Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 84

cestors were quiet country people in Dorset and Devon and Somerset, but to an unskilled listener there
is nothing now to distinguish their speech from that of their fellow-islanders. For the Barbadian accent
is the only thing in the island which is common, in some degree, to every stratum of society. Like the
dialects of England a few generations ago, it is a regional, not a social thing.
Unruly Scots were also packed off to Barbados in the early days, and the numbers of the original
Redlegs or, as they are alternately styled, the Mean Whites, were steadily augmented by the deportation
of convicts from England to the West Indies, who lived here in the same loathsome circumstances as the
slaves, and when their sentences had expired, often settled here. It is significant of the gulf that yawns
between them and the other white islanders that even in this colony where a white complexion is con-
sidered to be of inestimable and intrinsic merit, they seldom rise in the world, or play, as the Negroes
do, a rôle in island politics. These pale, Nordic people, standing barefoot in the dust with loads of sugar-
cane on their heads and gazing listlessly as the trim limousines go bowling past, are pathetic and moving
figures, and their aspect has none of the cheerfulness of the inhabitants of the Saints or of the pleasant
solidity of the whites of the Guadeloupean hinterland. They look like poor devils and nothing else.
Owing to the smallness of the island, all the interesting things in Barbados seem to juxtapose each oth-
er with a gratifying abundance. At one moment we were wandering through the streets of the old capital
at Speightstown, and a few minutes later peering through iron bars under a mahogany wood peopled by
wild monkeys (for which we gazed in vain) into the dungeon where once the newly-landed slaves were
locked. Soon afterwards we passed a gully choked with tropical vegetation which hides the entrance to
a system of caves and a measureless subterranean river. These caves used to be a hiding-place for run-
away slaves. During the night, with their naked black bodies invisible in the darkness, an old writer [3]
records, the maroons would creep forth and range through the countryside, stealing pigs and potatoes and
plantains, and then, safe in their grottoes, 'they would feast all day upon what they stole the night before.'
This free life would continue until they were hunted down with hounds which had been specially trained
for these occasions by the sport-loving planters.
Under the palm trees of a quiet beach in St. James's Parish, in the west of the island, we beheld the
arresting vision of three half-built Spanish galleons, their sterns climbing into high castellated poops, of-
fering their new timbers to the sunlight like the breast-bones of whales. Negro shipwrights were sawing
planks and hammering home wooden pegs. In a hut near by, a young Englishman unfolded the blue prints
of the superannuated vessels and the heaps of canvas that were to be rigged to the castled masts and the
spars. They were exact reproductions of the three ships in which Christopher Columbus first discovered
the archipelago—the Santa Maria , the Niña and the Pinta —destined for use in an Arthur Rank film that
was to be shot at some future date.
We encountered on the same day another spectacle that was, at first glance, utterly mysterious. In
a clearing among the trees about a hundred yards from the sea, a group of young white Barbadians in
bathing drawers was assembled round the mouth of a deep hole. It was several yards in diameter and, to
within a yard or two of the surface, full of water. Pipes and ropes disappeared into this mysterious well,
and a noisy pumping machine drained great quantities of water out of it, leading it away some distance
down the slope of the beach. Young men, working away for all they were worth, replaced each other at a
stirrup pump, and a constant circle of bubbles disturbed the surface. Every now and then a petrol-tin full
of mud and stones was hauled from the depths, emptied, and lowered into the water again.
After a time an object like the head of a giant grasshopper appeared above the water, and was followed
up the ladder by a plump and rosy middle-aged body. A gas mask, that had been turned into a primitive