Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
under their muslin mosquito nets, slumber in prams. The cricket pitches and golf links melt into the open
country.
The rest of the island is a low, rolling panorama of cane-fields, 166 square miles in area—the size of
the Isle of Wight or of a small English county which, in many ways, it closely resembles. For the omni-
present sugar-cane, sweeping and ruffling across the undulations, is wonderfully reminiscent of an Eng-
lish pasture-land under a wheat harvest, and the turning sails of occasional windmills further an illusion
which only the colonnades of palm trees belie. This gentle landscape, with the silver-grey arrows of the
sugar-cane puffing and bending in the breeze, possesses a smooth and restful charm. The cool wind pen-
etrates everywhere, for the island offers no obstruction to the westward blowing Trades, which ferry their
cargo of clouds high overhead, sparing Barbados many of the terrible deluges of the other Antilles, and
reserving their spite for the cones of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The air is clear and invigorating,
and, at moments, almost European.
The little island is one of the most densely populated of the West Indies. Every inch of its surface is de-
voted to cultivation or sport—a factor which has drained from the scenery any wild or haphazard element
that it may have possessed in the past. There are few points in the island in which houses and people are
invisible. At every step one feels that this was the island where sugar-cane was first planted, and where
its cultivation has attained the highest pitch of intensity and perfection. Barbados was, from the begin-
ning of its colonization, one of the most profitable markets for the slave trade, and, with the labour of
their well-stocked barracoons, the slave-owning oligarchy of the island, untroubled by foreign invasion
or occupation, lived for many happy generations in solid and tranquil prosperity. Slave-management and
sugar crops became their chief preoccupation and theme, and Trollope reports that the splendour of their
cane harvests and the excellence of their rum and molasses were topics that ousted all others from the
conversation of the white Barbadians. They were known then as the Bims: a syllable suggestive of solid-
ity and security. [1] With such a record of well-being and authority it would be difficult for the Barbadians
to escape the charge of self-satisfaction with which writers have so often taxed them.
Their conceit (if so strong a word may be used) has the curious obverse today of an extreme touchi-
ness. In writing a book like this, one is often warned that all reference to the Colour problem must be
made with the utmost circumspection; and it is true that the Negro race is often, understandably, sens-
itive to unintentional slights. But this readiness to take offence is the mildest of foibles compared with
the touchiness of the white Barbadians, whose suspicion of foreign criticism goes to extravagant lengths.
Unless one is prepared for the execration of a community from which one has after all received nothing
but civility, one must think ten times before setting down anything about them that is not praise.
The term 'Little England' which the Barbadians apply to their home is no empty boast; and if the ver-
dict of modern opinion has gone against the sort of English life on which the Barbadians have modelled
theirs, it is not the Barbadians' fault. But it is hard to stay long in the island without feeling that Barbados
reflects most faithfully the social and intellectual values and prejudices of a Golf Club in Outer London,
for example, or of the married quarters of a barracks in Basutoland, which are not England's most inter-
esting or precious contributions to world civilization. Many travellers find in the island a tropical exuber-
ance of exactly those values to which they had most joyfully bidden farewell in England.
But Barbados is pre-eminent in the Antilles for the beauty of its country houses. They excel anything
which is to be seen in the French islands or, with the possible exception of Jamaica, in the other British
West Indies. Labat, when he called here, was impressed by the appearance of Bridgetown, by the solidity
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