to show itself. And to the these natural results of personal antagonism or opposition were afterwards superadded various resentments--irrational, perhaps, but extremely violent,--caused by the father's cynical frankness as a writer. He spoke freely about the family origin and personal failings of various colonists considered high personages in their own small world; and to this day his book has an evil reputation undeserved in those old creole communities, but where any public mention of a family scandal is never just forgiven or forgotten.... But probably even before his work appeared it had been secretly resolved that he should never be permitted to return to Martinique or Guadeloupe after his European mission.

The exact purpose of the Government in this policy remains a mystery,--whatever ingenious writers may have alleged to the contrary.

We only know that M. Adrien Dessalles,--the trustworthy historian of Martinique,--while searching among the old _Archives de la Marine_, found there a ministerial letter to the Intendant de Vaucresson in which this statement occurs;--

... "Le Pere Labat shall never be suffered to return to the colonies, whatever efforts he may make to obtain permission."

IV.

One rises from the perusal of the "Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l'Amerique" with a feeling approaching regret; for although the six pursy little volumes composing it--full of quaint drawings, plans, and odd attempts at topographical maps--reveal a prolix writer, Pere Labat is always able to interest. He reminds you of one of those slow, precise, old-fashioned conversationalists who measure the weight of every word and never leave anything to the imagination of the audience, yet who invariably reward the patience of their listeners sooner or later by reflections of surprising profundity or theories of a totally novel description. But what particularly impresses the reader of these volumes is not so much the recital of singular incidents and facts as the revelation of the author's personality. Reading him, you divine a character of enormous force,--gifted but unevenly balanced; singularly shrewd in worldly affairs, and surprisingly credulous in other respects; superst.i.tious and yet cynical; unsympathetic by his positivism, but agreeable through natural desire to give pleasure; just by nature, yet capable of merciless severity; profoundly devout, but withal tolerant for his calling and his time. He is sufficiently free from petty bigotry to make fun of the scruples of his brethren in the matter of employing heretics; and his account of the manner in which he secured the services of a first-cla.s.s refiner for the Martinique plantation at the Fond Saint-Jacques is not the least amusing page in the book. He writes: "The religious who had been appointed Superior in Guadeloupe wrote me that he would find it difficult to employ this refiner because the man was a Lutheran. This scruple gave me pleasure, as I had long wanted to have have him upon our plantation in the Fond Saint-Jacques, but did not know how I would be able to manage it! I wrote to the Superior at once that all he had to do was to send the man to me, because it was a matter of indifference to me whether the sugar he might make were Catholic or Lutheran sugar, provided it were very white." [10]

He displays equal frankness in confessing an error or a discomfiture. He acknowledges that while Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, he used to teach that there were no tides in the tropics; and in a discussion as to whether the _diablotin_ (a now almost extinct species of West Indian nocturnal bird) were fish flesh, and might or might not be eaten in Lent, he tells us that he was fairly worsted,--(although he could cite the celebrated myth of the "barnacle-geese" as a "fact" in justification of one's right to doubt the nature of diablotins).

One has reason to suspect that Pere Labat, notwithstanding his references to the decision of the Church that diablotins were not birds, felt quite well a.s.sured within himself that they were. There is a sly humor in his story of these controversies, which would appear to imply that while well pleased at the decision referred to, he knew all about diablotins. Moreover, the father betrays certain tendencies to gormandize not altogether in harmony with the profession of an ascetic.... There were parrots in nearly all of the French Antilles in those days [11] and Pere Labat does not attempt to conceal his fondness for cooked parrots. (He does not appear to have cared much for them as pets: if they could not talk well, he condemned them forthwith to the pot.) "They all live upon fruits and seeds," he writes, "and their flesh contracts the odor and color of that particular fruit or seed they feed upon. They become exceedingly fat in the season when the guavas are ripe; and when they eat the seeds of the _Bois d'Inde_ they have an odor of nutmeg and cloves which is delightful (_une odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_)." He recommends four superior ways of preparing them, as well as other fowls, for the table, of which the first and the best way is "to pluck them alive, then to make them swallow vinegar, and then to strangle them while they have the vinegar still in their throats by twisting their necks"; and the fourth way is "to skin them alive" (_de les ecorcher tout en vie_).... "It is certain,"

he continues, "that these ways are excellent, and that fowls that have to be cooked in a hurry thereby obtain an admirable tenderness (_une tendrete admirable_)." Then he makes a brief apology to his readers, not for the inhumanity of his recipes, but for a display of culinary knowledge scarcely becoming a monk, and acquired only through those peculiar necessities which colonial life in the tropics imposed upon all alike. The touch of cruelty here revealed produces an impression which there is little in the entire work capable of modifying. Labat seems to have possessed but a very small quant.i.ty of altruism; his cynicism on the subject of animal suffering is not offset by any visible sympathy with human pain;--he never compa.s.sionates: you may seek in vain through all his pages for one gleam of the goodness of gentle Pere Du Tertre, who, filled with intense pity for the condition of the blacks, prays masters to be merciful and just to their slaves for the love of G.o.d.

Labat suggests, on the other hand, that slavery is a good means of redeeming negroes from superst.i.tion and saving their souls from h.e.l.l: he selects and purchases them himself for the Saint-Jacques plantation, never makes a mistake or a bad bargain, and never appears to feel a particle of commiseration for their lot. In fact, the emotional feeling displayed by Pere Du Tertre (whom he mocks slyly betimes) must have seemed to him rather condemnable than praiseworthy; for Labat regarded the negro as a natural child of the devil,--a born sorcerer,--an evil being wielding occult power.

Perhaps the chapters on negro sorcery are the most astonishing in the book, displaying on the part of this otherwise hard and practical nature a credulity almost without limit. After having related how he had a certain negro sent out of the country "who predicted the arrival of vessels and other things to come,--in so far, at least, as the devil himself was able to know and reveal these matters to him," he plainly states his own belief in magic as follows:

"I know there are many people who consider as pure imagination, and as silly stories, or positive false-hoods, all that is related about sorcerers and their compacts with the devil. I was myself for a long time of this opinion. Moreover, I am aware that what is said on this subject is frequently exaggerated; but I am now convinced it must be acknowledged that all which has been related is not entirely false, although perhaps it may not be entirely true."...

Therewith he begins to relate stories upon what may have seemed unimpeachable authority in those days. The first incident narrated took place, he a.s.sures us, in the Martinique Dominican convent, shortly before his arrival in the colony. One of the fathers, Pere Fraise, had had brought to Martinique, "from the kingdom of Juda (?) in Guinea," a little negro about nine or ten years old. Not long afterwards there was a serious drought, and the monks prayed vainly for rain. Then the negro child, who had begun to understand and speak a little French, told his masters that he was a Rain-maker, that he could obtain them all the rain they wanted. "This proposition," says Pere Labat, "greatly astonished the fathers: they consulted together, and at last, curiosity overcoming reason, they gave their consent that this unbaptized child should make some rain fall on their garden." The unbaptized child asked them if they wanted "a big or a little rain"; they answered that a moderate rain would satisfy them. Thereupon the little negro got three oranges, and placed them on the ground in a line at a short distance from one another, and bowed down before each of them in turn, muttering words in an unknown tongue. Then he got three small orange-branches, stuck a branch in each orange, and repeated his prostrations and mutterings;--after which he took one of the branches, stood up, and watched the horizon. A small cloud appeared, and he pointed the branch at it. It approached swiftly, rested above the garden, and sent down a copious shower of rain. Then the boy made a hole in the ground, and buried the oranges and the branches. The fathers were amazed to find that not a single drop of rain had fallen outside their garden. They asked the boy who had taught him this sorcery, and he answered them that among the blacks on board the slave-ship which had brought him over there were some Rain-makers who had taught him. Pere Labat declares there is no question as to the truth of the occurrence: he cites the names of Pere Fraise, Pere Rosie, Pere Temple, and Pere Bournot,--all members of his own order,--as trust-worthy witnesses of this incident.

Pere Labat displays equal credulity in his recital of a still more extravagant story told him by Madame la Comtesse du Genes. M. le Comte du Genes, husband of the lady in question, and commander of a French squadron, captured the English fort of Gorea in 1696, and made prisoners of all the English slaves in the service of the factory there established. But the vessel on which these were embarked was unable to leave the coast, in spite of a good breeze: she seemed bewitched. Some of the the slaves finally told the captain there was a negress on board who had enchanted the ship, and who had the power to "dry up the hearts"

of all who refused to obey her. A number of deaths taking place among the blacks, the captain ordered autopsies made, and it was found that the hearts of the dead negroes were desiccated. The negress was taken on deck, tied to a gun and whipped, but uttered no cry;--the ship's surgeon, angered at her stoicism, took a hand in the punishment, and flogged her "with all his force." Thereupon she told him that inasmuch as he had abused her without reason, his heart also should be "dried up." He died next day; and his heart was found in the condition predicted. All this time the ship could not be made to move in any direction; and the negress told the captain that until he should put her and her companions on sh.o.r.e he would never be able to sail. To convince him of her power she further asked him to place three fresh melons in a chest, to lock the chest and put a guard over it; when she should tell him to unlock it, there would be no melons there. The capttain made the experiment. When the chest was opened, the melons appeared to be there; but on touching them it was found that only the outer rind remained: the interior had been dried up,--like the surgeon's heart. Thereupon the captain put the witch and her friends all ash.o.r.e, and sailed away without further trouble.

Another story of African sorcery for the truth of which Pere Labat earnestly vouches is the following:

A negro was sentenced to be burned alive for witchcraft at St. Thomas in 1701;--his princ.i.p.al crime was "having made a little figure of baked clay to speak." A certain creole, meeting the negro on his way to the place of execution, jeeringly observed, "Well, you cannot make your little figure talk any more now;--it has been broken." "If the gentleman allow me," replied the prisoner," I will make the cane he carries in his hand speak." The creole's curiosity was strongly aroused: he prevailed upon the guards to halt a few minutes, and permit the prisoner to make the experiment. The negro then took the cane, stuck it into the ground in the middle of the road, whispered something to it, and asked the gentleman what he wished to know. "I, would like to know," answered the latter, "whether the ship has yet sailed from Europe, and when she will arrive." "Put your ear to the head of the cane," said the negro. On doing so the creole distinctly heard a thin voice which informed him that the vessel in question had left a certain French port on such a date; that she would reach St. Thomas within three days; that she had been delayed on her voyage by a storm which had carried away her foretop and her mizzen sail; that she had such and such pa.s.sengers on board (mentioning the names), all in good health.... After this incident the negro was burned alive; but within three days the vessel arrived in port, and the prediction or divination was found to have been absolutely correct in every particular.

... Pere Labat in no way disapproves the atrocious sentence inflicted upon the wretched negro: in his opinion such predictions were made by the power and with the personal aid of the devil; and for those who knowingly maintained relations with the devil, he could not have regarded any punishment too severe. That he could be harsh enough himself is amply shown in various accounts of his own personal experience with alleged sorcerers, and especially in the narration of his dealings with one--apparently a sort of African doctor--who was a slave on a neighboring plantation, but used to visit the Saint-Jacques quarters by stealth to practise his art. One of the slaves of the order, a negress, falling very sick, the wizard was sent for; and he came with all his paraphernalia--little earthen pots and fetiches, etc.--during the night. He began to practise his incantations, without the least suspicion that Pere Labat was watching him through a c.h.i.n.k; and, after having consulted his fetiches, he told the woman she would die within four days. At this juncture the priest suddenly burst in the door and entered, followed by several powerful slaves. He dashed to pieces the soothsayer's articles, and attempted to rea.s.sure the frightened negress, by declaring the prediction a lie inspired by the devil. Then he had the sorcerer stripped and flogged in his presence.

"I had him given," he calmly observes, "about (_environ_) three hundred lashes, which flayed him (_l'ecorchait_) from his shoulders to his knees. He screamed like a madman. All the negroes trembled, and a.s.sured me that the devil would cause my death.... Then I had the wizard put in irons, after having had him well washed with a _pimentade_,--that is to say, with brine in which pimentos and small lemons have been crushed.

This causes a horrible pain to those skinned by the whip; but it is a certain remedy against gangrene."...

And then he sent the poor wretch back to his master with a note requesting the latter to repeat the punishment,--a demand that seems to have been approved, as the owner of the negro was "a man who feared G.o.d." Yet Pere Labat is obliged to confess that in spite of all his efforts, the sick negress died on the fourth day,--as the sorcerer had predicted. This fact must have strongly confirmed his belief that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair, and caused him to doubt whether even a flogging of about three hundred lashes, followed by a pimentade, were sufficient chastis.e.m.e.nt for the miserable black. Perhaps the tradition of this frightful whipping may have had something to do with the terror which still attaches to the name of the Dominican in Martinique. The legal extreme punishment was twenty-nine lashes.

Pere Labat also avers that in his time the negroes were in the habit of carrying sticks which had the power of imparting to any portion of the human body touched by them a most severe chronic pain. He at first believed, he says, that these pains were merely rheumatic; but after all known remedies for rheumatism had been fruitlessly applied, he became convinced there was something occult and diabolical in the manner of using and preparing these sticks.... A fact worthy of note is that this belief is still prevalent in Martinique!

One hardly ever meets in the country a negro who does not carry either a stick or a cutla.s.s, or both. The cutla.s.s is indispensable to those who work in the woods or upon plantations; the stick is carried both as a protection against snakes and as a weapon of offence and defence in village quarrels, for unless a negro be extraordinarily drunk he will not strike his fellow with a cutla.s.s. The sticks are usually made of a strong dense wood: those most sought after of a material termed _moudongue_, [12] almost as tough, but much lighter than, our hickory.

On inquiring whether any of the sticks thus carried were held to possess magic powers, I was a.s.sured by many country people that there were men who knew a peculiar method of "arranging" sticks so that to touch any person with them even lightly, _and through any thickness of clothing_, would produce terrible and continuous pain.

Believing in these things, and withal unable to decide whether the sun revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun, [13] Pere Labat was, nevertheless, no more credulous and no more ignorant than the average missionary of his time: it is only by contrast with his practical perspicacity in other matters, his worldly rationalism and executive shrewdness, that this superst.i.tious navete impresses one as odd. And how singular sometimes is the irony of Time! All the wonderful work the Dominican accomplished has been forgotten by the people; while all the witchcrafts that he warred against survive and flourish openly; and his very name is seldom uttered but in connection with superst.i.tions,--has been, in fact, preserved among the blacks by the power of superst.i.tion alone, by the belief in zombis and goblins....

"_Mi! ti manmaille-la, moin ke fai Pe Labatt vini pouend ou!_"...

V.

Few habitants of St. Pierre now remember that the beautiful park behind the cathedral used to be called the Savanna of the White Fathers,--and the long shadowed meadow beside the Roxelane, the Savanna of the Black Fathers: the Jesuits. All the great religious orders have long since disappeared from the colony: their edifices have been either converted to other uses or demolished; their estates have pa.s.sed into other hands.... Were their labors, then, productive of merely ephemeral results?--was the colossal work of a Pere Labat all in vain, so far as the future is concerned? The question is not easily answered; but it is worth considering.

Of course the material prosperity which such men toiled to obtain for their order represented nothing more, even to their eyes, than the means of self-maintenance, and the acc.u.mulation of force necessary for the future missionary labors of the monastic community. The real ultimate purpose was, not the acquisition of power for the order, but for the Church, of which the orders represented only a portion of the force militant; and this purpose did not fail of accomplishment. The orders pa.s.sed away only when their labors had been completed,--when Martinique had become (exteriorly, at least) more Catholic than Rome itself,--after the missionaries had done all that religious zeal could do in moulding and remoulding the human material under their control. These men could scarcely have antic.i.p.ated those social and political changes which the future reserved for the colonies, and which no ecclesiastical sagacity could, in any event, have provided against. It is in the existing religious condition of these communities that one may observe and estimate the character and the probable duration of the real work accomplished by the missions.

... Even after a prolonged residence in Martinique, its visible religious condition continues to impress one as somethmg phenomenal. A stranger, who has no opportunity to penetrate into the home life of the people, will not, perhaps, discern the full extent of the religious sentiment; but, nevertheless, however brief his stay, he will observe enough of the extravagant symbolism of the cult to fill him with surprise. Wherever he may choose to ride or to walk, he is certain to encounter shrines, statues of saints, or immense crucifixes. Should he climb up to the clouds of the peaks, he will find them all along the way;--he will perceive them waiting for him, looming through the mists of the heights; and pa.s.sing through the loveliest ravines, he will see niches hollowed out in the volcanic rocks, above and below him, or contrived in the trunks of trees bending over precipices, often in places so difficult of access that he wonders how the work could have been accomplished. All this has been done by the various property-owners throughout the country: it is the traditional custom to do it--brings good-luck! After a longer stay in the island, one discovers also that in almost every room of every dwelling--stone residence, wooden cottage, or palm-thatched ajoupa--there is a _chapelle_: that is, a sort of large bracket fastened to the wall, on which crosses or images are placed, with vases of flowers, and lamps or wax-tapers to be burned at night. Sometimes, moreover, statues are placed in windows, or above door-ways;--and all pa.s.sers-by take off their hats to these. Over the porch of the cottage in a mountain village, where I lived for some weeks, there was an absurd little window contrived,--a sort of purely ornamental dormer,--and in this a Virgin about five inches high had been placed. At a little distance it looked like a toy,--a child's doll forgotten there; and a doll I always supposed it to be, until one day that I saw a long procession of black laborers pa.s.sing before the house, every, one of whom took off his hat to it.... My bedchamber in the same cottage resembled a religious museum. On the chapelle there were no less than eight Virgins, varying in height from one to sixteen inches,--a St.

Joseph,--a St. John,--a crucifix,--and a host of little objects in the shape of hearts or crosses, each having some special religious significance;--while the walls were covered with framed certificates of baptism, "first-communion," confirmation, and other doc.u.ments commemorating the whole church life of the family for two generations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WAYSIDE SHRINE, OR CHAPELLE.]

... Certainly the first impression created by this perpetual display of crosses, statues, and miniature chapels is not pleasing,--particularly as the work is often inartistic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque, and nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions of francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its emotional sincerity, and which--amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms--jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,--something strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill or spring had its gracious divinity, and the boundaries of all fields were marked and guarded by statues of G.o.ds.

Instances of iconoclasm are of course highly rare in a country of which no native--rich or poor, white or half-breed--fails to doff his hat before every shrine, cross, or image he may happen to pa.s.s. Those merchants of St. Pierre or of Fort-de-France living only a few miles out of the city must certainly perform a vast number of reverences on their way to or from business;--I saw one old gentleman uncover his white head about twenty times in the course of a fifteen minutes' walk. I never heard of but one image-breaker in Martinique; and his act was the result of superst.i.tion, not of any hostility to popular faith or custom: it was prompted by the same childish feeling which moves Italian fishermen sometimes to curse St. Antony or to give his image a ducking in bad weather. This Martinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one day, feeling badly in need of a gla.s.s of tafia, perhaps, left the animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of the Virgin, with this menace (the phrase is on record):--

"_Moin ka quitte bef-la ba ou pou gade ba moin. Quand moin vini, si moin pa trouve compte-moin, moin ke foute ou vingt-nef coudfouett!_" (I leave these cattle with you to take care of for me. When I come back, if I don't find them all here, I'll give you twenty-nine lashes.)

Returning about half an hour later, he was greatly enraged to find his animals scattered in every direction;--and, rushing at the statue, he broke it from the pedestal, flung it upon the ground, and gave it twenty-nine lashes with his bull-whip. For this he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment, with hard labor, for life! In those days there were no colored magistrates;--the judges were all _bekes_.

"Rather a severe sentence," I remarked to my informant, a planter who conducted me to the scene of the alleged sacrilege.

"Severe, yes," he answered;--"and I suppose the act would seem to you more idiotic than criminal. But here, in Martinique, there were large questions involved by such an offence. Relying, as we have always done to some extent, upon religious influence as a factor in the maintenance of social order, the negro's act seemed a dangerous example."...

That the Church remains still rich and prosperous in Martinique there can be no question; but whether it continues to wield any powerful influence in the maintenance of social order is more than doubtful. A Polynesian laxity of morals among the black and colored population, and the history of race-hatreds and revolutions inspired by race-hate, would indicate that neither in ethics nor in politics does it possess any preponderant authority. By expelling various religious orders; by establishing lay schools, lycees, and other educational inst.i.tutions where the teaching is largely characterized by aggressive antagonism to Catholic ideas;--by the removal of crucifixes and images from public buildings, French Radicalism did not inflict any great blow upon Church interests. So far as the white, and, one may say, the wealthy, population is concerned, the Church triumphs in her hostility to the Government schools; and to the same extent she holds an educational monopoly. No white creole would dream of sending his children to a lay school or a lycee--notwithstanding the unquestionable superiority of the educational system in the latter inst.i.tutions;--and, although obliged, as the chief tax-paying cla.s.s, to bear the burden of maintaining these establishments, the whites hold them in such horror that the Government professors are socially ostracized. No doubt the prejudice or pride which abhors mixed schools aids the Church in this respect; she herself recognizes race-feeling, keeps her schools unmixed, and even in her convents, it is said, obliges the colored nuns to serve the white! For more than two centuries every white generation has been religiously moulded in the seminaries and convents; and among the native whites one never hears an overt declaration of free-thought opinion. Except among the colored men educated in the Government schools, or their foreign professors, there are no avowed free-thinkers;--and this, not because the creole whites, many of whom have been educated in Paris, are naturally narrow-minded, or incapable of sympathy with the mental expansion of the age, but because the religious question at Martinique has become so intimately complicated with the social and political one, concerning which there can be no compromise whatever, that to divorce the former from the latter is impossible. Roman Catholicism is an element of the cement which holds creole society together; and it is noteworthy that other creeds are not represented. I knew only of one Episcopalian and one Methodist in the island,--and heard a sort of legend about a solitary Jew whose whereabouts I never could discover;--but these were strangers.

It was only through the establishment of universal suffrage, which placed the white population at the mercy of its former slaves, that the Roman Church sustained any serious injury. All local positions are filled by blacks or men of color; no white creole can obtain a public office or take part in legislation; and the whole power of the black vote is ungenerously used against the interests of the cla.s.s thus politically disinherited. The Church suffers in consequence: her power depended upon her intimate union with the wealthy and dominant cla.s.s; and she will never be forgiven by those now in power for her sympathetic support of that cla.s.s in other years. Politics yearly intensify this hostility; and as the only hope for the restoration of the whites to power, and of the Church to its old position, lies in the possibility of another empire or a revival of the monarchy, the white creoles and their Church are forced into hostility against republicanism and the republic.

And political newspapers continually attack Roman Catholicism,--mock its tenets and teachings,--ridicule its dogmas and ceremonies,--satirize its priests.

In the cities and towns the Church indeed appears to retain a large place in the affection of the poorer cla.s.ses;--her ceremonies are always well attended; money pours into her coffers; and one can still wittness the curious annual procession of the "converted,"--aged women of color and negresses going to communion for the first time, all wearing snow-white turbans in honor of the event. But among the country people, where the dangerous forces of revolution exist, Christian feeling is almost stifled by ghastly beliefs of African origin;--the images and crucifixes still command respect, but this respect is inspired by a feeling purely fetichistic. With the political dispossession of the whites, certain dark powers, previously concealed or repressed, have obtained, formidable development. The old enemy of Pere Labat, the wizard (the _quimboiseur_), already wields more authority than the priest, exercises more terror than the magistrate, commands more confidence than the physician. The educated mulatto cla.s.s may affect to despise him;--but he is preparing their overthrow in the dark.

Astonishing is the persistence with which the African has clung to these beliefs and practices, so zealously warred upon by the Church and so mercilessly punished by the courts for centuries. He still goes to ma.s.s, and sends his children to the priest; but he goes more often to the quimboiseur and the "_magnetise_." He finds use for both beliefs, but gives large preference to the savage one,--just as he prefers the pattering of his tam tam to the music of the military band at the _Savane du Fort_.... And should it come to pa.s.s that Martinique be ever totally abandoned by its white population,--an event by no means improbable in the present order of things,--the fate of the ecclesiastical fabric so toilsomely reared by the monastic orders is not difficult to surmise.