Travel Reference
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perhaps win by a very short head on the strength of absolute callousness. The French, however cynical
and dishonest in their original argument, did attempt, by sending out numbers of missionaries, to give
some faint corroborative tinge to their argument; and many priests, especially of the Dominican Order,
worked all their lives among the slaves. Not that this mitigated the barbarous treatment of the Negroes,
which was every bit as iniquitous as that of the English. These regarded their slaves, quite literally, as
heads of cattle. It was very late in the day—only slightly earlier than the first agitation for the abolition
of the slave trade—that evangelization began on any scale. The numbers of slaves in the colonies of both
powers were so vast that, even then, they received little more than a veneer of Christianity, adopting the
talismanic and, to them, immediately comprehensible side of the religion, and discarding the rest. The
Quakers let both sides down by purchasing slaves, converting them and setting them free; a procedure
that made the Quakers objects of abhorrence to Catholics and Protestants alike. The Jews bought slaves
and circumcised them.
One very noticeable result of all this is the lack of importance that is attached to the rite or the sacra-
ment of marriage. No rebuke or stigma clings to the loss of virginity or the birth of illegitimate children,
and, like so many other things, the illegitimacy rate in the islands is very high. Children are usually the
commitment of the mother, and it is not rare for a woman to have produced several illegitimate children
before she settles down with her final mate. These she brings with her, and rears them alongside the off-
spring of her last and quasi-official ménage. Their adopted fathers find nothing incongruous in this, and
they treat their wives' unusual dowries with great kindness. Indeed, a man may also bring one or two
of his own, either because they have taken his fancy or because their mothers have died, and they are
greeted by his wife with the same impartial benevolence. Bourgeois yearnings sometimes overcome them
late in life and they may, if they have enough money to spend on the social celebrations involved, treat
themselves to a marriage. There are accounts of fifty or a hundred couples of old paramours being, at a
single service, married
en masse
. But in the poorer classes of which I have been speaking, concubinage
and illegitimacy is the general custom, and on the whole it works out very well, thanks to the good nature
and charitable disposition of the Negroes.
The drawback, of course, is that nobody has time to look after these vast and heteroclite families. Often
they run quite wild, and many Antillean towns seethe with children who range about the streets like little
wolves, fighting, begging and stealing when they get a chance, and generally leading an undisciplined
and uninhibited life. It must be due to some fundamental virtue in the Negro character that they are not
ten times worse.
As a rule, with their enormous liquid eyes, amazing teeth and lithe and graceful movements, they are
charming to look at, and sometimes funny, intelligent and entertaining conversationalists. Quite often, as
the reader will have gathered, they turn themselves into unofficial guides and general managers if they
discover a stranger wandering about the town, and by no means always in the hopes of a tip; out of in-
terest and kindness, I think, and because it makes a change. Grown-up Negroes, collectively, usually give
an impression of shyness in dealing with white people; sometimes of hostility—not incomprehensibly.
Individually, they are practically always communicative and friendly.
Monkey Hill, a mountain some miles west of Basseterre, on the way to the fortress, was the scene of a
sharp battle between the French and a Barbadian baronet called Sir Timothy Thornhill, in which the latter
succeeded in defeating the French and in turning them out of the colony. Was it called Monkey Hill then?
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