Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
nique) had better luck. For the sum of 1,660
livres
, he bought Martinique, St. Lucia and Grenada from
the French “Company of the Isles of America,” settled in Martinique, and, landing in Grenada with a
gang of adventurers in 1650, also succeeded in buying the island from the Caribs for (Father Du Tertre
records) 'some knives and hatchets and a large quantity of glass beads, besides two bottles of brandy for
the chief himself.' Leaving a relation of his behind as governor, Duparquet sailed back to Martinique.
Le Comte had orders to exterminate the Caribs if they should attempt to go back on their bargain, which
the poor wretches were not slow to do—they could not stop killing Frenchmen whenever they got the
chance. The campaign of annihilation began, and the Caribs, who were powerless against the armour and
the muskets of the French, were routed from the leewardside with terrible losses. Père Labat
[2]
describes
their last stand, which took place exactly where we were eating our hard-boiled eggs. The savages with-
drew to the summit of a steep
morne
surrounded by terrible precipices, which could only be climbed by a
narrow secret pathway. Having at last discovered it, the French attacked them by surprise. A fierce fight
took place, and those of the Caribs who survived the battle preferred to hurl themselves to death from
the top of this rock rather than surrender. Father Du Tertre, who describes the same event, remarks that
the victors marched home
bien joyeux
. The Caribs on the leewardside retaliated by killing every isolated
Frenchman they saw, and le Comte (who, it appears, would have spared them if his orders had been less
definite) surprised their headquarters, where the majority of the remaining Caribs in the island were as-
sembled, and, without regard to age or sex, butchered them all. The last evidence of the race was recorded
in 1705, when a handful of them still lived in a valley in the north-west of Grenada.
[3]
As we rounded the north-eastern corner of the island, the scenery changed instantaneously. The smooth
sand and water were replaced by the rough windward waves and a gusty shore from which the more lux-
uriant trees had retreated inland. The only growth on these bleak dunes was the sea-grape, that stubborn
shrub which alone is able to resist the violence of the weather. The Trade winds had twisted and topiaried
it into innumerable fantastic shapes; growing normally on the sheltered side, the part of the bush which
was exposed to the east appeared to have been shorn away in flat, slanting planes. These extraordinary
contortions infect the whole coastline with a disquietingly harassed and tyrannized air, as though the land-
scape might all at once be blown away, leaving the traveller locked there knee deep in the wet sand like a
scapegoat.
It took me some time to determine, as we travelled inland through the wooded hills, what it was that
made the country so pleasant and so distinct from other tropical forests. There was none of that sodden
and noxious splendour about these trees which in the past had moved us to admiration and rage, and
when they made way for clearings, no monotonous sweep of sugarcane broke loose. For we were driv-
ing through plantations of nutmeg and cacao. The straight stems of the cacao trees and their large, poin-
ted and almond-shaped leaves were gathered in woods and groves which were filled with an unreal and
filtered light, an atmosphere resembling that of a mediæval tapestry or the mysterious background of a
nocturnal hunting scene by Paolo Uccello. The cacao beans hung on the end of short stalks, like red and
purple hand-grenades. Weeds, for some reason, refuse to grow under the cacao and the nutmeg, so the
trunks are free of the choking tangle of undergrowth and creeper and parasite that muffles the shapes of
nearly everything else in these latitudes. The architecture of the forest is unencumbered, and one can gaze
among their trunks down glimmering vistas of luminous and variable green. A great luxury after a month
or two of the throttling and claustrophobic underwood of the tropics.
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