Guadeloupe continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 20

straight out of the rock-face. She glittered with paint and reflected the brilliant sunlight from her hull,
her anchor and all her port-holes, and her rigging was gay with flags. But only the bows were visible.
The stern and all of her aft of amidships was seemingly embedded in the leaf-clad matrix of the island.
It turned out to be a large villa, built by the owner in a moment of furious and wonderful marine enthu-
siasm. A detestable modern villa dominates the little village-capital, a gathering of timber houses that
otherwise has all the charm and simplicity of a European fishing village.
The café above the quay is a long chamber of planks painted in cool and watery colours. Sipping
Pernod—or rather a cunningly labelled opalescent drink called Père Noel, which is brewed in Marti-
nique—we covertly took stock of the other occupants.
The population of these islands—the Poor Whites of the Saints—seem to me as unusual as any of the
odd ethnological rock-pools of Europe. It is difficult to discover who were the ancestors of this popula-
tion. Most of them, no doubt, were engagés , humble white colonists and sailors who accompanied the
various expeditions in the seventeenth century; some may have originated in the penal colony that was
once established in the archipelago; a few filibusters, perhaps, and here and there a cadet de famille who
had gone downhill. There is no cut-and-dried explanation, as there is for the Poor Whites of Jamaica
(Cromwell), or the Redlegs of Barbados (Judge Jeffries). They refer to themselves as Bretons, which is
probably pretty close to the truth, as large numbers of the early colonists came from Brittany. Bretons in-
deed still seem to expatriate themselves more easily than any other Frenchmen. They certainly look like
most of the sailors and fishermen whom one sees in Brittany. Till very recently, they remained rigorously
white, and so the majority still remain, but a small minority have intermarried with their African neigh-
bours during the last generation or so.
The remarkable thing about them is that they have turned themselves into Negroes in all but colour,
and if all the races of the Caribbean sea were to be repatriated to their countries of origin, the Saintois
would now feel more at home in the African jungle than in Brittany. They have long ago forgotten the
French language, and speak nothing but the Afro-Gaulish patois of the Negroes, and are more inexpert in
correct French and more illiterate than the humblest black inhabitants of the Guadeloupean savannahs.
They sat round us in the café, drinking rum at lightning speed. Their strange hats, shoved back
like dilapidated haloes, framed heads which, though some had Negro characteristics, were mostly pure
European in colour, texture and contour. A conflicting strain was visible in a few of the children who
stood about among the grown-ups' tables, in the jutting bone structure under hair that was often lint-
white and straight. The skin of most of the fishermen, under a heavy tan and the pickling effects of wind
and brine and rum, was fair and florid. Their eyes were blue or grey, set in features of a fine aquiline
cut of Latin or Celtic affinity. Their hair was brown or fair, wavy or straight, and bleached by the sun.
Many were good-looking but most of them, on closer inspection, displayed degenerate physical traits that
were plainly the result of centuries of inter-breeding. Some were large and brawny and sunburnt, but far
too many were ravaged by alcoholism and disease. Their clothes were the same sordid rags as those of
the Negroes. Their conversational tone seemed extraordinarily violent. The nasal quacking of Créole, the
flailing gestures and the constant childish cachination appeared to separate these queer folk from Europe
not by centuries, but by thousands of years. There is something disturbing, at first almost frightening
in this strangeness; but something rather engaging too. Undertones of squalor, disease and brutality are
mitigated by a timidity and a fecklessness which are far from unattractive. They are all fishermen and ac-
complished boat-builders. The quay was crowded with skeletons of half-built vessels and, in the morning,
the waters between the Saints and Guadeloupe are white with their light craft, flying across the waves