Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 82

of the buildings, the cleanliness of the streets, and the warehouses filled to the eaves with every kind of
merchandise, but was stirred to greater wonder still by the plantation houses. 'They are even better built,'
he writes, 'than those in the town. They are large, well ventilated, and all plentifully supplied with glazed
windows. The layout of the rooms is commodious and well planned. They are almost all accompanied
by beautiful alleys of tamarind, or by those great orange trees which we call Shaddock, or by other cool
trees which bestow upon the houses a smiling aspect. The opulence and good taste of the inhabitants may
be remarked in their furniture, which is magnificent, and in their silver, which they have in considerable
quantities…. They eat much meat and little bread, and their tables are well served. They have excellent
cooks and very fine linen, and much order and cleanliness. People of distinction have live partridges
brought from Europe, which they keep in coops…. One can say that no people exist who spend more,
or who go to greater lengths, to have all that is rarest and best from foreign lands, even the most distant.
Their houses are well stocked with every kind of wine and liqueur and they are delighted if their guests
are hard put to it to find their way home. It is to avoid accidents that might befall them, if the roads were
bad, that they take special care of their upkeep.' All of this holds good today, except that the excellence
of the roads, though they very often fulfil their original charitable office, may now be attributed to more
general and prosaic causes. Every mile or so the sugar-cane is broken by a long avenue of trees leading
to a manor house. A double flight of steps unites in a pillared portico, which leads into a splendid hall;
and another flight of stairs ascends to a balustraded gallery into which the bedrooms open through finely
carved and moulded doorways. None of these houses is very large, but some of them are, in their par-
ticular way, perfect. Here, at any rate, Barbados reflected all that England had best to offer, and indeed
outlived her in architectural merit. For these houses, which an English observer would at once ascribe to
the period of the Adam brothers, were built in the 1830's after the terrible hurricane of 1831, which de-
molished most of the old buildings and uprooted nearly all the trees in Barbados. But the island profited
by an architectural time-lag of thirty years, and, while architecture at home was declining into less at-
tractive forms, the manor houses of Barbados were rebuilt in the modes of one of the finest periods of
English architecture. The cellars and the first floor are usually of stone and the upper storeys of planks in
the American colonial style, with beautifully sculpted woodwork inside. The rooms are large and nobly
planned and filled with beautiful furniture carved out of West Indian timber by Barbardian joiners and
cabinet-makers in the designs of Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Miniatures and portraits of pleasant-faced,
bewigged ancestors abound, and old English silver and all the agreeable amenities of life prove that,
whatever may justly be said on other scores in detraction of the little colony, in architectural and domestic
civilization it far excelled the other Antilles.
By great good luck we were redeemed from the usual squalors of our island sojourns to spend part of
our stay in Barbados in one of these charming houses. For almost the most beautiful of them, Canefield
House, is owned by Mrs. Nicolas Embiricos, a cousin of Costa's, whose hospitality altered our whole life
in Barbados. From mooching morosely about in one of the seaside hotels and growing bilious with rage
over certain aspects of Barbadian life, we were transported to this refuge of great, cool rooms and, un-
der the influences of Canefield and of our hostess's kindness and love for the island, we felt the acerbity
of any future attack on the colony being gently blunted. Our days turned into a delicious sequence of
bathes on the west coast and drives all over the island to look at the considerable amount of architectural
beauties and curiosities; of visits to Barbadian and English neighbours or American compatriots of our
hostess. There were days of reading and writing among the flowering trees in the garden, in front of a
little pool bright with water-hyacinths; and in the evenings, memorable dinners in a long room where the