Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 195

cisterns for drinking water and magazines of powder and shot were built to withstand a siege of several
years.
When one reads of Christophe, of his executions, his tyranny and his palaces, the creation of his
Haitian nobility and the erection of a presidency into a monarchial institution, one is prone to get the
man out of focus. He was much more than a despot or a megalomaniac, and his measures were destined
for his personal aggrandizement, certainly, but also to wipe from the mind of his subjects the memory
of slavery, and to establish the dignity of the Negro race in their own eyes and those of the world. He
was a tireless worker and possessed an excellent brain. The Constitution and the mass of Royal edicts
which were issued when he had himself declared King Henri I of Haiti in 1811 prove that every detail
of the organization of his realm had been minutely prepared in advance. The monarchy was pronounced
hereditary, an aristocracy was established, and a heralds' college to matriculate their arms. Ministries
were set up, the administration of Justice was co-ordinated in the Code Henry, with a sovereign court and
a system of regional seneschalsies. A navy was built and manned, the army and finance were success-
fully reorganized, hospitals were founded, and agriculture was fostered. He hated Voodoo, as a survival
from the time of slavery. Marriage was enforced and Catholicism was established as the State religion.
Priests bearing the viaticum to a death-bed were supplied with a guard of honour, and the whole army
turned out to escort the monstrance at the feast of Corpus Christi. He set up a State printing press, built
schools in the provinces, and summoned a staff of foreign professors to his new Academy in Cap Haitien.
Christophe had a passion for education, and his letters prove that he himself had learnt to read and write
very adequate French. A governess was brought from Philadelphia for the Royal princesses, and they had
drawing lessons from the English painter Evans, who had been an assistant of Sir Thomas Lawrence in
London, and now directed the Royal Academy of Art [3] which Christophe installed in his palace of Sans
Souci. He was, until the movement and the widespread interest generated by the Centre d'Art , the only
patron of the arts in Haiti.
But although the kingdom prospered under his rule, his despotism, and the curtailment of liberty that
was the corollary of his attempt to turn Haiti, overnight, into a world power on the European scale,
brought about his downfall. Repeated insurrections broke out, and, as a Negro and king, he was the natur-
al enemy of Pétion, the civilized Mulatto republican (and friend and ally of Simon Bolivar in his fight for
the freedom of the South American states), and of his successor Boyer, who in turn ruled the other half
of Haiti from Port-au-Prince. After a nine years' reign, this combination of internal and external forces
finally disintegrated his kingdom and caused his death. In the inner courtyard, a small white tomb and
a pile of whitewashed cannon-balls mark the place where his body, carried here from Sans Souci, lies
buried. A bronze plaque bears his device: Je renais de mes cendres .
The roof of the citadel extends for acres round this central well, and here and there the caretaker has
cultivated vegetable gardens among the battlements. Seeds, blown by the wind, have found lodging in
the cracks of the stones, and produced a small wilderness of weeds and flowers. Everywhere, among the
thistles and dandelions and pimpernel, old bronze cannon lie prone. Only a few bear the crowned H of
Christophe. The others must all have been captured at some period from the various European powers
in the Caribbean. Lion-mouthed and dolphin-swivelled, they are embossed with the arms of Aragon,
Castile, Navarre and Leon surrounded by the chain of the Golden Fleece, or with the lilies of France, and
with gorgons and radiating suns. A British gun, dated 1742, is adorned by the Royal Arms with the Han-
overian inescutcheon, and farther along the barrel, by another coat under a ducal coronet: three lozenges
within a bordure quartering an eagle with wings displayed, with the motto Spectemur agendo . Searching,