Lady Barker - "Station Amusements"

Wang Xu - "Wenyuange Sikuquanshu"

L. Frank Baum - "The Tin Woodman of Oz"

Roland Cheney - "Si'Wren of the Patriarchs"

Two Years in the French West Indies

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




[Illustration: A CREOLE CAPRE IN WORKING GARB.]

The feathery beauty of the tree-ferns shadowing each brook, the
grace of bamboo and arborescent grasses, seem to decrease as the
road descends,--but the palms grow taller. Often the way skirts
a precipice dominating some marvellous valley prospect; again it
is walled in by high green banks or shrubby slopes which cut off
the view; and always it serpentines so that you cannot see more
than a few hundred feet of the white track before you.
About the fifteenth kilometre a glorious landscape opens to the
right, reaching to the Atlantic;--the road still winds very high;
forests are billowing hundreds of yards below it, and rising
miles away up the slopes of mornes, beyond which, here and there,
loom strange shapes of mountain,--shading off from misty green to
violet and faintest gray. And through one grand opening in this
multicolored surging of hills and peaks you perceive the gold-
yellow of cane-fields touching the sky-colored sea. Grande Anse
lies somewhere in that direction.... At the eighteenth kilometre
you pass a cluster of little country cottages, a church, and one
or two large buildings framed in shade-trees--the hamlet of
Ajoupa-Bouillon. Yet a little farther, and you find you have left
all the woods behind you. But the road continues its bewildering
curves around and between low mornes covered with cane or cocoa
plants: it dips down very low, rises again, dips once more;--and
you perceive the soil is changing color; it is taking a red tint
like that of the land of the American cotton-belt. Then you pass
the Rivière Falaise (marked _Filasse_ upon old maps),--with its
shallow crystal torrent flowing through a very deep and rocky
channel,--and the Capote and other streams; and over the yellow
rim of cane-hills the long blue bar of the sea appears, edged
landward with a dazzling fringe of foam. The heights you have
passed are no longer verqant, but purplish or gray,--with Pelée's
cloud-wrapped enormity overtopping all. A very strong warm wind
is blowing upon you--the trade-wind, always driving the clouds
west: this is the sunny side of Martinique, where gray days and
heavy rains are less frequent. Once or twice more the sea
disappears and reappears, always over canes; and then, after
passing a bridge and turning a last curve, the road suddenly
drops down to the shore and into the burgh of Grande Anse.



III.


Leaving Morne Rouge at about eight in the morning, my friend and
I reached Grande Anse at half-past eleven. Everything had been
arranged to make us comfortable, I was delighted with the airy
corner room, commanding at once a view of the main street and of
the sea--a very high room, all open to the trade-winds--which had
been prepared to receive me. But after a long carriage ride in
the heat of a tropical June day, one always feels the necessity
of a little physical exercise. I lingered only a minute or two
in the house, and went out to look at the little town and its
surroundings.

As seen from the high-road, the burgh of Grande Anse makes a
long patch of darkness between the green of the coast and the
azure of the water: it is almost wholly black and gray--suited to
inspire an etching, High slopes of cane and meadow rise behind it
and on either side, undulating up and away to purple and gray
tips of mountain ranges. North and south, to left and right, the
land reaches out in two high promontories, mostly green, and
about a mile apart--the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de
Séguinau, or Croche-Mort, which latter name preserves the legend
of an insurgent slave, a man of color, shot dead upon the cliff.
These promontories form the semicircular bay of Grande Anse. All
this Grande Anse, or "Great Creek," valley is an immense basin of
basalt; and narrow as it is, no less than five streams water it,
including the Riviere de la Grande Anse.

There are only three short streets in the town. The principal,
or Grande Rue, is simply a continuation of the national road;
there is a narrower one below, which used to be called the Rue de
la Paille, because the cottages lining it were formerly all
thatched with cane straw; and there is one above it, edging the
cane-fields that billow away to the meeting of morne and sky. There
is nothing of architectural interest, and all is sombre,--walls and
roofs and pavements. But after you pass through the city and
follow the southern route that ascends the Séguinau promontory,
you can obtain some lovely landscape views a grand surging of
rounded mornes, with farther violet peaks, truncated or horned,
pushing up their heads in the horizon above the highest
flutterings of cane; and looking back above the town, you may see
Pelée all unclouded,--not as you see it from the other coast, but
an enormous ghostly silhouette, with steep sides and almost
square summit, so pale as to seem transparent. Then if you cross
the promontory southward, the same road will lead you into
another very beautiful valley, watered by a broad rocky torrent,
--the Valley of the Rivière du Lorrain. This clear stream rushes
to the sea through a lofty opening in the hills; and looking
westward between them, you will be charmed by the exquisite vista
of green shapes piling and pushing up one behind another to reach
a high blue ridge which forms the background--a vision of tooth-
shaped and fantastical mountains,--part of the great central
chain running south and north through nearly the whole island.
It is over those blue summits that the wonderful road called _La
Trace_ winds between primeval forest walls.

But the more you become familiar with the face of the little
town itself, the more you are impressed by the strange swarthy
tone it preserves in all this splendid expanse of radiant
tinting. There are only two points of visible color in it,--the
church and hospital, built of stone, which have been painted
yellow: as a mass in the landscape, lying between the dead-gold
of the cane-clad hills and the delicious azure of the sea, it
remains almost black under the prodigious blaze of light. The
foundations of volcanic rock, three or four feet high, on
which the frames of the wooden dwellings rest, are black; and
the sea-wind appears to have the power of blackening all timber-
work here through any coat of paint. Roofs and façades look as
if they had been long exposed to coal-smoke, although probably no
one in Grande Anse ever saw coal; and the pavements of pebbles
and cement are of a deep ash-color, full of micaceous
scintillation, and so hard as to feel disagreeable even to feet
protected by good thick shoes. By-and-by you notice walls of
black stone, bridges of black stone, and perceive that black
forms an element of all the landscape about you. On the roads
leading from the town you note from time to time masses of jagged
rock or great bowlders protruding through the green of the
slopes, and dark as ink. These black surfaces also sparkle. The
beds of all the neighboring rivers are filled with dark gray
stones; and many of these, broken by those violent floods which
dash rocks together,--deluging the valleys, and strewing the
soil of the bottom-lands (_fonds_) with dead serpents,--display
black cores. Bare crags projecting from the green cliffs here and
there are soot-colored, and the outlying rocks of the coast offer
a similar aspect. And the sand of the beach is funereally black--
looks almost like powdered charcoal; and as you walk over it,
sinking three or four inches every step, you are amazed by the
multitude and brilliancy of minute flashes in it, like a subtle
silver effervescence.

This extraordinary sand contains ninety per cent of natural
steel, and efforts have been made to utilize it industrially.
Some years ago a company was formed, and a machine invented to
separate the metal from the pure sand,--an immense revolving
magnet, which, being set in motion under a sand shower, caught
the ore upon it. When the covering thus formed by the adhesion of
the steel became of a certain thickness, the simple interruption
of an electric current precipitated the metal into appropriate
receptacles. Fine bars were made from this volcanic steel, and
excellent cutting tools manufactured from it: French
metallurgists pronounced the product of peculiar excellence, and
nevertheless the project of the company was abandoned. Political
disorganization consequent upon the establishment of universal
suffrage frightened capitalists who might have aided the undertaking
under a better condition of affairs; and the lack of large
means, coupled with the cost of freight to remote markets,
ultimately baffled this creditable attempt to found a native
industry.

Sometimes after great storms bright brown sand is flung up from
the sea-depths; but the heavy black sand always reappears again
to make the universal color of the beach.



IV.


Behind the roomy wooden house in which I occupied an apartment
there was a small garden-plot surrounded with a hedge
strengthened by bamboo fencing, and radiant with flowers of the
_loseille-bois_,--the creole name for a sort of begonia, whose
closed bud exactly resembles a pink and white dainty bivalve
shell, and whose open blossom imitates the form of a butterfly.
Here and there, on the grass, were nets drying, and _nasses_--
curious fish-traps made of split bamboos interwoven and held in
place with _mibi_ stalks (the mibi is a liana heavy and tough as
copper wire); and immediately behind the garden hedge appeared
the white flashing of the surf. The most vivid recollection
connected with my trip to Grande Anse is that of the first time
that I went to the end of that garden, opened the little bamboo
gate, and found myself overlooking the beach--an immense breadth
of soot-black sand, with pale green patches and stripings here
and there upon it--refuse of cane thatch,decomposing rubbish spread
out by old tides. The one solitary boat owned in the community lay
there before me, high and dry. It was the hot period of the afternoon;
the town slept; there was no living creature in sight; and the booming
of the surf drowned all other sounds; the scent of the warm strong
sea-wind annihilated all other odors. Then, very suddenly, there came
to me a sensation absolutely weird, while watching the strange wild
sea roaring over its beach of black sand,--the sensation of
seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more
tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first
white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge,--or by those old
green tide-lines on the desolation of the black beach,--or by
some tone of the speaking of the sea,--or something indefinable
in the living touch of the wind,--or by all of these, I cannot
say;--but slowly there became defined within me the thought of
having beheld just such a coast very long ago, I could not tell
where,--in those child-years of which the recollections gradually
become indistinguishable from dreams.

Soon as darkness comes upon Grande Anse the face of the clock in
the church-tower is always lighted: you see it suddenly burst
into yellow glow above the roofs and the cocoa-palms,--just like
a pharos. In my room I could not keep the candle lighted because
of the sea-wind; but it never occurred to me to close the
shutters of the great broad windows,--sashless, of course, like
all the glassless windows of Martinique;--the breeze was too
delicious. It seemed full of something vitalizing that made
one's blood warmer, and rendered one full of contentment--full of
eagerness to believe life all sweetness. Likewise, I found it
soporific--this pure, dry, warm wind. And I thought there could
be no greater delight in existence than to lie down at night,
with all the windows open,--and the Cross of the South visible from
my pillow,--and the sea-wind pouring over the bed,--and the
tumultuous whispering and muttering of the surf in one's ears,--
to dream of that strange sapphire sea white-bursting over its
beach of black sand.



V.


Considering that Grande Anse lies almost opposite to St. Pierre,
at a distance of less than twenty miles even by the complicated
windings of the national road, the differences existing in the
natural conditions of both places are remarkable enough. Nobody
in St. Pierre sees the sun rise, because the mountains
immediately behind the city continue to shadow its roofs long
after the eastern coast is deluged with light and heat. At
Grande Anse, on the other hand, those tremendous sunsets which
delight west coast dwellers are not visible at all; and during
the briefer West Indian days Grande Anse is all wrapped in
darkness as early as half-past four,--or nearly an hour before
the orange light has ceased to flare up the streets of St. Pierre
from the sea;--since the great mountain range topped by Pelée
cuts off all the slanting light from the east valleys. And early
as folks rise in St. Pierre, they rise still earlier at Grande
Anse--before the sun emerges from the rim of the Atlantic: about
half-past four, doors are being opened and coffee is ready. At
St. Pierre one can enjoy a sea bath till seven or half-past seven
o'clock, even during the time of the sun's earliest rising,
because the shadow of the mornes still reaches out upon the bay;
--but bathers leave the black beach of Grande Anse by six o'clock;
for once the sun's face is up, the light, levelled straight at
the eyes, becomes blinding. Again, at St. Pierre it rains almost
every twenty-four hours for a brief while, during at least the
greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and
less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less
impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which
makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin
comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is
quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much
rarer not to see it at Grande Anse.... A curious fact concerning
custom is that few white creoles care to bathe in front of the
town, notwithstanding the superb beach and magnificent surf, both
so inviting to one accustomed to the deep still water and rough
pebbly shore of St, Pierre. The creoles really prefer their
rivers as bathing-places; and when willing to take a sea bath,
they will walk up and down hill for kilometres in order to reach
some river mouth, so as to wash off in the fresh-water
afterwards. They say that the effect of sea-salt upon the skin
gives _bouton chauds_ (what we call "prickly heat"). Friends took
me all the way to the mouth of the Lorrain one morning that I
might have the experience of such a double bath; but after
leaving the tepid sea, I must confess the plunge into the river
was something terrible--an icy shock which cured me of all
further desire for river baths. My willingness to let the sea-
water dry upon me was regarded as an eccentricity.



VI.


It may be said that on all this coast the ocean, perpetually
moved by the blowing of the trade-winds, never rests--never
hushes its roar, Even in the streets of Grande Anse, one must in
breezy weather lift one's voice above the natural pitch to be
heard; and then the breakers come in lines more than a mile long,
between the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de Séguinau,--every
unfurling thunder-clap. There is no travelling by sea.
All large vessels keep well away from the dangerous coast. There
is scarcely any fishing; and although the sea is thick with fish,
fresh fish at Grande Anse is a rare luxury. Communication with
St. Pierre is chiefly by way of the national road, winding over
mountain ridges two thousand feet high; and the larger portion of
merchandise is transported from the chief city on the heads of
young women. The steepness of the route soon kills draught-
horses and ruins the toughest mules. At one time the managers of
a large estate at Grande Anse attempted the experiment of sending
their sugar to St. Pierre in iron carts, drawn by five mules; but
the animals could not endure the work. Cocoa can be carried to
St. Pierre by the porteuses, but sugar and rum must go by sea, or
not at all; and the risk and difficulties of shipping these
seriously affect the prosperity of all the north and north-east
coast. Planters have actually been ruined by inability to send
their products to market during a protracted spell of rough
weather. A railroad has been proposed and planned: in a more
prosperous era it might be constructed, with the result of
greatly developing all the Atlantic side of the island, and
converting obscure villages into thriving towns.

Sugar is very difficult to ship; rum and tafia can be handled
with less risk. It is nothing less than exciting to watch a
shipment of tafia from Grande Anse to St. Pierre.

A little vessel approaches the coast with extreme caution, and
anchors in the bay some hundred yards beyond the breakers. She
is what they call a _pirogue_ here, but not at all what is called a
pirogue in the United States: she has a long narrow hull, two
masts, no deck; she has usually a crew of five, and can carry
thirty barrels of tafia. One of the pirogue men puts a great
shell to his lips and sounds a call, very mellow and deep, that
can be heard over the roar of the waves far up among the
hills. The shell is one of those great spiral shells, weighing
seven or eight pounds--rolled like a scroll, fluted and scalloped
about the edges, and pink-pearled inside,--such as are sold in
America for mantle-piece ornaments,--the shell of a _lambi_.
Here you can often see the lambi crawling about with its nacreous
house upon its back: an enormous sea-snail with a yellowish back
and rose-colored belly, with big horns and eyes in the tip of
each horn--very pretty yes, having a golden iris. This creature
is a common article of food; but Its thick white flesh is almost
compact as cartilage, and must be pounded before being cooked. [4]

At the sound of the blowing of the lambi-shell, wagons descend to
the beach, accompanied by young colored men running beside the
mules. Each wagon discharges a certain number of barrels of
tafia, and simultaneously the young men strip. They are slight,
well built, and generally well muscled. Each man takes a barrel
of tafia, pushes it before him into the surf, and then begins to
swim to the pirogue,--impelling the barrel before him. I have
never seen a swimmer attempt to convey more than one barrel at a
time; but I am told there are experts who manage as many as three
barrels together,--pushing them forward in line, with the head
of one against the bottom of the next. It really requires much
dexterity and practice to handle even one barrel or cask. As the
swimmer advances he keeps close as possible to his charge,--so as
to be able to push it forward with all his force against each
breaker in succession,--making it dive through. If it once glide
well out of his reach while he is in the breakers, it becomes an
enemy, and he must take care to keep out of its way,--for if a
wave throws it at him, or rolls it over him, he may be seriously
injured; but the expert seldom abandons a barrel. Under the most
favorable conditions, man and barrel will both disappear a score
of times before the clear swells are reached, after which the
rest of the journey is not difficult. Men lower ropes from the
pirogue, the swimmer passes them under his barrel, and it is
hoisted aboard.

... Wonderful surf-swimmers these men are;--they will go far out
for mere sport in the roughest kind of a sea, when the waves,
abnormally swollen by the peculiar conformation of the bay, come
rolling in thirty and forty feet high. Sometimes, with the swift
impulse of ascending a swell, the swimmer seems suspended in air
as it passes beneath him, before he plunges into the trough
beyond. The best swimmer is a young capre who cannot weigh more
than a hundred and twenty pounds. Few of the Grande Anse men are
heavily built; they do not compare for stature and thew with
those longshoremen at St. Pierre who can be seen any busy
afternoon on the landing, lifting heavy barrels at almost the
full reach of their swarthy arms.

... There is but one boat owned in the whole parish of Grande
Anse,--a fact due to the continual roughness of the sea. It has
a little mast and sail, and can hold only three men. When the
water is somewhat less angry than usual, a colored crew take it
out for a fishing expedition. There is always much interest in
this event; a crowd gathers on the beach; and the professional
swimmers help to bring the little craft beyond the breakers. When
the boat returns after a disappearance of several hours,
everybody runs down from the village to meet it. Young colored
women twist their robes up about their hips, and wade out to
welcome it: there is a display of limbs of all colors on such
occasions, which is not without grace, that untaught grace which
tempts an artistic pencil. Every _bonne_ and every house-keeper
struggles for the first chance to buy the fish;--young girls and
children dance in the water for delight, all screaming, "_Rhalé
bois-canot!_"... Then as the boat is pulled through the surf
and hauled up on the sand, the pushing and screaming and crying
become irritating and deafening; the fishermen lose patience and
say terrible things. But nobody heeds them in the general
clamoring and haggling and furious bidding for the _pouèsson-
ououge_, the _dorades_, the _volants_ (beautiful purple-backed
flying-fish with silver bellies, and fins all transparent, like
the wings of dragon-flies). There is great bargaining even for
a young shark,--which makes very nice eating cooked after the
creole fashion. So seldom can the fishermen venture out that
each trip makes a memorable event for the village.

The St. Pierre fishermen very seldom approach the bay, but they
do much fishing a few miles beyond it, almost in front of the
Pointe du Rochet and the Roche à Bourgaut. There the best
flying-fish are caught,--and besides edible creatures, many queer
things are often brought up by the nets: monstrosities such as
the _coffre_-fish, shaped almost like a box, of which the lid is
represented by an extraordinary conformation of the jaws;--and
the _barrique-de-vin_ ("wine cask"), with round boneless body,
secreting in a curious vesicle a liquor precisely resembling wine
lees;--and the "needle-fish" (_aiguille de mer_), less thick than
a Faber lead-pencil, but more than twice as long;--and huge
cuttle-fish and prodigious eels. One conger secured off this
coast measured over twenty feet in length, and weighed two
hundred and fifty pounds--a veritable sea-serpent.... But even
the fresh-water inhabitants of Grande Anse are amazing. I have
seen crawfish by actual measurement fifty centimetres long, but
these were not considered remarkable. Many are said to much
exceed two feet from the tail to the tip of the claws and horns.
They are of an iron-black color, and have formidable pincers with
serrated edges and tip-points inwardly converging, which cannot
crush like the weapons of a lobster, but which will cut the flesh
and make a small ugly wound. At first sight one not familiar
with the crawfish of these regions can hardly believe he is not
viewing some variety of gigantic lobster instead of the common
fresh-water crawfish of the east coast. When the head, tail,
legs, and cuirass have all been removed, after boiling, the
curved trunk has still the size and weight of a large pork
sausage.

These creatures are trapped by lantern-light. Pieces of manioc
root tied fast to large bowlders sunk in the river are the only
bait;--the crawfish will flock to eat it upon any dark night, and
then they are caught with scoop-nets and dropped into covered
baskets.



VII.


One whose ideas of the people of Grande Anse had I been formed
only by observing the young porteuses of the region on their way
to the other side of the Island, might expect on reaching this
little town to find its population yellow as that of a Chinese
city. But the dominant hue is much darker, although the mixed
element is everywhere visible; and I was at first surprised by
the scarcity of those clear bright skins I supposed to be so
numerous. Some pretty children--notably a pair of twin-sisters,
and perhaps a dozen school-girls from eight to ten years of age--
displayed the same characteristics I have noted in the adult
porteuses of Grande Anse; but within the town itself this
brighter element is in the minority. The predominating race
element of the whole commune is certainly colored (Grande Anse is
even memorable because of the revolt of its _hommes de couleur_
some fifty years ago);--but the colored population is not
concentrated in the town; it be1ongs rather to the valleys and
the heights surrounding the _chef-lieu_. Most of the porteuses
are country girls, and I found that even those living in the
village are seldom visible on the streets except when departing
upon a trip or returning from one. An artist wishing to study
the type might, however, pass a day at the bridge of the Rivière
Falaise to advantage, as all the carrier-girls pass it at certain
hours of the morning and evening.

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