Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to flick back like beads along a wire, and all that lay before us was unfamiliar and new; a different ar-
chipelago was obtruding itself towards us out of the north.
Caribbean towns are very surprising. St. John's, the capital of Antigua and the seat of government of
the Leeward Islands, sounds important enough, and I was mentally geared for an active little metropolis;
bustling, commercial and proconsular, with traffic blocks, perhaps, in the busy streets. But the car drove
past a village green into an empty street where low, white wooden houses were as closed and empty-look-
ing as if they had been evacuated years ago. It was quite early, and yet there was nobody about, not even a
figure in the distance to prove that the blank façades hid anything except sheeted furniture and cobwebs.
It was like a bone-yard, the bleached anatomy of a flat fish washed up here among the sand dunes. The
motor, although it had been creaking along at the pace of a tortoise, seemed unable to stop. The driver
jerked again and again at the levers until it shuddered into immobility. We asked him where the centre of
the town was. He told us we were right there.
The light in the streets of this necropolis burnt into the eye-balls pitilessly. It was with real relief that
we found an hotel and escaped behind the plank walls into an interior as dim as a harem, and as quiet and
shuttered. But seemingly an abandoned one, as there was no sign of life there except, at the end of a pas-
sage, a many-branched hat-stand adorned with an extraordinary profusion of superannuated masculine
headgear—several trilbies and peaked caps, a reversible fishing hat that was covered with tweed on the
outside and lined with leather, a faded straw boater, a solar topee, and the forage cap of some regiment
that must have been disbanded for half a century. Thinking that we had irrupted into a private house, we
were about to depart when an elderly parlourmaid appeared and led us in silence to rooms which were
crammed full of beds, either assembled or leaning against the walls. She uncoiled a mosquito net in each
room and vanished. There seemed nothing for it but to go to bed. The message of the town was imperi-
ous. We climbed therefore into our milky pavilions, and prepared for sleep.
A copy of
John Inglesant
had been forgotten by somebody on the table beside my bed. The print had
faded to a pale brown, and the pages and cover were drilled full of tunnels by insects. I dozed off after
half a page.
At the other side of the island, later in the day, a lugubrious Negro pointed to a worm-eaten four-poster, a
chair almost in bits and a table. 'These aren't the real ones. They were sold when the Admiralty gave up
the place in 1906. But this is where Lord Nelson lived. This was his bedroom.'
These sad and echoing chambers were decayed almost to the verge of disintegration. We tiptoed from
room to room. One hard stamp, you felt, would bring the building down in a heap. The bedrooms, the
dining-room, the office—these had been the daily background of Nelson for the years which, as Captain
of H.M.S.
Boreas
, he had spent on the West Indies Station. A figurehead and a little cannon guarded the
door, and all over the flat promontory that jutted into English Harbour stood the crumbling impedimenta
of an eighteenth-century naval base. Capstans, for careening the men-o'-war, radiating long rotten beams,
over-hung the water's edge like enormous spiders too old to walk away. The Negro pointed out the em-
placements of the batteries that had defended the harbour, the old powder magazine, and the massive pil-
lars which had once held up the roof of the boat-house, standing above the water like a group of druidical
monoliths. The galleried officers' quarters at the end of the spit had relapsed into a state of barn-like des-
olation. We followed our guide into a dark and enormous building of wood: the old sail loft and stores.
The timbers were so eaten away that we had to step from beam to beam, for the boards between them had
fallen to powder, or still hung from rusty nails in rotten fragments. He put his finger on the walls, and
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