Eliza Lee Follen - "Two Festivals"

George Bernard Shaw - "The Man of Destiny"

Louisa May Alcott - "Work: A Story of Experience"

John H. Bechtel - "Slips of Speech"

Two Years in the French West Indies

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> Two Years in the French West Indies




Other authorities divide the _saison chaude et sèche_ into two
periods, of which the latter, beginning about May, is called the
_Renouveau_; and it is at least true that at the time indicated
there is a great burst of vegetal luxuriance. But there is always
rain, there are almost always clouds, there is no possibility of
marking and dating the beginnings and the endings of weather in
this country where the barometer is almost useless, and the
thermometer mounts in the sun to twice the figure it reaches in
the shade. Long and patient observation has, however, established
the fact that during the hivernage, if the heavy showers have a
certain fixed periodicity,--falling at midday or in the heated part
of the afternoon,--Pelée is likely to be clear early in the morning;
and by starting before daylight one can then have good chances of
a fine view from the summit.



IV.


At five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave
St. Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent
by the shortest route of all,--that of the Morne St. Martin, one
of Pelée's western counterforts. We drive north along the shore
for about half an hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a
winding mountain road, leading to the upper plantations, between
leagues of cane. The sky begins to brighten as we ascend, and a
steely glow announces that day has begun on the other side of the
island. Miles up, the crest of the volcano cuts sharp as a saw-
edge against the growing light: there is not a cloud visible.
Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone; and one of
the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right an
immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens
very quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning
to catch the light, sink below us in distance; and above them,
southwardly, an amazing silouette begins to rise,--all blue,--a
mountain wall capped with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée
itself in the middle, but sinking down to the sea-level westward.
There are a number of extraordinary acuminations; but the most
impressive shape is the nearest,--a tremendous conoidal mass
crowned with a group of peaks, of which two, taller than the
rest, tell their name at once by the beauty of their forms,--
the Pitons of Carbet. They wear their girdles of cloud, though
Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only
deepens the color, does not dissipate it;--but in the nearer valleys
gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has
not been able to show himself;--it will take him some time yet to
climb Pelée.

Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden
cottages,--the quarters of the field hands,--and receive from the
proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At
his house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;--he provides
for our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,--two young colored
men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The
guides walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand
and a package on his head--our provisions, photographic
instruments, etc.

The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred
feet; and for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the
planter's residence we still traverse fields of cane and of
manioc. The light is now strong in the valley; but we are in the
shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at last; the ascending
path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass run mad, and
other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms. The
forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-
lance glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the
bare feet of our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it
with a touch of his cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches
long, and almost the color of the yellowish leaves under which it
had been hiding.... The conversation turns on snakes as we make
our first halt at the verge of the woods.

Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows
himself by daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm.
We are not likely, in the opinion of all present, to meet with another.
Every one in the party, except myself, has some curious experience to
relate. I hear for the first time, about the alleged inability of the
trigonocephalus to wound except at a distance from his enemy of
not less than one-third of his length;--about M. A--, a former
director of the Jardin des Plantes, who used to boldly thrust his
arm into holes where he knew snakes were, and pull them out,--
catching them just behind the head and wrapping the tail round
his arm,--and place them alive in a cage without ever getting
bitten;--about M. B--, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the
coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his
fright that the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite
him;--about M. C--, who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail,
and "crack it like a whip" until the head would fly off ;--about
an old white man living in the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-
meat, and who always kept in his ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents"
(_yon ka sèpent-salé);--about a monster eight feet long which
killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles Fabre's white cat, but was
also killed by the cat after she had been caught in the folds of
the reptile;--about the value of snakes as protectors of the
sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;--about an unsuccessful
effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to introduce
the fer-de-lance there;--about the alleged power of a monstrous
toad, the _crapaud-ladre_, to cause the death of the snake that
swallows it;--and, finally, about the total absence of the
idyllic and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to
the presence of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna
of the country remain to a large extent unknown,"--adds the last
speaker, an amiable old physician of St. Pierre,--"because the
existence of the fer-de-lance renders all serious research
dangerous in the extreme."

My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a
conversation;--I never saw alive but two very small specimens of
the trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable
time in Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a
jar of alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied
fast to a bamboo, But this is only because strangers rarely
travel much in the interior of the country, or find themselves on
country roads after sundown. It is not correct to suppose that
snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood of St. Pierre: they
are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and on the verge
of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets by
heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been
bitten by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about
the bulwarks after dark;--for the snakes, which travel only at
night, then descend from the mornes towards the river, The Jardin
des Plantes shelters great numbers of the reptiles; and only a
few days prior to the writing of these lines a colored laborer in
the garden was stricken and killed by a fer-de-lance measuring
one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length. In the interior
much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one freshly killed
measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg in the
middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some of
their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering
seasons;--the average annual mortality among the class of
_travailleurs_ from serpent bite alone is probably fifty, [31]
--always fine young men or women in the prime of life. Even
among the wealthy whites deaths from this cause are less rare
than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a rich citizen of
St, Pierre, who in ten years lost three relatives by the
trigonocephalus,--the wound having in each case been received in
the neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure
is impossible.



V.


... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-
fields, and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding
beyond an opening in the west. It has already broadened
surprisingly, the sea appears to have risen up, not as a
horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure precipice: what
will it look like when we shall have reached the top? Far down we
can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_, as it
is called, of a plantation slowly descending a slope, hewing the
canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder
(_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down; binds
them with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and
carries them away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so
beautifully that it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often
enjoy such a spectacle nowadays; for the introduction of the
piece-work system has destroyed the picturesqueness of plantation
labor throughout the island, with rare exceptions. Formerly the
work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an army;--first
advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then the
amareuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
ka, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the song;--
and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old
days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an
English corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor
into veritable military: more than one attack was repelled by the
cutlasses of a plantation atelier.

At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though
not distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice,
powerful as a bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he
walks along the line, looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I
ask one of our guides what the cry is:--

--"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is
telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the
cutlassers approach the end of their task, the greater the
danger: for the reptiles, retreating before them to the last
clump of cane, become massed there, and will fight desperately.
Regularly as the ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human
lives from among the workers. But when one falls, another steps
into the vacant place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these
dark swordsmen never retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as
before; there is hardly any emotion; the travailleur is a
fatalist.... [32]



VI.


... We enter the grands-bois,--the primitive forest,--the "high
woods."

As seen with a field-glass from St. Pierre, these woods present
only the appearance of a band of moss belting the volcano, and
following all its corrugations,--so densely do the leafy crests
intermingle. But on actually entering them, you find yourself at
once in green twilight, among lofty trunks uprising everywhere
like huge pillars wrapped with vines;--and the interspaces
between these bulks are all occupied by lianas and parasitic
creepers,--some monstrous,--veritable parasite-trees,--ascending
at all angles, or dropping straight down from the tallest crests
to take root again. The effect in the dim light is that of
innumerable black ropes and cables of varying thicknesses
stretched taut from the soil to the tree-tops, and also from
branch to branch, like rigging. There are rare and remarkable
trees here,--acomats, courbarils, balatas, ceibas or fromagers,
acajous, gommiers;--hundreds have been cut down by charcoal-
makers; but the forest is still grand. It is to be regretted
that the Government has placed no restriction upon the barbarous
destruction of trees by the _charbonniers_, which is going on
throughout the island. Many valuable woods are rapidly
disappearing. The courbaril, yielding a fine-grained, heavy,
chocolate-colored timber; the balata, giving a wood even heavier,
denser, and darker; the acajou, producing a rich red wood, with a
strong scent of cedar; the bois-de-fer; the bois d'Inde; the
superb acomat,--all used to flourish by tens of thousands upon
these volcanic slopes, whose productiveness is eighteen times
greater than that of the richest European soil. All Martinique
furniture used to be made of native woods; and the colored
cabinet-makers still produce work which would probably astonish
New York or London manufacturers. But to-day the island exports
no more hard woods: it has even been found necessary to import much
from neighboring islands;--and yet the destruction of forests still
goes on. The domestic fabrication of charcoal from forest-trees
has been estimated at 1,400,000 hectolitres per annum. Primitive
forest still covers the island to the extent of 21.37 per cent;
but to find precious woods now, one must climb heights like those
of Pelée and Carbet, or penetrate into the mountains of the
interior.

[Illustration: LA MONTAGNE PELÉE, AS SEEN FROM GRANDE ANSE.]

Most common formerly on these slopes were the gommiers, from
which canoes of a single piece, forty-five feet long by seven
wide, used to be made. There are plenty of gommiers still; but
the difficulty of transporting them to the shore has latterly
caused a demand for the gommiers of Dominica. The dimensions of
canoes now made from these trees rarely exceed fifteen feet in
length by eighteen inches in width: the art of making them is an
inheritance from the ancient Caribs. First the trunk is shaped
to the form of the canoe, and pointed at both ends; it is then
hollowed out. The width of the hollow does not exceed six inches
at the widest part; but the cavity is then filled with wet sand,
which in the course of some weeks widens the excavation by its
weight, and gives the boat perfect form. Finally gunwales of
plank are fastened on; seats are put in--generally four;--and no
boat is more durable nor more swift.

... We climb. There is a trace rather than a foot-path;--no
visible soil, only vegetable detritus, with roots woven over it
in every direction. The foot never rests on a flat surface,--
only upon surfaces of roots; and these are covered, like every
protruding branch along the route, with a slimy green moss,
slippery as ice. Unless accustomed to walking in tropical woods,
one will fall at every step. In a little while I find it
impossible to advance. Our nearest guide, observing my predicament,
turns, and without moving the bundle upon his head, cuts and trims
me an excellent staff with a few strokes of his cutlass. This staff
not only saves me from dangerous slips, but also serves at times to
probe the way; for the further we proceed, the vaguer the path becomes.
It was made by the _chasseurs-de-choux_ (cabbage-hunters),--the
negro mountaineers who live by furnishing heads of young cabbage-
palm to the city markets; and these men also keep it open,--
otherwise the woods would grow over it in a month. Two
chasseurs-de-choux stride past us as we advance, with their
freshly gathered palm-salad upon their heads, wrapped in cachibou
or balisier leaves, and tied with lianas. The palmiste-franc
easily reaches a stature of one hundred feet; but the young trees
are so eagerly sought for by the chasseurs-de-choux that in these
woods few reach a height of even twelve feet before being cut.

... Walking becomes more difficult;--there seems no termination
to the grands-bois: always the same faint green light, the same
rude natural stair-way of slippery roots,--half the time hidden
by fern leaves and vines. Sharp ammoniacal scents are in the air;
a dew, cold as ice-water, drenches our clothing. Unfamiliar
insects make trilling noises in dark places; and now and then a
series of soft clear notes ring out, almost like a thrush's
whistle: the chant of a little tree-frog. The path becomes more
and more overgrown; and but for the constant excursions of the
cabbage-hunters, we should certainly have to cutlass every foot
of the way through creepers and brambles. More and more amazing
also is the interminable interweaving of roots: the whole forest
is thus spun together--not underground so much as overground.
These tropical trees do not strike deep, although able to climb
steep slopes of porphyry and basalt: they send out great far-
reaching webs of roots,--each such web interknotting with others
all round it, and these in turn with further ones;--while between
their reticulations lianas ascend and descend: and a nameless
multitude of shrubs as tough as india-rubber push up, together with
mosses, grasses, and ferns. Square miles upon square miles of
woods are thus interlocked and interbound into one mass solid
enough to resist the pressure of a hurricane; and where there is
no path already made, entrance into them can only be effected by
the most dexterous cutlassing.

An inexperienced stranger might be puzzled to understand how
this cutlassing is done. It is no easy feat to sever with one
blow a liana thick as a man's arm; the trained cutlasser does it
without apparent difficulty: moreover, he cuts horizontally, so
as to prevent the severed top presenting a sharp angle and
proving afterwards dangerous. He never appears to strike hard,--
only to give light taps with his blade, which flickers
continually about him as he moves. Our own guides in cutlassing
are not at all inconvenienced by their loads; they walk perfectly
upright, never stumble, never slip, never hesitate, and do not
even seem to perspire: their bare feet are prehensile. Some
creoles in our party, habituated to the woods, walk nearly as
well in their shoes; but they carry no loads.

... At last we are rejoiced to observe that the trees are
becoming smaller;--there are no more colossal trunks;--there are
frequent glimpses of sky: the sun has risen well above the peaks,
and sends occasional beams down through the leaves. Ten minutes,
and we reach a clear space,--a wild savane, very steep, above
which looms a higher belt of woods. Here we take another short
rest.

Northward the view is cut off by a ridge covered with herbaceous
vegetation;--but to the south-west it is open, over a gorge of
which both sides are shrouded in sombre green-crests of trees
forming a solid curtain against the sun. Beyond the outer and
lower cliff valley-surfaces appear miles away, flinging up broad
gleams of cane-gold; further off greens disappear into blues, and
the fantastic masses of Carbet loom up far higher than before.
St. Pierre, in a curve of the coast, is a little red-and-yellow
semicircular streak, less than two inches long. The interspaces
between far mountain chains,--masses of pyramids, cones, single
and double humps, queer blue angles as of raised knees under coverings,
--resemble misty lakes: they are filled with brume;--the sea-line has
vanished altogether. Only the horizon, enormously heightened, can
be discerned as a circling band of faint yellowish light,--auroral,
ghostly,--almost on a level with the tips of the Pitons. Between this
vague horizon and the shore, the sea no longer looks like sea,
but like a second hollow sky reversed. All the landscape has
unreal beauty:--there are no keen lines; there are no definite
beginnings or endings; the tints are half-colors only;--peaks
rise suddenly from mysteries of bluish fog as from a flood; land
melts into sea the same hue. It gives one the idea of some great
aquarelle unfinished,--abandoned before tones were deepened and
details brought out.



VII.


We are overlooking from this height the birthplaces of several
rivers; and the rivers of Pelée are the clearest and the coolest
of the island.

From whatever direction the trip be undertaken, the ascent of
the volcano must be made over some one of those many immense
ridges sloping from the summit to the sea west, north, and east,
--like buttresses eight to ten miles long,--formed by ancient
lava-torrents. Down the deep gorges between them the cloud-fed
rivers run,--receiving as they descend the waters of countless
smaller streams gushing from either side of the ridge. There are also
cold springs,--one of which furnishes St. Pierre with her _Eau-de-
Gouyave_ (guava-water), which is always sweet, clear, and cool in
the very hottest weather. But the water of almost everyone of
the seventy-five principal rivers of Martinique is cool and clear
and sweet. And these rivers are curious in their way. Their
average fall has been estimated at nine inches to every six
feet;--many are cataracts;--the Rivière de Case-Navire has a fall
of nearly 150 feet to every fifty yards of its upper course.
Naturally these streams cut for themselves channels of immense
depth. Where they flow through forests and between mornes, their
banks vary from 1200 to 1600 feet high,--so as to render their
beds inaccessible; and many enter the sea through a channel of
rock with perpendicular walls from 100 to 200 feet high. Their
waters are necessarily shallow in normal weather; but during
rain-storms they become torrents thunderous, and terrific beyond
description. In order to comprehend their sudden swelling, one
must know what tropical rain is. Col. Boyer Peyreleau, in 1823,
estimated the annual rainfall in these colonies at 150 inches on
the coast, to 350 on the mountains,--while the annual fall at
Paris was only eighteen inches. The character of such rain is
totally different from that of rain in the temperate zone: the
drops are enormous, heavy, like hailstones,--one will spatter
over the circumference of a saucer;--and the shower roars so that
people cannot hear each other speak without shouting. When there
is a true storm, no roofing seems able to shut out the cataract;
the best-built houses leak in all directions; and objects but a
short distance off become invisible behind the heavy curtain of
water. The ravages of such rain may be imagined! Roads are cut
away in an hour; trees are overthrown as if blown down;--for
there are few West Indian trees which plunge their roots even as
low as two feet; they merely extend them over a large diameter; and
isolated trees will actually slide under rain. The swelling of
rivers is so sudden that washer-women at work in the Roxelane
and other streams have been swept away and drowned without the
least warning of their danger; the shower occurring seven or
eight miles off.

Most of these rivers are well stocked with fish, of which the
_tétart_, _banane_, _loche_, and _dormeur_ are the principal varieties.
The tétart (best of all) and the loche climb the torrents to the
height of 2500 and even 3000 feet: they have a kind of pneumatic
sucker, which enables them to cling to rocks. Under stones in
the lower basins crawfish of the most extraordinary size are
taken; some will measure thirty-six inches from claw to tail. And
at all the river-mouths, during July and August, are caught vast
numbers of "_titiri_" [33] --tiny white fish, of which a thousand
might be put into one teacup. They are delicious when served
in oil,--infinitely more delicate than the sardine. Some regard
them as a particular species: others believe them to be only the
fry of larger fish,--as their periodical appearance and disappearance
would seem to indicate. They are often swept by millions into
the city of St. Pierre, with the flow of mountain-water which
purifies the streets: then you will see them swarming in the gutters,
fountains, and bathing-basins;--and on Saturdays, when the water
is temporarily shut off to allow of the pipes being cleansed, the
titiri may die in the gutters in such numbers as to make the air
offensive.

[Illustration: ARBORESCENT FERNS ON A MOUNTAIN ROAD.]

The mountain-crab, celebrated for its periodical migrations,
is also found at considerable heights. Its numbers appear to
have been diminished extraordinarily by its consumption as an
article of negro diet; but in certain islands those armies of
crabs described by the old writers are still occasionally to be
seen. The Père Dutertre relates that in 1640, at St. Christophe,
thirty sick emigrants, temporarily left on the beach, were
attacked and devoured alive during the night by a similar species
of crab. "They descended from the mountains in such multitude,"
he tells us, "that they were heaped higher than houses over the
bodies of the poor wretches... whose bones were picked so clean
that not one speck of flesh could be found upon them."...



VIII.


... We enter the upper belt of woods--green twilight again.
There are as many lianas as ever: but they are less massive in
stem;--the trees, which are stunted, stand closer together; and
the web-work of roots is finer and more thickly spun. These are
called the _petits-bois_ (little woods), in contradistinction to
the grands-bois, or high woods. Multitudes of balisiers, dwarf-
palms, arborescent ferns, wild guavas, mingle with the lower
growths on either side of the path, which has narrowed to the
breadth of a wheel-rut, and is nearly concealed by protruding
grasses and fern leaves. Never does the sole of the foot press
upon a surface large as itself,--always the slippery backs of
roots crossing at all angles, like loop-traps, over sharp
fragments of volcanic rock or pumice-stone. There are abrupt
descents, sudden acclivities, mud-holes, and fissures;--one
grasps at the ferns on both sides to keep from falling; and some
ferns are spiked sometimes on the under surface, and tear the
hands. But the barefooted guides stride on rapidly, erect as ever
under their loads,--chopping off with their cutlasses any branches
that hang too low. There are beautiful flowers here,--various
unfamiliar species of lobelia;--pretty red and yellow blossoms belonging
to plants which the creole physician calls _Bromeliacoe_; and a
plant like the _Guy Lussacia_ of Brazil, with violet-red petals.
There is an indescribable multitude of ferns,--a very museum of
ferns! The doctor, who is a great woodsman, says that he never
makes a trip to the hills without finding some new kind of fern;
and he had already a collection of several hundred.

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