Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
island of Nevis—whose abrupt silhouette lies only a couple of miles to the south of St. Kitts—still exist,
with the iron banisters so shaped that three ladies in panniered dresses could descend them abreast. It
was here that Nelson was married to Mrs. Nesbit, a doctor's widow, and daughter of Mr. Woodward and
granddaughter of Mr. Herbert of Nevis. Not so very long ago there were five thousand white inhabitants
in the daughter island; there are now exactly six—souls, not thousands—a minute rearguard of the flight
from the islands after the dethronement of King Sugar at the Emancipation of the slaves. The population
of the island is now fourteen thousand, and of St. Kitts, where the same evacuation took place, eight-
een thousand five hundred. In Antigua, the English settlers (who arrived there with a son of the great Sir
Thomas Warner of St. Kitts) were governed by two successive Lords Willoughby of Parham, who held
the lease from the son of Charles I's original grantee, Lord Carlisle; grantee not only for Antigua, but for
nearly all the Caribbean islands—a private archipelago. The size and value of the property makes one's
head swim. We met a lady of St. Kitts who still remembers the last of the great receptions and balls given
by the last remnants of this vanished island aristocracy. They sounded, from her description, magically
dazzling. How I would like to have seen one! One is so often a century, a decade, or a day late for occa-
sions like these.
Sugar-cane clothes the country that lies round the great fortress of Brimstone Hill, flowing and waving
down from Mount Misery in the same beautiful sweeps, fold on soft fold of pale grey-green, which in
Barbados make such a pleasing impression. These smooth planes of colour snap off near the sea's edge,
and sink to the waves in a disorder of rocks and a sudden flaring green insurrection of tropical trees. Here,
on forested beaches near little African-looking kraals of wooden houses, we swam all through the after-
noons, and (always in vain) stalked fish with goggles and the underwater gun I had acquired in Marti-
nique.
Not far from one of these retreats we searched a long time, without success, for some carved Carib
stones which we had been recommended to look at. A village woman had pity on us finally, and led us
through the cane to a large dark stone that must have been flung here from the volcano. Thrusting the
stalks aside and recklessly lopping off a few with her cutlass, she cleared the sloping upper surface. It was
another of those button-eyed, stick-limbed scribbles, but this time attached to a lozenge-shaped body; and
the arms and legs were scratched with some semblance of a design. The drawing had resolved itself into
some sort of glyptic formula. The ones in Guadeloupe might have been done by a three-year-old child;
this perhaps by a four-year-old. Poor old Caribs! How many centuries, I wonder, spanned this enormous
stride in plastic feeling and technique?
But in their real racial attribute they were always expert, and they fought with the utmost fierceness
against Warner and his settlers and against the filibusters of d'Esnambuc, both of whom landed here on
the same day of 1625.
[6]
But the Caribs were slaughtered in the end, and the survivors fled in their canoes
to other islands. The curious thing about the occupation of St. Kitts is that the French and the English
settled down amicably side by side, and for a long time they shared the island, and threatened to take such
firm root there that for once the Spaniards resented it, and sent an armada of thirty-eight ships to St. Kitts
that almost exterminated the settlers. This, as far as I can make out, is the only backward glance of the
Spaniards from their drive westward through the colonies into the American continent.
D'Esnambuc was the originator and patriarch of the French colonies in the Antilles, and Warner was
the Governor of the first English Antillean possession. A formidable figure, whose progeny—half-Carib,
if Labat's bald and centenarian Madame Ouvernard is none other than Mrs. Warner, widow, or rather ex-
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