Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 97

minorities and, rather surprisingly, a number of Corsican families, who (I was told) derive from support-
ers of the eighteenth-century Corsican patriot, General Paoli, the leader whose cause impelled Boswell
to the eccentricity of appearing in the full Corsican uniform in the streets of London. All these curious
threads in the fabric of the Trinidadian world invest the social life of the island with a colourfulness, a
lack of inhibition and a dashing cosmopolitan atmosphere that turn the fading recollection of Barbados
into something parochial and grey and fiercely Anglo-English.
We were sailing, a few days later, along the north-western peninsula, the mountainous contours of
which define the northern side of the Gulf of Paria. The promontory seemed to continue straight into
the Venezuelan range that stretched from the flank of the South American Continent to meet it. As the
launch churned its way westwards, the sea appeared between the extremities of the two mountain ranges.
Both of them subsided into the water to join hands, as it were, in a ravine beneath the channel of the
Dragons' Mouths which separates them with its fifteen island-sprinkled miles. Trinidad was once a part
of the mainland, and the subsiding of the dividing valley was an event which, geologists say, happened
very recently; so few million years ago, in fact, that from their tone of voice it scarcely sounds older than
yesterday's evening paper. The southern promontory of the Gulf loomed along the horizon towards the
Orinooc Delta, from which the island is severed by the expanse of water known as the Serpent's Mouth.
The dim coast of the South American mainland lay beyond the fringe of the interior where the phantom
city of Eldorado lay. The sea here is discoloured by the water that the Orinoco carries down from its
many sources in the Andes. It was exciting to remember that the faint sky-line was the rim of a contin-
ent containing colossal rivers and mountains, forests, and Indian tribes that have never been disturbed in
their forests; swelling southwards to a great girth, and tapering then to the mountains of Patagonia and
the Tierra del Fuego and then expiring at last on the rugged coast where Cape Horn points its crooked and
broken knuckle bones to the Antarctic. Conversing of Amazonian forests and Inca cities and inland seas
that were lifted above the clouds, we threaded our way through a collection of pale green islands which
floated gently towards us, and then fell away behind, almost brushing the bulwarks with their drooping
boughs: two lines of green plumage on the smooth water. The sea roughened as we emerged from the
shelter of the mainland and reached the shores of our destination.
Nothing, at first, distinguished the lepers of Chacachacare from the other inhabitants of the West Indies.
Some were working under the trees, and others were talking or sitting in the sun on the balconies of their
little cabins. 'Good morning, Doctor,' they all said, as Dr. Campbell led us along the village street. He
pointed to a neat building between the pathway and the shore. 'That's the theatre they built for them-
selves. They've got a band, and they give concerts to each other there, quite good ones, and variety shows,
and we manage to get cinemas from Port of Spain now and then to cheer them up.' There were sports for
the lepers whose stamina and whose equal state of contamination with their fellows permitted it.
The disease, as we had learnt in the Saints, is very widespread in the West Indies, and little leper colon-
ies, usually situated, like Chacachacare or the Désirade, on islands, are scattered all over the archipelago.
The mysterious leprosy bacillus, the Mycobacterium leprae , whose effects may only in some cases be ar-
rested or mitigated, but which, once it has attacked a victim in its severe form, can never be cured, is the
cause of unimaginable misery; but not, thank heavens, of the ostracism and shame to which it once con-
demned its victims. After seeing Chacachacare and meeting Dr. George Campbell (who has lived among
lepers for years) and some of the nuns who devote their lives to the alleviation of the disease, one realizes
what a gulf now exists between the bells and the clappers, the cries of Unclean, the outlawry, the official,