Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 192

avait ici dans le temps ' —the creeks and the bayous mantled in weeds and lilies and the trees draped in
the grey tatters of Spanish moss; la barbe espagnole , as it is called in Haiti. The Negroes, he said, spoke
a French patois called Gombo, which he was just able to understand.
He was an extremely intelligent man, and seemed touched and diverted by our preoccupation with
Voodoo. He had been a hounci-bossale in his youth, he said, and he regaled us, driving at a hair-raising
pace, with an invocation to Damballah. This was followed by a charming song called Erzulie, né né oh!
and a stirring call to Papa Inglessou.
' Lo m'songe z'enfants m', m'coeur, m'fait moin mal '
Bam couteau!
Bam poignard!
M'pwal' piqué Ibo!'
He was still intoning when, half an hour after nightfall, we rattled into the narrow streets of Cap Hai-
tien.
Our awakening was as grey and depressing as a midwinter morning in Huddersfield. The sky was over-
cast, and Cap Haitien was lost in a damp sea-mist. From the windows of the old-fashioned hotel where
we had found lodging, the great dome of the cathedral and its cluster of attendant cupolas were just dis-
tinguishable. How strange and unsuitable is such Nordic weather in the tropics! A gust of wind from time
to time blew a hole in the swirling grey film, and a couple of palm trees would appear, or a barefooted
Negress balancing a trayful of pine-apples on her head. Then the wind dropped, and all was Huddersfield
again. We had a queer apocalyptic vision of the interior, visible through the open windows, of a Wesleyan
Methodist chapel: whitewashed walls, the Tables of the Law, a grandfather clock, a wheezy harmonium
and two dozen Haitians droning away at the tune of Ein Fester Burg ist unser Gott . In their midst I dis-
tinguished my cock-fighting neighbour from the St. Rose of Lima.
The Cathedral was a rather fine lofty Louis XV building of pilasters and semi-circular arches and
marble slabs under the misty concavity of the domes. We examined the usual ferocious statue of Dessa-
lines in the centre of the untidy square. Next to it lay a memorial of tremendous national import. ' Hon-
neur et gloire ,' ran the inscription, ' aux martyrs, Mackandal, Lacombe, Ogé, Chavannes qui furent éx-
ecutés sur cette Place d'Armes; à Boukman dont la tête y fut exposée et aux milliers d'Esclaves revoltés
qui furent pendus. A ces héros de la Liberté, Reconnaissance '. For this, in French colonial times, was the
emplacement of the gibbet, the wheel and the block, and all the country surrounding le Cap speaks of the
terrible and heroic events that led to the Independence of Haiti.
The earlier place-names and events, though important in themselves—the reef at Petit Anse where
Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria , went aground and sank; the site of the fort built from its timbers,
which was the first Spanish building in the New World; the scene of his meeting with Guacanagaric, the
cacique of the Arawaks of northern Haiti; the later battles of the buccaneers—all these fade into insig-
nificance before the stupendous doings at the beginning of the last century. The north has monopolized
most of the great happenings of Haitian history, and Le Nord is always mentioned in a different tone of
voice to the west and south. Port-au-Prince was the headquarters of the more tractable Mulattoes, and
Cap Haitien is considered to be blacker, more authentically African, Haitian and revolutionary. The mist