Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 83

walls were dimly resplendent, by the light of the candles in their enormous, cylindrical hurricane glasses,
with replicas of the frescoes of Pompeii.
Our drives with Anne Embiricos resembled mild antiquarian rambles through a shire that had drifted
loose from the coast of England and floated all the way to these tropic waters, its familiar fields having ac-
quired outlandish flowers and trees on the journey, but never in great enough quantities to impair the de-
ception. The roads lay in shallow ravines below the level of the surrounding countryside, crossing gullies
on massive stone bridges, or sinking into hollows filled with a sudden damp profusion of undergrowth
and trees. But they would always rise again, to continue their undulating courses through the fluttering
grey-green dunes of sugar-cane as they lapsed in their gentle heave and fall to the rocky windward, or to
the calm leeward, coast.
In a hollow beyond a spinney of tall mahogany, south of the township of Bathsheba, a beautiful Pal-
ladian building, reclining dreamily on the shores of a lake among lawns and balustrades and great shady
trees, suddenly appeared, its columns and pediments conjuring up, in the afternoon sunlight, some enorm-
ous country seat in the Dukeries. It was Codrington College, founded at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, and endowed from the revenues of his plantations, by Christopher Codrington, [2] the Governor-
General of the Leeward Islands. A little farther on, the road climbed through an avenue of enormous
cabbage palms, each of them between eighty and a hundred feet high. Their succession of smooth, grey
trunks rose as straight and symmetrically as the peristyle of a Greek temple, bursting high in the air into
a series of exaggerated Corinthian capitals.
Sam Lord's Castle, a curious house on the rocky windward coast, was the goal of one of our excur-
sions. The roof is surrounded by machicolations that from a distance lend it the appearance of a fortress
cut out of cardboard. The inside, with its pillars of mahogany, its carved trophies and cornices of stucco
and chandeliers hanging from the centre of plaster cart-wheels, is strange and overpowering and con-
vincingly grandiose. It was built, according to local rumours, on the proceeds of a certain Samuel Lord
from the wrecking of cargo vessels which, like a will-o'-the-wisp, he lured to their destruction on stormy
nights by hanging lanterns in the trees on the jagged rocks below the house. It is now a hotel (or a 'Club').
Its stout masonry resisted the 1831 hurricane, but the scaffolding that had been erected for some minor
repairs was blown clean through the air and dropped in a yard three miles away.
On the way back to Canefield House we passed through the more hilly district of Scotland, and ob-
served, working in the fields or sitting in the doorways of miserable wooden shacks, not the Negro figures
to which the eye is accustomed in such settings in the West Indies, but ragged white men with blue eyes
and tow-coloured hair bleached by the sun. This little population of Redlegs, as they are called, are des-
cendants of the followers of the Duke of Monmouth, who, after their defeat at Sedgemoor, were deported
to Barbados by order of Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes. They have remained here ever since, in
the same humble plight as when they were first herded ashore. Labat and many other writers talk of the
presence in the islands of Irish deportees shipped here by Cromwell after Wexford and Drogheda, and
it is perhaps due to them that the closest affinity of the Barbadian way of speaking is with the Irish ac-
cent. But this is now scarcely recognizable. Its nasal tone makes it resemble, for the first few minutes, the
American accent, and it is further disguised by the 'yawny-drawly' delivery of which Coleridge speaks.
If, as seems likely, this is the origin of the Barbadian speech, it has discovered the secret of purging every
trace of charm from the Irish brogue. It sounds terrible. Some writers have succeeded in detecting West
Country inflexions in the language of the Redlegs, miraculously surviving from the time when their an-