Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 88

al disasters have flung them down and the parishioners have built them up again and again, but no hint
of these vicissitudes mars their peaceful solidity. Nothing but the mid-Victorian stained glass suggests a
modification later than the earliest murmurs of the Gothic revival in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, although, like the plantation houses, they were nearly all rebuilt later than the great 1831
hurricane. But the shell always remained, and little differentiates them now from their English prototypes
of a generation or two earlier. It is the Gothic of the times of Beckford and Horace Walpole, not of the
Victorian age. Occasional oddities, such as Regency fan-topped windows, arbitrarily placed among lan-
cets and corbels that might have been modelled on the first illustrations of the works of Sir Walter Scott,
or the juxtaposition of gargoyles and acanthus leaves, Corinthian pilasters and herringbone moulding,
give the buildings a distinctive style, which, coupled with their green habitat of mango and paw-paw and
palm, can best be evoked by the term of Tropical-Gothic. Memorial slabs on the walls and among the
flagstones of the nave, bear the names and biographies of planters of former centuries—Hayneses, Chal-
loners, Alleynes, Massiahs and a few dozen others that constantly recur—and those of former vicars and
of soldiers and sailors laid low by fever or the fortunes of war.
The most pleasing of these churches is St. John's. It rides high on the summit of an inland cliff which
commands the eastern shores and a rugged palisade of coral reefs which break up the advance of the At-
lantic waves and give shelter to a succession of lagoons. Canefields and trees embower it in tranquillity.
But, apart from the beauty of its position it has a claim upon the attention of the traveller that makes it, in
the recent world of the Antilles, strangely venerable. For, on a tablet in the churchyard, carved with Doric
columns and the Cross of St. Constantine, runs the following inscription: Here lyeth ye body of Ferdin-
ando Palaeologus, descended from ye Imperial lyne of ye last Christian Emperor of Greece. Church-
warden of this parish 1655-1656. Vestry-man twentye years. Died Oct 3. 1679.
The implications of this brief epitaph send the mind spinning away to regions and to tremendous his-
torical events remote indeed from the quiet parochial world of Barbados; back to the tragic morning of
May 29th, 1453, when the Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, in full armour, sword in hand, shod with
the purple buskins and crowned with the imperial diadem, waited at the head of his nobles for the last
assault of the Turks on the walls of Byzantium. Historians have often repeated the terrible tale of the
battle: the obliterating smoke of the artillery, the exhaustion of the defenders' ammunition, the Janissaries
breaching the ramparts on a ladder of their own dead, the teeming thousands of the Turkish irruption and
the desperate heroism of the Greeks. 'Amidst these multitudes,' writes Gibbon, 'the Emperor, who ac-
complished all the duties of a general and a soldier, was long seen and finally lost. The nobles who fought
round his person sustained till their last breath the honourable names of Palaeologus and Cantacuzene.'
The Emperor's body, surrounded by a mountain of Ottoman dead, was trampled out of recognition by the
turbaned and stinking horde of Moslems, howling the name of Allah from a myriad throats, that surged
through the Adrianople gate. The sacred town was given over to rape and massacre and sack, the Oecu-
menical Patriarchate was defiled, and the infidels were soon swarming in thousands beneath the great
dome of Saint Sophia.
Later in the day the Emperor's body was singled out by the double-headed eagles of his insignia, and
the victorious Sultan was able to expose before the barbarians the mangled head of the last of the Caesars.
The Roman Empire, founded by Augustus almost fifteen centuries before, and Byzantium, that shim-
mering and irridescent thing, the inheritor and guardian, however corrupt, of the art and philosophy and
learning of ancient Greece, had breathed their last. Gazing at the empty shell of the autocrator's halls, it
was with justice indeed that Mahomet II thoughtfully quoted an elegant couplet of Persian poetry: 'The