Travel Reference
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was only about eight feet long, and was propelled by a disproportionately large triangular sail that was
ribbed like the canvas of a junk. This, and the strange headgear of the sailors, in the pearly morning light
gave the world around us the appearance of a Far Eastern print. We were sailing through a sea-picture by
Hiroshige.
But we had not been more than two hours on our way before a storm blew up. Clouds blotted out the
sun, and in a few minutes rain was falling on a grey and turbulent sea. Soon we were shipping so much
water that we had to bale continually with halves of calabash. The sea grew rougher and rougher, and I
caught a glimpse of Costa in the stern vomiting genteelly into a scoop. It became much darker, as though
night were about to fall, and suddenly I noticed that the little fleet of fishing boats that had been hovering
in a scattered circle all round us had disappeared from view, and that the two grey blurs of Guadeloupe
and La Désirade had vanished too. The skyline had contracted to a close and jagged circumference of vast
triangular waves that rose and tilted and sank with hateful deliberateness and recovered and rose again all
round our little tossing pivot. The wind had almost reached gale force, and just in time the sailors hauled
down the sodden sail, and piled it into the foot of rolling bilge water in which, huddled, baling demiurges,
we were sitting waist deep. It was a dangerous moment. The motion of the vessel at once grew quieter,
and its insane motion was reduced to a sickening climb and fall over the mountainous waves. The whites
of the sailors' eyes had been treacherous tokens of alarm, but not once did the timbre of their deep in-
comprehensible Créole change, and even while they hauled the sail down they shot reassuring smiles in
our direction. '
Ce n'est wien, Madame—un petit gwain de vent
.' But the nose of the boat was dragged
round in the direction of invisible Guadeloupe, and our journey to the Désirade had to be abandoned; as
it turned out, for ever. A moment of sunlight exposed a watery vision of the distant rock. Then the clouds
closed in again and effaced it.
On the way back to Pointe-à-Pitre a small cemetery caught our eye. The remarkable thing about it was
its wretchedness, for even the poorest Negro village is flanked by a little city of monuments. Who, then,
were buried under these mounds of mud, that only a few pebbles adorned, or a nosegay of withered hibis-
cus? One or two were surmounted by crosses or wormeaten slabs of wood. The only names that I could
decipher were 'Samuel Valiswamy' and 'J. Alicout.' They were, Raoul explained, the graves of
coulis
échappés
, and he told us a curious story which he had learnt from his old black nurse as a child, to ac-
count for the presence, so many thousands of miles from home, of these escaped coolies.
At an undefined era in the past (Raoul said), presumably after the emancipation of the slaves, the plant-
ers, anxious to fill the hole made in the labour-market by the abolition of slavery, turned their eyes in
the direction of India. Ships mysteriously left the Antilles, and, after two months at sea, dropped anchor
in harbours off the Indian coast, either off British India or the shores of their own colonies of Pondich-
erry and Chandernagore. When night fell, the crew festooned the rigging with lanterns. Bands discoursed
cheerfully on the deck, and all who cared to come were welcome aboard. Drinks flowed, little presents
were distributed, a ball was organized, and the Indians fluttered on to the glittering decks like a swarm
of moths. The ball continued, and when a sufficiency of guests were carried away in the dance or reeling
under unaccustomed draughts of rum punch, the anchor was secretly weighed, the ship drifted out to sea,
and armed guards began to mingle with the revellers…. In two months' time the ship would reach the
Caribbees, and there, Raoul's nurse triumphantly concluded, the Indians were marooned, and here, gen-
eration after generation, they have remained ever since.
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